May’s Euro divorce is bound to end in tears
I WRITE this smashing a straight banana bendy with my Sheffield stainless steel hammer.
I’m sitting in a pair of John Bull Y-fronts, raising my hands from the keyboard only to sip Earl Grey tea and throw darts at a poster of The Muscles from Brussels. When I’ve finished, I plan on taking a marker pen to all my tins and bottles, and changing the metric weights back to imperial ones.
Because I get it. After last Wednesday we’re all Leavers now, riding on the same Brexit bus, even if half of us don’t believe a word that’s written on the side of it. So, bearing that in mind, is it OK to question our chances of making it to a land of tarifffree milk and honey, without being called a whinging Remoaner who can’t admit defeat? Because
Discussions in Europe have left us with bottoms spanked
although I accept we’re leaving the EU, I don’t accept that means we have to dance round with our fingers in our ears for two years singing The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.
And I suggest the 48% who told YouGov they’re confident Theresa May will win a good deal for Britain look back over the past 80 years to see how many times we’ve gone into discussions in Europe with a delusional air of superiority and had our backsides spanked.
In 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich claiming “Peace For Our Time” but instead we got war.
When it was over and, as co-victors, we carved-up Germany, it resulted in an economic miracle which turned them into the world’s second most powerful economy.
The 1992 Maastricht Treaty consolidated Germany at the centre of the newly-formed EU but was seen by so many Brits as a blow to our pride that UKIP was formed. And when David Cameron arrogantly believed he could charm our European partners into giving him enough concessions to win his referendum, he was given the square root of sod all. Why should that pattern suddenly change because those who voted to leave believe it must?
Indeed, why should we have any faith in government claims that they know how to take on foreign powers to protect British interests? This week the Chinese bought South West Trains, meaning – along with the Italian, German, French, Dutch, Belgian, Singaporean and Qatari governments – foreign state-owned companies now run three-quarters of our rail routes.
Yet the government that 60% of us believe should be running our railways, the British one, refuses to. It’s not just railways. London’s major airports are all foreign-run, four of the Big Six energy firms are in French, German and Spanish hands, and only three of our 10 water authorities are Britishowned. Oh, and the French are starting to build nuclear power stations here, with Chinese money.
So our political masters have allowed foreign governments to make billions from asset-stripping our vital services, diverting profits that should go back into our infrastructure to theirs. Radical Thatcherite free-marketeers like David Davis, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson, who demanded their country back, are quite happy to flog huge chunks of the family silver to the same governments they now have to negotiate a divorce settlement with. So why would you have any confidence in their success?
Why wouldn’t you guess that if the deal we’re offered fails to fit with their own strict ideology they’ll ditch our long-term national interests and drive the bus we all now sit in, over a cliff ?