Essays in Idleness

I found more encouragement in the result of the Brexit referendum than in any other recent poll, and before changing my mind, judged it more significant even than the election of Mr Donald Trump. I always doubt an electorate (any electorate) has the courage of its apparent convictions, or can hold a course, so while I’m sometimes pleased, it is never for long. A few thousand examples could follow. Yet the mere indication that the British might still have life in them, on some days of the week, and the ability to distinguish “sugar from shit” (colloquial English expression), was rather thrilling.

That the bureaucracy, including amateur politicians like Mrs Theresa May, would move quickly to sabotage their own stated commitments, was hardly surprising. Such people “know,” instinctively, that anything the public wants must be wrong. I, by contrast, only know that it is usually wrong.

Enough cannot be said about the black heart of the European Union. By providing a single-size straitjacket for countries so various in size and shape, that they don’t even fit elasticized pajamas, the EU is a monument to modern monumentality. It is also, as Peter Hitchens put it, “A continuation of Germany by other means.” Yet to my mind, the Germans are as strangled by the straitjacket as any of their client states.

As a proposition in political economy the semi-defunct European Free Trade Association was a much less bad idea. The OECD remains as a clearing house for practical trade arrangements, as the EU dissolves. There were and there are international fora for other cross-border agreements, and while “it would be nice” to walk across Europe without a passport, just as one can across the Natted States (or Canada, if you don’t mind freezing to death), in this age of terrorists and refugees, nation states need borders.

These are general considerations, but Britain is a special case. Her deeply mediaeval traditions of Crown-in-Parliament, and personal liberties defensible in Common Law, were never compatible with the pagan, Teutonic, jackboot traditions of “Enlightenment” Prussia, whose aggressions launched so many Continental wars, and again contribute to lethal tensions, by their embodiment in the EU. That said, it should be mentioned that each of the other twenty-seven member states is a special case, too.

Of course, the gliberal commentariat do not care for such things as history or religion, and are exclusively focused upon macro-economic questions — which in turn blind them to actual economic questions, in a world where huge, faceless, indeed ruthless multinational corporations cannot provide for all human needs, and the human being himself is not reducible to pure consumer. As we are often reminded, the consequence of homogenizing vast populations is never what the Procrusteans expect. People want space to enjoy their own, and to be themselves, without alien invasion. They will always want this. It is why vast supranational aggregations such as the Soviet or the European Union always fall apart.

From the other side, attempts at essentially municipal legislation on the continental scale — without regard to local history and culture — also fail. Free trade itself only works when it is not imposed by a Colossus, but simply allowed to take place.

The original (1951) European Coal and Steel Community was conceived as a regulatory body to enable gargantuan economies of scale, though sold as a free-trade agreement. The tendency of any regulatory body is to extend and increase regulation. The course of “European unity” was predictable. It would get bigger, until it collapsed.

A majority of the British wanted out. And while they may have been successfully subverted and dishonoured by the Euro ruling caste (including those in their own government), they will eventually get their way. For the EU cannot last, as even its functionaries are beginning to understand.