A few notes on David Cameron's Big EU Speech

So many events now taking place (e.g. the Trump phenomenon, the repeated resort to stupid wars, the relentless fall in educational standards and the equally relentless assault on liberty of speech and thought) persuade me that we in the ���West��� are now witnessing the death of politics as we have known it, and quite possibly the final decades of universal suffrage democracy, which can no longer provide stable or intelligent government.

The Prime Minister���s ridiculous speech, which you may read here,   https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-the-uks-strength-and-security-in-the-eu-9-may-2016

���must count as one of the most absurd ever delivered.  And yet he and all his aides do not seem to have realised this. Together they planned, wrote, rehearsed and publicised it, and ensured that it was delivered. And it may well succeed in its objective, of frightening ignorant people into voting for the status quo.  I have to fear for the future of any country where the level of debate has sunk so low. A proper dismissal of it would take days to write, and hours to read. But the few thoughts below may be helpful to some readers:

One bit of it I quite liked ; ���And I understand and respect the views of those who think we should leave, even if I believe they are wrong and that leaving would inflict real damage on our country, its economy and its power in the world.��� I too believe that leaving might lead to all these things, and worse, but still favour it. The ���Remain��� side have been absolutely right to point out that people such as me, who believe in national independence as a principle, recognise that it may come at a price.

I wish more people on the ���Leave��� side would make it clear that this is what they think. If it isn���t, I really don���t know why they *do* want to leave.

Our economy, of course, is not doing well, but wallowing in unpayable debt and deficit, from which the only escape will be very serious inflation. This is currently being targeted mainly at savers, whose funds are being stealthily drained by the policy of paying no interest at all,  but must soon expand into other parts of the economy. The supposed ���rise��� in house prices is in fact a true measure of inflation, since housing property is a market limited by the existence of land, and must rise as the true value of sterling falls, especially while savers are diverting funds from savings into housing investment. Something similar is happening to the dwindling number of fully-trained professionals and skilled artisans in this country, whose wages cannot be depressed by mass immigration, and who can charge very heavily for their services.

I do wish people would stop claiming that the economy is doing especially well simply because it is outside the Euro and so under the chancy stewardship of Mr Osborne. It just has a different sort of crisis, as all the indicators are now starting to show.  I also think that it is very hard to maintain that a British exit from the EU would bring any short-term economic benefits at all. It wouldn���t automatically bring any long-term benefits either. That would depend on the governments we then chose.

In the same spirit I think claims that we would be at more risk from the (greatly exaggerated) terrorist bogey, if we stayed in *or* if we stayed out, are moonshine. We don���t control these things. ���Security��� services are a state-sponsored confidence trick, whose power to influence events is hugely over-rated. The European Arrest warrant is an unacceptable  threat to Habeas Corpus, a liberty too vital to be trifled with,  and makes no difference to our ability to ���fight terror���, since those affected by it are arrested and under suspicion anyway, and are therefore of no use in the surprise attacks in which terrorists specialise.

But this is the passage from the speech which I wish to deride most thoroughly:

My comments are interleaved with it, marked ***

���Our history teaches us: the stronger we are in our neighbourhood, the stronger we are in the world.���***PH: This is a platitude. But national strength cannot be equated with our membership of supranational bodies, that is, not alliances between nations but bodies set up above the level of nation states, which claimed to have power over our law and government.. Indeed, we belonged to no such bodies after Henry VIII���s 1534 break with Rome, which removed the supranational Church���s power to interfere in our internal affairs.***

���For 2,000 years, our affairs have been intertwined with the affairs of Europe. ���

***PH notes  Of course they have. That is where we are, geographically.  But this would only matter to someone who is a child in political matters, and cannot distinguish between differing applications of the same word. The British Isles, like Muscovy, are in the continent of Europe. But geographical Europe is not synonymous with the political construct now known as the EU, which governs, in such places as Martinique, territories which are not in Europe at all, and which permanently and deliberately excludes from membership the largest country in Europe, Russia.****

���For good or ill, we have written Europe���s history just as Europe has helped to write ours.

From Caesar���s legions to the wars of the Spanish Succession, from the Napoleonic Wars to the fall of the Berlin Wall.���

***PH notes: Britain did not exist in Roman times, or for many centuries afterwards. Nor did England.  Our independent history began much later. The War of the Spanish Succession was an opportunist intervention designed to limit French power and allow us to get on with expanding our global trade and colonies. Likewise the Napoleonic Wars, which allowed us to turn our backs on the continent for a happy and prosperous century of successful isolation (with the daft exception of the Crimean war, ultimately a failure). As for the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher, not unreasonably, strove vainly to prevent German reunification when that still seemed possible, and as far as I can tell British policy would have been perfectly happy for the Cold War to continue indefinitely, freezing continental diplomacy where it had been in 1945 . It���s an odd collection of examples. In no case between 1534 and 1972 did any British government seek to be governed by a continental supranational power. Indeed, much of its diplomacy and warlike activity were directed specifically to avoid this outcome.    ****

���Proud as we are of our global reach and our global connections, Britain has always been a European power, and we always will be.���

***PH notes: No, it hasn���t. Britain has been a global power, and now, largely thanks to failed and costly continental entanglements in the 20th century,  isn���t.  It never attempted to become a European continental power until this century, and the results were not happy (bankruptcy and an inconclusive outcome dictated by others,  which was so unenforceable that it had to be fought all over again 21 years later). Before 1916, Britain never raised an army on a continental scale, and fought its wars on the Continent through cynical, ad-hoc coalitions based on the old principle of my enemy���s enemy is my friend, or simply paid to fight with London gold. Our main armed force was the Navy, which secured the Channel against invasion and which enabled us to hold on to our imperial possessions . It was a British *naval* defeat on the far side of the Atlantic, the 1781 Battle of the Chesapeake,  which led to the military defeat at Yorktown and Britain���s greatest setback in history, the loss of the American colonies. Likewise it was the overpowering of British *naval* force in the Pacific by the Japanese in 1941-2 which led to the catastrophic defeat at Singapore and the subsequent loss of the British Empire as a whole. It was British *naval* power ( which always served the dual purpose of keeping the home islands safe while projecting imperial power around the world) which ultimately made a German invasion of this country impossible, and which enabled us to survive to the 1940-44 period without being starved to death.  I have discussed elsewhere the role of British armed forces against the main body of the (German) enemy on the continent of Europe between 1939 and 1945, but it is an astonishing fact that from Dunkirk to D-Day our army was not in direct contact with the main body of the enemy. That is how unEuropean our power was. ****

���We know that to be a global power and to be a European power are not mutually exclusive.���

***PH: Do we? The height of our power as a nation, from 1815 to 1914, was spent mainly in isolation from European matters. Our attempt to become a European power costs us our global power***

���And the moments of which we are rightly most proud in our national story include pivotal moments in European history.

Blenheim. Trafalgar. Waterloo.���

***PH: each of these is quite distinct. Blenheim is discussed above, in the War of the Spanish Succession. Trafalgar made us safe from invasion, but had no real effect on the Continental struggle, which Bonaparte continued to win for years afterwards. He was fundamentally defeated by Russia, which destroyed his original Grand Army on the retreat from Moscow,  and then at the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, in which we played no direct part  (if he hadn���t been defeated in this period, there���d have been no Waterloo) . Waterloo likewise gave us permission to do what we wanted to do and leave the Continent to its own devices for a century. ***

������. Our country���s heroism in the Great War. And most of all our lone stand in 1940, when Britain stood as a bulwark against a new dark age of tyranny and oppression. When I sit in the Cabinet Room, I never forget the decisions that were taken in that room in those darkest of times. When I fly to European summits in Brussels from RAF Northolt, I pass a Spitfire just outside the airfield, a vital base for brave RAF and Polish pilots during the Battle of Britain. I think of the Few who saved this country in its hour of mortal danger, and who made it possible for us to go on and help liberate Europe. Like any Brit, my heart swells with pride at the sight of that aircraft, or whenever I hear the tell-tale roar of those Merlin engines over our skies in the summer.���

***PH: This is all very sentimental, though I am dismayed by the Eton  and BNC premier���s use of the coarse word ���Brit��� in a supposedly uplifting speech. I doubt he has much of a grasp of the diplomatic and political reality of that period, or ever has cause to wonder at the contrast between the bravery of the Polish pilots and our abandonment of their country to half a century of foreign tyranny, having promised them our support. Churchill���s resolve was indeed a great thing. But why do we so seldom question the incompetent continental diplomacy which so nearly imperilled the freedom of this country in that period?  Sentimentalising over Spitfires 76 years ago is all very well, but what is the state of our current armed forces, and the industries which sustain them, under Mr Cameron���s premiership? ****

���Defiant, brave, indefatigable.

But it wasn���t through choice that Britain was alone. Churchill never wanted that. Indeed he spent the months before the Battle of Britain trying to keep our French allies in the war, and then after France fell, he spent the next 18 months persuading the United States to come to our aid.

And in the post-war period he argued passionately for Western Europe to come together, to promote free trade, and to build institutions which would endure so that our continent would never again see such bloodshed.���

***PH: I do think he should be careful about suggesting that Churchill ever favoured supranationalism. He was very much in favour of Franco-German unity, and of a strong Council of Europe, which was not a supranational body and still isn���t  - but not of Britain losing its independence in a supranational body. ****

���Isolationism has never served this country well. Whenever we turn our back on Europe, sooner or later we come to regret it.���

***PH asks: Is this in fact true?  I don���t think it is, and I would be interested to know what other readers think. ***

As for the claim that the EU has prevented war, I think we have discussed this many times here. There���s no doubt that it has made war between France and Germany very difficult, but there has really been no great reason for such a war in the post-1945 period. The fundamental conflict of our continent, between Germany and Russia, remains alive as I believe has been proved in both the Balkans and Ukraine (I would also attribute the foolish war in Georgia to this tension) . The EU, either as itself or in the form of its dominant member state, has not in my view been a force for peace in these areas.

As for ���Either we influence Europe, or it influences us.���, I should have thought that if we remained independent of the EU, it would be true that each would *influence* the other. But since the EU now has actual *power* over our borders, our laws, our trade and our foreign policy, and since we lack any effective veto in any council of the EU, it is q

wrong to speak of influence. The EU has power over us. We have no power over the EU. Only by leaving could we return to an era when the two influenced each other.