The One That Is Amazed With The Bone Headedness. . .

There's been reams written about it, a forest of paper and a lake of ink taken up in newsprint, but since the Irish voted 'No' to Lisbon, one phrase keeps coming to the fore. This little quote is taken from http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3417083,00.html:

The EU executive has commissioned a survey to try and find out what went wrong in Ireland.

I'll tell you what went wrong in Ireland: Nothing.

It was a process of democracy. There is no right or wrong answer, merely an outcome. It may be outcome that you do not agree with, but that does not mean it is wrong. I am thankful that it is an outcome that I find favourable, but make no mistake had the vote been 'Yes' I would have accepted the outcome as the democratic desicion of the Irish people.

I fail to understand why this is so difficult for people to grasp. We had it only a few weeks ago when Boris won the London Mayoral election, those with Labour sympathies were bemoaning the death of democracy and the electorate making the wrong decision.

No, No, No. Not the death of democracy, indeed quite the reverse, an indication that on the occasions when the old war horse is led out of the stable she is as energetic and vital as ever. Not the wrong decision, merely an outcome that is not to your liking.

Unfortunately the wishes of the Irish public would appear to amount to nought. Al-Beeb is trotting out the line that only 3 million people voted in the whole of the EU. That is not a statistic to make the Irish referendum an irrelevance, it is a damning statistic about the dictatorial nature of the EU and their national sub-alterns that so few people have had a say on the treaty. We in the UK have had no direct opportunity to give an opinion since Heath and the Common Market, before I was born, and we certainly didn't vote in favour of this.

The Romanians have come out with some swill that effectively says if people are going to vote the wrong way, then they shouldn't be allowed to vote at all. Dangerous, dangerous ground. Those in Eastern Europe would do well to remember what happened to the Romanian Communist Party and their leaders, I for one will never forget the footage of the moment the crowd turned, Ceaucescu's look of complete incomprehension and the military big-wigs behind him very quietly and efficiently shitting themselves.

These dictatorial post-war regimes lasted 40 years before the populations rose up for a taste of democracy, here in the West we've had that taste for decades, verging on centuries. How long will it take us to rise up? Not as long as 40 years, I'll bet.