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J Clive Mathews seems to be a firm supporter of a utopian European vision, who nevertheless is prepared to support the EU Nightmare that is in reality the only one on offer, in the hope that it will all work out right in the end.  

Having crossed swords with Nosemonkey on his Blog several times, I have arrived at the eccentric confluence of thoughts that to a certain extent I agree with just about everything he writes, unless he happens to be writing about the EU, it is then that fundamentally I disagree with his position. Perhaps because when he writes about the EU he generally lets his European vision cloud his otherwise excellent judgment.

 
Oddly I might even agree with his vision “To preserve as much as possible of the cultures of the individual nations and regions, a far, far looser banding together is the only solution - a confederation, not a federation, if you will.”

The self admitted inconsistencies in Nosemonkey approach can be clearly seen in the his recent soul searching post Philosophicae Nasalis larvatus* when he writes;

Support for the EU can ONLY be justified by idealism and hope. The reality is currently simply too shoddily organised, too wasteful and too self-satisfied to be deserving of anything approaching enthusiastic support, and is often extremely difficult to defend against the anti-EU lot’s accusations, even when they are entirely unjustified.

Although admitting the problems with the EU he disregards that reality and rather like a celebrant of an ideology, justifies his belief in romantic aspirations for the future and asks us to belive beyond reason. He says it is difficult to defend the EU against accusations, but then goes on to say those are entirely unjustified. Which rather begs the question if the accusations are unfunded- baseless- without foundation- or unjustified why on earth is it so extremely difficult to defend against them?

To be fair Nosemonkey is absolutely open and honest, because he fully accepts the fallibility of his approach. 

“Perhaps an explanation is due… Though I’m afraid that, due to the rampant inconsistencies in my approach to politics, my utter lack of a unified value system, and the fact that I haven’t really thought it all through properly (the following will be written entirely off the top of my head)”

Without trying to Fisk an already admitted off the top of the head post, many of the things mentioned in the post chime with my own views, for instance:

“The biggest mistake of the originators of the EU project was to think that it could all be acheived in their lifetimes. It takes, at the very least, decades to shift ideas on something as fundamental to most people as national identity, and that is what the EU is, at its most basic level, trying to do.”

 One piece of evidence for this is runs thus “It took the best part of three centuries after the conquest of Wales before that principality became a stable part of the union, and (thanks to the Jacobite threat) a good two centuries after the union of the crowns of England and Scotland before they were able peacefully to coexist (and many questions brought by the formal union 300 years ago this year have still not been settled).”

One thing which he might well have added was that there was one hundred years between the union of the English and Scottish Crowns before the union of the states. In that hundred years there was a great deal of negotiations manoeuvring and not least a bloody civil war in England into which Scotland was eventually dragged the Scottish Parliament was dissolved and then later reinstated and in England we ended up with what can only be termed as an (illegal) revolutionary state.   

To selectively quote Nosemonky “I like the idea, I see the potential, but I worry about the reality. I am both optimistic and pessimistic at the same time, both cynical of the chances of and idealistic in my hope for its success. The only thing I am certain of is that the people who are currently providing the guiding hand for the union seem to have an even less clear idea than I do of what it is actually for, and what it should be aiming to be. The whole thing needs to be re-thought - and needs to be re-thought before the remaining good-will evaporates.” He added as a final note “For that way lies disaster.” Many would disagree!

 
In all it would I do not think it would be over fastidious to read the argument that the European Project is a good plan but practically everything about it would need to be changed for it to be successful.   

The problem is I cannot see how we can get from where we are to where Nosmonkey would like to be without totally destroying and unpicking all that the EU has done in the past fifty years.

 
In 1952 Monnet made it absolutely clear what the European project was about, and that without question was a United Sates of Europe, along the same lines as the United Sates of America. That is what was in the minds of the Founding Fathers of the project when the designed the template for the Union, that is reason why we have a Customs Union in the fist place.

It might well be argued that not everything has gone to plan, the political union may have been sidelined by the French later in the 1950s but it was only delayed, and replaced with the Monnet Method whereby political union could be advanced under the guise of a common market, but now we are clearly seeing the revival of the political union and the advancement of military integration.    

 
We are already beyond the limits of a confederation and are heading towards a unitary style of central government rather than a federation. A confederation for instance would not require us all to become citizens of the EU, as the rules would only apply to our sovereign nation states of which we were citizens. Of course a confederation is also a road to follow in the creation of either a federation http://www.politicalinformation.net/encyclopedia/Federalism.htm or a Unitary state. http://www.politicalinformation.net/encyclopedia/Unitary_state.htm

To assert that Support for the EU can ONLY be justified by idealism and hope. Is one thing but to then make the same claim for the Rejection of British membership of the EU does not make the sense.

 “Where my pro-EU stance comes from my conclusion that Britain (and the majority of other western European countries) are past their prime and likely to continue to decline without banding together for strength in numbers, the “let’s pull out of the EU” case is based on what I’d argue is an even more shaky premise: that despite losing the Empire and the industry which made her the greatest economy in the world, Britain will somehow manage to maintain her position amongst the world’s leading economies and powers ad infinitum, even while existing in splendid isolation."

This is shot through with inaccurate assumptions even if he is right that European countries are likely to continue to decline without banding together, that is not an argument for the present and likely future direction of the EU, it is not an argument for creating a powerful central government. Further, to my knowledge EUsceptics do not oppose the EU because we belive in some future of splendid isolation, but because we do not belive the EU offers us anything worth having. We see it as nothing more than an attempt to force a centralised union on the sovereign nation states and the peoples of Europe, we see it as Eurocratic nightmare, where the meanings of words like democracy, freedom of choice, accountability have to be changed to meet new EU definitions which signify nothing like the original meanings, where centrally controlled polling replaces real elections, where instead of a change of government we get a change of management. Where there is absolutely no mechanism available for the people to change the direction because the people have been decisively omitted from the very beginning. In short we belive in democracy, the EU despite all its pretensions and posturing is not only non democratic but anti-democratic.