The G2 piece also had quite a good piece by Varifakis reporting on EU tactics to defeat the Greek negotiations. They included sophistry about mandates, endless prevarication,simply ignoring proposals and leaking to the press the claimed inadequacies of the Greek contingent, reversing the truth. All very familiar to any student of modern management.
He drew two conclusions:
When Schäuble welcomed me with his “it is my mandate against yours” doctrine, he was honouring a long EU tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them. Like all dangerous hypotheses, it is founded on an obvious truth: the voters of one country cannot give their representative a mandate to impose upon other governments conditions that the latter have no mandate, from their own electorate, to accept. But, while this is a truism, its incessant repetition by Brussels functionaries and political powerbrokers, such as Angela Merkel and Schäuble himself, is intended to convert it surreptitiously into a very different notion: no voters in any country can empower their government to oppose Brussels....For all their concerns with rules, treaties, processes, competitiveness, freedom of movement, terrorism etc, only one prospect truly terrifies the EU’s deep establishment: democracy.
and
The only way May could secure a good deal for the UK would be by diffusing the EU’s spoiling tactics, while still respecting the Burkean Brexiteers’ strongest argument, the imperative of restoring sovereignty to the House of Commons. And the only way of doing this would be to avoid all negotiations by requesting from Brussels a Norway-style, off-the-shelf arrangement for a period of, say, seven years.[Another option would have been to simply repeal the EU legislation unilaterally, and then negotiate,rather than going through Article 50 tedium]
The Graun flagged up the article on its front page thus:
The Six Brexit Traps that will defeat Teresa May
No word about the EU being opposed to democracy, of course
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