MarkR's Blog

[These are the footnotes to my previous blog post: http://forum.tz-uk.com/entry.php?311...ompatibilities ]


Footnotes:-
1: In very brief, the Political Compass divides the usual one dimensional (single axis) ideas of 'Left' and 'Right' into two axes: The X axis (east-west) measures economic policy preferences and the Y axis (north-south) measures social policy preferences. I use the Political Compass because it prevents misleading conflation that simple Left-Right terminology forces on one: Not everyone who is on the political Left shares the same views about social aspects and not everyone on the political Right shares the same views about the power of the state; similarly, political authoritarians may have Left-leaning economic views or Right-leaning economic views. The Political Compass neatly helps avoid presumptions and conflations.

2: Some time ago I found several examples of these wildly different political/social/cultural outlooks in relation to the EU from people (both public and politicians) in various EU member nations but I can't find it now to provide it as a reference, for which I apologise. The fundamentally incompatible viewpoints were striking and went beyond matters of current political leadership in the particular member nations. It was a matter of national character and very long term outlook. It was clear that the EU could never be the homogeneous, borderless whole that the EU project's supporters truly believed in and were (and are) attempting to impose.

3: Although in future the UK might find itself more closely aligned with Poland, but that remains to be seen.

4: This is another reason for the UK to leave the EU: It will make British politicians genuinely answerable to the British electorate again. British politicians have been able to hide behind and blame the EU for too long. I strongly suspect that this is a large part of the reason that so many members of the political status quo in the UK are so pro-EU, even where they must know that it harms British interests.