The other day we found ourselves at a cramped Venetian restaurant, chatting to a fortyish woman from Milan, whom fate and waiters plonked at a table inches away from ours. Witty, vivacious and multilingual, she had that insouciant elegance that well-heeled Italian and French women seem to acquire with their mothers’ milk. And she made sense on every subject we touched upon – until the EU came up.
‘We need it,’ explained Francesca, ‘because our own government is too corrupt.’ I knew better than to demur. For arguing against the EU isn’t like taking issue with a rational proposition. It’s more in the nature of trying to convince a believer that God doesn’t exist. In a godless Europe, the EU has become a Christ surrogate, and it’s supposed to save us from our own sins.
The Germans don’t want to be German, but the French do. The former hope the EU will save them from their perennial urge to attack France and other neighbours. The latter count on the EU to save them from their diminished status in the world. The Eastern Europeans want the EU to save them from the legacy of their communist past, poverty being the aspect that upsets them most. The British expect the EU to save them from their own government. And, as Francesca explained, the Italians pray to the EU to save them from corruption.
Capitalising on such cravings, the federastic bureaucrats in all countries have realised that their best chance lies in elevating the EU to the perch that religion used to occupy for almost 2,000 years but has since vacated. The trick has worked for Darwinism, taught in our schools not as the half-baked theory that it is, but as Gospel truth. It has worked for global warming and its turbine offshoots – never has so much been spent by so few on so little scientific evidence. It has worked for the NHS, easily the worst possible way of financing medicine.
None of these abominations would survive 10 minutes of intelligent, well-informed debate. That’s why they have been raised to a height where debate can’t reach them. In that rarefied atmosphere people subsist on irrational beliefs and vague longings, not on reason. Unlike real believers in real God, they breathe in secular faith and exhale toxic gibberish. Before long, those who think the way I do will be described not as ‘sceptics’ but as ‘infidels’ or ‘heretics’. And those who advocate leaving the EU won’t be known as realists or patriots any longer. They’ll be apostates.
The EU is like a religion then, but this simile can only go so far. After all, the adherents don’t expect their deity to expiate their sins by dying on the cross. On the contrary, against all available evidence they claim it’ll live eternally, just like God but without the intervening nuisance of death and resurrection.
Emulating all the most pernicious secular creeds of modernity, the EU steals the rightful property of religion, perverts it and uses it for its own nefarious purposes. It’s like the Enlighteners who preached what sounded like Christian brotherhood, but was in fact martial law and mass murder. Or like the Bolsheviks who plundered church valuables and used the proceeds to make themselves strong enough to enslave their own populace and eventually, they hoped, the rest of the world.
So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that all those Europeans who seek salvation from themselves come to the EU not as a sinner begging forgiveness from God, but as a friendless, neurotic yuppie going to his psychoanalyst – or even as a drug addict seeking psychiatric help because he supposedly can’t help shooting up heroin. In that sense, the EU has been turned into a giant methadone clinic, and it acts accordingly by treating like with like, the way a psychiatrist gives an addict small doses of opiates to prevent him from killing himself with large ones.
The Germans get a dose of EU to settle for buying up their neighbours, rather than brutalising them. The French are injected with the hope of playing second fiddle to Germany rather than beating the drums in the back row. The Italians are shot up with a new kind of corruption to help them overcome their addiction to the old kind. The Eastern Europeans are weaned off one type of tyranny and onto another, which they hope will be milder.
That leaves us. Which addictions do we expect the EU to cure for us? The one to just laws and accountable governments? But our own self-treatment has been doing the job reasonably well. The one to ‘social justice’, otherwise known as rampant statism? If so, that treatment doesn’t seem to be efficacious. The one to political independence? Yes, that must be it – the therapy is working so well that it proves the diagnosis. So it’s only fair that we should continue to pay our EU contributions: after all, patients do pay their shrinks’ fees in the hope of buying themselves some peace of mind.
‘I am made all things to all men,’ said St Paul (I Corinthians 9: 22). Replace ‘I am’ with ‘the EU is’, and you’ll grasp the true meaning of political vulgarity; you’ll perceive the depth of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. And what’s worse, we keep on digging.