And how many conservatives really want this..

Methinks the answer is not very many, not very many at all, from either camp!!

And capital is employed conservatively, very lazily, and money remains with those who own, versus work hard and with enterprise..

And businesses that are not competitive or futuristic retain lobbyists with political power, gaining subsidies and more wealth, over more useful enterprises….

And others working at the bottom get dissolusioned, and increase the low-end malaise..

And governments become more important, the distributors of alms to the poor…

And populaces get into this two-society deal (Hamilton versus Jeffersonian).. where you have haughty middle class people afraid of one day losing their job, blaming the poor, And these same middle class people ordinarily unable to afford a nanny in the free market place, get their slave afterall, a la the third world husband who has a wife-slave, or an inefficient Texan farm with its Mexican migrants in Texas…or Saudi oil companies with their Pakistani workers without rights…….

I agree with that. Well maybe not Labour, but at least dear Tony. He basically put politics back at the center stage: even if biased, even if polluted by national debates, people will have to discuss and think and ultimately will have their country’s fate in their hands (which, except for the Swiss, doesn’t happen that often). As our Irish participant mentioned, people do get some of their reading done. And I guess it is a good mental exercise to ask oneself every once in a while: “where do we want to go?”

I do not think that leaving people in the dark, with “elites” only saying that they are acting for the greater good, is a good way to build trust.

Anyway, Rhode Island did refuse to ratify the original US constitution, and did so through.. a referendum!

I don’t know though whether R.I. accounted for a bigger or smaller state back in 1788.

” . . Eurozone growth has averaged 1.8 per cent a year and unemployment has remained stuck at about 9 per cent. This failure to raise economic performance meaningfully was recognised in the recent report by Wim Kok, former Dutch prime minister, and is reflected in the desire of Jose Barroso, European Commission President, to reinvigorate the Lisbon agenda. . . ”

Any suggestion of some conspiracy between myself and Goldman Sachs is (regretfully) fanciful and I only read the piece in the FT many hours after posting my previous comments here.

Tony Blair is the eternal optimist but then he is the Big Picture man. Mere detail is for lesser mortals, which is why the absence of any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq has turned out to be compeletely irrelevant to his decision to back George Bush and invade Iraq.

Tony Blair is personally convinced that he can persuade us, or sufficient of us, to vote for the EU Constitution, notwithstanding the present commanding majority of the grumblers and naysayers.

Predictably, there will be heaps of advertising to paint critics of the Constitution as proto-fascist nitpickers, demented xenophobes, wild men with staring eyes or just dyed in the woodwork Conservatives. Anything, any abuse and any distraction to avoid actually focusing on the deep flaws and corrupt practices in the EU, which make the draft Constitution rather like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. As someone notorious wrote in 1925: The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.

It is not the absence of a Constitution which prevents present national governments in the EU from dealing with the fundamentals causing the miserable unemployment rates and poor economic growth in the EU. No one obliges present EU national governments from disregarding agreed EU treaties, pacts and directives whenever it is convenient to do so. Will an EU Constitution ensure that the EU Court of Auditors endorses the EU Commission accounts thereafter?

The Labour in UK is very courageous to lead a campaign for the constitution, despite of the genral public opinion in GB.

Maybe british people will have a truly pro-european big party for the first time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/opinion/27appelfeld.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Always, Darkness Visible
By AHARON APPELFELD

Jerusalem

IN January 1945, 60 years ago today, the wheels of destruction in Auschwitz stood still.

The few people left alive describe the prevailing silence as the silence of death. Those who came out of hiding after the war - out of the forests and monasteries - also describe the shock of liberation as freezing, crippling silence. Nobody was happy. The survivors stood at the fences in amazement. Human language, with all its nuances, turned into a mute tongue. Even words like horror or monster seemed meager and pale, not to mention words like anti-Semitism, envy, hatred. Such a colossal crime can be committed only if you mobilize the darkest dark of the soul. To imagine such darkness apparently needs a new language.

“Where were we?” “What did we go through?” “What’s left of us?” the survivors wondered. Primo Levi tried to use images of Dante’s hell; others turned to the works of Kafka, especially “The Trial” and “In the Penal Colony.”

In the penal colony of Auschwitz, the Jew was not condemned because of his old or new beliefs, but because of the blood that flowed in his veins. In the Holocaust, biology determined a person’s fate. In the Middle Ages, the Jew was killed for his beliefs. A Jew who chose to convert to Christianity or Islam was saved from his suffering. In the Holocaust, there was no choice. Observant Jews, liberal Jews, communist Jews and Jews who were sure they weren’t Jews were crammed into the ghettos and camps. Their one and only offense: the Jewish blood in their veins.

The Holocaust stretched over six years. Such long years there probably never were in Jewish history. Those were years when every minute, every second, every split-second held more than it could bear. Pain and fear reigned, but even then, in the midst of hunger and humiliation, the amazement sprouted: “Is this Man?”

During the Holocaust, there was no place for thought or feeling. The needs of the hungry and thirsty body reduced one to dust. People who had been doctors, lawyers, engineers and professors only yesterday stole a piece of bread from their companions and when they were caught, they denied and lied. This degradation that many experienced will never be wiped out.

Under conditions of hunger and cold, the body, we learned in the camps, is liable to lose its divine qualities. That too was part of the wickedness of the murderer: not only to murder, but first to humiliate the victim utterly, to exterminate every shred of will and faith, to turn him into a despicable body whose soul had fled, and only then, that degradation complete, to murder him. The lust to debase the victim until his last moments was just as great as the lust for murder….

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