The British Common Law tradition means that people are free to experiment with ideas and creative ways of thinking. Things are permitted unless explicitly forbidden. The European rule of law is the Napoleonic Code, a top-down system where things are forbidden unless you have permission to do something different. In EU world Government knows best. Britons have always had a healthy disdain for pompous authority and official ‘bossiness’. Europe seems to live off it; often in European projects one is trying to get over or around officialdom. EU is officialdom par excellence.
In the long run, agility and flexibility will always be greater assets. Douglas Murray is right; EU has a fundamental design flaw which will prevent it from ever being the power it thinks it is or wants to be.
Until a year ago you were absolutely right about British Common law, but we now live in a country where it is illegal to leave the house without “a reasonable excuse” and we’re waiting for the government to tell us when we’ll be allowed to hug a family member. What a brave new world we live in.
I am so far willing to give the government the benefit of doubt. I realise that rights taken away are not easily returned by power-crazed officials and politicians. I sincerely hope I am not wrong in being trusting. Time will tell.
Exactly. Once the principle of removal is established, especially when by mere statutory instrument, ‘rights’ become contingent and are therefore no longer rights.
Indeed. When California tried to close churches due to the pandemic, the churches went to court. SCOTUS found for the churches based on the 1st amendment right to religious freedom. Now the state has to figure out how to accommodate the right to worship in light of the pandemic. If there is no guaranteed right, the onus is on the wrong people. It should be on those trying to remove a right rather than those trying to maintain one,
Scottish courts have this week ruled that the Scottish government acted unlawfully by ruling that churches had to be closed. In England the CofE heirarchybwent along with the government decision to close churches and that decision has not been tested in court.
Yes, courts may rule one way or the other wherever you don’t have a constitutional right to freedom of religion.
The point is that when there is a constitutional right to freedom of religion, the onus is on the government to figure out how to accommodate that. If there’s no right, it’s always going to be a case by case basis.
Also if this vaccine is the panacea Murray is suggesting , why is Britain still in lockdown/mask wearing mode and will remain so for the foreseeable future? He suggests European countries are only having lockdowns/curfews until they eventually get the vaccine,which their ‘ belligerance’ has delayed. My understanding of this vaccine is it has no affect whatsoever on the virus, you can still catch it , be ill and infect someone else.
‘…this vaccine has no affect (sic) whatsoever on the virus..’. Interested in where you have gained this understanding from, as my understanding is that according to well-developed and standard testing procedures, it has well-established efficacy levels that are not zero (if by ‘it’ you mean AZ and Pfizer). We are in lockdown & mask-wearing mode because only about half the country has yet received the first dose, and only about 5-6% the full set of two. But willing as always to be proved wrong if you can offer your sources.
Kathleen’s choice of words is a bit array; I am sure she just means you can still get COVID-19 from the SARS CoV 2 virus, plus still pass it on as well, even if you have had one or two doses of the new injected prophylactics.
“We are in lockdown & mask-wearing mode because only about half the country has yet received the first dose…”
If this is the case we truly are in a totalitarian state.
You are technically incorrect. All of the vaccines prevent infection (not just symptomatic infection, hospitalization and death) and therefore prevent transmission. Figures seem to vary between 50% to 80%. However more importantly serious illness and death is reduced by 80% to 100%, so even with transmission deaths and hospitalisation should fall by this amount – effectively making the pandemic not a ‘big deal’.
The problem here is the constant media distortions of “case”-demic, versus the long term vaccination goal of reducing deaths. As long as the media remain obsessed with the “case”-demic, none of the data will make any sense.
Why we are still in lockdown and mask-wearing mode is an excellent question, but it is a political one, not an epidemiological one. Since the vaccine rollout, cases, hospitalisations and deaths have fallen dramatically. That would suggest the vaccine is effective? In Europe, where the vaccines have not been administered to many people, cases are rising. That would seem to be more evidence that vaccines make a difference. Of course, nothing is a panacea, but at some point we have to have the basic courage required to deal with real life. If we can’t do it now, then when?
You are incorrect, it’s a epidemiological one. The more people we have vaccinated by the time we end the lockdown, the fewer infections, deaths and hospitalizations there will be. Ideally we would wait until everyone who wants a vaccination is given one (two doses). However there needs to be a balance, waiting 16 more days before we essentially open up 90% of activities that were prevented, seems a reasonable balance to me.
Yes and Britain would gain the advantage of ‘look at us we got the vaccine and now we are back to normal’ over EU-instead we have gloom and doom of Sage who seem to want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is that the latest information shows the OAZ vaccine reduces, although may not eliminate, transmission of the Covid-19 virus.
As Whitty, Vallance, JVT et al have said, Covid will become endemic; we’ll have our yearly vaccinations and learn to live with it, just as we’ve learned to live with the 10-20K fatalities from the flu each year.
I’m in my early 60’s, lost my Mum to Covid during the 1st wave, and although I’ve had my 1st dose of OAZ I’ve no problem wearing a mask in a store or on the very rare occasion I use public transport to help protect not only myself, but others.
Never voted, follow the Mark Twain principle-‘If voting made a difference ,they wouldn’t let us do it’. So I wonder why Britain has been allowed to leave the EU ( as there is no way of verifying the referendum result) and whether it is to allow us to be financially ruined?
Is it too obvious to point out that in the EU referendum the establishment wanted to remain but the voters secured a leave? Turns out Mark Twain wasn’t quite correct with that one.
Unclear if the vaccine is a panacea, they are absolutely efficacious in the older folk – evidence shows, less cases, less really sick, less hospital admissions. Why is Boris still locking down? Because he can…he can ignore the science as he sees fit because of the precedent already set at the beginning of this whole mess – Simon Wood University of Bristol paper, Lancet, Stanford paper, Nature paper, BMJ paper all say, knowing what we know now, that locking down is more harmful than not locking down. Here’s a compilation https://principia-scientific.com/scientific-analyses-and-papers-on-lockdown-effectiveness/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+psintl+%28Principia+Scientific+Intl+-+Latest+News%29
BTW these are not vaccines in the truest sense – more like treatments. Small pox, polio – those are vaccines – those jabs prevent you from getting the bad effects of the virus or bacterium. These covid-19 jabs help lessen the effects of the illness of covid-19.
you have a weak understanding of what a vaccine is and how vaccines protect against infection, and you don’t seem to understand that often when a doctor prescribes a medication to a patient, it is not just the pill but a variety of other instructions are also given according to the condition.
Lockdowns, masks, etc, have a purpose, the only issue will be when and if it will be safe to remove them. People who have travelled a bit are aware that people from certain Asian countries who have had very low virus infection and disease rates often were wearing masks in public settings long before corona.
Yes, what the UK really needs is a constitution and a bill of rights. If things are permitted unless prohibited, there can always be a reason found for it to be prohibited. Much better to guarantee rights against political machinations leaving the government to have to figure out how to accommodate the right rather than making people fight for the right each time.
I have from the start refused to accept either of those premises, I have met frequently with family members and have left the house (avoiding the gestapo) those that give up freedom for safety deserve neither
The divide goes back further. The Divine Right of Kings was adopted by Charlemagne from the Roman tradition of the Emperor being Divine and The Law being used to impose his will.. The Anglo Saxons, Celts and Vikings elected Kings, the wisest warrior and kingship was not always hereditary. In England the first laws combined AS Tradition and the Bible were written by Aethelbert of Kent in about 650 AD. AS Kings ruled through consultation and consent. Edward 1 said ” That which affects all must be consulted by all”. Napoleon assumes the Divine Right of Kings of Charlemagne, makes his Empire a reality by imposing his code and like him, is crowned by the Pope and makes Napoleon breaks the power of the feudal aristocracy and RC Church in Europe, enabling Charlemagne’s Empire to exist. The French kings believed in the Divine Right of Kings and in droit administratif, a sacred principle of state which can crush the people. The EU is using droit administartif to block vaccines to the UK. The EU is an attempt to recreate the Empire Of Charlemagne which is why Mitterand and Kohl visited his tomb at Aachen. If you look at the centres of power of the EU, they are largely in heart of Charlemagne’s Empire. Charlemagne’s Empire extended to south of barcelona, Italy North of Rome, in Italy, Slovenia Bohemia, Western Austria, Non- Prussian Germany, Belgium and perhaps RC Netherlands. Charlemagne-empire-map-814-.jpg (650×594) (shorthistory.org) Those countries which are least pro EU are largely those which existed outside of Charlemagne’s Empire. Who knows England who only knows England? A major reason why there is lack of understanding of the EU is massive failure of the opinion forming middle classes to understand European History post 410 AD. The days when politicians had History degrees and could read Latin and French, is well history.
Yes, fundamental design flaw as is the case with all Left thinking organizations. I believe it stems from the Most basic flaw incorporated into Marxism by Marx himself. They do not take into account human nature and that people are individuals and not all the same. Some will excel, some are satisfied with the status quo, but you can’t force all into the mediocrity of the Leftist mindset.
True enough about not being able to force everyone into a leftist mindset, but it’s still amazing to see the numbers, and apparent intelligence of individuals, who do indeed enthusiastically adopt that position.
The key words here are ‘apparently intelligence’. That is the skill of our politicians. They exude ‘apparent intelligence’. Dissect the word politics phonetically and you have:
Poly – more than one
Tic – blood sucking parasite
I forge to separate authoritarian leftists from libertarian leftists. There’s a big difference between the wokism dominating the covid debate and the libertarian leftists who lean to better hospital care, but more liberty for the majority of the population.
Wokeism rules the covid debate, as it rules other debates in society presently. The woke Left have embraced the religious authoritairian ways of church pushing right-wingers. It’s sad time in history.
The pontifications of Klaus Schab head of the World Economic Forum author of the Great Reset is just another marxist idea where nobody owns anything but they will still be happy. Where have we heard that before?
The EU is our nearest and largest trading partner with which we had a perfectly functional relationship and a very open one until by a very narrow margin the U.K. electorate voted to leave. It is now perfectly clear that this was a self-damaging act and a terrible mistake, which will take years, decades to unpick. These abstractions about differing legal traditions are irrelevant. The U.K. will have to deal with whatever the EU is, whether from within it, or as a Third Country. The rest is mindless bombast.
It is most definitely not clear that leaving the EU was damaging. Nor that it was a terrible mistake. In fact, it is ever more clear that the decision to leave was the right decision. This is somewhat supported by almost every bullying action that the bloc takes against the UK now. Rather than unpick our decision to leave, we should be working to build on opening our opportunities in the wider world and move on. Yes, we can, and will, work with the EU, even if, it seems that the EU is determined to stick the boot in at every opportunity. I would also take issue with your description of differing legal traditions as being irrelevant. Just recall that North America was built upon Common Law whilst South America evolved using European (aka Napoleonic) law. There is, it would appear, a strong correlation between the relative success of the USA and Canada versus the collection of basket cases that lie to the south of the Rio Grande. To counter your bombast accusations, I would say that it is they, not us, who seem to be looking for fights. I suggest, for your own mental health if nothing else, that you pull your shoulders back, hold your head up and get on with the new world rather than whingeing about leaving an arrangement which was rejected by the majority of the British public. The EU would have had us vote and vote and vote again until we got it right. We chose to vote and we voted to leave. It is irrelevant whether our majority was large or small – and I won’t throw into the mix the substantial minority who acquiesced to whatever the result was by staying in bed that day – so whichever side won should consider those votes to be theirs (sort of ‘a la PR’). It was a majority and that is what happens in a democracy.
“..unless you have permission to do something different”. You neglected to add, ‘and armies of bureaucrats to make it all but impossible to achieve that permission’.
Yet! When it comes to the populace, it was said, I think by Thoreau, that “The British obey the law because it’s the law, while the French obey the law only if it appears rational and useful”
If Napoleonic or Roman Law is such a problem then the “design fault” exists in each European country. They are all fatally flawed because they don’t follow English Common Law. This is plainly ridiculous. The unwieldiness of the EU is because so many countries are represented there. Outside the EU exactly the same unwieldiness exists, as U.K. is discovering, but without the forum to resolve it. Daft.
Yes. Poland and Hungary have done well to keep their own currencies. It gives them real independence and freedom to leave the EU one day without have to extricate themselves from the euro.
Likewise Sweden and Denmark. The poorer countries that have adopted the euro are trapped. Their debts are denominated largely in euros and those debts would completely crush them were they revert to the lira, drachma etc.
The richer countries could leave. Obviously, their currencies would appreciate against the euro. This might harm their exports, but they would not be sending their money to southern Europe in perpetuity.
It is utter nonsense to say countries can’t leave the Euro. Any sovereign country can leave the EU and/or the Euro any time they like. They simply have to accept the cost of doing so. It may surprise many readers of Unherd that the EU is made up of 27 sovereign entities (defined as ones with the guns and prisons and tax collectors and total control of their defined territories). I am sure all the countries involved also have printing presses just like the UK. All these wretched fiat currencies are much the same. All you have to do is BELIEVE – just like Brexiters and, of course, be willing to pay the price of your belief.
It is utter nonsense to say countries can’t leave the Euro. Any sovereign country can leave the EU and/or the Euro any time they like. They simply have to accept the cost of doing so
And businesses in Tierra Caliente can decline offers of protection from the cartels at any point also. They just have to accept the cost of doing so.
I am being facetious but not all costs are equal. And nobody was indicating that it would be physically impossible to leave the Euro – just that the overwhelming cost (largely debt) would make it a poor choice.
Not at all. Simply default and start from scratch again – like Argentina has done many times over the past 50yrs – and they’re still great at the tango! Yes, your interest rate may be higher than those who don’t default but you’re only liable for ~20c on the € or $. Voracious hedge funds will surely take a punt on the higher rate of return – particularly with the ludicrously low interest rate on major currencies.
Life goes on.
So yes! any sovereign country can leave the Euro. The Brexiters were and are wholly wrong on this. The price for leaving will be loss of access to the Single Market but the UK knows all about that already!
Nobody said they couldn’t so not sure what you’re saying.
What is undeniable is that being a member of the Eurozone makes it more costly/difficult to leave the EU than not. Even accepting your positive outlook on a country leaving.
Not really that much more difficult. Just change the paper stuff in people’s pockets or the 0s and 1s in their bank accounts. It’s been done many, many times around the world.
The REAL price will be loss of access to the Single Market – so you’d have to haul your collective asses around the world trying to gain access to even more protected markets than those of the EU. Now THAT would be truly an awful price to pay.
It is difficult to leave the Euro as a debtor nation. That was demonstrated by the fact that Greece would rather sustain a crushing recession than leave and default. It would take an extreme event to persuade the elite of any debtor country to take that risk. It is more likely that a creditor nation like Germany leaves.
You clearly did not read my earlier post correctly. It’s the countries in debt that can default! Surplus countries would be the loosers.
The debt isn’t the big issue as it relates to the past – it’s the future that matters and that’s where the price of leaving the Single Market simply makes no sense whatsoever.
It’s the countries in debt that can default! Surplus countries would be the loosers.
And so defaulting on debt will have no effect on that country’s future ability to borrow money? There’s being positive about prospects, then there’s outright delusion.
No a country cannot just decide it can’t be bothered pay back debt, not unless it wants to become an international financial pariah. This is quite funny, sorry. Yeah loans are so easy if you just don’t pay them back! Free money! Same with other crimes. Robbery is easy – just don’t get caught and arrested!
The deeper you get into it the more difficult it is to leave. The EU knows this and designs it that way like a muddy bog that you cannot break free from.
The majority of our exports are not to the EU. Anyone in business should know that. We buy from the EU much more than we export. These things can be discussed instead of the EU being bossy.
Not impossible but having to extract from the Euro makes it much, much harder than our tortuous exit. Sweden and Denmark are watching very closely how we fare.
Not quite. German banks lent heavily to Greek oligarchs who disappeared with the money . So The EU illegally helped those banks by enforcing austerity on the Greek people (who had no part in that money) to get those loans repaid . This action was completely illegal. But Greece suffered terribly for it .
But both of these countries get huge amounts of financial asistance from the EU, so will probably never leave, inspite of the occasional 2 fingers their leaders give to VdL and Mutti.
It should be a commonwealth of countries not a domination by the EU. It started as trade then went political although that was probably the idea from the start.
Well, it might well make sense for the UK to have ‘left’ the EU, but that doesn’t mean that the EU itself will dissolve. There are powerful forces holding it together that trump individual preferences and grumbles. Not saying that’s a good thing, mind you.
UK won’t be the last to leave, we’ll have Opened the flood-gates and that’s what E.U. know and have been trying to bully us out of. EU were doing very well at it with Theresa may – best thing happened to UK is seeing the back of her.
A lot of them want to leave but the EU makes it very difficult and they all see how difficult it was for us.
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
While there’s a bit of schadenfreude over the EU’s incompetence after it did everything it could to hurt the UK during Brexit, it should be noted that this Covid incompetence means many lives will be lost while more nimble countries zip ahead with vaccines. There will likely be no accountability over it either as who would conduct such oversight? The EU will bungle along, blaming others, without any consequences whatsoever and if any country gets any big Brexit type ideas, they know what they will be in for from the EU. In my view, the EU’s response to the UK decision to leave the bloc was never about the UK which had always been a thorn in the Franco/German alliance. They were just putting on a show to intimidate any others from getting any independent ideas.
The EU did not “do everything it could to hurt the UK during Brexit”. It just treated the UK as a non-member. The interests of members take priority over those of non-members. As Rafael Behr in the Guardian put it Britain is “too small to be an equal, too big to be a client; not powerful enough to assert its will in trade negotiations but hefty enough to cause trouble.” Did Brexiteers expect the EU to make sacrifices – even small sacrifices – to make Brexit a success?
Not entirely true. If you look at the trade deal the EU finally did with the UK, it’s a worse deal than it has offered other countries like Canada and Japan. There’s a reason for that. Offering the UK a favourable deal (i.e. a worse situation than being a member, but better than the current situation) would have been hugely advantageous to the EU. It would have provided a framework for restructuring relations with Switzerland (they will not accept the current framework agreement on offer) as well as for the states of the West Balkans which have been waiting patiently for accession negotiations to begin for about 15 years. There is clearly no appetite or ability to expand the club but also not enough political courage to be honest with those countries. Having a decent associate membership structure might have been a good compromise which allowed them to benefit from that kind of “half way house” and would also hug them close, keeping China and Russia at bay. By failing to get over itself and its “no cherry-picking” obsession, and failing to get beyond the rigid “either you are in or out” position, the EU has just hurt itself and made sure its sphere of influence in its own neighbourhood will remain compromised.
Sure, you can make a case for the EU offering a better deal. But as they see their interests, it is more important to make sure that those who enjoy the benefits also pay the costs. Norway or Switzerland are not going to abuse (as the EU sees it) any deal, because they are so small that the EU can force them back in line. Canada and Japan cannot make a mint by systematically undercutting EU rules and deviating investments that were going to the EU – they are too far away. Britain can do it – and openly planned to do exactly that. That is the reason that the UK was offered a worse deal. A better deal was on offer – if the UK would limit its freedom of action to ensure that future ‘level playing field’. The UK would not offer anything. End of story.
“Norway or Switzerland are not going to abuse (as the EU sees it) any deal, because they are so small that the EU can force them back in line” – there is not enough time in the day to argue about why this is an unacceptable way to treat free and sovereign countries. It is not for the EU to “force” them to do anything. If the EU is going to force anyone to do anything, then they might like to start with countries that consistently violate the budget rules…or perhaps even the ECB which rather likes to test the limits of its own mandate.
Canada and Japan have to comply with certain international standards to be able to trade with the EU (even if there is no truly frictionless trade). The “level playing field” rules that the EU offered Britain were far stricter than asked of any 3rd countries. It was never about having a “level playing field” at all. There’s no “level playing field” even within the EU. It was a superficial argument used to keep maximum control over Britain in return for trade – just like “peacekeeping” was a superficial argument to what the true strategy was in Northern Ireland.
It was never Britain’s plan to have a race to the bottom with regulation; maybe a few hardcore Brexiteers dreamed of it but it was never a realistic proposition and today, this is mainly EU paranoia. And one must ask oneself: why are they so afraid of competition? Could it be that they know that the EU is highly uncompetitive, regulating itself into irrelevance but don’t want to face up to the truth?
As for the argument about geographical distance meaning anything – what a bunch of absolute rubbish. The UK is a services economy – geographical distance to the recipient mostly doesn’t matter. If it was going to systematically undercut rules, the effect would be the same whether it was 30 miles away over the channel or in the middle of the Pacific. One of the most hilarious bits of EU rhetoric on this theme was arguing that Britain should accept EU rules and regulations to be able to trade “because our economies are so interlinked” – all the while contemplating a no-deal outcome. If it had have come to no deal, then the economies would have been completely unlinked overnight and that argument would have disintegrated.
The EU has no right to tell small countries what to do. True. On the other hand, small countries have no right to access the EU markets. North Korea is almost totally free from foreign interference, but if you want to deal with others, you need to settle on the conditions.
Geography does matter – in the real world. A lot of companies set up in Britain because they wanted a presence in Europe, and the British system suited them better than the French. Give Britain the freedom to set more relaxed rules while keeping EU market access, and it would happen more.
I am glad you konw what the Boris plans to do – nobody else does. But if Britain is so doggone determined to accept no limits on what it might do, surely it is because it plans to do some of it. Is even the Boris crazy enough to ruin his relationship to Europe in order to be allowed to do something he does not actually want?
As for control, why should the EU care to control Britain? They want to stop Britain doing things that interfere with their own markets or their own internal arrangements, but if they can prevent that I am sure they are happy to let Britain go to hell in any way it wants.
Uncompetitive? The EU has made some choices that make production more expensive in order to favour workers, consumers, the environment, social development. If there was free access for lower-cost producers those choices would not be available to them.
No there is no right of access. But the EU harms itself by putting barriers up too high. There was no objective reason to put up barriers to trade with the UK that were as high as the ones in the trade agreement. That was the will to punish, pure and simple. The EU was willing to harm itself to do that.
If companies choose to set up in Britain rather than France, then that – given a little more courage on the other side of the channel – might have been a cause to look at why the UK was so attractive and improve the french system. But no, protectionism prevailed. And the French didn’t really win out either as expected – I think they thought they would clean up the banking business to be had from London. And yet it is flooding into the Netherlands, which has a similarly liberal approach to Britain. Will the French learn from this? Probably not.
Britain I think was willing to accept limits, but they had to be reasonable. Any trade agreement is going to ask for certain standards. It would be quite reasonable to accept the same standards as were asked of Canada and Japan as a price for trading with the EU. The ones that were forced on it were simply overblown – see the conclusion of my first paragraph.
And I’m not buying the geography argument.
What you are saying is that the UK way is much better, and the EU ought to see that. Lower barriers, slacker rules, more competition, less ‘ever closer union’. If giving access to the UK would force the EU to change that would be all to their benefit. For what it is worth I might agree with you.
The problem is that the EU does not want that. All those things you dislike are there because other countries like them, and demanded them as the price for accepting the open markets Britain wanted. You said it – giving Britain what it wanted would have forced the EU to change and become more like a mere free-trade area. Since the EU member states do not want that, that is a perfectly objective reason for setting high barriers.
Are you sure that all EU states (or rather their populations) want an ever closer union? I think if populations were asked (which they won’t be), then you would find a significant portion of them (if not an outright majority) would happily just have a free trading bloc. As it is, ever closer union (economic and political) seems to have become something being forced onwards from above without any reference to whether it works in reality or whether it is wanted by a majority of citizens (and is thus democratic). And the reality, as far as I can see, is that it doesn’t. It is quite mad to think that a group of 27 countries, all vastly different histories, cultures and ways of seeing the world are all going to be able to come together and act in concert in the swift way that the 21st century is going to frequently require. The vaccine fiasco simply serves to underline that. Maybe Britons can just see this in a more sober light than Europeans can because it isn’t quite so much in our culture to dive into ideologies headfirst. We ask: is it working? And if it isn’t – how can it work? And that approach has, historically, served us well. By contrast, the EU seems to be hell bent on saying “this is our idea which is wonderful in theory so, by God, we shall MAKE it work in reality, whatever the cost.” It can’t end well.
The big difference is another one: Britain seems to think that it is big and strong enough to take on China and the EU on its own and win. France and Germany have no such illusions. And smaller countries know that they will be squashed if they stand alone, no matter how nimble they are. As a Danish foreign minster put it: “There are two kinds of country in Europe. Those that are too small to make it on their own – and those that have not figured it out yet.”
I do not think at all that the UK ever thought it could take on China alone. If you care to read British news you can see that such delusional thinking is difficult to find.
But the UK believes that there is no need for a political entity to coordinate the cooperation that is needed to take on China and that Britain can more efficiently look after its own interests without having to nurture this ideological longing for a United States of Europe.
Frankly that idea is now so far fetched ( and probably has been since the admittance of Eastern Europe along with some Balkan countries into the EU ) that it would be beneficial to drop the pretension and have a honest conversation about the future. The trouble is that this is not possible within the current framework of EU institutions because their very survival depends on the status quo.
Also probably many are now wondering whether it is the EU’s intention to take on China anymore.
Indeed – why is it that so many Remainer arguments are based upon what the author conveniently decides is the motive of someone who opposes their view.
Just plain arrogance ..
Remainers may have used many arguments, but the strongest ones are still true: Brexit is making the UK poorer and weaker, and it is threatening the Union.
Great rebuttal of this guy’s ridiculously brainwashed drivel.
The normal person in the UK isn’t even contemplating trying to compete with the great superpowers of the world in the first place. Neither are they in Europe.
Only the super-rich billionaires for whom political entities like the EU are vehicles to achieve their endlessly avaricious business goals think like that. They wanted the people of Britain to simply give up ever more control to the little band at the top of the EU who do their bidding for them first and foremost: their real pay masters.
OK, ‘take on China on its own’ was a little exaggerated. Let us say that you believe you are strong enough to do well on your own most of the time, and when there is a need for cooperation on some specific point you will always find willing allies. Without having to trade off in some unrelated area (which is how the EU works). Without a framework that encourages cooperation. And without worrying what will happen when individual medium-sized countries try to make deals one by one with the US or China. I think you are neither big enough, strong enough, lucky enough or universally loved enough for that to work. Up to the Boris to prove me wrong.
It’s quite a bit more complex than that though isn’t it.
Take currency as a starter. The UK govt is now able to make decisions that are of benefit to UK businesses based on a whole range of criteria. Furthermore the UK citizenry can vote in and out governments accordingly.
Trouble for the EU is that the business conditions for German industry differ somewhat from Italian industry (for example, etc). They might have the same currency but there have to be unified decisions made for the EU. Furthermore, those not in the Eurozone will always be outvoted by those within.
So yes a small(er) politically and democratically responsible government will most likely make better decisions for businesses under its currency, than a large federation of nations with less unifying purpose, leadership and responsibility.
I don’t think any polls have been done on the question of ever closer union. However in terms of satisfaction with the EU in the 2019 there were significant proportions of the populations (and by significant I mean a third or greater) of Spain, Netherlands, Greece, UK, Italy, Czech Republic and France who held an unfavourable opinion of the EU.
It would be interesting to see an update of this in light of the vaccine fiasco.
This is the best summation for the Brexit position I’ve seen. Ours has consistently been a superior approach. Pragmatic, flexible, sensible, non-ideological.
It was the reason this ‘Little Englander Flag-shagger’ propaganda, which sought to conflate and demonize anyone choosing the British approach rather than the totalitarian, ideological, collectivist EU one, as a backwards-looking, uneducated peasant, was the main thrust of their media strategy.
It was one of the greatest moments in British history for the nation as a whole to have rejected that vile nonsense.
Ironic, as I voted remain. But I always looked at both sides of the argument with equanimity, never called leave voters stupid and was always willing to revise my opinion of the EU.
Haha Katharine 🙂
Reminds me of when I worked at a well-known strategy consulting business. In the UK (and in Germany, where I worked for two years) we used to ask at the end of an assignment “It’s all very well in theory, but does it work in practice?”. Except in France, where they asked “It’s all very well in practice, but does it work in theory?”.
”A mere free-trade area”.
This is the one area where I understand Remainers’ opposition to Brexit. What else beyond that does the EU offer that is so coveted and sought-after that people are so mad to give away so much autonomy for?
I would prefer a free-trade area, probably.I would certainly prefer much less ‘ever-closer union’. The problem is that we have the EU we have. We either take it or leave it.
it is more important to make sure that those who enjoy the benefits also pay the costs.
Really? I think you totally made that up. I am not familiar with the EU ever applying that approach when we were members.
It’s anyway a profoundly unlikely doctrine for the EU to adopt. It’s at heart a socialist organisation, and socialists think that those who’ve got money should pay the costs – of literally everything. To that end they organise the state to take private individuals’ money off them. By your logic, the 24 countries who pay nothing into the EU pay nothing because they aren’t gaining. If so, why are they even members?
The EU has applied the same approach with the vaccine.
A point not often appreciated is that the EU’s hostility to vaccine nationalism arises from its belief that what should instead prevail is vaccine socialism. If everybody can’t have something, nobody can have it, and the EU’s principles instruct them to confiscate it from those who do.
Our ideologies are different.
The EU doctrine is that we are all better off negotiating a common way ahead than having everybody fight to profit at each others’ expense. You can call it socialism if you like. It has its costs, but it is not unreasonable. Look at it this way: their policies managed to avoid a situation where they were hitting each other with vaccine export bans – even if they still use them against outsiders.
Yes and it seems to be working fabulously, doesn’t it? People are dying like flies and the economy is tanking and there’s no end in sight….but at least we’re all tanking together! Yay!
Would have been far better to let a couple of the larger countries to forge on ahead and bag a bunch of vaccines which they would then share out. Wouldn’t have had the lovely unity optics, but people’s lives would have been saved.
Because Germany and France are in the EU still and could therefore have been pressured into sharing what vaccines they obtained with smaller countries in the club using the EU solidarity argument. Britain is now outside the EU (you might have noticed) and cannot be pressured in the same way. Britain will surely share once it is able to.
Sharing after vaccinating their own population may still have meant a faster roll out than the EU is so far achieving. It may also have meant that they could concentrate on getting vaccination done rather than looking for who to blame for it not happening.
“I do not notice Britain sharing out vaccines.” Then you should pay more attention to the UK’s financial and scientific contributions to GAVI, CEPI and COVAX. And note the UK’s insistence that the AZ vaccine be distributed to the developing world at cost, in perpetuity, something the EU has conspicuously failed to do for the BioNTech vaccine.
No. Instead their respective heads of state issued completely false statements about the effectiveness and safety of the OxAZ vaccine, flip-floped in public as to whether or not they will have the vaccine or not, ignored the scientific advice of their own precious EU medical advisory authority and suspended the vaccine programme on the basis of precisely NO valid scientific data or evidence citing nothing more than a preposterous “precautionary principle” only to u-turn again a few days later, which further damaged confidence amoungst their respective populations in the vaccine programme, with the result that half of the OxAZ vaccines actually delivered to EU countries are still unused and even if they are able to secure more the likelihood of people wanting to have it has been dramatically reduced. What a bravura performance!
Do stop trying to defend the indefensible with vague references to “different ideologies” and simply admit that the EU’s entire vaccination approach has been a fiasco from the moment it was conceived right up to today.
I can only hope that the majority of European peoples finally have their eyes opened as to how poorly they have been served by their leaders and their misplaced faith in the EU, and by the EU’s own floundering incompetence throughout this entire episode. I do not, however, hold out the same hope for you.
I cant help feeling there has been at least an element of luck in that the UK backed a couple of vaccines that came through early, were approved early and appear to be effective against the variant that was first noticed in Britain. The EU also backed the successful vaccines but were slightly slower in terms of ordering and in approval. Someone was always going to be first in the ‘race’ but actually winning the race is a less meaningful victory if we still have to wait for the last runners to come in before celebrating.
The current wave of Covid going through some of Europe now is indeed a tragedy but before we get too smug about the falling rates of disease or death in the UK compared to some others where rates are rising we should remember some countries are experiencing a third wave due to a new variant. We didn’t have a third wave as our second wave lasted from September to now (despite having a vaccine available since December) with catastrophic consequences in terms of lives lost.
The new variant is, I assume, the British or Kent one. There’s a bit of clue there in that the AZ and Pfizer vaccines must be tolerably good against this variant, otherwise the UK would not be seeing the efficacy results that we evidently are.
I suspect that when the history of the virus is written we’ll find that its spread was not easy to control by government edict and was affected by things that were not fully understood as the time, like relative innate resistance among populations and initial starting conditions affected by fairly random factors. So the relatively very poor UK stats, whilst definitely due in part to government ineptitude (e.g. over deaths in care homes) will not look quite so bad, compared with the EU’s outstanding uselessness when it came to vaccinations.
I think I agree but also that the EU uselessness over vaccines will not look quite so bad from the perspective of time. On average EU seems to be about 7 weeks behind UK in terms of % vaccinated with one dose and we’re about two weeks behind them on two doses.
ok Mark, you look back in seven weeks time and see how many EU citizens paid the ultimate price. Its like Napoleon playing war and empire building with his battalions of cannon fodder?
There are several new variants, P1 and P2 from Brazil, and one more from South Africa. These are designations of convenience regards origin, as UK is one of the very few jurisdictions with anywhere near sufficient genomic tracking. Basically we therefore can’t know where they really originated.
No luck involved. The UK backed several vaccines and placed orders early, long before trials were conducted. We also got on with funding development and production facilities early. That was the key missing factor in the EU approach, not the relatively short delays in placing contracts and achieving authorisation.
Then there is the efficiency of the vaccination programme itself. Germany has still not authorised vaccination in doctors’ surgeries, to give just one example of their dilatoriness.
The worst thing about Brexit is that for the amount of time all those remainers who were around having their collective mental breakdown and unleashing the worst, most toxic bile againt leaver, is they will forever be driven to write-off, negate, play down, ridicule and diminish any positive outcome of being a freer, more agile, more autonomous nation. Just like this guy.
Such is the power of propaganda that give one group free reign to unleash all of their endless prejudice, their deeply-held, sub-concious sense of superiority, arrogance and contempt on one group. Brexiteers were made out to all belong to the UK underclass. And it was lapped up by people like this poster, who will now always be downplaying the UK in the context of the EU.
Well, the Brexit campaign was solidly based on lies, misinformation, and fantasy. Remember ‘the worlds easiest trade deal’? That does not mean that brexiteers are wrong *every* time, of course. But it does mean that anything you say requires lots of independent confirmation before there is reason to take it seriously.
The vaccine debacle suddenly made a lot of nationalists out of EU members. Some did go their own way on it once it became clear the EU was too sclerotic to get it done.
The EU is a supranational political, monetary and trade federation that priorities the manufacturing economy of German goods over Eastern members whole economies. Its literally profit for Germany at other nations expense.
like you say your an ideologue and unable to objectively appraise the EU’s actions as opposed to its rhetoric, but well done admitting that it is the first step to recovery. the golden bridge is now open for you pal.
In the real world you make deals, and the powerful get more of what they want than the weak. Coming from a small country I know that you are better off inside the club, where they have to at least pretend to listen to you, than outside. Do you think that Germany would be less powerful, or more generous to its neighbours, if there was no EU?
The EU is an unlovely beast – slow, ungainly, too centralising, and full of messy compromises. Still countries are free to stay out, and most have decided that they are better off joining. In material terms I have absolutely no doubt they are right.
‘In the real world you make deals, and the powerful get more of what they want than the weak. ‘ But the EU’s whole image is that of a ‘rules-based’ order, and the whole point of having rules, surely, is that they occasionally work in favour of the weaker party and against the stronger. Otherwise why bother with a mile-high acquis communautaire? Why not just let the strong states clean up and have done with it? It is fine for Germany to be powerful, but unfortunately, in its short-sighted pursuit of what seems to be good for Germany within the EU, it is forgetting that having happy, friendly and above all, prosperous neighbours and allies is also greatly to the long-term advantage of a state. Not neighbours that have been hollowed out and beggared by a selfish financial strategy. The UK at present seems to be one of very few countries in the world that sees that trade and international relations can and should be mutually beneficial, not a zero-sum, ‘win-lose’ game. If the world is in no mood to get the message then it’s a bad look-out for all of us, but that doesn’t make the UK wrong.
“trade and international relations can and should be mutually beneficial,” No disagreements there. Does it mean that Britain should make a bigger effort to make sure its neighbours, friends and allies are happy, and Germany should expect to get more benefits from its trade deals? Or is it the other way around?
Well it wouldn’t be able to benefit from the Euro, which greatly distorts currency exchange rates, to Germany’s benefit and the detriment of UK exporters among others. As to the benefits for member states, there is sadly a great deal of groupthink going on among the whole European political elite, so that, as Douglas Murray argued, alternative approaches towards cooperation within a much looser framework are automatically dismissed, even though they very likely would deliver better economic outcomes and be more democratic.
The EU destroyed the people of Greece in order to save French and German banks. That is not ‘socialism’ or a common way forward. It is financial tyranny. You are either trolling, or incredibly naive and misguided. I suggest you read ‘And The Weak Suffer What They Must?’ by Yanis Varoufakis.
Varoufakis? The man who ran Greek economic policy on the assumption that German taxpayers would be forced to bail out Greece, so that Greece could set its own terms?
Maybe. But his negotiating strategy only makes sense if he took it for granted that the EU *had to* bail out Greece to prevent the Euro from collapsing. Which is why he chose to lecture European finance ministers on macroeconomics instead of trying to, maybe, convince some of the people who were supposed to pay.
Greece should have defaulted on its debts. But had she done so what would have happened to her creditors who were, as Fraser points out, French and German Commercial Banks ? And, lest you forget, which you obviously have, the whole mess was created by the EU itself firstly by allowing Greece to join the Euro when she didn’t meet the criteria written into the Treaty, and subsequently by allowing the impression to be gained that there was no difference between a German Bund and a Greek Bond, that 4% in Athens was as good as 4% in Berlin, thus erradicating the risk premium. It was a disaster. Couple this with a vastly overvalued Euro (for Greece it should be worth about 35 US cents, whereas for Germany it should have a value of $2.35) and you can see how the mess was created.
Varofakis is an arrogant oaf, but even a clock is right once a day or twice depending on type ! Tsipras was a damn fool and a duplicitous one like Mrs May.
Your ideologies seem to be such that you would endorse the USSR or Chinese approach.
Mine are such that I see the EU doctrine as being “us Eurocrats are doing brilliantly – why should we change”
I don’t think there is a choice. The introduction of the Euro has made it nigh on impossible for countries to leave, without serious financial fall-out.
“It is more important to make sure that those who enjoy the benefits also pay the costs” An interesting notion given that there are more member states who are net beneficiaries than net contributors. Perhaps you would like to acknowledge that the UK was badly weakened in the negotiations by the reprehensible actions of Europhiles in sabotaging the negotiating leverage of their own country against a foreign power. Lib Dem and Labour Party leaders and their MPs ran off to Brussels to tell them to offer a bad deal so they could force a second referendum. At home MPs conspired with a rogue Speaker, willing to trash Parliamentary precedent, to vote for measures that prevented Britain walking away from the negotiating table, giving the EU the upper hand. Then we had Mrs May sytematically and intentionally throwing away negotiating leverage by agreeing a “divorce bill” before trade negotiations. I don’t blame the EU for the poor deal. I blame Europhiles, who instead of respecting the result of a democratically held referendum and joining together with their fellow countrymen to show a united from against the EU, did everything they could to reverse the result and damage the UK’s bargaining position. The EU simply took advantage of their treachery.
The Tories have already been uncooperative and abrasive enough to extract everything that could be achieved that way. We are now where the UK is insisting on having its own way, even in contravention of the treaties Johnson (not May) have signed, and the European parliament is threatening No Deal. No amount of UK unity would have helped you.
In negotiating it is not enough to say ‘give me what I want, or I make a mess’. You also have to convince the other side that if they do give you what they want, you will in return give them something they find acceptable.
Let me spell it out then: Britain wanted a deal that was way beyond what the EU was willing to give. For the EU, No Deal really was worse than a bad deal. Ultimately the europhiles made no difference; no matter how united or intransigent the British had been the result would have been no better.
I see. agreeing to give the EU £40 billion upfront before entering trade negotiations, , endless campaigning and marching by Europhiles, opposition politicians convincing the EU they could stop us leaving and legally preventing the government from walking away from the negotiating table, had no effect. I doubt even you believe such obvious nonsense.
It is very simple. Britain had to convince the EU that it would walk away if it did not get what it wanted. The Boris pushed it right to the wire – in the end I think he made the point as well as it could be made. The EU would still not offer you a deal that they felt was worse (for them) than No Deal. When you do not have the necessary leverage, playing hardball will not get you what you want.
People like you are and always will be incredibly dangerous. Easily propagandized ideologues who get ideas in their heads and then become impervious to reason, sanity, opposing view points or any idea that runs counter to their pre-held ideology. We had religion, Nazism, Marxism, Fascism, and now this weird hybrid of EU Federalism, Collectivism, Globalism, Supra-nationalism, Socialism and Capitalism.
The EU offered no incentive to be nice. Theresa May acted nice and got screwed. Everything which the UK suggested was shot down, because at the end of the day, the EU wasn’t willing to accept anything except what it wanted. That, in my mind, is not negotiating, that is dictating. The British are a very patient and flexible people, but even we have limits. Boris Johnson being elected was a signal that patience had been lost and now we won’t even try to be friendly or obliging. And the thing is – the EU doesn’t even acknowledge that its behaviour was THE contributing factor in the UK becoming abrasive and uncooperative. Self-reflection? Forget it. And that lack of questioning itself will lead to the EU’S downfall.
Everything the UK suggested was shot down because it was way beyond what the EU was willing to give. If you ask for the moon, being nice will not help. Being nasty still hurts you, though – it gives the other side a personal desire to see you fail, and it suggests that you cannot be trusted to implement any deal in good faith. Face it: no matter what you think you deserve, you were never going to get the kind of deal you wanted. Negotiation means finding out the limits of each side and looking for the least bad result you can get. Losing your patience, not bothering to be nice, and putting the blame on the other side is not going to help you.
The UK explicitly ran on brinksmanship. Refuse to extend deadlines, refuse concessions, threaten No Deal, and hope you get concessions at the last mnute. Refuse to make any promises that could limit what you might try to do in the future, then refuse to honour the deals you just signed. It might work for China – who actually are strong and do not have to care if anybody like them. For the UK?
Mrs May had a faulty approach to setting her red lines, which made it difficult to get her deal through parliament. If she had (as promised) involved the devolved administrations – and parliament – and built a consensus-based approach at a time when both main parties were committed to leaving, then she would have had a much better chance of getting a deal through parliament.
As it was, far from being “screwed”, she got as good a deal as was possible, given her red lines!
“The Tories have already been uncooperative and abrasive enough to extract everything that could be achieved that way.” Rubbish – Boris etc were only allowed to start negotiating in a meaningful way after the damage had been done.
We have seen that ‘level playing field’ and ‘reciprocity’ only work one way with the EU – whenever we are perceived to be ahead of them. We are having reciprocity flung at us over the vaccines but what reciprocity have the EU ever shown us?
UK financial regulations are currently identical to those of the EU, yet the EU cannot bring itself to agree equivalence, even though it has offered equivalence to countries such as Chile.
Since no trading contract can be agreed without a willing buyer and a willing seller, both of whom see the deal as advantageous, it is axiomatic that trade disruption damages both parties. But the Commission doesn’t care about the damage it is doing to the economic wellbeing of EU citizens by deliberately disrupting cross-Channel trade: the future of the “project” is more important.
EU financial regulations, particularly MiFID 1, were a cut & paste of existing UK SFA/FSA regs with a few additions and modifications.
MiFID 2 was a howitzer shell aimed at the heart of the largest equities market in Europe.
The much heralded migration of financial services businesses and personnel to the EU hasn’t happened. Frankfurt (who’d swap it for London?), Paris (not a major trading hub or global marketplace), Dublin (too small, limited housing available) and Luxembourg (do I really need to..?!) all failed to capture from London despite some questionably legal incentives.
Understandably a % of trading and liquidity has migrated to Amsterdam, given the engineered impasse, for the time being. Ultimately it will come back, when yet another failed protectionist EU strategy becomes self-defeating. In the meantime if it were so minded (so small minded?), Britain could inflict a lot of damage on European markets by turning off or down a number of liquidity taps. Maybe we should.
Yes but the Crazy thing is that a better arrangement would have been in the EU’s interests. All commercial deals that work have mutual interest. The Eu stance has been to reduce mutual advantage . Which makes no economic sense.
Rafael Behr was once a relatively sane counterweight at the Guardian. He used to write on a wide range of subjects, from foreign affairs, to defence and culture with a fairly rational centrist viewpoint.
However since the 2016 referendum he has somewhat lost the plot and writes a weekly diatribe on why this week x or y is bad because of Brexit. Indeed he even attributes his heart attack to Brexit. (I am not making this up): https://www.rt.com/uk/512814-corbyn-guardian-heart-attack/
My neighbour and I expect each other to be neighbourly. We don’t expect sacrifices from each other. You seem to think that there are only two ways to behave: be supplicant or be domineering. Might work in a bedroom; doesn’t work in international relationships.
If you make an important business deal with your neighbour, do you expect him to demand the market rate, or be neighbourly and put you in a position to profit at his expense?
A good deal with the UK would not necessarily have been at the EU’s expense. There were a thousand ways of structuring the relationship in a mutually beneficial way whereby membership in the EU still remains attractive but the UK can regain sovereignty and trade with the EU. But the way you see it (which seems to be shared by the EU top brass) is that any success for the UK is at the EU’s expense. This is crackers. There is no fixed amount of success in the world so that when one person has more, the other has less.
There was a deal to be made that the UK thinks would be very good for both sides. Unfortunately that is a deal that the EU thinks would be very bad for them. When negotiating what matters is what the other side thinks, not what you think they ought to think.
When you say the EU I’m betting you really mean the Eurocrats – the majority of the EU would almost certainly be happy with a nice easy trade deal – why not poll the citizenry?
It is one of the frustrations of life that we have to deal with the Europe that is there, not the completely different one what we would prefer to have.
Quoting the Grun around here, crazy! I suspect a lot of people have come here fed up with the stupidity and lies of that toilet paper. On the bright side, you can comment in disagreement with the narrative and not have your comments deleted. The Grun is moderated in the classic Nazi/Communist way, by removing any sign that goes against the papers dictats. In the Grun comment is anything but free. They can’t execute you, which is fortunate, but they will delete your account.
“Did Brexiteers expect the EU to make sacrifices – even small sacrifices – to make Brexit a success?”
We didn’t expect them to make ANY sacrifices; we expected them to play by their own ‘rule book’!
OK, I’ll give it a rest on this one and be back on another post. Never expected to convince anybody, but you learn more from discussions where you disagree – politely of course. At least you are more tolerant and make more sense than the lot at the Guardian.
If the French Senate report had said “the EU must not be worse off after Brexit than before”, that would have been understandable, but it said “the UK must not be better off after Brexit than before”? Is that not revealing? Every action of the EU can be explained as being intended to fulfil this objective.
We obviously see things differently, the EU did indeed try to hurt the UK and even tried again over the vaccines. It was sending a message to the other EU members, try this and this will happen to you as well. I wouldn’t put too much faith into anything in the Guardian,
And what country in continental Europe has the highest death rate from Covid?
The Czech Republic. Followed by Slovenia then Belgium. UK is not doing so great in 4th place admittedly but you keep saying the same falsehood.
Secondly, since we are miles ahead of most countries in vaccinating, despite our failings at the start, it is likely that come the end of the pandemic we will not be at the top of that list, unfortunately for EU citizens. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/
If memory serves, last report named three EU countries – Belgium, Czech Rep and one other – all with significantly higher death rates than the UK!! Why do treasonous Remainders insist on lying as a means of self-aggrandisement?
Having lived & worked in Southern France for 3 years, plus a year spent in Rome and 6 months in Frankfurt, greatly enjoying the lifestyle.____ I had no hesitation in voting Leave on Referendum Day but was very pleasantly surprised by the Brexit Result. _____It is clear to me that the Napoleonic and English Common Law will never be able to coexist happily for any period over 50 years. ____. It does not take much understanding of European History to see why EU and UK will be at loggerheads for the next 50 years. Hopefully no actual war in Europe, just posturing as with the Vaccine War.
Peter Scott
3 years ago
[1] “Far less important for Brussels was the fact that Greece, in particular, would not have been in this mess if it had not been accepted into the Eurozone in the first place.”
And Greece was admitted entirely for political reasons and against the bloc’s own criteria for membership of monetary union.
[2] “In recent years, critics of the EU have repeatedly noted that while there was much criticism in Brussels of the UK for leaving the bloc, there was no self-reflection over why we might have chosen that decision.”
This is true in spades not only of the EU, but also of the entire Ruling Caste in the western world today: the politicians, the bureaucrats, the mainstream media, academe, big business, the lot.
It ought to be one of the wonders of world history that in 2016 a majority of British participants in a referendum could vote for Brexit, that 63 million Americans could vote for Donald Trump (lately at least 74 millions, possibly much more depending on how fraudulent the 2020 election in that country was), that populist parties could make real gains in European elections 2017/18; AND VERY NEARLY THE WHOLE NEWS COMMENTARIAT, LET ALONE THE GOVERNING CLASSES, CONTINUE NEVER TO ASK THEMSELVES WHY!!
The rulers of the Occident in our time are as stupidly unreflective, unself-critical, unself-aware as the most besotted of aristocrats in eighteenth-century France.
And they call themselves ‘meritocrats’.
‘The rulers of the Occident in our time are as stupidly unreflective, unself-critical, unself-aware as the most besotted of aristocrats in eighteenth-century France’ Yes, for at least 10 years I have been saying that the EU leaders, and other western leaders, are as remote from normal people as were Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and that they deserve the same fate.
Yes; but with this difference.
Born and raised in extreme privilege lifelong, Louis XVI and his queen (herself an Austrian princess) had little experience of ordinary people’s lives.
Today’s rulers in the West have mostly come from middle-class backgrounds where, at least nominally, they have had to prove themselves; even if only by obtaining the ultra-suspect PPE degree at Oxford University.
Emily Thornberry MP, SO snooty about white-van man and the St George’s flag hanging from his bedroom window, allegedly had to rely on free school meals and food parcels after her parents divorced.
Then, from age 17 she worked as a cleaner and a barmaid.
If Marie Antoinette deserved to be guillotined for her remoteness from the lives of normal people, what is the appropriate penalty for a snob like Ms Thornberry?
Hanging, drawing and quartering; the Mikado’s surmise with ‘something lingering with boiling oil in it’?
The appropriate penalty for a snob like Thornberry? I would make her serve behind the bar at a Wetherspons in, say, Southampton, for the rest of her days.
Under the old Treason Laws, for reasons of ‘modesty’, woman were not hanged drawn and quartered, but rather burnt at the stake.
However as one modern (female) historian has pointed out this cannot have made much difference.
Scantily clothed in the first place, the flames would rapidly have consumed any clothing, leaving the victim “naked and trembling “ before the actual immolation began.
All these suggestions gratefully received.
Perhaps they could be carried out seriatim; i.e first serving behind the pub bar in her least favourite place, and then after that burning at the stake.
This would at least encourage other Labour MPs to stop saying snooty things about working-class people.
Nothing like making the punishment fit the crime eh?
Don’t you think you’re overreacting a little to a foolish remark a female Labour MP made a few years ago? It’s the sort of overreaction that makes some suspect misogyny – though I’m sure you wouldn’t mean to be guilty of such a thing.
I share your exasperation at our ruling caste (in government or opposition). But men joking about severe punishments for female MPs seems sadly common these days, and it’s a profoundly depressing instance of how far the level of political discourse has sunk. I blame the Internet. Or possibly human nature. Some might blame “the patriarchy” whatever that is.
First of all, have you seen the price of petrol nowadays?
Second of all, who needs an accelerant to set fire to circa 200lbs of lard?
The problem will be putting it out. Could burn for days….
Are you sure I am ‘overreacting’?
The Trouble with the ‘foolish remark’ is that the habit of thinking in that wise, on Ms Thornberry’s part (and that of so many others now controlling our society), gives them the green light to do devastating things to working and lower-middle class people.
If you dismiss your fellow-creatures as pretty worthless – very much the language of ALL hardline Remainers in the 4 years following the 2016 Referendum – you feel entitled to send millions of jobs abroad, bully the people whose employment you have expunged with ever more encroaching Political Correctness rules, subject them to the cancel culture (Tommy Robinson, the man who quoted Winston Churchill, parents who don’t want their children to be encouraged to transgender) and inflict all manner of other penalties, very drastic, very severe, upon them.
Being contemptuous of the persons we wrong not only purges pangs of conscience on our part, it also authorises our infliction of further cruelties in future.
You’re right to object to contempt for the people, when you see it – even if your lenses let you see it most clearly in the opposition.
But I don’t think contempt for the people is a Labour monopoly. Nor is doing devastating things to them. Both have been seen in spades from government over the past decade.
EU seems to make rules which it then breaks-it allowed Greece to join and there was talk of Ukraine joining,yet Catalonia is blocked. If Scotland voted for independence I wonder if they would be allowed to join EU just to annoy England,as they don’t meet the financial criteria.
Yes that would probably be enough for them to close their eyes at the funding they would need to shell out. EU rules are for the ‘little people’ Merkel and Co ignore them whenever it suits them.
Catalonia would be blocked by Spain, because Spain doesn’t want them to secede. But you might be right about Scotland – such are the perils of the current administration’s needlessly confrontational approach to negotiation.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
The EU combines fanaticism with incompetence to a degree that might be unparalleled in all of human history. At least other totalitarian regimes got some things right, or were briefly successful, even if only in a military sense. At least their leaders had usually proved themselves in some sphere.
The EU, on the other hand, endlessly virtue signals while thousands die because it cannot organise a vaccine roll out. And why did it ever think it was competent to organise a vaccine roll out? It has no expertise or personnel related to any useful or productive activity, for instance with regard to the supply chain and logistics capability etc necessary for this particular task.
The EU exists in order that the world’s worst politicians get to play at politics, and that thousands of bureaucrats get to dream up schemes and laws that make life difficult of impossible for normal people and businesses. It’s like your local council on a grand scale. So why on earth did they ever think they could organise a vaccine roll out?
That’s something that rarely gets picked up… I can’t think of a single high profile EU leader who wasn’t either emphatically rejected by the voters in their own country, or mired in some controversy usually centered on fraud or incompetence. The quality of them is shocking, its like a retirement home for the cr*p, the mad and the useless.
Credit where its due, one of the original intentions was to end war in Europe and its succeeded at that so far. Not much else, but that.
The league of Nations failures contributed to the deaths of millions so the EU still has some way to go.
No, it hasn’t even succeeded in that. That was NATO. Plus the fact that with no European empires left, and with the Cold War going on over their heads, European countries really had nothing left to fight each other about. But the EU itself could yet change that.
I think that was mainly due to (positively) NATO and (negatively) the massive Soviet Army on the doorstep who would have taken advantage of any internecine conflict between western European states.
Can you imagine how short the Cold War would have been had The USSR been facing the EU?!
NATO and its counterpart the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, (GSFG) prevented any major European War, pure and simple.
Incidentally who was going to start one, not the beaten and divided Germans, or the ‘runaway’ French & Italians surely?
Off course this excludes the little bit of bother in the ‘beastly’ Balkans, not Germany’s finest hour one might say, but with so many to choose from that doesn’t count for much does it?
The peace in Europe is not dependent on the EU. It is thanks to NATO (for which, pretty much think USA) and the fact that the countries are democracies (and therefore extremely unlikely to go to war with each other). The existence of democracy in those countries is not dependent on membership of the EU. And indeed the EU as an institution is no great beacon of democracy itself.
The League of Nations failed largely because the US didn’t want anything to do with it, and even if it did it was not the power it was in 1945 (UN and latterly NATO underpinning it all).
As others have pointed out. The EU is almost completely irrelevant in terms of adding to European or even global peace. It rides on the coattails of so many other things and takes credit where none is due.
Especially as the EU seems to be the dumping ground for incompetent, weak, fraudulent, politicians from the main EU countries – for proof if proof were needed – who was President of the Commission prior to the useless Ursula? Drunker Juncker and nonentity bank clerk von Rompey – not a statesman to be seen. Ursula is useful for Merkel to hide behind when she herself makes a mess of things, as she often does.
But you misunderstand they have organized a vaccine rollout.
It is just on the lines of socialism, that if everybody cannot have one, it is better that nobody has one.
Andrew Best
3 years ago
No buyers regret from any leave voter I know.
It may take a while but the longer it goes the better off we are, as the EU project will consume Europe untill only the EU controls every part of the nations in it.
So long
Fare well
Auf wiedersehen
Good bye
The post-Brexit trading arrangements have not been uniformly popular in Northern Ireland. And I’m guessing you don’t know many folk from the fishing industry.
It’s unfortunate you can’t downvote reality as easily as downvoting comments on a discussion forum :-/
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
EU, they take every failing of all the member nations management and combine those to form the super Management, which then behaves as expected. Now an EU which combined all the strengths would be a very different matter, but that would not be possible as it highlights member nations failings, so EU is an ‘all must win a ribbon’ collective where the slowest manage the sprint team and the most timid control the military.
Or so it seems, from someone who remembered traveling from one European nation to another, changing the money, and looking for some local specialty to eat. Maybe its just being old, and that the past seems to have been a better place.
Paul Blakemore
3 years ago
I had some direct involvement 15-20 years ago in the EU’s media monitoring operation in the UK; and doubtless similar monitoring goes on across the block. The reaction to the vaccine shambles is doubtless being shaped by the criticisms now being made about the EU across the European media: it wants to be seen as being ‘tough’ and ‘decisive’. In short, we are seeing a knee-jerk populist response.
I remember reading an article many years ago about how the EU was increasing funding on its ‘influencing’ activities and wanted to do more to ‘shape a positive message’ (I have a feeling the article was in the Wall St Journal, but cannot find any information about the EU’s activities in this area from doing a cursory search on the internet). I often wondered during the referendum debate and afterwards what the EU is up to with regard to trying to influence UK politics behind the scenes and covertly (there are many examples of open manipulation). Just viewing the reality-defying messages/propaganda churned out by the Guardian, I have to wonder if it is now being directly funded by the EU. Its talk of a ‘vaccine war’ is singularly vexing when it is only one side that is engaging in hostilities. More ‘piracy’ than ‘war’.
The truly pathetic truth about the EU is that it is not only serially incompetent, it is desperate to be loved.
I suspect ‘influencing activities and wanting to shape a positive message’ is where most of the EU budget (you know that bit that never gets audited) disappears.
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago
Generally a good article, although saying that “the EU always fails” is a bit hyperbolic…I think it’s more accurate to say that it never solves the problems it has (like the permanently-smouldering euro crisis) but just kicks the can down the road with various sticking-plaster solutions. That might all come home to roost at some point with one big fail.
Gradually and irreversibly stripping its member states of sovereignty, even when this is in breach of their constitutions? Subverting their democracies by sowing their national assemblies with quislings who persistently vote to obstruct the implementation of referendum results?
Trying to be fair I think that in the area of harmonisation of standards there has been success; the CE mark, traceability, interoperability. Free trade is certainly facilitated by common standards. However this could have been achieved without all the other apparatus of the EU.
I’ve always been a fan of free trade but even here it is difficult to say the the EU was successful. A customs union is a limited interpretation of free trade. Moreover free trade does not require free movement of people, harmonisation of laws, a single currency, a flag, anthem or army.
For me the Euro was the turning point. Up until then I was ambivalent about the EU but trying to impose a unified mechanism for exchange on to countries with wildly differing productivities, gdp growth per head and taxation regimes without any extra-market surplus recycling mechanisms in place was always going to result in failure…. yet another one.
And there was the EHIC / mutual health coverage. And free roaming (and standardised chargers for mobile phones).
But apart from harmonisation of standards, mutual health coverage, and free mobile roaming, what has the EU ever done for us? 🙂
I was once a very enthusiastic proponent of the EEC/EU. However, the fact is that, for many years now, the EU has failed at everything it has attempted, or has failed to solve any of the problems that it has created.
Exactly – “failing” and “failing to solve problems” are two separate things in my mind. The former has an air of finality and acknowledgment and putting things to bed; the latter implies limping on, still trying, still thinking it’s going to get better. The EU is definitely still going with the latter and will do for the foreseeable future because there is an awful lot of political will for the EU to survive. That’s something Brits tend to forget.
I think we are all aware of how much political will there is to keep the EU going, and It’s not about to disappear anytime soon.
It will either ‘succeed’ by subjugating the people of Europe via ever harsher measures and the total elimination of democracy across the continent, or collapse spectacularly at some point. That is the way of all totalitarian systems.
Political will I presume means at the governmental level – don’t forget Macron said he wouldn’t permit a referendum on EU membership because it might not go the way he wanted.
“If we only had a little more money and a little more power” ad infinitum. Somehow the solution is just out of reach.
Rob Mein
3 years ago
It’s telling that the UK and US had people with a lifetime experience in the international biotech trade in charge of vaccine procurement but the EU chose a trade commission bureaucrat.
David Morrey
3 years ago
Looking at some of the comments posted here, the narrative always seems to be that the EU is right to worry that the UK will embark in a ‘race to the bottom’ on regulation and legal protections covering, for instance, workers rights and the environment.
My professional field is financial services regulation, and that is one of the sectors in which the EU makes the loudest noise about potential unfair competition. Since Article 50 was invoked, my response to that line of argument has been to say, just watch what happens, because the race to the bottom in regulation is just as likely to be by the EU rather than the UK. Early signs are that this is what is in fact coming to pass. The UK is formalising its commitment to having the highest international standards of FS regulation, whilst the EU has watered down some of the MiFID II requirements (on research unbundling for those who are interested) and is allowing its banks to count nebulous software assets as ‘loss absorbing capital’ to make it easier for them to meet regulatory capital requirements. How does the EU attract some wholesale FS businesses from London? Well relax the bonus restrictions which London laboured under while in the EU, and still maintains.
In my view, when (likely rather than ‘if’) the UK ends up with higher standards than the EU across a range of other areas, notably environmental rules, we will come to realise that the EU position on UK trade has got nothing to do with standards, and everything to do with very traditional, very old fashioned protectionism.
The EU is stuffed to the ceiling with insolvent Banks. Quite how ‘nebulous software assets’, which are not really assets at all, can be considered ‘loss absorbing capital’ God alone knows. But it neatly illustrates the dire straits some EuroZone banks are in if this is what they call ‘capital’.
You missed an opportunity then. If you had offered a solid guarantee that you would maintain and increase standards, the EU would likely have offered a better deal in return.
Sidney Falco
3 years ago
The EU, with their threats of embargoes and punishments, are acting with exactly the same malice they displayed towards Britain throughout the Brexit negotiations. The purpose is to humiliate and to mask their own incompetence.
Vindictiveness on this scale is the hallmark of a burgeoning dictatorship.
If this had happened in a couple of years they would already have hauled off a few AZ executives to a “rehabilitation camp”.
All the forelock-tugging “good europeans” have got that to look forward to.
I wonder when we’ll start getting our first boatloads of EU refugees…
“Is the EU a ‘burgeoning dictatorship’ or a bunch of bungling bureaucrats?” No conflict there ….. ‘dictatorships’ are, in the historical record, quite regularly ‘served’ by regiments of “bungling bureaucrats”. Ergo, not very bright but self-aggrandising bullies with personal ambitions.
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
I would like to know what happened to all the Remainers. I assume they are keeping low and waiting for the Covid thing to subside? I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find any. In the referendum, my wife voted Remain but she says that she has changed now,
But in Wales you have to be a Remainer (Rejoiner) to vote for Welsh independence because somebody has to pay us when the UK taxpayer is not there any more.
They have retreated to their last redoubt in the rarefied air of the mountainous Guardian.
Though some still talk of building an underground army that will rise up to reverse the defeat once people have gone back to their normal lives.
What sort of misinformation? The fishermen are unhappy with the deal? There are problems with trade between GB and NI? The UK is unilaterally breaching the agreement it signed?
We have absorbed the damage and are getting on with our lives. Britain has decided to damage its future prosperity and its standing in the world on a mixture of fraudulent promises and incoherent yearnings. After the referendum one could still hope (it was Farage who first said “if we do not get the result we want, we just try for one more referendum”). But since the last election it is clear that this really is the democratic will of the British people. So be it. It was not a good idea, and it will not end well, but it has happened. Meanwhile, I’ll leave it to the Brexiteers to make a success of this glorious venture. If they can.
The last election does not establish for one moment that Brexit is the democratic will of the British people. Those voting for Brexit parties were well below 50%. Brexit has consistently polled below 50% since 2016.
As a practical matter it does. We have a democratic system, and the system answered. If the Brexit referendum had campaigned and won on “We will suffer – but we will be FREE” that would have been the end of it. The referendum result could be questioned since it was not clear what Brexit if any people actually voted for, and the whole question was run on manifestly fraudulent promises. But people had the chance to reconsider, and decided to put the Boris in charge of further developments. That has to be enough. If you ask a question at some point you have to accept the answer.
The result of any GE in UK does not establish the democratic will of the people as our electoral system is not democratic. However, changing that should be one major focus of the parties who took a remain position – especially Labour.
I would not make things worse out of spite. But I will not try to do the impossible. If it was such a good idea you can make it succeed without my help.
I’m still here, and still think Brexit is an act of self-harm, which will shrink the UK economy, damage the Union, and is being sustained politically by a government activating xenophobic nationalism. Brexit is not only unwise, it is also a gateway to self-destructive populism, and it fundamentally misreads the priorities of our global future. I believe myself to be in the majority, and I would not be at all surprised if the coming years see the UK moving closer to the EU, first by accepting some EU jurisdictions in order to reopen our trading relationship with what remains our largest market, and then probably rejoining the Single Market. I don’t anticipate the UK resuming full EU membership within the next decade, or longer, but what I have described would funnily enough be completely in keeping with the 2016 vote to leave (which I still of course believe to have been a disaster). I hope that answers your question.
Oh, and using COVID vaccine supplies to justify Brexit is pretty desperate, and rather tasteless. You might as well be blaming the UK government’s appalling ineptitude over the last year on Brexit.
Maybe they went to the sunlit uplands the rest of the UK doesn’t quite seem to have reached just yet?
Valerie Killick
3 years ago
Merkel was behind the migrant crisis with her invitation to the 3rd world, and then again it was she who scolded Germany when it started to source vaccines and insisted on a combined EU effort. Why is Merkel so powerful when she constantly makes huge errors. She was naive negotiating with Erodgan to hold back the migrants in Turkey giving him a hand on the screw to tighten around her own neck, and again buying her fossil fuel from Russia giving Putin a hand on the on/off tap – these are not men to trifle with.
Philip Walsh
3 years ago
I am now thinking that the AZ/EU row has been created by lobbyists. The lobbyists of Pfizer, etc. who are selling their vaccines ‘for-profit’. As such, each AZ vaccine dose bought is a loss on – for example – Pfizer’s profit and loss account. Note also that the US regulator has also made some noises about AZ data being too old. I truly hope that my suspicions are unfounded but it seems very odd (and unsustainable) that all of the noise about AZ – but no other vaccine – is purely Brexit-related.
Pierre Pendre
3 years ago
The EU has always failed at the big things, sometimes deliberately. In no particular order:
Embarking on flawed projects is a feature since they create crises that enable Brussels, Paris and Berlin to bully the other countries into doing things they don’t want to.
Becoming obsessed with growth and never understanding that constantly adding new members who had nothing in common would defeat its “one size fits all” principle. It is now beset not just by the familiar north-south tensions but east-west tensions as well. It should have stuck at the original six.
Allowing the UK with its entirely different worldview to join. De Gaulle knew the British would be trouble for this reason. This error was compounded by making Brexit unnecessarily difficult when in fact the UK leaving removed an obstacle to EU ambitions.
Allowing the CAP to become irrevocable and a source of permanent discord and inefficiency.
Adopting the euro, which is still on life support, as a political project in the knowledge that it would not survive basic economics. The aim was to try to make debt sharing and money transfers between the member states possible under economic and political union. Neither will happen.
Schengen allows any foreigner who can get across the peripheral border to have whole EU at his disposal. It now finds itself hostage to Erodgan who can release several million migrants whenever he likes.
Encouraging the mass arrival of islam in Europe without regard to whether it could be integrated. EU pols talk about creating a European Islam which also is not going to happen because it would require Moslems to give up core beliefs.
Being protectionist which condemns EU consumers to high prices.
Trying to become a state in its own right and ignoring the fate of the Hapsburgs and the Soviet Union.
And ainsi de suite….
Mike Wylde
3 years ago
There are 3 common denominators to all EU summits:
It must start with dinner or some other large meal.
It must last all night before it finishes
Agreement will not be reached but it will be spun the way the Commission need it to be i.e. a triumph for Brussels
From memory of the Brexit process there was a similar approach in the UK.
1 & 2 were identical, and 3 was subtly different: Agreement will not be reached but it will be spun the way the UK Government need it to be i.e. Brussels is to blame.
William Cameron
3 years ago
If you have a contractual dispute you go to court. Indeed the AZ contract with the EU specifies how and to which court disputes should be taken (Belgian courts ruling in Belgian law) . By failing to do that the Eu admits it has no case.
In any well run operation people are intelligent enough to admit error and change.
But the EU machine does not.
No one has been sacked for the hopeless vaccine procurement.
No one has been sacked for losing their second largest member .
Now there is major capital flight from the Euro -this is because of the crazy new legislation meaning the EU can confiscate any goods of any sort made in any of the 27 countries at any time.
No sane business is going to invest in such an environment . And those who are there now will move away. The consequent cost of borrowing to prop up the Euro will now cause austerity on a huge scale- all to protect EU official incompetents from being called to account and fired.
According to a recent column by A E-P in the DT there are already massive capital outflows from the EU, and have been since late last year. It hasn’t shown up in the cost of EU imports/exports yet due to hedging.
Don’t delude yourself, growth and investment in the EU, across all the different countries’ circumstances, outstrips the UK and Brexit is increasing the gap. Size of market counts a lot.
jules Ritchie
3 years ago
Clear and concise analysis of the EU response to several past crises and now the abysmal handling of this WuFlu pandemic. Their hubris knows no bounds.
So glad I don’t live in Europe at this time even though I’m desperate to be able to travel there once again.
there is no analysis there at all, and “WuFlu” is a fatuous trivialisation of the pandemic.
X Xer
3 years ago
I also remember reading about the Balkans when Yugoslavia broke up and the EU made that worse too, initially trying to keep Yugoslavia together. They disdained the Americans, yet in the end, as usual, the Americans sorted out Europe’s problems with the Dayton Agreement.
Edit: With von der Leyen it does feel like the ‘ever closer union’ hubris has appointed its unelected nemesis; she’s clearly an incompetent who has ‘failed up’ and is only in the job as a compromise nonentity to keep Macron and Mutti happy.
Edit: Georgia and Ukraine are two other countries where the EU also exacerbated tensions to disastrous effect.
The Balkan Wars were a direct result of the EU – more specifically the damn Germans – recognising states without defined borders. The UK begged them not to do this, but Genscher wouldn’t listen. Eventually it was the US and UK who basically put a stop to the carnage.
Von der Leyen was basically appointed so Merkel and Macron could run the show – she was seen as more reliable than the drunk. She is, alas, flat footed, incompetent and basically stupid, but then again in many ways she reflects the two idiots who control her.
A nation that systematically butchered of 6million innocents should never be trusted again.
Had it not been for the Cold War, Germany would have ceased to exist under the Morgenthau Plan.
It was to be dissolved into bite sized pieces and kept in a perpetual state of subservience.
An opportunity missed indeed, for which ‘we’ shall all pay a heavy price when
The Beast, re-emerges from its Bavarian lair.
Last edited 3 years ago by Charles Stanhope
Chuck Burns
3 years ago
Finger pointing and assuming no responsibility for their actions and decisions must be a trait of the Leftist mindset. Every Democrat aka leftist politician in the USA never assumes responsibility. It is always someone else’s fault.
And all the other politicians do? Could you point me in the direction of one, I might just send him or her a gift!
J J
3 years ago
Excellent article. The one thing the EU had going for it pre covid was they won the PR battle on Brexit. They were the sensible, competent, moral and reasonable ones. The UK were the unreasonable, incompetent ideologues. It was a PR battle they won due to the support of the largely EU supporting left wing UK media and UK opposition parties. Many of the British public will never forgive these institutions for turning against their own country in the midst of a crisis. With their mess up on delivering vaccines and attempting to block their export in a desperate attempt to solve the problem, the EU have now lost that reputation for competency and the moral high ground. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here. However the one big mistake all Brexiteers made was to assume the EU would be a passive bystander in the Brexit process. The were and are not. They now see the UK as their devout enemy and will do everything they can to ensure we fail. We have yet to grapple with that issue.
Well said. .The EU, like all cults, believes implicitly in its own infallibility. Therefore to explain its own incompetence regarding vaccination, it has to have a scapegoat. Step forward the UK!
The EU has never been our friend, despite our own left-wing media and in particular rhe BBC insisting otherwise. The last few weeks has surely brought their attitude regarding us into clearer focus, even the most devout Remainer must acknowledge that?
The EU is not a cult. Nonsense. It is a highly successful free trade group. They work very closely together to stop the mass slaughter of its citizens. Something which happened on a regular basis for thousands of years until it was formed.
Also most of the British press media is right-wing,80%, and owned by billionaire tax exiles. The BBC is not left-wing. When Labour were in power they complained that they were right wing.
guardian
independent
mirror
bbc
itv
channel 4
Are all left wing, all anti-governent, all pro-remain.
The EU isn’t free-trade, it’s devoutly protectionist
The EU vacillated over the Balkans, and Ukraine to name just two and, as usual, actually achieved zero.Plenty of European citizens have died there. I’m assuming you’re mot counting those? The peace in Europe is kept by Nato and has been since the end of WW2
There’s no war between Germany and France because France has kindly stepped aside to let Germany run Europe in return for the CAP and other material benefits.
If the BBC pleases no political party, then let’s all agree to stop funding it? Do you agree with that? It has after all become a woke mouthpiece, as opposed to a national broadcaster
Eight national dailys. Two left, one centrist, five right. 81% of papers sold are right wing. TV channels are not allowed to be biased. It is in their charter. It will be interesting to see how the Paisley Buddy gets on with GB News.
Exactly what does this woke insult mean, are they affecting things badly in the UK.
If there are five right wing national dailies, that is because there is a demand for five right wing national dailies. Anyway, most of them aren’t right wing in any meaningful sense.
Most of the main TV channels are publicly funded and their (very) left wing position do not reflect the country at large. Their views are forced down or throats. Well, not down mine because I threw out the TV some decades ago.
Britain isn’t free trade either and actually no one is, it’s a chimera. But the prize for the largest imposition of trade barriers in modern history goes to…. Brexit Britain
Most of the British media are in the hands of the right, yet the country has already given up on Brexit leading to a better Britain, reality breaking through the hype?
Won’t be rejoining though as they’ve had enough. They’ve set things up so they can move on and we have to bear the consequences of our own choices. It’s about us not them.
I agree with everything this article says BUT we should learn from theEU’s failures so that we don’t repeat them.No polity is likely to succeed if it is run by bureaucrats and not democratically elected politicians.
Possession Friend .uk
3 years ago
Hope the Remoaners can now see the Pernicious E.U for what they really are.. Take legal action against the for breaching contract over vaccines.
And exactly what are they other than ‘Pernicious’ and it’s difficult to understand how a group of countries can all be ‘Pernicious’!!
Big words with little meaning I’m afraid, after all whoever and whatever they are they just countries thst want to survive and prosper like us.
Sadly name calling has become a fashionable norm and resolves nothing, reality is thousands of not millions will die in this pandemic who just want to survive and so far political intransigence and name calling is all we offer as hope.
Nobody has actually breached any contracts, as far as I’m aware. What happened was that the UK signed some very tight contracts with AZ some months before the EU. And then the EU contrived to sign contracts that did not actually commit AZ to provide a certain number of vaccines on a specific date. Instead, AZ merely had to ‘make all reasonable efforts’ to supply so many vaccines on such and such a date – or something like that. All of this was explained by a contract lawyer in The Spectator a couple of months ago.
Steve Garrett
3 years ago
‘The subsidiarity principle aims to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen. Except in cases where the EU has exclusive competence, action at European level should not be taken unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level.’ “… the Council is incapable of absorbing criticisms which cast any negative light on its own direction of travel” & “it (the EU) will doggedly remain committed to the wrong answer even when that answer has been proved wrong” The EU Institutions and Agencies consistently act contrary to it’s own functioning treaty, and one of its core principles – subsidiarity. Why? The blind adherence to the Regulatory and Rule-making processes, but not the outcome; the “process” is God! “Look, we followed the rules in making the rules”; “what’s that, they don’t work? Well, you should have notified us in accordance with the rules! Too late now, sorry; we were perfect!!” In my experience there are few, if any cases, where the EU has “exclusive competence”, yet they continue with their mission creep to convert Directives into Regulations, and expand the scope of their so-called “competence” at every turn (jobs and pensions need protecting after all). Let the EC run its own 28-legged race (think about it), while the rest of us compete in all events. Any eggs we have left over from our spoon race can be broken into the Brussels face omelette, but I fear it will not be an oeuf to change their minds.
Ah but when their efforts fail, it gives them yet again the opportunity to say ‘What we need is more Europe (EU)’ to give themselves permission to move ever more towards complete integration when there will be no longer 27 legs but one!
ian.gordonbrown
3 years ago
Spot on. If an article was ever ever able to articulate my thoughts on the matter, this would be it. There is nothing here any reasonable person (EUPhile or Brexiteer) could disagree with.
I was never a fan of the E. U. But they seemed competent (especially when I didn’t want them to be). But now it’s just like it’s being run by the three stooges! You just wait to see what prat fall is coming next. And that’s not just bad for the EU, it’s effects us in the UK to.
Nigel
3 years ago
I always go back to this quote during the Greek/euro crisis. ”Keep in mind that the ruling class can be self-destructively mad; not just pretending!” (Daniel Ellsberg to Yanis Varoufakis, 2015).
Mark Walker
3 years ago
Having lived & worked in Southern France for 3 years, plus a year spent in Rome and 6 months in Frankfurt, greatly enjoying the lifestyle. I had no hesitation in voting Leave on Referendum Day but pleasantly surprised by the Brexit Result. _____It is clear to me that the Napoleonic and English Common Law will never be able to coexist happily for any period over 50 years. ____. It does not take much understanding of European History to see why EU and UK will be at loggerheads for the next 50 years. Hopefully no actual war in Europe, just posturing as with the Vaccine War.
This was the point made by the late Sir Roger Scruton. I understand why Macmillan, Heath et all were so desperate to join the EEC as was, but it was a huge mistake. They should have had more faith and stuck with EFTA, and had they done so I am sure all the old Eastern block would have joined that and not the EU. By joining the EEC we facilitated its transformation into what is fast becoming a danger to the very peace in Europe. I fear it will all end in War.
Apologies for the double post, I had to edit out certain words. You know how it is…
Last edited 3 years ago by Fraser Bailey
Peter Scott
3 years ago
Postscript: I admire Mr Murray ‘this side idolatry’ (as Ben Jonson said of his friend, colleague and rival Shakespeare); but when did the fine entirely serviceable English word ‘obstinacy’ turn into ‘obstinance’?
According to Jonathan Nash above it is in the OED and the earliest known use was in 1475. But I suppose you don’t consider the Oxford English Dictionary to be a ‘proper dictionary’.
And anyway, surely neologisms are always permitted, so long as meaning by inference works reasonably well.
Andrew Baldwin
3 years ago
I haven’t checked since March 18, but as of that date, the top three countries according to the Bloomberg data for the percentage of their population vaccinated were Monaco, the UK and Serbia. Iceland and Norway were also ahead of the EU on average, although behind a few other EU countries. It’s not much of an advertisement for EU membership.
The EU is not a competitor to Britain or vice versa. They’re different kinds of thing and of different orders of magnitude.
Andrew Taylor
3 years ago
They have even adapted our Comprehensive Education policy to help them with their vaccination programme! “Then there was the disaster of the roll-out, where the bloc’s efforts to ensure that nobody raced ahead meant that every country advanced at the slowest rate possible.”
There’s no evidence to support that whatsoever. It’s a blag for your amusement.
Tino Joseph
3 years ago
The problem for the UK is that this dysfunctional organisation will always find a stick with which to beat the UK (defector)
This will only get worse as it stumbles and the UK stretches its legs over the next few years.
It’s time for the UK to employ “Real Politik”. Automatic tariff sanctions for bad behaviour, effective control over UK waters, well secured strategic supply chains etc…
In seeking friendship, it will only receive contempt from the EU. Respect is what it needs.
mikeselby
3 years ago
Obstinacy. (but abstinence).
Paul Blakemore
3 years ago
I must say that Ursula vd L increasingly reminds me of Peter O’Toole playing Lawrence of Arabia; at the point where he lost it and took great delight in slaughtering a column of dispirited Turkish soldiers.
Are you suggesting that those who stalk the corridors of the Berlaymont might be little people? Silly people? Greedy, barbarous and cruel?
David Purchase
3 years ago
I am afraid this just reminds me of a saying attributed to Albert Einstein (not an exact quotation, and in any case the original would have been in German):
“There are two things which are infinite. The Universe, and human stupidity. And I am not quite sure about the first one.”
Of course this could be used by Brexiteers and Remainers alike.
J J
3 years ago
Excellent article. The one thing the EU had going for it pre covid was they won the PR battle on Brexit. They were the sensible, competent, moral and reasonable ones. The UK were the unreasonable, incompetent ideologues.
It was a PR battle they won due to the support of the largely EU supporting left wing UK media and UK opposition parties. Many of the British public will never forgive these institutions for turning against their own country in the midst of a crisis.
With their balls up on delivering vaccines and attempting to block their export in a desperate attempt to solve the problem, the EU have now lost that reputation for competency and the moral high ground. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
However the one big mistake all Brexiteers made was to assume the EU would be a passive bystander in the Brexit process. The were and are not. They now see the UK as their devout enemy and will do everything they can to ensure we fail. We have yet to grapple with that issue.
Jeff Mason
3 years ago
Government, by its very nature, is inefficient at delivering goods and services. If it weren’t, there would be no private sector. The bigger the government, the less efficient it is. The EU is a very big government. Be careful what you ask for. You may just get it.
I have always been impressed by the EU’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but I suppose it should not really be a surprise. If like me you regard our own House of Lords as the political equivalent of care in the community, where failed politicians are put out to grass, the Commission is surely the international version. Van Der Leyden is a classic example, a failed German Defence Minister, not trusted with another Cabinet post in her own country, was instead rubber stamped into the Commission. The only difference really is that the has been in the Commission are more grossly over compensated and can do, as recent events demonstrate, vastly more damage than our House of Lords.
Fintan Power
3 years ago
Well I wouldn’t see the policies of Boris Johnson and his government as exemplars of how things should be managed.
John Dewhirst
3 years ago
Has anyone else noticed how the EU and European press has gleefully adopted reference to the ‘British strain’ of Covid rather than recognising the scientific reference or crediting the fact that it was British scientists who themselves identified the gene?
I suspect we will hear more of the British strain. No doubt the EU would have us believe that the ‘British strain’ is the cause of the bloc’s miseries with regards the virus. Oh to be loved.
Tony Conrad
3 years ago
I couldn’t agree more. I have watched Nigel Farage for years trying to represent the feelings of half of Britain. At no point did they really listen as the EU with their unelected leadership was the be end and all of all things. Independent countries obviously mean nothing to them, so having a commonwealth (an agreement of independent countries) is not the idea but that they all conform eventually to the undemocratic dictatorial centre of the colossos.
William Blake
3 years ago
I am fully in agreement with the author’s conclusion. But then anyone with a shred of common sense would know that the bigger a committee the more difficult it must become to reach a conclusion which is acceptable to every committee member. Especially when some members are more equal than others ie, Germany and France.
The larger the EU the harder it must be to achieve unity. Put simply the EU as constituted just cannot function. Hence the calls for federalism. And it must be federalism overseen by either Germany or France. I put my money on Germany. The Third Reich is looming.
Peter KE
3 years ago
Good that we are nearly away from the EU grasp.
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Is “obstinance” a word? Isn’t it “obstinacy”?
It sounds like a coinage based on misremembering the word “abstinence”. I used to work with a bloke who said “normarily” when he meant “normally” or “ordinarily”. Drove me crazy.
but you knew exactly what that guy meant. That is the hallmark of words that are not real, but perhaps should be. Here’s yours for today – dramastically.
The Author writes “Evidence from around the world suggests that countries which are limber and independent — such as Israel, Singapore and Britain — have been able to act swiftly during the pandemic, particularly with regard to vaccinations”. Poppycock! Our Democracy has been destroyed, our freedoms destroyed, our health and well-being all but destroyed by a pack of incompetents on Corona TV pimping for Bill Gates and Big Pharma who will make massive profits from a no-liability, profiteering vaccine, which is still in its third stage of trials, and for which God knows how many side-effects will pop up over the next ten years. Our so-called heath “experts” failed criminally to implement early-use life-saving PREVENTATIVE TREATMENTS and thousands have died. High Dose vitamin D & C & Zinc. Hydroxychloroquine & Zinc, or Ivermectin. Instead the Govt has paid billions of pounds to frighten the public through all the media channels and newspapers, censored top scientists and doctors who won’t spout the vaccine propaganda. And they have allowed Bill Gates to dominate Global Health – a non doctor who from his own lips says he wants to “inject Genetically Modified Organisms into little kids arms – just shoot them into the vein” talks about a 20-1 return from vaccines, says we won’t go back to normal until everyone has largely been vaccinated, and threatens another pandemic while smirking with his wife? Unbelieveable conspiracy theory stuff? Check it out: https://ourtube.co.uk/watch/UIawpstyY9TbHFv
Yes, you are right. All the fuss about the vaccines ignores the fact that they are unnecessary for most of us and may well have side effects down the line. And, as you say, there are many common sense and inexpensive preventative and active treatments available for Covid. But governments and the healthcare industry will never go for the common sense and inexpensive options.
Re unnecessary vaccines, the measles jabs is unnecessary for most people, i had measles as a kid and just bad few days, but on balance isn’t it a good idea.
Though the measles vaccine has some bad even fatal reactions, that is less than endemic measles reactions.
As i understand, that’s the basic logic of vaccines, they are on balance an improvement. I think time will tell the Covid vaccine to be similar. My opinion anyway.
I’m with you on high dose vit C and vit D. No money to be made in proving this – despite there even being some proof against traditional colds and flu for vit C. Of couse this is a personal opinion – based on research and personal trials.
The vaccine, i think is likely effective and safe. This only a personal opinion.
Logic for the opinion is that random bits of virus and bacteria RNA and DNA are floating around us like no tomorrow, google virome.
The vaccine just chucks a bit of RNA in that is known to be benign, but happens to prime the immune system against SARS-Cov-19.
There is always a risk, but it think this is a good one. I choose a dose or two of vaccine.
Kelvin Rees
3 years ago
Well, yes. But they aren’t going away.
Diana Durham
3 years ago
great article. Thanks.
Phil Bolton
3 years ago
I wouldn’t crow too much about the British pandemic strategy. There have been plenty of screwups from our own Government there. Perhaps the only thing we did right was to bipass the Department of Health for the vaccine rollout, but that’s about it ! It’s all useful post-Brexit ammunition though.
Only pumping more air into the sagging blimp. Cuts no ice internationally, which is why BJ is being nice as pie with Brussels.
Trishia A
3 years ago
Complete reopen is the only solution. Let the fearful ruin their own lives, instead of the lives of all humanity!
Michael L
3 years ago
All one needs to know about the EU. “Italian newspaper La Stampa reported on Wednesday that authorities had discovered 29 million doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine stockpiled at a manufacturing site in the country. According to the newspaper, the doses likely come from AstraZeneca’s Halix plant in the Netherlands”
James Moss
3 years ago
Please tell me Murray doesn’t get paid for writing this turgid tosh. I see Unherd is seeking to convert its current giveaway business model into a subscription service. You just have to be joking.
With you, one topic is “turgid tosh”, another is “you have to be joking”.
Presumably, in your mind, that’s a contribution to a forum
A few more like you demolishes any business model based on a subscription service. I mean, why would I want to pay to be in a forum with deadbeats?
Ben Morris
3 years ago
Vapid, pointless propaganda, desperately scraping the barrel for good news on Brexit.
Rob Alka
3 years ago
Autonomy, federalisation, central control are word markers on a continuum that runs from independence or control of one’s destiny to that of unwilling or resigned dependence or subjugation (when citizens’ civil servants become their masters).
Given that there is an essential truth in the corny saying that “no man is an island”, there has to be an ideal balance between:
Model 1: entirely individual freedom
Model 2: accepting rules from a higher order.
Model (1) is the very opposite of society, self-destructively Neanderthal rather than progressively Homosapien. By contrast, Model (2), when taken to extremes, frustrates the very nature of individual freedom. Clearly a balance is called for between freedom and order.
If one accepts that thinking, one surely recognises the fundamental and perhaps incurable problem of the EU concept, which is that it goes against the grain of the inescapable fact that individual freedom and aspiration, with varying success or failure, is the very essence of existence and, some might say, spice of life (it is said after food, water & shelter comes stimulation).
The inherent variability of individual freedom creates a free-for-all, in which one individual’s freedom contests another’s, creating mayhem, destroying the possibility of society. This is why such excess variability, for its own security, has formed into a variety of clusters, homogeneous within, heterogeneous without. That surely is how mutual or common interests grow within each cluster (or fail if the common-interests are ill-founded). It is axiomatic that each homogeneous cluster will not share the very same common interests with another homogeneous cluster, otherwise they wouldn’t have fragmented into separate clusters in the first place. The consequence is wars or antagonism between clusters. The cure is civilisation, in this case, of live-and-let-live, or conquest or obliteration of one of the two antagonists (which not only resolves the conflict but prevents global overcrowding).
These clusters begin and build up from very small-populated clusters of common interest, eg a gang or a tribe, then community, city, region, country, continent (or, with advances in travel and communication, no longer bound by geography (communism, left wing extremism, white supremacism, Islam etc).
The problem is that the bigger the cluster, the less homogeneous it becomes, falling too heavily into Model (2). Independence and progressiveness of a member state are greatly impeded by an overweight government which has allowed its bloated bureaucracy (and Brussels “gravy train” of apparatchiks) to create decision-paralysis. The EU’s only workable cure for the future of Europe is the EU’s eradication. An alternative cure is for the EU to advance to totalitarianism, where its citizens across all member states are subjugated into a homogeneous segment of single-mindedness (or else) – good luck with that!
None of the above is a sure-fire cure for global disorder but nor is giant-size globalism and superpowers. Westphalian balanced relationships between countries is surely a workable means towards live-let-live (as well as live-and-let’s-trade). All that’s left is an improved age of enlightenment within societies, which are becoming fractious, feral, anarchist and mentally unstable. Improved education, upbringing, with effective government leadership and control and a recalibration of liberalism Did I say All?!
Last edited 3 years ago by Rob Alka
john.flahive
3 years ago
When you read a article like this you wonder what meaningful discussion has this writer ever had with anyone in Continental Europe to get their perspective on the question of the EU? There is no sign of that here.
Douglas Murray is well travelled but that’s not the same thing as soliciting viewpoints and making the effort to understand where other nationalities are coming from, and why so little support for imitating the UK’s departure from the EU exists. It takes time to get another country let alone the EU-27.
All too often English columnists on the right project all sorts of things on to Europe from their echo chambers, and then articles such as this one will appear which are nothing more than reactions to what they themselves project.
It does not help that the most in-depth and revealing reflections on EU and national concerns by continental equivalents of Douglas Murray will be expressed in German, French, Dutch etc for their domestic audiences and will rarely have any pick-up in the UK. It’s much less so the other way round given most European’s proficiency with English.
But this even happens with Ireland next door, where I’m from. I along with many of my compatriots roll our eyes when so many British struggle to even identify which area is part of Northern Ireland (and thus in the UK) or the Republic.
But it should be totally possible for professional British columnists to research Irish opinion, read articles, inform themselves of the politics, of the state of the parties in the Dail etc but very few make that effort.
For example, the myth of the Irish Govt being the EU’s “useful idiots” during Brexit is widely believed in the UK, when in reality it was mostly the other way round. After Brexit the Irish Govt launched a major diplomatic offensive in European capitals, in the EU Parliament and amongst EU commissioners and officials to have the Northern Ireland border on the Withdrawal Agreement negotiation agenda. Another misguided approach was to personalise this policy around Leo Varadkar when it was actually formulated by his predecessor Enda Kenny with pretty much unanimous support of the Dail.
British commentators have realised that there is mutual incomprehension with continental Europe, and that this played a role in the decision to leave.
But this state of incomprehension is not a good thing, it only leads to false perceptions and decisions get made on that suspect basis. But until Douglas Murray and co. recognise that this malaise of incomprehension is a problem that needs addressing, then articles as poorly informed as this will keep appearing.
Last edited 3 years ago by john.flahive
Real Horrorshow
3 years ago
We were lucky with the Astra-Zeneka vaccine being developed here. We were lucky to have the excellent NHS – which the Tories despise and want to flog off.
Everything which was the responsibility of the government meanwhile, has been a shambles. We are on our third lockdown. We have one of the highest death rates per capita in the world and billions have been wasted on contracts to Tory chums who have largely failed to deliver. Thirty seven billion on a test and trace program that has never worked and never will? We have nothing to be smug about.
Tim Beattie
3 years ago
When will the EU have a serious debate about its failings. “What is wrong with us that the UK voted to leave?”; “Why could we not move faster on Covid?”; “Are we truly democratic?”; and “How do we show we are accountable for our failures?”.
Philip Burrell
3 years ago
“Evidence from around the world suggests that countries which are limber and independent — such as Israel, Singapore and Britain — have been able to act swiftly during the pandemic, particularly with regard to vaccinations.” Israel and Singapore I can agree with but Britain’s response to the pandemic has been woeful right from the very beginning. Failure to lockdown early, shifting NHS patients into care homes, PPE procurement, the complete multi-billion farce that is track and trace, schools going back for one day and then closing and the worst death rate in Europe. The list is long with the one shining light being the procurement of vaccines and the speed with which they are being used. For that the goverment does indeed deserve credit. As for the rest, I suggest you take off your rose tinted spectacles and look again at the past year.
The UK acted quickly in funding and purchasing (and approving) vaccines. though much of that happened while we were members of the EU’s European Medicines Agency, but nevertheless sufficiently “limber and independent” to act.
The UK used to be well prepared for a pandemic, and had a stockpile of PPE. Unfortunately it had been allowed to expire without being renewed. And the committee to oversee epidemic response was stood down just as Covid-19 was getting going, so the civil service could concentrate on “more urgent” issues.
Other than the vaccine rollout, the UK’s response has been, as one Conservative MP put it, world-beatingly bad”.
Richard Long
3 years ago
its all about structure I’m afraid and with the EU its about being overstructured or even paranoid.
The idea a unified group of countries joining together, with an equal say in affairs of the group, is a nice idea but time after time it is doomed to failure when the structure of one of the countries is so different in politics, religion, ethic makeup, economic stability etc, that it could never agree to conform to being part of the team.
The question is why did that country join the EU in the first place?
To any group, crisis is probably the hardest to agree on and the muddle and catastrophic that has been the stuff of Covid vaccines is to us baffling beyond belief but to the EU it is trying to find common ground with a problem that defies boundaries.
So what would have happened if the UK had not left the EU, well then our frustration would have boiled over knowing that our scientists had a solution but the meeting to discuss it could not be scheduled for all members until, say August this year. The safety issues would drag on for every, thousands more would die and the world would suddenly stop turning.
All this implies that I am a Brexit fan by fortune, in fact I’m not. On one hand we embrace the idea of the world joining hands and working together for the benefit of ALL mankind and on the other we find it endlessly necessary to isolate ourselves building safe fences around our version of the ideal world.
We forget conveniently that millions of people in the world cannot even read a newspaper to find out what’s killing them, they will die perhaps in millions before either we stop isolating ourselves behind our wealth or we start working together with other countries as a agreed team.
So far, Never the twain shall meet
Anton van der Merwe
3 years ago
So much of the debate about the EU misses the essential point that EU rules tie its members down to neoliberalism. That is why Hayek and Thatcher were so keen on the EU single market idea. Together with the Euro they make neoliberalism democratically irreversible. Neoliberalism has manifestly failed in developed countries, where there has been income stagnation and increasing economic insecurity for the bottom 70% of the country for 40 years since it’s introduction. Its most damning failure is falling productivity growth, which is essential for sustained improvements in living standards. These failures are behind the emergence of populist movements such as Trump and Brexit supporters. A large segment of the population knows that more of the same is not working and they will support radical change. Ironically many on the right, who supported Brexit because they felt the EU version of neoliberalism was too restrictive, have provided voters in the UK with an opportunity to escape the constraints of neoliberalism. Now that we are outside the EU it is possible to vote in a Labour government that can eliminate neoliberalism and restore social democracy, fiscal expansion, and state intervention. This is such a delicious irony!
You were doing very well until the final conclusion. The current Labour party would rejoin the EU instantly if elected because it now represents the rich, not the 70% of the country that you refer to.
I agree that New Labour largely abandoned the working classes. However they will need to change to get elected again. And when they do get elected with left wing platform they will be able to introduce it. This contrasts markedly with the situation if the UK had remained in the EU, where some policies are illegal (e.g. sustained fiscal expansion and state intervention) and others very difficult (e.g. controlling supply of labour in order to force increases in labour productivity).
What you say about néolibéralism has some point. But it is everywhere, not Justin the EU. You will not be seeing ANY country make a complete break with it under any stripe of government. Indeed the most interesting attempts to control néolibéralism and make it serve people’s interests are taking place in the …..EU!
There are already breaks appearing in the USA. The USA has finally embraced fiscal stimulus as a way of matching demand with supply, rather than relying entirely on monetary policy. There is also more recognition of the need to protect its own workers from the supply shock that comes from globalisation. Hence the increase in minimum wage and proposal to strengthen labour. Finally, in the UK there is recognition of the need for the state to intervene in the economy more aggressively. The above policies are more difficult to implement in the EU because of the constraints such as the single market and supranational rules on fiscal policy that voters cannot change.
Joseph Berger
3 years ago
The EU has fundamentally been operating as a communist bloc, and therefore was boi und to fail.
The EU was really established to prevent France and Germany dragging Europe and the World into yet another major war. From a simple small European economic union, it grew into the monolithic communist pretend-empire that it has become, and like the bloated USSR was condemned to fail ab initio.
Britain – fortunately although very late – managed to escape its stranglehold, and the vaccine success is the first very clear demonstration of the wisdom of leaving.
Most sensible Brits shrink in horror at the thought that had Ms May remained, or had the left and the BBC and the other puppets of far-left ideas succeeded in rejecting Brexit, Britain would probably have been the worst off of all the European countries.
Peter Branagan
3 years ago
God it’s so tiresome reading all the Brexiter moanings in Unherd. Nearly as bad as in the DT.
You wanted out of the Single Market and the Customs Union. Now you’re out, it may be timely for you all to forget about the EU – most of whose citizens would likely want – ever so politely – to ask you all to go f**k off and wander around the world in HMS Global Britain. It’ll be interesting to see who your new trading pals will be and how you get on with them particularly given that the vast majority of them – the US, India, China, Mercusor in South America, Indonesia and Canada etc. are far more protectionist than the EU.
Return to the Guardian and the Dingle Echo, you will a much happier.
Now run along, there’s a good chap.
Franz Von Peppercorn
3 years ago
I’ll pop in again to point out that the U.K. is doing worse than most of the world in terms of deaths and its economy has crashed more than any EU country and exports are off a cliff. in fact in trade agreements, where the EU has managed to ink a few more in just the last few weeks, the UK is also floundering.
The U.K. has just managed to antagonise China which is where most of the 95% growth outside the EU exists.
The vaccine rollout is mostly up to the individual countries anyway, on AZ the EU was clearly stiffed by the U.K., which is the general opinion in Europe.
Pretty sure the first sanctions China announced this week were on the EU. Won’t argue over who, if anyone, stiffed anyone else on the AZ vaccine – we probably won’t agree. I assume we can agree though that no private company is ever going to build a vaccine factory or manufacture a new vaccine in the EU again as their non-EU customers now know they won’t be able to rely on getting the product they ordered.
Not so much stiffed, as out-negotiated. The UK negotiated penalty clauses for non-delivery. The EU seems not to have done. And in the early stages it may have made sense for AZ to supply the country that was using their vaccine, rather than the bloc that hadn’t approved it yet, or that later was restricting its use.
Gerald O'Connell
3 years ago
The EU doesn’t always fail, but it often fails. That’s why Brexit was a mistake. Without the UK onboard the EU becomes a Franco-German Empire, with both countries getting to do what they like most: France postures, while Germany runs things and has a captive market for its exports. A strong, confident, well-run EU would be a powerful counterbalance to the USA, China and a host of multinational companies. The UK on its own will suffer. We will pay the price for our failure to engage properly with the EU and steer it in the right direction.
The Euro has allowed the Germans to take over Europe just as Nick Ridley famously remarked. So we now have the Fourth Reich. The French think they can run things in their usual arrogance, but they are no match for the Germans. Helping to force the UK out might have seemed to them a good plan on paper, but I really, really hope they rue the day. I wish the EU nothing but ill.
harry.adam
3 years ago
“Evidence from around the world suggests that countries which are limber and independent — such as Israel, Singapore and Britain — have been able to act swiftly during the pandemic, particularly with regard to vaccinations.” A lesson for Britain, then. Britain has done spectacularly badly with respect to test and trace, for exactly the same reasons. Over-centralisation and lack of distributed delegation. Just as well they didn’t go overboard on the centralised vaccine rollout.
Caroline Galwey
3 years ago
Douglas, there is no such word as ‘obstinance’. It’s ‘obstinacy’. Please don’t undermine the effect of your excellent arguments with embarrassing illiteracy.
Well, I have always used obstinance. It is in The Oxford Shorter, though marked as rare. I admire a gal who is brave enough to accuse Douglas Murray of illiteracy.
In my online full OED the earliest usage of obstinance is 1475; the most recent citation is 1987. I think an apology may be required.
Norman Ballard
3 years ago
Meanwhile the EU will continue to be the most successful free trade zone in the World and the UK to continue its decline.
John Stone
3 years ago
It is dismaying that even Douglas Murray is unaware of the dangerous futility of the “vaccines”. Products put together in days with novel technologies: briefly tested, results suppressed, uncertainty of effectiveness (limited anyway) or safety beyond weeks, and yet they are trying to build an international system based on this techno-junk. There is here a colossal scientific naivety.
You can’t have a great deal of evidence of long-term safety for a vaccine that’s only been in use for a few months. That’s the arrow of time for you.
But the AZ vaccine uses the same technology as the flu vaccine (and it’s not microchips, before some smart alec starts). So it’s unlikely to have any more long term effects than flu vaccines do.
Some people seem remarkably cynical about vaccines (and 5G), and at the same time remarkably credulous about anti-vaccine propaganda. Maybe it’s something in the water?
“You can’t have a great deal of evidence of long-term safety for a vaccine that’s only been in use for a few months.”
You said it. 5G btw is weapons grade technology and has minimal advantages for domestic use.
It’s even more dismaying – to put it mildly – that there was an excellent early-use life-saving drug (apart from High Dose vitamin D) which was set up to fail in trials because it would have destroyed the vaccine agenda. And who sponsored those trials? (Solidarity & Recovery trials). Of course it was Big Pharma, Bill Gates, Wellcome Trust. They gave the patients four times the dose of Hydroxychloroquine and poisoned many of them. But where it has been used, it works as a prophylactic and with zinc as an early use PREVENTATIVE life-saver. But no profit in it. And you can’t control a population with a cheap life-saving drug can you.. But you can with a vaccine – and vaccine passport. And into the bargain make a massive massive profit for your Big Pharma cronies and Vaccine Fuhrer Bill Gates, who has his money in the BBC Gavi the WHO the Guardian – virtually everywhere – and they are all dancing to his tune while people who could have been saved die in their thousands. Here’s one of the many doctors who are speaking the truth (but most get censored) Explained in 90 seconds: https://twitter.com/i/status/1374120015079870466
You mean it’s already been privatised and I missed the share offering? Oh Noes!
Ben Morris
3 years ago
COVID is an international issue. There is no single-nation route to security. This anti-EU diatribe has nothing to do with the current situation, and everything to do with the strangely aggressive mindset of its author. It is neither appropriate nor is it decent to attempt to score cheap nationalistic points over the pandemic, which is a shared problem for all humans. It is also extremely unwise, because in other areas of the COVID response Brexit Britain has failed dismally to protect its citizens. Let us be glad that in the UK we have a functional vaccine programme. But let us also accept that zero-sum protectionist nationalism will do nobody any favours at all.
It is neither appropriate nor is it decent to attempt to score cheap nationalistic points over the pandemic, so people should stop haranguing states or nations that do not live in perpetual lockdown, demanding that citizens now wear two masks? This thing was politicized early and often, and that is not going to change.
You forgot to mention Brazil and Italy!
Covid-19 is an issue for every country experiencing infections, and for any country at risk from infections (in case there actually are any countries currently infection-free). So it’s an issue for all of us.
Learn lessons on which approaches work best, so we are better prepared for the next inevitable epidemic.
Prepare for the next pandemic (and don’t let the stockpiles of PPE expire this time)
And somewhere below 99: Find someone else to blame as a distraction from the above.
Phineas Finn
3 years ago
“Try again.Fail again.Fail better.” Beckett understood the challenges in life better than Douglas Murray. Mr Murray might to do better to write about the many challenges confronting the U.K. at the moment. We have a phrase for Murray’s stance in Ireland. He is the ever-critical ‘ hurler on the ditch’. The ‘Know-all’ who sees everyone else’s faults.
He might, for example, review the tragically large numbers who died of Covid in the U.K. due to a dilatory Tory government and hold those responsible for such a failure to account.
But, of course, Brexiters and their ilk never fail.
What has your wittering got to do with the proposition ‘The EU always fails’? Do you, or do you not agree with it?
T J Putnam
3 years ago
Everybody in Europe knows that the way to improve vaccine provision is to strengthen these new collaborative efforts coordinated by the Commission, not grouse and slink away as happened with Brexit. Read today’s news and you will see that’s exactly what’s happening, withThierry Breton already making excellent progress. It’s a new type of collaborative programme and there are things being learned, most particularly about drafting tighter contacts and making it clear from the start you will back them up with trade controls. (A big chunk of Britain’s vaxx supply has been manufactured in the EU.)
There will also be broader efforts to coordinate public health across Europe because more people now see that’s necessary. But health will remain primarily a national ( and in some cases regional) responsibility in Europe, as it is in the UK, and the main learning will be lateral not top down.
Sorry, but reality can’t be shoehorned into neat polemics, especially ones attacking European institutions from the outside ( for whose benefit?). The article projects a completely fictiive ideology of obsessive European unification. Rather, within the Union there is a healthy two way movement between devising new collaborative institutions when clearly needed and criticising and refining those that exist. Europe and Britain both lose because UK political leaders bottled out of that process.
There’s a second baseless notion which pollutes the article and that’s this idea that agility and enterprise are somehow a monopoly of states like Britain and Israel and inimical to Europe. Rubbish. European Union states and companies have the advantage of being able to act on their own AND have the Union act on their behalf where scale and/or a coordinated approach counts, as it often does. Big can be quick, too, as Biden’s recently shown. Shame Britain’s now going to be missing out on a whole layer of effective action on several fronts.
Last edited 3 years ago by T J Putnam
Rasmus Fogh
3 years ago
“Yaah, EU BAD!” . Yawn.
You blame the EU for France and Germany favouring their own companies!? How consistent is that?
Please remember that no matter how independent and nimble a country you are, it will not increase global vaccine production. All you can do is jump the queue.
You don’t need to jump a queue if you were quick enough to be at the front of it in the first place. Queue jumping is only necessary (for example) if you faff around placing political ideas above practicality (and human lives) and get to the party late.
Are you playing word games? Or did I use a lightly inaccurate expression? The point is that getting the vaccines quickly is a zero-sum game. If you get yours faster, it means others have to wait longer. If EU membership limits your freedom to get ahead at your neighbour’s expense, *) I’d say that was a price worth paying. That said, there are other aspects to it, and Britain (an Israel) have indeed handled those rather better than most of the EU.
*) I do not think Britain did anything wrong in getting ready fast. But if France or Germany had broken with the EU and moved faster, it would have been at the expense of other countries, for instance Britain.
Circular argument. The point is that getting the vaccines quickly is a zero-sum game. If you get yours faster, it means others have to wait longer.
If we waited for the EU to get it’s act together over vaccines, the UK would looking forward to lockdown season 4, the death rate would be still rising and the rate of infections would still be increasing.
It was never a zero sum game.
I don’t see how you can possibly believe what you’re saying. Getting the vaccines quickly isn’t a zero-sum game at all. Thanks to our government’s funding of the AZ-Oxford partnership, there are loads of cheap vaccines where, if we had relied on the EU and Pfizer/Sanofi, there would be fewer and more expensive ones. Thanks to our early input, we get first dibs, but EVERYONE gets some sooner than they would have done without UK efforts, so why are the EU complaining?
But that’s simply untrue. The UK invested in the actual nuts-and-bolts infrastructure needed to develop and manufacture vaccines (so did the US). The EU could have done the same. It did not.
If it had, that would have increased the global vaccine supply.
The BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine was the first to be used in the west. BioNTech was a very small company (the creation basically of the two mRNA researchers who developed the vaccine). A 300 million euro investment was made by the German government early last year to help develop the usable vaccine (not the EU), but it took the heft of the partnership with Pfizer (a US pharma giant) to mass produce it. It has since been rolled out successfully in the US, UK, across Europe, Israel etc.
Sounds pretty much like what the UK government did with Oxford and AstraZeneca. So, accepting that might-have-beens can never be proven, what are you saying would have happened if the German government had gone it alone, that was prevented by the EU collaboration?
The point is that if you get your vaccines faster, then others have to wait…this is surely the reality, even the definition of a queue, is it not? I just don’t understand the logic in this situation where thousands of lives are on the line of holding back so as not to step on your neighbour’s toes. This was a situation where speed and getting to the front of the queue was everything, not some solidarity niceties. By focusing on the latter, everyone ended up worse off, people are dying. That is not a price worth paying for adherence to an ideology! You can tell yourself if you like that small countries like Denmark would have been left behind if they hadn’t taken the collective EU approach but I say: look at Israel, look at Serbia: both small, neither in the EU. And doing fine for themselves. The EU should have sent some powerful players with big elbows into the fray to secure a decent place in the queue and then share the spoils with their smaller mates. And finally: why would you even be bothered about whether France and Germany getting ahead would be at Britain’s expense? There was no such consideration in the Brexit negotiations, why now?
I could not agree more with KE. To go even further the EU is directly responsible for Brexit. If David Cameron had returned from the EU with something out of the negotiation (anything) it may well have been a different story. The EU leadership is generally talentless, failed politico’s given a cushy job, expecting dynamism from them is hopeless. We see that now!
COVID is not a national issue. It is rather desperate and sad to be seeking validation for Brexit on the basis of the UK’s successful vaccine procurement. Vaccination has to be handled regionally and globally. The UK is dependent on French and other European lorry drivers, for example, and if they haven’t been vaccinated they may bring in new variants. The Little England mentality typical of Brexiters has absolutely nothing to contribute to the global response to COVID.
It’s not ‘jumping the queue’ to invest heavily in vaccine development and manufacture. I posted this under a different article recently, but will mention it again: the chief executive of the French pharma company Valneva spoke recently of how the EU vaccine programme showed little interest in the company’s Covid vaccine last year, whereas the UK taskforce had provided the company with 90+ million euros for development, ordered millions of doses and began setting up a manufacturing site in Scotland. Just having a quick look online this morning I notice the EU concluded preliminary talks with the company in January and placed an order, while the UK government placed an additional order for tens of millions of doses in February (for delivery in 2022). This takes the total UK order to over 100m doses when added to the orders placed last year.
If EU countries had acted independently they (like Britain) could have begun work on mass production of vaccines: the components required for each; the m(b)illions of glass vials needed to store; the m(b)illions of syringes required; the cold storage; logistics etc etc. These are the kind of issues the UK taskforce (and US Operation Warp Speed) were tackling last year. Alternatively the EU could have tackled all these issues centrally and set up this capacity across the bloc: it did not. And now it is threatening to blockade deliveries to the UK and seize manufacturing sites and supplies of a vaccine its leaders have undermined with their ill-considered remarks.
Such behaviour, if coming from a recent US president, would have been roundly and widely condemned as the worst sort of populism, right-wing nationalism and incipient fascism. Haha!
The great irony is that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine the EU wants to seize has now been so undermined in Europe that recent polling shows that more than half of people in France and Germany do not want to take it: and millions of doses are sitting unused in cold storage. Last year the Serum Institute of India began mass production of hundreds of millions of doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine: before trials were concluded and before it had been approved for use. These vaccines are being supplied to (last I saw) 15-plus countries in Asia as well as to Britain. It is a remarkable achievement: and the vaccines are being supplied at cost price.
The UK did this one very well (for the first time during the pandemic, I might add), and recent EU behaviour has been (let us be nice) ‘very unfortunate’. But I honestly see no reason why countries getting together in the EU vaccine program would have slowed down *production*, as opposed to delivery. Nothing would prevent countries with their own vaccine or infrastructure to speed things up anyway. In fact it was my definite impression that France and Germany did exactly that. There seems to be several production facilities in Belgium and the Netherlands. If you have evidence that individual countries were going to boost production but the EU effort prevented them, I would actually like to see it.
I say above that setting up the manufacturing base could have been done nationally or by the EU, I don’t have any agenda to push one way or the other. If anything slowed down mass production and delivery of vaccines under the EU programme it was likely that the individuals charged with the task were not terribly gifted (let us be nice) and the EU was not prepared to put money upfront to finance development and expand the manufacturing base.
Obviously the pharma companies are major players in this, not national governments. The German example shows that an early investment by a national government in small pharma achieved impressive results (in partnership with big pharma).
The UK govt was very pro-active and invested heavily to get vaccines produced.
France, and thus the EU (at that stage), put all its eggs in the Sanofi basket, doubtless choosing a ‘national champion’ (though of course, the Sanofi vaccine, which has now been delayed until later this year, was a collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline).
It is obvious to everyone here you simply want to push a pro-EU message, I’ll leave you to it…
Not at all. People are trying to tell me that things would have been so much better if the EU had done nothing and left it to France and Germany to act on their own. And I am asking for the evidence. Your post sounds like a fairly good summary of what actually happened. My guess is that a nation-by-nation effort would have made most of the same mistakes, led to much the same total volume of vaccines produced, advantaged some nations at the expense of others, and given more border rifts and fights within the EU. Of course the EU effort on vaccines was pretty pedestrian, compared to the UK one, but why would France and Germany have done much better on their own?
You might add that the UK did rather worse than much of the EU on lockdowns, and on test-and-trace. And that you took some chances in vaccine policy. I’d say they were the right decisions, and the bets certainly did win, but things would be looking a lot different if one of the emergency-approved vaccines had shown major side effects, or if the one-jab-at-a-time approach had proved to be clearly inferior to following the tested procedures.
The UK did not jump any queue. The EU is trying to hijack UK supplies in order to avoid the consequences of it’s own incompetence. Utterly shameless. Yawn away, but the truth is the truth. My contempt for the EU and its adherents grows by the day.
The British Common Law tradition means that people are free to experiment with ideas and creative ways of thinking. Things are permitted unless explicitly forbidden. The European rule of law is the Napoleonic Code, a top-down system where things are forbidden unless you have permission to do something different. In EU world Government knows best. Britons have always had a healthy disdain for pompous authority and official ‘bossiness’. Europe seems to live off it; often in European projects one is trying to get over or around officialdom. EU is officialdom par excellence.
In the long run, agility and flexibility will always be greater assets. Douglas Murray is right; EU has a fundamental design flaw which will prevent it from ever being the power it thinks it is or wants to be.
Until a year ago you were absolutely right about British Common law, but we now live in a country where it is illegal to leave the house without “a reasonable excuse” and we’re waiting for the government to tell us when we’ll be allowed to hug a family member. What a brave new world we live in.
I am so far willing to give the government the benefit of doubt. I realise that rights taken away are not easily returned by power-crazed officials and politicians. I sincerely hope I am not wrong in being trusting. Time will tell.
Once rights are taken away, even if they are subsequently reinstated, they become a privilege.
Exactly. Once the principle of removal is established, especially when by mere statutory instrument, ‘rights’ become contingent and are therefore no longer rights.
Indeed. When California tried to close churches due to the pandemic, the churches went to court. SCOTUS found for the churches based on the 1st amendment right to religious freedom. Now the state has to figure out how to accommodate the right to worship in light of the pandemic. If there is no guaranteed right, the onus is on the wrong people. It should be on those trying to remove a right rather than those trying to maintain one,
Scottish courts have this week ruled that the Scottish government acted unlawfully by ruling that churches had to be closed. In England the CofE heirarchybwent along with the government decision to close churches and that decision has not been tested in court.
Yes, courts may rule one way or the other wherever you don’t have a constitutional right to freedom of religion.
The point is that when there is a constitutional right to freedom of religion, the onus is on the government to figure out how to accommodate that. If there’s no right, it’s always going to be a case by case basis.
The right to infect others is not a right to allow.
I hope you’re right, but don’t share your faith.
Lmao. Sucker
Also if this vaccine is the panacea Murray is suggesting , why is Britain still in lockdown/mask wearing mode and will remain so for the foreseeable future? He suggests European countries are only having lockdowns/curfews until they eventually get the vaccine,which their ‘ belligerance’ has delayed. My understanding of this vaccine is it has no affect whatsoever on the virus, you can still catch it , be ill and infect someone else.
Caution. The government has had too many failures in the past 12 months and so is acting (unnecessarily, in my view) cautiously.
‘…this vaccine has no affect (sic) whatsoever on the virus..’. Interested in where you have gained this understanding from, as my understanding is that according to well-developed and standard testing procedures, it has well-established efficacy levels that are not zero (if by ‘it’ you mean AZ and Pfizer). We are in lockdown & mask-wearing mode because only about half the country has yet received the first dose, and only about 5-6% the full set of two. But willing as always to be proved wrong if you can offer your sources.
Kathleen’s choice of words is a bit array; I am sure she just means you can still get COVID-19 from the SARS CoV 2 virus, plus still pass it on as well, even if you have had one or two doses of the new injected prophylactics.
“We are in lockdown & mask-wearing mode because only about half the country has yet received the first dose…”
If this is the case we truly are in a totalitarian state.
Should that perhaps be “awry” in place of “array”.
Array = orderly
Awry = away from the correct course
We are far from a totalitarian state. If we were you would not be commenting on this forum.
You are technically incorrect. All of the vaccines prevent infection (not just symptomatic infection, hospitalization and death) and therefore prevent transmission. Figures seem to vary between 50% to 80%. However more importantly serious illness and death is reduced by 80% to 100%, so even with transmission deaths and hospitalisation should fall by this amount – effectively making the pandemic not a ‘big deal’.
The problem here is the constant media distortions of “case”-demic, versus the long term vaccination goal of reducing deaths. As long as the media remain obsessed with the “case”-demic, none of the data will make any sense.
ARR
Time will tell Andrew. The effects of the vaccine so far are staggering.
Why we are still in lockdown and mask-wearing mode is an excellent question, but it is a political one, not an epidemiological one. Since the vaccine rollout, cases, hospitalisations and deaths have fallen dramatically. That would suggest the vaccine is effective? In Europe, where the vaccines have not been administered to many people, cases are rising. That would seem to be more evidence that vaccines make a difference. Of course, nothing is a panacea, but at some point we have to have the basic courage required to deal with real life. If we can’t do it now, then when?
You are incorrect, it’s a epidemiological one. The more people we have vaccinated by the time we end the lockdown, the fewer infections, deaths and hospitalizations there will be. Ideally we would wait until everyone who wants a vaccination is given one (two doses). However there needs to be a balance, waiting 16 more days before we essentially open up 90% of activities that were prevented, seems a reasonable balance to me.
It was 16 days over a year ago!!!!!!!! No more.
You may as well wait 16 days (now 15 days) before having your revolution, just incase you are wasting your time.
Yes and Britain would gain the advantage of ‘look at us we got the vaccine and now we are back to normal’ over EU-instead we have gloom and doom of Sage who seem to want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is that the latest information shows the OAZ vaccine reduces, although may not eliminate, transmission of the Covid-19 virus.
As Whitty, Vallance, JVT et al have said, Covid will become endemic; we’ll have our yearly vaccinations and learn to live with it, just as we’ve learned to live with the 10-20K fatalities from the flu each year.
I’m in my early 60’s, lost my Mum to Covid during the 1st wave, and although I’ve had my 1st dose of OAZ I’ve no problem wearing a mask in a store or on the very rare occasion I use public transport to help protect not only myself, but others.
Murray’s article doesn’t mention the efficacy of the vaccines, Kathleen, let alone describe them as a panacea. You see what you want to see.
I thought it was about the EU never apologising or changing their minds when they, fail not about vaccines.
I bet you voted remain and have bashed leavers contantly since.
Never voted, follow the Mark Twain principle-‘If voting made a difference ,they wouldn’t let us do it’. So I wonder why Britain has been allowed to leave the EU ( as there is no way of verifying the referendum result) and whether it is to allow us to be financially ruined?
Is it too obvious to point out that in the EU referendum the establishment wanted to remain but the voters secured a leave? Turns out Mark Twain wasn’t quite correct with that one.
Unclear if the vaccine is a panacea, they are absolutely efficacious in the older folk – evidence shows, less cases, less really sick, less hospital admissions. Why is Boris still locking down? Because he can…he can ignore the science as he sees fit because of the precedent already set at the beginning of this whole mess – Simon Wood University of Bristol paper, Lancet, Stanford paper, Nature paper, BMJ paper all say, knowing what we know now, that locking down is more harmful than not locking down. Here’s a compilation
https://principia-scientific.com/scientific-analyses-and-papers-on-lockdown-effectiveness/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+psintl+%28Principia+Scientific+Intl+-+Latest+News%29
BTW these are not vaccines in the truest sense – more like treatments. Small pox, polio – those are vaccines – those jabs prevent you from getting the bad effects of the virus or bacterium. These covid-19 jabs help lessen the effects of the illness of covid-19.
Because they haven’t finished Vaccinating ? Two jabs for everyone.
Build back better. Save the world from global warming. Sit in your house and wait to die. Make the world safe for billionaires again
Scientists who don’t agree that global warming is man made don’t get research grants so there is a lot of pressure to comply.
The vaccine is 80% effective in protection from the virus but 100% effective so far in preventing serious infection leading to hospitalisation.
you have a weak understanding of what a vaccine is and how vaccines protect against infection, and you don’t seem to understand that often when a doctor prescribes a medication to a patient, it is not just the pill but a variety of other instructions are also given according to the condition.
Lockdowns, masks, etc, have a purpose, the only issue will be when and if it will be safe to remove them. People who have travelled a bit are aware that people from certain Asian countries who have had very low virus infection and disease rates often were wearing masks in public settings long before corona.
Yes, what the UK really needs is a constitution and a bill of rights. If things are permitted unless prohibited, there can always be a reason found for it to be prohibited. Much better to guarantee rights against political machinations leaving the government to have to figure out how to accommodate the right rather than making people fight for the right each time.
We all break the law. There is a statute still on the books which says that all men over 18 should get 4 hrs of archery practice a week.
That seems unconnected to my post.
I have from the start refused to accept either of those premises, I have met frequently with family members and have left the house (avoiding the gestapo) those that give up freedom for safety deserve neither
Sean, do you feel the same way about being coerced into forever driving on the left?
He said that things are permitted unless expressly forbidden which is still the case.
The divide goes back further. The Divine Right of Kings was adopted by Charlemagne from the Roman tradition of the Emperor being Divine and The Law being used to impose his will.. The Anglo Saxons, Celts and Vikings elected Kings, the wisest warrior and kingship was not always hereditary. In England the first laws combined AS Tradition and the Bible were written by Aethelbert of Kent in about 650 AD. AS Kings ruled through consultation and consent. Edward 1 said ” That which affects all must be consulted by all”.
Napoleon assumes the Divine Right of Kings of Charlemagne, makes his Empire a reality by imposing his code and like him, is crowned by the Pope and makes
Napoleon breaks the power of the feudal aristocracy and RC Church in Europe, enabling Charlemagne’s Empire to exist. The French kings believed in the Divine Right of Kings and in droit administratif, a sacred principle of state which can crush the people. The EU is using droit administartif to block vaccines to the UK.
The EU is an attempt to recreate the Empire Of Charlemagne which is why Mitterand and Kohl visited his tomb at Aachen. If you look at the centres of power of the EU, they are largely in heart of Charlemagne’s Empire. Charlemagne’s Empire extended to south of barcelona, Italy North of Rome, in Italy, Slovenia Bohemia, Western Austria, Non- Prussian Germany, Belgium and perhaps RC Netherlands.
Charlemagne-empire-map-814-.jpg (650×594)
(shorthistory.org)
Those countries which are least pro EU are largely those which existed outside of Charlemagne’s Empire.
Who knows England who only knows England?
A major reason why there is lack of understanding of the EU is massive failure of the opinion forming middle classes to understand European History post 410 AD. The days when politicians had History degrees and could read Latin and French, is well history.
Yes, fundamental design flaw as is the case with all Left thinking organizations. I believe it stems from the Most basic flaw incorporated into Marxism by Marx himself. They do not take into account human nature and that people are individuals and not all the same. Some will excel, some are satisfied with the status quo, but you can’t force all into the mediocrity of the Leftist mindset.
True enough about not being able to force everyone into a leftist mindset, but it’s still amazing to see the numbers, and apparent intelligence of individuals, who do indeed enthusiastically adopt that position.
The key words here are ‘apparently intelligence’. That is the skill of our politicians. They exude ‘apparent intelligence’. Dissect the word politics phonetically and you have:
Poly – more than one
Tic – blood sucking parasite
Maybe they think they will get something for nothing and not have to work.
I forge to separate authoritarian leftists from libertarian leftists. There’s a big difference between the wokism dominating the covid debate and the libertarian leftists who lean to better hospital care, but more liberty for the majority of the population.
Wokeism rules the covid debate, as it rules other debates in society presently. The woke Left have embraced the religious authoritairian ways of church pushing right-wingers. It’s sad time in history.
The pontifications of Klaus Schab head of the World Economic Forum author of the Great Reset is just another marxist idea where nobody owns anything but they will still be happy. Where have we heard that before?
The EU is our nearest and largest trading partner with which we had a perfectly functional relationship and a very open one until by a very narrow margin the U.K. electorate voted to leave. It is now perfectly clear that this was a self-damaging act and a terrible mistake, which will take years, decades to unpick. These abstractions about differing legal traditions are irrelevant. The U.K. will have to deal with whatever the EU is, whether from within it, or as a Third Country. The rest is mindless bombast.
It is most definitely not clear that leaving the EU was damaging. Nor that it was a terrible mistake. In fact, it is ever more clear that the decision to leave was the right decision. This is somewhat supported by almost every bullying action that the bloc takes against the UK now. Rather than unpick our decision to leave, we should be working to build on opening our opportunities in the wider world and move on. Yes, we can, and will, work with the EU, even if, it seems that the EU is determined to stick the boot in at every opportunity. I would also take issue with your description of differing legal traditions as being irrelevant. Just recall that North America was built upon Common Law whilst South America evolved using European (aka Napoleonic) law. There is, it would appear, a strong correlation between the relative success of the USA and Canada versus the collection of basket cases that lie to the south of the Rio Grande. To counter your bombast accusations, I would say that it is they, not us, who seem to be looking for fights. I suggest, for your own mental health if nothing else, that you pull your shoulders back, hold your head up and get on with the new world rather than whingeing about leaving an arrangement which was rejected by the majority of the British public. The EU would have had us vote and vote and vote again until we got it right. We chose to vote and we voted to leave. It is irrelevant whether our majority was large or small – and I won’t throw into the mix the substantial minority who acquiesced to whatever the result was by staying in bed that day – so whichever side won should consider those votes to be theirs (sort of ‘a la PR’). It was a majority and that is what happens in a democracy.
It is not perfectly clear by a long shot.
“..unless you have permission to do something different”. You neglected to add, ‘and armies of bureaucrats to make it all but impossible to achieve that permission’.
Yet! When it comes to the populace, it was said, I think by Thoreau, that “The British obey the law because it’s the law, while the French obey the law only if it appears rational and useful”
That’s the trouble with the French.
If Napoleonic or Roman Law is such a problem then the “design fault” exists in each European country. They are all fatally flawed because they don’t follow English Common Law. This is plainly ridiculous. The unwieldiness of the EU is because so many countries are represented there. Outside the EU exactly the same unwieldiness exists, as U.K. is discovering, but without the forum to resolve it. Daft.
Their history is more about dictators than democracy. I think they still don’t get what a democracy is supposed to be.
What amazes me is not that one nation left the EU, but that 27 stayed.
Give ‘em time!
They all have large percentages of people who want out, not to leave their country but not to have the EU over them.
Most have gone down the path of no return – the Euro – unfortunately
Yes. Poland and Hungary have done well to keep their own currencies. It gives them real independence and freedom to leave the EU one day without have to extricate themselves from the euro.
Likewise Sweden and Denmark. The poorer countries that have adopted the euro are trapped. Their debts are denominated largely in euros and those debts would completely crush them were they revert to the lira, drachma etc.
The richer countries could leave. Obviously, their currencies would appreciate against the euro. This might harm their exports, but they would not be sending their money to southern Europe in perpetuity.
It is utter nonsense to say countries can’t leave the Euro. Any sovereign country can leave the EU and/or the Euro any time they like. They simply have to accept the cost of doing so. It may surprise many readers of Unherd that the EU is made up of 27 sovereign entities (defined as ones with the guns and prisons and tax collectors and total control of their defined territories). I am sure all the countries involved also have printing presses just like the UK. All these wretched fiat currencies are much the same. All you have to do is BELIEVE – just like Brexiters and, of course, be willing to pay the price of your belief.
And businesses in Tierra Caliente can decline offers of protection from the cartels at any point also. They just have to accept the cost of doing so.
I am being facetious but not all costs are equal. And nobody was indicating that it would be physically impossible to leave the Euro – just that the overwhelming cost (largely debt) would make it a poor choice.
Not at all. Simply default and start from scratch again – like Argentina has done many times over the past 50yrs – and they’re still great at the tango! Yes, your interest rate may be higher than those who don’t default but you’re only liable for ~20c on the € or $. Voracious hedge funds will surely take a punt on the higher rate of return – particularly with the ludicrously low interest rate on major currencies.
Life goes on.
So yes! any sovereign country can leave the Euro. The Brexiters were and are wholly wrong on this. The price for leaving will be loss of access to the Single Market but the UK knows all about that already!
Nobody said they couldn’t so not sure what you’re saying.
What is undeniable is that being a member of the Eurozone makes it more costly/difficult to leave the EU than not. Even accepting your positive outlook on a country leaving.
Not really that much more difficult. Just change the paper stuff in people’s pockets or the 0s and 1s in their bank accounts. It’s been done many, many times around the world.
The REAL price will be loss of access to the Single Market – so you’d have to haul your collective asses around the world trying to gain access to even more protected markets than those of the EU. Now THAT would be truly an awful price to pay.
It is difficult to leave the Euro as a debtor nation. That was demonstrated by the fact that Greece would rather sustain a crushing recession than leave and default. It would take an extreme event to persuade the elite of any debtor country to take that risk. It is more likely that a creditor nation like Germany leaves.
You clearly did not read my earlier post correctly. It’s the countries in debt that can default! Surplus countries would be the loosers.
The debt isn’t the big issue as it relates to the past – it’s the future that matters and that’s where the price of leaving the Single Market simply makes no sense whatsoever.
And so defaulting on debt will have no effect on that country’s future ability to borrow money? There’s being positive about prospects, then there’s outright delusion.
No a country cannot just decide it can’t be bothered pay back debt, not unless it wants to become an international financial pariah.
This is quite funny, sorry. Yeah loans are so easy if you just don’t pay them back! Free money! Same with other crimes. Robbery is easy – just don’t get caught and arrested!
Maybe you should advise those countries that want to leave starting with Greece.
The deeper you get into it the more difficult it is to leave. The EU knows this and designs it that way like a muddy bog that you cannot break free from.
You people really are sad.
I’m as happy as a buck hare with a harem of does. As for your argument……..?
Actually, the more appropriate description might be contemptible!
Sadly after today the single market no longer exists. Any EU official can distrain on any transaction involving EU exports – of anything.
Yes it does continue to exist much to the chagrin of UK exporters. Watch the UK’s export figures over the next few years.
The majority of our exports are not to the EU. Anyone in business should know that. We buy from the EU much more than we export. These things can be discussed instead of the EU being bossy.
Or reap the reward.
Absolutely – or reap the ‘reward’.
Well said.
Not impossible but having to extract from the Euro makes it much, much harder than our tortuous exit. Sweden and Denmark are watching very closely how we fare.
Yes indeed, the world awaits with bated breath (nah – not really) how Global Britain fares navigating all those world markets – which happen to be far more protectionist than the EU! See:
https://itif.org/publications/2016/01/11/seven-countries-home-world%E2%80%99s-10-worst-cases-protectionism-subverting
I hope they learn by how we have been treated.
Not quite. German banks lent heavily to Greek oligarchs who disappeared with the money . So The EU illegally helped those banks by enforcing austerity on the Greek people (who had no part in that money) to get those loans repaid . This action was completely illegal. But Greece suffered terribly for it .
You are obviously not aware of the creeping undemocratic nature of the EU.
They would have to default.
But both of these countries get huge amounts of financial asistance from the EU, so will probably never leave, inspite of the occasional 2 fingers their leaders give to VdL and Mutti.
It should be a commonwealth of countries not a domination by the EU. It started as trade then went political although that was probably the idea from the start.
Well, it might well make sense for the UK to have ‘left’ the EU, but that doesn’t mean that the EU itself will dissolve. There are powerful forces holding it together that trump individual preferences and grumbles. Not saying that’s a good thing, mind you.
UK won’t be the last to leave, we’ll have Opened the flood-gates and that’s what E.U. know and have been trying to bully us out of. EU were doing very well at it with Theresa may – best thing happened to UK is seeing the back of her.
bullseye!
Most of them receive German and French money – if that wasn’t happening they would be off .
A lot of them want to leave but the EU makes it very difficult and they all see how difficult it was for us.
While there’s a bit of schadenfreude over the EU’s incompetence after it did everything it could to hurt the UK during Brexit, it should be noted that this Covid incompetence means many lives will be lost while more nimble countries zip ahead with vaccines. There will likely be no accountability over it either as who would conduct such oversight? The EU will bungle along, blaming others, without any consequences whatsoever and if any country gets any big Brexit type ideas, they know what they will be in for from the EU. In my view, the EU’s response to the UK decision to leave the bloc was never about the UK which had always been a thorn in the Franco/German alliance. They were just putting on a show to intimidate any others from getting any independent ideas.
The EU did not “do everything it could to hurt the UK during Brexit”. It just treated the UK as a non-member. The interests of members take priority over those of non-members. As Rafael Behr in the Guardian put it Britain is “too small to be an equal, too big to be a client; not powerful enough to assert its will in trade negotiations but hefty enough to cause trouble.” Did Brexiteers expect the EU to make sacrifices – even small sacrifices – to make Brexit a success?
Not entirely true. If you look at the trade deal the EU finally did with the UK, it’s a worse deal than it has offered other countries like Canada and Japan. There’s a reason for that. Offering the UK a favourable deal (i.e. a worse situation than being a member, but better than the current situation) would have been hugely advantageous to the EU. It would have provided a framework for restructuring relations with Switzerland (they will not accept the current framework agreement on offer) as well as for the states of the West Balkans which have been waiting patiently for accession negotiations to begin for about 15 years. There is clearly no appetite or ability to expand the club but also not enough political courage to be honest with those countries. Having a decent associate membership structure might have been a good compromise which allowed them to benefit from that kind of “half way house” and would also hug them close, keeping China and Russia at bay. By failing to get over itself and its “no cherry-picking” obsession, and failing to get beyond the rigid “either you are in or out” position, the EU has just hurt itself and made sure its sphere of influence in its own neighbourhood will remain compromised.
Sure, you can make a case for the EU offering a better deal. But as they see their interests, it is more important to make sure that those who enjoy the benefits also pay the costs. Norway or Switzerland are not going to abuse (as the EU sees it) any deal, because they are so small that the EU can force them back in line. Canada and Japan cannot make a mint by systematically undercutting EU rules and deviating investments that were going to the EU – they are too far away. Britain can do it – and openly planned to do exactly that. That is the reason that the UK was offered a worse deal. A better deal was on offer – if the UK would limit its freedom of action to ensure that future ‘level playing field’. The UK would not offer anything. End of story.
“Norway or Switzerland are not going to abuse (as the EU sees it) any deal, because they are so small that the EU can force them back in line” – there is not enough time in the day to argue about why this is an unacceptable way to treat free and sovereign countries. It is not for the EU to “force” them to do anything. If the EU is going to force anyone to do anything, then they might like to start with countries that consistently violate the budget rules…or perhaps even the ECB which rather likes to test the limits of its own mandate.
Canada and Japan have to comply with certain international standards to be able to trade with the EU (even if there is no truly frictionless trade). The “level playing field” rules that the EU offered Britain were far stricter than asked of any 3rd countries. It was never about having a “level playing field” at all. There’s no “level playing field” even within the EU. It was a superficial argument used to keep maximum control over Britain in return for trade – just like “peacekeeping” was a superficial argument to what the true strategy was in Northern Ireland.
It was never Britain’s plan to have a race to the bottom with regulation; maybe a few hardcore Brexiteers dreamed of it but it was never a realistic proposition and today, this is mainly EU paranoia. And one must ask oneself: why are they so afraid of competition? Could it be that they know that the EU is highly uncompetitive, regulating itself into irrelevance but don’t want to face up to the truth?
As for the argument about geographical distance meaning anything – what a bunch of absolute rubbish. The UK is a services economy – geographical distance to the recipient mostly doesn’t matter. If it was going to systematically undercut rules, the effect would be the same whether it was 30 miles away over the channel or in the middle of the Pacific. One of the most hilarious bits of EU rhetoric on this theme was arguing that Britain should accept EU rules and regulations to be able to trade “because our economies are so interlinked” – all the while contemplating a no-deal outcome. If it had have come to no deal, then the economies would have been completely unlinked overnight and that argument would have disintegrated.
The EU has no right to tell small countries what to do. True. On the other hand, small countries have no right to access the EU markets. North Korea is almost totally free from foreign interference, but if you want to deal with others, you need to settle on the conditions.
Geography does matter – in the real world. A lot of companies set up in Britain because they wanted a presence in Europe, and the British system suited them better than the French. Give Britain the freedom to set more relaxed rules while keeping EU market access, and it would happen more.
I am glad you konw what the Boris plans to do – nobody else does. But if Britain is so doggone determined to accept no limits on what it might do, surely it is because it plans to do some of it. Is even the Boris crazy enough to ruin his relationship to Europe in order to be allowed to do something he does not actually want?
As for control, why should the EU care to control Britain? They want to stop Britain doing things that interfere with their own markets or their own internal arrangements, but if they can prevent that I am sure they are happy to let Britain go to hell in any way it wants.
Uncompetitive? The EU has made some choices that make production more expensive in order to favour workers, consumers, the environment, social development. If there was free access for lower-cost producers those choices would not be available to them.
No there is no right of access. But the EU harms itself by putting barriers up too high. There was no objective reason to put up barriers to trade with the UK that were as high as the ones in the trade agreement. That was the will to punish, pure and simple. The EU was willing to harm itself to do that.
If companies choose to set up in Britain rather than France, then that – given a little more courage on the other side of the channel – might have been a cause to look at why the UK was so attractive and improve the french system. But no, protectionism prevailed. And the French didn’t really win out either as expected – I think they thought they would clean up the banking business to be had from London. And yet it is flooding into the Netherlands, which has a similarly liberal approach to Britain. Will the French learn from this? Probably not.
Britain I think was willing to accept limits, but they had to be reasonable. Any trade agreement is going to ask for certain standards. It would be quite reasonable to accept the same standards as were asked of Canada and Japan as a price for trading with the EU. The ones that were forced on it were simply overblown – see the conclusion of my first paragraph.
And I’m not buying the geography argument.
What you are saying is that the UK way is much better, and the EU ought to see that. Lower barriers, slacker rules, more competition, less ‘ever closer union’. If giving access to the UK would force the EU to change that would be all to their benefit. For what it is worth I might agree with you.
The problem is that the EU does not want that. All those things you dislike are there because other countries like them, and demanded them as the price for accepting the open markets Britain wanted. You said it – giving Britain what it wanted would have forced the EU to change and become more like a mere free-trade area. Since the EU member states do not want that, that is a perfectly objective reason for setting high barriers.
Are you sure that all EU states (or rather their populations) want an ever closer union? I think if populations were asked (which they won’t be), then you would find a significant portion of them (if not an outright majority) would happily just have a free trading bloc. As it is, ever closer union (economic and political) seems to have become something being forced onwards from above without any reference to whether it works in reality or whether it is wanted by a majority of citizens (and is thus democratic). And the reality, as far as I can see, is that it doesn’t. It is quite mad to think that a group of 27 countries, all vastly different histories, cultures and ways of seeing the world are all going to be able to come together and act in concert in the swift way that the 21st century is going to frequently require. The vaccine fiasco simply serves to underline that. Maybe Britons can just see this in a more sober light than Europeans can because it isn’t quite so much in our culture to dive into ideologies headfirst. We ask: is it working? And if it isn’t – how can it work? And that approach has, historically, served us well. By contrast, the EU seems to be hell bent on saying “this is our idea which is wonderful in theory so, by God, we shall MAKE it work in reality, whatever the cost.” It can’t end well.
The big difference is another one: Britain seems to think that it is big and strong enough to take on China and the EU on its own and win. France and Germany have no such illusions. And smaller countries know that they will be squashed if they stand alone, no matter how nimble they are. As a Danish foreign minster put it: “There are two kinds of country in Europe. Those that are too small to make it on their own – and those that have not figured it out yet.”
I do not think at all that the UK ever thought it could take on China alone. If you care to read British news you can see that such delusional thinking is difficult to find.
But the UK believes that there is no need for a political entity to coordinate the cooperation that is needed to take on China and that Britain can more efficiently look after its own interests without having to nurture this ideological longing for a United States of Europe.
Frankly that idea is now so far fetched ( and probably has been since the admittance of Eastern Europe along with some Balkan countries into the EU ) that it would be beneficial to drop the pretension and have a honest conversation about the future. The trouble is that this is not possible within the current framework of EU institutions because their very survival depends on the status quo.
Also probably many are now wondering whether it is the EU’s intention to take on China anymore.
Indeed – why is it that so many Remainer arguments are based upon what the author conveniently decides is the motive of someone who opposes their view.
Just plain arrogance ..
Remainers may have used many arguments, but the strongest ones are still true: Brexit is making the UK poorer and weaker, and it is threatening the Union.
I think the vaccine roll-out disproves the ‘weaker’, theory. And I don’t think we can judge the ‘poorer’ theory until we get passed Covid.
Great rebuttal of this guy’s ridiculously brainwashed drivel.
The normal person in the UK isn’t even contemplating trying to compete with the great superpowers of the world in the first place. Neither are they in Europe.
Only the super-rich billionaires for whom political entities like the EU are vehicles to achieve their endlessly avaricious business goals think like that. They wanted the people of Britain to simply give up ever more control to the little band at the top of the EU who do their bidding for them first and foremost: their real pay masters.
OK, ‘take on China on its own’ was a little exaggerated. Let us say that you believe you are strong enough to do well on your own most of the time, and when there is a need for cooperation on some specific point you will always find willing allies. Without having to trade off in some unrelated area (which is how the EU works). Without a framework that encourages cooperation. And without worrying what will happen when individual medium-sized countries try to make deals one by one with the US or China. I think you are neither big enough, strong enough, lucky enough or universally loved enough for that to work. Up to the Boris to prove me wrong.
Depends what you mean by ‘win’!
It’s quite a bit more complex than that though isn’t it.
Take currency as a starter. The UK govt is now able to make decisions that are of benefit to UK businesses based on a whole range of criteria. Furthermore the UK citizenry can vote in and out governments accordingly.
Trouble for the EU is that the business conditions for German industry differ somewhat from Italian industry (for example, etc). They might have the same currency but there have to be unified decisions made for the EU. Furthermore, those not in the Eurozone will always be outvoted by those within.
So yes a small(er) politically and democratically responsible government will most likely make better decisions for businesses under its currency, than a large federation of nations with less unifying purpose, leadership and responsibility.
I don’t think any polls have been done on the question of ever closer union. However in terms of satisfaction with the EU in the 2019 there were significant proportions of the populations (and by significant I mean a third or greater) of Spain, Netherlands, Greece, UK, Italy, Czech Republic and France who held an unfavourable opinion of the EU.
It would be interesting to see an update of this in light of the vaccine fiasco.
This is the best summation for the Brexit position I’ve seen. Ours has consistently been a superior approach. Pragmatic, flexible, sensible, non-ideological.
It was the reason this ‘Little Englander Flag-shagger’ propaganda, which sought to conflate and demonize anyone choosing the British approach rather than the totalitarian, ideological, collectivist EU one, as a backwards-looking, uneducated peasant, was the main thrust of their media strategy.
It was one of the greatest moments in British history for the nation as a whole to have rejected that vile nonsense.
Ironic, as I voted remain. But I always looked at both sides of the argument with equanimity, never called leave voters stupid and was always willing to revise my opinion of the EU.
Haha Katharine 🙂
Reminds me of when I worked at a well-known strategy consulting business. In the UK (and in Germany, where I worked for two years) we used to ask at the end of an assignment “It’s all very well in theory, but does it work in practice?”. Except in France, where they asked “It’s all very well in practice, but does it work in theory?”.
”A mere free-trade area”.
This is the one area where I understand Remainers’ opposition to Brexit. What else beyond that does the EU offer that is so coveted and sought-after that people are so mad to give away so much autonomy for?
I would prefer a free-trade area, probably.I would certainly prefer much less ‘ever-closer union’. The problem is that we have the EU we have. We either take it or leave it.
Really? I think you totally made that up. I am not familiar with the EU ever applying that approach when we were members.
It’s anyway a profoundly unlikely doctrine for the EU to adopt. It’s at heart a socialist organisation, and socialists think that those who’ve got money should pay the costs – of literally everything. To that end they organise the state to take private individuals’ money off them. By your logic, the 24 countries who pay nothing into the EU pay nothing because they aren’t gaining. If so, why are they even members?
The EU has applied the same approach with the vaccine.
A point not often appreciated is that the EU’s hostility to vaccine nationalism arises from its belief that what should instead prevail is vaccine socialism. If everybody can’t have something, nobody can have it, and the EU’s principles instruct them to confiscate it from those who do.
Our ideologies are different.
The EU doctrine is that we are all better off negotiating a common way ahead than having everybody fight to profit at each others’ expense. You can call it socialism if you like. It has its costs, but it is not unreasonable. Look at it this way: their policies managed to avoid a situation where they were hitting each other with vaccine export bans – even if they still use them against outsiders.
Yes and it seems to be working fabulously, doesn’t it? People are dying like flies and the economy is tanking and there’s no end in sight….but at least we’re all tanking together! Yay!
Would have been far better to let a couple of the larger countries to forge on ahead and bag a bunch of vaccines which they would then share out. Wouldn’t have had the lovely unity optics, but people’s lives would have been saved.
I do not notice Britain sharing out vaccines. Why should it? And why would Germany or France do it, before they had finished vaccinating their own?
Because Germany and France are in the EU still and could therefore have been pressured into sharing what vaccines they obtained with smaller countries in the club using the EU solidarity argument. Britain is now outside the EU (you might have noticed) and cannot be pressured in the same way. Britain will surely share once it is able to.
Just not with the EU if Boris has any regard for British public opinion. Especially while Australia is languishing.
Sharing after vaccinating their own population may still have meant a faster roll out than the EU is so far achieving. It may also have meant that they could concentrate on getting vaccination done rather than looking for who to blame for it not happening.
“I do not notice Britain sharing out vaccines.”
Then you should pay more attention to the UK’s financial and scientific contributions to GAVI, CEPI and COVAX. And note the UK’s insistence that the AZ vaccine be distributed to the developing world at cost, in perpetuity, something the EU has conspicuously failed to do for the BioNTech vaccine.
No. Instead their respective heads of state issued completely false statements about the effectiveness and safety of the OxAZ vaccine, flip-floped in public as to whether or not they will have the vaccine or not, ignored the scientific advice of their own precious EU medical advisory authority and suspended the vaccine programme on the basis of precisely NO valid scientific data or evidence citing nothing more than a preposterous “precautionary principle” only to u-turn again a few days later, which further damaged confidence amoungst their respective populations in the vaccine programme, with the result that half of the OxAZ vaccines actually delivered to EU countries are still unused and even if they are able to secure more the likelihood of people wanting to have it has been dramatically reduced. What a bravura performance!
Do stop trying to defend the indefensible with vague references to “different ideologies” and simply admit that the EU’s entire vaccination approach has been a fiasco from the moment it was conceived right up to today.
I can only hope that the majority of European peoples finally have their eyes opened as to how poorly they have been served by their leaders and their misplaced faith in the EU, and by the EU’s own floundering incompetence throughout this entire episode. I do not, however, hold out the same hope for you.
I cant help feeling there has been at least an element of luck in that the UK backed a couple of vaccines that came through early, were approved early and appear to be effective against the variant that was first noticed in Britain. The EU also backed the successful vaccines but were slightly slower in terms of ordering and in approval. Someone was always going to be first in the ‘race’ but actually winning the race is a less meaningful victory if we still have to wait for the last runners to come in before celebrating.
The current wave of Covid going through some of Europe now is indeed a tragedy but before we get too smug about the falling rates of disease or death in the UK compared to some others where rates are rising we should remember some countries are experiencing a third wave due to a new variant. We didn’t have a third wave as our second wave lasted from September to now (despite having a vaccine available since December) with catastrophic consequences in terms of lives lost.
The new variant is, I assume, the British or Kent one. There’s a bit of clue there in that the AZ and Pfizer vaccines must be tolerably good against this variant, otherwise the UK would not be seeing the efficacy results that we evidently are.
I suspect that when the history of the virus is written we’ll find that its spread was not easy to control by government edict and was affected by things that were not fully understood as the time, like relative innate resistance among populations and initial starting conditions affected by fairly random factors. So the relatively very poor UK stats, whilst definitely due in part to government ineptitude (e.g. over deaths in care homes) will not look quite so bad, compared with the EU’s outstanding uselessness when it came to vaccinations.
I think I agree but also that the EU uselessness over vaccines will not look quite so bad from the perspective of time. On average EU seems to be about 7 weeks behind UK in terms of % vaccinated with one dose and we’re about two weeks behind them on two doses.
ok Mark, you look back in seven weeks time and see how many EU citizens paid the ultimate price. Its like Napoleon playing war and empire building with his battalions of cannon fodder?
There are several new variants, P1 and P2 from Brazil, and one more from South Africa. These are designations of convenience regards origin, as UK is one of the very few jurisdictions with anywhere near sufficient genomic tracking. Basically we therefore can’t know where they really originated.
No luck involved. The UK backed several vaccines and placed orders early, long before trials were conducted. We also got on with funding development and production facilities early. That was the key missing factor in the EU approach, not the relatively short delays in placing contracts and achieving authorisation.
Then there is the efficiency of the vaccination programme itself. Germany has still not authorised vaccination in doctors’ surgeries, to give just one example of their dilatoriness.
The worst thing about Brexit is that for the amount of time all those remainers who were around having their collective mental breakdown and unleashing the worst, most toxic bile againt leaver, is they will forever be driven to write-off, negate, play down, ridicule and diminish any positive outcome of being a freer, more agile, more autonomous nation. Just like this guy.
Such is the power of propaganda that give one group free reign to unleash all of their endless prejudice, their deeply-held, sub-concious sense of superiority, arrogance and contempt on one group. Brexiteers were made out to all belong to the UK underclass. And it was lapped up by people like this poster, who will now always be downplaying the UK in the context of the EU.
Well, the Brexit campaign was solidly based on lies, misinformation, and fantasy. Remember ‘the worlds easiest trade deal’? That does not mean that brexiteers are wrong *every* time, of course. But it does mean that anything you say requires lots of independent confirmation before there is reason to take it seriously.
UK bought seven vaccines, not lucky but risk management
Yes, and they bought early like the US. The EU was months behind and then tried to get in line ahead if those who bought early.
Fortuna eruditis favet
The vaccine debacle suddenly made a lot of nationalists out of EU members. Some did go their own way on it once it became clear the EU was too sclerotic to get it done.
The EU is a supranational political, monetary and trade federation that priorities the manufacturing economy of German goods over Eastern members whole economies. Its literally profit for Germany at other nations expense.
like you say your an ideologue and unable to objectively appraise the EU’s actions as opposed to its rhetoric, but well done admitting that it is the first step to recovery. the golden bridge is now open for you pal.
In the real world you make deals, and the powerful get more of what they want than the weak. Coming from a small country I know that you are better off inside the club, where they have to at least pretend to listen to you, than outside. Do you think that Germany would be less powerful, or more generous to its neighbours, if there was no EU?
The EU is an unlovely beast – slow, ungainly, too centralising, and full of messy compromises. Still countries are free to stay out, and most have decided that they are better off joining. In material terms I have absolutely no doubt they are right.
‘In the real world you make deals, and the powerful get more of what they want than the weak. ‘
But the EU’s whole image is that of a ‘rules-based’ order, and the whole point of having rules, surely, is that they occasionally work in favour of the weaker party and against the stronger. Otherwise why bother with a mile-high acquis communautaire? Why not just let the strong states clean up and have done with it?
It is fine for Germany to be powerful, but unfortunately, in its short-sighted pursuit of what seems to be good for Germany within the EU, it is forgetting that having happy, friendly and above all, prosperous neighbours and allies is also greatly to the long-term advantage of a state. Not neighbours that have been hollowed out and beggared by a selfish financial strategy.
The UK at present seems to be one of very few countries in the world that sees that trade and international relations can and should be mutually beneficial, not a zero-sum, ‘win-lose’ game. If the world is in no mood to get the message then it’s a bad look-out for all of us, but that doesn’t make the UK wrong.
“trade and international relations can and should be mutually beneficial,” No disagreements there. Does it mean that Britain should make a bigger effort to make sure its neighbours, friends and allies are happy, and Germany should expect to get more benefits from its trade deals? Or is it the other way around?
Who is expendable in the EU when it comes to satisfying Germany and France? Perhaps who is expendable for satisfying Germany’s wants?
Well it wouldn’t be able to benefit from the Euro, which greatly distorts currency exchange rates, to Germany’s benefit and the detriment of UK exporters among others. As to the benefits for member states, there is sadly a great deal of groupthink going on among the whole European political elite, so that, as Douglas Murray argued, alternative approaches towards cooperation within a much looser framework are automatically dismissed, even though they very likely would deliver better economic outcomes and be more democratic.
The EU destroyed the people of Greece in order to save French and German banks. That is not ‘socialism’ or a common way forward. It is financial tyranny. You are either trolling, or incredibly naive and misguided. I suggest you read ‘And The Weak Suffer What They Must?’ by Yanis Varoufakis.
Varoufakis? The man who ran Greek economic policy on the assumption that German taxpayers would be forced to bail out Greece, so that Greece could set its own terms?
Not true – he was the man who wanted to reject EU/German cash, because of the destructive terms being dictated by the North.
Maybe. But his negotiating strategy only makes sense if he took it for granted that the EU *had to* bail out Greece to prevent the Euro from collapsing. Which is why he chose to lecture European finance ministers on macroeconomics instead of trying to, maybe, convince some of the people who were supposed to pay.
Greece should have defaulted on its debts. But had she done so what would have happened to her creditors who were, as Fraser points out, French and German Commercial Banks ? And, lest you forget, which you obviously have, the whole mess was created by the EU itself firstly by allowing Greece to join the Euro when she didn’t meet the criteria written into the Treaty, and subsequently by allowing the impression to be gained that there was no difference between a German Bund and a Greek Bond, that 4% in Athens was as good as 4% in Berlin, thus erradicating the risk premium. It was a disaster. Couple this with a vastly overvalued Euro (for Greece it should be worth about 35 US cents, whereas for Germany it should have a value of $2.35) and you can see how the mess was created.
Varofakis is an arrogant oaf, but even a clock is right once a day or twice depending on type ! Tsipras was a damn fool and a duplicitous one like Mrs May.
Your ideologies seem to be such that you would endorse the USSR or Chinese approach.
Mine are such that I see the EU doctrine as being “us Eurocrats are doing brilliantly – why should we change”
Nonsense – the Southern EU states are not better off.
The EU Commission exists to keep everyone locked in – whatever the collateral damage.
Maybe. But they chose to enter and they choose to remain. Maybe they know something you don’t?
I don’t think there is a choice. The introduction of the Euro has made it nigh on impossible for countries to leave, without serious financial fall-out.
You seem to have conveniently forgotten various PPE export bans within the EU last year.
“It is more important to make sure that those who enjoy the benefits also pay the costs”
An interesting notion given that there are more member states who are net beneficiaries than net contributors.
Perhaps you would like to acknowledge that the UK was badly weakened in the negotiations by the reprehensible actions of Europhiles in sabotaging the negotiating leverage of their own country against a foreign power.
Lib Dem and Labour Party leaders and their MPs ran off to Brussels to tell them to offer a bad deal so they could force a second referendum. At home MPs conspired with a rogue Speaker, willing to trash Parliamentary precedent, to vote for measures that prevented Britain walking away from the negotiating table, giving the EU the upper hand. Then we had Mrs May sytematically and intentionally throwing away negotiating leverage by agreeing a “divorce bill” before trade negotiations.
I don’t blame the EU for the poor deal. I blame Europhiles, who instead of respecting the result of a democratically held referendum and joining together with their fellow countrymen to show a united from against the EU, did everything they could to reverse the result and damage the UK’s bargaining position. The EU simply took advantage of their treachery.
The Tories have already been uncooperative and abrasive enough to extract everything that could be achieved that way. We are now where the UK is insisting on having its own way, even in contravention of the treaties Johnson (not May) have signed, and the European parliament is threatening No Deal. No amount of UK unity would have helped you.
In negotiating it is not enough to say ‘give me what I want, or I make a mess’. You also have to convince the other side that if they do give you what they want, you will in return give them something they find acceptable.
I notice you didn’t address either of my points.
Let me spell it out then: Britain wanted a deal that was way beyond what the EU was willing to give. For the EU, No Deal really was worse than a bad deal. Ultimately the europhiles made no difference; no matter how united or intransigent the British had been the result would have been no better.
I see. agreeing to give the EU £40 billion upfront before entering trade negotiations, , endless campaigning and marching by Europhiles, opposition politicians convincing the EU they could stop us leaving and legally preventing the government from walking away from the negotiating table, had no effect. I doubt even you believe such obvious nonsense.
It is very simple. Britain had to convince the EU that it would walk away if it did not get what it wanted. The Boris pushed it right to the wire – in the end I think he made the point as well as it could be made. The EU would still not offer you a deal that they felt was worse (for them) than No Deal. When you do not have the necessary leverage, playing hardball will not get you what you want.
People like you are and always will be incredibly dangerous. Easily propagandized ideologues who get ideas in their heads and then become impervious to reason, sanity, opposing view points or any idea that runs counter to their pre-held ideology. We had religion, Nazism, Marxism, Fascism, and now this weird hybrid of EU Federalism, Collectivism, Globalism, Supra-nationalism, Socialism and Capitalism.
The EU offered no incentive to be nice. Theresa May acted nice and got screwed. Everything which the UK suggested was shot down, because at the end of the day, the EU wasn’t willing to accept anything except what it wanted. That, in my mind, is not negotiating, that is dictating. The British are a very patient and flexible people, but even we have limits. Boris Johnson being elected was a signal that patience had been lost and now we won’t even try to be friendly or obliging. And the thing is – the EU doesn’t even acknowledge that its behaviour was THE contributing factor in the UK becoming abrasive and uncooperative. Self-reflection? Forget it. And that lack of questioning itself will lead to the EU’S downfall.
Everything the UK suggested was shot down because it was way beyond what the EU was willing to give. If you ask for the moon, being nice will not help. Being nasty still hurts you, though – it gives the other side a personal desire to see you fail, and it suggests that you cannot be trusted to implement any deal in good faith. Face it: no matter what you think you deserve, you were never going to get the kind of deal you wanted. Negotiation means finding out the limits of each side and looking for the least bad result you can get. Losing your patience, not bothering to be nice, and putting the blame on the other side is not going to help you.
It was shot down because Barnier hadn’t mastered any English other than “Non” to strat with. Make negotiating very easy.
Why do you say “being nasty” when it was simply being strong rather than just bending over?
The UK explicitly ran on brinksmanship. Refuse to extend deadlines, refuse concessions, threaten No Deal, and hope you get concessions at the last mnute. Refuse to make any promises that could limit what you might try to do in the future, then refuse to honour the deals you just signed. It might work for China – who actually are strong and do not have to care if anybody like them. For the UK?
Mrs May had a faulty approach to setting her red lines, which made it difficult to get her deal through parliament. If she had (as promised) involved the devolved administrations – and parliament – and built a consensus-based approach at a time when both main parties were committed to leaving, then she would have had a much better chance of getting a deal through parliament.
As it was, far from being “screwed”, she got as good a deal as was possible, given her red lines!
“The Tories have already been uncooperative and abrasive enough to extract everything that could be achieved that way.”
Rubbish – Boris etc were only allowed to start negotiating in a meaningful way after the damage had been done.
Boris had to sign May’s appalling legacy to get to a point where it could be unpicked.
We have seen that ‘level playing field’ and ‘reciprocity’ only work one way with the EU – whenever we are perceived to be ahead of them. We are having reciprocity flung at us over the vaccines but what reciprocity have the EU ever shown us?
UK financial regulations are currently identical to those of the EU, yet the EU cannot bring itself to agree equivalence, even though it has offered equivalence to countries such as Chile.
Since no trading contract can be agreed without a willing buyer and a willing seller, both of whom see the deal as advantageous, it is axiomatic that trade disruption damages both parties. But the Commission doesn’t care about the damage it is doing to the economic wellbeing of EU citizens by deliberately disrupting cross-Channel trade: the future of the “project” is more important.
EU financial regulations, particularly MiFID 1, were a cut & paste of existing UK SFA/FSA regs with a few additions and modifications.
MiFID 2 was a howitzer shell aimed at the heart of the largest equities market in Europe.
The much heralded migration of financial services businesses and personnel to the EU hasn’t happened. Frankfurt (who’d swap it for London?), Paris (not a major trading hub or global marketplace), Dublin (too small, limited housing available) and Luxembourg (do I really need to..?!) all failed to capture from London despite some questionably legal incentives.
Understandably a % of trading and liquidity has migrated to Amsterdam, given the engineered impasse, for the time being. Ultimately it will come back, when yet another failed protectionist EU strategy becomes self-defeating. In the meantime if it were so minded (so small minded?), Britain could inflict a lot of damage on European markets by turning off or down a number of liquidity taps. Maybe we should.
Yes as Horatio Nelson said” Engage the enemy more closely “!
Yes but the Crazy thing is that a better arrangement would have been in the EU’s interests. All commercial deals that work have mutual interest. The Eu stance has been to reduce mutual advantage . Which makes no economic sense.
I suggest you watch ‘Brexit – Behind Closed Doors’ as that will show just how determined the EU was to punish the UK.
Rafael Behr was once a relatively sane counterweight at the Guardian. He used to write on a wide range of subjects, from foreign affairs, to defence and culture with a fairly rational centrist viewpoint.
However since the 2016 referendum he has somewhat lost the plot and writes a weekly diatribe on why this week x or y is bad because of Brexit. Indeed he even attributes his heart attack to Brexit. (I am not making this up):
https://www.rt.com/uk/512814-corbyn-guardian-heart-attack/
Clearly UK has the means, economy and will to bolster defence of EU, half of which still failed to back UK on a landmark single issue: Novichok.
My neighbour and I expect each other to be neighbourly. We don’t expect sacrifices from each other. You seem to think that there are only two ways to behave: be supplicant or be domineering. Might work in a bedroom; doesn’t work in international relationships.
Interesting comparison there.
If you make an important business deal with your neighbour, do you expect him to demand the market rate, or be neighbourly and put you in a position to profit at his expense?
A good deal with the UK would not necessarily have been at the EU’s expense. There were a thousand ways of structuring the relationship in a mutually beneficial way whereby membership in the EU still remains attractive but the UK can regain sovereignty and trade with the EU. But the way you see it (which seems to be shared by the EU top brass) is that any success for the UK is at the EU’s expense. This is crackers. There is no fixed amount of success in the world so that when one person has more, the other has less.
There was a deal to be made that the UK thinks would be very good for both sides. Unfortunately that is a deal that the EU thinks would be very bad for them. When negotiating what matters is what the other side thinks, not what you think they ought to think.
When you say the EU I’m betting you really mean the Eurocrats – the majority of the EU would almost certainly be happy with a nice easy trade deal – why not poll the citizenry?
It is one of the frustrations of life that we have to deal with the Europe that is there, not the completely different one what we would prefer to have.
No, I expect it to be mutually beneficial otherwise why would either of us make the deal?
“be neighbourly and put you in a position to profit at his expense?”
That is not being neighbourly ! Nor would planning to rip your neighbour off be!
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Might work in YOUR bedroom – not mine!!
.
🙂
Quoting the Grun around here, crazy! I suspect a lot of people have come here fed up with the stupidity and lies of that toilet paper. On the bright side, you can comment in disagreement with the narrative and not have your comments deleted. The Grun is moderated in the classic Nazi/Communist way, by removing any sign that goes against the papers dictats. In the Grun comment is anything but free. They can’t execute you, which is fortunate, but they will delete your account.
“Did Brexiteers expect the EU to make sacrifices – even small sacrifices – to make Brexit a success?”
We didn’t expect them to make ANY sacrifices; we expected them to play by their own ‘rule book’!
I disagree – the EU officials conduct has been that of a petulant teenager .
You need to find a new service Ramus, either that or stop posting mate. 56 down votes and counting.
Cumulatively he’s running a deficit well into the hundreds. But that never bothered a dogmatic (as opposed to ideological) Europhile or Remainer.
OK, I’ll give it a rest on this one and be back on another post. Never expected to convince anybody, but you learn more from discussions where you disagree – politely of course. At least you are more tolerant and make more sense than the lot at the Guardian.
If you want to get rid of me, just ignore me.
If the French Senate report had said “the EU must not be worse off after Brexit than before”, that would have been understandable, but it said “the UK must not be better off after Brexit than before”?
Is that not revealing? Every action of the EU can be explained as being intended to fulfil this objective.
We obviously see things differently, the EU did indeed try to hurt the UK and even tried again over the vaccines. It was sending a message to the other EU members, try this and this will happen to you as well. I wouldn’t put too much faith into anything in the Guardian,
And what country in continental Europe has the highest death rate from Covid? The almighty UK. Bit of a bummer that.
The Czech Republic. Followed by Slovenia then Belgium. UK is not doing so great in 4th place admittedly but you keep saying the same falsehood.
Secondly, since we are miles ahead of most countries in vaccinating, despite our failings at the start, it is likely that come the end of the pandemic we will not be at the top of that list, unfortunately for EU citizens.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/
If memory serves, last report named three EU countries – Belgium, Czech Rep and one other – all with significantly higher death rates than the UK!! Why do treasonous Remainders insist on lying as a means of self-aggrandisement?
Because it is all they’ve got left?
Fact Check – Belgium has a higher deaths per million population than UK.___________ Great Beer but even more crowded than UK.
Your nomen betrays your stupidity.
Having lived & worked in Southern France for 3 years, plus a year spent in Rome and 6 months in Frankfurt, greatly enjoying the lifestyle.____ I had no hesitation in voting Leave on Referendum Day but was very pleasantly surprised by the Brexit Result. _____It is clear to me that the Napoleonic and English Common Law will never be able to coexist happily for any period over 50 years. ____. It does not take much understanding of European History to see why EU and UK will be at loggerheads for the next 50 years. Hopefully no actual war in Europe, just posturing as with the Vaccine War.
[1] “Far less important for Brussels was the fact that Greece, in particular, would not have been in this mess if it had not been accepted into the Eurozone in the first place.”
And Greece was admitted entirely for political reasons and against the bloc’s own criteria for membership of monetary union.
[2] “In recent years, critics of the EU have repeatedly noted that while there was much criticism in Brussels of the UK for leaving the bloc, there was no self-reflection over why we might have chosen that decision.”
This is true in spades not only of the EU, but also of the entire Ruling Caste in the western world today: the politicians, the bureaucrats, the mainstream media, academe, big business, the lot.
It ought to be one of the wonders of world history that in 2016 a majority of British participants in a referendum could vote for Brexit, that 63 million Americans could vote for Donald Trump (lately at least 74 millions, possibly much more depending on how fraudulent the 2020 election in that country was), that populist parties could make real gains in European elections 2017/18; AND VERY NEARLY THE WHOLE NEWS COMMENTARIAT, LET ALONE THE GOVERNING CLASSES, CONTINUE NEVER TO ASK THEMSELVES WHY!!
The rulers of the Occident in our time are as stupidly unreflective, unself-critical, unself-aware as the most besotted of aristocrats in eighteenth-century France.
And they call themselves ‘meritocrats’.
‘The rulers of the Occident in our time are as stupidly unreflective, unself-critical, unself-aware as the most besotted of aristocrats in eighteenth-century France’
Yes, for at least 10 years I have been saying that the EU leaders, and other western leaders, are as remote from normal people as were Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and that they deserve the same fate.
Yes; but with this difference.
Born and raised in extreme privilege lifelong, Louis XVI and his queen (herself an Austrian princess) had little experience of ordinary people’s lives.
Today’s rulers in the West have mostly come from middle-class backgrounds where, at least nominally, they have had to prove themselves; even if only by obtaining the ultra-suspect PPE degree at Oxford University.
Emily Thornberry MP, SO snooty about white-van man and the St George’s flag hanging from his bedroom window, allegedly had to rely on free school meals and food parcels after her parents divorced.
Then, from age 17 she worked as a cleaner and a barmaid.
If Marie Antoinette deserved to be guillotined for her remoteness from the lives of normal people, what is the appropriate penalty for a snob like Ms Thornberry?
Hanging, drawing and quartering; the Mikado’s surmise with ‘something lingering with boiling oil in it’?
The appropriate penalty for a snob like Thornberry? I would make her serve behind the bar at a Wetherspons in, say, Southampton, for the rest of her days.
Portsmouth, if you’re feeling really vicious…
Grimsby..
‘And may the Lord have Mercy on her Soul’.
Buckland in Pompey would be more appropriate, I think.
Based on the current panic she wouldn’t have many customers.
Split shifts.
Thornberry’s father was a senior diplomat at the UN.
Belfast, Cambridge (St Cats’s), LSE, journalist for the Guardian, Human Rights Lawyer, UN.*
Did a “runner” after seven years of marriage.
* Wikibeast.
When little Emily was born, the midwife should have smacked her mother.
Under the old Treason Laws, for reasons of ‘modesty’, woman were not hanged drawn and quartered, but rather burnt at the stake.
However as one modern (female) historian has pointed out this cannot have made much difference.
Scantily clothed in the first place, the flames would rapidly have consumed any clothing, leaving the victim “naked and trembling “ before the actual immolation began.
All these suggestions gratefully received.
Perhaps they could be carried out seriatim; i.e first serving behind the pub bar in her least favourite place, and then after that burning at the stake.
This would at least encourage other Labour MPs to stop saying snooty things about working-class people.
Nothing like making the punishment fit the crime eh?
Don’t you think you’re overreacting a little to a foolish remark a female Labour MP made a few years ago? It’s the sort of overreaction that makes some suspect misogyny – though I’m sure you wouldn’t mean to be guilty of such a thing.
I would assume they are joking no? Allowed?
Although admittedly not been round their houses to check for wood and petrol stockpiles…
Yes, we are joking.
But it relieves our exasperation at the horrible standards of today’s Ruling Caste.
I share your exasperation at our ruling caste (in government or opposition).
But men joking about severe punishments for female MPs seems sadly common these days, and it’s a profoundly depressing instance of how far the level of political discourse has sunk. I blame the Internet. Or possibly human nature. Some might blame “the patriarchy” whatever that is.
🙂
First of all, have you seen the price of petrol nowadays?
Second of all, who needs an accelerant to set fire to circa 200lbs of lard?
The problem will be putting it out. Could burn for days….
Are you sure I am ‘overreacting’?
The Trouble with the ‘foolish remark’ is that the habit of thinking in that wise, on Ms Thornberry’s part (and that of so many others now controlling our society), gives them the green light to do devastating things to working and lower-middle class people.
If you dismiss your fellow-creatures as pretty worthless – very much the language of ALL hardline Remainers in the 4 years following the 2016 Referendum – you feel entitled to send millions of jobs abroad, bully the people whose employment you have expunged with ever more encroaching Political Correctness rules, subject them to the cancel culture (Tommy Robinson, the man who quoted Winston Churchill, parents who don’t want their children to be encouraged to transgender) and inflict all manner of other penalties, very drastic, very severe, upon them.
Being contemptuous of the persons we wrong not only purges pangs of conscience on our part, it also authorises our infliction of further cruelties in future.
You’re right to object to contempt for the people, when you see it – even if your lenses let you see it most clearly in the opposition.
But I don’t think contempt for the people is a Labour monopoly. Nor is doing devastating things to them. Both have been seen in spades from government over the past decade.
Beautifully expressed; thank you. I find myself to be of ‘like mind’!
She is so full of bile and hate I doubt she would burn.
But they do let their people eat cake.
Or maybe not in Greece!!!!
EU seems to make rules which it then breaks-it allowed Greece to join and there was talk of Ukraine joining,yet Catalonia is blocked. If Scotland voted for independence I wonder if they would be allowed to join EU just to annoy England,as they don’t meet the financial criteria.
Yes that would probably be enough for them to close their eyes at the funding they would need to shell out. EU rules are for the ‘little people’ Merkel and Co ignore them whenever it suits them.
Catalonia would be blocked by Spain, because Spain doesn’t want them to secede. But you might be right about Scotland – such are the perils of the current administration’s needlessly confrontational approach to negotiation.
The EU combines fanaticism with incompetence to a degree that might be unparalleled in all of human history. At least other totalitarian regimes got some things right, or were briefly successful, even if only in a military sense. At least their leaders had usually proved themselves in some sphere.
The EU, on the other hand, endlessly virtue signals while thousands die because it cannot organise a vaccine roll out. And why did it ever think it was competent to organise a vaccine roll out? It has no expertise or personnel related to any useful or productive activity, for instance with regard to the supply chain and logistics capability etc necessary for this particular task.
The EU exists in order that the world’s worst politicians get to play at politics, and that thousands of bureaucrats get to dream up schemes and laws that make life difficult of impossible for normal people and businesses. It’s like your local council on a grand scale. So why on earth did they ever think they could organise a vaccine roll out?
That’s something that rarely gets picked up… I can’t think of a single high profile EU leader who wasn’t either emphatically rejected by the voters in their own country, or mired in some controversy usually centered on fraud or incompetence. The quality of them is shocking, its like a retirement home for the cr*p, the mad and the useless.
Credit where its due, one of the original intentions was to end war in Europe and its succeeded at that so far. Not much else, but that.
The league of Nations failures contributed to the deaths of millions so the EU still has some way to go.
No, it hasn’t even succeeded in that. That was NATO. Plus the fact that with no European empires left, and with the Cold War going on over their heads, European countries really had nothing left to fight each other about. But the EU itself could yet change that.
I think that was mainly due to (positively) NATO and (negatively) the massive Soviet Army on the doorstep who would have taken advantage of any internecine conflict between western European states.
Can you imagine how short the Cold War would have been had The USSR been facing the EU?!
Yugoslavia!?
A total myth I’m afraid.
NATO and its counterpart the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, (GSFG) prevented any major European War, pure and simple.
Incidentally who was going to start one, not the beaten and divided Germans, or the ‘runaway’ French & Italians surely?
Off course this excludes the little bit of bother in the ‘beastly’ Balkans, not Germany’s finest hour one might say, but with so many to choose from that doesn’t count for much does it?
The peace in Europe is not dependent on the EU. It is thanks to NATO (for which, pretty much think USA) and the fact that the countries are democracies (and therefore extremely unlikely to go to war with each other). The existence of democracy in those countries is not dependent on membership of the EU. And indeed the EU as an institution is no great beacon of democracy itself.
War in the Balkans – how useful were they then?
The League of Nations failed largely because the US didn’t want anything to do with it, and even if it did it was not the power it was in 1945 (UN and latterly NATO underpinning it all).
As others have pointed out. The EU is almost completely irrelevant in terms of adding to European or even global peace. It rides on the coattails of so many other things and takes credit where none is due.
Especially as the EU seems to be the dumping ground for incompetent, weak, fraudulent, politicians from the main EU countries – for proof if proof were needed – who was President of the Commission prior to the useless Ursula? Drunker Juncker and nonentity bank clerk von Rompey – not a statesman to be seen. Ursula is useful for Merkel to hide behind when she herself makes a mess of things, as she often does.
But you misunderstand they have organized a vaccine rollout.
It is just on the lines of socialism, that if everybody cannot have one, it is better that nobody has one.
No buyers regret from any leave voter I know.
It may take a while but the longer it goes the better off we are, as the EU project will consume Europe untill only the EU controls every part of the nations in it.
So long
Fare well
Auf wiedersehen
Good bye
Nous allons
Wir gehen
We’re off!
The post-Brexit trading arrangements have not been uniformly popular in Northern Ireland. And I’m guessing you don’t know many folk from the fishing industry.
It’s unfortunate you can’t downvote reality as easily as downvoting comments on a discussion forum :-/
EU, they take every failing of all the member nations management and combine those to form the super Management, which then behaves as expected. Now an EU which combined all the strengths would be a very different matter, but that would not be possible as it highlights member nations failings, so EU is an ‘all must win a ribbon’ collective where the slowest manage the sprint team and the most timid control the military.
Or so it seems, from someone who remembered traveling from one European nation to another, changing the money, and looking for some local specialty to eat. Maybe its just being old, and that the past seems to have been a better place.
I had some direct involvement 15-20 years ago in the EU’s media monitoring operation in the UK; and doubtless similar monitoring goes on across the block. The reaction to the vaccine shambles is doubtless being shaped by the criticisms now being made about the EU across the European media: it wants to be seen as being ‘tough’ and ‘decisive’. In short, we are seeing a knee-jerk populist response.
I remember reading an article many years ago about how the EU was increasing funding on its ‘influencing’ activities and wanted to do more to ‘shape a positive message’ (I have a feeling the article was in the Wall St Journal, but cannot find any information about the EU’s activities in this area from doing a cursory search on the internet). I often wondered during the referendum debate and afterwards what the EU is up to with regard to trying to influence UK politics behind the scenes and covertly (there are many examples of open manipulation). Just viewing the reality-defying messages/propaganda churned out by the Guardian, I have to wonder if it is now being directly funded by the EU. Its talk of a ‘vaccine war’ is singularly vexing when it is only one side that is engaging in hostilities. More ‘piracy’ than ‘war’.
The truly pathetic truth about the EU is that it is not only serially incompetent, it is desperate to be loved.
I suspect ‘influencing activities and wanting to shape a positive message’ is where most of the EU budget (you know that bit that never gets audited) disappears.
Generally a good article, although saying that “the EU always fails” is a bit hyperbolic…I think it’s more accurate to say that it never solves the problems it has (like the permanently-smouldering euro crisis) but just kicks the can down the road with various sticking-plaster solutions. That might all come home to roost at some point with one big fail.
If the EU does NOT always fail, please will you provide me with an instance of some big policy-area in which it has succeeded?
Gradually and irreversibly stripping its member states of sovereignty, even when this is in breach of their constitutions? Subverting their democracies by sowing their national assemblies with quislings who persistently vote to obstruct the implementation of referendum results?
Trying to be fair I think that in the area of harmonisation of standards there has been success; the CE mark, traceability, interoperability. Free trade is certainly facilitated by common standards. However this could have been achieved without all the other apparatus of the EU.
I’ve always been a fan of free trade but even here it is difficult to say the the EU was successful. A customs union is a limited interpretation of free trade. Moreover free trade does not require free movement of people, harmonisation of laws, a single currency, a flag, anthem or army.
For me the Euro was the turning point. Up until then I was ambivalent about the EU but trying to impose a unified mechanism for exchange on to countries with wildly differing productivities, gdp growth per head and taxation regimes without any extra-market surplus recycling mechanisms in place was always going to result in failure…. yet another one.
I live in France, quite near Spain; still different electrical sockets, gas cylinder connections and plumbing standards.
“harmonisation of standards”?
And there was the EHIC / mutual health coverage. And free roaming (and standardised chargers for mobile phones).
But apart from harmonisation of standards, mutual health coverage, and free mobile roaming, what has the EU ever done for us? 🙂
I was once a very enthusiastic proponent of the EEC/EU. However, the fact is that, for many years now, the EU has failed at everything it has attempted, or has failed to solve any of the problems that it has created.
Exactly – “failing” and “failing to solve problems” are two separate things in my mind. The former has an air of finality and acknowledgment and putting things to bed; the latter implies limping on, still trying, still thinking it’s going to get better. The EU is definitely still going with the latter and will do for the foreseeable future because there is an awful lot of political will for the EU to survive. That’s something Brits tend to forget.
I think we are all aware of how much political will there is to keep the EU going, and It’s not about to disappear anytime soon.
It will either ‘succeed’ by subjugating the people of Europe via ever harsher measures and the total elimination of democracy across the continent, or collapse spectacularly at some point. That is the way of all totalitarian systems.
It will collapse – just a matter of when. Hope I’m still here to watch it.
Political will I presume means at the governmental level – don’t forget Macron said he wouldn’t permit a referendum on EU membership because it might not go the way he wanted.
“If we only had a little more money and a little more power” ad infinitum. Somehow the solution is just out of reach.
It’s telling that the UK and US had people with a lifetime experience in the international biotech trade in charge of vaccine procurement but the EU chose a trade commission bureaucrat.
Looking at some of the comments posted here, the narrative always seems to be that the EU is right to worry that the UK will embark in a ‘race to the bottom’ on regulation and legal protections covering, for instance, workers rights and the environment.
My professional field is financial services regulation, and that is one of the sectors in which the EU makes the loudest noise about potential unfair competition. Since Article 50 was invoked, my response to that line of argument has been to say, just watch what happens, because the race to the bottom in regulation is just as likely to be by the EU rather than the UK. Early signs are that this is what is in fact coming to pass. The UK is formalising its commitment to having the highest international standards of FS regulation, whilst the EU has watered down some of the MiFID II requirements (on research unbundling for those who are interested) and is allowing its banks to count nebulous software assets as ‘loss absorbing capital’ to make it easier for them to meet regulatory capital requirements. How does the EU attract some wholesale FS businesses from London? Well relax the bonus restrictions which London laboured under while in the EU, and still maintains.
In my view, when (likely rather than ‘if’) the UK ends up with higher standards than the EU across a range of other areas, notably environmental rules, we will come to realise that the EU position on UK trade has got nothing to do with standards, and everything to do with very traditional, very old fashioned protectionism.
The EU is stuffed to the ceiling with insolvent Banks. Quite how ‘nebulous software assets’, which are not really assets at all, can be considered ‘loss absorbing capital’ God alone knows. But it neatly illustrates the dire straits some EuroZone banks are in if this is what they call ‘capital’.
You missed an opportunity then. If you had offered a solid guarantee that you would maintain and increase standards, the EU would likely have offered a better deal in return.
The EU, with their threats of embargoes and punishments, are acting with exactly the same malice they displayed towards Britain throughout the Brexit negotiations. The purpose is to humiliate and to mask their own incompetence.
Vindictiveness on this scale is the hallmark of a burgeoning dictatorship.
If this had happened in a couple of years they would already have hauled off a few AZ executives to a “rehabilitation camp”.
All the forelock-tugging “good europeans” have got that to look forward to.
I wonder when we’ll start getting our first boatloads of EU refugees…
Bizarre. Is the EU a ‘burgeoning dictatorship’ or a bunch of bungling bureaucrats?
“Is the EU a ‘burgeoning dictatorship’ or a bunch of bungling bureaucrats?” No conflict there ….. ‘dictatorships’ are, in the historical record, quite regularly ‘served’ by regiments of “bungling bureaucrats”. Ergo, not very bright but self-aggrandising bullies with personal ambitions.
I would like to know what happened to all the Remainers. I assume they are keeping low and waiting for the Covid thing to subside? I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find any. In the referendum, my wife voted Remain but she says that she has changed now,
But in Wales you have to be a Remainer (Rejoiner) to vote for Welsh independence because somebody has to pay us when the UK taxpayer is not there any more.
They have retreated to their last redoubt in the rarefied air of the mountainous Guardian.
Though some still talk of building an underground army that will rise up to reverse the defeat once people have gone back to their normal lives.
I’m sure that was revealed in one of the QAnon drops.
Ah yes the ultimate ‘Trust Fund Brat’.
There are still quite a few of them left putting blatant disinformation in The Times’s below-the-line comments section.
What sort of misinformation? The fishermen are unhappy with the deal? There are problems with trade between GB and NI? The UK is unilaterally breaching the agreement it signed?
We have absorbed the damage and are getting on with our lives. Britain has decided to damage its future prosperity and its standing in the world on a mixture of fraudulent promises and incoherent yearnings. After the referendum one could still hope (it was Farage who first said “if we do not get the result we want, we just try for one more referendum”). But since the last election it is clear that this really is the democratic will of the British people. So be it. It was not a good idea, and it will not end well, but it has happened. Meanwhile, I’ll leave it to the Brexiteers to make a success of this glorious venture. If they can.
The last election does not establish for one moment that Brexit is the democratic will of the British people. Those voting for Brexit parties were well below 50%. Brexit has consistently polled below 50% since 2016.
Try it now!
As a practical matter it does. We have a democratic system, and the system answered. If the Brexit referendum had campaigned and won on “We will suffer – but we will be FREE” that would have been the end of it. The referendum result could be questioned since it was not clear what Brexit if any people actually voted for, and the whole question was run on manifestly fraudulent promises. But people had the chance to reconsider, and decided to put the Boris in charge of further developments. That has to be enough. If you ask a question at some point you have to accept the answer.
The result of any GE in UK does not establish the democratic will of the people as our electoral system is not democratic. However, changing that should be one major focus of the parties who took a remain position – especially Labour.
If you accept that it is the democratic will of the British people, then you should be helping to make it a success.
I would not make things worse out of spite. But I will not try to do the impossible. If it was such a good idea you can make it succeed without my help.
So what are you still hanging around here for then?
I’m still here, and still think Brexit is an act of self-harm, which will shrink the UK economy, damage the Union, and is being sustained politically by a government activating xenophobic nationalism. Brexit is not only unwise, it is also a gateway to self-destructive populism, and it fundamentally misreads the priorities of our global future. I believe myself to be in the majority, and I would not be at all surprised if the coming years see the UK moving closer to the EU, first by accepting some EU jurisdictions in order to reopen our trading relationship with what remains our largest market, and then probably rejoining the Single Market. I don’t anticipate the UK resuming full EU membership within the next decade, or longer, but what I have described would funnily enough be completely in keeping with the 2016 vote to leave (which I still of course believe to have been a disaster). I hope that answers your question.
Oh, and using COVID vaccine supplies to justify Brexit is pretty desperate, and rather tasteless. You might as well be blaming the UK government’s appalling ineptitude over the last year on Brexit.
Maybe they went to the sunlit uplands the rest of the UK doesn’t quite seem to have reached just yet?
Merkel was behind the migrant crisis with her invitation to the 3rd world, and then again it was she who scolded Germany when it started to source vaccines and insisted on a combined EU effort. Why is Merkel so powerful when she constantly makes huge errors. She was naive negotiating with Erodgan to hold back the migrants in Turkey giving him a hand on the screw to tighten around her own neck, and again buying her fossil fuel from Russia giving Putin a hand on the on/off tap – these are not men to trifle with.
I am now thinking that the AZ/EU row has been created by lobbyists. The lobbyists of Pfizer, etc. who are selling their vaccines ‘for-profit’. As such, each AZ vaccine dose bought is a loss on – for example – Pfizer’s profit and loss account. Note also that the US regulator has also made some noises about AZ data being too old. I truly hope that my suspicions are unfounded but it seems very odd (and unsustainable) that all of the noise about AZ – but no other vaccine – is purely Brexit-related.
The EU has always failed at the big things, sometimes deliberately. In no particular order:
Embarking on flawed projects is a feature since they create crises that enable Brussels, Paris and Berlin to bully the other countries into doing things they don’t want to.
Becoming obsessed with growth and never understanding that constantly adding new members who had nothing in common would defeat its “one size fits all” principle. It is now beset not just by the familiar north-south tensions but east-west tensions as well. It should have stuck at the original six.
Allowing the UK with its entirely different worldview to join. De Gaulle knew the British would be trouble for this reason. This error was compounded by making Brexit unnecessarily difficult when in fact the UK leaving removed an obstacle to EU ambitions.
Allowing the CAP to become irrevocable and a source of permanent discord and inefficiency.
Adopting the euro, which is still on life support, as a political project in the knowledge that it would not survive basic economics. The aim was to try to make debt sharing and money transfers between the member states possible under economic and political union. Neither will happen.
Schengen allows any foreigner who can get across the peripheral border to have whole EU at his disposal. It now finds itself hostage to Erodgan who can release several million migrants whenever he likes.
Encouraging the mass arrival of islam in Europe without regard to whether it could be integrated. EU pols talk about creating a European Islam which also is not going to happen because it would require Moslems to give up core beliefs.
Being protectionist which condemns EU consumers to high prices.
Trying to become a state in its own right and ignoring the fate of the Hapsburgs and the Soviet Union.
And ainsi de suite….
There are 3 common denominators to all EU summits:
From memory of the Brexit process there was a similar approach in the UK.
1 & 2 were identical, and 3 was subtly different:
Agreement will not be reached but it will be spun the way the UK Government need it to be i.e. Brussels is to blame.
If you have a contractual dispute you go to court. Indeed the AZ contract with the EU specifies how and to which court disputes should be taken (Belgian courts ruling in Belgian law) . By failing to do that the Eu admits it has no case.
In any well run operation people are intelligent enough to admit error and change.
But the EU machine does not.
No one has been sacked for the hopeless vaccine procurement.
No one has been sacked for losing their second largest member .
Now there is major capital flight from the Euro -this is because of the crazy new legislation meaning the EU can confiscate any goods of any sort made in any of the 27 countries at any time.
No sane business is going to invest in such an environment . And those who are there now will move away. The consequent cost of borrowing to prop up the Euro will now cause austerity on a huge scale- all to protect EU official incompetents from being called to account and fired.
According to a recent column by A E-P in the DT there are already massive capital outflows from the EU, and have been since late last year. It hasn’t shown up in the cost of EU imports/exports yet due to hedging.
Don’t delude yourself, growth and investment in the EU, across all the different countries’ circumstances, outstrips the UK and Brexit is increasing the gap. Size of market counts a lot.
Clear and concise analysis of the EU response to several past crises and now the abysmal handling of this WuFlu pandemic. Their hubris knows no bounds.
So glad I don’t live in Europe at this time even though I’m desperate to be able to travel there once again.
there is no analysis there at all, and “WuFlu” is a fatuous trivialisation of the pandemic.
I also remember reading about the Balkans when Yugoslavia broke up and the EU made that worse too, initially trying to keep Yugoslavia together. They disdained the Americans, yet in the end, as usual, the Americans sorted out Europe’s problems with the Dayton Agreement.
Edit: With von der Leyen it does feel like the ‘ever closer union’ hubris has appointed its unelected nemesis; she’s clearly an incompetent who has ‘failed up’ and is only in the job as a compromise nonentity to keep Macron and Mutti happy.
Edit: Georgia and Ukraine are two other countries where the EU also exacerbated tensions to disastrous effect.
Yes, the EU has been failing since its failure to intervene effectively in the Balkans.
The Balkan Wars were a direct result of the EU – more specifically the damn Germans – recognising states without defined borders. The UK begged them not to do this, but Genscher wouldn’t listen. Eventually it was the US and UK who basically put a stop to the carnage.
Von der Leyen was basically appointed so Merkel and Macron could run the show – she was seen as more reliable than the drunk. She is, alas, flat footed, incompetent and basically stupid, but then again in many ways she reflects the two idiots who control her.
Basically
A nation that systematically butchered of 6million innocents should never be trusted again.
Had it not been for the Cold War, Germany would have ceased to exist under the Morgenthau Plan.
It was to be dissolved into bite sized pieces and kept in a perpetual state of subservience.
An opportunity missed indeed, for which ‘we’ shall all pay a heavy price when
The Beast, re-emerges from its Bavarian lair.
Finger pointing and assuming no responsibility for their actions and decisions must be a trait of the Leftist mindset. Every Democrat aka leftist politician in the USA never assumes responsibility. It is always someone else’s fault.
And all the other politicians do? Could you point me in the direction of one, I might just send him or her a gift!
Excellent article. The one thing the EU had going for it pre covid was they won the PR battle on Brexit. They were the sensible, competent, moral and reasonable ones. The UK were the unreasonable, incompetent ideologues.
It was a PR battle they won due to the support of the largely EU supporting left wing UK media and UK opposition parties. Many of the British public will never forgive these institutions for turning against their own country in the midst of a crisis.
With their mess up on delivering vaccines and attempting to block their export in a desperate attempt to solve the problem, the EU have now lost that reputation for competency and the moral high ground. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
However the one big mistake all Brexiteers made was to assume the EU would be a passive bystander in the Brexit process. The were and are not. They now see the UK as their devout enemy and will do everything they can to ensure we fail. We have yet to grapple with that issue.
Well said. .The EU, like all cults, believes implicitly in its own infallibility. Therefore to explain its own incompetence regarding vaccination, it has to have a scapegoat. Step forward the UK!
The EU has never been our friend, despite our own left-wing media and in particular rhe BBC insisting otherwise. The last few weeks has surely brought their attitude regarding us into clearer focus, even the most devout Remainer must acknowledge that?
The EU is not a cult. Nonsense. It is a highly successful free trade group. They work very closely together to stop the mass slaughter of its citizens. Something which happened on a regular basis for thousands of years until it was formed.
Also most of the British press media is right-wing,80%, and owned by billionaire tax exiles. The BBC is not left-wing. When Labour were in power they complained that they were right wing.
guardian
independent
mirror
bbc
itv
channel 4
Are all left wing, all anti-governent, all pro-remain.
The EU isn’t free-trade, it’s devoutly protectionist
The EU vacillated over the Balkans, and Ukraine to name just two and, as usual, actually achieved zero.Plenty of European citizens have died there. I’m assuming you’re mot counting those? The peace in Europe is kept by Nato and has been since the end of WW2
There’s no war between Germany and France because France has kindly stepped aside to let Germany run Europe in return for the CAP and other material benefits.
If the BBC pleases no political party, then let’s all agree to stop funding it? Do you agree with that? It has after all become a woke mouthpiece, as opposed to a national broadcaster
Eight national dailys. Two left, one centrist, five right. 81% of papers sold are right wing. TV channels are not allowed to be biased. It is in their charter. It will be interesting to see how the Paisley Buddy gets on with GB News.
Exactly what does this woke insult mean, are they affecting things badly in the UK.
If there are five right wing national dailies, that is because there is a demand for five right wing national dailies. Anyway, most of them aren’t right wing in any meaningful sense.
Most of the main TV channels are publicly funded and their (very) left wing position do not reflect the country at large. Their views are forced down or throats. Well, not down mine because I threw out the TV some decades ago.
Only 45% of people vote for right wing parties. Only the BBC is publicly funded.
Britain isn’t free trade either and actually no one is, it’s a chimera. But the prize for the largest imposition of trade barriers in modern history goes to…. Brexit Britain
unutterable tosh, from start to finish.
Like all cults
Most of the British media are in the hands of the right, yet the country has already given up on Brexit leading to a better Britain, reality breaking through the hype?
Won’t be rejoining though as they’ve had enough. They’ve set things up so they can move on and we have to bear the consequences of our own choices. It’s about us not them.
It’s a conspiracy!
I agree with everything this article says BUT we should learn from theEU’s failures so that we don’t repeat them.No polity is likely to succeed if it is run by bureaucrats and not democratically elected politicians.
Hope the Remoaners can now see the Pernicious E.U for what they really are.. Take legal action against the for breaching contract over vaccines.
And exactly what are they other than ‘Pernicious’ and it’s difficult to understand how a group of countries can all be ‘Pernicious’!!
Big words with little meaning I’m afraid, after all whoever and whatever they are they just countries thst want to survive and prosper like us.
Sadly name calling has become a fashionable norm and resolves nothing, reality is thousands of not millions will die in this pandemic who just want to survive and so far political intransigence and name calling is all we offer as hope.
Very sad really.
Nobody has actually breached any contracts, as far as I’m aware. What happened was that the UK signed some very tight contracts with AZ some months before the EU. And then the EU contrived to sign contracts that did not actually commit AZ to provide a certain number of vaccines on a specific date. Instead, AZ merely had to ‘make all reasonable efforts’ to supply so many vaccines on such and such a date – or something like that. All of this was explained by a contract lawyer in The Spectator a couple of months ago.
‘The subsidiarity principle aims to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen. Except in cases where the EU has exclusive competence, action at European level should not be taken unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level.’
“… the Council is incapable of absorbing criticisms which cast any negative light on its own direction of travel” & “it (the EU) will doggedly remain committed to the wrong answer even when that answer has been proved wrong”
The EU Institutions and Agencies consistently act contrary to it’s own functioning treaty, and one of its core principles – subsidiarity. Why? The blind adherence to the Regulatory and Rule-making processes, but not the outcome; the “process” is God! “Look, we followed the rules in making the rules”; “what’s that, they don’t work? Well, you should have notified us in accordance with the rules! Too late now, sorry; we were perfect!!”
In my experience there are few, if any cases, where the EU has “exclusive competence”, yet they continue with their mission creep to convert Directives into Regulations, and expand the scope of their so-called “competence” at every turn (jobs and pensions need protecting after all).
Let the EC run its own 28-legged race (think about it), while the rest of us compete in all events. Any eggs we have left over from our spoon race can be broken into the Brussels face omelette, but I fear it will not be an oeuf to change their minds.
Think you’re over egging normal to and fro within and between the EU institutions and states. Make realistic comparisons.
Ah but when their efforts fail, it gives them yet again the opportunity to say ‘What we need is more Europe (EU)’ to give themselves permission to move ever more towards complete integration when there will be no longer 27 legs but one!
Spot on. If an article was ever ever able to articulate my thoughts on the matter, this would be it. There is nothing here any reasonable person (EUPhile or Brexiteer) could disagree with.
I beg strongly to differ.
I was never a fan of the E. U. But they seemed competent (especially when I didn’t want them to be). But now it’s just like it’s being run by the three stooges! You just wait to see what prat fall is coming next. And that’s not just bad for the EU, it’s effects us in the UK to.
I always go back to this quote during the Greek/euro crisis. ”Keep in mind that the ruling class can be self-destructively mad; not just pretending!” (Daniel Ellsberg to Yanis Varoufakis, 2015).
Having lived & worked in Southern France for 3 years, plus a year spent in Rome and 6 months in Frankfurt, greatly enjoying the lifestyle. I had no hesitation in voting Leave on Referendum Day but pleasantly surprised by the Brexit Result. _____It is clear to me that the Napoleonic and English Common Law will never be able to coexist happily for any period over 50 years. ____. It does not take much understanding of European History to see why EU and UK will be at loggerheads for the next 50 years. Hopefully no actual war in Europe, just posturing as with the Vaccine War.
This was the point made by the late Sir Roger Scruton. I understand why Macmillan, Heath et all were so desperate to join the EEC as was, but it was a huge mistake. They should have had more faith and stuck with EFTA, and had they done so I am sure all the old Eastern block would have joined that and not the EU. By joining the EEC we facilitated its transformation into what is fast becoming a danger to the very peace in Europe. I fear it will all end in War.
Who is going to fight who.
Any why will that be better than watching something on Netflix.
Do you speak French, Italian or German?
Apologies for the double post, I had to edit out certain words. You know how it is…
Postscript: I admire Mr Murray ‘this side idolatry’ (as Ben Jonson said of his friend, colleague and rival Shakespeare); but when did the fine entirely serviceable English word ‘obstinacy’ turn into ‘obstinance’?
It’s in the dictionary – I thought the same until I looked it up. It’s always good to learn a new word!
Not in a proper dictionary.
According to Jonathan Nash above it is in the OED and the earliest known use was in 1475. But I suppose you don’t consider the Oxford English Dictionary to be a ‘proper dictionary’.
And anyway, surely neologisms are always permitted, so long as meaning by inference works reasonably well.
I haven’t checked since March 18, but as of that date, the top three countries according to the Bloomberg data for the percentage of their population vaccinated were Monaco, the UK and Serbia. Iceland and Norway were also ahead of the EU on average, although behind a few other EU countries. It’s not much of an advertisement for EU membership.
The EU is not a competitor to Britain or vice versa. They’re different kinds of thing and of different orders of magnitude.
They have even adapted our Comprehensive Education policy to help them with their vaccination programme! “Then there was the disaster of the roll-out, where the bloc’s efforts to ensure that nobody raced ahead meant that every country advanced at the slowest rate possible.”
There’s no evidence to support that whatsoever. It’s a blag for your amusement.
The problem for the UK is that this dysfunctional organisation will always find a stick with which to beat the UK (defector)
This will only get worse as it stumbles and the UK stretches its legs over the next few years.
It’s time for the UK to employ “Real Politik”. Automatic tariff sanctions for bad behaviour, effective control over UK waters, well secured strategic supply chains etc…
In seeking friendship, it will only receive contempt from the EU. Respect is what it needs.
Obstinacy. (but abstinence).
I must say that Ursula vd L increasingly reminds me of Peter O’Toole playing Lawrence of Arabia; at the point where he lost it and took great delight in slaughtering a column of dispirited Turkish soldiers.
Are you suggesting that those who stalk the corridors of the Berlaymont might be little people? Silly people? Greedy, barbarous and cruel?
I am afraid this just reminds me of a saying attributed to Albert Einstein (not an exact quotation, and in any case the original would have been in German):
“There are two things which are infinite. The Universe, and human stupidity. And I am not quite sure about the first one.”
Of course this could be used by Brexiteers and Remainers alike.
Excellent article. The one thing the EU had going for it pre covid was they won the PR battle on Brexit. They were the sensible, competent, moral and reasonable ones. The UK were the unreasonable, incompetent ideologues.
It was a PR battle they won due to the support of the largely EU supporting left wing UK media and UK opposition parties. Many of the British public will never forgive these institutions for turning against their own country in the midst of a crisis.
With their balls up on delivering vaccines and attempting to block their export in a desperate attempt to solve the problem, the EU have now lost that reputation for competency and the moral high ground. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
However the one big mistake all Brexiteers made was to assume the EU would be a passive bystander in the Brexit process. The were and are not. They now see the UK as their devout enemy and will do everything they can to ensure we fail. We have yet to grapple with that issue.
Government, by its very nature, is inefficient at delivering goods and services. If it weren’t, there would be no private sector. The bigger the government, the less efficient it is. The EU is a very big government. Be careful what you ask for. You may just get it.
The EU is not a government at all, mate.
I have always been impressed by the EU’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but I suppose it should not really be a surprise. If like me you regard our own House of Lords as the political equivalent of care in the community, where failed politicians are put out to grass, the Commission is surely the international version. Van Der Leyden is a classic example, a failed German Defence Minister, not trusted with another Cabinet post in her own country, was instead rubber stamped into the Commission. The only difference really is that the has been in the Commission are more grossly over compensated and can do, as recent events demonstrate, vastly more damage than our House of Lords.
Well I wouldn’t see the policies of Boris Johnson and his government as exemplars of how things should be managed.
Has anyone else noticed how the EU and European press has gleefully adopted reference to the ‘British strain’ of Covid rather than recognising the scientific reference or crediting the fact that it was British scientists who themselves identified the gene?
I suspect we will hear more of the British strain. No doubt the EU would have us believe that the ‘British strain’ is the cause of the bloc’s miseries with regards the virus. Oh to be loved.
I couldn’t agree more. I have watched Nigel Farage for years trying to represent the feelings of half of Britain. At no point did they really listen as the EU with their unelected leadership was the be end and all of all things. Independent countries obviously mean nothing to them, so having a commonwealth (an agreement of independent countries) is not the idea but that they all conform eventually to the undemocratic dictatorial centre of the colossos.
I am fully in agreement with the author’s conclusion. But then anyone with a shred of common sense would know that the bigger a committee the more difficult it must become to reach a conclusion which is acceptable to every committee member. Especially when some members are more equal than others ie, Germany and France.
The larger the EU the harder it must be to achieve unity. Put simply the EU as constituted just cannot function. Hence the calls for federalism. And it must be federalism overseen by either Germany or France. I put my money on Germany. The Third Reich is looming.
Good that we are nearly away from the EU grasp.
Is “obstinance” a word? Isn’t it “obstinacy”?
It sounds like a coinage based on misremembering the word “abstinence”. I used to work with a bloke who said “normarily” when he meant “normally” or “ordinarily”. Drove me crazy.
“normarily” – thats going to be my new word. I’m already looking forward to confusing and annoying people with it. 🙂
but you knew exactly what that guy meant. That is the hallmark of words that are not real, but perhaps should be. Here’s yours for today – dramastically.
“Dramastically” – does that mean “chewing in a histrionic manner”?
Its full steam ahead to political onion then
That will end in tears…
The Author writes “Evidence from around the world suggests that countries which are limber and independent — such as Israel, Singapore and Britain — have been able to act swiftly during the pandemic, particularly with regard to vaccinations”. Poppycock! Our Democracy has been destroyed, our freedoms destroyed, our health and well-being all but destroyed by a pack of incompetents on Corona TV pimping for Bill Gates and Big Pharma who will make massive profits from a no-liability, profiteering vaccine, which is still in its third stage of trials, and for which God knows how many side-effects will pop up over the next ten years. Our so-called heath “experts” failed criminally to implement early-use life-saving PREVENTATIVE TREATMENTS and thousands have died. High Dose vitamin D & C & Zinc. Hydroxychloroquine & Zinc, or Ivermectin. Instead the Govt has paid billions of pounds to frighten the public through all the media channels and newspapers, censored top scientists and doctors who won’t spout the vaccine propaganda. And they have allowed Bill Gates to dominate Global Health – a non doctor who from his own lips says he wants to “inject Genetically Modified Organisms into little kids arms – just shoot them into the vein” talks about a 20-1 return from vaccines, says we won’t go back to normal until everyone has largely been vaccinated, and threatens another pandemic while smirking with his wife? Unbelieveable conspiracy theory stuff? Check it out:
https://ourtube.co.uk/watch/UIawpstyY9TbHFv
Yes, you are right. All the fuss about the vaccines ignores the fact that they are unnecessary for most of us and may well have side effects down the line. And, as you say, there are many common sense and inexpensive preventative and active treatments available for Covid. But governments and the healthcare industry will never go for the common sense and inexpensive options.
Re unnecessary vaccines, the measles jabs is unnecessary for most people, i had measles as a kid and just bad few days, but on balance isn’t it a good idea.
Though the measles vaccine has some bad even fatal reactions, that is less than endemic measles reactions.
As i understand, that’s the basic logic of vaccines, they are on balance an improvement. I think time will tell the Covid vaccine to be similar. My opinion anyway.
I’m with you on high dose vit C and vit D. No money to be made in proving this – despite there even being some proof against traditional colds and flu for vit C. Of couse this is a personal opinion – based on research and personal trials.
The vaccine, i think is likely effective and safe. This only a personal opinion.
Logic for the opinion is that random bits of virus and bacteria RNA and DNA are floating around us like no tomorrow, google virome.
The vaccine just chucks a bit of RNA in that is known to be benign, but happens to prime the immune system against SARS-Cov-19.
There is always a risk, but it think this is a good one. I choose a dose or two of vaccine.
Well, yes. But they aren’t going away.
great article. Thanks.
I wouldn’t crow too much about the British pandemic strategy. There have been plenty of screwups from our own Government there. Perhaps the only thing we did right was to bipass the Department of Health for the vaccine rollout, but that’s about it ! It’s all useful post-Brexit ammunition though.
Only pumping more air into the sagging blimp. Cuts no ice internationally, which is why BJ is being nice as pie with Brussels.
Complete reopen is the only solution. Let the fearful ruin their own lives, instead of the lives of all humanity!
All one needs to know about the EU.
“Italian newspaper La Stampa reported on Wednesday that authorities had discovered 29 million doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine stockpiled at a manufacturing site in the country. According to the newspaper, the doses likely come from AstraZeneca’s Halix plant in the Netherlands”
Please tell me Murray doesn’t get paid for writing this turgid tosh. I see Unherd is seeking to convert its current giveaway business model into a subscription service. You just have to be joking.
With you, one topic is “turgid tosh”, another is “you have to be joking”.
Presumably, in your mind, that’s a contribution to a forum
A few more like you demolishes any business model based on a subscription service. I mean, why would I want to pay to be in a forum with deadbeats?
Vapid, pointless propaganda, desperately scraping the barrel for good news on Brexit.
Autonomy, federalisation, central control are word markers on a continuum that runs from independence or control of one’s destiny to that of unwilling or resigned dependence or subjugation (when citizens’ civil servants become their masters).
Given that there is an essential truth in the corny saying that “no man is an island”, there has to be an ideal balance between:
Model 1: entirely individual freedom
Model 2: accepting rules from a higher order.
Model (1) is the very opposite of society, self-destructively Neanderthal rather than progressively Homosapien. By contrast, Model (2), when taken to extremes, frustrates the very nature of individual freedom. Clearly a balance is called for between freedom and order.
If one accepts that thinking, one surely recognises the fundamental and perhaps incurable problem of the EU concept, which is that it goes against the grain of the inescapable fact that individual freedom and aspiration, with varying success or failure, is the very essence of existence and, some might say, spice of life (it is said after food, water & shelter comes stimulation).
The inherent variability of individual freedom creates a free-for-all, in which one individual’s freedom contests another’s, creating mayhem, destroying the possibility of society. This is why such excess variability, for its own security, has formed into a variety of clusters, homogeneous within, heterogeneous without. That surely is how mutual or common interests grow within each cluster (or fail if the common-interests are ill-founded). It is axiomatic that each homogeneous cluster will not share the very same common interests with another homogeneous cluster, otherwise they wouldn’t have fragmented into separate clusters in the first place. The consequence is wars or antagonism between clusters. The cure is civilisation, in this case, of live-and-let-live, or conquest or obliteration of one of the two antagonists (which not only resolves the conflict but prevents global overcrowding).
These clusters begin and build up from very small-populated clusters of common interest, eg a gang or a tribe, then community, city, region, country, continent (or, with advances in travel and communication, no longer bound by geography (communism, left wing extremism, white supremacism, Islam etc).
The problem is that the bigger the cluster, the less homogeneous it becomes, falling too heavily into Model (2). Independence and progressiveness of a member state are greatly impeded by an overweight government which has allowed its bloated bureaucracy (and Brussels “gravy train” of apparatchiks) to create decision-paralysis. The EU’s only workable cure for the future of Europe is the EU’s eradication. An alternative cure is for the EU to advance to totalitarianism, where its citizens across all member states are subjugated into a homogeneous segment of single-mindedness (or else) – good luck with that!
None of the above is a sure-fire cure for global disorder but nor is giant-size globalism and superpowers. Westphalian balanced relationships between countries is surely a workable means towards live-let-live (as well as live-and-let’s-trade). All that’s left is an improved age of enlightenment within societies, which are becoming fractious, feral, anarchist and mentally unstable. Improved education, upbringing, with effective government leadership and control and a recalibration of liberalism Did I say All?!
When you read a article like this you wonder what meaningful discussion has this writer ever had with anyone in Continental Europe to get their perspective on the question of the EU? There is no sign of that here.
Douglas Murray is well travelled but that’s not the same thing as soliciting viewpoints and making the effort to understand where other nationalities are coming from, and why so little support for imitating the UK’s departure from the EU exists. It takes time to get another country let alone the EU-27.
All too often English columnists on the right project all sorts of things on to Europe from their echo chambers, and then articles such as this one will appear which are nothing more than reactions to what they themselves project.
It does not help that the most in-depth and revealing reflections on EU and national concerns by continental equivalents of Douglas Murray will be expressed in German, French, Dutch etc for their domestic audiences and will rarely have any pick-up in the UK. It’s much less so the other way round given most European’s proficiency with English.
But this even happens with Ireland next door, where I’m from. I along with many of my compatriots roll our eyes when so many British struggle to even identify which area is part of Northern Ireland (and thus in the UK) or the Republic.
But it should be totally possible for professional British columnists to research Irish opinion, read articles, inform themselves of the politics, of the state of the parties in the Dail etc but very few make that effort.
For example, the myth of the Irish Govt being the EU’s “useful idiots” during Brexit is widely believed in the UK, when in reality it was mostly the other way round. After Brexit the Irish Govt launched a major diplomatic offensive in European capitals, in the EU Parliament and amongst EU commissioners and officials to have the Northern Ireland border on the Withdrawal Agreement negotiation agenda. Another misguided approach was to personalise this policy around Leo Varadkar when it was actually formulated by his predecessor Enda Kenny with pretty much unanimous support of the Dail.
British commentators have realised that there is mutual incomprehension with continental Europe, and that this played a role in the decision to leave.
But this state of incomprehension is not a good thing, it only leads to false perceptions and decisions get made on that suspect basis. But until Douglas Murray and co. recognise that this malaise of incomprehension is a problem that needs addressing, then articles as poorly informed as this will keep appearing.
We were lucky with the Astra-Zeneka vaccine being developed here. We were lucky to have the excellent NHS – which the Tories despise and want to flog off.
Everything which was the responsibility of the government meanwhile, has been a shambles. We are on our third lockdown. We have one of the highest death rates per capita in the world and billions have been wasted on contracts to Tory chums who have largely failed to deliver. Thirty seven billion on a test and trace program that has never worked and never will? We have nothing to be smug about.
When will the EU have a serious debate about its failings. “What is wrong with us that the UK voted to leave?”; “Why could we not move faster on Covid?”; “Are we truly democratic?”; and “How do we show we are accountable for our failures?”.
“Evidence from around the world suggests that countries which are limber and independent — such as Israel, Singapore and Britain — have been able to act swiftly during the pandemic, particularly with regard to vaccinations.”
Israel and Singapore I can agree with but Britain’s response to the pandemic has been woeful right from the very beginning. Failure to lockdown early, shifting NHS patients into care homes, PPE procurement, the complete multi-billion farce that is track and trace, schools going back for one day and then closing and the worst death rate in Europe. The list is long with the one shining light being the procurement of vaccines and the speed with which they are being used. For that the goverment does indeed deserve credit. As for the rest, I suggest you take off your rose tinted spectacles and look again at the past year.
Speed of vaccine deployment is attributable to the NHS, not the government.
The UK acted quickly in funding and purchasing (and approving) vaccines. though much of that happened while we were members of the EU’s European Medicines Agency, but nevertheless sufficiently “limber and independent” to act.
The UK used to be well prepared for a pandemic, and had a stockpile of PPE. Unfortunately it had been allowed to expire without being renewed. And the committee to oversee epidemic response was stood down just as Covid-19 was getting going, so the civil service could concentrate on “more urgent” issues.
Other than the vaccine rollout, the UK’s response has been, as one Conservative MP put it, world-beatingly bad”.
its all about structure I’m afraid and with the EU its about being overstructured or even paranoid.
The idea a unified group of countries joining together, with an equal say in affairs of the group, is a nice idea but time after time it is doomed to failure when the structure of one of the countries is so different in politics, religion, ethic makeup, economic stability etc, that it could never agree to conform to being part of the team.
The question is why did that country join the EU in the first place?
To any group, crisis is probably the hardest to agree on and the muddle and catastrophic that has been the stuff of Covid vaccines is to us baffling beyond belief but to the EU it is trying to find common ground with a problem that defies boundaries.
So what would have happened if the UK had not left the EU, well then our frustration would have boiled over knowing that our scientists had a solution but the meeting to discuss it could not be scheduled for all members until, say August this year. The safety issues would drag on for every, thousands more would die and the world would suddenly stop turning.
All this implies that I am a Brexit fan by fortune, in fact I’m not. On one hand we embrace the idea of the world joining hands and working together for the benefit of ALL mankind and on the other we find it endlessly necessary to isolate ourselves building safe fences around our version of the ideal world.
We forget conveniently that millions of people in the world cannot even read a newspaper to find out what’s killing them, they will die perhaps in millions before either we stop isolating ourselves behind our wealth or we start working together with other countries as a agreed team.
So far, Never the twain shall meet
So much of the debate about the EU misses the essential point that EU rules tie its members down to neoliberalism. That is why Hayek and Thatcher were so keen on the EU single market idea. Together with the Euro they make neoliberalism democratically irreversible. Neoliberalism has manifestly failed in developed countries, where there has been income stagnation and increasing economic insecurity for the bottom 70% of the country for 40 years since it’s introduction. Its most damning failure is falling productivity growth, which is essential for sustained improvements in living standards. These failures are behind the emergence of populist movements such as Trump and Brexit supporters. A large segment of the population knows that more of the same is not working and they will support radical change. Ironically many on the right, who supported Brexit because they felt the EU version of neoliberalism was too restrictive, have provided voters in the UK with an opportunity to escape the constraints of neoliberalism. Now that we are outside the EU it is possible to vote in a Labour government that can eliminate neoliberalism and restore social democracy, fiscal expansion, and state intervention. This is such a delicious irony!
You were doing very well until the final conclusion. The current Labour party would rejoin the EU instantly if elected because it now represents the rich, not the 70% of the country that you refer to.
Hilarious
I agree that New Labour largely abandoned the working classes. However they will need to change to get elected again. And when they do get elected with left wing platform they will be able to introduce it. This contrasts markedly with the situation if the UK had remained in the EU, where some policies are illegal (e.g. sustained fiscal expansion and state intervention) and others very difficult (e.g. controlling supply of labour in order to force increases in labour productivity).
What you say about néolibéralism has some point. But it is everywhere, not Justin the EU. You will not be seeing ANY country make a complete break with it under any stripe of government. Indeed the most interesting attempts to control néolibéralism and make it serve people’s interests are taking place in the …..EU!
There are already breaks appearing in the USA. The USA has finally embraced fiscal stimulus as a way of matching demand with supply, rather than relying entirely on monetary policy. There is also more recognition of the need to protect its own workers from the supply shock that comes from globalisation. Hence the increase in minimum wage and proposal to strengthen labour. Finally, in the UK there is recognition of the need for the state to intervene in the economy more aggressively. The above policies are more difficult to implement in the EU because of the constraints such as the single market and supranational rules on fiscal policy that voters cannot change.
The EU has fundamentally been operating as a communist bloc, and therefore was boi und to fail.
The EU was really established to prevent France and Germany dragging Europe and the World into yet another major war. From a simple small European economic union, it grew into the monolithic communist pretend-empire that it has become, and like the bloated USSR was condemned to fail ab initio.
Britain – fortunately although very late – managed to escape its stranglehold, and the vaccine success is the first very clear demonstration of the wisdom of leaving.
Most sensible Brits shrink in horror at the thought that had Ms May remained, or had the left and the BBC and the other puppets of far-left ideas succeeded in rejecting Brexit, Britain would probably have been the worst off of all the European countries.
God it’s so tiresome reading all the Brexiter moanings in Unherd. Nearly as bad as in the DT.
You wanted out of the Single Market and the Customs Union. Now you’re out, it may be timely for you all to forget about the EU – most of whose citizens would likely want – ever so politely – to ask you all to go f**k off and wander around the world in HMS Global Britain. It’ll be interesting to see who your new trading pals will be and how you get on with them particularly given that the vast majority of them – the US, India, China, Mercusor in South America, Indonesia and Canada etc. are far more protectionist than the EU.
Return to the Guardian and the Dingle Echo, you will a much happier.
Now run along, there’s a good chap.
I’ll pop in again to point out that the U.K. is doing worse than most of the world in terms of deaths and its economy has crashed more than any EU country and exports are off a cliff. in fact in trade agreements, where the EU has managed to ink a few more in just the last few weeks, the UK is also floundering.
The U.K. has just managed to antagonise China which is where most of the 95% growth outside the EU exists.
The vaccine rollout is mostly up to the individual countries anyway, on AZ the EU was clearly stiffed by the U.K., which is the general opinion in Europe.
Pretty sure the first sanctions China announced this week were on the EU. Won’t argue over who, if anyone, stiffed anyone else on the AZ vaccine – we probably won’t agree. I assume we can agree though that no private company is ever going to build a vaccine factory or manufacture a new vaccine in the EU again as their non-EU customers now know they won’t be able to rely on getting the product they ordered.
Not so much stiffed, as out-negotiated. The UK negotiated penalty clauses for non-delivery. The EU seems not to have done. And in the early stages it may have made sense for AZ to supply the country that was using their vaccine, rather than the bloc that hadn’t approved it yet, or that later was restricting its use.
The EU doesn’t always fail, but it often fails. That’s why Brexit was a mistake. Without the UK onboard the EU becomes a Franco-German Empire, with both countries getting to do what they like most: France postures, while Germany runs things and has a captive market for its exports. A strong, confident, well-run EU would be a powerful counterbalance to the USA, China and a host of multinational companies. The UK on its own will suffer. We will pay the price for our failure to engage properly with the EU and steer it in the right direction.
The Euro has allowed the Germans to take over Europe just as Nick Ridley famously remarked. So we now have the Fourth Reich. The French think they can run things in their usual arrogance, but they are no match for the Germans. Helping to force the UK out might have seemed to them a good plan on paper, but I really, really hope they rue the day. I wish the EU nothing but ill.
“Evidence from around the world suggests that countries which are limber and independent — such as Israel, Singapore and Britain — have been able to act swiftly during the pandemic, particularly with regard to vaccinations.” A lesson for Britain, then. Britain has done spectacularly badly with respect to test and trace, for exactly the same reasons. Over-centralisation and lack of distributed delegation. Just as well they didn’t go overboard on the centralised vaccine rollout.
Douglas, there is no such word as ‘obstinance’. It’s ‘obstinacy’. Please don’t undermine the effect of your excellent arguments with embarrassing illiteracy.
Well, I have always used obstinance. It is in The Oxford Shorter, though marked as rare. I admire a gal who is brave enough to accuse Douglas Murray of illiteracy.
It is in my copy of The Oxford Shorter.
Excellent arguments?
In my online full OED the earliest usage of obstinance is 1475; the most recent citation is 1987. I think an apology may be required.
Meanwhile the EU will continue to be the most successful free trade zone in the World and the UK to continue its decline.
It is dismaying that even Douglas Murray is unaware of the dangerous futility of the “vaccines”. Products put together in days with novel technologies: briefly tested, results suppressed, uncertainty of effectiveness (limited anyway) or safety beyond weeks, and yet they are trying to build an international system based on this techno-junk. There is here a colossal scientific naivety.
You can’t have a great deal of evidence of long-term safety for a vaccine that’s only been in use for a few months. That’s the arrow of time for you.
But the AZ vaccine uses the same technology as the flu vaccine (and it’s not microchips, before some smart alec starts). So it’s unlikely to have any more long term effects than flu vaccines do.
Some people seem remarkably cynical about vaccines (and 5G), and at the same time remarkably credulous about anti-vaccine propaganda. Maybe it’s something in the water?
“You can’t have a great deal of evidence of long-term safety for a vaccine that’s only been in use for a few months.”
You said it.
5G btw is weapons grade technology and has minimal advantages for domestic use.
It’s even more dismaying – to put it mildly – that there was an excellent early-use life-saving drug (apart from High Dose vitamin D) which was set up to fail in trials because it would have destroyed the vaccine agenda. And who sponsored those trials? (Solidarity & Recovery trials). Of course it was Big Pharma, Bill Gates, Wellcome Trust. They gave the patients four times the dose of Hydroxychloroquine and poisoned many of them. But where it has been used, it works as a prophylactic and with zinc as an early use PREVENTATIVE life-saver. But no profit in it. And you can’t control a population with a cheap life-saving drug can you.. But you can with a vaccine – and vaccine passport. And into the bargain make a massive massive profit for your Big Pharma cronies and Vaccine Fuhrer Bill Gates, who has his money in the BBC Gavi the WHO the Guardian – virtually everywhere – and they are all dancing to his tune while people who could have been saved die in their thousands. Here’s one of the many doctors who are speaking the truth (but most get censored) Explained in 90 seconds:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1374120015079870466
You mean it’s already been privatised and I missed the share offering? Oh Noes!
COVID is an international issue. There is no single-nation route to security. This anti-EU diatribe has nothing to do with the current situation, and everything to do with the strangely aggressive mindset of its author. It is neither appropriate nor is it decent to attempt to score cheap nationalistic points over the pandemic, which is a shared problem for all humans. It is also extremely unwise, because in other areas of the COVID response Brexit Britain has failed dismally to protect its citizens. Let us be glad that in the UK we have a functional vaccine programme. But let us also accept that zero-sum protectionist nationalism will do nobody any favours at all.
It is neither appropriate nor is it decent to attempt to score cheap nationalistic points over the pandemic,
so people should stop haranguing states or nations that do not live in perpetual lockdown, demanding that citizens now wear two masks? This thing was politicized early and often, and that is not going to change.
‘ aggressive mindset ‘, ‘score cheap nationalistic points ‘,’failed dismally to protect its citizens.’, ‘zero-sum protectionist nationalism’ all perfectly describe the EU’s posturing.
No COVID is a Chinese issue aided and abetted by France, possibly helped by the USA.
You forgot to mention Brazil and Italy!
Covid-19 is an issue for every country experiencing infections, and for any country at risk from infections (in case there actually are any countries currently infection-free). So it’s an issue for all of us.
Guilt must be apportioned correctly
I would say our priorities should be
And somewhere below 99: Find someone else to blame as a distraction from the above.
“Try again.Fail again.Fail better.” Beckett understood the challenges in life better than Douglas Murray. Mr Murray might to do better to write about the many challenges confronting the U.K. at the moment. We have a phrase for Murray’s stance in Ireland. He is the ever-critical ‘ hurler on the ditch’. The ‘Know-all’ who sees everyone else’s faults.
He might, for example, review the tragically large numbers who died of Covid in the U.K. due to a dilatory Tory government and hold those responsible for such a failure to account.
But, of course, Brexiters and their ilk never fail.
What has your wittering got to do with the proposition ‘The EU always fails’? Do you, or do you not agree with it?
Everybody in Europe knows that the way to improve vaccine provision is to strengthen these new collaborative efforts coordinated by the Commission, not grouse and slink away as happened with Brexit. Read today’s news and you will see that’s exactly what’s happening, withThierry Breton already making excellent progress. It’s a new type of collaborative programme and there are things being learned, most particularly about drafting tighter contacts and making it clear from the start you will back them up with trade controls. (A big chunk of Britain’s vaxx supply has been manufactured in the EU.)
There will also be broader efforts to coordinate public health across Europe because more people now see that’s necessary. But health will remain primarily a national ( and in some cases regional) responsibility in Europe, as it is in the UK, and the main learning will be lateral not top down.
Sorry, but reality can’t be shoehorned into neat polemics, especially ones attacking European institutions from the outside ( for whose benefit?). The article projects a completely fictiive ideology of obsessive European unification. Rather, within the Union there is a healthy two way movement between devising new collaborative institutions when clearly needed and criticising and refining those that exist. Europe and Britain both lose because UK political leaders bottled out of that process.
There’s a second baseless notion which pollutes the article and that’s this idea that agility and enterprise are somehow a monopoly of states like Britain and Israel and inimical to Europe. Rubbish. European Union states and companies have the advantage of being able to act on their own AND have the Union act on their behalf where scale and/or a coordinated approach counts, as it often does. Big can be quick, too, as Biden’s recently shown. Shame Britain’s now going to be missing out on a whole layer of effective action on several fronts.
“Yaah, EU BAD!” . Yawn.
You don’t need to jump a queue if you were quick enough to be at the front of it in the first place. Queue jumping is only necessary (for example) if you faff around placing political ideas above practicality (and human lives) and get to the party late.
Are you playing word games? Or did I use a lightly inaccurate expression? The point is that getting the vaccines quickly is a zero-sum game. If you get yours faster, it means others have to wait longer. If EU membership limits your freedom to get ahead at your neighbour’s expense, *) I’d say that was a price worth paying. That said, there are other aspects to it, and Britain (an Israel) have indeed handled those rather better than most of the EU.
*) I do not think Britain did anything wrong in getting ready fast. But if France or Germany had broken with the EU and moved faster, it would have been at the expense of other countries, for instance Britain.
Circular argument.
The point is that getting the vaccines quickly is a zero-sum game. If you get yours faster, it means others have to wait longer.
If we waited for the EU to get it’s act together over vaccines, the UK would looking forward to lockdown season 4, the death rate would be still rising and the rate of infections would still be increasing.
It was never a zero sum game.
I don’t see how you can possibly believe what you’re saying. Getting the vaccines quickly isn’t a zero-sum game at all. Thanks to our government’s funding of the AZ-Oxford partnership, there are loads of cheap vaccines where, if we had relied on the EU and Pfizer/Sanofi, there would be fewer and more expensive ones. Thanks to our early input, we get first dibs, but EVERYONE gets some sooner than they would have done without UK efforts, so why are the EU complaining?
But that’s simply untrue. The UK invested in the actual nuts-and-bolts infrastructure needed to develop and manufacture vaccines (so did the US). The EU could have done the same. It did not.
If it had, that would have increased the global vaccine supply.
The BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine was the first to be used in the west. BioNTech was a very small company (the creation basically of the two mRNA researchers who developed the vaccine). A 300 million euro investment was made by the German government early last year to help develop the usable vaccine (not the EU), but it took the heft of the partnership with Pfizer (a US pharma giant) to mass produce it. It has since been rolled out successfully in the US, UK, across Europe, Israel etc.
Sounds pretty much like what the UK government did with Oxford and AstraZeneca. So, accepting that might-have-beens can never be proven, what are you saying would have happened if the German government had gone it alone, that was prevented by the EU collaboration?
You asked a bad question. The hivemind is displeased!
The point is that if you get your vaccines faster, then others have to wait…this is surely the reality, even the definition of a queue, is it not? I just don’t understand the logic in this situation where thousands of lives are on the line of holding back so as not to step on your neighbour’s toes. This was a situation where speed and getting to the front of the queue was everything, not some solidarity niceties. By focusing on the latter, everyone ended up worse off, people are dying. That is not a price worth paying for adherence to an ideology! You can tell yourself if you like that small countries like Denmark would have been left behind if they hadn’t taken the collective EU approach but I say: look at Israel, look at Serbia: both small, neither in the EU. And doing fine for themselves. The EU should have sent some powerful players with big elbows into the fray to secure a decent place in the queue and then share the spoils with their smaller mates. And finally: why would you even be bothered about whether France and Germany getting ahead would be at Britain’s expense? There was no such consideration in the Brexit negotiations, why now?
I could not agree more with KE. To go even further the EU is directly responsible for Brexit. If David Cameron had returned from the EU with something out of the negotiation (anything) it may well have been a different story. The EU leadership is generally talentless, failed politico’s given a cushy job, expecting dynamism from them is hopeless. We see that now!
Credit the blame where it is due: with that fool Merkel. She created Brexit just as she has b*ggered up Greece.
COVID is not a national issue. It is rather desperate and sad to be seeking validation for Brexit on the basis of the UK’s successful vaccine procurement. Vaccination has to be handled regionally and globally. The UK is dependent on French and other European lorry drivers, for example, and if they haven’t been vaccinated they may bring in new variants. The Little England mentality typical of Brexiters has absolutely nothing to contribute to the global response to COVID.
Nor has your ‘Little European mentality’ contributed anything to the global response to COVID.
It’s not ‘jumping the queue’ to invest heavily in vaccine development and manufacture. I posted this under a different article recently, but will mention it again: the chief executive of the French pharma company Valneva spoke recently of how the EU vaccine programme showed little interest in the company’s Covid vaccine last year, whereas the UK taskforce had provided the company with 90+ million euros for development, ordered millions of doses and began setting up a manufacturing site in Scotland. Just having a quick look online this morning I notice the EU concluded preliminary talks with the company in January and placed an order, while the UK government placed an additional order for tens of millions of doses in February (for delivery in 2022). This takes the total UK order to over 100m doses when added to the orders placed last year.
If EU countries had acted independently they (like Britain) could have begun work on mass production of vaccines: the components required for each; the m(b)illions of glass vials needed to store; the m(b)illions of syringes required; the cold storage; logistics etc etc. These are the kind of issues the UK taskforce (and US Operation Warp Speed) were tackling last year. Alternatively the EU could have tackled all these issues centrally and set up this capacity across the bloc: it did not. And now it is threatening to blockade deliveries to the UK and seize manufacturing sites and supplies of a vaccine its leaders have undermined with their ill-considered remarks.
Such behaviour, if coming from a recent US president, would have been roundly and widely condemned as the worst sort of populism, right-wing nationalism and incipient fascism. Haha!
The great irony is that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine the EU wants to seize has now been so undermined in Europe that recent polling shows that more than half of people in France and Germany do not want to take it: and millions of doses are sitting unused in cold storage.
Last year the Serum Institute of India began mass production of hundreds of millions of doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine: before trials were concluded and before it had been approved for use. These vaccines are being supplied to (last I saw) 15-plus countries in Asia as well as to Britain. It is a remarkable achievement: and the vaccines are being supplied at cost price.
The UK did this one very well (for the first time during the pandemic, I might add), and recent EU behaviour has been (let us be nice) ‘very unfortunate’. But I honestly see no reason why countries getting together in the EU vaccine program would have slowed down *production*, as opposed to delivery. Nothing would prevent countries with their own vaccine or infrastructure to speed things up anyway. In fact it was my definite impression that France and Germany did exactly that. There seems to be several production facilities in Belgium and the Netherlands. If you have evidence that individual countries were going to boost production but the EU effort prevented them, I would actually like to see it.
I say above that setting up the manufacturing base could have been done nationally or by the EU, I don’t have any agenda to push one way or the other. If anything slowed down mass production and delivery of vaccines under the EU programme it was likely that the individuals charged with the task were not terribly gifted (let us be nice) and the EU was not prepared to put money upfront to finance development and expand the manufacturing base.
Obviously the pharma companies are major players in this, not national governments. The German example shows that an early investment by a national government in small pharma achieved impressive results (in partnership with big pharma).
The UK govt was very pro-active and invested heavily to get vaccines produced.
France, and thus the EU (at that stage), put all its eggs in the Sanofi basket, doubtless choosing a ‘national champion’ (though of course, the Sanofi vaccine, which has now been delayed until later this year, was a collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline).
It is obvious to everyone here you simply want to push a pro-EU message, I’ll leave you to it…
Not at all. People are trying to tell me that things would have been so much better if the EU had done nothing and left it to France and Germany to act on their own. And I am asking for the evidence. Your post sounds like a fairly good summary of what actually happened. My guess is that a nation-by-nation effort would have made most of the same mistakes, led to much the same total volume of vaccines produced, advantaged some nations at the expense of others, and given more border rifts and fights within the EU. Of course the EU effort on vaccines was pretty pedestrian, compared to the UK one, but why would France and Germany have done much better on their own?
You might add that the UK did rather worse than much of the EU on lockdowns, and on test-and-trace. And that you took some chances in vaccine policy. I’d say they were the right decisions, and the bets certainly did win, but things would be looking a lot different if one of the emergency-approved vaccines had shown major side effects, or if the one-jab-at-a-time approach had proved to be clearly inferior to following the tested procedures.
We were at the front of the queue, which is why we’re getting served first. Anyway, the EU don’t want the vaccine, it’s useless/dangerous apparently.
We could’ve all been ahead in the queue if the EU had done it our way
Ahead of whom?
Everyone, as we have been since 1765, if not before.
Where did you go to school?
The UK did not jump any queue. The EU is trying to hijack UK supplies in order to avoid the consequences of it’s own incompetence. Utterly shameless. Yawn away, but the truth is the truth. My contempt for the EU and its adherents grows by the day.
Tosh Rastmus, utter tosh and I rather suspect that you know that