A Chapter that's a mixture of politics and memories

In July there was the Chequers fiasco. This really took the biscuit. And provided material for many happy hours of trolling and arguing, in the summer heat. Virginia’s case was this: The Prime Minister had allowed a Foreign Power to write an agreement which dictated terms to the country over which she was supposed to be governing and, on whose behalf, she was meant to be negotiating a satisfactory settlement. This piece of outrageous treachery had then been presented to members of the cabinet at Chequers where they had been more or less locked in, had their mobile phones removed from them and had been told if they did not agree to what was set out in the document they could resign and walk home, as their official transport would no longer be available to them. The thing was an absolute surrender document, a total capitulation, and included all the guff about British involvement and cooperation with E.U military Union, procurement, intelligence and security matters. Boris and David Davis resigned over the matter, in horror at what was proposed, and at how they, and the rest of the cabinet, had been treated.

In the immediate aftermath of ‘Chequers’ May sent a man who Virginia thought of as Utter Bastard in Chief, Half Frog, French speaker and traitor, to explain to the Franco British Council that there was no need to panic, post Chequers. Things would be going ahead with the merging of Britain’s defence, intelligence and security forces with European ones under European central command and control, come Hell or high water, Brexit or no. The job was going to be done, via various bilateral treaties leading to a great big tangled web and mess of the sort people would not be easily able to untangle, or clean up, especially since it was being kept out of the news.

The idea of central command and control of all the European defence forces, manufacturing, procurement, security and intelligence was an idea the British and French had cooked up during the second world war. It had taken off more seriously in 1948 and one could understand why, at that time, such thinking might have seemed to be driven by the angels rather than the devil. Even now there was something to be said for it if one believed there were real goodies and baddies, but who should decide whom they might be. A power might be benign one year and malign the next, with a change of leader and this was as true of a European power as of any other. Anyway, the E.U Defence Union thing had a long history, longer than the history of the E.U, in fact. And Nato had only ever meant to be a steppingstone on the way towards European Military Union. In fact, European Military Union had been the original intention of European Union, but in the aftermath of the second world war it was more necessary to create economic stability on the continent than to start banging on about military matters again. Rebuilding western Europe was a worthy goal, cooperation between states who had been at war was a worthy goal, and the old allies agreeing to have each other’s backs and look out for each other on a case by case basis, seemed to suffice and represent the kind of cooperative relationship between nations the ordinary peace-loving citizens could appreciate.

Virginia thought of herself as typically English in her detestation of the idea of The French, although she excluded Debussy, Poulenc, Ravel, Fauré, Couperin, Rameau, Satie and Durufflé and the others. Composers were above the rank and file in all things, having a more direct line to God themselves and providing a superfast broadband connection for others through their work. But in some ways Virginia’s dislike of The French was more personal. Virginia’s family were not given to foreign travel, it was too expensive, for one thing and constipating and irritating for another. Kineburn was beautiful and interesting and strange enough. Getting away from it didn’t ever seem like a necessity.

These days of course there was the added annoyance, to put it mildly, on travelling abroad, of being presumed guilty of terrorism, until proven innocent. Going out of Germany on a flight from Dusseldorf Virginia had been appalled to find herself pulled over by some dreadful female gauleiter for the most thorough clothes on molestation she’d had since she was a child of thirteen or fourteen. While a very large family of Arabs dressed in traditional Islamic extremist garb were all allowed through, entirely unmolested. Virginia did not believe this act was random, she believed it was a deliberate policy of discrimination against middle aged, middle class English women in tweed and brogues who looked like quintessentially decent people, so as to prove non-discrimination against those Muslims who looked like quintessential terrorists.

Anyway, Virginia wouldn’t miss abroad, post Brexit, if it came to that, because she hadn’t been much used to it, but one summer, Virginia’s father had gone down to the south of France to paint and once the school holidays began the children and Virginia’s mother had travelled down to stay with him. The journey had involved much vomiting into bags, on the Hovercraft, much witnessing of other people vomiting into bags, especially men with waist length hair, Virginia remembered. The longer the man’s hair the weaker his sea legs might have been a rule one could have drawn from that mid 70s experience. But after that came the awful experience of being robbed in the station in Paris. They had arrived too early for the sleeper they were taking down to Montpelier and had spent the afternoon walking about the botanical gardens. Virginia and her sisters had gathered up large quantities of bark from the plane trees and used it to make pictures with. Later they had seen spiteful, frog children kick the pictures to pieces again. Anyway, some other, spiteful, adult frog stole Virginia’s mother’s handbag with all her money and tickets in it. Virginia’s mother knew which carriage she and the children were meant to be in so she instructed the children just to shuffle through the barrier past the man collecting the tickets and to try and look natural, as if their Daddy was behind them with the tickets, she followed behind her daughters, indicating with her thumb that her husband, further back did indeed have them. She and the girls then merged with the crowds swarming on the platform and found their carriage.

When they got to Montpellier they were supposed to get a bus that would take them to the Medieval village, Pegairolles de l’Escalette, in which they were meant to be staying the summer. Virginia supposed her mother must have kept these tickets in the suitcase that had not been stolen because they did get on the coach and must have travelled a good deal of the way towards their destination, when Virginia’s mother had panicked and decided they must have overshot their mark. They disembarked from the coach, in what seemed to be the beautiful middle of nowhere, a kind of wide gorge with a fairly main road running through it. Virginia’s mother had a map and being left-handed was slightly less stupid at map reading than most other women, but it was no good, they were still about fifteen miles from their destination. The suitcase had no wheels and the three girls had their new sandals on and were stiff and tired from the night before, hungry and thirsty from lack of two meals and thoroughly fed up. Virginia and her mother and sisters trudged on slowly over about five miles, on the shady side of the main road as early morning turned into the heat of the southern midday. Eventually another chap with waist length hair passed in an orange VW Camper van and Virginia’s mother thumbed a lift. Fortunately he wasn’t any kind of a psycho and he dropped them at the bottom of the village.

That was not the end of the adventure though, because Virginia’s father was not going to be joining them for a few days and although they had the keys for the house, they had no money with which to buy food. Virginia’s mother did her best with a half bag of plain flour and some salt and pepper that the previous occupants had left in a cupboard. She made unleavened bread and they ate it with a little land cress. Fortunately, Virginia’s mother had brought tea and dried milk with her and there was a tiny bit of sugar in a bowl. In the evening of the second day they walked above the village in beautiful light after rain and saw two Frenchmen gathering ‘escargot’ in net bags. They hoped their father would turn up before they found it necessary to do likewise. He did, of course and things were alright again, though her mother had found it necessary to think up the question “Avez vous quell que chose pour la constipation?’ and to pose it at the local pharmacy. Which phrase Virginia always kept tucked away in the back of her mind in case Nick got it into his head they might need a holiday in France, at some stage. But Virginia never forgave France for that unwanted adventure and later, when she read Rumer Godden’s ‘Greengage Summer’ she could not entirely get over the idea that France was simply not the place for English women travelling alone with their three children. And if it were not the place for English women and their daughters, it was not the place for English women’s sons to have to defend.

But of course what was suitable for British people was of no interest to politicians. The needs and wants of ordinary peace-loving citizens were not the concerns of the power crazed and military leaders. The European Union had always intended to be an Empire and an Empire required a huge military machine, it required nuclear arms, it required a vast intelligence network, it required satellite spying systems. An Empire needed to be able to procure its own arms, without borrowing money from those whom it might come to regard as its enemies. An Empire therefore must be able to manufacture its own arms, but in such a way as each part of that Empire had some involvement and therefore something of itself invested in the enterprise, that is the war mongering, which drove the demand for the defence equipment or armaments the Empire required.

European Defence Union was drawing closer and closer. The Empire was going to be born, hashtag ‘Despite Brexit’ as they said, these days. Mrs Thatcher had resisted it, in her day, but she had been the last British leader so to do. She had said, “No, no, no” to that Devil. But as a result she really had been got at by Tarzan and Ken Clarke and Geoffrey Howe (who as solicitor general had been responsible for drawing up the treacherous and unconstitutional European Communities Act in 1972 and who, therefore occupied a special place of loathing in Virginia’s heart) and John Major among other pro EU swine. Everyone who had held power since then had been in favour of the European Empire. As a result of this, defence manufacturing had declined in Britain. The peace-loving population were not too worked up about it in the scheme of things. But over time, a system was devised where Britain didn’t really (which meant couldn’t really) make anything on its own. It became part of the Empire system, making parts of things for joint projects.

The left of course didn’t care about this, they instinctively hated all things American, so they weren’t interested in defending NATO as a better idea than E.M.U. It was true that where Britain had chosen to get involved with America in the Middle East it had caused devastation. It was also true that various other European nations had opted out of getting involved with wars in the Middle East, so that they looked like good judges of right and wrong, with hindsight. But what the lefties never admitted in all the arguments Virginia had with them at this time, was that it was that very ability to choose not to join in that made the way NATO was set up superior to the way E.M.U. was to be set up.

During these last few years as E.M.U escalated, coming closer and closer to reality, after decades of planning, another horrid piece of devilry was played out. There was a witch hunt by hideous, greedy, lefty lawyers. Only in reality it was they who were the witches, thought Virginia. Former and even serving soldiers who had taken part in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were put on trial for war crimes on the flimsiest of evidence. Sometimes they were tried over and over again. The lawyers made millions. The lefties patted themselves on the back and addressed each other like Pharisees, describing how they had always been on the side of the angels and how it was necessary for decent chaps like them, who knew what was what to bring justice at last for those other paragons of virtue, the men who had been fighting for Saddam Hussein or the Taliban and were therefore the innocent victims of NATO forces. All this seemed to Virginia to have been encouraged by the Conservative Government, despite the fact they knew their supporters hated it, because it created the narrative that British involvement with American allies didn’t work out well. Which of course on the one hand was true, but yet did not imply that British soldiers commanded from Brussels would never act in ways which could not be criticised by lefty liberals, taking the moral high ground on the internet either.

Things went from bad to worse after Chequers. Virginia could feel something dreadful stirring in her political bones against which her black magic would be less use than her all day bickering and online trolling. She could not say why it was exactly, but she had the feeling the Constitution was under greater threat than it had been since the country joined the Common Market and Geoffrey Howe had drawn up his dreadful Bill. The country and the Constitution may not have been under such a threat since the civil war in fact.

Virginia started a one-woman crusade to publicise the written parts of the British Constitution. Every day she would bang on about the importance of the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Rights, The Coronation Oath Act and so on. Everyday multiple opponents would pile in, insisting Britain had no written Constitution, as every schoolboy knew, and was Virginia thick, or what? It took a bloody long time to win these arguments and persuade her fellow trolls every schoolboy had been deliberately misinformed by a lefty education system which did not wish him to understand his rights and freedoms were upheld in perpetuity under Common Law, by a Constitutional Monarch, in accordance with Her Oath, which was Her contract of employment. Because that lefty educational establishment had Marxist tendencies and was therefore a Republican.

The need Virginia had, to remind her fellow commentators on line, or teach them anew, about the written part of the British Constitution and how it had existed first as Common Law in its form the ‘Declaration of Rights’ and could not therefore be repealed by an act of Parliament, was brought on by Parliament and Government both seeming keen to pretend that there was no written element to the Constitution. They were pretending there was nothing but them and the laws they dreamt up, without admitting even the need for a brief mention of them in the previous manifesto by the party of government, as long as a majority of MPs believed these proposed laws were good, in their own minds it did not even matter to them that they were in direct contradiction of what had been in their manifestos. They were pretending the ‘Sovereignty of Parliament’ was a thing, rather than acknowledging that it was the people who were sovereign. They had grown fond of quoting Burke, in order to justify their self-aggrandising.