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Samizdata quote of the day – the EU ‘elections’ vindicate Brexit Some 200 million Europeans will not be voting for an EU government but rather for a chamber to rubber-stamp the laws passed down from the unelected self-sustaining oligarchy that is the European Commission. It is rather as if Sir Humphrey really did rule from on high in Whitehall, writing all parliamentary bills which were then nodded through by a compliant Commons with maybe just a change here and there.
Real parliaments hold governments to account – they don’t just fiddle around with the details. The EU has sucked powers away from national governments but without replicating the infrastructure and institutions of a functioning democracy. It has created a strange hybrid structure whereby the first the public hears about legislation which will affect their lives tends to be when it is too late, when it is passed to national governments with the instruction to incorporate it into national law – under threat of sanctions.
– Spectator editorial (£)
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The EU doesn’t suck anything from its members. Everything is given by elected governments and parliaments.
See, this is why I need to remember to read more than just the first four words of a sentence before giving up.
This is what the EU is all about. It was designed to give a veneer of democracy to a form of government which is fundamentally non-democratic. The men who formulated the “European Ideal”, Salter, Monnet et al, wanted Europe to be directed by an elite caste of philosopher kings, ie them. That’s what it’s all about. The little people are meant to think they have some sort of democratic control, but in fact they have none. That’s why they took Brexit so badly. It was a real blow to the foundations of their political belief. The idea that a free people could decide to leave the EU was just poison to them. Luckily for them the UK political establishment were of much the same view, and conspired to sabotage Brexit from the start.
Sadly the United Kingdom is going (going – we are NOT yet totally there) the same way – with policy handed down from officials and “experts” and both ministers and Parliament acting as a rubber stamp.
Sadly if a Bill is truly repulsive – if it will do really terrible harm, often (often NOT always) it will have “support from all parties” with any Member of Parliament daring to opposing it being treated as either insane, evil, or both. These vague Enabling Acts (they started many decades ago) have handed over power (NOT total power, but much power) to officials and “experts”.
The pressure to support “policy”, both at the national and local level, is intense – and questions such as “who exactly made this policy?” are considered both stupid and rude (very rude).
All is not yet lost – “policy” is still sometimes modified or even defeated, but I fear that will come to an end in less than a month.
The European Union form of governance is really part of the international form of governance – with organisations such as the World Health Organisation, and so many others, having no democratic limits on them at all – that is the plan.
And, Americans please note, it is the plan for the United States as well – America is also to be under international governance, the rule of officials and “experts”, and the drift to power in the hands of such officials and “experts” has being going on in the United States for a very long time – just as has in the United Kingdom.
To people interested in British history – Lord Chief Justice Hewart “The New Despotism” (his 1929 warning as the process was just starting) was correct.
To people interested in American history – Senator Roscoe Conkling was correct.
Brexit was always a good idea, but putting the people in charge of it that Britain did was a fatal error. The instincts of the electorate were correct, but the “expert elite” has done everything possible to suborn the will of the people.
The EU is set up as a massive con game, wherein you join it and then give up your statehood and let the unelected bureaucrats run it. If you look at the supporting paperwork, the EU was never, ever meant to be a democratic governing body. It was always a slow-motion coup by the bureaucrats and “experts”, most of whom have the practical intelligence of planaria. The really amazing thing to an outsider is how little resistance to the whole thing there has been… Although, as these “experts” put their plans into action, the way they went after farmers in Holland, the people are beginning to catch on. A little.
I applaud Britain for the decision to do Brexit, but deplore the execution of it all, and the trusting way they left it all up to the same people who signed them up for this mess in the first place. You can’t trust the bastards, obviously. I don’t believe that anyone in the political sphere outside of Nigel Farage really and truly believes in giving the people what they want, which is the retention of sovereignty and the ability to actually elect the politicians running things.
It’s the same all over, however: The bloat of government has turned us all into Imperial China, with its mandarin class lording it over the peasantry. It’s far past the time that the mandarins get shut down and removed from positions of power and authority, because just as in Imperial China, their essential and inutterable incompetence is killing the host they parasitize.
Human beings do not do large-scale organization over lengthy periods of time very well at all. Every endeavor we set up as a bureaucracy winds up corrupted and taken over by the precise wrong people to put in charge of it… Witness the CDC/NIAH complex here in the US. How, pray tell, did an incompetent nonentity like Fauci wind up making a career of running those things, and while constantly screwing things up? He mismanaged the AIDS “pandemic” that somehow never got out of the host population of gay males, despite his projection of fears about mass infections of heterosexual AIDS never occurring in actual fact… That alone should have had his ass fired.
We do not do governance at all well, as a species. Every time we set up these massive reef structures of bureaucracy and government, those structures wind up choking the life and vitality out of our societies. So, why do we keep on doing it?
Longer I live, the more I see the virtues in anarchy. The way we’ve implemented government just isn’t working very well.
Starmer isn’t going to be able to achieve very much with his honorable colleagues fighting like cats in a sack behind him and the bureaucrats in front of him treating him like an employee, thanks to his dependence in public sector unions.
The real problem is that the bureaucrats desperately want to rejoin the EU mothership. They will probably cook up some scheme like the associate membership suggested by Macron a while ago where Britain gives the EU money and in return the EU tells Britain what to do, which will be yet another obstacle to Starmer getting anything done.
Looks like a fair deal to me!
Roue le Jour.
A Labour government would end what resistance there is to “policy” – meaning policy made by officials and “experts” both national and international.
It is astonishing that you do not understand this – and, of course, it would make whether the United Kingdom is inside or outside the European Union no longer relevant.
There is not much resistance now – but there is some. A Labour government would end what resistance there is.
Yet people round here seem fanatically dedicated to producing a Labour government. “The present government has not resisted policy enough – so we must have a government that does not resist it at all” is their position.
Rest in Peace Britain.
Paul,
I am not convinced the Tories are resisting “Policy” to any significant degree.
It absolutely does matter whether or not Britain is inside the EU. Britain was a significant contributor to the EU budget. The EU wants British cash, the UK bureaucrats want to rejoin the EU bureaucracy, done deal.
The UE hates Britain and may well block Starmer policy just because they can. I was in favour of Brexit regardless of the economics because I thought it a bad idea to be to be part of an organization that clearly despises the UK.
While most people who voted in Britain to leave the EU were at least partly motivated to do so because they wanted less globalism, there was a small minority on the pro-Brexit side who felt the EU was insufficiently globalist. Unfortunately the latter, while numerically low, often had considerable media and political clout.
I give you exhibit A – this guy was an editor of the Spectator and is currently Rishi Sunak’s political secretary. So we have immigration levels now that make the EU levels pre-Brexit look modest.
I think the guy doing the most to make a Labour government possible is Rishi Sunak. Everyday he does something which suggests the guy has absolutely no political skills or is clearly trying to throw the election to Labour. How else to explain him buggering off from the D Day commemorations in a hurry?
Martin:
I hate to use the term, but Rishi Sunak really does seem to me to be a rootless cosmopolitan. He happens to have been born here. His parents were not, neither was his fabulously rich wife, who is still an Indian citizen. He had a green card before it became politically uncomfortable. So for him, Britain is a nice enough place in which to live and work, and eventually become prime minister. Apart from that, what? The 6th June 1944 is a date on the calendar. He went to a ceremony, said some words, met some veterans. I don’t think he can really see what the problem is.
I agree with you but am more than happy to use the term 😄.
He and his liberal staffers see Britain at best as a mere economic zone.
It will be interesting to watch your Tories as they (possibly) move further left, to attempt to capture more centrist Labor-voters, in an acknowledgment that Reform will be draining voters from the right.
At this point in history, I think it undeniable fact that the majority of our problems stem from one source, and that source alone: Professional life-long politicians and their associated remora-like hangers on.
They don’t possess any real beliefs at all in what they tell us; it’s all about staying in office to suck the gravy up, while looting the treasury. Note how many switch sides here in the US, then espouse identical policies. It’s all theater, all the time.
And, we’re suckers for falling for it. As I keep telling people: “Don’t pay attention to what they say; watch what they do…”
The so-called “conservative” parties on both sides of the Atlantic are past masters at saying they oppose the unworkable fallacies of the socialist left, but they keep right on enabling them and even putting them into effect. Why is this? Self-interest; they’ve more in common with their professional parasite class than they do with us. We do not have “representational democracy” because the people who put themselves up for election in the closed-shop environment we’ve allowed to build up are not truly our representatives. They’re their own advocates, for their class.
And, that’s true everywhere. Who makes up the majority of the EU’s supposed “parliament”? Why, the transnational globalists and their favored enablers, of course. Same here in the US.
The way to put an end to this is to outright ban professional politicians. Five cumulative years of lifetime government service sounds about right to me; limit people to this, and include the unelected bureaucracy right along with it. Allowing these cretins to have lifelong sinecures doing nothing in legislatural positions is just nuts, along with the “revolving door” between things. You should absolutely not have bureaucratic or legal authority over an industry you work in, or may go into after your time in government. Allowing that is just plain stupid…
So, a continuation of what the Tories have been doing for a decade then. I’ll be voting Reform.
Nah, I’m a former trad Labour voter who went Tory, only to discover they weren’t what they claimed to be. Eventually the ‘Red Wall’ will go Turquoise. Even my dad is voting Reform & he used to be a trade union activist back in the 1990s.
Hitler and Stalin smile, have beer together, and watch with approval.
They never were enemies, just fellow travelers with minor tactical disagreements.
They’re organizing a ghostly ‘Good times’ revival dinner with Ulbricht, Pot, Ceaucescu, Minh, Tito, Corbin (If, hopefully, he’s dead by then) and few other select Jew hating guests immediately after Labour is elected.
Bulldog Drummond.
What part of “end what resistance there is” did you not understand?
There is still limited resistance to the policies made by national and international officials – a Labour government will end that limited resistance.
And that ending of what limited resistance remains, is what you Sir are voting for.
It seems to me that the Spectator has it pretty much spot on. The EU does indeed suck powers away from national governments. I would say to Stuart Noyes that the fact that national governments are complicit in the sucking does not mean there is no suck. Of course it is not just the EU but other globalist institutions, the WHO, the UN , the Council of Europe. National governments have surrendered important policy issues, that were previously decided democratically, to these institutions, all of whom have frequently shown themselves to be arrogant, autocratic and miserably incompetent.