Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum

The European Union has everything it wanted:

The ending of veto by a single member-state;
The Charter of Fundamental Rights;
A permanent President;
A Foreign Office and Minister for European Union relations with the rest of the world;
And, to all intents and purposes, a single identity.

The optouts inserted for itself by the United Kingdom affect only the UK, and possibly only England, and possibly not even England; that is for the courts to decide.

The main effect of the failure to impose a view of the European Union as a free trade and competition area of nation states was to consolidate a tightly-knit group intent on acting as a federal state both internally and externally.

That is theirs to choose, and they have the strong support of their electorates now that the defence of European interests against globalised competition has been asserted.

It will not be a choice the electorate here has made. Here we have chosen neither what is now settled, nor what the Labour regime tried to impose. Nor will we be allowed any expression of dissent to any of it, either in a general election, or in a more narrowly based referendum on our country's future.

European Union Redux

What will be signed-up to will be a simple statement of intent to move European Union governance into greater transparency and ordered simplification. The Charter of Fundamental Rights will be accepted by all but the United Kingdom, which will have an optout; this optout from the Charter is already agreed and the window dressing is the written-in explicit confirmation of the optout, which will be emphasized in the English press as standing out for the defence of the common law and the provisions for the 'war against terror'. The text of the Charter will be accessed by a single clause in the Treaties but not embodied there.

Much of the agreed text of the new Treaty will be consolidation and cleaning up of extant treaties - the Treaty on the European Union, and the Treaty on the establishing of the European Community; there will be two Supplementary Protocols by which innovations to these two treaties will be adopted and ratified together with the new Treaty - A Protocol on the Functioning of the Union and, A Protocol on the Developments of the Union's Policies in Order to Meet the Challenges of the XXIst Century. This last will provide the structural framework for innovations to be agreed at future IGCs (intergovernmental conferences).

So after the consolidation of the amendments introduced by the Protocols the European Union will be governed by two treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Expect all attention to be focused on the Charter optout and its explicit confirmation, and on the future policies of the EU. A Downing Street official spokesperson stated "we believe it is in the national interest of this country and the interests of Europe as a whole that we move on from discussing the constitution to practical matters.

"Europe has shown that when it talks about issues such as energy and energy security and climate change it can make a real difference. That's where the focus should be and therefore we need to agree a practical way of working together to get the maximum benefit out of European co-operation,".

Got it? You will, whether you like it or not.

Roman Summer

What European literary culture has offered in the creation of European morality was the subject of a 2 day conference at La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university.
Most of Europe’s ancient seats of learning contributed (an inquiry into what made the European spirit can only be investigated seriously in Rome in June). The Bible (and scriptures of some other major faiths) was taken as the frame in which the study was set; so was Homer.

As Ulysses went to the borders of the known universe, not just those of Europe, to encapsulate Ulysses’ human predicament we Europeans were advised to pursue “virtude e cognoscenza” “fatti non fummo per viver come bruti”. Il Contrapasso - that wonderful assertion that punishment should fit the crime - is such a satisfying contribution to our European culture (or it should be); certainly it was acclaimed as such when Benigni packed the piazza S.Croce for nights on end as he preached Dante to the Florentines, native and adopted, and held thousands in absorbed, breath- held silence as, at the end of each glorious evening, he read the best bits.

The brains powered on in Rome: Shakespeare, who gave us Doubt, took up more time than most, though any pause given to authoritarian socialist righteousness, the plague of the last 100 years and with us still in England, is welcome.

Bigotry met its end in the Dictionnaire philosophique, and Candide; here Europe arrived, laical and at the end of ipse dixit, enlightenment and reason re-take their place. On we galloped, Cervantes and idealism, Goethe, Kafka... but we had parted ways.

A group beckoned to me that others did not heed:

Cesare Beccaria whose Dei Delitti e delle Pene brought the rule of law, no torture, and no death penalty - all the most basic of civil rights and their guarantees we watch destroyed today, disgraced by their abolition.

Maynard Keynes - discoverer of the determinants of income and employment in capitalist societies, (of course Richard Kahn was feeding him potted Marx which is why, chewed and digested (though indigestible to most) it is used in keynesian understanding.

Beveridge - whose ideas and policies ended absolute poverty in Europe.

Gramsci, whose rational version of communism inspired or antagonised us all, whatever degraded version has reached us.

The prize for wrongest of all yet so influential goes to Freud. No women here? Ask him.

Trusties

Trust in political leaders has been so damaged in the last ten Labour years that the temptation to turn away from all who represent us in our social and political lives has to be resisted. Some politicians have earned and continue to deserve our attention.

William Hague, Conservative shadow Foreign Secretary, stands in that long line of Conservative politicians who can articulate the political will that transcends Party allegiance, except among the most bigotted and self-serving party crawlers.

David Cameron's speech today addresses the moribund and ugly socialist authoritarian collectivism embodied in the Labour government Executive and much of the constituent factions that make up Labour support. It does not address what most people in England are concerned about, (insofar as their concerns are political for we all have lives), the European Union Treaty for a Constitution for Europe, and England's involvement.

Quite rightly so, for the Conservatives regard relations with the European Union as the field of responsibility and competence of the Foreign Secretary; there is no 'one Party, one Leader' smack to Conservative governance, as Cameron underlines today. Nor is the Conservative Foreign Office portfolio assigned to a washed-up, conformist hack seeking to please the narrow focus of an even narrower Labour party faction that is definedly disloyal both to Party and to the electorate.

To hear Mr Hague in a considered and at length setting-out of Conservative understanding of past relations between the United Kingdom and the European Union , the current position and Conservative policy on it and, more than anything, a clear exposition of Conservative intentions and determinations towards the union of the United Kingdom and its relationship with the federal European state that is to be constituted this year, would be a contribution to our polity above Party, and beyond price.

The Economics of Happiness

That the poor are always with us is long acknowledged, and studied in the economics of relative poverty. The Nu-Speak of the economics of happiness merely allows yet more poseurs of the Labour party to clamber aboard the gravy train of nomenklatura profit while pretending to social concern and moral commitment in the Fabian style.

In truth there is a measure that would provide the greatest happiness of the greatest number in the socio-economic reality of England : an immediate and binding vote on the single issue of withdrawal from the European Union.

Referendums enjoy ambivalent status in our Constitution, even the savaged remnant that is left after the last 10 years, and it might well be safer to have a general election in which leaving the European Union immediately was a manifesto policy.

But if happiness is a serious criterion for policy pursuit, then more English people would be made instantly and considerably happier by casting their vote to leave, to leave now, and to restore English rule within England's borders than anything else in the world.