I've never been to Greenland, but I'd like to go. I imagine I would like the people. After all, Greenland is the only country to leave 'Europe', as our masters insist on calling it. They left what was the European Community in 1985, the only country ever to have done so.
Basically, they realised that the EC was decimating their primary industry, fishing, and had a referendum on leaving the EC. The referendum told the government that the people wanted to leave, and the government (servants of the people rather then their masters) honoured the people's decision. Greenland now has a higher average income than Germany, France or Britain.
Fishing used to be a major British industry, too, and we were more dependent on it than any other European nation, for obvious geographical reasons. It is estimated that when Britain entered the EU we controlled 80% of all European fish stocks. This is because our fishermen had carefully managed fish stocks in the North Sea, whereas French and Spanish fishermen had heavily over-fished the Mediterranean and had destroyed most of the stocks. Nowadays, gigantic Spanish trawlers hoover up the seas round the British Isles, and our fishing industry is a shadow of what it used to be.
Incidentally, while the unions and the left were outraged at job losses in the subsidised coal industry under Mrs Thatcher, they were strangely quiet about the much greater job losses in our profitable fishing fleets. Fishermen are tough and independent people (they have to be) and perhaps they weren't the right kind of working class.
Interesting facts for those who say that leaving the EU would be catastrophic for Britian's economy. It could be the best thing we ever did.
Time for that referendum you promised us, Mr Cameron.
H/t Alex Singleton.
It is beyond my comprehension that so many highland constituencies, dependent as they are historically on fishing and farming, keep returning fanatically pro EU MPs to parliament. I cannot understand why the SNP want to stay in the EU should they attain the independence they purport to advocate. Highly remunerative sinecures in Brussels?
ReplyDeleteBeats me too. I had always assumed that (some) Scots would prefer to be an equal member of an association of smaller nations (the Europe of the Regions idea) than in an asymmetric relationship with the auld enemy England. I can have some sympathy with that. I'm sure that was Labour's general idea in pushing Prescott's ill-fated regional assemblies, which the English weren't having at any price.
ReplyDeleteWhen you look at the fantastically generous conditions of employment as an EU minister, and the histories of Mandleson and the Kinnocks, you have to suspect that it may be just aiming high in career terms.
I suspect the EU would devour an independent Scotland.