If you're quoting the likes of Mencken after a night out, it obviously wasn't a good one. Did you not see a good example of your fellow Man?
No it really wasn’t. Got dragged to it by a mate who couldn’t scientifically drown his sorrows away from me. Though he paid for everything, including the cab fare home, I have a sneaking suspicion that we had gone Dutch. I haven't returned his calls all day long. (re ‘scientifically’, wouldn’t a psephologist say that the question in your poll is leading and leading towards a yes answer?)
But on a serious long note, this immigration thing still looms so large in the ongoing debate. I have misgivings about having a referendum at all and that we are having one because David Cameron is trying to keep his party from imploding; when he was in opposition in 2009, Cameron did a U-turn on his cast-iron guarantee to holding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty if he became a Prime Minister (that is, if the treaty was in the process of ratification when he became PM). This treaty created the post of a president and of a foreign minister of the European Union. It’s hard to not see this as the EU officially turning into a looser superstate.
Came 2010, David Cameron was in No.10 Downing Street but found himself sharing power with an ideologically pro-EU party so that the question of an EU referendum was shelved and kicked into the long grass. He did make some reassuring noises about having a referendum should there be any significant change, such as the one just mentioned, to the nature of the EU as well as there being any risk of further enlargement of the union (i.e. immigration). That was that, or so it would have seemed. But the morphine wore off and the poltergeist of referendum was now criminally vivacious, again, because of 2013 English local electoral haemorrhages and victories largely made elsewhere by UKIP. This is not to say that when it came to Europe, Cameron did not have his own swivel-eyed loons.
But further back in time, 2004 in particular, there was the Labour Party in power and it grossly underestimated the numbers of EU citizens, from the so-called A10 countries, who would immediately exercise their treaty right to come to Britain. They arrived in their hundreds of thousands because the Labour Government do not avail itself of the transitional restrictions on freedom of movement that the other prosperous European countries (Germany, Austria, France, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands etc) had put in place for fear of mass migration.
However, the transitional restrictions wisely placed by the other countries have practically created a situation where these new EU citizens could exercise their untrammelled freedom of movement by coming to Britain to work and live. (There were media reports that for a long period of time there were 17000 Polish people arriving each day in coaches at St Pancras International. Recently, “The Romanians Are Coming!” have been an apt xenophobic cry of alarm to start off the year 2014, like Channel 4 did, and even the usually balanced BBC was counting down the days to this expected immigration flood which, this time round, simply failed to materialise.) If this was a blunder, it was certainly made by the Labour government. Indeed, we could be excused to be cynical and question the belated sincerity and truthfulness of the New Labour figures, who have recently started publically admitting it was a mistake not to put in place the needed transitional restrictions. This is because some respectable critics on the Right have long been arguing that mass migration was intentional and wasn't a mistake. It was a hard-nosed political strategy for Labour to the end of socially engineering Britain.
(We can talk about that until the cows come home. We can also talk about a similar bottleneck situation vis-a-vis recent mass migration into Europe that was created by Germany unilaterally opening its doors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of people in 2015. The on route southern EU countries were waving the migrants through just like the absence of transitional restrictions did to Britain — I’m, of course, leaving out from this rather simplified analysis the undoubted impact of the recent global economic downturn on other new EU citizens coming to Britain. The cynics say that Germany has an aging population and its workforce needed replenishment of the sort which the Syrian refugees, fortuitously, have come to fit. Those educated probably middle class people who were resourceful enough to make it to Germany would likely to be employment-ready within two to three years of proper orientation as well as linguistic training. The humanitarian side to the German initiative to generously take in refugees is a given but, like any other mass acceptance of immigrants, it cannot be the only motivation that persuasively excludes demographic planning and reconstruction. No, it cannot even for a nation that is still in the grips of collective expiation like Germany.)
Going further, further back in time, could it really be that the people who avoided defeat in WW II — largely because of the reluctant and belated entrance of the US into the fight — have been told that they were the liberators of Europe? Their wartime leader might have been an architect of European trade and political unity (so much so that Churchill insisted on including Germany in the nascent project, a country without which, he opined, there couldn’t be a Europe) but that did not change, as far as these victors were concerned, the realities and the outcomes of the recent war.
We won the war, it seems to these people, because we ‘was’ good. If pressed, we would rather hold dearly to our principle of ‘first among equals’ instead of bothering too much about what would that practically mean to those whose countries were occupied by Germany then the Soviet (sic) less than a century ago. We’ve earned our special status alright! And left alone, we wouldn’t in our reserved politeness make a song and dance about it, my dear Sir, would we now?
Back to the future: May 2015, David Cameron unexpectedly won a small majority in the Commons that enabled him to form a Tory government and was immediately forced to deliver on his now long due EU referendum promise.
The EU immigration thing has up to this point been advanced by Ukippers shouting “500 million people can potentially come to work and live in Britain”. Now there was Germany’s decision to take in nearly a million people to heat up the immigration debate in Britain. Further, there are currently about three million Syrians in Turkey waiting to come to Europe; immigrants fleeing war and ISIS that Turkey is reported to have been utilising to hasten two strategic things for itself a) getting more financial support, and b) becoming a member of the EU. Indeed, some people would argue that Turkey was almost waving through these and other immigrants going to Europe on purpose to achieve its two strategic goals (in the same manner Putin is said to have been intensifying his bombing campaign — is it over now? — to inundate and overwhelm the EU with immigrants so that the EU plays a more constructive role about lifting the Crimea related international sanctions). Therefore, Turkey’s possible near-future accession to the EU is of moment to the EU immigration debate in Britain because Turkey’s population is 74 million which is larger than Britain’s.
Meanwhile if David Cameron was honest about his ability and serious about renegotiating Britain’s relationship with in the EU in Feb 2016, he could have offered an immediate referendum on the facts as they currently are in order to secure an easy Brexit. That done, he could then have gone to Brussels with democratic mandate from the word GO. If your spouse started talking to you through solicitors, then mate, they are serious about ending your marriage to them.
Having rejected the EU as it presently is in a non-binding referendum, Cameron's hand would be strengthened in the renegotiation to the point where if the EU is going to make Britain a deal then that is the only compelling way forward. (Nigel Farage, of all the foreigners, was in The Netherlands a few weeks ago, campaigning for the Dutch to reject the EU-Ukraine Partnership Deal. Not sure Farage had any influence over the Dutch people but they did vote to reject the deal for reasons which would be inappropriate to guess here. Farage thought that this Dutch referendum could have a knock-on effect in the same way the French and Dutch referenda in 2005, which resulted in rejecting the EU Constitution, had had and arguably eventuated in the Irish indefinitely postponing theirs. The Constitution was repackaged thereafter and it's been a spectacular sovereignty mission creep ever since.)
But Cameron did not do that and did not go into the negotiation from a position of strength. Cameron, as recently as four months ago, kept posturing and talking about treaty change and EU reforms to the effect of over promising what could realistically be achieved in the renegotiation.
In the leaflet the UK government sent ten days ago, there was no single reference to reducing EU immigration. Rather, the government suggests on its second page that one of the five points through which the UK has secured a
special status in the EU is “there will be tough new restrictions on access to our welfare system for new EU migrants”. The other relevant point is “we will keep our own border controls” which of course was not secured through the renegotiation process but was made explicit in it, this in itself has got nothing to do reducing EU immigration, which what the man and the woman on the street seem to (unrealistically) want when they talk about "the services are stretched, the NHS can't cope, the country's full".
I have focused on the political events pertaining to the EU immigration into Britain as though those political events could be isolated from their socio-economic dimensions. That is not reflective of the whole picture nor was it my intention when I began typing this post to widen its scope beyond politics (the post is from memory and isn’t fully fact checked). But based on our historical perception of Europe, it is easy to understand the difficulty the Home Secretary, Theresa May MP, was facing, on the Andrew Marr Show this morning, when she tried to say the unpalatable: that we in Britain cannot reduce our ties to the European Union to a trading partnership which at the one and same time excludes the free movement of labour. (Simples; kiss your teeth)
Soyons logiques! The Home Secretary was arguing for the triumph of logic over rhetoric. Get over yourselves, people. Get over this other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself, Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
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Updated as usual.
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