Every morning at around 6 AM I hear a sound at the front door, here at my father's house in Shipston, as a little man pushes a copy of the Guardian through the letter box. My father can hear the same sound from upstairs and emits a grunt of approval and prepares to start his day with a mug of coffee prepared by me and a dose of poisonous lies from Polly Toynbee and her mates. The paper is written by middle class lefties who are filled with hate for so many things but mainly the value set of the working classes a group they claim to support but clearly despise and just never meet. Each day there is stiff competition for the nastiest and most inaccurate article. Monday's winner on both counts was a classic from Joris Luyendijk "After Brexit, a game plan for the EU, unleash Project Pain"
Joris wants the EU to be as horrible to Britain as possible, to make the lives of British people as miserable as possible to "stop other arsonists and help reinvest British democracy". On the off chance that the EU could trainwreck our economy it would not be middle class lefties like Joris who suffer but the poor and vulnerable. But so what? Lefties do not really care for the sans culottes, they just pretend to care about what is their "client state". The poor are cannon fodder for Joris and co. The point here is that the British need to "reinvent democracy" because Joris does not like the result of the largest democratic exercise in our history. And any other nation in the EU tempted to allow its own people to decide their own futures must be deterred. Democratic expression of the will of other peoples in Europe is arson if it endangers that anti-democratic edifice, worshipped by the Guardian, the EU.
Joris reckons the EU owes the UK no favours. He lists the nasty things we have done to the EU. The most laughable of these is "when France was trying to reduce inequality by increasing taxes on the rich and the UK Government sadistically rolled out the carpet for French millionaires". Jeepers where do you start?
France hiked the top tax rate to 75% in order to punish the rich. President Hollande, like Joris and other mad lefties, thinks that this reduces the gap between rich and poor which is a policy goal in its own right. We on the right care not a jot about that gap we just want the poor to be less poor in absolute terms. That is why we are actually the friend of the poor and Joris and his Guardian pals are not. Britain did nothing sadistic in response but hundreds of thousands of Froggies, many of whom were not millionaires but just hard working and well off, used EU freedom of movement rules to move to London to pay 45% tax. It was a nil brainer.
In today's world many of us can opt to work where we want, register our companies where we want and if one country whacks us with punitive taxes it will see an exodus. Post Brexit the UK will continue to welcome hard working Froggies who want to live here and pay 45% tax not 75%. Naturally France saw its tax take from the 75% class plunge and so its State finances weakened. Meanwhile those rich Froggies were spending their ( enhanced) post tax earnings in London not Paris so the French economy weakened. The big losers from Hollande's madness were thus in every way the French poor. The big winners the British poor. C'est la vie.
How is Joris going to trash the British economy? He says "it must become nearly impossible for multinationals from outside the EU to have their European HQs in Britain". Hmmm so Joris is going to force them to relocate to higher tax zones. How? It gets better. He wants the EU to sink the UK economy by getting EU universities to offer much higher wages so that British academics flock to abandon UK universities and to work overseas. Joris wants to stuff the workers of the EU with higher taxes so that middle class Guardian reading Brits can trouser it big time. One suspects that having a few less tossers filling the heads of British young people with daft left wing ideology will not exactly kill off UK PLC. Since when were the campuses a hot bed of entrepreneurial talent anyway? Meanwhile in EU land it will just see the workers even more pissed off at their masters.
More taxes for the workers so that University Lecturers can have more money. I guess that is how Owen Smith thinks Labour can reconnect with the working classes so Joris is not the only delusional lefty on this score.
The plans of Joris wont wreck Britain. They are silly. His arguments and assertions are nonsense driven by hate. But what he appears to hate the most is democracy, the idea that ordinary, smelly, white van driving men and women across the EU ( whose views, aspirations and wants he despises) are sick of the rubbish that folks like him and the EU law-makers have forced upon them and are now daring to say "no" via the ballot box.