Here is what he means "we will let matters rest there".
Is it not amazing that possibly geopolitical reverberation depends on one little word? Fascinating.
Having done a ridiculous amount of reading and researching today I have a whole swathe of ideas I would like to write about but am frankly too tired. So I shall indulge my very small cohort of readers with an excellent comment found on Daniel Hannan's blog, truly worth reading (the comment). Here it is reproduced in full:
In recent days Peer Steinbrück and Thilo Sarrazin have featured in Ambrose Evans-Prichard’s articles on this website: the first [the German Finance Minister] made a violent verbal attack on Britain and the second, [an official of the Bundesbank], an even more violent attack on Turkish immigrants in Berlin. One that made Enoch Powell look like a pussycat, although Sarrazin was gracious enough to say that he preferred Jews to the Turks.
I didn’t notice the Labour Party or the BBC responding to them because, after all, Europe and Europeans are perfect aren’t they? In fact, Germans foaming at the mouth are nothing to worry about. It’s inconceivable that just because they have a tradition of exploding every fifty years, or so, they will do it again because we’re all in the European Union now, aren’t we? And, heaven knows, it’s inconceivable that the Euro is turning out to be an instrument of German hegemony of which Hitler would have been proud. Perish the thought.
I live a lot of my time in the heart of Europe and people are somewhat similar everywhere, of course. Where they differ is in what one might call ’shared atavism’. It is obviously easy for people in the BBC and the Labour Party to pretend that this doesn’t exist. Maybe that is because our ‘ancestral pattern’ is to keep the hell away from Europe. About once per century, we ourselves go mad and get involved. The last person to make a reasonable fist of that was The Duke of Wellington [sorry, but I think WWI and WWII were a disaster for Britain]. He, however, is not a figure in European history books whereas Napoleon is still universally a hero.
When Europeans think of ‘the English’ they often have only a narrow economic view of what Britain stands for. Democracy, so hard-won and so longstanding in Britain, has astonishingly shallow roots in swathes of Europe. Authoritarian elites using vicious Kafkaesque bureaucracies to control the serfs are absolutely run-of-the-mill, however. The next time you are staying in Prague and are woken at 6am by someone trundling dustbins around behind your hotel, pop down and ask why they get up so infernally early; you’ll be told with some pride that the Emperor Ferdinand told the Czechs to be early risers [I'm not joking about this, although you'll need to brush up your Czech first].
The BBC and the Labour Party have been allowed to create a caricature of English nationalism. Enoch Powell, who was a professor of Greek at age 25 and rose from private to be the youngest brigadier in the British Army, was pilloried for saying what probably 80% of Englishmen believed, and believe, to be true. G.K. Chesterton said:
“Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.”Daniel, you are an amiable soul with clever ideas. Your article displays a commendable desire not to ruffle feathers. But I think that the people of England are about to speak. If Cameron will not give them their say about the EU, their voice will be heard as votes for UKIP at the next general election. And as a result of that Cameron & co will likely end up as mere footnotes in that thick volume entitled: ‘Failures of Nerve in British Political Life’.
What I will say is simple, easy for anyone to understand: we are sick and tired, utterly, of ambiguity, of broken promises, of pseudo-policies, of wishy-washy and of touchy-feely - all which always end up amounting to nothing. No Referendum, no Vote. Simple.
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