Nick Cohen, who has taken recently to crticising the BBC for not being anti-Brexit enough, has found a new BBC programme to admire:
Nick Cohen: As well as being a superb documentary, the BBC’s secret history of the war in Northern Ireland is a quiet argument for staying in the EU. If you don’t understand why some of us old farts are furious about Brexit, it explains why.I bet it does!
We understand exactly why you "old farts" are furious about Brexit, Nick.
ReplyDeleteAs soon as it was clear our Empire was doomed, back in the 1950s (when Northern Ireland was relatively untroubled), our political elite alighted upon the EU as a kind of "substitute empire" entity. After all, we were told by Verhofstadt only the other week that the EU is an empire in a world of empires. The British political elite's obsession with "Europe" was encouraged by the Americans who saw British influence within the EEC (as then was) as positive.
War in Northern Ireland both preceded and followed our entry into the EU. It took 25 years for the EU to work its magic, if magic it was, and achieve "peace". I think though that the real story was one of war weariness chiefly on the part of Republicans occasioned by long prison terms, defeats in the field, inteligence penetration of the organisation and equally horrendous attacks on them by Loyalist paramilitaries.
The EU's stance was always to favour the Republic's side as I recall things...I don't remember them ever being that helpful really.
I watched this interesting series, and I think it was clearly made as a cautionary tale about the perils of life outside the EU. The EU is sold as a universal panacea to all political ills. Irish unification, well if we're all in the EU its rather irrelevant, Scottish independence, no problem a mere EU internal formality etc.ect
ReplyDeleteThe only problem is it clearly doesn't work.