OH what joy! In the very week that Ken Loach, one of Britain's most celebrated film directors, launches an excoriating attack on the BBC ("Cull it!" he says, "it's a collective disaster run by time-servers who kill creativity!") Mark Harper holds forth once more on the illusory view (yes, it was Major's once, then it was Cameron's and now it's the Coalition's) of Britain being "In Europe, not run by Europe."
Can Harper still be serious? Does he really think that a profligate bureaucracy called the Brussels Tower of Babel, which has just spent £1.4 million of taxpayers' money on a programme to "define God", which squandered £12 million on a project whose principal conclusion was that "fruit is good for us", is in the slightest bit interested in what he calls "the clarity of our common law" or the subject of UK sovereignty.
Coffee time is here again! When will he and his fellow flat-earthers finally wake up to the fact that if they volunteer to play the hind legs in the Christmas pantomime they're not only in the donkey, they're also run by its head?
To echo Maya Angelou (she of Why The Caged Bird Sings fame): "The question is not how to survive inside the EU, but how to thrive with passion, compassion, beauty and style outside it."
The answer of course is for Britain to break free of this "collective disaster" and declare to its political time-servers that the EU is the enemy of our creativity... up with which, to echo Sir Winston ("We are with Europe but not of it. We are linked but not compromised...") we will no longer put!
John Muir
Newnham