Tabloid Edition

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn has a few words of wisdom today:

After that, the rest doesn't matter: you can't do trickle-down nation-building. The British, who've written more constitutions for more real nations than anybody in history and therefore can't plead the same ignorance as President Juncker, should be especially ashamed of going along with this farrago of a travesty of a charade.

Ah, say the Eurofetishists, but you naysayers are gloating undeservedly: the French didn't suddenly see the light and decide British Eurosceptics had been right all along; they rejected the EU constitution because they thought it was an Anglo-Saxon racket to impose capitalism on their pampered protectionist utopia.

But so what? Britain's naysayers don't have to reject the constitution for the same reason as France's commies, fascists, racists, eco-nutters, anachronistic unionists, featherbedded farmers, middle-aged "students", Trot professors and welfare queens, bless 'em all. If they want to go down the Eurinal of history clinging to their unaffordable welfare state, their 30-hour work weeks, 10-month work years and seven-year work decades, that's up to them. If Britain doesn't, that should be up to Britain.
....
Incidentally, that "lunatic fringe" in France now accounts for about 60 per cent of the electorate. That's another lesson for the decayed Euro-elite. One of the most unattractive features of European politics is the way it insists certain subjects are out of bounds, and beyond politics. That's the most obvious flaw in Giscard's flaccid treaty: it's not a constitution, it's a perfectly fine party platform for a rather stodgy semi-obsolescent social democratic party. Its constitutional "rights" - the right to housing assistance, the right to preventive action on the environment - are not constitutional at all, but the sort of things parties ought to be arguing about at election time.

I don’t (despite what you might think) agree with everything Steyn says but that last sentence does strike a chord. Indeed, looking at some of the speeches from the pro- side, that’s actually the point. Attempting to set in stone the European exception, the social democratic state. Yet that is exactly what we are supposed to be deciding at each and every election.

What we need in a Constitution.

Again from Mr Kleiman. Quite probably the shortest destruction of the new EU Constitution possible, even if that's not what the comment was aimed at:

The reason that the American Revolution created a republic that has done so well for so long, while the French and Russian revolutions degenerated so quickly into tyranny, was that the American Framers didn't try to create a government capable of doing great good in the hands of brilliant and well-intentioned people. Instead, they tried to create a government that couldn't do too much to ruin the country in the hands of a bunch of corrupt morons. And they did a pretty good job of it.

(Jordan Peterson)
Now, if that document that Giscard spent so long away from his diamonds writing did the above, I think I might even be in favour of it. As it doesn't of course, the answer at the referendum is obvious.

EU Constitution

Today's Telegraph
on the EU Constitution. ( free reg req ). The main point is that we all need to understand what it is that we are actually being asked to sign up for. In the spirit of non partisan enquiry for which this blog is already known there will be a series of articles " Fisking the Constitution " for your edification. At present we only have the draft document to work with and that is 266 pages long in the version I have. So it won't be an immediate task : rather something that will have updates over the next couple of months. Some clauses, even some simple phrases, require pages of explanation as to their effects. Other entire pages can be dismissed in one word :" blather ".
Make sure to tune in for updates.