CONSCIENCE
In the name of conscience, what the Dickens is going on in this deeply serious referendum? Both sides should be bowing their heads in shame.
During these months of unacceptably opaque campaigning, I feel the same sense of ‘oncoming doom’ as I felt before the Iraq war. I campaigned, marched, wrote letters and was restrained from being tied to 10 Downing Street railings in case it looked like self-promotion.(!) How I regretted that moment of vanity – at moments like these, who cares what people think?
Again I have this sense of ‘oncoming doom’, but this time with added shame. Why have both sides allowed such a lack of conscience to take hold? It is common throughout history, after the fall of an Empire for decadence to follow, and I fear with this referendum we have to be vigilant and guard against it at all costs.
One of the reasons I returned home from LA in the late seventies was because I felt a lack of conscience springing up, and the difference between a lie and the truth being nonchalantly waved aside. We all fib sometimes, but I was convinced England’s morality would be in a far healthier state. Oh dear,fancy throwing away those brilliantly creative swinging sixties, simply to swing from the US coat tails!
For England’s freedom and democracy my father had his horse shot from under him twice on the battlefield during World War One. His desk was stuffed full of medals including the Military Cross and he must’ve been a pretty effective spy in World War Two because the family never knew until recently. That is because he possessed a fearless integrity that stemmed from an overwhelming sense of duty and love for his country. Whereas in today’s pathetically grey small mindedness, any sense of reverence for England, its language, the greatness of its people and its glorious land, has become politically incorrect.
There will never be peace without justice and never justice without sharing. Therefore, one day, unification could be a wondrous way forward – but first we have to grow up. Unity has to be birthed at the grass routes with the goodwill, love and respect of the ordinary people. Unity without democracy, conscience and moral fortitude is doomed to fail.
Thus a timely retreat is urgently called for. Retreat at the right moment is far more courageous than plunging headlong into the murky disarray of greed and corruption: a Shangri-la for the elite, lining their pockets while sipping on the Devil’s gravy train, sloshing their way, ducking and diving, towards the inevitable United States of Europe. Onwards still further, as they proceed towards world government, where we’ll have the elite verses the masses.
Why are there so few with the vision to see how we could run and even fly if we discarded this false unification? If my father were alive today, he would shake his head in despair, finding our present cowardice shameful, totally incomprehensible and certainly not what he fought and risked his life for. But then he fought for freedom and democracy and the EU is neither.
