Bromley & Sevenoaks
Boiling frogs the EU way
Monday, 15th March 2010
Boiling frogs the EU way
Now that the so-called PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are squealing because of the euro’s death-grip (or “mortgage” in Latin), there are renewed comments saying that whatever we think of the Prime Minister’s stewardship we must be grateful to him for keeping Britain out of the euro. This statement could only be made by those who do not believe in the will of the people freely expressed; when did each of us cease to be, in the argot of the times, the master of our fate, the captain of our soul*? The implication being, if our rulers wish to join a currency union they will join one. In fairness, that’s exactly the process that took sterling into the so-awful-it’s-almost-funny ERM in 1990. You’d have thought all concerned would have learnt a lesson. But sadly for taxpayers, the millions of personal tragedies across Europe caused by unemployment and never-employment didn’t register with the architects of the grand plan and their overpaid apparat.
So, encore un fois! Millions newly unemployed and millions more in the 18-25 age group will become the never-employed. Apart from anger at the unnecessary destruction of lives, my other reaction is a wry smile as the same people use the same explanations for the same predictable outcomes. For example, the finance eurocrats are again railing against “market speculators” and “domino effects” as they did when each of the ill-fated members of the ERM were forced out of the mechanism in turn by populations who could see all the sacrifice meant only more sacrifice. There was no acknowledgement that such a disparate group of countries could never be an optimal currency area. But that’s the point; the powers-that-be believe (for reasons best known to themselves) that nations are the wrong way to organise macroeconomic life. That is why patriotism has become a pejorative; why history is taught as a sequence of bad things countries did and why we must deny the reality of the nation state as an efficiently functioning entity.
Like the proverbial frog that won’t jump out of hot water if the temperature rises imperceptibly, Britons are being slowly boiled by the EU and softened up for the euro’s acceptance. Joining the euro will be offered as the only solution to an economic crisis that will soon to be upon us. The real hope for Britain’s long term recovery is full repatriation of our political independence and with it an end to the economic hobbles of the EU. UKIP is the only party that knows we are in hot water and the only solution is to jump out, now.
Owen Brolly, UKIP PPC Beckenham
*Paraphrased from W.H. Henry’s poem Invictus, cited as an inspiration by Nelson Mandela and the title of a film about post-apartheid South Africa.
