Remain Campaign

The T–Word

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

David Cameron - George Osborne - EU Referendum - Brexit - European Union - Democracy

–

We are fast running out of measured words to describe the character and behaviour of the prime minister and his chancellor during this EU referendum campaign

There is one word which thinking Brexiteers will do almost anything to avoid using to describe an opponent, however much they may want to: the T-word. While sanctimonious, virtue-signalling EU apologists are often quite happy to sneer at eurosceptics and make baseless charges of xenophobia and racism (accusations which can do grave real-world reputational damage in the modern world), Brexiteers are generally much more reticent to to deploy their own nuclear word.

Why? Because it sounds hysterical. To use the word in seriousness or in anger suggests that we have lost our minds, that we are deliberately exaggerating, that we and our arguments should not be taken seriously. And so we suppress it. We sit on the T-word, lips clamped shut even as Remainers paint an offensively false picture of Britain as a weak an ineffectual nation, and even go as far as suggesting that other European nations would be right to “punish” us for daring to reject their vision of a common European state.

But it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid levelling the T-word at some – though by no means all – people on the Remain side. In fact, some people, through their abhorrent and irresponsible behaviour, seem to be going out of their way to live up to the word, to goad us into saying it. And sadly, senior members of the current government – including David Cameron and George Osborne – can now be included in that number.

As the Remain camp continues to slide in the polls, we have already seen David Cameron pledge – for no good reason at all – to take Britain out of the single market as well as the European Union in the event of a Leave vote, promising to implement the most irresponsible form of Brexit as a pure act of spite rather than through any democratic imperative (the referendum asks whether we want to leave or remain in the EU, not the EEA). And he followed that up with a shameful attempt to scare Britain’s pensioners.

But that is nothing compared to George Osborne’s indefensible decision to attempt to scare the British people into voting Remain by releasing a mocked-up “emergency budget”, detailing a catalogue of arbitrary and vindictive actions a future Conservative government would implausibly take to punish the British people for defying his will and voting to Leave the EU.

The BBC reports:

In the latest of a series of government warnings about the consequences of a vote to leave, Mr Osborne shared a stage with his Labour predecessor, Lord Darling, setting out £30bn of “illustrative” tax rises and spending cuts, including a 2p rise in the basic rate of income tax and a 3p rise in the higher rate.

They also said spending on the police, transport and local government could take a 5% cut and ring-fenced NHS budget could be “slashed”, along with education, defence and policing.

[..] Mr Cameron said “nobody wants to have an emergency Budget, nobody wants to have cuts in public services, nobody wants to have tax increases,” but he said the economic “crisis” that would follow a vote to leave could not be ignored.

“We can avoid all of this by voting Remain next week,” he told MPs.

This is blackmail, pure and simple. This is the prime minister of the United Kingdom threatening to inflict arbitrary and deliberate damage on the country in retaliation if we vote against him in the EU referendum.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is apoplectic:

George Osborne is disqualified from serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer for a single week longer.

Whatever his past contributions, his threat to push through draconian fiscal tightening in an emergency Brexit budget is economic madness, if not criminal incompetence.

Such action would leverage and compound the financial shock of Brexit, and would risk pushing the country into a depression. It violates the known tenets of macro-economics, whether you are Keynesian or not.

Alistair Darling, the former Labour Chancellor, has connived in this Gothic drama. He professes to be “much more worried now” than he was even during the white heat of the Lehman crisis and the collapse of the Western banking system in 2008.

So he should be. The emergency Budget that he endorses might well bring about disaster.  The policy response is the mirror image of what he himself did – wisely – during his own brief tenure through the Great Recession.

We all understand why George Osborne is toying with such pro-cyclical vandalism – or pretending to – for he is acting purely as as partisan for the Remain campaign. He has fatally mixed his roles. No head of the Treasury can behave in this fashion.

Absolutely. And the figures on which George Osborne has cooked up his Armageddon Budget are of course based on the most extreme and unlikely  Brexit scenarios, the Treasury having dropped the practical and popular interim EFTA/EEA option from its analysis because this Brexit method fails to bring about the kind of telegenic economic disaster the Remain campaign need for their propaganda.

But even if it were not in response to an incredibly unlikely and pessimistic set of economic assumptions, Osborne’s emergency budget would still be hugely irresponsible, as Evans-Pritchard points out:

This is a fiscal contraction of 1.7pc of GDP. It would hammer the economy just as it was reeling from the immediate trauma of a Brexit vote and the probable contagion effects across eurozone periphery, already visible in widening bond spreads.

It would come amid political chaos, before it was clear what the UK negotiating strategy is, or what the EU might do. It would be the worst possible moment to tighten.

The Treasury has already warned that the short-term shock of Brexit would slash output by 3.6pc, or 6pc with 820,000 job losses in its ‘severe’ scenario. The Chancellor now states he will reinforce this with austerity a l’outrance.

It is a formula for a self-feeding downward spiral, all too like the scorched-earth policies imposed on southern Europe during the debt crisis.

A funny time for George Osborne to finally discover fiscal conservatism, one might observe.

While many conservatives have rightly chafed at Osborne’s inability to get to grips with public spending, none but the flintiest ideologue would celebrate a significant, deliberate fiscal contraction at a time of political uncertainty and sensitivity. Osborne’s critics are right to castigate him for his profligacy with the International Development budget and unwillingness to tackle the real drivers of government spending (yes, including pensions), but fulfilling every single demand on the fiscal conservatives’ wish list in one spiteful go – and at the wrong moment – would be deliberate vandalism, pure and simple. And it shows that George Osborne is thinking politically at a time when Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer most needs to act like a statesman.

It is also astonishing that a chancellor who has been perfectly happy to falsely claim to be “paying down Britain’s debts” while actually still running a persistent budget deficit and adding greatly to the national debt should now propose to deal with any economic shock resulting from Brexit exclusively through fiscal tightening and not with increased short term borrowing. Again, this is only more evidence that Osborne has absolutely no core convictions or political philosophy of his own, save furthering his own power and thwarting his political enemies. Certainly the idea that the chancellor has somehow discovered strict fiscal conservatism now out of genuine principle is absolutely laughable.

But of course, this “emergency budget” is a political ruse, not a work of policy. For starters, in the event of a Leave vote, both the prime minister and his sorry chancellor of the exchequer will be sent packing from Downing Street back to their home constituencies almost immediately, to the sorrow of absolutely nobody. The Conservative Party will not tolerate their presence a moment longer. But more to the point, even George Osborne doesn’t believe his own apocalyptic predictions.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard points out:

There are quite enough dangers in Brexit already without adding more. What the Chancellor should do is the exact opposite: prepare an emergency stimulus of 1.7pc of GDP if need be,  targeted at critical infrastructure and strategic investment that pays for itself over time.

The money should be borrowed. As of today the Treasury can raise funds for five years at 0.66pc, for ten years at 1.12pc, and for thirty years at 1.94pc. These are lowest yields in our history, and they have been falling steeply over the last three weeks.  There is no sign yet that Brexit will trigger a ‘Gilts strike’ or a run on the British debt markets.

Mr Osborne could have taken advantage of these give-away rates to build up a war chest for any post-Brexit turmoil. He has not done so. Over the last three months the Government has raised just £36bn of its estimated needs of £131bn for this financial year. Either he is negligent, or he does not believe his own doom scenario.

[..] It takes a nuclear bomb or the Bubonic Plague to bankrupt a developed country that borrows in its own currency, has its own central bank, and has deep layers of wealth. Mr Osborne has not yet conjured either.

(Where I depart from Ambrose’s excellent response to George Osborne is his call for a national unity government drawn from all the parties in the event of a Leave vote, to guide us through the “turmoil”. To my mind, this could only make things worse, diluting the strategic direction of government by weighing it down with the statist, centralising baggage of the Green Party and SNP – though I concede that a unity government would help to dispel John McDonnell’s “Tory Brexit” line.)

So here we have a chancellor of the exchequer citing economic scenarios he does not believe (as evidenced by his lack of preparation for them) to produce a vengeful and counterproductive fictional budget in an attempt to frighten and bully the British people into abandoning their desire for democracy and self-government outside of the EU.

Brendan O’Neill’s response is best, condemning the Left’s complicity in this Cameron and Osborne-led campaign of intimidation:

Today in Kent, the establishment united, across party lines, to tell us that they will have no choice but to financially punish us if we vote to leave the EU. There will be severe budget cuts if you people vote for a Brexit, says Osborne. In short: we’ll hurt you, we’ll make your lives harder, we’ll inflict economic pain on you if you make the wrong political decision. How the left can line up behind this elite crusade that has now descended into blackmailing the poor and the plebs to support the EU “or else” is beyond me. The left has been dead for a long time, but its backing of the EU is the stake in its heart — after this it won’t even be able to pull off its zombie act.

So, back to that awkward T-word.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the crime of betraying one’s country”, or “the action of betraying someone or something”. If you were, say, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, that “someone or something” might reasonably include the British national interest and the wishes of the people to be represented and served honestly and honourably by their government.

David Cameron and George Osborne wish Britain to remain part of an ever-more tightly integrating, expressly political union whose ultimate intention is to merge the countries of Europe into a common state.

David Cameron promised to extensively renegotiate the terms of our membership of the European Union but came back with less than nothing – a reaffirmation of the status quo, contracted not with the EU but with current heads of government, whose successors are in no way beholden to honour what little was promised to Britain.

David Cameron, George Osborne and their allies in the Remain campaign have used every trick in the book to threaten, deceive and coerce the British people into voting to stay in the EU. They have abused the bully pulpit of government, ignored Electoral Commission recommendations, produced and distributed taxpayer-funded propaganda, peddled in subliminal messaging techniques to influence people to vote Remain, misrepresented what the European Union really is and misrepresented their opponents.

And they did all this while supposedly serving their country – Cameron and Osborne as prime minister and chancellor respectively, and many of their Remain allies as fellow MPs, all of whom also swore the parliamentary oath.

I have put off using the T-word on this blog, thus far – mostly because while I am but a mere blogger, I do still want to be taken seriously and have my ideas and opinions listened to rather than rejected as the rantings of a blind partisan.

I will again put off using the T-word today, even though there is no longer any doubt in my mind that the word is justified when used to describe specific people and elements of their conduct during this EU referendum campaign.

But the reckless behaviour of the prime minister and his chancellor of the exchequer now contravenes their fundamental duty to the people, not to mention the basic standards of human decency; even the most ardent Remain supporter will surely look back with shame on what is being done to tilt this referendum in their favour.

On this present trajectory, it may not be long before whole swathes of the British public (justifiably) begin openly using the T-word as an accusation levelled at the two most powerful political figures in Britain, as well as many of those who might plausibly replace them.

And if we reach that acute point, we will face an unprecedented crisis in this country.

 

European Union - United Kingdom - Britain - Flags

–

Top Image: The Sun

–

Support Semi-Partisan Politics with a one-time or recurring donation:

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

The European Union Does Not Promote The Neighbourliness Preached By Jesus

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Bishop Robert Innes - EU Referendum - Remain - Brexit - European Union - Christianity

–

As yet another bishop declares his support for keeping Britain in the EU, the last gasp strategy of the intellectually and morally defeated Remain campaign starts to become clear

More hand-wringing, wheedling declarations that Britain should sacrifice our own democracy and national interests in order to “save Europe from itself”, over at the Reimagining Europe blog.

Robert Innes, bishop of the Diocese in Europe writes:

At the heart of Jesus’ teaching is an ethic of neighbourliness. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, he says. And in the parable of the Good Samaritan he stretches the idea of the neighbour to include even those in close by regions with whom we have traditional rivalries.

Ah, so we are going to be treated to another rendition of that glib assertion that because “friendship” and “co-operation” sound like nice Christian things, it automatically follows that Britain should sacrifice our democracy and dissolve ourselves into the embryonic common European state.

This is based on the blinkered view that co-operation between friendly democracies is only possible when coordinated by a powerful supranational regional government, something which would come as a great surprise to Christians in Africa, Asia and the Americas, whose countries seem to be able to co-operate with one another on environmental, energy, economic, defence and intelligence matters without becoming vassals of a large regional organisation with slobbering aspirations of statehood.

Bishop Innes continues:

Being a good neighbour has costs. We may be expected to come to our neighbour’s aid. Frankly, at the moment Europe needs British help. The whole continent is struggling with migration. Debt and unemployment afflict the southern states. And these are generating populist sentiments which threaten us all. The European Institutions in Brussels have benefited from a good deal of British administrative and political expertise in the past. In order for them to work well and to promote the good of the whole continent, they need that expertise now. We have contributed democratic principles, a sense of humanity, tolerance and practical common sense over many decades. These are loved and valued by our European neighbours.

From where I sit, there is an awful lot riding on the Referendum Vote. It feels, from Brussels, like a vote that could determine not just the future of Britain but the future of the European continent, for decades to come. I have already posted my vote. There’s no secret that it was for ‘Remain’. Not everyone in my diocese will agree with me, and I respect that. But I hope that the remaining days of the campaign will be marked by high quality information and truly informed debate. I hope there will be a massive voting turnout. And, yes, I hope that Britain will stay in the European Union and help our whole continent find its way through difficult times and into a new future.

Having been comprehensively routed in the argument about democracy (though to be fair, the EU apologists, knowing their weak position, barely put up a fight) and seen the polls gradually turn towards Brexit as people tire of the scaremongering and pessimism of the Remain campaign, we seem to be moving into a new phase of the referendum.

It now seems to be the contention of some Remainers that the EU may well do us little or no good whatsoever, but that it is our duty to remain lashed to the mast nonetheless out of blind solidarity with our European allies. We saw Jonathan Freedland advancing just such a case in the Guardian this week, essentially arguing that British democracy is a small and trivial thing, a worthless trinket and a small price to pay to stop the squabbling countries of Europe from going at each others’ throats.

Of course, this is insidious nonsense. The European Union undermines democracy in all of its member states, not just Britain. That’s what it was designed to do – become an increasingly powerful supranational government of Europe by slowly and steadily accumulating more powers and hollowing out the democracy and decision-making competencies of the member states. And we see a growing antipathy toward the EU project across Europe, not just in Britain and not just in the traditionally eurosceptic countries, with France now holding a more unfavourable view of the EU than we do.

In this modern context, stubbornly voting to remain in the European Union in defiance of the damage it is doing to our democracies as well as the social and economic harm being wrought by the EU’s single currency and migration policy is the height of irresponsibility. If you see four friends stumbling drunk out of a bar and walking toward their parked car, you don’t hop in the back seat and go along for the ride, you beg them not to drive and call them a taxi instead. And so it is with the EU – there is no good reason why we should march in lockstep with the rest of the EU in a direction which can only lead to more voter apathy, civil unrest and socio-economic misery – least of all because a very superficial interpretation of Christian teaching suggests that it is the right-on, progressive thing to do.

Interestingly, Robert Innes’ article is currently unavailable at Reimagining Europe – perhaps he encountered hostility to his blinkered europhilia from members of his diocese, or perhaps even he realised the fatuous over-simplicity of his article.

But this is an argument which is coming up again and again, the Hail Mary pass of the Remain campaign – that the EU may well be terrible, but that somehow we owe it to the other member states to stick around until the bitter end. It is a weak argument from a campaign based entirely on weak arguments, and if the Remain camp continue to push this defeatist narrative it suggests that they really are in trouble.

 

Postscript: More on the Christian case for Brexit here, here, here, here and here.

 

European Union - United Kingdom - Britain - Flags

–

Top Image: Archbishop of Canterbury

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

 

David Cameron: Portrait Of A Deceitful Charlatan With No Redeeming Qualities

Samuel Hooper25 Comments

–

Apparently there is panic in Number 10 Downing Street and among the slavishly pro-EU establishment. Good. They have waged a contemptible, negative and deceitful campaign, and whether or not it prevails on June 23 the hearts, minds and consciences of all those involved richly deserve to be troubled

Having done everything but fill in all of the ballot papers himself to ensure a “Remain” vote on 23 June, at this point in the unevenly fought EU referendum campaign we might expect to see a bit of magnanimity or statesmanship from the prime minister as he coasts toward the closing stages.

But the polls have tightened unexpectedly as the British public rightly begin to suspect that the near-unanimous hysterical screeching from the establishment in favour of Remain sounds more like naked self-interest and wretched pessimism about Britain than a realistic warning about what might happen in the event of Brexit. And this has caused David Cameron – a notably weak strategist only capable of thinking one step ahead, unlike his gifted general election campaign manager – to panic, and start behaving in a most un-prime ministerial manner.

Three interventions in particular mark out the descent of David Cameron from oleaginous, confident salesman to the nation’s Bully in Chief – the impromptu rooftop press conference at which Cameron openly accused ministers in his own government of knowingly peddling falsehoods, the statement that Cameron would take Britain out of the single market in the event of a “Leave” vote despite leaving the EEA not being on the ballot paper, and his shameful attempts to bully and coerce Britain’s pensioners, effectively holding a gun to their heads and commanding them to vote Remain or see their pensions fall.

The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman says of Cameron’s panicked rooftop press conference:

David Cameron doesn’t do that many press conferences at all, despite promising in Opposition that he would hold a monthly one, and so when he summons hacks to the roof of a hotel at short notice, you know that there is a Crisis that the Prime Minister is taking Very Seriously indeed.

Cameron then proceeded to list six ‘complete untruths to the British people’ that the Leave campaign was guilty of producing. These were that the UK is liable to bail out eurozone countries, that our rebate is at risk, that we have given up our ability to veto EU treaties, that we have no ability to stop EU spending from going up, that we are powerless to stop Britain being forced into an EU army and that we would save £8bn if we left the EU.

Were these untruths really so heinous that he was forced to hold a press conference at short notice? Or was it, as one of the journalists sitting on the roof with the Prime Minister suggested, that the Leave campaign currently had the momentum and the debate was all about immigration, which damages Remain? Cameron replied:

‘Look, I was watching the news last night and it just came over to me so clearly that there is such a contrast between the weight of independent expert opinion that wishes our country well but is giving us an unvarnished view of the decision we could be taking, there’s a massive contrast between that – respected, independent experts warning us about lost jobs, about instability, about a smaller economy, about the effect on our country. The contrast between that and a series of assertions from the Leave campaign that just simply aren’t right…’

So the Crisis was that the Prime Minister had been watching the news last night.

Some archly dry humour there from Isabel Hardman. When The Spectator openly mocks a Conservative prime minister in this way, you know things are bad.

Cameron’s specific counterpoints are immaterial here – they were aimed at the ravings of the official Vote Leave campaign, which does not speak for all Brexiteers. But what is telling is the fact that David Cameron – a man who promised that he “ruled nothing out” in his renegotiation with the EU while actively colluding with business leaders to plan the eventual Remain campaign, and who then presented the empty gift bag given to him by Brussels as a deal which had fundamentally “reformed Europe” – is willing to go on live television and accuse his Brexit-supporting ministers of being liars.

More insidious than this, though, was the way that David Cameron pledged on the Andrew Marr show last weekend that in the event of a Leave vote he would seek to take Britain out of the single market, despite this being just one (incredibly sub-optimal) mode of Brexit, and the referendum question saying nothing at all about the single market or EEA.

Dr. Richard North of the eureferendum.com blog remarks on:

[..] an extraordinary interview on the Marr Show yesterday which had David Cameron pledging to take the UK out of the Single Market in the event of a Brexit vote. This was despite Andrew Marr suggested that we could stay in, with Cameron refusing to entertain the idea, “because the ‘leave’ campaign had specifically rejected that option”.

The segment of the interview started with Andrew Marr reminding the Prime Minister that he had promised to “carry out the wishes of the British people” if we vote to leave. The trouble is, Marr then said, is that “the wishes of the British people” is a rather indistinct thing – it’s a blunt “yes” or “no”.

Cameron responded by saying that if we vote to leave the Government would carry out the instructions of the British people. That, Marr averred, would put the Prime Minister in “a very strange position”. He’d be doing things like introducing an Australian-style points system that he didn’t believe in. As for, the Single Market, though, Marr said, “there is room for a Prime Minister to negotiate that”.

It was here that the role of Vote Leave came to the fore. “I think one of the most important moments in this campaign”, Cameron said, “was when the ‘out’ campaign said they wanted to leave the Single Market”. He continued: “They didn’t have to make that choice. They’ve made that choice. And what the British public will be voting for … would be to leave the EU and leave the Single Market”.

What the Prime Minister is doing, therefore, is using Vote Leave as a proxy for the entire British public. However, this is a small group of individuals with singular views, put in place by an unelected Electoral Commission to carry out the role of lead campaigner. This can’t in any way be taken to represent the will of even those who favour Brexit – much less the entire British population.

Dr. North is absolutely right to emphasise firmly that Vote Leave do not represent the ideas and wishes of all Brexiteers. They were not elected to represent us, and their most prominent figurehead (Boris Johnson) had not even decided which side he was going to support until a couple of months ago.

Just because the same idiots who stubbornly persist in peddling their “£350 million a week for the NHS” falsehood in the face of endless rebuttals and fact checks have airily decided that Britain should not Brexit to an interim state preserving single market access in no way precludes that option. As Richard North reminds us, the ballot paper asks whether we want to leave or remain in the European Union – nothing more and nothing less. We should know, we spent long enough haggling over the wording at the time.

All the evidence suggests that if Britain leaves the EU without securing an “off the shelf” deal to ensure continuity of access to the single market (while fully extricating us from political union, which is what the referendum is all about) there will be at least some negative short term economic consequences, as no new trade deals can possibly be negotiated in the two-year window provisioned in Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. By contrast, Brexiting to an interim EFTA/EEA arrangement (the so-called Norway Option) would maintain our full access to the single market in the short to medium term while we work on a better bespoke solution for Britain.

The attractiveness of the interim EFTA/EEA route is self-evident: Britain would immediately be free of ever-closer political union and democracy would be restored, while maintaining single market access (for which we would pay) would return our relationship with the EU to the state that people believed they were voting for in the 1975 referendum. Therefore, it is unsurprising that Remainers are desperate to slander and dismiss the option as unworkable – it represents dynamite which would obliterate their entire case for continuing to suffer the EU.

But while David Cameron’s eagerness to problematise the Norway Option is understandable politically, for the prime minister to flat-out state that he would not pursue this option and instead take Britain out of the single market (despite no mandate to do so from the electorate) is bordering on threatening self-harm. Any Brexit model not involving keeping interim access to the single market would inevitably come with higher risks and potential economic costs than adopting the Norway Option. By ruling it out, David Cameron is essentially threatening the electorate, saying that if we vote Leave he will pursue the most disruptive and costly form of Brexit within his power, purely as an act of spiteful vengeance.

Just stop and think about that for a moment. David Cameron has effectively told voters that if we vote to leave the European Union, he will sneer “your wish is my command” and then set about doing so in the most reckless and ill-considered manner possible, just to teach us a lesson. The prime minister of this country has just threatened  our own national interests on live television. Is that something which we should just blink and accept, writing it off as “fair play” in a hard fought referendum? I profoundly disagree. I think that it is contemptible behaviour, the kind of action which immediately disqualifies the perpetrator from holding further public office.

And if this still wasn’t enough, David Cameron then went from threatening the British people in general to attempting to scare Britain’s older voters in particular, with despicable threats that Brexit would automatically and inevitably lead to pension cuts.

Tim Stanley, rightly outraged, calls this what it is – blackmail:

Project Fear has turned into Project Frightened. Remain are losing ground in opinion polls and running scared. So what do they do? Go positive? Make a better, brighter case for the EU? No. They double-down and turn to blackmail.

That’s the only word that suits David Cameron’s threat that Brexit might lead to pensions being cut, made today in this newspaper. His logic is that Brexit will create a gap in the finances that will have to be filled somehow. The triple lock on pensions, guaranteeing rising incomes, would probably have to picked. Even if it were a moral necessity to help the aged, it would suddenly become unaffordable.

This is rubbish for two reasons. First, it’s based on the Government’s assumption that Brexit will lead to a collapse in trade that will wipe billions off GDP. The Treasury forecasts that this is based on are alarmist and absurd – they suggest a retraction worse than the Great Depression. Businessmen who actually deal with Europe every day, such as Sir James Dyson, report that they don’t see such a risk and are confident that Britain will continue to grow.

Second, Cameron suggests that the Government would have no choice but to cut pensions – as though the invisible hand of the free market would be clasped around its throat. Nonsense. It would face spending choices and, Cameron is telling us, it would choose to cut pensions. Much as the Government has chosen in the last few years to cut the highest rate of income tax on the rich or chosen to cut benefits for the poor. If Brexit did trigger a recession, the Government would once again have to do what it’s supposed to do and make budget decisions based upon its political preferences. I humbly suggest it chases the tax evaders and closes some loopholes before it bleeds pensioners dry.

And Stanley’s devastating conclusion:

The bottom line is this: the Prime Minister has moved from warning the British people to threatening them. And picking on the elderly – some of whom are legitimately worried about the future – is one of the lowest things you can do in politics.

At this point in the EU referendum campaign we are used to seeing the European Union portrayed by its cheerleaders and apologists as a controlling, abusive spouse that would rough us up without hesitation if we try to leave its cloying embrace. But now, the prime minister himself is behaving like an abusive spouse, essentially pushing Britain’s pensioners up against the wall with his hand on their throat, pointing to the kitchen knife on the counter and saying “I don’t want to do this, but you’ll leave me no choice if you cross me”.

What utterly despicable and unmanly behaviour from our prime minister. What debased, fearmongering garbage this man is capable of spewing in order to get his way in the EU referendum. David Cameron’s legacy as prime minister has long been in question, having governed for five years as part of an unmemorable centrist coalition and latterly as a party which blind observers might guess to be the work of Blue Labour, if not Blair’s New Labour. But now that legacy has crystallised – Cameron is the prime minister who betrayed conservatism and bullied his own people, preferring to serve the interests of the EU than those of his country.

David Cameron doesn’t have a conservative bone in his body. He doesn’t have an ideological bone of any kind, and from his craven behaviour in this referendum campaign it is quite clear that he lacks a backbone, too. And like a common school bully, he is willing to throw the full weight of his office and government around, breaking conventions and standards of common decency left, right and centre as he seeks to gain every inch of advantage.

Whether it is conducting a blatantly fraudulent “renegotiation” and presenting the status quo as shiny new baubles he secured from Brussels, calling the referendum implausibly early against the advice of the Electoral Commission, spending taxpayer money on a one-sided propaganda leaflet, sending out voting advice guides which subliminally encouraged people to vote Remain, winning over prominent Remain supporters with government jobs and official honours, cravenly failing to take part in a single proper televised debate, misrepresenting his opponents, attacking conscientious objectors to his slavish europhilia within the Conservative Party and isolating and targeting every possible voter group with customised attempts at scaremongering – now including this unsubtle warning to pensioners that he will spitefully lash out at them if they vote to Leave – in every way imaginable, David Cameron has debased himself and his office.

That’s why the prime minister’s days are numbered. At present he takes false courage from the fact that his normally sworn enemies in the Labour Party and on the generic Left are holding their fire in their shared desperation to keep Britain in the EU. But on June 24, Cameron will quickly realise that a good half of his own Conservative Party, together with everyone else in the country, will be straining at the leash to eject him from office, strip him of the bully pulpit he has so abused, and send him marching barefoot back to Witney in sackcloth and ashes.

And such is the amount of political capital and personal goodwill Cameron has squandered, barely a single person will come to his defence when the inevitable party leadership coup takes place. In the minds of many people – now including this blog – whether his successor is just as bad (i.e. Boris Johnson) is almost immaterial. The pleasure of seeing such an arrogant and dishonest man as David Cameron driven from power in disgrace, his reputation rightly in ruins, will be its own reward.

There is a legitimate and intellectually coherent case for Britain remaining in the European Union, but David Cameron has not made it. In fact, when it comes to the rarely heard (in this country) principled euro federalist case, its proponents all seem to have been abducted and held far away from any television studio so that they don’t open their mouths and drive thousands more people into the Brexit column.

Whether the prime minister is among their number is not known. It is possible that the man is catastrophically misguided and actually believes some of the nonsense he has spewed about securing a “better deal” for Britain, and that Britain could somehow prosper as a country inevitably on the margins of an ever more tightly integrating eurozone. Perhaps.

But either way he has not been honest with the British people. Worse than that, though, he treats the people with open contempt. Some politicians lie because they fear the people, but not so with Cameron. David Cameron lies because he despises the people, holds their intelligence in low regard, and is more than willing to alternately deceive, belittle and threaten the people in the service of his establishment masters and instincts.

This is a prime minister who, when given the choice between vociferously defending the national interest of his country against the EU elite or siding  with that same elite and bullying his own people into submission to their will, gladly chooses the latter course of action every single time.

There are few words strong enough to adequately describe the prime minister’s odious character and behaviour as revealed over the course of this EU referendum campaign – certainly none which I am willing to publish on this blog.

Which is why I am ending this piece here, in utter disgust at the conniving, arrogant, untrustworthy and weak approximation of a man presently in charge of our country – before I say something that I might later come to regret.

 

David Cameron Patriotism

European Union - United Kingdom - Britain - Flags

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

A Strong, Christian Case For The Nation State (And Against The European Union)

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Justin Welby - John Sentamu - Archbishops - Church of England - EU Referendum - European Union - Brexit - Remain

–

Here is an intellectually robust, theologically rooted argument in support of the nation state and against the European Union. Why are Christian EU apologists unable to produce a similarly heavyweight case of their own, instead of relying on woolly platitudes about ‘togetherness’ and ‘co-operation’?

The Reimagining Europe blog has just published a serious intellectual (and even theological) but highly readable case for the continuance of the nation state, and criticism of those who suggest that the age of supranational government is either logical, inevitable or a goal to which Christians should aspire.

While I do not agree with every single nuance of the argument put forward by Nigel Biggar (Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church college, Oxford) the overall thrust of his argument is quite unimpeachable. It certainly is rooted in a far deeper reading of scripture and theological analysis than the glib statements of support for the European Union and Remain campaign from Archbishops John Sentamu and Justin Welby.

Biggar begins:

Thirty years ago I was told by a senior Anglican clergyman that the nation-state was passé. I can’t remember why he thought as he did, but I do remember that his conviction was a fashionable one. Quite why it was fashionable isn’t clear to me now. The mid-1980s were too early for globalisation’s transfer of power from national governments to free global markets and transnational corporations to have become evident. Perhaps it was the recent entry of an economically ailing and politically strife-torn Britain into the arms of the European Economic Community that made the nation-state’s days look so numbered. And, of course, the Cold War, which would not thaw until 1989, made international blocs look like a monolithic fact of global political life.

Finally, someone raises the historical context of Britain’s entry into the EEC in their Christian argument about the EU referendum. Good. Nothing can be understood without understanding the history and purpose of the European Union, but also the circumstances which led Britain to join in the first place. For if those circumstances (global obsolescence and lack of a “role”, economic decline, industrial strife, the very real risk of being ejected from what Michael Moore might call the “Premier League” of nations) are no longer present, why on earth would we now wish to stay, given all of the EU’s manifold flaws and failings?

Biggar goes on to discuss differing national attitudes toward being a quasi-autonomous member of a larger supranational grouping:

But there’s another, historically deeper reason. This was graphically impressed upon me during a visit to last year’s exhibition at the British Museum, “Germany: Memories of a Nation”. (I’d strongly recommend the book, by the way.) One of the exhibits was a map of north-western Europe in the mid-18th century, on which were superimposed the coinages current in Germany and Britain at the time. In Britain, there was one coin; in Germany, about sixty. Britain was a unitary state; Germany a territory with a common language, but comprising dozens of different kingdoms and principalities.

And here’s where being both German and Roman Catholic comes into play. For the dozens of mini-states in mid-18th century Germany were the vestiges of the multinational, Catholic, Holy Roman Empire, which the Protestant Reformation had helped to destroy. For Roman Catholics, especially on the European continent, and especially in Germany, the notion of a federation of states, sharing a broadly common culture and subject to a transcendent, quasi-imperial authority seems a perfectly natural condition.

Not so for the English, who have inhabited a nation-state whose basic structures span a thousand years, and whose history has taught them to fear the concentration of continental power. It’s no accident, therefore, that one can find in Anglican thought a marked tendency, from F. D Maurice in the mid-19th century to Oliver O’Donovan now, to affirm the existence of a plurality of independent nations, whose external relations are governed by international law rather than a supranational state.

Quite so. The lived experience of Britons, and our national history, is simply too different to reconcile with that of continental Europe under the umbrella of an overarching set of political institutions. In some areas of Europe, particularly the disputed regions which have changed back forth between countries over centuries (think Alsace-Lorraine), people have a history of maintaining a cohesive identity almost separate to whichever nation happened to claim their territory at the time. There is no similar history in Britain (though one could argue that the experience of the non-England home nations within the UK comes closest).

The upshot is that there is precious little in our folklore, literature, art or indeed politics which well equips us to carry on functioning happily no matter which foreign king makes the key decisions, or from which city they may do so. We are not built for supranational rule – despite ourselves having presided over an empire which did exactly that, we have not been on the receiving end in a thousand years.

Biggar then gets biblical, something which too few of the most prominent Christian apologists for the European Union have been willing to do:

Christians tend to view the nation-state and so the prospect of a European federation differently, according to whether they are Roman Catholic or Protestant, and according to their historical experience. All Christians, however, are accountable to the Bible. What does it have to say about these matters?

On the one hand, the New Testament makes quite clear that a Christian’s affection and loyalty have to go beyond the nation. They have to transcend it. Primarily, they have to attach themselves to God and to His coming Kingdom or rule. This we read in the third chapter of the Epistle to the Philippians, where St Paul, having identified himself strongly with the Jewish nation—“a Hebrew of the Hebrews”—then firmly subordinates his Jewish identity to his loyalty to God in Christ:

“But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ…. [O]ur citizenship”, he tells the Christians at Philippi, “is in heaven” (vv. 7-9, 20).

Taken at face value, it would seem that Paul is saying that Christian identity must obliterate and completely replace national identity. But Paul, I think, is speaking hyperbolically here; he’s exaggerating. In fact, he never entirely repudiated his Jewish identity, but rather sought to understand how his new-found loyalty to God in Christ could actually fulfil his original national loyalty.

Biggar is right to suggest that St Paul’s injunction to completely erase national identity is a rhetorical exaggeration. And it is certainly the case that if British Christians were indeed called to renounce their Britishness, there is absolutely no reason why they should then take up a European identity – if any passing allegiance to country is wrong, then allegiance to a supranational body which is actively trying to become a country in its own right is just as wrong.

As Jesus Himself said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). While we are indeed all brothers and sisters in Christ, it is made very clear to us that our common citizenship is at an embryonic stage in this temporal world, represented by the global Church, and that the nation to which we shall all one day belong is not one of Earth.

Biggar goes on to concede the transitory nature of nation states:

Against such idolatrous nationalism, Christians must refuse the claim that nations have an eternal destiny, and that their survival is an absolute imperative. Nations are in fact contingent, evolving, and transitory phenomena. They come and they go. The United Kingdom did not exist before 1707 (and could have ceased to exist this year, had the Yes campaign won the Scottish independence referendum.) The United States could have ceased to exist in the early 1860s. Czechoslovakia did cease to exist in 1993.

So a Christian cannot be a Romantic nationalist, idolatrously attributing an absolute value to any nation. That’s one part of the truth.

With this important counterpoint:

But there is another part. This is alluded to by St Paul’s continuing identification with the Jewish people. And it’s made explicit in the Old Testament, where the prophet Jeremiah addresses the Jews, who had been carried off into exile in Babylonia, after the sacking of Jerusalem in the year 586BC. This is what he says:

“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the welfare of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper (vv. 4-7).”

Though they are citizens of another country, though they are currently exiles in Babylon, the people of God should nevertheless “seek the welfare of the city”.

Why is this? The answer lies in our created nature as human beings. We are finite, not infinite; creatures, not gods. We come into being and grow up in a particular time, and if not in one particular place and community, then in a finite number of them. We are normally inducted into particular forms of social life by our family and by other institutions—schools, churches, clubs, workplaces, political parties, public assemblies, laws. These institutions and their customs mediate and embody a certain grasp of the several universal forms of human prosperity or flourishing—that is to say, the several basic human goods—that are given in and with the created nature of human being. It is natural, therefore, that we should feel special affection for, loyalty toward, and gratitude to those communities, customs, and institutions that have benefited us by inducting us into human goods; and, since beneficiaries ought to be grateful to benefactors, it is right that we should.

This is true – we do indeed feel special affection and loyalty toward communities, customs and institutions which give us utility. But we should be wary of where this particular strand of thought may lead us. For as we know, the European Union is particularly adept at “purchasing loyalty” by using funds raised from nation state taxpayers and sent to Brussels as EU membership fees to then bribe national citizens with their own money in the form of development spending or sponsorship of various arts and community projects.

Pete North warns about this very phenomenon with this brilliant observation:

The founding fathers were savvy in their design of le grande project. They always knew it could never be done all at once because the central vision would never secure a mandate. Integration by deception has always been the modus operandi. It salami slices powers little by little, so gradually that few ever notice. And you’d never see it unless you know what the game plan is. They were long term thinkers. They knew it would take a generation or so to advance their agenda and they had a roadmap to do it.

It has always used funding of local projects to manufacture consent. It’s why you’ll find EU logos emblazoned on any nature reserve or community hall or obscure museum out in the shires, to convince the plebs that their benevolent EU guardians cared more for them than the London government. It is why it funds universities too. Every strata of civil society has an injection of EU cash. Education, NGOs, you name it. And it works.

[..] The founding fathers always knew a day would come where the legitimacy of the EU would be questioned. And now you see how well their pernicious scheme worked, with the entirely of the civic establishment coming out in favour of remain. They have made idle supplicants of our institutions, robbing them of their vitality, curiosity and dynamism.

While Biggar is absolutely correct to make his point, defenders of the nation state must be careful that this is not then used as justification by EU apologists for the behaviour and existence of the EU – a kind of retroactive justification for unwanted supranational political union based on the wheedling claim that people like it when Brussels gives them back their own money.

Biggar’s conclusion is a resounding rejection of pessimism about the nation state and the ignorant embrace of the EU by many in leadership positions in the church, based only on the woolliest of Christian thinking (my emphasis in bold):

Of course, institutions at a national level are not the only ones that enable us to flourish as human beings, but they do remain among them; and they are still the most important. This is true, notwithstanding the easy illusion of global identity that today’s social media create. While international institutions such as the United Nations have developed since the Second World War, they haven’t replaced nation-states and don’t seem likely to do so any time soon. Indeed, the UN only has as much power as nation-states choose to give it. So the nation-state is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and it continues to have great power to shape the lives of individual human beings. Insofar as it has shaped our lives for the better, helping us to prosper, we owe it our gratitude and loyalty; insofar as it has mis-shaped our lives (or other people’s) for the worse, we owe it our commitment to reform. Either way, we owe it our attention and our care.

So, in sum, as I see it, the Bible teaches on the one hand that no nation-state deserves absolute loyalty. Every state is subject to the universal laws of God, of which it may fall foul and deserve criticism. On the other hand, Scripture implies that nation-states can, and should, and often do furnish the structures necessary for human flourishing. They cause us to prosper. Therefore, they deserve our loyal, if sometimes critical, care.

[..] In the age of global capitalism, they are less powerful than they used to be. And they have always been bound, more or less, to each other by need, by treaty, and by law. Nevertheless, nation-states remain the fundamental units in the international order, and the day when they will be superseded by a global state is nowhere in sight.

Nation-states are not in fact passé, and the Bible doesn’t tell us that they should be. What’s more, my German Catholic friend really shouldn’t argue for Britain’s remaining in the European Union on the ground that the age of the nation-state is over. Because, of course, a federal EU would be nothing other than a larger state, serving the newly self-conscious nation of Europeans, and able to hold its own against the United States on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other.

There may well be good reasons for Britain to remain in the E.U. But if that is so, the unchristian nature, or the obsolescence, of the nation-state is not one of them.

An intellectually rousing piece with a resoundingly clear conclusion – that the nation state, for all its flaws, has been the underwriter of our most fundamental freedoms and liberties for too long to carelessly cast it aside in the blinkered rush toward supranationalism.

Those with senior leadership positions within the church – I’m thinking here particularly of Archbishops John Sentamu and Justin Welby of the Church of England – are too intelligent not to know the history, purpose and inevitable future trajectory of the EU. Unlike the average man on the street, we need not extend to them the charitable assumption that they are simply ignorant on the matter – after all, our state church is about as deeply embedded in the British establishment as it is possible to be.

Therefore, when the likes of Justin Welby or John Sentamu argue that Britain should vote to remain in the EU in the coming referendum, they do so from a clear base of knowledge that this would mean our continued participation in a project whose ultimate direction has never wavered – the creation of a common European state. This means that they either want Britain to be part of this reckless European endeavour (though they are too dishonest to admit as much, perhaps believing it is their duty to mislead their congregations, who they consider too stupid to appreciate the necessity of political union), or they think that Britain can somehow flourish as a kind of “associate member” on the margins of an ever-tightening political union of the eurozone countries, in which our existing influence would be greatly diminished.

If it is the former, and the Archbishops are closet euro federalists who dare not declare their ultimate goal in public, then this is a truly reprehensible way for them to behave, advocating as they do a wishy-washy, hand-wringing argument for Remain based on economic fears rather than making their true political intentions clear. And if it is the latter, and they have convinced themselves that remaining on the margins of a steadily integrating European Union can do anything but marginalise us and diminish our presence on the world stage then their political judgement is bordering on the catastrophic – and only reinforces the case that the Church of England should be fully disestablished and severed from its anachronistic, unjustifiable constitutional role in the United Kingdom.

But here we have it – a muscular Christian case in support of the nation state, and implicitly against the European Union. Will we ever hear the equivalent pro-EU Christian case articulated so eloquently, or at such length? We have certainly seen nothing to date. In fact, the further up the church hierarchy the Christian EU apologists are found, the weaker and more insubstantial their arguments generally become.

I recently had an exchange on Twitter with Nick Baines, the Anglican Bishop of Leeds, in which I questioned his description of the Leave campaign as “insular” and asked when we might expect a substantive Christian case in favour of the EU:

Bishop Nick Baines - Sam Hooper - EU Referendum - Brexit - Christian case for EU

Bishop Baines promised just such an article, but none has yet been forthcoming. Indeed, a clear, unambiguous and unapologetic Christian case in favour of the European Union and a Remain vote in the EU referendum can scarcely be heard, despite the weight of establishment Christianity coming down on the side of remaining in the EU.

This is untenable. If the bishops are to retain any kind of temporal authority – at least in my eyes – it is not enough to make wishy-washy statements vaguely supportive of the Remain campaign without any intellectual or theological legwork to back them up. This reeks of confirmation bias – of bishops, comfortably ensconced in the establishment, making up their minds that the EU is a good thing in advance, and then cherry picking facts to support their existing viewpoint.

A common Christian complaint is that our religion is being increasingly forced from the public square in this new secular age. And it is partly true – freedom of speech and religious expression are sometimes outrageously curtailed in this country. But participation in the public square comes with a price: if one wants to be heard and taken seriously, one must say sensible things and be prepared to back them up with a solid argument.

At present, too many bishops of the church are willing to sell out the public square and everything else in this country to Brussels, and do so without offering a sound argument for remaining in the European Union based on our knowledge of the nature, purpose and direction of the EU. The bishops believe that a sprinkling of glib words about “togetherness” and “co-operation”, mixed with some hand-wringing concerns about the short term economic impact of Brexit taken straight from the Remain camp’s playbook, amount to a sufficient case. But they do not.

Ideally, the bishops should come down unanimously on the right side of this issue. But since that is not going to happen, they should at least participate in the debate with a shred of honour. And if they arrogantly proceed with their current approach, preaching the Remain argument on the flimsiest of pretexts, then they should not be surprised if they cause the gates to the public square to be permanently locked to Christians.

And what a dismal legacy that will be.

 

Postscript: More on the Christian case for Brexit here, here, here and here.

 

European Union - United Kingdom - Britain - Flags

–

Top Image: New Statesman

–

Support Semi-Partisan Politics with a one-time or recurring donation:

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

Wait – When I Said That Gordon Brown Should Be Sent To Coventry…

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

–

With this intervention by Gordon Brown, the Remain campaign scrapes rock bottom

The worst thing you’ll see all day: Gordon Brown sullying the grounds of the beautiful Coventry Cathedral (my favourite modern cathedral – I used to attend choral evensong while studying at nearby Warwick University) with his latest tawdry intervention in the EU referendum campaign.

Sebastian Mallaby, a Washington Post opinions contributor (and not coincidentally in this case a paid up Remainer) thinks that this is just brilliant:

A few days ago, former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown offered a glimpse of what Britain can be. He paced the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, a medieval gem destroyed by Hitler’s bombs, and praised “a Europe where the only battle is the battle of ideas; a Europe where we fight with arguments and not with armaments.” Staring into the camera, Brown appealed to his countrymen to lead, not leave. “What message would we send to the rest of the world if we, the British people, the most internationally minded of all, were to walk away from our nearest neighbors?”

The best news from this desultory referendum campaign is that Brown’s video has gone viral.

In the video, which I watched while literally shaking with rage, Brown roams around the beautiful ruins, heaping praise on the European Union for ushering in “a Europe where decisions are made by dialogue, discussion and debate”.

But those decisions are not made democratically, are they, Mr. Brown? At least not by any serious definition of the word. Or is the mere existence of the European Parliament supposed to make up for the fact that the only EU institution with even a tenuous claim to the word “democracy” can neither propose new legislation or strike down the bad, and represents an utterly non-existent European demos (hence the abysmally turnout in European elections)?

Until now, I thought the succession of intellectually tepid interventions by the misguided pro-EU bishops were the worst thing to be done to (and by) the Church during this EU referendum. But Gordon Brown has gone and outdone himself, making the hand-wringing apologetics of John Sentamu and Rowan Williams seem positively devout.

Standing in the ruins of the old Coventry Cathedral, and in the shadow of the new – a magnificent and unique British contribution to architecture, conceived and built to the glory of God long before we joined the European Economic Community – Gordon Brown propagated the Remain campaign’s fatuous assertion that the EU single-handedly kept the peace in Europe and is still needed today for this purpose.

Back on planet Earth, anybody with a brain, a television and an internet connection can see for themselves that the European Union is doing far more to foster resentment and discord between the European countries than sowing peace. Whether it is the promise of young lives being permanently snuffed out or curtailed by 50% youth unemployment or the utter ruin of a small country which ought never to have been allowed to join the calamitous euro experiment in the first place, the last thing the EU is doing is promoting peace, cooperation, tolerance or understanding. I’ve been to Athens. I have seen the anti-German graffiti on every street corner.

Exactly how bad would it have to get for Gordon Brown and his allies in the Remain campaign to feel a twinge of shame or doubt about using Coventry Cathedral, an international emblem of peace and reconciliation, to drum up support for a European Union which has drifted far from the lofty goals of its own mythology, and which only now manages to function at all to the extent that it suppresses democracy and the popular will of the various member states?

I happened to be in Coventry Cathedral on April 21st this year, the Queen’s birthday. And after choral evensong was over, as a tribute the organist played “Orb and Sceptre”, William Walton’s coronation march written for the Queen’s coronation in 1955. In the music echoed centuries of history and independence which Gordon Brown and many in the Remain campaign are apparently willing to cast aside gladly and without a second thought, enthralled instead by a creaking and dysfunctional supranational political union, a mid-century relic which will almost certainly not live to see its hundredth birthday.

But as magnificent as the organ sounded that day, and speaking from a purely personal perspective, it will take a long time to stop the echo of Gordon Brown’s nauseating hymn of praise to the European Union from reverberating around that beautiful cathedral.

 

Coventry Cathedral - The Latter Glory Of This House Shall Be Greater Than The Former

Coventry Cathedral - Sculpture of Reconciliation

European Union - United Kingdom - Britain - Flags

–

Images: Semi-Partisan Politics

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.