In 2016, in a full and free vote by the citizens of the UK, the majority, (slim as it was), voted to leave the EU and take back their sovereignty and assume total control of their own territories via their Parliament at Westminster.
It was an example of our cherished western democracy in action. As an Irishman, in the last several years I have democratically voted for the ‘other guy’ and been disappointed at how the majority voted instead. But I’m a democrat and as such, I must accept the will of the people and get on with it, whatever it brings.
That is why I am so fascinated by the UK today. Those who lost the election are now making every conceivable excuse as to why the will of the majority must be overturned. They appear to be agitating to move the UK away from democracy as a system of Government but they are hazy as to what wish to replace it. They seems to suggest that if they can overturn a democratic vote in favour of what the minority desires, then they are willing to carry on with the facade of democracy inside a wider EU.
More worrying still from an Irish perspective is the fact that the EU itself is backing the destroyers of democracy by making it nigh impossible for the UK to leave the club without fearsome retribution. I don’t support that as an Irish citizen but then I voted against this present Government’s election the last time out and now that same Government is at the forefront of making life hard for the UK majority. And of course, not one of the 550m Europeans voted for the Commissioners in Brussels.
I do find it strange in modern times that whenever an American Government decides to overthrow any elected Government anywhere else in the world, they position it as returning the target country to democracy and the EU bays its wild support in all of our names. For the American version of democracy, see Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine etc. None of that is democracy in action, it is pure fascism.
So what will they decide on in the UK? Will they choose to become a fascist nation or will they stick with their democratic decision and leave the EU? Time will tell but democracy is under threat and if the UK dumps it, what hope for Ireland?
Many in this country, and most in the UK, have no idea what the “backstop” actually is.
At its simplest, it involves re-locating a border, specifically the Eire/UK border. It is proposed that we try hard to think of an imaginary line in the Irish Sea and having solidified that thought, we must then regard it as the new border between the UK and the Rep. of Ireland. That’s what the backstop comes down to, an imaginary line in the sea.
It is all very fine in theory if you also imagine that six of the nine counties of Ulster just aren’t there, but they are and they are part of the UK, (The Good Friday Agreement says so). Therefore the backstop must involve either the UK ceding Northern Ireland to the EU or splitting the Union and allowing one member of it to remain in the EU while being a part of the UK at the same time. But then there is no BREXIT. Plan Z would be to tell Northern Ireland that they are on their own.
You can bet your ass that Arlene Frosty and her dull crew of ‘No-merchants’ won’t be ceded to anyone without blood on the streets first. They consider themselves to be more British than the Queen. In their mindset, the mainland is a continent to their immediate East called the UK so this EU-Europe thingy must be on the other side of Asia somewhere.
Down here the party line is, ‘there will be no hard border.’ In fact, Finance Minister Pascal Donohue was on Morning Ireland earlier and I nearly fell off my perch when I heard him say, “Dere will be no hard border on our border.” At this point it may be instructive to inform readers that, prior to the UK and Ireland joining the EU, neither party legally required a passport to enter the other’s sovereign territory. At that time, the early seventies, we had different currencies, different laws, different attitudes, different life’s experience and different Governments and yet we could travel freely between the two islands without formal ID. Effectively then, when we both joined the EU, nothing really changed between us.
So the British Government want out of the EU but without a hard border between the Eire & the UK. The Irish Government don’t care whether the British stay or leave but won’t accept a hard border. The EU would like the UK to stay but will try all it can to punish them for leaving. The EU also doesn’t want a hard border, hence the backstop that could only be patrolled by a Navy, but whose Navy? Meanwhile the UK itself appears to be split between those who want to leave and those who want to stay. A poster I used to have in the seventies just about sums it all up. It read, “Sometimes when you’re up to your bollocks in alligators, it’s hard to remember that the original idea was to drain the swamp.”
So May is heading back to Europe to re-negotiate because she doesn’t want a hard Irish border. The EU leaders she will meet don’t want a hard Irish border either but say that there can be no re-negotiation. Over here we are all shivering with economic fear as to what the outcome could turn out to be. Looking into my crystal ball today I see a future where at the eleventh hour, the EU Commissioners will send May back to London empty handed, leaving her and her Government with no option but to crash out of the EU. Varadkar & Co will jump up and down in Dublin bleating and moaning and saying it is unacceptable. Then Leo will be summoned for a come-to-Jesus meeting in Brussels and on his return, he will tell a perplexed Irish Nation that it was the best deal we could get and it could have been worse if Fianna Fail were in power.
In other words, business as usual, nothing to see here, suck it up and get on with it. It was ever so!
Among other things last evening, there was a mildly heated exchange in my company between and Englishman in favour of leaving the EU and an Irish woman promoting the Irish establishment’s party line on the issue.
This took place around a convivial dinner table in a Cork hotel and it informed well the confusion over each others positions. I have to admit that I do not understand everything about it, (who does?), but the Irish media are misleading us by claiming the British were lied to in order to get them to vote leave.
Certainly there were lies told by both sides during the run up to the vote but then consider the deluge of lies we were told before being forced by to vote on the Lisbon Treaty a second time. That Lisbon Treaty, as I wrote at the time, was the death knell for the Irish Constitution. It was an evil document which sneakily made an ignorant Irish Nation hand over its sovereignty to an unelected elite in Brussels in the guise of something else and we didn’t even get thirty pieces of silver in return.
It is my belief now that the British have realized this in their own circumstances and a majority of them chose to take their sovereignty back, hence Brexit. In that regard, I support the Brexiteers in their quest and I believe also that at some time in the future, we Irish will begin to grumble about leaving the EU but more about that anon.
The Irish woman above claimed that the British despise the immigrants and that was the core of the issue. In the seventies when I travelled first to the UK I left a 100% white Irish nation only to arrive in a very coloured London, much to my astonishment at that time. There were black policemen, bobbies with turbans instead of helmets, Pakistani shop owners, covered Arab women and the brown skins on many nations on the streets of the Capitol. Far from being anti-immigrant it seemed that the British welcomed them in by the ship load.
The accepted narrative here claims that the British en-masse are anti-European and that is patently untrue. It was De Gaulle who blocked their first application by Wilson to join and it took Ted Heath to finally get them accepted into the EEC. But like ourselves, they understood they were joining an ‘economic union.’ We didn’t vote to give up our Irish identity in order to be ruled from Brussels. That it has morphed into that now should make us all very nervous, not just the British.
From the outset, I always understood that joining Europe was a voluntary act and while membership brought responsibilities, departure if unhappy would also be voluntary. I mean, what kind of club would force a disgruntled member to remain in its club. Dissent from within is infectious. So for me, when the British decided democratically to leave then there should have been a simple two stage process. First would be the formal disengagement involving an army of civil servants from both sides. Once the terms of the severing of ties was agreed upon the second part of the process would plan the relationship the UK would have with the Union once outside it. What would be the social and economic rules of interaction between both parties?
I have written here and elsewhere that there has been a marked lack of generosity of spirit on the EU’s part in this wrangle. It would have been judicious at the beginning if the EU elite had simply said, “Look we understand you wish to leave and that is your right. But how about we have a trial separation for say, twenty years, after which we sit down again and discuss how it has worked out for both parties? We may discover that it has been a win-win for the EU & UK, in which case, carry on. Or we might also discover that difficulties, we didn’t anticipate twenty years before, had arisen in the interim and it would be in everyone’s best interests for the UK to re-join.” That approach would have been wise and sensible with no bridges burned on either side. Were the EU afraid of something they’re not telling us? I see no justifiable reason to make an enemy of the UK now by insisting the backstop is non-negotiable. In any negotiation, everything is negotiable right up to the signing of a legally binding agreement.
Back in 1945 among the ruins of Europe, Gen. George Marshall put in place a plan to rebuild Europe. Unlike our so-called bail-out recently, it was a generous and giving plan that didn’t involve loans to be repaid with interest. Instead it was a heartfelt positive flow of money and resources to get society and industry back on track in Europe after years of devastation. There was an upside for the Yanks in that they were the industrial engine of the world at that time and with the American monies received, the fledgling European Governments bought American equipment and ideas to build factories.
In among that, there is the little known story of the birth of the modern German motor industry. A British Captain was given charge of an area of Wolfsburg in 1945. His men came across a factory which used to make the cute beetle car for Hitler. This captain instructed his men to take some undamaged parts and make as many beetles as they could with them. They made thirteen and the captain then sent some of these back to the British army engineers in the UK to test the vehicles for suitability in the armed forces. In the weeks that followed, the largest ever post war order came for one single model of Volkswagen car and the savvy captain brought in German managers and engineers to get the plant in Wolfsburg up and going. Even more amazingly, the post-war British Government gave Volkswagen back to the Germans. It’s all so easily forgotten as the modern snowflakes chant their anti-British rhetoric.
Forgotten too is the sacrifice made by thousands of “Tommys” as they beached in Normandy for Operation Overlord only to be cut to pieces by withering German machine gun fire. They were fighting and dying to free France from fascism. They did so again in the Low Countries and all the way across Germany itself. A mere 73 years later an unelected European elite seeks to humiliate them for their audacity in seeking to leave the club they run exclusively for themselves.
The sin the Brits appear to have committed is their stated desire to be free to run their own country. That ladies and gentlemen is the foundation stone of true democracy.
Spotting a useful bandwagon from a mile away, our own Mary Robinson hopped on it with her own statement. “David Attenborough’s climate change speech ‘has echoed around the world,” the ex-Nodding President said. “We must take action with much more ambition to be on track for a carbon-neutral world. That’s why what David Attenborough said is important. The situation is potentially catastrophic, but it is doable. People need to take steps in their own lives. They need to get cross if governments are not doing enough,” she added. Undoubtedly she will soon be off again, jumping onto a huge four engined jet to fly half way around the world, (leaving a trail of CO2), to attend another lavish conference on man-made Global Warming.
Then I came across this Channel 4 documentary, by British television producer Martin Durkin, which argues against the virtually unchallenged consensus that global warming is man-made. A statement from the makers of this film asserts that the scientific theory of anthropogenic global warming could very well be “the biggest scam of modern times.” According to Martin Durkin the chief cause of climate change is not human activity but changes in radiation from the sun. Some have called The Great Global Warming Swindle the definitive retort to Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient Truth. Using a comprehensive range of evidence it’s claimed that warming over the past 300 years represents a natural recovery from a ‘little ice age’.
I urge all of my readers to take an hour out of their busy evening to see and hear the other side of the Climate Change story as presented by this film.
Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is a very common, naturally occurring molecule that contains two oxygen atoms and one carbon atom. In everyday conditions on Earth, carbon dioxide is a commonly occurring gas that is all around us. It is colourless, odourless, is naturally present in Earth’s atmosphere and is an important part of Earth’s carbon cycle. All humans and animals exhale carbon dioxide when they breathe, and plants absorb it during a process called photosynthesis in order to grow. It is not toxic, poses no great danger to man and indeed if it were in short supply or even absent, the planet would die. Carbon dioxide is essential to all of us.
The thoughtful scientists on the above Channel 4 documentary present the real facts about CO2 and this Earth. Firstly, the feared greenhouse gases represent only a tiny portion of all of the World’s gases. Then 95% of the feared greenhouse gases are simply evaporation from the oceans. The other 5% of greenhouse gases contain as little as 2% carbon dioxide. Of that little 2%, man-made CO2 is in the minority. Only .117% of atmospheric carbon dioxide is directly attributable to human technology. That’s less than one per cent of the existing CO2.
So, is there really a problem? To this unprofessional eye, the weather is unsettled these last few years and the seasons are less distinct. But weather is not climate. However, if as the film contends, man-made CO2 is far too small to have any effect on climate, then what could? To quote another source, “It is ten times as likely that atmospheric CO2 is coming from natural sources, namely the warming ocean surface, as it is likely that it is coming from anthropogenic sources.” The changes in CO2 track ocean surface temperature, not global carbon emissions. Burning fossil fuels is not increasing atmospheric CO2. Recovery from the Little Ice Age, driven by the sun, is causing the oceans to release CO2. It is temperature driving CO2 release, not the other way around. Just as it has always been. As the sun gets quiet in the next few years, sea surface temperature will begin to fall, and the rise in CO2 will cease. If the sun stays quiet for 30 or 40 years, ocean surface temperatures will fall far enough to reverse the CO2 rise, the globe will enter a new little ice age, and things will get really interesting.” It is a web site really worth visiting if Climate Change is of interest to you.
But back to the fiery nuclear ball in the sky. “Sunspots have all but vanished in recent years.” Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago — and it signaled a solar event known as a “Maunder Minimum,” along with the start of what we now call the “Little Ice Age.”Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, says it may be happening again. Overseeing a giant radio telescope he calls a “stethoscope for the sun,” Tapping says, if the pattern doesn’t change quickly, the earth is in for some very chilly weather.
If you look, there are plenty of climate sceptics, of which, here’s a selection:
The above is just a small sample of the alternative view.
At this point I will end this article but I will write the second part of it shortly as I believe it is important that this topic be debated even more. It is not sufficient to state, as the IPCC is doing, that the science is irrefutable. That is not how true science works. It is however, how dishonest politics works and with the amount of money poring into fighting climate change measured in Trillions, we’d need to be sure it is actually a real problem first.
