David Millard

Imagine if you will a super-national organisation dedicated to peace. It’s population is over half a billion, and it has the largest GDP on Earth (some 16.6 trillion US dollars). It is a fiercely progressive place, with universal suffrage, laws to foster equality for women, protection for children, rights for homosexuals, and none – absolutely none – of its members claim the right to kill their own citizens in the name of justice.

Within its borders can be found the cities of London, Rome, Paris, Budapest, Barcelona, Dublin, Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Copenhagen and Vienna. It is in no small measure a beacon for humanity, a paradise raised from the ashes of centuries of conflict. A magnificent and almost unimaginable success that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for being totally awesome. No really.

This is the European Union. The best place in all of history to be a human being.

So imagine my surprise at the recent EU election results, or perhaps more accurately the anti-EU election results. Far right parties taking sizeable victories in France, Denmark and Austria. Far left parties kicking out the moderates in Greece. And the largest state, Germany, returning its first neo-Nazi MEP. And in the UK, some man in a pub grabs all the headlines, and nearly a third of the votes, by blaming everything on Eastern Europeans, and suggesting ruining the EU for everyone else.

It could make you weep.

The EU is magnificent, it is successful, but it is also flawed. It is bureaucratic and bloated, supports anachronistic policies, passes sometimes weird legislation, and most importantly for an organisation with such profoundly democratic goals – suffers from a fairly serious democratic deficit.

But leaving the EU – or voting in a bunch of political neanderthals to wreck it – is like taking your new Mercedes to the scrapyard because its exhaust is a bit rattley.

The people who brought us to this point are idiots. They should be profoundly ashamed of themselves. And I don’t mean the voters, many of which are protesting in more or less good faith, misguided or not.

No, the people we should be angry with are the politicians who took Europe and treated it like a gravy train, and who passed endless legislation to homogenise when they should have been reforming. Only now is it clear how high the stakes were. I recently wrote that the UK needs a good dose of Systems Engineering to address the challenges raised by the Scottish Referendum, tonight I can’t help but wonder if the EU might not need the same.

So let us blame them, as they sneak out of Brussels with their restaurant receipts between their legs, to be replaced by fist-waving neo-nazis, flag draped nationalists, and all manner of political scumbags.

I wonder if they can hear us.

We blame you. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!