 |
| Up EURS: Cameron in Churchill pose |
Britain has refused to join an EU fiscal union under the tutelage of a banker from Goldman Sachs.
This has enraged the Liberal left who know that exclusion from the fiscal union means ultimate exclusion from the emerging Union of European Soviet Socialist Republics, with its cosy unthinking political conformity, its windmills and other boondoggles, and its abundance of comfy well-paid births in the nomenklatura for those of the politically correct tendency.
This outrage provides Cameron with a chance that can come only once in a premier's lifetime.
It is the chance to split the coalition, to go to the country on the promise of a referendum on EU membership, and to restore the Thatcherite agenda without Maggie's streak of lunacy and without her ambivalence on the EU.
The future that Britain out of the EU would then face would be one either of independence, goodwill to all men, peace and prosperity, or of total subservience and incorporation into the American Empire.
If Cameron wishes to be remembered as a great man he would opt for national independence. More likely though, Britain would undergo incorporation as the unnamed fifty-first American state, complete with TSA gropers at Heathrow and surveillance and assassination drones overhead.
See also:
Mish -- Cameron should tell the EU to take all their rules and shove them
PostScript
When Niall Ferguson happens to agree with me, I am reluctant to admit this as proof that great minds think alike, whatever the exceptional force of my own mind. Still, I have to hand it to Ferguson that he quite independently sketched the scenario that I have outlined above. Writing in the Wall St. Journal he has an essay about Europe in the year 2021, which contains the following paragraphs:
David Cameron—now beginning his fourth term as British prime minister—thanks his lucky stars that, reluctantly yielding to pressure from the Euroskeptics in his own party, he decided to risk a referendum on EU membership. His Liberal Democrat coalition partners committed political suicide by joining Labour's disastrous "Yeah to Europe" campaign.Ferguson also offers in this essay a concise explanation of how bankrupt Britain managed to weather the European debt crisis so easily:
Egged on by the pugnacious London tabloids, the public voted to leave by a margin of 59% to 41%, and then handed the Tories an absolute majority in the House of Commons. Freed from the red tape of Brussels, England is now the favored destination of Chinese foreign direct investment in Europe. And rich Chinese love their Chelsea apartments, not to mention their splendid Scottish shooting estates.
With a fiscal position little better than most of the Mediterranean countries' and a far larger banking system than in any other European economy, Britain with the euro would have been Ireland to the power of eight. Instead, the Bank of England was able to pursue an aggressively expansionary policy. Zero rates, quantitative easing and devaluation greatly mitigated the pain and allowed the "Iron Chancellor" George Osborne to get ahead of the bond markets with pre-emptive austerity. A better advertisement for the benefits of national autonomy would have been hard to devise.He also projects what seems eminently sensible, a re-union of the British Isles:
At the beginning of David Cameron's premiership in 2010, there had been fears that the United Kingdom might break up. But the financial crisis put the Scots off independence; small countries had fared abysmally. And in 2013, in a historical twist only a few die-hard Ulster Unionists had dreamt possible, the Republic of Ireland's voters opted to exchange the austerity of the U.S.E. for the prosperity of the U.K. Postsectarian Irishmen celebrated their citizenship in a Reunited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland with the slogan: "Better Brits Than Brussels."His anticipation of a Nordic union also seems both plausible and desirable:
Another thing no one had anticipated in 2011 was developments in Scandinavia. Inspired by the True Finns in Helsinki, the Swedes and Danes—who had never joined the euro—refused to accept the German proposal for a "transfer union" to bail out Southern Europe. When the energy-rich Norwegians suggested a five-country Norse League, bringing in Iceland, too, the proposal struck a chord.These ideas lead naturally to the conclusion that Europe will be transformed into a German-dominated block. This was essentially the arrangement envisaged by Neville Chamberlain in the 1930's as he worked to set Germany against Russia, the goal being to create a central European German Empire that would be balanced to the East by a truncated Russia and to the West by an Atlantic bloc comprising Britain, France and the US. Ferguson's prediction differs only in the assumption that France will go with Germany not Britain. But who knows. Do the French really wish to submerge their identity in a German-dominated union? We'll see.
Post-postscript
This explanation of Cameron's foreign policy from the BBC sitcom Yes Minister via Mish:
Episode Five: The Writing on the Wall
Sir Humphrey: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?
Hacker: That's all ancient history, surely?
Sir Humphrey: Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased; it's just like old times.
Hacker: But surely we're all committed to the European ideal?
Sir Humphrey: [chuckles] Really, Minister.
Hacker: If not, why are we pushing for an increase in the membership?
Sir Humphrey: Well, for the same reason. It's just like the United Nations, in fact; the more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes.
Hacker: What appalling cynicism.
Sir Humphrey: Yes... We call it diplomacy, Minister.
See also:
Peter Hitchens: David Cameron’s Phoney War, or A Curse in Disguise
Patrick Buchanan: David Cameron's Finest Hour
Mish: Sniveling, apologetic Cameron seeks to snatch defeat from jaws of EU victory
With respect to Mr. Ferguson’s predictions (particularly about Scotland’s future and his even more ludicrous suggestion of a re-union of Ireland and Britain) all I can suggest, as a fellow Glaswegian, is that it’s the festive season and he may just have been celebrating Hogmanay a little too early.
ReplyDeleteAs for Chamberlain – He was something of a necessary scapegoat. One mustn’t forget that most of the UK establishment in the run up to ww2 was for appeasing Hitler, and they needed a scapegoat for history’s attention to be diverted elsewhere. Indeed some high ranking members of the UK establishment were even for appeasement after the war had started. For example, one aristocratic group of appeasers was called “The Link” and it has been reported that it even held meetings in the then Duke of Westminster’s London residence after ww2 had been declared. Though their influential role has been largely airbrushed out of history there were other similar influential groups of appeasers. One thing is certain is that there were large chunks of the London establishment that needed a scapegoat and Chamberlain was there to fit the bill.
You may think the idea of a confederation or union of the British Isles ludicrous but it is nevertheless the case that the Irish would be vastly better off today had they opted for such an arrangement before their banks crashed.
ReplyDeleteAt least they would then have enjoyed the same advantage as the British; namely, that of inflating away the debt.
As it is, restrained by the Euro straightjacket, they are unable to print their way out of debt as the British amd the Americans are doing.
Chamberlain may have been treated as a scapegoat, but he was, in fact, more of a villain than is generally realized and his object in negotiating with Hitler was not the avoidance of war but the instigation of Germany's long-planned genocidal war against Russia, which is estimated to have reduced Russia's post-war population by over 40 million -- 8.5 million military dead, 24 million civilian dead and millions fewer births due to the stress of war.
ReplyDeleteTo bring that about, it was necessary to bring Germany and Russia face to face. That is what Chamberlain achieved: first, by forcing the Czechs to capitulate on the Sudetenland, thereby making Czechoslovakia indefensible when Hitler decided to take the whole of it; second, by providing a false guarantee of security to Poland, on the basis of which the Poles foolishly refused to negotiate Germany's legitimate demand over Danzig, a 90% German city. When Hitler then invaded Poland, Chamberlain did absolutely nothing to aid Poland.
The reason Britain was drawn into the war was that Hitler became contemptuous of Chamberlain and opted to take out France and Britain before focusing on the overriding objective, expansion to the East.
Germany's invasion of France was Hitler's first big mistake. It forced Britain to fight for the sake of her own security. And, contrary to the expectations of the French generals who said that in three weeks "England will have her neck wrung like a chicken" the German assault on Britain failed.
Then followed Hitler's second big mistake, which was to proceed with the assault on Russia while still fighting on the Western front -- exactly the same mistake the Germans made during the first World War.
In other words, the war was largely contrived by Chamberlain, but things went awry for both Germany and Britain. As a result, it was Russia not Germany that made vast territorial gains.
"One mustn’t forget that most of the UK establishment in the run up to ww2 was for appeasing Hitler"
ReplyDeleteNot exactly so. They were for Germany smashing the Bolsheviks: the Chamberlain doctrine.
This objective was supported by the Cliveden Set, which is to say the Rhodes Milner group, which included Lord and Lady Astor, Phillip Kerr, Robert Brand, Geoffrey Dawson (Editor of the Times), and other Germanophiles.
And there was no secret at the time about Germany's intention. In 1937, Von Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador to Britain visited Churchill at Chartwell and showed him a map indicating the area that Germany intended to conquer. When Ribbentrop asked Churchill what he thought, Churchill is said to have replied: "we don't like the Russians, but we don't hate them that much." A statement that could be interpreted to mean, we will not tolerate such a large expansion of the German empire.
Subsequent to that meeting, Leo Amery, a key member of the Rhodes-Milner group defected and became instrumental in forcing Chamberlain's resignation from office.