You don't know what EU're talking about

Published on 03/05/2004 01:00

The European Union has expanded. Oh dear.

Not content with forcing us to straighten our bananas, cucumbers and rhubarb; banning double-decker buses, smoky bacon crisps and yogurt and generally undermining the Great British way of life, the unelected criminal Euro Marxists/Nazis (delete as applicable) want us to open our doors to millions of impoverished ex-Communist gypsies who are queueing up at our ports and airports intent on stealing thousands of low-paid jobs that our millions of shiftless unemployed don't seem to want to do, or setting up organised criminal networks the like of which the Mafia would kill for.

Only they're not, are they?

Fuelled by utter, utter keech such as "THOUSANDS of migrants will be waved into Britain by officials completely unprepared for an invasion by new EU citizens, The Sun can reveal," reporters gleefully lined up at Stansted, Dover, Heathrow and anywhere else they might get trampled in the stampede, waiting to interview the novo-Europeans queuing up to get a slice of the UK's miracle economy - but all they found was a solitary Hungarian looking for a bar job.

What the tabloids aren't screaming about are the thousands of UK citizens greedily snapping up properties for peanuts in Budapest, Krakow or Prague, fuelling inflation and pricing the locals out of a home. No. That's for their own good. That's investment, not exploitation.

But it's corrupt, they cry! Those euro-crats and MEPs are only in it to feather their own nests! Yes, the EU is an overly bureacratic gravy train and, yes, there are a hell of a lot of people making a mint out of pursuing their own narrow self-interests, but that does not mean we have to just pull out. On the contrary. Rather than bellyaching about those filthy light-fingered continentals, we need to take the lead in sorting out the inefficiencies and corruption. But we can't do that from the periphery.

If people don't like the EU they can easily vote for parties who want out, but they don't. The UK consistently has the lowest turnout of any EU country when it comes to Euro elections. In the 1999 elections the turnout was a cringingly pathetic 24%. If everyone in this country is so anti-EU why didn't they turn out in their millions to vote for the UK Independence Party?

Because they just don't care. They can be whipped up into an occasional jingoistic frenzy by the irresponsible gutter press; they'll phone low-brow radio shows with inarticulate, half-formed non-opinions on how we're getting screwed by the snivelling, untrustworthy French (it's always the French...) - while secretly admiring their determination to stand up for their own interests - but they can't be bothered getting off their pasty posteriors to express their opinion at the ballot box. They'd rather blurt nonsense about pulling out of Europe to form closer ties to the US.

That's all we need. Sod bloody America. What have they ever done for us, apart from get us in a whole heap of trouble? OK, as they keep on telling us, they did save our faggy limey asses ( Americans on the internet, everywhere) a couple of times in the 20th Century (with oodles of help from the Soviet Union - what's the Russian for "faggy limey asses"?), but they've been dunking us in the brown stuff ever since.

Fifty per cent of our trade is with Europe. Historically, ethnically, politically and economically, we're utterly intertwined with Europe. We are European. Sniping from the sidelines will get us nowhere. Accept the fact that we're in Europe, we're there to stay and it's good for us. Stop bloody whining.

• For some facts debunking the Euro myths - ("EU tyrants ban firemen's poles" ... that sort of thing) peddled in the British media, take a look at http://www.cec.org.uk/press/myths/