Brexit and the European Union Revisited

 

This was my view on the proposed European Union from the beginning:

I am in favour of open borders, free and fair trade, cultural exchange and international cooperation; however, I am also strongly in favour of democracy, and the proposed European Union would not likely be compatible with democracy. More than three decades later, history has proven that concern to be well founded. The big banks and other big corporations rule the European Union, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank, and democracy has no place in it.

If democracy is important to you, then that, to me, must be the deciding factor. Freedom, constitutional rights and democracy are fundamental and non-negotiable. Hence, coming from a view of the libertarian democratic left, I have to favour an exit, not from European relations, of course, but from a fundamentally flawed, anti-democratic, and failed institution, which is the European Union.

Will Brexit (an exit from the EU) bring economic disaster? 

I have news for you: 

1. There are more important things than economics, such as freedom and democracy; 

and 

2. Economic cataclysm is coming fast for the world, for long-standing structural reasons, and more directly, because the ruling corporate-state oligarchy just took a wrecking ball to the global economy, by making the POLITICAL DECISION to lockdown the nations. (See Trends Journal, August 2020, along with my own essay, Sinking All Ships (But Our Own).) Being in or out of the European Union is likely to make very little difference in terms of economics – but it may be decisive in terms of whether a given nation succeeds in saving democracy and freedom from destruction by the new global corporate fascist empire.

JTR,
August 14, 2020

post-script:

A note on the two minute video clip of Tony Benn’s talk to Oxford (below), which is worth more than all the thousands and millions of articles and video footage of verbal diarrhea and leftist and rightist non-sense put together, because he succinctly gets to the heart of the matter in under two minutes:

I wasn’t aware that the venerable Tony Benn had voiced strong opposition to the EU, and on exactly the same grounds and for the same reasons as I did. But I am not surprised, since I seem to agree with him on just about everything.

He looks old and frail here, but his mind remains incomparably clearer than the talking heads in the media, or their parade of “experts”, or the imbeciles and political prostitutes who fill the government. Listen carefully. He makes impeccable sense.

But first, listen to Tony Benn on the history and importance of democracy, and the very real and aggressive attack on it today, in this very important BBC documentary, here: