The Queen, God bless her, doesn’t speak her own mind in public. She speaks the PM’s mind, in this instance Dave’s.
That’s why one can’t really blame her for joining the campaign portrayed by the government as an epic struggle between David (Cameron) and Goliath (the EU).
Against overwhelming odds, David claims to be swinging his slingshot loaded with the stone of reforms. The composition of the stone remains unknown, but then it’s only a tool.
Any tool is designed to do a certain job, and Dave’s courageous efforts are no exception. The job is to get the Yes vote in the upcoming referendum, thus shutting up all those Little Englanders attached to our centuries-old sovereignty.
The EU fanatics play along by playing hard to get, only to make Dave’s eventual ‘victory’ so much more effective. Thus a youthful French minister explained to Dave the other day that there’s no such thing as “à la carte Europe”.
The culinary idiom comes naturally to the French, and they tend to use it with precision. True enough, no compromise is possible to the founding aspiration of the EU: a single European state.
However, tactical concessions aimed at pacifying some restless natives are possible, indeed inevitable. When the time comes, Dave will bang his head together with the federasts, and they’ll figure out the sufficient minimum of concessions needed to swing the referendum the right way.
Whatever it is, one can be certain that the concessions will be both meaningful and irreversible. However, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, the meaningful ones won’t be irreversible, and the irreversible ones won’t be meaningful.
Meanwhile, Dave is waging a war of words, using focus groups to identify the key triggers to which our comprehensively educated masses will respond with Pavlovian alacrity.
Take ‘cooperation’, for example. The thesaurus gives such antonyms for it as ‘hostility’, ‘obstruction’, ‘antagonism’ – rotten words every one of them. All God’s children will prefer cooperation to hostility, so Dave can win an important propaganda skirmish by repeating ‘cooperation’ so often that the masses will identify it with European federalism unfailingly.
‘Unity’ is another referendum winner, while its opposites, such as ‘division’, ‘dissention’, ‘denial’, all leave a nasty taste in the population’s collective mouth. Wouldn’t you prefer unity to its antonyms? Any sane person would.
One just wishes that Dave played his little word games on his own, without dragging in our aged monarch. But of course such deference is impossible to expect from our spivs.
Hence Dave, acting as ventriloquist, made Her Majesty utter these words on her state visit to Germany: “We know that division in Europe is dangerous and that we must guard against it in the west as well as the east of the continent.”
The statement is meaningless demagoguery any way you look at it. Considering that the last time Europe (minus Britain) was truly united was in 1940-1944, one could say with greater justification that unity is much more dangerous than division.
But such general statements never have any value, other than the propaganda kind. What the Queen has actually said, or rather allowed Dave to say through her, is that any unity is better than any division. But that is demonstrable nonsense, as anyone who lived under German occupation will agree.
It’s true that some unity is better than some division, but not when the former stands for the Fourth Reich of a European federation and the latter represents Britain retaining her sovereignty.
And what is the division ‘in the east of the continent’ against which ‘we must guard’? The only topical disunity to which Her Majesty could have been alluding is Russia’s unprovoked aggression against the Ukraine.
If so, then the word ‘division’ is no more applicable here than it would have been in 1939 if used to describe the rape of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union. Thus division, as used by the Queen, means war.
Hence we must guard against one Western European state attacking another. Contextually it follows that only elevating my friend Junk (as Jean-Claude Juncker likes to be known) to the de facto presidency of Europe can prevent Germany, to use one hypothetical example, from attacking France yet again.
This jibes with the mendacious line taken by federasts, that only the mighty power of the EU has secured peace in Europe since 1945. By saying this, they inadvertently show their hand.
For the only power that has prevented another war of all against all in post-war Europe is Nato generally and the American nuclear umbrella specifically. But for that, the only possible unity Europe could have achieved would have been under the red flag – just like in 1940, but with different symbols superimposed on the red background.
Other than that, there have been wars aplenty in Europe, with thousands dying in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Georgia, the Ukraine – while pan-European institutions’ peace-keeping efforts ranged from incompetent to criminal.
However, and that’s where the federasts unwittingly tell the truth, the EU is predominantly a Franco-German enterprise. Hence, when they say that thanks to the EU there have been no wars in Europe since 1945, they mean no wars between France and Germany – and the rest be damned.
We are among the presumably damned ones, and one wishes Her Majesty were constitutionally entitled to spit out the words Dave was trying to shove down her throat. Alas she isn’t – monarchy is one of the European institutions modernity has befouled.