Accidents and...

The first point of this post is to explain that my laptop had an unfortunate accident last weekend, for which a remedy is being sought. For the moment, Ed's laptop is unwell...

The second (and main point), is to register my surprise at this news from Jamaica at the inquest of Bob Woolmer- surprise that the original pathologist is insisting that Woolmer's death was no accident. This would accord with my observation that there is much to be suspicious of in the Woolmer case. It is surprising he is allowed to be heard.

Another brick in the wall

That's all the EU treaty is, in that it simply binds together previous treaties and makes more of them operative, plus creating the platform for the next layer of EU power grabs. Or so it seems to me.

It's a sad business trying to dissect the legalities because it's not what a concerned person, a subject of his own nation, ought to have to do. Legal personality. An overall EU foreign minister. Demotion of competition law. Promotion of social protection. These are all just soundbytes really, and it makes about as much sense summing them up neatly as it does to take a few swipes at a roomful of cobwebs.

The fundamental point is this: I and most other Britons of age to vote today have never had a chance to vote specifically on anything to do with the EU, let alone membership of its various incarnations. I did actually vote for James Goldsmith in the elections of 1997 (my first vote), but with a heavy heart- single issues are not what national elections are for.

Yet the EU is not a single issue, it's a multitude of issues rolled into one, and it has created a democratic deficit which no politicians seem to want to address, rather than manage.

Britain is essentially suffering from Europe's weakness. If Europe were strong then each nation would negotiate in a complex diplomatic nexus areas of agreement that could be flexible and joined or not depending on circumstances. Europe would be a dynamic place not fixated on 0.2% of economic growth here, -.3% there.

British people, when they think about politics, think about our politics. The EU is essentially irrelevant to their thinking but paradoxically determinative when it comes to their options. The people in Louisiana seem to be far more rationally focussed on politics than the British people (this story actually holds a lot of hope for peoples slumped for many years in paralysing political doldrums).

Yet that lack of focus is fundamentally not the British people's fault, but the myopia and supine laziness of their leaders- and their leaders' ignorance, as was interestingly pointed out by EU Ref.

If you think about the only issue of hot political debate in the UK over the last ten years, the only thing which turned situations in constituencies upside down, that would be the Iraq war. Key point: that was a British decision to support the US. It was a sovereign choice, right or wrong. One reason I think that such an issue was so hot was, I think, because the lazy Europhile underbelly of public opinion was suddenly shaken (wobbled?) by the notion of a British policy independent of the EU. Quel horror!

Well, Britain, not Europe as such, was attacked in the '05 bombings. Britain still exists, and the legal fraud of the EU will one day soon be brought to answer because of sheer hypocrisy. The EU's trading standards were clearly not being kept when the country was sold the project, and sold to the project, in one referendum before the lifetimes of me and many of my fellow voters.