Diary 2017
Unity
"This country is one great union of people and nations", so says our Prime Minister. I don't think she does irony. In her efforts to preserve the "union", to deny "control" to the Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, she uses language that is completely at odds with that used by her, and her fellow Brexiteers, about Europe. She believes the "union" is worth preserving. Why is that? "Stronger together", perhaps. There are many among us who believe much the same about the European Union.
37.4% voted to leave. 34.7% voted to remain. 27.9% expressed no view. So the leavers have it, and they have it on two grounds: less immigration, and less globalization. So, what's the grand plan; the master-strategy that will more than compensate for this decision? Apparently, we are to become an outward-looking, global-facing, trading nation. Hello? How do you think that will affect immigration and globalization? At least we'll have "control". Conrol is good; except when it comes to Scotland, or Wales or Cornwall or Northern Ireland. Then "control" must play second fiddle to the "great union".
Brexit is so so little, and it makes me feel ashamed. Winston Churchill, having witnessed, and participated in, the slaughter of young men in two world wars, called for a United States of Europe as the only way to dilute nationalism to the extent that it no longer resulted in war. The results of his efforts, and the efforts of like-minded people, have been spectacularly successful. Much the same can be said for the greatest union on Earth today: the United States of America. I don't see any intelligent Americans wanting to dismantle that.
When I walk in the park, I see young men and women with their babies, and their children, many speaking in European languages, and I feel so desperately sad for them and for their prospects, subject as they are to a decision made in answer to a facile question posed by an incompetent and weak Prime Minister, a man seduced by power but unable to rise to its responsibilities.
cix:enquire_within/63discussion:10354
That's what strikes the observer about this mass folly: that peculiar walking-zombie sense of fatalistic resignation that is now somehow supposed to have become the acceptable response to a casual, toss-of-the-coin-level vote that barely scraped through, which almost half the electorate don't want, for an ill-planned -- indeed no-plan -- action with an outcome of possibly catastrophic, certainly highly disruptive, certainly very costly, consequence. And nobody is supposed to raise a peep about it?
Diana's grandchild
I have heard that parents at Princess Charlotte's nursery have been complaining that the teachers will spend all their time on Charlotte and none on their own children. I wonder whether social media actually produces brain-dead people. If these parents really think that their child's teachers would reduce themselves to such a level of unprofessionalism, why on Earth do they send their children there?