Findus Fop wrote:
Did anyone watch
Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil on Monday?
It left me thoroughly depressed on several levels.
1) How reasonable Europe's arguments have been for the last several years, let alone post-referendum
2) How childishly the UK has behaved as a direct result of the Tory's own self-interests for YEARS. The EU has been suffering this bullshit from us for a long time.
3) I felt sorry for Cameron in the end because of the utter dim-witted, self-serving cuntishness of the party he is sworn leader of. He was stuck in a hard place.
4) Euro-sceptics have been tussling for this for DECADES, yet in all those years they haven't developed a viable alternative plan.
5) There were no concessions the EU could make that would have stopped the referendum. The only acceptable result for hardliners was the removal of the UK from the EU, end of.
Childish pricks, the lot of them.
That said, it's interesting, very well made, if inordinately infuriating. And Donald Tusk is a dude.
I did, or at least, half watched it. I didn't feel sorry for Cameron, though - it brought back to mind his empty gesture (and strategic error) of going back to Europe to renegotiate, which is what started the whole thing. He failed, as he was always going to, and that set us on the path to a referendum, and him to losing it. And the shot of Farage saying "did you see Dave's face?" (after he'd been turned down by the EU) was interesting in showing the chummy 'mates in a front room' lying behind UKIP, but also the skills (such as they are) that F. has.
But the whole basis for it all: that we need to renegotiate based on the idea that people come here and go straight onto benefits when no figures were produced to suggest this is a problem. So that was dog-whistle "they come over 'ere..!" bullshit, which might be helped if the Tories in any way believed education was a good thing and tried telling people what's what (see also May's "queue jumpers" crap). And, as I understand it, there's provision within EU law for 'us' to put restrictions on what people can claim, on what terms they are here and so on. Knowledge of which, again, isn't passed on to people. So the whole start of the thing was a load of cack, and Cameron could have handled it better.
So I suppose I could feel sorry for Cameron within the parameters of him following in a long line, assuming that everything they do much be pitched at some great mass of people who can't learn, and whose every prejudice must be indulged.
Perhaps pity was too strong a sentiment on my part, but I certainly felt myself empathising with him for the ceaseless demands of different masters he was constantly trying to placate, especially those needle-headed ganglions in his party.
That said, that's what you sign up for as PM.