Time to get serious

Sarah Lall​ has just rightly reminded me that the UK's EU referendum next Thursday is deeply, deeply serious. Despite trying my best to joke about it, I’m as serious about it as she and many others.

Leave aside the economic, social and constitutional arguments for a minute.

WHATEVER the outcome next Thursday, Britain’s well will be poisoned for some time to come, because this referendum has both revealed and encouraged some truly horrible things about our country that will not go away. It will also seep into others’ water tables.

Above all, I believe David Cameron will be castigated by history.

As our Prime Minister he has, for party political purposes - that is, to stop UKIP making inroads into the Conservative Party's seats at the last general election - abdicated his responsibility as the nation’s leader.

As an international statesman he has been the epitome of perfidious Albion, subjecting nations with whom we should be cooperating to the possible whirlwind of our withdrawal at a time when neither we nor they will benefit and when dark forces are stirring all over Europe and beyond. Revenge will follow, even if it others may choose to or have to eat it cold.

As the custodian of a nation – his and our own union, the UK – Cameron risks its imminent demise, because if we do vote to leave the EU than it’s almost certain that the Scots and perhaps others will leave and so the UK will cease to exist. This bitter irony appears lost on those imbecile flag-wavers who are too angry now to see what stands before them.

John Major at least took the ‘bastards’ on as a leader should: by leading from the front not delegating the decision to often incoherently angry voters who resent the whole political class he represents and are now, like the rest of us and thanks to Cameron, at the mercy of demagogues, liars, quacks and charlatans.

Shame on David Cameron and God help us all – whatever the result.

America is looking old.

In 1991, Supreme Court Judge Warren Burger called the American gun lobby’s interpretation of  the US Constitution’s Second Amendment – the right to have and bear arms – “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by any special interest group that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Burger – and others – pointed out that the rights it conferred made sense in the context of the then necessary existence of state militias to keep the peace.

The fraud has been the gun lobby’s successful reworking of a pragmatic, late 18th-century decision into a general and pretty-much unfettered right for any US citizen who isn’t chained up in a padded cell to carry just about any lethal weapon as a piece of arm candy in the early 21st.

I think that is a just criticism of the NRA’s stance.

It also raises something else:

It’s worth recalling that, while the founding of the USA at the end of the 18th century was a revolutionary novelty – a New World indeed – it’s in fact the oldest and in many ways the most antiquated of all constitutional states apart, I believe, from San Marino.

I wonder whether the reverence which US citizens give to their Constitution may actually hinder America’s development, whereas many older European nations, bloodied from wars and ideological strife, have had to re-imagine and even reconstitute themselves from time to time, which has encouraged a necessary pragmatism.

Perhaps this may lie behind some of the US’s present dysfunctions?

In short, has the USA become too old for its own good?