A photo from my Emma the artist. It doesn't all look like that, of course. This is one of the better bits.
Anyhow, a huge thank you to everybody who sent in their best wishes and otherwise made contact those six weeks ago, at a very trying time. I don't think I can express enough how much that meant to us, and how comforting it was to Mrs EU Referendum.
To be perfectly blunt, I did not expect to be here this Christmas. Yes, I know the odds were very much in my favour, but I'm the sort of guy who gets the Friday car, who gets the breakdown the day after a service, and who never wins lotteries. I actually wrote my own obituary for the blog. Mercifully, Peter deleted it before it appeared.
Six weeks down the line, with added pig, life looks and feels very different. Mrs EU Referendum and I celebrate a quiet Christmas together, just the two of us – and the blog, a family of thousands who have come to be part of our lives. I think, without the blog, life would feel different again, but less complete.
So, to you all, friends near and far, relatives (mostly far), and the thousands of blog readers, plus the smaller family of forum members, a very Merry Christmas.
Traditionally, one also wishes for a prosperous New Year, but after the politicians have done their worst, that is too much to hope for. Thus, we will content ourselves with wishing for an entertaining, interesting and, above all, healthy one for all EU Reffers, that select band of people who gave us hope and something extra to live for.
Normal grump will be resumed tomorrow, so don't get carried away.
COMMENT THREAD
It comes to something when Christmas is seen as an opportunity to bury bad news or (effectively) to obscure important policy shifts. It is somewhat worrying though, as Your Freedom and Ourspoints out, that there is an international dimension to this.
It seems that vigilance cannot be relaxed over Christmas. Even then our masters are up to no good.
COMMENT THREAD
It seems that vigilance cannot be relaxed over Christmas. Even then our masters are up to no good.
COMMENT THREAD
Christmas is a time of good will to all men but, clearly, not all women – and especially the ghastly Cathy Ashton. In fact though, her very existence is a benefit to the cause, a testament to the very nature of the nature of the "evil empire" that rules over us.
But, it seems – according to Bruno Waterfield - even the "evil empire" is sick to the back teeth of the woman – just supposing empires, evil or otherwise, have back teeth.
This is not news to us. For some time, there have been murmurings of discontent, but latterly divers foreign ministers have added their voices to the growing chorus of discontent. Strange though some people might think it, we don't actually give a rat's bottom. The "colleagues" can have her with our blessing – in a delicious inversion, their loss is our gain.
The only real problem is that the woman is paid such an obscene amount of money - £230,000 plus expenses, pensions and all the rest. But here there is one small advantage in being in the EU – we only have to pay about 12 percent of her total cost, the rest being shared between the other member states.
Of course, if we left the EU altogether, we would have to pay nothing at all to the woman's upkeep and the "colleagues" would have to bear the full burden of her costs, as well as having to put up with the woman. That, as Raedwald observed is a reason to be cheerful. More to the point, it is yet another reason why we must leave the EU.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
More about Hungary
I do apologize if the fate of this small and far-off country is beginning to bore readers. I promise to get on to some other EU member soon. However, if things go seriously belly-up in another one of the member states (and this time we shall see no resignations) that will have an effect on the EU, which, in turn, will have an effect on Britain. So, we had better be prepared.
At the time of the negotiations with the former Communist states of Eastern Europe, one of the things I wrote against it was that their political structures are quite fragile and economic problems that will almost inevitably follow their accession to the EU may well unbalance them. Is this what is happening in Hungary? The omens, as I said before, are not good.
Walter Russell Mead, not a man who can be accused of leftward leanings has an even stronger piece on his blog in which he wonders whether Europe is not approaching the situation of the thirties. Well, actually, no, as the situation today cannot be what it was in the thirties but the constant ratcheting of EU powers at the expense of any accountable national government together with severe economic problems is producing the result many of us predicted but one that was not supposed to happen under the benign gaze of Brussels: the growth of a more extreme and unpleasant form of nationalism.
Both Radio Free Europe and the BBC report arrests of opposition MPs who were protesting against the passage of constitutionally important laws in haste on the last day before Christmas. (A favourite ploy in many countries, one may add.)
At the time of the negotiations with the former Communist states of Eastern Europe, one of the things I wrote against it was that their political structures are quite fragile and economic problems that will almost inevitably follow their accession to the EU may well unbalance them. Is this what is happening in Hungary? The omens, as I said before, are not good.
Walter Russell Mead, not a man who can be accused of leftward leanings has an even stronger piece on his blog in which he wonders whether Europe is not approaching the situation of the thirties. Well, actually, no, as the situation today cannot be what it was in the thirties but the constant ratcheting of EU powers at the expense of any accountable national government together with severe economic problems is producing the result many of us predicted but one that was not supposed to happen under the benign gaze of Brussels: the growth of a more extreme and unpleasant form of nationalism.
Both Radio Free Europe and the BBC report arrests of opposition MPs who were protesting against the passage of constitutionally important laws in haste on the last day before Christmas. (A favourite ploy in many countries, one may add.)
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