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This blog\’s message for Europe Day

Fuck off would you?

No, really, just bugger off and leave us all alone.

Yes, this does mean you, you rotund short arsed ponce. Please resume your career as a bag of spanners impersonator. Dear God, who knows enough about the rest of them to even care about thinking up an insult, let alone one that anyone would recognise?

You lot can go back to your socially useful careers as ferret felchers and this is the sort of problem best solved the Carthaginian Way. Slaughter the inhabitants, raze the buildings to the ground and plough the land with salt.

It\’s not just that I wouldn\’t piss on you if you were on fire, I wouldn\’t crap on you even if you were Mark Oaten.

G\’arn, hie thee hence and leave the 500 million of us to plot our own courses from the cradle to the grave.

If I could get the entire 170,000 of you onto one scaffold I\’d happily pull the lever. After you\’d watched these three corpses hanged and properly tarred for their time on the gibbet. To point out to you what will happen to your own scrawny carcasses: to provide a symbol for happy children to gambol under at every crossroads on the continent.

Our new symbol of freedom, slowly rotting politicians and bureaucrats.

I commend this course of action to the House.

50 thoughts on “This blog\’s message for Europe Day”

  1. Why have you left out that treasonous sack of shit Ted Heath?

    And the last 4 treasonous scumbags who have dared to style themselves as Prime Ministers. And that creature Clegg.

  2. I read a book a few years ago, where the author pointed out that the standard defence of the EU is that it has helped keep Europe peaceful since WWII. And it is largely true that the big nations of Europe have been peaceful in that time, but he also asked the obvious counterfactual: does anybody really think Germany would have invaded France again if it wasn’t for the common agricultural policy?!?

  3. José Manuel Barroso

    I will take that as a ringing endorsement of the wonderful work myself & my fine colleagues in the European Union are doing to make our continent increasingly prosperous & harmonious.

  4. The totally useless toerags are so far up themselves that it is believable that José Manuel Barroso would smile and say “thank you for your kind words” as he laughs all the way to the bank to deposit his fat, taxpayer funded salary and probably fatterer expenses cheque. At the end of the day, they are taking the piss big time and the peasants just turn their backs, drop their trousers and let themselves get royally rogered (or is it Kinnocked?). I’m so glad England is just a holiday destination to us now.

  5. We wouldn’t have to deal with such verbal diarrhoea were it not for your ardent quest to roll back the frontiers of anal dildonics. Is this crap really necessary?

  6. Herman Achille Van Rompuy

    It just goes to show that without the EU, we would descend into violence.

    Mr thomas jones, don’t speak from ignorance please. There is a chapter of Mein Kampf dedicated to the intractable problems faced by peasant farmer in France. In fact Good European that he was, Monsieur Hitler invaded France to protect the rights of peasant farmers.

  7. It makes me wonder what if anything Tim would collectivise and at what level. It makes little difference to me if the rulers are in Berlin or Brussels, I have very little influence with any of them and currently no influence at all on who represents me in Berlin. I accept the process will never go in exactly the direction I would have, same goes for everyone. But since anarchies are not good places to live or do business, I tolerate government. Sure, I’d minimise it well below the level it is as the moment but not do away with it. As Berlin takes about 59% of my income and Brussels takes about 1%, I’d start cutting at the national level first. The latter contribution is, for me at least, far better value for money. Same probably goes for anyone taking advantage of freedom of movement, residence, capital transfer, and so on that go along with being in the EU.

  8. José Manuel Barroso

    In a sense James sums up what this argument is all about. Don’t know about anyone else but I voted for “…freedom of movement, residence, capital transfer, and so on” back in the 70’s. I didn’t vote for this attempt to rebuild the Roman Empire particularly as it’s current Vice Emperor bears a passing resemblance to Caligula’s horse.

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  10. TJ @ 6:
    “where the author pointed out that the standard defence of the EU is that it has helped keep Europe peaceful since WWII. And it is largely true that the big nations of Europe have been peaceful in that time…”

    At the risk of stating the obvious…NATO, not the EU, has achieved that.

  11. JamesV, “I accept the process will never go in exactly the direction I would have, same goes for everyone.”

    It seems a statement of the obvious to me that you are more likely to get the process moving in a direction you prefer if the decision making is made at the lowest possible level.

    My town has a better understanding of what I need than my continent does. And if it doesn’t, then I can always move to a town that is aligned with my thinking. This is harder to do if you govern from continents.

    So I would suggest cutting from the top first.

  12. “And if it doesn’t, then I can always move to a town that is aligned with my thinking.”

    But but but that would lead to a POSTCODE LOTTERY!!

  13. @Mr Potoarto,

    Of course decisions should be taken at the lowest possible level, that’s one of the most important arguments for reducing government overall. That doesn’t however mean every decision. With greater local sovereignty you can go back to every city banning practitioners of certain trades from other cities from doing business there, re-establish a customs post at every state border, and setting slightly different standards for washing machine sizes or shapes of headlamps. The EU has been extremely effective at reducing protectionist measures and trade barriers (at least within the EU) – something I’d have thought liberals would cheer for unreservedly. So mounting some kind of effective campaign to keep the EU (and national and even local governments) from mission-creeping into areas that are not their concern (or over-regulating the things it should be doing) would in my view make more sense than abolishing it. Trouble is, liberalism has very little popular credibility at the moment.

  14. Is it me or has anyone else noticed the more than coincidental resemblance between our earstwhile European President Herman Achille Van “Rumpy-Pumpy” Rompuy and Supreme Chancellor Palpatine aka Darth Sidious aka “The Emporer” from Star Wars.

    Either that or Ian McDiarmid’s long lost bastard brother.

    Go Fuck Yourself Herman! You Belgian damp rag. Why don’t you fuck off back to Brussels and rustle up the government that your countries been missing for the past cunting year?

    Apologies – My Libertarian Tourettes is playing up again.

  15. Britain was not at war with Germany from 1945 – 1973, when we began our surrender. What kept the peace between us for those 28 years?

  16. JamesV, when I read EU bullshit or your mealymouthed apologies for it, I think I would be happier in one of those medieval towns, or even a castle with a moat full of sharks, to keep the sheer idiocy of the world away from me.

    But to get back to the point, I still have the papers belonging to my great-great-grandfather’s company (1875). He was a grain dealer who traded everywhere between Munich and Budapest, spoke 5 languages, and navigated borders, language and culture despite being a Jew wandering around in a black coat with a beard down to his bellybutton Am I supposed to thank the fucking EU for that?

  17. Sorry you think I make mealy-mouthed apologies. I can be as critical as the next man about the EU when it deserves it, there is obvious costly insanity – carbon emissions targets, subsidies for tobacco crops and restrictions on what varieties of vegetable seeds it is legal to sell. But the only way I can fault the EU’s approach to trade barriers and protectionism is that it is not fast enough – and not tough enough on countries like the UK that deign to conduct routine (and hence illegal) customs checks on persons arriving from what is supposedly a customs union – or tough enough on countries like Germany that have only recently opened their labour market to the east (Britain to its credit did that 7 years ago).

    Sure, you don’t have the EU to thank for your grandfather’s enterprise as it wasn’t around then – it also has nothing to do with the five languages he spoke. As for the four I speak, it has at least something to do with that as I acquired two of them by living in the respective countries under freedom of movement provisions. I am skeptical that Europe would have had a major war since 1945 even without the EU (but I do think it makes a future war between member states slightly less likely). However, you really do have the EU to thank for freedom of movement and trade over such a large area.

    In 1875, the German state was newly unified – and got on very well with its neighbour Austria-Hungary. This probably helped your grandfather a great deal. In fact, if he was making money moving grain around in 1875, the recent unification would have boosted that considerably, for it tore down all the thousands of customs posts and turnpikes in Germany. There are still the remnants of a few on the edge of the city I live in. 150 years ago I’d have had to cross two state lines to get to the next town. (On those turnpikes and toll booths the EU could do more to dissuade countries like Slovenia, Austria, and in the future Belgium from re-errecting them by requiring you to stop on the now nonexistent border and buy a sticker for your windscreen to drive in their country. Or certian German towns from requiring an emission standards sticker in the windscreen issued by the German vehicle licesnsing authorities, even of foreign vehicles. There – some more criticism of the EU for you.) Prior to that all manner of minor princelets kept themselves in the style to which they were accustomed by levying duties on anyone passing through their territory. Having only one border (and hence set of duties) to cross is rather easier than dozens. Having none is much better, and not having to restrict my trade or movements to the corridor between newly-Prussian Munich and closely-allied Habsburg Budapest is even better.

    So I don’t accept one entrepreneurial grandfather taking advantage of a newly-founded customs union as an argument against even wider customs unions.

    If the anti-EU crowd could construct a consistent and persuasive argument for me, rather than mouthing off about my being mealy-mouthed, or threatening to “hang the lot of them”, I’d be interested to hear it. But mostly I hear bullshit about straight bananas, invented nonsense about conferences chaired by Peter Mandelson to discuss regulation of mushy peas in Barbados (straight up, some anti-EU nut told me that, but I have not found a scrap of evidence for it), or failure to offset the costs of membership (including some of the idiocy I mentioned above) against the benefits (such as increased trade, not having to queue for 2 hours between every country [except England] to show a passport, or giving lots of money to banks to buy a coffee in Vienna instead of Frankfurt.

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  19. @JamesV

    How many elections have you participated in to elect members of the EU Commission, the Presidency or Vice-Presidency of the Union?

    Personally, I need know no more than the answer to that question to understand that the EU is not a democratic structure and should be destroyed.

  20. James V

    People have been trading with each other since the dawn of time. The political shite are parasites on that trade as well as being direct and indirect obstacles to it. The only need for a “customs union” is because of the states thieving antics in the first place.

  21. @Mr Ecks

    I totally agree. The less state thieving shitery we have the better. But did we manage it in ~400 years of the modern nation state? No. Are we managing it now? No, but better than we were.

    @nbc

    I’ve voted three times for candidates to the European parliament, I’ve voted every chance I got for my national government, which itself forms the council of ministers, and which directly appoints (with the approval of the European parliament) the commission. I can’t much help it if Britain chooses never-weres (Patten, Mandelson, Britten, Kinnock …) for its commission spot rather than the has-beens every other government sends.

    So my influence on the commission, as small as it is, is infinitely larger than my influence on the composition of the upper chamber of the British parliament, or the head of state of the United Kingdom. Perhaps you would tell me when you last voted for the most powerful people in the country?

  22. Also a quibble – I wasn’t aware the European Union had either a president or a vice president. I think it’s a good sign that the person frequently erroneously referred to as former has an extremely low profile and the latter is so nonexistent that I can’t even name them.

  23. @ JamesV,

    it’s interesting that you wax lyrical over the Prussian take-over of Germany. You overlook that this was hardly a peaceful transition. Not everyone appreciated coming under the heel of Prussia.

    Likewise I do not wish to see my country extinguished by the soft prussianism of Brussels.

    You ask for persuasive arguments. I’ll leave that to others. Your side has none, which is why ‘the project’ has advanced through deceit, and why supporters of the EU are terrified that one day the people may be given a democratic choice in the matter, and then your EU will disappear.

    The advantages of co-operation between the countries of Europe could all be achieved without the parasitical institutions of Brussels. The many problems caused by national governments interferring with individual liberty (including economic liberty) will not be solved by empowering a government over Europe. It will have all the faults of the national governments multiplied.

    We will win in the end, because we not only have all the rational arguments, but we have irrational human nature on our side too. I love my country and I hate the EU.

  24. I’m not waxing lyrical over the Prussian takeover, merely pointing out (for the sake of one tangential example) that one consequence was an abolition of customs and tarrifs.

    I don’t doubt that a europe-wide referendum would be a close call for abolition of the EU. Trouble is, what we would subsequently have is not a nation-state liberal paradise but the resumption of barriers to all manner of freedoms.

    I don’t love my country (not sure what my country is actually, there are three good candidates – one I am a current citizen of, one a former citizen of and another one I live in) or the EU. I’d rather both were supreme irrelevances. As things stand I like Churchill tolerate this system because the alternatives are worse.

    I thank you for your highlighting of the irrational nature of opposition to trade liberalisation. I don’t agree that, governments being what they are, this can be effectively achieved without broad international agreements. Even then (in the context of other treaties and organisations) countries like the USA can ignore them at will and tarrif European steel and cheese, to name two recent examples (or France with British beef for a more local example).

  25. Just a moment of solidarity: I’m with JamesV.

    “As things stand I like Churchill tolerate this system because the alternatives are worse.”

    I have had great personal advantage from the EU, the free movement of labor and residency rights, the liberalization of the professions, the liberalization of umpteen things that make a European’s life much better these days than 20 years ago. Still lots to rant about. But you can’t run a free market at the town level, and you can flat guarantee the national jacks-in-office and idiots that would succeed the EU would be at least as thick and illiberal as the international ones we have now, and without the free market rules to hold them (imperfectly) in check.

  26. I have had great personal advantage from the EU, the free movement of labor and residency rights,

    Yes – however, if you came from an EFTA country outside of the European Union, you could have all of these freedoms without most of the bullshit.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EFTA_AELE_countries.svg

    Switzerland might be pleasant and boring and not everybody’s cup of tea, but I don’t remember the last time a Swiss cop shot an innocent traveller on the Zurich Metro.

  27. John Galt,

    “if you came from an EFTA country outside of the European Union, you could have all of these freedoms without most of the bullshit.”

    Well said. This reiterates the point I made; that we can have the benefits of co-operation without Brussels.

    As for Ambrose Murphy and his ‘liberalisation’ arguments, would you like to justify for me the ‘liberalisation’ of the extradition laws? Tell me how wonderfully efficient it is, now that the police in Hungary don’t need any evidence before they can have you dragged out of your bed in this country and thrown into a dungeon over there, without charge for as long as they like?

    The EU are not creating free markets. They are creating the most heavily-regulated markets in the world.

  28. Trooper and others: exactly. I happily worked in Switzerland with an EU passport, and the low tax area I lived in certainly wasn’t paying for EU bullshit.

    JamesV: what are you talking about with this bumph about unification of the German state?? My family lived near Lake Balaton. They weren’t ‘unified’ until the 1940s.

    But to get to the point, people have been freely moving around Europe and trading for centuries. The relative I mentioned only travelled in one area that had been a German kingdom., and never traded across previous intra-German borders. So his lifestyle owed nothing to a German customs union. That’s pretty obvious really.

    The single important question is, does movement of goods and people require the EU? The answer is, obviously not, as the EFTA and pre-WWII Europe have been clear examples of the former without the latter.

  29. JamesV,
    Where to start, I have never seen such a lame defence of the EU. It is not liberal or free trade, it is an unaccountable , corrupt, protectionist political construct. It is designed to be like that. It has no legitimacy whatsoever being non democratic. The Council of Ministers is of no use since the veto has been scrapped and most things are decided by qualified majority voting. There is no European demos and the whole scam was done through lies and deceit, deliberately! Our own politicians are fully complicit in this and are, therefore, traitors to their own Country! I agree with every thing Tim says and then some.

  30. @rech,

    1871 and all that? Areas around lake Balaton were never part of Germany, except for a brief period during the German occupation of Austria, in the 1940s (as you mentioned). I never said otherwise.

    Norway, Switzerland et al. have to implement a whole load of EU law in order to remain in the mix – and with no influence at all over what that law is. If they don’t like it their only options are to tolerate it or leave. Britain can negotiate.

    As to whether the EU is free trade, I can only disagree with Derek, at least so far as trade within its own borders goes. Of course it implements protectionist measure on external trade, and I don’t seek to defend that. But without it you would have all 27 countries implementing their own forms of protectionism (in the first instance) against the outside world, which would ultimately lead to the resurrection of protectionist barriers within Europe (if Luxembourg imported cheap underwear from China with no tariffs you’d quickly find those customs posts on its borders opened up again). As for being liberal, bits obviously are and bits are obviously not.

    I agree I am personally biased here, as I see positive effects that directly impact my life. I am at a loss for any negative ones that would not be imposed by a national government anyway. Even in Greece – in the absence of an EU or euro my tax money would still be used to prop the place up to prevent total social collapse, and to rescue overexposed German banks (in reverse order of importance).

    It’s simplistic to say the EU is undemocratic. Particularly to criticise majority voting! All democracies exist in degrees rather than absolutes. One entire house of the British parliament is a total democracy-free zone. And don’t tell me the British civil service is remotely democratic. It, like the commission, is appointed by the government it serves.

    Further, is it not rather anti-democratic of you not to accept that your democratically elected politicians chose to enter and have ever since chosen to stay? You might be of a different view but the demos, through its representatives, have chosen otherwise. After all, the three largest parties are all in favour of remaining in the EU, so if quitting was important enough to most people they would vote for someone else. Not long ago you had the referendum party – committed to do just one thing (hold the referendum on EU membership) and then resign. If people had wanted out, the referendum party would have been elected under the UK’s democratic process.

    Now, you believe these decisions to be wrong. And that’s perfectly fine – but one thing about democracy is that you have to accept democratic decisions you don’t agree with.

  31. @ JamesV,

    “one thing about democracy is that you have to accept democratic decisions you don’t agree with.”

    Oh really? Like when the French voted down the Constitution, and the Dutch also, and when the Irish voted down the repackaged Constitution?

    You can, for the moment, enjoy your smugness, because we can all acknowledge that the majority of the people are not going to rise up and smash the state, in order to free themselves from the EU. As the Declaration of Independence noted: “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

  32. JamesV- I said we don’t need the EU one example being that long ago people like my family members move and traded freely between Germany, Czech lands, Austria and Hungary. You replied that this was because of German unification. Do you think that opponents of the EU’s aims are congenitally stupid?

  33. José Manuel Barroso

    I don’t think many of us would argue with James’s defence of what the EU is intended to achieve. The problem is that we’ve ended up with the EU structure itself. Instead of being the servant of common needs it’s transformed into a self propagating monstrosity that’s continually creating roles for itself beyond any requirements. It’s followed exactly the processes of growth that Norththcote Parkinson warned against in his seminal work, which by chance shares its publication year with the establishment of the European Economic Community.

  34. Or as a leader in times gone by put it a “…union between Scandinavia and Great Britain, with the adherence of Finland and Holland, and in which Germany and eventually the British Dominions and America might later on be absorbed, would take away the sting of any communist combination and secure European civilization and peace for the foreseeable future”.

  35. Jose Manuel Barosso wrote:

    The problem is that we’ve ended up with the EU structure itself. Instead of being the servant of common needs it’s transformed into a self propagating monstrosity that’s continually creating roles for itself beyond any requirements.

    —–

    Right, but I could say the same about any government at any level. But try persuading politicians to reduce the power they have. The mechanisms to do that in the US constitution have also proved ineffective at reining in that country’s current and recent leaders. I don’t know how to solve it either, but abolition is not a solution.

    I still don’t take one example of one trader in times gone by trading between two closely-allied countries as indicative of us being able to return to a non-EU situation without re-errection of a lot of trade and travel barriers. There is enough pressure for that at the moment (viz. Denmark) even within the current structure. Plus, cross-border trade and travel is daily reality for millions of people now. It wasn’t then. Maybe even a majority of people don’t take advantage of the rights and opportunities, or realise the invisible benefits that accrue to them from it, but that’s no more reason to campaign for their abolition than I would have for campaigning to abolish cricket on the basis that that is likewise a minority pursuit.

  36. @TrooperThompson

    “Oh really? Like when the French voted down the Constitution, and the Dutch also, and when the Irish voted down the repackaged Constitution?”

    Yes. The correct constituency for European treaty issues that are not delegated to representative parliaments is the whole of Europe. It is extremely unlikely that you would get unanimity across 27 constituencies – someone has to accept being on the losing side. Of 27 countries that went through some kind of democratic process on Lisbon, only 3 put up any obstacle. The minority opinion – in all democracies – has to lump it or opt out – the latter is now a realistic option (ironically thanks to Lisbon). So Ireland could indeed now vote to leave the EU and would be doing us all a favour if it did.

    So the way to do this is:
    1) Delegate to representative parliaments (as most countries did)
    2) Hold a single Europe-wide referendum (probably the best choice)
    3) Hold popular referenda simultaneously in all countries individually and accept a majority by-country decision, and let countries leave the union if they can’t tolerate the result.

    All of which are far more democratic than having the first referendum in X years in one country with a deeply unpopular government in office. Whatever the result – positive or negative – it would have a clear democratic mandate, either reducing bickering about introducing something some people don’t want, or completely killing something most people don’t want.

    If referenda were a bit more frequent (like in Switzerland), I would have greater trust that the result was actually related to the issue. I’m not convinced that any of the Irish referendun results (whether the primary or the re-runs) had anything at all to do with the Lisbon treaty, or EU membership as a concept.

    The EU really can be its own worst enemy a lot of the time.

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