Sunday, 11 December 2011

What the hell is wrong with us?

So Britain has shied away from an EU treaty designed to ease some of the terrible pain caused since the collapse of Lehman Bros and everything that has gone down since then. 26 countries thought it was a plan, but DC thought not, not enough protection for our financial services apparently. At one level you can see why. Finance wheeling and dealing forms a bigger part of our economy than that of any other European country, and, so the argument goes, if we don't suck up to the money men they will fly away and set up in Singapore or some other place that really lets capitalism rip. So we fall over ourselves to make it nice for them.

In 2007, just after Gordon Brown came to office (I say office, rather than power, echoing Norman Lamont's famous aside) the leaders of every EU country met in Lisbon to sign the treaty. Except Gordon, who for some reason couldn't bring himself to attend and sent his foreign secretary instead. What I'm saying here is that it isn't just DC and his rabidly anti-EU cronies like Bill Cash (and what a nice weekend he must be having) who are suspicious of all things European. If the public opinion surveys are anything to go by (and they are) DC has taken a substantial fraction of the British population with him. It seems most of us are afraid of throwing in our lot with our neighbours, at almost any level.

Why? I fear the answer is not pretty. It has to do with the innate xenophobia we feel for anyone different from ourselves, from slitty-eyed Asians to darkies of almost any hue other than pure pink, extending all the way to the Welsh and Irish. We're better than them, and we'd rather have as little to do with them as possible, secure in our green and (not so) pleasant land

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Can you change your name to something else? Perhaps Dr. EU lover. Your moronic blog keeps showing up one searches for "Pelagius" and I'm searching for the theologian who opposes Augustine, not for idiotic rantings in favor of some continental communist empire run by fatcats who want to take money from the producers and squander it on bums and drug addicts.