"There
was no real preparation for Brexit.
There is still no realistic preparation for it. The best that can be
done now may be to start at the beginning, spend two years, three years, more
if necessary finding out and telling people what exactly is the price they and
we would pay for doing business with the biggest hosting of trading and
military empires the world has ever seen. Rushing into that situation with
patriotic cries and waving flags will not do."
When
this remark was made (Blog January 17 th. January 2019) it was a long shot. But
like many another strange thing in the present Brexit upheaval, it became less
of a long shot because some people insisted on shifting the target to where they wanted it to
be.
Now
Mr Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, is talking about a delay with a rather open
end and even Kenneth Clarke has been
murmuring words like... "as long as it takes....", and some
British politicians have even suggested
that if they have to take part in European Parliament elections, well,
they might simply have to get elected
but not sit or take part in a parliament they believed should not control what
they don't want. Curious, because they still say they don't understand Irish
people, like Sinn Fein, getting elected to Westminster and not taking their seats because that parliament should
not control their policies! Political upheaval in London produces some understandings amid the chaos!
The
upheaval of people in British streets struggling to control the direction of their
government, members of parliament struggling inside the House of Commons to
take control of business away from the government, all of it a struggle to
define where power should lie in the
British political system, so many of the certainties of British
political life becoming uncertain - one could say that Mr Rees Mogg should
understand this shaking of the foundations of old institutions: ancient certainties of the old church have
also been shaken to the core in recent times.
Institutions
are not forever. Submitting to change
they get extensions of power on their
own terms through the centuries but even
in Buckingham Palace these days there
must be some ideas about how stability can lead to
stagnation, to demands for more reasonable government in which fresh energies can emerge from fresh minds.
We
could argue that the next logical step
in the development of modern democracy must be to have every political party in government. Is the
British party system past it? What is happening in Britain has been described
as a serious crisis: very well then, in
time of war it is normal to create a national government rather than a party
one. So, nothing strange about Mrs May and Mr Corbyn coming together to solve
problems rather than as rivals to create
them - after all, whoever may be responsible for present political failure or success, everyone is affected by
both of them. So why not a national co-operative government in Britain now
?
In
the far future students may well be studying the emergence of such a pattern of
government emerging out of the present
British chaos. And quite likely if the
BBC is still working it will be referring to "the British triumph of creating
such a step forward", even while
other nations may be moving
towards it because of reason ! There is no need for empires to crumble into
intellectual and material poverty but it most often happens that way. The worst
of them have crumbled from within, like the Roman one, while pledging
international co-operation, good order and goodwill. From the setting up of the
EEC until now London has never been happy with European co-operation except on
its own terms. The European Union will not last forever any more than the
European empires did. But we could say, "Let nature take its course, letting
it develop with reason and then evolve, not with old fashioned ideas of a
united states of Europe arming itself for
other wars but with new ideas you have to nourish from within, rather than let it stagnate with old ideas
that did not work even for yourselves".
No comments:
Post a Comment