Eamonn McCann: The Tories and the EU are equally unappealing

For a moment there I was nearly tempted to feel sorry for Theresa May. What a bunch of boors, bubble-brains and bigots she has hemming her in. And that’s only the Mail, the Express and the Telegraph.

She seems a lonely sort of being.

That’s as much sympathy as I can manage.

What must be kept in mind about the British Tories is that, objectively, looking at both sides of the question, taking everything into account, they are worse than vermin. Aneurin Bevan said that in 1947. He was Minister for Health in the British post-war Labour Government and can fairly claim to have been the founder of the NHS.

The Conservative Party, then led by the brandy-addled racist Winston Churchill, reckoned that giving everybody healthcare as a right would sound the deathknell of deference and lead to the disintegration of everything decent people hold dear.

Alongside James Connolly, Bevan was our house’s political hero. The vermin quote was my father’s favourite mantra. I use it every now and then, out of a sort of duty.

The poisonous buffoon Johnston, treacherous reptilian Rees Mogg, gruff bluffer Iain Duncan Smith, oleaginous solipsist and all-round nincompoop Michael Gove. Three rats and an evil mouse. (Duncan Smith is such a self-reverential dunderhead he even puts an extra i into Ian.) Anybody who thought that that gang of toxic no-goods would play fair by the people of Britain – or Ireland – or anywhere – needs their brains reprogrammed to recognise reality.

Then there’s the other side in the British Exit (Brexit) mayhem – Michel Barnier and his rampaging gang of EU bureaucrats. Barnier is the bees’ knees for many in Ireland on account of him regularly putting the boot into the Brits. And right enough, it’s hard not to take pleasure in the Tories’ squirmy predicament. But Barnier, despite the hosanna of praise which greets him every time he calls in to pat our politicians on the head for being such good girls and boys, is no friend of the plain people of anywhere.

There are hundreds of kilometres of barbed wire protecting the eastern flank of the EU from migrants. Wherein lies the difference between this and the wall Donald Trump wants to build along the US-Mexican border?

An anti-migrant fence on the Norway-Russia border is expected to be completed next month, to staunch the flow of (mainly) Syrians who have trekked north through Moscow and Murmansk. The Russians, of course, played a full part in reducing their country to rubble.

EU ships in the Mediterranean no longer rescue migrants from drowning and carry them to the nearest available landfall. Now they scoop up the clumps of humanity and carry them back where they’ve came from – most commonly Libya, where they know they will face torture, rape and death. Last year, CNN broadcast footage from an undercover camerawoman showing black Africans lined up in what appeared to be a warehouse as an auctioneer made his pitch: “Big strong fellow, what am I bid?”

This, facilitated by European countries, in 2018, The EU is a slaver. Calls for freedom of movement are treated by admirers of the EU, in Ireland and more widely, as abstract, naïve and impracticable. Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan stood in the lee of the Berlin Wall and called on Mikail Gorbachev to “tear down this Wall.”

But there’s nobody standing now in front of the rolled-out spirals of barbed wire, calling – “Tear down these fences.” No free movement for dusky Muslims.

No “Give me these/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me…”

None of that malarkey.

A member of the Hungarian Government, Gyorgy Schopflin, last week suggested that pigs’ heads be hung along the border fence to deter would-be Muslim migrants.

None of this is to deny that, generally speaking, the EU is no worse than Britain and in some member states is better than Britain when it comes to welcoming strangers. It’s to say that there must be more to the shaping of the future of Europe than this miserable choice.

My own starting point is rejection of both entities: Out of the EU! Out of the UK!

Leo Varadkar says he will be hiring 1,000 border guards and customs officials to make any frontier that emerges secure.

Will he now? Has he decided how much danger money to pay them?

One of the facets of the hard border/soft border question which may be mentioned sotto-voce but doesn’t make it into mainstream coverage is this – that any installation erected at or near crossing points will be shot at. Hardly anybody would welcome this happening. But hardly anybody might be enough. Half a dozen?

A better way to handle the eventuality would be the infrastructure torn down by bare hands.

Has anybody explained any of this to Theresa May, or Rees Mogg, or Michel Barnier? Or Simon Coveney? Or to the flotillas of commentators in Irish and British media who can write thousand-word think-pieces of erudite analysis at the drop of a hat without mention of this aspect of the matter?

I really think it’s time.

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I was chatting to a few teenage rioters during recent lively events in Derry. For fuck’s sake lads, stop attacking the (tiny Protestant working class) Fountain area.

“Aye, it’s bad PR for us.”

He couldn’t have been more than 15.