Pligget Little to say for myself |
Friday, May 30, 2003 The European nightmareI honestly can't see what all the fuss is about with the forthcoming EU constitution. We are bombarded with nightmare stories of a Federal Europe, or worse: A United States of Europe. Can someone tell me what is wrong with the idea of a United States of Europe (after all, the U.S.E. has a nice utilitarian ring to it)?All this guff about loss of sovereignty. At the moment, I vote for someone in Cambridge and end up being governed by someone from Sedgefield/Islington - with whom I have very little in common. Where is my sovereignty in that? How is that different from voting in England and being governed from Brussels, apart from the question of scale? All politics is a compromise, so why would it be so awful to live under a system that compromises across a collection of countries instead of counties? And I'm talking about laws, taxes, the lot. I for one am fully prepared to have my living standards dragged down to the level of those in France, Germany, Holland, Italy etc. What makes Britain so different from the other European countries that leads so many to the conclusion that the system may work for them but it won't for us? It all seems to stem from a xenophobic conviction that there are two types of people: Brits and foreigners. While a system might work for foreigners (all of them, apparently), it won't necessarily work for us Brits. What bollocks. The same xenophobes have been complaining recently about the insularity and antagonism of the French - a perfect example of how a country enthusiastically wedded to the idea of European union, and one of the stalwarts of Euro-land, can still act as freely and independently within that structure as the xenophobes would claim Britain could do only if it was politically independent. It seems to me that we face a choice: either we join with our European friends and live collectively with them (and, through the world's 4th largest economy joining the Euro, make Europe much stronger), or we retain our fiercely proud independence and do exactly what George W. Bush tells us to do. posted by Plig | 15:06 |
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