This Hideous Strength

The European Union has spent the last forty years intimidating its way through Europe, using every dirty little trick in the book to advance its dream of a federal Europe.

Always advancing or at worst, moving sideways, like a grotesque supranational crustacean.

Unburdened by democratic or financial accountability, its despotic and unsackable nomenklatura have politicked through Europe like Hitler’s Panzer divisions in 1939, crushing all resistance before them.

But how?

They are notoriously poor at negotiating trade deals, have no military with which to threaten opponents, no common fiscal policy with which to co-ordinate their economic efforts, a clownish currency which has impoverished half the EU at the expense of the other half, very little demand for their so-called services, and deranged ideologues festooning their management landscape.

Yet they have prevailed and prospered, even as youth unemployment in their periphery has risen to over 50%.

In the face of such baffling success, we need to recognise that the EU is at war with us and cast events in a military light.

And once we think of their operations as sieges, all becomes clear.

Because there are only four ways to win a siege.

1 – Frontal Attack

This involves siege ladders and battering rams, and you’ll need to stand ready to lose most of your men. You’ll need an appetite for boiling oil being poured on your heads.

Noisy and costly.

2 – Sabotage

This involves high explosives and sappers, but once you’ve blown a hole in their defences, you’ll still be pouring your men into a bottleneck – expect significant losses.

Noisy and messy.

3 – Starvation

If you can encircle the enemy and cut off their resupplies, you might be able to starve them out. But while you sit outside their walls you deplete your own resources, become unpopular with the locals, and are vulnerable to attack. And you’ll still probably have a battle at the end.

Slow and obvious.

4 – Betrayal from within

The gold standard. Get someone inside the fort to quietly raise the portcullis late at night, sneak in, kill the leaders in their beds and when the occupants wake up, announce that you and your army are their new leaders.

And this has been the EU’s strategy over and over again.

Sometimes they even just parachute in their guy over the walls and declare him the new king from outside the walls, like in poor Greece and Italy.

So now we know how the EU have triumphed in the past, what are we to make of their Brexit strategy?

The EU have been just as intransigent as they always are – they have not budged an inch, yet seem strangely unconcerned about the consequences.

Oh dear. That sounds a little off.

Maybe ending up with Remainers in charge of our Brexit revolution was not an accident?

The greater the confidence of your enemy, the more collaborators he has surely placed in your ranks.