Download - 2SUNS Special Edition: the EU Referendum
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GIVE 'EM
ENOUGH
E
E
U
UROPE
SPECIAL EDITION 4/SUMMER 2016 FREE (US $FREE)
EURO 2016
2SUNS
SPECIAL EDITION
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So welcome to the EU Referendum special edition of 2SUNS, in which no we
will not use a certain compound word made of Britain and Exit because it's
fucking stupid to obsessively reduce every thought to a single syllable.
Things are Orwellian enough already without explictly emulating Newspeak,
for Christ's sake. We're going to refer to it as "The Leave Campaign" instead.
Even though there's two.
If you hadn't noticed - maybe you stumbled across this special edition late
in the day and have never heard of us before; we couldn't blame you - the
official 2SUNS position is for a "Remain" vote on Thursday. The short
version: the EU has its problems (to put it mildly) but none of them will be
solved by cutting ties altogether, like an adolescent having a temper
tantrum and running away from home. A week on the streets and that
teenager will be back, skinny fists hammering on the front door, clutching a
bag of laundry and weeping that his key doesn't fit anymore. And the door
will stay shut tight, and rightly so.
And the worst thing about this is that the polls have "leave" gaining
momentum. Obviously the polls were hot poop at the last General Election,
but wouldn't it just be typical for them to suddenly be 100% accurate now? If
Leave wins, it will be the victory of fear and contempt over common sense.
Of course, the polls at time of writing stop just before Jo Cox MP was literally
assassinated by exactly the sort of far-right British exceptionalist shitlord
that have been UKIP's bread and butter for years. No-one wants to be on the
same side as a murderer, after all. No-one wants to be on the side of David
Cameron or A. A. Gill either, of course, but here we are.
In case you care, this special edition is notably different from previous ones.
There's no contents page because there is only one content: a single, almost
stream of consciousness rant. We originally tried to split this up into
multiple rants about different aspects of the campaign, but it all tended to
merge into one so much that we eventually stopped fighting it and let the
damn thing osmose. There's no debate reviews because we were unable to
watch any of them without projectile-vomiting blood all over the screen.
That's the problem with a debate where one side is Farage, Gove and
Johnson and the other is Cameron, Osborne and an unenthusiastic and
largely absent Corbyn. Instead, it's just a rambling case for staying in,
backed with lots of swearwords and crude insults at the expense of the
Conservative Party and UKIP. As you might expect.
2SUNS
FUCKING EUROPE SPECIAL
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FUCKING EUROPE SPECIAL
Publ isher: M.H.
Editor: Thierry Henry Thoreau
Contributors: Humphrey Jaylynn, Sampford
Courtenay
Acknowledgement to the works of
Christopher Titus
Images copyright Getty, Associated Press,
BBC, Shutterstock
Associate producers: Peter Beeston, Andrew
Coldrick, Alex Csar Nick Higgins, Christopher
Lyons, Rhys Marshal l , Chris Oakley, Jacob
Smith, Patrick Stratford, Jul iet Wakefield
Executive producers: Steven Bride, Maxim
Grunewald, Nei l Murton, Craig McLeod, Sean
Quinn, Sarah Sea, Craig Thurston, Wil l Tudor
Producers: Glenn Reuben & David Stratford
Designer: Mel Christgold
Art director: Jops
FOR BOB THE FISH MAGAZINES
Head of Production: Congori l la
Managing Editor: John Yes
Chairman: M.H.
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LOATHING
&
FEAR
Britain in Europe: the final
conflict. Well, probably not. But
it's definitely a watershed
moment, as the nation decides
once and for all between its nose
and its face.
Words by Thierry Henry Thoreau,
Humphrey Jaylynn and
Sampford Courtenay.
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LOATHING
&
FEAR
Britain in Europe: the final
conflict. Well, probably not. But
it's definitely a watershed
moment, as the nation decides
once and for all between its nose
and its face.
Words by Thierry Henry Thoreau,
Humphrey Jaylynn and
Sampford Courtenay.
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Oh, how sick and tired we are of this whole
fucking thing. This fucking Europe debate.
And not just the fucking referendum, although
GOD we want it over. The whole fucking
conversation that's been going on in one form or
another for decades now and entered its current
phase in 1991 , with the drafting of the
punishingly boring Treaty of Maastricht that
transformed the EC into the EU.
Maastricht permanently fractured the then (and
now) ruling Conservative Party. Europe was still
a contentious issue before that, of course, but in
the era between the first in/out referendum and
the transformation of the EC to the EU, it was
more of a low-frequency rumble of discontent.
This was, of course, also the Thatcher era; she
naturally hated Europe and the basic idea of
Britain being anything other than their superior.
Thatcher being Thatcher, this meant that for
pretty much the entirety of the 1980s, so did the
rest of her party, or they were cast out to the
backbenches with the rest of the wets.
It was Europe that ultimately cost Thatcher, as
her typical immobility on the issue - with
Maastricht looming large, she refused to even
look at it - gradually alienated everyone around
her, from chancellor Nigel Lawson (ironically
now prominent in the Leave campaign) to,
crucially, her long time henchman Geoffrey
Howe, whose response was what started the
dominoes falling.
Her eventual replacement, John Majors, would
fight just as hard to get Maastricht signed and
over with as she had to get it killed. He succeeded
where she failed, the EC became the EU, and the
battle lines for today were drawn up between
those who thought Britain were probably better
off working with Johnny Foreigner and those
who still missed the Empire and couldn't abide
Britain being treated like it wasn't inherently
special and awesome.
That's only the Conservative Party, of course.
Not all arguments against the EU are based on
British exceptionalism b/w basic racism. That's
only the general motivation from the right. There
are other arguments coming from the left, and
they're perfectly valid too. They mostly involve
the economic setup of the Union: a free-market-
worshipping neoliberal system that's much more
American than European and has almost
THERE ARE PLENTY OF
REASONABLE PEOPLE
ON THE LEAVE SIDE,
WITH REASONABLE
OBJECTIONS
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completely failed during this harsh near-decade
since the collapse of the economy at the end of
the Bush era. A system based on as little
interference with the sainted free market as
possible, a trust in its ability to self-regulate (an
ability it has never demonstrated) that bypasses
both naivety and basic stupidity altogether to
reach a near-psychotic denial of the facts. A
system that, we reiterate, has failed, and for
which the only remedy it can think of is
austerity.
The thing is, even if we leave the EU we
won't be free of this system, because it's the
exact one that David Cameron and Gideon
Osborne are operating in Britain. They'll
never admit it's failed.
Talking of failures, there's also things like
the CAP, an attempt to impose a single
agricultural policy on an entire continent
of various biospheres and unpredictable
climate, which simply doesn't work. More
recently, the reforms to the VAT system
(including the giant pain in the arse VAT-
MOSS registration system - technically
voluntary, in the sense that paying
protection money to a gang of pinstriped thugs is
voluntary) are a shining example of the EU's
infuriating habit of trying to fix something that
wasn't yet broken and making a bollocks of
everything. We don't want to suggest that we're
backing Remain because the Leave campaign is
full of racists and Little Englanders. Despite
appareances, it's not. They're just the loudest. But
there are plenty of reasonable people on that side
LIEWATCH - VOTE LEAVE'S MYTHS BUSTED
#1: THE EU IS UNDEMOCRATIC
This is one of the biggest objections to the EU: that it's inherently
undemocratic, that a bunch of grey foreign-accented bureaucrats, hand-
picked by the inevitably corrupt EU star chamber, run everything without
being elected to it. Even Jeremy Corbyn has bemoaned the Union's
"democracy deficit".
So is the EU undemocratic? Well, no, if only on the QED basis that it has an
elected parliament, dummy. And a Council of ministers from the national
Governments who were, of course, elected in their respective countries
(it's official EU rules that every member has to be a democracy of some
kind, even one like Britain where everyone, including the Government,
tugs their forelocks at a meaningless painted figurehead). But it does also
have a Comission that isn't elected and has on at least one occasion turned
out to be so bent it needed dissolving altogether, and they're the ones
who draft EU legislation. They have no power to pass it, however; that
power is vested in the Parliament and Council.
This isn't the best way to run a railroad. It's not the worst either, but it's a
mess. What is clear is that the democracy deficit, while real, isn't as
glaring an issue as there being simply too much of it. Currently, to get
passed as EU legislation, a law has to be ping-ponged through three equal
houses - which don't communicate with each other as much or as cordially
as you might expect - and then get approved by the Governments (and/or
the people, if they decide to throw it to them) of all 28 countries. If just
one of them doesn't like the idea, it's done.
This is a gigantic pain in the arse, but it's not undemocratic. It's less
democratic than it should be, but it's mostly over-complicated and stupid.
What it certainly doesn't do is exclude Britain, or anywhere else, from the
process at any stage. Not only are we represented in the parliament and
the Council, but that veto power means we can nullify anything at the
blink of an eye, and occasionally have - most notably, Britain used this
power to nix Jacques Delors' chosen replacement as head of the
Commission. It had no effect whatsoever (choice number two, Jacques
Santer, was more or less identical, give or take a sport of massive
corruption) but we still did it). So when Vote Leave and company tell you
plucky li'l Britain is somehow powerless to stop all our laws being
rewritten by sneering snail-eating frogs jealous of our Empire, they're
telling one of their more efficient lies.
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with reasonable objections and reasons behind
their decision They're legitinately worried about
losing their jobs or their homes, or they run
businesses and fear that thanks to VAT-MOSS -
which essentially introduces the business
equavalent of a pointless Krypton Factor
obstacle course, to little or no net gain - they
might not have one much longer.
More pressingly, anyone opposing the EU from
the left - right though they might be - are on a
hiding to nothing here, because the national
debate doesn't belong to them, and never has.
It doesn't belong to us either. It doesn't belong to
anyone on the left. This is a civil war between the
right with consequences for everyone. And as
enjoyable as it is to watch the Tories tear
themselves apart, there's a very real chance
they could take the whole country with
them.
O
bviously any left-wing Eurosceptics
might be unhappy about our
characterisation of this debate as inherently
right-wing. It's not that those coming to a
"leave" conclusion from the left are wrong,
This one involves one of the bigger lies told by the Leave campaign: that
the EU costs us 350 million a week. Bollocks it does. And yet there it is
daubed on the Vote Leave failbus: "We send the EU 350m a week",
alongside some NHS concern-trolling. The faces and voices of the
campaign have been defending this number everywhere from the Today
Programme to Sky News. The even had to deploy John Redwood at one
point because all the arseholes anyone could still recognise were out
patronising Dermot Murnaghan or someone.
The best thing one can say about the 350m figure is that it wasn't
technically pulled out of someone's anus. It's apparently based on the
official Treasury estimation of the gross amount we contributed last year:
17.8bn. This actually comes to 342m a week. We're pretty sure even
Gideon Osborne knows how to round up better than that, let alone Boris
Johnson.
And even that isn't the whole truth, or even a bit of it. The EU funding rules
are that member states have to pay about 1% of their annual GDP, which is
about what that 17.8bn is. But way back in 1984, Vote Leave's very own
Eternal God-Empress negotiated a special rebate for the UK that isn't
accounted for in the initial estimate. Last year, we were let off for just shy
of five billion quid, for a grand (if still estimated) total of 12.9bn. That
comes to 248m a week.
And even that is just hair-splitting, because it totally ignores the fact that,
as members of the EU, we're the ones the money's being spent on anyway.
Well, us and 27 other countries, which is what really sticks in Vote Leave's
collective craw, let's face it. Whatever a craw is. Around about 5.8bn
eventually found its way back here via the Social Fund and agricultural
subsidies and the like, not to mention the huge injection of cash into the
private sector for science and R&D projects. Take that away and we're left
with a membership fee of 7.1bn, which comes to 136m a week. To put
that into perspective, the battlebus cost more than twice that.
In summary, this is one of the more blatant lies the Leave campaign has
told, and everyone should be reminded of it at every turn, especially
themselves.
LIEWATCH - VOTE LEAVE'S MYTHS BUSTED
#2: THE EU IS EXPENSIVE
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although we still disagree with the basic premise
that turning our backs would have any
positiveconsequences. It's that no-one's listening.
For proof, just go through the mainstream news
reporting of this fucking endless referendum
since the start of the year. How often has anyone
brought up things like the leftists' unease at the
neoliberal economic system and the continental
austerity policy. Vanishingly rarely if at all.
Instead, the discussion's all been about
"sovereignty" and immigration and deliberately
misleading cost analyses, and immigration again,
and immigration some more and then some
more sovereignty and immigration.
That's what UKIP and their allies on the Tory
right care about, and they're the faces of the the
Leave campaign (or more accurately campaigns),
so that's what they've campaigned on: foreigners
literally swarming into Britain.
The culmination of this - so far, at least; as we all
know, it can always get worse - has been the
UKIP poster in support of Leave depicting a
Labour-isn't-working style snaking queue of
refugees alongside the words "BREAKING
POINT". Its eerie resemblance to a sequence
from a Nazi propaganda film from the thirties
has been pointed out already. In both cases, the
line of foreign hordes aren't depicted as slavering,
monstrous feral beasts hammering at the door to
be let in and ravage our fair nation. They're just
men, women and children, obviously (by their
numbers) fleeing something. We're supposed to
be horrified at the simple prospect of foreign
THE DISCUSSION'S ALL
BEEN ABOUT
IMMIGRATION AND
SOVEREIGNTY AND
IMMIGRATION AGAIN
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people coming towards us, without them needing
to be visibly monstrous or evil or damaging or
anything other than simply not us.
It's a bit like the old optimist/pessimist test: if
you're a UKIP supporter, you see them as
running to something, ie poor creaking Brittania.
If you're a decent person, however, you're more
likely to see then as running from - from a
bombing campaign we started against their
government which somehow results in civilians
losing their homes instead, or from starvation
caused by global climate change we can't be
fucked to do owt about, or even acknowledge the
existence of, or just possibly something that isn't
our fault, although that's becoming increasingly
thin on the ground.
This reduction of the issue - of the entire EU - to
a simple exercise in pointing and shrieking at
foreign people obviously speaks volumes about
the Leave figureheads: Farage, Gove, Boris
Johnson, the de-mothballed Maastricht-era relic
John Redwood. It doesn't tell us anything we
didn't know about them - they're xenopobic,
nationalist to the point of exceptionalism,
nostalgic for the Empire, and far more worried
about their country as an abstract entity, a side in
an almighty game of Risk, than as a population
of fellow human beings. Standard stuff, and
much of it you could tell just from looking at the
likes of Gove and Johnson - living proof of
Orwell's maxim that by 50 everyone has the face
they deserve, even if Gove is only 48.
What's disturbing about this strategy is not just
THE REDUCTION OF THE ISSUE
TO POINTING AT FOREIGN
PEOPLE SPEAKS VOLUMES
ABOUT THE LEAVE CAMPAIGN
FIGUREHEADS
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that the message is "WOGS", it's that, for what
feels like the first time in decades, they haven't
even bothered to say it in code. To be sure, the
Tories have been smart enough to trust UKIP to
bring out most of the outright racist stuff, like
that poster, but that just cements the far-right
party's place in the mainstream, where it doesn't
belong. Not in the twenty-first century. The
"BREAKING POINT" poster would have felt
right at home in the nightmarish election in
Smethwick, 1964. It's a hop, skip and jump away
from ""If You Want A Nigger for a Neighbour,
Vote Labour". Earlier in the year, Zac
Goldsmith's failed bid for the Mayoralty of
London employed similar, if more subtle tactics,
aimed at the melanin content of his rival (and
now Mayor) Sadiq Khan. It didn't work for
Goldsmith, but it seemed to be working on the
larger scale for UKIP and the Leave Campaign -
until Jo Cox MP was murdered.
I
t didn't take much to draw those dots,
especially when her assassin gave his name in
court as Death to Traitors, Freedom for Britain.
Almost before Jo's body was cold, the Tory right
were leaping to their feet to condemn anyone
who pointed out that this was a political killing
as disgusting, insensitive monsters interested only
in politicising this political killing for their own
political ends, instead of for the political ends of
the Tory right which would be fine of course.
It's been like living in America, actually, what
with Deathtotraitors McFreedomforbritain (a
pasty-white Scotsman) being described as a
"mentally ill lone wolf", whereas the two
LIEWATCH - VOTE LEAVE'S MYTHS BUSTED
#3: THE SWISS MODEL
Switzerland is commited to this whole neutrality thing. They didn't even
join the UN until 2002, and the fact that they maintain a presence outside
of the EU but openly trading with it has been brought up by the Leave
campaign for the sake of citing something resembling precedent. The
Swiss do alright, so can we.
The problem with this is that the Swiss don't do that alright. They trade
with the EU without being a part of it, true. But to do this, they still have
to pay into the Union, and accept their immigration rules, open borders
and all - two things the Leave campaign decries as the worst things in the
entire universe. In fact, the cost and (especially) the immigration rules are
cited by the Leave campaign as being, between them, practically the entire
reason to leave the damn setup altogether.
But with Switzerland as a model, neither would change significantly, if at
all, in a brave new independent post-EU Britain. In fact, it would be worse,
because we'd have these rules hanging over us and no ability whatsoever
to change them. Kind of like how they want us to believe it works now but
doesn't. Right now, we can vote on EU legislation, including immigration
and membership fees. We even have the power to detonate anything we
really don't like with a veto. Switzerland don't, and neither will we if we
vote to leave.
The Swiss are reportedly looking at us in absolute bewilderment, that we'd
swap the cushy spot we've got now for the "continent's bitch" status they
currently enjoy. But as the country that recently banned minarets should
know better than anyone, xenophobia's a hell of a drug.
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shitheads who murdered Lee Rigsby - both
blacker than Bob Marley - were instantaneously
described as not just terrorists, but very probably
long-term members of Daesh, if not the
founding leaders of the entire organisation. The
same thing has happened with the clearly denial-
provoked slaughter in Orlando, since the
shooter's mental collapse involved loudly
proclaiming his loyalty to just about every
Islamic organisation he could think of, including
the ones that hated all the other ones. This was
much easier than mentioning what all his victims
(himself included) had in common.
It's the same principle with D. T. Freedombox -
he was clarly just a crazy man. Clearly. His
actions can't possibly have meant anything more
articulate than "bibble bibble bibble". Totally a
crazy person inspired by nothing except his own
madness, which itself exsited entirely in a
bubble. It's almost impressive, the sheer amout of
effort it's taken for him to be disowned by the
very people who gave him the idea in the first
place.
We don't mean Farage, Gove and Johnson
literally commanded him to assassinate an MP,
of course. When we say they gave him the idea,
we don't mean as a blueprint. They just painted a
picture of Britain being flooded by a stream of
brown rapists, a Britain being run from overseas
by froggy wop kraut dagos who were letting this
happen, a Britain being used as a toilet by an ill-
defined but frightening monster they called the
EU. Then they told him this was reality, that they
and only they could change it, even though
people like Cameron and Corbyn - and Jo Cox -
were against it.
To oppose this, the Remain camp are basically
relying on the fact that almost everyone who
knows anything about how anything works has
said repeatedly that to leave the EU would be
suicide. From bipartisan business moguls such as
Karren Brady and Alan Sugar, to economic
experts like Paul Krugman and Warren Buffet, to
almost every foreign head of state in the world
(with the notable exception of Vladimir Putin) -
almost every qualified person on Earth has
expressed emotions ranging from doubt to full-
on horror at the prospect of Britain leaving the
EU. Just about anyone who knows what they're
talking about has begged us not to do it,
sometimes in tears and on their knees. Most
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people would see the pattern developing.
Unfortunately, the Leave Campaign has done a
good job of damage control on this one. Mostly
represented for these purposes by Michael Gove,
they've tapped into a well of anti-intellectualism
in British society that inherently distrusts
"experts". What do "experts" know anyway?
Apart from "more than anyone else by
definition"? On Question Time, someone heckled
David Cameron for "listening to experts". That's
where we are as a nation right now. It's inspiring,
in that it makes us want to hurl ourselves off a
cliff.
H
ere's why we're in, despite the VAT-MOSS
and the CAP and the austerity and the
Reagonomics and the hey hey. The EU is
imperfect and needs changing, but leaving doesn't
help. Stopping free movement of people doesn't
give us control of our borders. It probably will
reduce immigration a bit, but since immigrants
mostly leave us better off rather than worse that
doesn't mean all the public services will get better.
We're more likely to have less money to spend on
them.
Leaving doesn't necessarily free us from
regulation. We're still going to want to trade with
the EU, and that means they're going to make us
follow some amount of those regulations for
market access, just like they do with everyone
else. See "The Swiss Model".
The 'Remain' campaign haven't done a great job
at convincing us the Four Horsemen are going to
ride the moment we leave. But they don't really
need to. We know what it'll be like if we vote
'Remain', because we're living it. We're one of
the richest countries in the world. We're doing
well. And we'll keep doing well.
"Remain" is the case for the defence. It's "Leave",
appearing for the prosecution, that shoulders the
burden of proof. It's those guys who need to
show us why we should be gambling our current
success on some promise that things will -
eventually - be even better. Not immediately,
because pretty much everyone thinks we're in for
a tough few years if we vote out. We can get
behind the idea of a short-term cost if there's
going to be a long-term gain, but the "Leave"
campaign haven't demonstrated one. They've
given us nothing that could convince so much as
"REMAIN" IS THE
CASE FOR THE
DEFENCE. THE
BURDEN OF
PROOF IS ON THE
LEAVE CAMPAIGN
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a pebble. More than once, when asked what exactly their plans are for the bold new post-EU Britain,
they've admitted they have no idea.
What they have given us is a bus with the "EU costs 350million a week" figure, which has been
shown repeatedly to be misleading. Not, techinically, untrue. But it doesn't mention that we get about
half of it back. It doesn't explain the, let's say, creative algebra it took to arrive at that figure. It
doesn't. . .well, see the boxout for details. They don't even need to use that number - can you imagine
this conversation happening anywhere: "Hey, want an extra 175million a week?" "Eh, no."
But they still use and try to defend the 350million one, because they're out to mislead people. This
is propaganda and manipulation. They're playing people for idiots, and that's not how we like to be
treated. As noted, "remain" is hardly covering itself in glory either. But we live in their world, we
don't need to trust someone who's probably lying to us. We have the option of trusting in
demonstrable reality.
So that's why we're advocating "remain". Well, broadly speaking; we didn't have time to mention the
EU Convention on Human Rights, not to mention worker's rights, both of which we can guarantee
most Leave voters will come to miss within minutes. Or the benefits of the Social Fund and other
economic leg-ups for regions like Cornwall and West Wales that are among the most deprived in the
continent. We firmly believe that even if leaving the EU somehow isn't a disaster for the whole
nation, it will be for those areas. Or the fact that doing something so stupid will reduce Britain on the
world stage to a cautionary tale, or a punchline. But if you're still going to jump the other way, make
sure you're convinced leaving will actually give you what you want. Leaving will mean costs -
everyone agrees on this, even the Leave campaigners. And gambling blind is never a good plan.
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This magazine is dedicated to the memory of Jo Cox MP (1975-2016).
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VOTE, YOU FUCKERS, VOTE
2SUNS EU Referendum Special Edition, June 2016.