Monday 29 February 2016

Europhiles are the ones dripping with hate


Heh! Look at all those silly flag-waving old people wanting Brexit. Those hateful old racists huh? That's the attitude of leftist Europhiles on Twitter.

Nevermind that these are ordinary people who will have been about my age the last time we saw a political con to take us deeper into the European project.

Nevermind that it's these people who have been our teachers, doctors, bus drivers, nurses, policemen, diplomats, traders, businessmen, servicemen, labourers and civil servants. The people who made Britain what it is. They just hate immigrants right?

Or could it be that these people know something these smartarse, smug leftists don't? I'm guessing these are the people who have seen Britain at its best and worst - and know that something is missing and that something isn't right - and have been around long enough to know that we had something worth keeping?

But let's not let that get in the way of snobbery and ageism right? They're old people. What could they possibly know?

Sunday 28 February 2016

An open letter to Remain voters


Dear Remain voter,

By now you've had a good look at the Leave camps and their arguments. You will have concluded that for the most part they are godawful people with dreadful ideas and a slim grasp on reality. Lucky for all of us, this isn't an election and after the vote, if Leave wins, these people won't be in charge - so a lot of what they say is completely irrelevant.

That said, I trust that you are not going to vote to remain on the basis of the politicians involved. This is a referendum where yours and my vote matters as much as theirs. And if you're honest you've got some idiotic specimens speaking for your side too. You can't honestly expect me to believe you think Chuka Umunna is a serious person? No. Of course not.

So we have to rise above this, ignore the media and the politicians and the crap they spout and look at the facts. What we can say with absolute certainty is that we are not going to get facts from either campaign and it's going to be a torrent of interminable bullshit right through to June.

I don't believe Brexit will cause the apocalypse any more than you believe we're going to have £933.17 back in our wallets and a spending bonanza on teachers and nurses. Unlike them, we both live on planet Earth. And it may surprise you to think that it's not just your side who thinks Nigel Farage is a "goggle-eyed cock goblin", or that Boris Johnson is a pompous, lazy, self-serving buffoon.

What matters is what we can deduce for ourselves on the basis of what is in front of us. What we know for a fact is that the EU is a dysfunctional bureaucratic mess that struggles to call itself a democracy. Many on your side point this out, and the main reason they want to stay is that our side can't offer a better idea that bears any relation to reality - and can't guarantee we can achieve it. In this, I don't blame you. You've taken one look at the complexities involved and thought "bollocks to that".

The rest of you believe that because the Leave side are swivel eyed dinosauric little-Englander losers, that wanting to remain in the EU means the opposite - which by virtue makes you an internationalist progressive - exactly as you see yourself.

But that's not true. The world is seldom ever binary like that. What if I told you that the EU was Kipperism writ large? After all it is erecting massive fences in Hungary, it's obsessed with controlling immigration, it puts up all kinds of protectionist barriers and it spends half its diplomatic runtime look for ways to close off avenues in.

Now I'm not going to spend the rest of this letter badmouthing the EU, because you've heard it all before, and if you're honest, you know most of it is absolutely true, but you're still going to vote to remain on the basis that there is, to your mind, no other option. Personally I think that's a cop out.

The point I wish to convey to you is one of a different nature though. I challenge you to go and look at Hansard and dig out some of the parliamentary debates from 1975, and also 1992. Have a look at some of the media archives and Youtube.

The first thing you notice is that the people change but the same tired, dogmatic arguments do not. We have had vote after vote, and row after row and still we don't seem to be able to resolve this. And when the Leave side inevitably screws up this referendum, we will have more of the same, for decades, until we have yet another referendum.

In short, your children will have to suffer the same interminably beige politics we have for all of our adult lives. Do you really wish that upon them? If so you are even more of a complete bastard than me.

The fact is, the EU is thorn in the paw of Britain and it doesn't sit right with our national ego to be ruled by a supreme government for Europe. It was assumed as the old boys shuffled loose of the mortal coil that this resistance to le grande project would die off. It hasn't. It has passed like a torch to the next generation. It will never die. So really we have to find some way to accommodate these people so they will shut up and go away and let us get on with something else in politics.

That's where Brexit comes in. Like I said earlier, the scare stories about Brexit are nonsense, and so leaving the EU is actually safe. And here's why. Our government, and in fact any government handling the negotiations, will not want to leave the EU. Consequently, what they agree on will likely be as close to being EU membership as possible without actually being in the EU.

That is going to resemble something a lot like the so-called Norway EEA/Efta model. It won't touch on freedom of movement to the annoyance of kippers, but the government will likely say "tough, this wasn't a referendum on freedom of movement". It's worth voting out just to watch the kipper outrage.

Now I know what you're going to say. Norway has no say and we still pay. I may surprise you here by saying so what? Go and look at a Youtube of MEPs in action. For the last few years we've been lampooning Ukip MEPs for being thick as a whale omelette, but go and have a closer look at the others.

Pay close attention and you will see that Kippers are not all that far removed from the norm, Do you honestly believe these people sat in the Hemicycle, pushing buttons when various lights go off, have the first idea what they are voting for - or what its effects will be - when just a few hundred of these morons are making decisions for half a billion people? Do you really think they add a critical layer of scrutiny and protection? If so, stay right there, I have a bridge to sell you.

This idea that being in the EU somehow means we have influence is a long standing joke, not least among MEPs not suffering from delusions of adequacy. People criticise Ukip MEPs for not turning up, when when you look at how utterly futile it is, I can't say I would honestly bother either. No amount of reform or tinkering with the process is ever going to make the parliament relevant or democratic.

More to the point, I am keen to remind voters that the EU employs fewer people directly than the BBC. There is no possible way it could come up with sophisticated industry regulations as diverse as marketing standards for cabbages through to pollutant levels in container ship ballast water. And that's because they don't.

The EU doesn't make the substance of these laws and adopts them from global conventions and international super-regulators - so in or out of the EU we end up accepting them as they are and we will increasingly find, to avoid deviation from the global standard, MEPs won't be allowed to amend them in any meaningful way. Regulation is increasingly globalised and the EU is increasingly irrelevant to that process.

So my point is really this... who gives a tinker's damn if we send a bunch of mouth-breathers from the shires over to Strasbourg to push buttons that wave through masses of regulation they couldn't even begin to understand? As to having to pay into the budget, that's inevitable. What we can say is that we'll pay a bit less. Who cares? We need regulation, devising it is based on research and that won't come for free.

As to joint cooperation programmes, we will still participate and by way of being the world's fifth largest economy, we will still be consulted. We have clout in our own right so long as we keep paying. Money talks.

What we get for our trouble is Britain enjoying more or less the same good relations with the EU on slightly different terms. There are pitfalls to this approach but freedom to trade according to our own needs is a good way of offsetting them. On balance, it's going to be ok. From there, we'll have a few more freedoms and more control over fishing and agriculture and I can't for the life of me see why you might think that's a bad thing given what the CFP did to our fishing grounds with no real prospect of reform.

I don't see that we have that much to lose. Not that much is going to change so there is no real commercial advantage in businesses quitting Britain - and they know it. What we do gain is a clean slate in our relationship with Europe, and a change to put this horribly tedious debate to bed once and for all.

Best of all, it means no more Ukip. Sure, they will find something else to whinge about and they will never stop banging on about foreigners, but having thrown them a bone of leaving the EU, we can rightly tell them to shut the hell up. They got what they were set up for and if they didn't like the result then they should have drafted a vision and a plan before pushing for a referendum.

I won't pretend it's not without risk, but the default option is safe enough and it presents us a with a lot of new opportunities. That's really what will make us outward looking and enterprising. We won't have the option not to be. It will be a rebirth of multilateralism and possibly even democracy. If we are back in control of critical policy areas then we will need better politicians than Gove and Umunna, and maybe the public will start taking their votes seriously enough to elect competent people.

It's a long shot I know, but if you vote to remain, what you are saying is you can cope with decades more of the status quo - with these vacuous wastrels filling the airwaves and column inches with there their monotonous drivel. Don't you long for some real political change? Brexit would at the very least give us that elusive "new politics" we have been chasing for the last decade or so.

Voting to leave may throw up challenges and uncertainties, but it's challenges and uncertainties that make life worth living. It's what brings our lives meaning. The fact that we have eradicated both from politics means we can only expect Westminster politics to remain as empty as it is.

I say let's chuck out these tired old arguments and make way for something new. The EU issue is a bed blocker to advancing politics onto subjects which could manifestly improve our wealth, health and human experience. Thus far, the only thing this Brexit debate has enhanced is my ability to spell Chuka Umunna's name. How depressing is that?

If you vote to Remain in the EU, you are voting for certainty. You are voting for the certainty of identical politics for the next forty years and another tedious referendum. You are voting to bore us all into extinction. If that really is your intent, please let me know now so I can stop wasting my time and put a bullet in my brain - or see if I can get a Canadian visa. If this is the politics you really want to condemn us to for the remainder of our natural lives then you are welcome to it. I'm checking out. I can take no more.

Yours sincerely,

Complete Bastard.

Friday 26 February 2016

No, I won't stop attacking losers


If the above was a political party, would you vote for it? I wouldn't. At the moment, I couldn't be more anti-politics and anti-politician. I am totally fed up with empty-headed posturing know-nothings pontificating over matters in which they hold zero expertise.

While that is true in spades of the Remain camp, whose intellectual big guns thus far are Chuka Ummuna and Karen Brady (I know), I can still find plenty of room to loathe and despise the stupidity on my own side - of which there is an inexhaustible supply.

I'm told I shouldn't do this, but I profoundly disagree. We should never tolerate stupidity in our midst just because we like the flavour of it. That's how we got in this mess to begin with. For me the whole point of leaving the EU is to dismantle the idiocracy that rules over us - and it does not stop at leaving the EU.

Any undecided voter you talk to isn't convinced that we should leave the EU because it is not a democracy because there's not much you could call democratic about our own system. They are right. Every five years you get to vote for one of these mongs who is largely impervious to new information and sees the position of MP as one of authority, whereby they preach to us and make decisions for us - rather than doing as instructed.

Some say democracy is the freedom to vote for your dictators, but that isn't democracy - that's representative democracy - which isn't democracy at all. It represents democracy in the same way a stick man represents a person.

For the five years in between election, you have no say and very little power over how your MP votes. And though you can vote for someone else, that doesn't really make much of a difference, if any at all. For reasons that escape me, we're supposed to be satisfied with this arrangement.

I simply can't support the line that we should "return powers to Westminster" because I don't want those clowns making choices for me either. Just because these mouth-breathers pictured above want to leave the EU doesn't mean I should blithely accept or support whatever crapola leaks from their mouths even if it's conducive to winning (which is categorically isn't).

No, my blogs are for people who look at Boris Johnson and think he's a vacuous, unpleasant, lazy, venal man-child with all the innate charm of necrotising fasciitis. My blogs are for people who think none of these people should be trusted with so much as a TV remote.

Boris Johnson's opinion
This is to say that you don't have to identify with these window-lickers to see that there is obvious merit in retaining our vote and veto at the global level and that keeping control over energy and agriculture is a necessary part of self-rule and national security.

And if these things are too important to be delegated to MEPs then MPs can't be trusted with such choices either. We really need to find a wholly different approach to politics that involves a good deal more direct democracy, preferably with as little involvement form politicians as possible.

There have been two Brexit debates going on since the election. There's the debate among London hacks and politicians - and then there's the debate between citizens, which has been more thorough, more honest, more accurate and more up to date. Let's trust the people to sort it all out instead of these oxygen thieves. 

Click for large
Many bizarrely assume that MPs must posses a particular talent in order to climb the greasy pole as far as the house of commons, but the system is somehow broken so that people of extremely low calibre and intellect can now become MPs. (see right)

And then let's not go into Ukip MEP David Coburn saying the UK should leave EU so we can have better toasters. Or rather it's the EU's fault that his toaster doesn't work. And then there's the intellectually subnormal bunch who actually believe David Cameron has secured EU reforms. Morons.

The short of it is, the whole sorry lot of them need to get in the sea. We need out of the EU to first revitalise our politics and secondly to begin the process retiring politics as a profession.

We only need part time politicians to deal with national emergencies. There rest of it can be dealt with locally and through direct democracy. It may not produce more intelligent decisions, but if you're going to have stupid people making decisions, why not cut out the middleman? At least the decisions will be legitimate.

In this, referendum I honestly couldn't give a tinkers damn what any of the politicians think. I don't care what Tom Enders of Airbus thinks, I don't care about what the army Top Brass thinks, I don't care what the PM thinks and I especially don't care what MEPs or MPs think - and if they would kindly, quietly, go somewhere die that would be super. This is a referendum and this is about what you and I think, not them, and especially not Boris fucking Johnson.