EU must be kidding

Went to see a panel yesterday debating whether the UK should leave the EU. At the one level, this would seem completely academic (appropriately being held on a campus) with no possibility of affecting the outside world, in much the same way that a degree in English literature is just a glorified book club. Opens our minds to new streams of thought, blah, blah. Yet on another level, it was entertainment, for playing the Jeremiah (although he saw himself as David versus Goliath, typically) was the United Kingdom Independence Party councillor for Tonbridge and I attended primarily to hear his crackpot reasoning.


A should have had a ready supply of eggs to hand. But it’s not what you think. After all, one needs eggs to make a fruitcake. Of course, he was wearing a pinstripe suit, though mixing it up with a psychedelic purple lava lamp of a tie was interesting. He told of how the scales fell from his eyes about the EU as he went about his role as a law-cost ‘lawyer’, derided the ‘lies and deceit’ (repeated again later as if dogma) of Heath’s decision to enter the country for the common market without elucidating what these actually were – and contradicting himself when, further in his presentation, he said his party had no issue with a common market – and describing the previous presenter, a lithe long-legged lecturer in a rather summery outfit who gave a strident defence of the EU, as absolutely wrong akin to her being benighted and still living in Plato’s Cave (he didn’t use the Plato allegory but this was the general tenor). He drew hoots of derision when he referred to the EU as the Euro-Soviet – to be fair, he seemed prepared for the response – citing one unsupported anti-communist dissident’s description of the EU as a massive gulag. He mocked the level of justice in other EU countries, in a manner of ‘they do funny things in those funny places’ when slighting the European Arrest Warrant. Castigating all immigration as the fault of the EU, he curiously only talked of those coming in rather than net migration. Finally, he said, ‘don’t take my word for it’ or somesuch, promoting the literature he had brought with him written by “esteemed people” such as the odious prophet of selfishness Tim Congdon. Hyperbole was the order of the day.

Taking questions from the floor laying in to the decline of influence Britain would suffer when not pooling its resources or how non-EU countries like Norway have to implement a majority of EU legislation without a say in its formulation, it was clear that views on both sides were already set. What he never explained was how Britain could be “independent and sovereign’ in an interdependent, interconnected global economy. I didn’t care to ask it for what would it change? I was there for the fun.