Bloody Brexit
...Or, as the song says, consider this:
The person who most opposed the UK joining the Common Market was President de Gaulle. His concern was that the UK was not a team player and would not be able to handle being one of the team, rather than the team leader. But de Gaulle left office and along came Thatcher and then the UK was in, with an economy in such a mess it makes me wonder if membership was an act of charity.
For decades nobody in the UK was bothered about the EU. Except Nigel Farage, and he hadn't managed to make much of an impression. He couldn't get himself - or anyone else - a seat in the UK Parliament. (Still hasn't).
But Farage was elected to the EU parliament where, ironically, he had a place on the EU Fisheries Committee. Sadly, the meetings of that committee seemed to clash with whatever else Farage had going on and he failed to turn up for 32 out of 34 meetings. But he continued to claim he represented fishermen in the UK, and blamed the EU for all the problems associated with fishing, including over-fishing (mainly the fault of UK fishermen) which the EU Fisheries Committee was trying to deal with at meetings Farage didn't attend. He was utterly offensive and uncooperative in the EU parliament - proving President de Gaulle was right all along. But he managed to shuttle back and forth between London, Brussels and Strasbourg for 20 years, pulling in a fine salary and some nice travel expenses.
Then certain elements of the UK media stepped up. Newspapers whose billionaire owners were concerned that their savings, tucked away in offshore tax havens, were about to be attacked by EU laws that would force them to declare where their money was and make them pay tax. They began to campaign against the EU through their newspapers - and they had the help of TV outlets like Sky, the BBC and ITV, which seem to have recruited large numbers of right-wing (and not very bright) reporters in recent years.
The saddest thing of all is that the experienced, savvy UK population either switched off from politics altogether (the young) or believed everything they were told (the old). And that leaves us where we are now. About to hand the UK over to Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, nothing much has changed in the UK: the economy is still a basket case. There's no industrial sector left to speak of, and what there was has started to remove itself to more stable parts of the EU. Austerity has reduced life expectancy, raised the level of poverty in the population, led to the return of diseases of poverty like TB and rickets and sentenced the disabled to deprivation, fear of the state that's meant to support them - and an early death.
And no, none of this was the fault of EU citizens - often referred to as scrounging immigrants. You know, the people who man our hospitals, work in our schools, labour on our building sites and gather the food in our fields.
So here's the situation in my opinion: for the last 9 years, the Conservative party has been able to blame the Labour government before them and then the EU for the state the UK is in. We're at the laughable stage where the Tories' best appeal to the voters is to reinstate the public services they removed during austerity. So we're promised more nurses and doctors, more firefighters, more police officers, etc. Can they promise that with the UK debt standing at 2 trillion quid?
So my big question is this: assuming the Tories get back in to government in the UK in December 2019, which looks pretty likely, who will they blame when it all continues to go to hell in a handcart?
Because it will.
The person who most opposed the UK joining the Common Market was President de Gaulle. His concern was that the UK was not a team player and would not be able to handle being one of the team, rather than the team leader. But de Gaulle left office and along came Thatcher and then the UK was in, with an economy in such a mess it makes me wonder if membership was an act of charity.
For decades nobody in the UK was bothered about the EU. Except Nigel Farage, and he hadn't managed to make much of an impression. He couldn't get himself - or anyone else - a seat in the UK Parliament. (Still hasn't).
But Farage was elected to the EU parliament where, ironically, he had a place on the EU Fisheries Committee. Sadly, the meetings of that committee seemed to clash with whatever else Farage had going on and he failed to turn up for 32 out of 34 meetings. But he continued to claim he represented fishermen in the UK, and blamed the EU for all the problems associated with fishing, including over-fishing (mainly the fault of UK fishermen) which the EU Fisheries Committee was trying to deal with at meetings Farage didn't attend. He was utterly offensive and uncooperative in the EU parliament - proving President de Gaulle was right all along. But he managed to shuttle back and forth between London, Brussels and Strasbourg for 20 years, pulling in a fine salary and some nice travel expenses.
Then certain elements of the UK media stepped up. Newspapers whose billionaire owners were concerned that their savings, tucked away in offshore tax havens, were about to be attacked by EU laws that would force them to declare where their money was and make them pay tax. They began to campaign against the EU through their newspapers - and they had the help of TV outlets like Sky, the BBC and ITV, which seem to have recruited large numbers of right-wing (and not very bright) reporters in recent years.
The saddest thing of all is that the experienced, savvy UK population either switched off from politics altogether (the young) or believed everything they were told (the old). And that leaves us where we are now. About to hand the UK over to Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, nothing much has changed in the UK: the economy is still a basket case. There's no industrial sector left to speak of, and what there was has started to remove itself to more stable parts of the EU. Austerity has reduced life expectancy, raised the level of poverty in the population, led to the return of diseases of poverty like TB and rickets and sentenced the disabled to deprivation, fear of the state that's meant to support them - and an early death.
And no, none of this was the fault of EU citizens - often referred to as scrounging immigrants. You know, the people who man our hospitals, work in our schools, labour on our building sites and gather the food in our fields.
So here's the situation in my opinion: for the last 9 years, the Conservative party has been able to blame the Labour government before them and then the EU for the state the UK is in. We're at the laughable stage where the Tories' best appeal to the voters is to reinstate the public services they removed during austerity. So we're promised more nurses and doctors, more firefighters, more police officers, etc. Can they promise that with the UK debt standing at 2 trillion quid?
So my big question is this: assuming the Tories get back in to government in the UK in December 2019, which looks pretty likely, who will they blame when it all continues to go to hell in a handcart?
Because it will.
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