Herr Barnier descends into histrionics

The EU got the negotiations disastrously wrong from the start. Their cause was crippled not by the UK but by the territorial in-fighting between the Parliament and the unelected officials of the Commission. Herr Verhofstadt, who would have loved nothing more than to have faced the hated Brits across the table himself, only consented to Herr Barnier taking this place if he was constrained not to depart from the EP's detailed instructions by a millimetre. And instead of keeping this crippling disability secret, Herr Verhofstadt rose to his hind feet and crowed it all over Europe.

The EU assumed of course that their usual Panzer tactics would work; first they ridicule, undermine and insult us, then wear us down with verbiage and papers, all the time proclaiming that only they have control of the agenda and the UK must obey like a recalcitrant schoolboy. Boy, how little they know us.

This week it was time for the UK to tell the king he was wearing no clothes. The Berlaymont bullies sat gobsmacked with hanging jaws as some young Treasury rasper with an Oxbridge double first completely demolished the legal basis of their money grab. Then we had to tell them to get serious about negotiating - that in effect Herr Verhofstadt must allow Herr Barnier some flexibility.

An irascible Herr Barnier, undermined and on the back-foot, descended into Gallo-German histrionics at the press conference; the UK was finished (untrue) we would be forced out of Europol (untrue) and our nation would sink 'neath the waves. I was only waiting for the poor little man to turn to David Davis and exclaim "Your mother was a Hamster and your father smelt of Elderberries!"

Vote Socialist - Get Fascist

There is a fascinating dialogue in the comments to the post below that highlights how history is re-written. It was during WWII, I suspect, that the US government realised that securing black commitment to the war effort was critical. The trope was then developed that the US government - in direct succession to Abe Lincoln's Union - was the manumitter of Southern slaves and the champion of freedom, and this was the reason the civil war had been fought. This is the version of history that has stuck. The alternative reality - that the war was about the Constitution, in which victory for the Union meant that local power and autonomy was made forever subservient to the central State - has been lost. The latter reality makes it personal, as the statues being pulled down are of men who fought for Localism, a particular passion of mine. It's easy to hate someone for supporting slavery, harder to condemn them for their support of Burke's Little Platoons.

And so to Lord Tebbit (one of the few life peers I am happy to acknowledge) and his gentle reminder in the Telegraph that Fascism sprung from the left. Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf were both proto-Nazis, as most Fabians were in those days, advocating extermination camps using gas to kill (but humanely, in the English way) the poor, the genetically wanting, the educationally subnormal and anyone else who threatened the racial purity of their Fabian paradise. The Lefty Swedes were still compulsorily ripping out the wombs and excising the testicles of the mentally sub-normal until 1975, thirty years after we hanged a number of Germans for doing the same thing. Please do read the good Lord's piece if you can. It's a reminder of the truth of the warning "Vote Socialist - Get Fascist"