• EM Forster’s 1909 short story, ‘The Machine Stops‘, told of a future in which people have a preference for information which has been filtered through as many secondary sources as possible.

In 2018, referendum voters complain about the information that they got from a twitter feed of what others thought they had seen on television of a slogan on the side of a bus.

Perhaps there would have been a larger majority in favour of unshackling ourselves from the European Union if we had followed the thread of history from the Dunkirk debacle through Lend Lease, the Marshall Plan to the setting up of the European Coal and Steel Community that became the European Economic Community or Common Market and then the European Union, designed from the outset by the United States as an outlet for its surpluses generated following World War II.

Now, we hear complaints that crashing out of the European Union will leave us having to abide by the terms of the World Trade Organisation. Gulp!

It as if we are fish whose cosmos is apparently limited by the glass around us, in denial of a room beyond, faintly glimpsed through the glass. In this analogy, if the European Union were the goldfish bowl, American hegemony would be the room beyond.

Those deluded into thinking that European democracy has any substance and that Europe has any genuine independence from the US should read Yanis Varoufakis’s 2017 Adults in the Room, which relates how he attempted to negotiate with the European Union as finance minister for Greece.

Varoufakis is particularly legitimate as a primary source in this respect because he remained a confirmed believer in the European ideal even while he battled with “Europe’s Deep Establishment” and a disintegrating Greek government.

Finding no evidence of democracy and that Europe does not do “negotiation”, he concluded that the European Union is like the Eagles’ “Hotel California” in that “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave”.

The best we can hope for now is that David Davis will collaborate with Boris Johnson to publish a memoir of their battle with “Europe’s Deep Establishment” and Britain’s disintegrating government, a primary source for a better-informed future.

CHRIS GRAHAM
Tollington Park, N4