The Slog: I was drafting something this morning for what I hoped would be one of my more thoughtful/thought-through pieces. On the whole, I’m a bit of a draft-dodger when a piece of news sets one of my many hobby-horses free from the regularly mucked-out philosophical stables. But it’s important now and then to be apart from the action, in order to be closer to the truth.
So there I was, creating a terrific draft, and I wrote ‘In the end, Britain won’t leave the EU, the EU will simply leave all of us’. It was a hopeful draft this one, but it was almost immediately overtaken by Der Spiegel’s revelations about yet more Berlin ‘demands’. It is now pretty clear, at 20.40 GMT on May 14th 2012, that the EU and its madcap schemes will never leave us alone until Brussels has been destroyed by the inevitable eurobanking breakdown, and the Merkel/Schäuble axis of Shifty Thrifty has been voted out of history by a German electorate finally waking up to the deranged plans of those in search of Grosseuropa.
All of which, as the Buddhists say, has allowed some good to emerge from bad. Because while in the throes of coming to terms with unwanted symptoms of Herrenvolk Syndrome, I was reminded (and not for the first time) of the tectonic mismatch between the issues out there, and the navel-gazing of Europe’s national political Parties.
There they are in 2012, these diplodocus politicus, still boffing on about Left and Right – or Liberal and Conservative – while out there in the real world the issues couldn’t be clearer: SupraState Looney fascism vs Enterpreneurial freedom, globalism vs trading self-sufficiency, megamedia corruption vs the truth, Big surveillance state vs repaired society, Elite denialism vs Common Man reality.