David Mc Donagh

A factor in the pro-super-state vote in 1975 was the background of the press and mass media message, from about 1960 to ’75, that held a very pessimistic account of the UK and, by contrast, a high estimation of both France and especially Germany. This was certainly a factor in getting many to go for the EEC, as it then was called.

But since about 1990, the broad message of the mass media has been the euro was best dodged by the UK and that both France and Germany are not doing so well but the UK is, maybe, even doing a bit better, especially as it has dodged the euro as money. This tends to favour an out vote from the EU, as it is called today. I am not sure it decides the matter today but it seemed easy to expect a pro-super-state vote in the early 1970s. People felt it would just rescue the backward UK.

Your question answers itself, Sean. The nation will be free of the EU. That is what a free nation or country means. It is more nationalist than liberal, though.

I see nothing mad in this wish of the nationalists for national freedom.

Pristine liberals say the state is a mistake and a big super-state is a big warmongering mistake. Since the 1880s, statist neo-liberals have welcomed what they call the welfare state. Pristine liberals call that a misnomer. Free trade is trade free of the state and this liberalism has all round individual liberty at its core.

That the EU is about peace is as clearly false, even if not dishonest in every case, and as clearly false as the statist imperialist “Liberal” Joseph Chamberlain in saying that his tariff reform was about peace rather than about the British Empire being the top power in the world, and that is also the clear aim of the EU. It is an attempt at the statist ability to make successful war.

What has the Conservative Party to do with pristine liberalism? I will answer my own question: ever since Peel was won over by Cobden in 1846, it has had a few who have some sympathy with liberty in it but it remains statist and Tory; it remains the court party, no less.

I see no merit in this ruling class analysis from the religion of sociology began, named such by the backward Comte, nor in any system of supposed accountability, democratic or otherwise, of the state anyway. It all soon looks like bosh, to me, Sean. The less state the better, better none whatsoever: that is the pristine liberal message.

Metrication was well underway by 1970, by the bye.

The EU means the death of Britain as a nation. That is why the likes of Heseltine indulge in sheer absurdity when they say it is good for Britain, qua Britain, but they might be coherent if they were to only say it was good the people we now call British.

Sean thinks Marxism gave way to Political Correctness [PC] and it is true that one party of UK Bolshevism, not Marxism as a whole, did do that under the influence of Marcuse and Angela Davis in 1969, but only clearly within only the UK Communist Party [though maybe other groups were less clearly involved too] where the PC youth set up the Marxism Today magazine as against the traditional and older members of Morning Star paper.

But the, then, new magazine was a misnomer, as Sean suggests, for Bolshevism was dumped so it should have been called something like Culture Today. That would have been more apt.

The very idea of cultural Marxism looks utterly confused to me. PC is anti-Marxist. Marx as no more PC than was Winton Churchill or George Orwell despite many of the PC ideologues, like the late Christopher Hitchens, habitually thinking and repeatedly expressing his notions, that at least two of them just must be as PC as he was, for Hitchens simply did not know either Orwell or Marx as well as he seems to have supposed that he did. Even Germane Greer and Peter Tatchell seemed to have been deemed non-PC just lately. This attempted verbal reign of terror looks as if it will ebb by excluding even its leaders as the 1789 bloody one eventually chopped of Robespierre’s head.