The first part of the title is a direct quote from Jean-Claude Juncker, to whom I’m warming up rapidly.
The second came from my own vituperative heart, with Dave being the object of the vituperation.
My friend Jean-Claude’s detractors cite many of his drawbacks, such as a dearth of any discernible principles, the kind of amorality that’s de rigueur for a committed federast, perfidy, the intellect of a child with special needs and so forth.
All that is true. But, for the sake of balance, one must think of his redeeming qualities too. To wit: Jean-Claude is a hearty drinker, borderline alcoholic. He smokes like a soot-blocked chimney. And he can see right through Dave.
I must stress that regarding heavy consumption of booze and fags as Jean-Claude’s merits reflects my own idiosyncrasies, rather than his own intrinsic goodness. However, his perspicacity, at least in relation to Dave, is objectively laudable.
Dave, said my new friend, doesn’t want any Brexit. He wants to use the referendum “to dock his country permanently to Europe”.
Truer words have seldom been spoken, at least not since Nigel Farage questioned the advisability of spending £25,000 of our money a year to treat a recent immigrant with HIV. Dave wants precisely what Jean-Claude said he does, which is why I’m opposed to the referendum.
Alas, Jean-Claude’s statement that not only Dave but also the British people don’t want Brexit testifies to the fact that his perspicacity doesn’t extend beyond Dave’s character.
Jean-Claude understands Dave perfectly because they are cut from the same spivocratic cloth. Conversely, he doesn’t understand the British because their national character is dramatically different from his own.
Hence he’s wrong about the British not wanting to leave the EU. They do. But I doubt they will feel the same way come referendum day, after having been deluged with bucketfuls of sewage, otherwise known as federalist propaganda.
The British en masse will be deaf to the only absolutely irrefutable argument in favour of getting out: that relinquishing our sovereignty destroys the 1,000-year political tradition of our nation, thereby destroying the nation.
Two generations of oxymoronic ‘comprehensive education’ have rendered our population ignorant of both our political heritage and its key formative influence on the nation at large.
As part of that ‘education’, the nation has been fed the materialist lie, preached by both socialists and libertarians (including, one is sad to say, the sainted Lady Thatcher). Both groups insist that virtue be judged strictly in economic terms, and they differ only on which roads they propose to take to the fiscal Shangri-la.
Hence the whole issue of in or out will be pitched in strictly economic terms. The EU and Dave’s government will spend millions, not to say billions, lying that the country will be prosperous within the EU and pauperised outside it.
Their task won’t be difficult. Economic facts pass the criterion of truthfulness on which logical positivists insist: they are falsifiable. Moreover, they are easily falsifiable.
By the time the British go to the voting booths, they will have been exposed to endless columns of figures proving that Brexit will mean mass unemployment, starvation and their wives leaving them for swarthy foreigners.
Some token concessions that Juncker’s friends will have offered in the nick of time will be presented as real game changers. The overall message will be that, by staying in the EU, we’ll multiply our wealth and keep all our sovereignty.
(This, incidentally, was the message I recently received from a young lady blessed with a philosophy degree from a decent university. If EU propaganda, still in low gear, had such an effect on her, imagine what it’ll do going at full pelt to the masses barely able to sign their names.)
And, once the Yes vote has been cast, there will be no going back – unlike with the barely possible No vote, which, in the good tradition of the EU, will be held invalid.
This is exactly the outcome Dave wants, and Jean-Claude cottoned on to this in one of his rare lucid moments. Immediately thereafter, the booze got the best of my new friend and he began muttering incoherent football analogies of which he’s fond when in his cups.
On the issue of Brexit, he said, “the Commission is neither an attacker nor a defender. It’s the ‘libero’ who distributes the ball… it’s like a training camp, because there are a lot of balls. At the end there is only one ball – and you have to get it into the goal…”
A lot of balls indeed. But I’d suggest, using the same football idiom so beloved of Jean-Claude, that the Commission is none of those things. It’s a crooked bettor slipping a few quid to a team to throw a match and stack the odds.