Tuesday 29 January 2013

EU or not EU


The big political chat for the last couple of weeks is all about the Prime Minister’s in and out of the European Union speech.   Of course the Opposition said it was a terrible thing to talk about in that way.   Of course we all know that no matter what he had said the Opposition would have said it was a terrible thing, which makes a nonsense out of that attitude.    Non sense in the proper sense, of course, in that if Opposition NEVER agree with anything the Government says, it becomes meaningless.

What the politicians don’t seem to be aware of is that the vast majority of us outside the political world have no idea what the EU does, certainly not for this country, or why we ‘need’ to be in it at all, or why we went in to it in the first place.      I suspect it only exists to increase the number of jobs available to politicians, or am I being ingenuous?

Some might think it’s so that we can do business with Europe, and indeed we did vote for a Common Market so that all the countries of Europe could trade back and forth across borders.   I don’t know when we voted for anything else OR why we need anything else.

We trade with the rest of the world anyway, don’t we?   Nope, the more I think about it, it exists to keep politicians thinking they are doing something.

So I guess that IF I am going to vote for it, if ever that happens, they are going to tell me what good it does, what use it is… and at the moment that is going to take some doing.

As I write I am sitting in candlelight.  Romantic.   People in the old days must have had very good eyesight.   I have 14 candles around me and I am squinting.   We do take things for granted, don’t we?  Like electricity for example.

One night on a long drive home I focused on the number one purpose of government and came to the conclusion that way ahead of defence, education, and all that jazz, it came down to fresh water.   Without that absolutely everything else doesn’t exist.     We have plenty of that at the moment, a bit too much in fact, so the government must be doing a very good job in that department.   Forgive my laughter…

1 comment:

Pete Biro said...

In the dark eh? Time to buy an electric generator. We got one and have had to use it twice when our power went out.