While researching something else, I recently stumbled upon a smoking gun. Not a very big one, but smoking it was. And it had European Union written on it.
Eurosceptics are always saying that the EU is convenient for our ruling class in that it allows them to ram through stuff they could never get away with in political discourse on a national level, certainly not in a democracy. And that this is one of the main reasons the ruling class really wanted the EU. This is also what Europhiles would call a “conspiracy theory”. However, some such theories can be actually substantiated by facts. And here is one such fact (PDF), hiding in plain sight.
The object in question, the corpus delicti, is a speech given by one George Thomson, that’s the Rt Hon (Lab) George Thomson, in 1976. Later (after having joined the SDP) Baron Thomson of Monifeith. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on him. The speech addresses the “European Movement” in Brussels and is titled: “The Tindemans Report and the European Future”.
Thomson begins by openly admitting that he is a Fabian. As such, he says, he believes in “the inevitability of gradualism”, which, he claims, is also the right approach to “our complicated, multi-national Community”. He elaborates, using the tortoise, one of the symbols of the Fabians (the other is a wolf in sheep’s clothing [no joke]): “I sometimes think that the Community is like a tortoise: if you keep looking at it, it does not appear to move, but if you look away and then look back again, you will find that it has moved very perceptibly.”
He then goes on to talk a lot about the (then) new challenge of high unemployment rates, and that these can only be tackled by “painful effort as a Community”. Unfortunately, he says, some people still think that “a special exception should be made to allow them to do things their own national way”. Thomson spells out to these dissenters what they are obviously (to him) too thick to think of themselves: “They could use the Community as a protection to pass some of the blame for an unpopular action onto the long-suffering European Commission” (of which by then he is a well-paid member). He doesn’t think people would mind this kind of deception “if the results were right” and concludes this line of thought with the words:
“Most Governments have to do difficult things which they know are necessary and right. Indeed a rule of modern government appears to be that the more necessary a policy is the more unpopular it is. It can be a help if a Government can say that they have no alternative to a certain course of action if they are to keep to the rules of a Community where the benefits are accompanied by obligations.”
So now we know why trying to leave the EU is “not helpful”.
Finally, Thomson brushes off any thought of a looser inter-governmental grouping by claiming that Europe would then only be “a partial spectator in the great decisions that will be taken in the search for a new world order” – and that would never do, for these are “decisions on which living standards of our children depend”. We have to think of the children, you know.
At least one of his own children seems to have done well out of him being a member of the ruling class. That’s Caroline Morgan Thomson, also known as Lady Liddle, who was, according to Wikipedia, from March 2011 to September 2012 the BBC’s chief operating officer, after which she received a redundancy pay-off of £670,000. She is married to Labour Peer Roger Liddle, an advisor to Tony Blair while Blair was Prime Minister.
The outcome of the EU-referendum, when it finally comes, will depend mainly on whose side has the better propaganda. But also to a significant extent on whether, for the majority, the “results” of them being deceived are still “right”. It is by no means certain that the ruling class can still deliver the necessary level of deception – though they will certainly try.
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I have already written one reply – but it did not appear. I do not feel like typing it all again.
perhaps you should type your comments (which I often find valuble) into an editor and saving them. Then just copy and paste them.
Nobody here is preventing comments appearing, Paul. Sometimes WordPress is a bit iffy: I have suffered occasionally in the same way myself, and these days if something is sufficiently important I do it in “Word”, save it, and then put it on when I’m happy with it.
David T. – quit so.
I am terribly sorry David D. – I did not mean to imply that you (or anyone else) was preventing comments appearing, the fault is totally at my end (for example my telephone has not worked for more than a week – I rather doubt that Sean Gabb and the moral relativist minions of Imperial German Intelligence, still fighting the First World War for their Prussian masters in Berlin, are behind this, even my paranoia has some limits).
I will try a short comment…..
As the works of Christopher Booker (and others) have made clear, the European Union has done many things that most British politicians have never even thought of (let alone supported).
And this term “ruling class” is problematic any way – YES it has been used outside of a Marxist context, but it is so full of “economic interest” baggage that I am not sure the term is useful.
The organisation in 1976 that was used as a excuse to do what needed to be done was not the EEC (as it was then) it was the IMF.
British politicians could have cut (out of control) government spending themselves without the IMF – but, yes, “the IMF is making us do it” was a useful excuse in 1976.
As for not cutting government spending in 1976 – that would have meant total economic breakdown (taxes on productive activity by “the rich” were already around 90% – forcing wealthy people into putting their money into unproductive “investments” such as government debt).
In economic terms policy has been generally anti “the capitalists” since at least 1875 (when the first effort to put unions above the law was made – by Disraeli), taxes and so on have gone up and up.
What matters (in the end) is the climate of opinion created by the universities and so on – and even in the mid 19th century some leading intellectuals, such as J.S. Mill, were anti the “capitalists” – talking about a “distribution” problem that does not actually exist.
One reason that I in my youth (even I was young once) I objected to Mill being presented as the alternative to Karl Marx at university. Yes they were anti businessmen for different reasons – but both sets of reasons were false (and it is still the “anti” case – a debate between the two is, therefore, a rigged debate).
The anti business snobbery of the British “university class” may be traced back all the way to Plato – but Karl Marx and (sadly) J.S. Mill are no corrective to it.
If one really wants to see a “ruling class” – this is it.