Dipping in to the corporate mindwash yesterday, it was interesting to see so many media organs take the Hague/Eustice europlasticism seriously. Not so Norman Tebbit who is one of the few above-the-line commentators to see through the sham, as one Tory backbencher says: "There is a growing storm coming over Europe and we have to have something important to say about it".
Sadly, though, the brain-cell count will not extend to ridiculing this, nor even Hague's preposterous statement what Britain "should pull away from Brussels", demonstrating that even on-yer-bike Norm can't cope with the reality.
Rather predictably, Guardian content partner, Conservative Home, is having the same struggle with reality, recruiting Bernard Jenkin to trill about the "initiative" led by the fatuous Eustice, telling us it "might be the genesis of something big".
You have to go to the unpaid bloggers, therefore, in order to get any sense of this issue, and they do not come any more unpaid than my erstwhile co-editor who identifies what is probably the real reason for this outburst of europlasticism, and then thoroughly shreds the pretentiousness.
Witterings from Witney also does a creditable job on this, also pinning down a report from Open Europe which rather confirms that it is a europlastic front organisation.
Addressing "localism" and the EU, the report is written by Anthony Browne, the former Times Brussels correspondent, europhile extraordinaire and overpaid economics an adviser to Boris. We have met him before, and it was not a pretty sight. Then, he was writing for the Tories on why we must not leave the EU – and now he pops up in Open Europe. Nuff said.
It was Raedwald, though, who took on the substantive issues, dealing with the corporates, and getting the point entirely. Big business, he says, "is as pernicious as big government. It cares even less. It takes even more".
Yesterday, we also had Boiling Frog remark on the continuing euro crisis, but now the inevitability of a collapse makes it yesterday's issue in the figurative sense as well. The battle against the corporates, of which the EU is but one, must now take centre-stage.
Joke of today, though, is Paul Kenny, leader of the GMB union, and Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite (centre of pic), telling government that "bad laws have to be broken", warning of the "biggest campaign" of civil disobedience by public sector unions over spending cuts.
How many will appreciate the irony that, when it comes to breaking laws, many of the public sector workers will need little practice. It is a skill in which they are already highly proficient. But I wonder if their members will be so keen when we do the same?
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