A Vote to Stay in the European Union

by Glenn N. Holliman

For those who have been following recent post, we now come to Terry Field's statement of why the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union.  It is lengthy, deep, learned and worth a read. Bookmark the article if you need to do so.  As with a book, one may not chose to read the whole analysis at once.  But here we have a learned Englishman reluctantly but purposely choosing to vote to remain in the European Union. 

We invite comments from all, and extend an invitation to Terry's friend, David Lott, a founding member of the United Kingdom Independent Party to respond. - GNH

I Vote to Stay and Here is Why
by Terrance Field

The European Union now operates in a world beset with the following difficulties, any one of which would and does threaten stability and survival.   

Terry with his cooking and flowers in France                                                                             

A  The 'accession' of East European, mostly former communist states whose income levels are a small fraction of those previously enjoyed in the old western EU states.

B  The EU is now far less culturally or socially homogeneous than previously.

C  The financial and banking structure if the continent is in a state of partially-controlled 'collapse'.

D  Its cost base in the founder countries is generally noncompetitive internationally (i.e. too high), with the possible exception of Germany.

E  The collapse of societies in the states bordering and proximate to the Mediterranean - as well as those further a field in Asia Minor and sub-Saharan Africa is propelling enormous numbers of dispossessed, culturally and religiously alien people towards Europe.

F Climate change is causing the marked desertification of the Mediterranean basin. It is destabilising societies. This will get very much worse. The science is robust, and is not subject to rational rejection.

G  Europe has constructed and implemented a 'single currency' which has identified the uncompetitive southern states, isolated them from aid, and allowed their activities to be destroyed without either assistance or relief, since the required integration of budgetary sharing and financial transfers have been avoided-principally by Germany.

H Democratic deficit in Europe causes the weak south to be subject to severe deflation without ability of the population experiencing it to adequately express their rage and resentment, let alone require economic responses to ameliorate their condition. Their societies respond with the rise of crypto-fascist parties to garner the support of the desperate and the excluded.

I  The political dominance of France is now superseded by the (for the moment) complete and utter dominance of Germany, permanently neurotic over the stability of its currency as a result of its history.  

J Climate change causes subtle, but developing pressure on the resources and thus freedom of action of all states on earth; Europe being no exception.

K Competitive pressure from China, a massive low cost producer, and the United States, a high-cost, unconstrained capitalist high-technology and resource-rich competitor is intensifying.

L  Russia is a potentially disruptive autocratic armed state on Europe's borders.

M  For reasons of tiredness and lack-of-fear, NATO is withering on the vine.

N  For geopolitical reasons, the US 'pivot' to the Pacific feels like the abandonment of Britain by Rome in the 4th century. Then the Nordic tribes smelt blood and attacked. Now their place is taken by the Muslims. Europe and Britain are psychologically quite incapable of either recognising or dealing with this.

O  Lastly, the levels of debt held by British and all other Western states is potentially ruinous; The IMF calls the situation unsustainable, and supports the transfer of 10% of all major privately held capital to the state in order to re-establish the levels of debt as sustainable.

How do these forces work on Britain and Europe?

All countries face competitive pressures and resource deficiencies not experienced since the start of industrialisation 250 years ago. Some, like Britain, have rejected the route of egalitarian Statist social intervention to 'protect' the poor ( an arguable point) and have preferred to  accentuate individual liberty, and the primacy of private property. Britain has taken its steer from the US in this matter.  

As a general observation, Europe - particularly northern Europe, has embraced a greater degree of social and economic redistribution. This has included the suppression of the levels of unencumbered wealth found typically in both Britain and the United States, as well as in China and India.   Two in deep conversation

The migration of peoples into Western Europe from Eastern Europe and into Britain also, has been marked. In addition, the Eastern states of Europe, unencumbered by the debt now crippling Western European nations, have grown more rapidly in some regions; Poland is fizzing, and its Baltic coast is a booming region.

The pressure on local, constrained resources, particularly in Britain is acute; the country was already poorly served for houses, roads, railways, healthcare and other public utilities before the uncontrolled migration that began in earnest from Europe eighteen years ago.

This pressure on utilities is now felt more and more in other European states. Add to this the intentional destruction of Greece by the irresponsible power of the EU commissioners, and the gigantic migration from the Middle Eastern catastrophe, and social cohesion is at breaking point.

The Euro

With the creation of the Euro, the combined intellectual power of the economic institutes of the world and in particular the great university departments of economics found in the United States has been completely ignored in favour of French grandeur, with the unhappy acquiescence of Germany under Helmut Kohl, as the price of French agreement to German reunification. I am firmly of the opinion that the French are incapable of spelling the word 'economics', let alone applying its laws intelligently.

The Euro is a political construct. NOT an economic construct.

This is the view of the Bundeschanzelerin. Remember, she is an 'Ossie'. The integration of all major European economies needed to make it work is not acceptable in Britain, and will be tested in Europe in the autumn of 2016 as integration programs of taxation and budget sharing are proposed by the European Commission.

Europe is about to fully integrate its economies. That is unanticipated by the British people but has been dealt with in the negotiations by the British Prime Minister. No integration will include Britain without a vote on treaty change and taxation, and thus interest rate policy, is explicitly ruled out by the agreements made.

This will make the difference between 'inner' Europe, and 'outer' Europe stark. And 'outer' looks like now being Britain alone.

Britain, de-industrialised, and with a gigantic trade deficit, with little to export at any price the pound settles at (and if you doubt this look at export performance from 2008 to 2013) has to rely on the  financial economy of the 'city' to avoid collapse - and I do mean collapse.

There lies the dilemma. How to protect and improve upon its truly dire condition.

Add together personal debt and state debt, and it is by a fair margin the most severe in the whole developed world. There is massive asset value in real estate, but the matter of liquidity is the issue. 

Extreme consequences may result from political lack of confidence in Britain that can follow on adventurist political decisions. And it does not get more adventurist than Brexit.

Added to this, (Britain's national debt sits on a 'bed of nitro-glycerine' according to the ex head of PIMCO) Britain has lost its imperial and post-imperial advantage of the past two centuries - it has no longer the massive overseas net investment asset base that gave it a pleasant income and thus luxurious economic alternatives.  The 2007 / 8 crisis saw to that.

The response to the pressures from a fundamentally undemocratic, poorly-governed and dysfunctional Europe has been predictable.

UKIP has appeared. It has a charismatic leader, good with words, appearing to be agreeable, politically unconstrained, 'populist' and 'matey', offering the following, straightforward banner to march under:

It goes rather like this: Recover your sovereignty, trade with the world, trade with Europe but reject its pretensions at government, and recover the freedom of action that Britain has always prospered under. Control your borders, use the Channel for its historic purpose, and recover the control over inward migration the country has lost as it is integrated into European 'freedom of movement of peoples.

This seems attractive, so far as it goes, with very large numbers of English people, some Welsh, and very few Scots.

I say 'as far as it goes', since this is where my observations really become solely my own, subjective, and of course, clouded by emotion.  Remember, I said there is no absolute truth in this matter. But I am passionate about the value of my arguments, that I will  now outline.

I would firstly say that I dislike referenda. I love representative democracy, and dislike the idea and practice of direct 'decision making' by the population. I could write extensively on why I take this view, but now is not the time - simply to say that I greatly deplore the present event.

As to the decision to stay or leave, these, again in no particular order, are my observations and feelings.  I will bullet point for ease of summation.

In all my observations, I take a view that is not as short term as the arguments put on both sides. I also consider non-economic and non-sovereignty matters that I think to be more significant. Here goes then:

•  MIGRATION.

Europe has been constructed as a series of prisons for local populations since the Napoleonic wars; a Europe where travel across borders was highly constrained, and often simply prohibited. A regime of armed states facing each other with military force and constraints on freedom that became not only the accepted way of doing things, but even considered desirable by many. Of course the rich and powerful travelled then; now we have the inestimable pleasure that all citizens can do so.

That is a great achievement in our civilisation, not a problem.

I reject this Europe of prison bars as the default way to live. I yearn for a Europe of open borders that reintroduces the relaxed freedoms to engage as the free individual saw fit. The present arrangement goes some way towards this, but has allowed the transfer of people from poor to richer areas, with the competition for work, and the pressures on local societies that automatically results from such movements. The poverty of the post-communist east is thus seen as a problem for the prosperous west.

I take the view that there is a required period of adjustment by all members of this open-border society, such that incomes will rise in one part, and very probably fall in real terms in other parts. That is morally right.

The UKIP argument is essentially that this can be avoided, and the rich world can protect its conditions of life by simply excluding those poor competitor workers. This is an error. The intellectual power of the eastern accession states will propel a lower cost base continental Europe with a more dynamic economy. This is happening already, with the immense German investment in Poland, Czech, and Croatia. Leaving the European free movement of labour cuts Britain off from this immense competitive advantage.

At present Poles and East Europeans replete with degrees, doctorates and more come from a previous income level of $300 a month to assist the vital dynamism of the British economy. At the margin - and it is a significant margin - they displace ill-educated, unmotivated, often socially subsidised British so-called 'workers' because the British alternative is uncompetitive; not so clever, ill-educated, not multi-lingual, fundamentally unproductive. These people are the ones that UKIP targets and it flatters them - because it wants their votes. The future, however, is with societies and economics that are hard-nosed enough to use the cleverest, the most educated, the most driven. Open borders allow for this.

If Britain closes its borders, and builds barrier-protectionism against culturally very similar Europeans, it will give even more advantage to the continental competitors. Czech and Poland have always been some of the most sophisticated and advanced societies on earth. Just spend some time with these, in the main, delightful people, and you will realise what a massive loss it would be to cut off their ability to live, work, and enliven Britain. Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Sweden and others develops countless products in full collaboration with these societies, impossible without free transit.

France does not do so to anything like the same extent; the result is there for all to see.

The income difference between east and west Europe is immense, and imposes a strain, but the answers are not fairyland ones. Certainly there must be massive support payments to the rich states where these economic migrants move to, but it should be understood that Britain is a better place if a prosperous Pole who has a wife and children there and generates a fine income is adding to the society; they are focused, generally achieving as the local British are not, and I am relaxed at the idea of the idle, ill-educated, unmotivated, state-subsidised experiencing the generative experience of being made to suffer for their lazy choices.

We used to understand this. We need to understand it again.

Just as the influx of the intellectual cream of unwanted Germans and others transformed British culture and the depth of sophistication in the country during the period from the 1930s to the present, so we in Britain now have the delight of these new fine people.

Of course, not all are fine examples of humanity. But France did not hesitate in forcibly removing some thousands of identified east European criminals from within its borders quite recently. Britain should do the same. That it does not do so is an internal political and social failure. Nothing more.    

The garden and home in rural Normandy

I am aware that direct displacement of local labour with better labour from Europe is socially challenging, but no more so than wholesale deindustrialisation, or rapid technological change has and always will always be.

Britain is not and should not be a protected labour-camp for the inadequate. That, in effect, is what the Labour party attempted from 1945 to 1979; it was a catastrophe.

• FREE TRADE.

The Brexit group argues that Britain would do better, trade more profitably, recover lost relationships, escape European sclerotic slow growth and implied mediocrity by acting as a fully free and independent nation. This is a more difficult debating point, and hard to clarify, but I offer some observations.

In the 1970s, Britain was subject to capital starvation in all its main industries, and was incapable of competing, either at home or abroad. The strategic decision of the Thatcher government to open to global competition removed many local enterprises and replaced them with foreign owned, foreign directed activity.

Little of a 'national economy' remains. Continuity depends upon relative advantage. I suggest leaving would deliver a significant advantage to continental competitors for products shipped from Britain destined for integration in continental manufacture or final sale to European consumers.

As to inward investment, that depends upon a view of the relative merits of continental, British or emerging markets. Inward investment from Europe would decline, I suggest long term. Inward investment from China would be diverted to Eastern Europe after Brexit; US investment would further decline as the US further cemented its primary EMEA relationship with Germany, and through it, to Poland, Romania, Czech, Holland and Denmark.

I have seen the British East Midlands industry tranship to northern Italy after a changed political view of the desirability of manufacture in |Britain, and closeness to German customers. This would happen again on Brexit, but it would hit the new, creative industries severely. Expect to see clever British digital workers in anywhere from Europe to Malaysia to Bavaria  if the perspective shifts to a view that Britain is eccentrically unreliable. They and others will have to relocate.

I see no possibility that trading arrangements can be established for Brexit Britain that are more favourable than those forged via the EU. Certainly if TTIP is agreed between US and EU negotiators, Britain could only accept those, or worse terms for its own relatively tiny market.

The argument that WTO terms would suffice if all else fails comes from people who have never headed up design, manufacturing and distribution businesses trying to establish trade in Europe whilst competing against others who have deeper trading and technical standards agreements. An example; British manufacture fails even now in part because technical standards from the lowest standard available in any European country are accepted in British engineering and manufacture. In Spain, that country uses only the highest standards, usually the SDM from France, of the German TUV. The result is a manufacture and export performance in Spain that is markedly more successful proportionate to the size of the two economies, than is Britain's.

At best, Britain could replicate its present terms; it may buy some cheaper food from the old Commonwealth countries, but that would be as far as it goes.

Finally, the illusion about re-establishing 'free trade' needs to be debunked. For much of the imperial period, there was no such thing; Britain gained its greatest advantage from 'Imperial preference; this was the antithesis of free trade. It employed restricted access to the immense British merchant marine. Competitors were, in effect, frozen out. The enormous scale and reach of the Royal Navy stopped competitor lines from prospering. They were simply strangled.

As a Brit, I look back at this with pride and affection; it was brilliant commercial leverage, and it involved slight cost for massive gain.

ALL THAT HAS GONE. Now we would bob about on oceans dominated by massive powers, and would creep into ports begging for custom where we used to control the agenda.

The past is gone; we need to continue to face up to a changed present. Being a little country with 80% of the economy throughput to the rest of the world begs the question - what can we make, design, modify, 'add value' to and export to sustain prosperity? The record of the last eight years, and the appalling trade statistics tells us the answer to that.

• RECOVERY OF MANUFACTURE.

I have heard no real arguments from any quarter attempting to suggest that Brexit would result in more manufacture, more goods export success, than is now experienced, or could be expected in the future. I hear pious 'patriotic' hopes, but nothing more; I conclude that these dreams are just that.

THIS ILLUSTRATES A CENTRAL ARGUMENT I PROPOSE - that the dreadful failure of so much of the British state and the conditions of life suffered by its people is the result not of anything the European Union has done to Britain, but is the result of home-grown incompetence, arrogance, social division and misplaced ruthlessness.

• DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OVER THE FUTURE.

Here is a point where I find myself in large agreement with the UKIP /Brexit people.

At a personal level, being born in 1949 and living through the collapse of what I consider to be an exquisite and unmatched civilisation - being both a powerless participant and observer - has been and still is a pure agony. I am becoming old, and I pray that if the Lord Buddha is correct, then in my next incarnation, I experience no more such sadness.

Britain has had the most delightful democracy, the most beautiful legal system, the most pacific home society, the most generous inter-class transfer of power wealth and 'place' between 1750 and 1950. Contrast the horrors of Statist monarchical and absolutist Europe, to include its recent rough attempts at 'democracy'.

It was not the French experience that made the American experience possible; it was the British. 

Josephine and Terry after a dinner
in Tuscany....

I live in France, as most of you know. It is a crude arrangement of big state, little individual when the business of the creation of Law and its enforcement is considered.  If you doubt that, see how the gendarme talks to a Frenchman.

The Brussels 'parliament' is a comedic show of valueless nonsense. It initiates nothing, changes nothing, can veto nothing. It is the updated Soviet parliament under Stalin.

The 1936 constitution in bland form with croissants.

I will not hold back here - it is an instrument of autocratic power.

The Commission is an appointed nonsense of do-what-you-like placemen; except that some of the top people - like Barosso - have backgrounds of Maoism, and Marxism, or at the least, extreme socialism, big-state style. Well trained for how they actually behave.

That is the history of post-Hitler Europe - a tight, fundamentally undemocratic cabal of what really should be described as fascistic state-socialists. Individually weak, they bind together, control the organs of State power - for that is what the Commission wishes to develop - and force an Agenda that is put in place with NO regard to the desires of the peoples of Europe. They are currently at war with the chancelleries of Europe over who controls the steering wheel.

There is NO democracy there. And the horror strips all power and authority from national governments.

The Council of Ministers is a closed room where nasty deals are done, and then the local populations are lied to as to why the particular measures are needed.

All local parliaments MUST ratify ALL directives that come from this stench filled power-dealing.

The treatment of Greece and Italy, Spain and Portugal by the Commission and Germany is an obscenity that power, and a total lack of real democracy has facilitated.

SO, STAY OR GO???

If Britain has a deal to stop further integration, WHICH ITS PRIME MINISTER CLAIMS IT HAS, then there is an argument that Britain may establish a more rational politic with Germany, and remove the malign and insane influence of France. A thin hope, I admit, but there is NO such hope if Britain leaves. On this matter I am cynical and almost without hope. Germany seems joined to France by bonds of hate and terror. We do not get close to changing the course of these powers.

BUT if we leave, they will act together, powerfully against our interests.

That has been the Great Game of the last two and a half centuries for Britain - to counterbalance European alliances and survive accordingly. That has not changed.

SO - WE SHOULD STAY, and at least try to improve on a statist disaster.

• REFUGEE MIGRATION.

This is both an emotional and practical matter, and one which will grow hugely and grow in scale and threat.

The entire Mediterranean basin desertification (and here I must express NO sympathy with the non-arguments against the developing horror of climate change and consequent social and economic degradation) the flow of millions from the south and the Middle east and Asia Minor with turn to a flood of such scale as most people have never considered possible.

New desert conditions in Syria was a force for anarchy and war; added to the military nonsense, and the present disaster was unavoidable; but many other 'states' will experience similar collapse.

There are two choices here; binary, ruthless, unavoidable.

Europe either opens its borders to gigantic numbers of ill or nil-educated people, coming from alien and as we clearly see ( if we are honest with ourselves) fundamentally antipathetic and competing civilisations, or it stops it in its tracks. 

To date. the German chancellor has decided for us - open the borders, take literally millions, promote social meltdown and impose the policy on Britain as these hordes all gain European passports in five years time. German war guilt projected direct to the borders of ALL European states in five years time. Predictably, all states reacted, all borders closed, Schengen falls apart, scores by the Orthodox against the Muslim are settled. The European joy-fest resurfaces after the Nazi camps. Plus ca change.................

SO, why do I not agree that Britain should leave, close the borders, do its own thing???????

Europe will have to build impenetrable borders to stop the many tens of millions who will cross the Mediterranean. This may involve quarantining Greece, much of Italy, maybe some of southern France as the crisis deepens over the coming half-century. Certainly Spain will face open violent conflict across the straights of Gibraltar.

The Continent will either watch the hordes die close to its borders, or face internal collapse as its Judeo-Christian civilisation is replaced.

You may think I over-state the matter; you may prefer to see a 'compromise' solution. None exists.

Britain has the same problem. The hordes have already arrived from East Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and elsewhere. The pressure on entry cannot be resisted except by draconian controls. The open European borders will dissolve under the wave of religious violence, cultural dislocation, economic transfer from working Europeans to non-working migrants, and Britain will have to restrict transit rights to ALL including Europeans.

Leaving will not work. To trade with Europe, there will be an absolute requirement placed on Westminster by Brussels to accept free movement of labour.

If we stay in, we can define what 'free movement of labour' means. Mr Cameron has begun this; he should be much bolder. He should insist, and act accordingly. No Europeans would be in a position to object. Go to the French Italian border. It is like the Brandenburg gate in the Cold War already.

Britain needs to be more hard nosed with Europe; if that means I and people like me cannot any longer live in France in retirement, then so be it.

Close down all but corporate-sponsored movement if the situation requires.

The liberal, insulated, post-war dream of a controllable benign world is, in this part of the world, over. No reason for Britain to leave, however.

• IMPORTATION OF TERRORISM.

Of all the arguments, this one makes me smile the most. Britain has, more than any society on earth, transformed itself from a tight monoculture to a multicultural society since 1918, and rapidly since 1945. It is hard to find a society where more moral suasion, downright coercion, and manipulation of the truth has been applied by government and government-controlled media (BBC, etc)  to ensure social acceptance of this new reality.

In general, the newly cheek-by-jowl groups 'get on' reasonably well.

Trevor Phillips, then of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, bravely identified that it is not in truth a multi-racial or multi-cultural single society, but a society largely composed of social 'ghettos'. That is modified only trivially so far by the closer social integration of the intelligentsia and the professional classes, but the direction of travel is positive.

Where is the problem to be found?

Simple. Local Islam. Only a few days ago a major survey confirmed what all rational observers of the British scene well knew - that Muslims live remote and fundamentally different lives to the rest of the country. All too often their desires, values, prejudices, attitudes to women, violence, the home and work, all operate in stark contrast and often antipathetically to those of the other social, racial, religious and cultural components of the nation.

The Unites States high officials have openly stated that Britain remains a centre of potential 'Islamist' (nonsense word, but never mind) terrorism almost as potent as Pakistan.

Our security forces warn of many attempted atrocities thwarted, and warn of  the probability of a   home-grown super-attack that will kill enormous numbers. From the internal population, reinforced by those free to travel to and return from terror training camps.

The threat is local. It is not from Europe; and our migration security controls are advanced and capable of excluding all those identified as dangerous.

Only this week, an EU wide meta-data sharing system has been inaugurated to speed the transmission of interdiction data between European borders; the Brussels attacks will speed up integration enormously. Europe and Britain stand a better chance of controlling this together and acting together.

The luxury of separate security groups is gone after the Paris and Brussels attacks, if it ever existed.

SO, remain to minimise risk. A bitter logic, but there it is.

• BRITAIN IS DAMAGED BY EUROPE.

I reject this absolutely. We are the same stuff as Europeans. Before the wars, German was required by civilised British people; its civilisation important and needed by all. For that argument, I would include all of Europe, a super-concentration of civilisation that Britain only full engaged with after the Renaissance, and from which it cut itself off from during wars of religion and nationalism. 

I would like to see 'deepening' ( to use the tacky modern word) of cultural ties, recovery of religious closeness, healing of the division between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, with a relaxation over the coming century of relationships with Russia and the wonders of Russian intellectual, scientific and artistic life. Building walls and self-justified separateness will reverse this potential.

The historian AJP Taylor rightly identified Britain as being really quite like Russia. Britain can help Europe and Russia come together. If Britain leaves, power-hungry France and unsure Germany will career onwards with the present confrontational policy that Brussels has imposed on relations with The great Slavic civilisation. Putin is far from being the only sinner. 

My criticism here is not of Europe, it is rather of the gutless, headstrong, juvenile incompetence of British governments, commencing with the dangerous and dreadful Blair, in so mishandling the transition of the ex Soviet Union to participatory democracy. With, as ever, the enthusiastic support of the stupefyingly greedy and naive Western Super-power. (The US, for those of you who think I meant Ireland)

• LABOUR LAWS IMPOVERISH EUROPE, - AND BRITAIN CAN ESCAPE THEM BY BREXIT.

All is not as it seems. Firstly, productivity in a more expensive labour environment with working hour restrictions is higher than a labour market characterised as 'long-overtime' as is the case in Britain. Employers overcome the scarcity of labour by capitalising either machinery and equipment. France has higher productivity than Britain, compensating for labour time restrictions.

Ideally, labour should be more free in its relations with employment law, but little else. This will happen in Europe, and has happened in the main economy, Germany. It will travel further towards the Anglo Saxon work environment.  

France has NO choice here; it MUST and WILL change. France has played with lunatic socialism under the flaccid Hollande, who knowingly lied his way into the Elysee. He is a dead letter; his  policies are in rapid reverse. Modernity will overtake France. It hates its present condition, smarts under the boot of German economic authority, and a small push will effect great change, but it may be 'bloody'.

Below, Terry and friend David Lott, who is voting for a Brexit and has written several posts in this space, rest their eyes after lunch and another spirited conversation!

• THE WORLD IS GROWING, EUROPE IS NOT, WE CAN EAT THE APPLE, LEAVE THE SHRIVELED PRUNE BY BREXIT.

A simplistic fantasy. If Britain manages itself better in the future than it has between 1945 and the present, and given the depth of incompetence of British governments (except for the Blessed Margaret, and she was in effect only a sort of enema) and civil servants, this should be more-than possible, and Britain can trade where it will.  

Europe DOES NOT stop Britain selling to China; or India; or Brazil; or Africa. Germany does it. How? Super-integration, wise government, conservative values, superb intellectual and craft education, massive appropriate capital investment, integrated management and work forces; banks who engage long-term with their trading and manufacturing partners.

BRITISH EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN ONE OF INTERNAL ANARCHY IN MOST OF THESE KEY MATTERS.  That must change INTERNALLY.

MY suggestion for Britain - emulate modern European society, more equal experience, more fellowship, scrap the private - public health system divide, scrap the public-private educational divide, tax aggressively the very rich - they rot the social soul - assets as well, but preserve the currency by ending the Anglo-Saxon practice of permanently borrowing to finance the buying of votes of millions of allowed-to-be ill-educated and lazy people.

That is it for now.

Except for this. I would claim that I am European. A Christian European; full of the wonder of the civilisation; so thankful I can live my short little life in the knowledge of Mozart, BEETHOVEN, Kant, Brahms, Turner, Newton, Voltaire, so many.

The amazing shimmering beauty of this exquisite, but heartbreaking place.  (Right, the garden in Normandy)

From 1930 to 1945, there were 45,000 centres of murder on the continent; dispatching over 20,000,000 souls, additional to the slaughter of boys and very young men in uniform, and civilians buried in rubble. The new coming together of these for-so-long mutually murdering societies should last. Brexit acts against this. I oppose that.

SO:

STAY IN

BREXIT WILL (I EXPECT) FACILITATE, YET AGAIN, SOCIAL DIVISIONS, ECONOMIC FAILURE AND ABSURD DREAMS ENDING IN BITTER DISASTER. Brexiters include some very good people indeed; but I think them to be mistaken.

Terry Field

Somewhere in Europe.