I was rather impressed by Mr. Gove’s recent performance on the debate about the EU and why states should exit from it. A friend asked me if I found it ”distasteful” to be on the ”same side” as Michael Gove – to which I asserted that, one never finds it distasteful to have allies, especially astute and persuasive allies, so by all means give me allies! For I agree with Mr. Gove on one solemn thing: that nations, like the souls who shape them, are inextinguishable. But what of the opponents in this debate? After all, you can tell a lot about a man by analysing his enemies.
The campaign or ‘diktat’ scaring us towards Remain is being advanced mainly by those who have the most to gain from it – international bankers, financiers, CEO’s, trade union bosses (on six figure salaries!), corporations, media moguls and some within a scheming, self-serving class which has a strangle-hold on universities. Indeed, using all the aces up their sleeves, these people are stringing the masses along via the ink and pages of the very same newspapers, which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising continental spectre confronting it (Hitler and fascism). Mr. Cameron, like Mr. Chamberlain before him, came back with a set of ”reforms” not worth the paper they were written on, nor the process the public funded for him to even negotiate them. And just like with ‘Munich 1938’, we were told this deal would be the antibiotic to the infection – when really it is but Paracetamol to a more pertinent cancer.
It does nothing to tackle youth unemployment throughout the EU. It does nothing to protect ailing industries which the EU forbids us from rescuing. It does nothing to tackle tax evasion. It does nothing to adequately regulate multi-national corporations. It does nothing to let us assert a wholly separate economic policy. And it does everything which Mr. Corbyn has always stood against – shifting the blame onto immigration; cutting back on regulation; ignoring workers’ rights; cutting back on welfare and social security; overlooking any job guarantee for millions of youths; and preserving the toxic swamp which neo-liberalism continues to poison.
But if opening people’s eyes lands you in the same corner as ‘High Tories’ and ‘Red Clyde-Siders’ (From Tony Benn through to Alan Clark), then Comrades All! For this is about something much more fundamental to life than personalities or players – the right to decide who we are and what we want to be in this world. I want the European Union to disintegrate, like Rome and the Third Reich before it – People have rights, and the right to self-government is the basis for deciding or enhancing all other rights. When we possess and exercise that one, basic, human, right, then all others can follow from it. We have the right to chose who governs over us – however desirable they may or may not be. For it’s easier to sack one group of wasters some of the time, than trying to sack twenty-eight different groups of wasters all the time.
This referendum also grants us the rarest of moments, to think of what we want for the future and how to build towards that in the present. I want a nation where the sweat borne in industry enjoys the harvest of ingenuity residing in commerce; Olympic heights within our class-rooms and laboratories; a euphoria when gazing at our infrastructure. An Ireland defined not simply by our history, but by a unique philosophy – of ‘what can be’. After all, expression is a beautiful thing. Artists practice it, while dictators suppress it. While ethical, expression should know no boundaries. But how do individuals, families, neighbours, communities and societies, ‘express’ themselves? Through the lessons, joys and flaws of a nation-state. So, as humans, let us all reconcile in death what we cannot unite on Earth. For our bodies possess all the same needs, but our hearts and minds envision different skies.”
What a load of guff.
I don’t find my expression through the UK “nation state” and I wouldn’t find expression through a united Ireland. I’m a northern European from the professional middle classes. I’ve more in common with Danish people of similar class and professional background than a very great number of people in my own so-called nation.
I’ve found more self-expression and liberation through working for multinational businesses across borders than I ever would trapped by Visa restrictions on this island so that people like Gove can perform weird right wing libertarian experiments on me.
My family was born on both these Islands. It exists because of the unfettered travel between two states – The UK and the Republic of Ireland. Why should the same freedoms not be enjoyed between the Baltic, Francophone or Iberian countries – or between any other groups of neighbouring states? If the EU disintegrates as you wish for that leaves us with the default of vaguely culturally similar blocks in Europe with free travel within them and barriers to others. So it’s back to the joys of the nineteenth century.
That or we have 27 walled ghettos to express ourselves in and maybe an impenetrable spaghetti of bilateral visa unions between them – all within a territory that’s only half the size of the US.
Those people trying to steal my freedom and my children’s European inheritance with lies and appeals to “patriotism” haven’t begun to appreciate the utter contempt they’ll earn from the next generation when our children realise what’s been taken from them.