Lord Heseltine, writing in the Telegraph today, explains “Why I am joining the People’s Vote march on Saturday”.
Of course I argued from the beginning that we were better off in the EU than out of it. Better off resolving our differences from within the European family than as an isolated onlooker chipping in from the side-lines.
It is indeed the case that Mr Heseltine has used that line of argument before. Perhaps the passage of seventeen years has dimmed his memory of the exact context in which he did it. But the internet remembers:
Tony Blair came under growing pressure last night to declare that Britain is to join the European single currency as the clock ticked towards tonight’s historic launch of the new money.
The increasing impatience of pro-euro campaigners at No 10’s fence sitting exploded as Lord Heseltine, the former Tory deputy prime minister, joined Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy and the head of Labour’s MEPs, Simon Murphy, to urge the prime minister to take a lead and call an early referendum.
Lord Heseltine effectively accused Mr Blair of a lack of nerve as he dismissed the government’s five economic tests as a “protective barrier” behind which it could “cower in order to have apparently intellectually defensible reasons for putting things off”.
It’s not even the second time. Remember when it was absolutely essential for our national prosperity that we joined the ERM? And when the worst thing that could possibly happen when it turned out to be a disaster was that we might – What was the expression? Oh, yes… – “crash out”?
But this time there really is a wolf…
Heseltine has been a cunt for forty years. Who gives a shit?
Flubber calls it exactly. The only noteworthy info item Hesslehaff has left to generate is if his luxury barnet turned out to be as false as he is.
I’m glad hear Michael “Rambo” Heseltine’s elucidate his position on this, since it allows me to relax in comfort knowing that I’m in complete opposition.
If this twat is pro-Remain and anti-Democracy then I am even more sure that pro-Leave and pro-Democracy is the right place for me to be.
Same applies to Kenneth Clarke.
Ken Clarke was always a Tory, never a Thatcherite. Tax, tax and tax again….
Heseltine is on record as explaining that for small states to combine into larger was the trend of history, the way things are going, and so folly to resist. He explained this – with a wonderful lack of qualification – in the early 90s, as the old Soviet Union fell apart.
(His autobiography – swiftly remaindered, which was how I, who have a high boredom threshold, got a free copy to read – has several unwittingly-illuminating stories.)
Why on earth would we need to be ‘Chipping from the sidelines’ ? If we get ourselves properly free and independent we can just sit back and watch the EU stew in its own mess.
June 23, 2016 was the People’s Vote.
Too many of the wrong kind of people voted.
Which I look forward to doing with lots of beer and popcorn.
‘ Better off resolving our differences from within the European family than as an isolated onlooker chipping in from the side-lines.’
One is born into a family, not coerced to live with it as a servant.
Heseltine is a classic “Heathite” like Kenneth Clarke and others a follower of the late “Conservative” Prime Minister Edward Heath – he of price controls, wild government spending, the three day week, and devotion to Mao (the genocidal Marxist dictator of China – a man responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of human beings). How Edward Heath declined from the denouncer of Appeasement that he was as a student in the 1930s, and the brave solider (holder of the Military Cross) that he was in World War II, to the moral wreak of a man he was by the 1970s is one of the great tragedies of British political history.
And when I use the word “tragedy” I mean that that word – for it is a tragedy worthy of the writers of Ancient Greece. Edward Heath started off a good man (he really did), but he was bewitched by the desire to be “modern” and the desire to be a “social reformer”, a desire to change EVERYTHING in order to be “modern”, whatever was “modern” (whatever it was) must be done – that became the credo of Edward Heath. And that credo led him step-by-step from being a good man to being the opposite of a good man.
Heseltine has, at least, always been consistent – he has always had a fanatical (indeed pathological) hatred of the independence of this country. If he, and people like him, had their way – the British people would be enslaved, totally enslaved.
As for the march today it is a classic “Unholy Alliance” – Corporate State Big Business (such as the CBI – which openly models itself on the old pro Third Reich “Federation of British Industry” back in the 1930s) and the far left.
Like the European Union itself – in which Big Business groups (such as the Italian owners of the Economist magazine) happily cooperate with the far left, in order to crush human liberty.
An interesting example is the front cover of this week’s issue Economist magazine – how the noble European Union (described just as “Europe”) is “taking on the tech giants”, nothing about the attacks on Freedom of Speech by the “tech giants” (on the contrary the European Union wants much MORE censorship – see the “Copyright Directive”) – but just boiler plate “Anti Trust” “Competition Policy” stuff that is the stock-in-trade of the degenerate Economist magazine. The principle of “Anti Trust” being various inefficient companies using the power-of-the-state to pull down a successful competitor – supposedly to “help the consumers” but actually to totally RIP OFF the customers.
That has been the evil principle behind “Anti Trust” ever since the obscene case against Standard Oil more than a century ago (the “crimes” of Mr Rockefeller being to make better products at cheaper prices) – and such pro cartel (hello CBI!), anti individual successful company, stuff is what the European Union is about. It loves mediocrity and despises innovation and achievement.
Dear Miss Solent
What differences need be resolved? Let ’em get on with it. I won’t be wasting my time chipping in from the side-lines.
I voted to Leave the EU so my country can get on doing whatever we want in the rest of the world, not shackled to some dinosaur pipedream of a few politicos and bureaucrats, most of whom are foreign and most of whom are channelling their inner tyrant.
DP
I can’t remember Heseltine being keen for a people’s vote on the matter a few years ago.
Most of those on today’s march, if not all of them, were quite happy for the people’s opinion on EU membership to be ignored, and they were angered and appalled by Cameron’s decision to hold the 2016 people’s vote.
“Most of those on today’s march, if not all of them, were quite happy for the people’s opinion on EU membership to be ignored”
Ah, but according to the Dear Mother of the Scottish Nation, speaking at today’s rally, it’s the 48% who are being ignored. She actually said that. Three years after the biggest vote in our history, we’re still in the EU, with less prospect than ever of leaving, and she actually said that. What is this fantasy land these people are living in?
It’s the same bullshit she spouts at home, of course. The establishment has bent over backwards to accomodate the losing side in both referendums and all we, the majority, get – from both – is abuse.
I have never been so angry with a government, and the political class as a whole, as I am right now. With a few notable exceptions they’re utterly beneath contempt.
Sam Duncan I wish I could argue against what you say here – but I can not.