Last night I needed to make a tube journey, but the combination of ticket machines unwilling to take notes and ticket booths without staff meant that having arrived at my local tube station I had to leave it again and buy something – anything – just to get some change. Annoying. But the thing I did buy, a copy of yesterday’s Times, did contain a couple of valuable items. There was a deeply scary story about how Germany is going to hell in a handcart, by Rosemary Righter. And there was this letter to the Editor, which put the policies of the European Union in an even more negative light:
Poland and the EU
From Mr Rodney E. B. Atkinson
Sir, I have just returned from a book promotion in Poland, where even those MPs who had been in the forefront of opposition to the Communists told me that they found the EU far more oppressive and dismissive of Polish nationhood than their previous Soviet masters.
Laws were being forced through the Polish Parliament, at the behest of the EU, which had never appeared in any party manifesto, with little debate and which were not yet even law in the existing EU member states.
Perhaps the most insidious new provision in the Polish Constitution is that a law can be enforced in Poland even if it has not been translated into Polish. There can be no more disgraceful indicator of the true nature of the European Union as it constitutionally imprisons nations which so recently escaped from a different tyranny.
Yours etc,
RODNEY E. B. ATKINSON,
Alderley,
Meadowfield Road,
Stocksfield,
Northumberland NE43 7PZ.December 3.
It was the last paragraph that got me. I hope that gets bounced around the blogosphere. It deserves to.
And it’s from Rowan’s brother too. You know, Mr. Bean.
The forklift driver where I work is Polish- so I can get him to translate. Therefore, I’m more qualified then the EU to rule Poland.
And I’d do a better job too. However, being of German descent, I think it might be prudent of me to decline to do so.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were his brother. I believe Rowan himself has written in to the Times criticizing some of the anti-speech laws (since it would make some of his work illegal).
And the EU wonders why they’d rather cleave to the US at this point in time.
We need to move our remaining troops out of Germany and into Poland and the Czech Republic.
As sole survivor and someone who escaped across the Iron Curtain on 7 of 7 1980 I do not require a meteorologist to know the direction of the wind.
There have been only 14 Olympic Games since Hitler besieged the civilised world and the sources of human misery are still not found in limits on food or metals or energy, but in corruption, power hungry apparatchicks, senseless laws, and war.
Suppose there was such a thing as a time machine. Suppose all the bad-guy Germans of the 1930s and 1940s — the Gestapo, the Brownshirts, the Blackshirts — were fed into the time machine and emerged as modern-day Europeans. Suppose they all still held the beliefs they had when they died.
So my question is, Which political cause would they support now, unity or disunity; centralisation or decentralisation; masses or individual?