The more I think about British EU-philes, the stranger it
seems to me how committed they are to Britain staying within the EU, and how
insistent they are that the EU is the source of all that is good and civilised
in Britain, when so many ways of doing things that are normal in European
countries are things that they don’t like at all.
Off the top of my head: insurance-based healthcare systems;
heavily armed policemen; hefty bribes to middle-class parents to have children;
church taxes; preservation of historic city centres ‘in aspic’; ultra-tight
rules about how you may conduct yourself in rented/shared housing, and
neighbours who will give no quarter if you break them; fiercely elitist state
education; extreme formality in day-to-day interactions; the ability to
introduce someone as ‘Univ. Prof. Dr. med. Dr. theol. Mag. pharm. X’ without
the slightest sense that you’re saying anything funny …
This is how our largest neighbours within the EU behave, and always have done. This
is why the EU works for them. The whole
EU project depends on a level of respect for respectability itself, and a
certain po-faced grandiosity in public life, which Britain has not had for a
long time, if it ever did. I submit that
British EU-philes don’t actually want it, any more than Eurosceptics do.
Perhaps they’re wrong not to want it, because in some ways
it works very well on the Continent. It
is a social glue that makes European cities far more liveable and pleasant than
their counterparts in the UK. No tawdry
fast-buck development, no piles of litter, no hordes of aggressive drunks out
on Saturday night … But Brits in general aren’t willing to pay the price. If even Europhiles were willing, then British
society would have converged a lot more with Continental norms in the
half-century we have been in the EU. Has
it? No.
If anything, it’s diverged even more, with the supposedly Europhile centre-left
making the running away from respectability even more than the Eurosceptic ‘Tory
right’.
So, Remainers, unless you’re going to have a
road-to-Damascus moment and start demanding, at the very least, the
reintroduction of universal child benefit and the immediate dismantling of the
NHS as we know it, please stop pretending that Europe is the source of
everything you love. We might just start
suspecting that it’s not a question of loving Europe so much as of hating
Britain …
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