Fuck Calais.

Just over five months ago I blogged that as a result of the Lisbon Constitreaty coming into force I now call Australia home.

Why? Because for all practical purposes the country in which I was born no longer exists and Australia is all I am left with. I was born English and British in the same sense than someone can be born a Londoner or a Lancastrian, or for that matter Norman or Bavarian or Tuscan, but England and the UK no longer exist because the Czechs have dropped their opposition to the EU Constitreaty:

Vaclav Klaus, the only European Union leader who has still not signed the document, said he could not wait for a British general election next year which could lead to a Tory government and a possible referendum to bury the Treaty.
Mr Klaus said: "The train carrying the treaty is going so fast and it's so far that it can't be stopped or returned, no matter how much some of us would want that."

Oh fuck it.

And that's desperately sad not just because in the back of my mind the UK was always there to return to if Australia didn't work out for me, but because millions of people who want to think of themselves as British, to say nothing of those French, Germans, Spanish, Italians etc. who feel love and pride and patriotism towards their respective countries, can just fucking forget it from now on. It may not look it yet but Britain is dead.

...

So the choice is made for me. Home is here in Oz by my own decision to move here, but it could have been the UK once again in the future. Not now though. I can never go to that home again because it's not really there anymore. It is an ex-country.

Once or twice before then I'd blogged on some outrageous Orwellian move on the part of Her Majesty's Repulsive Bunch of Self Serving, Nest Feathering, Deceitful Cunts and said that it made me want to go no closer than Calais, but as a result of the EU's ever closer integration we now have a good reason to steer clear of the whole fucking continent.

MILLIONS of Britons face being snooped on by a new European intelligence agency which has been handed frightening powers to pry into our lives.

Europol can access personal information on anyone – including their political opinions and sexual preferences – if it suspects, rightly or wrongly, that they may be involved in any “preparatory act” which could lead to criminal activity.

It is understood the agency will concentrate on anyone thought “xenophobic” or likely to commit a crime involving the environment, computers or motor vehicles.

This could include covert monitoring of people who deny the existence of climate change or speak out on controversial issues.

This is genuinely worrying and goes further than my most tinfoil hatted dreams. Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance, at whose blog I picked this up, says:

“It doesn’t surprise me that Europol has been handed these rather frightening powers,… We now live in a pan-European state so it was to be expected that it would have a federal police force with powers over us….There is a real danger that opposition to EU policies could make an individual liable to arrest…. For example, if Brussels adopts a hard-line stance on climate change, it’s conceivable that someone who broadcasts their scepticism of climate change may be accused of committing an environmental crime because they have undermined the EU’s efforts to save mankind.”

The Angry Exile says, 'Fuck Calais, it's somewhere in southern Norway now, possibly Switzerland if Mrs Exile wants chocolate.'

As with all these things the worry is not so much a government of today which is granting itself these powers with a kind of 'just in case' attitude, but the unknown governments of the future who may decide to abuse these powers for their own benefit. But even before that there is a worry for the here and now: 'mission creep' as the machinery of state, the various little cogs and wheels with their quotas of toothbrush moustached cunts in high-viz jackets whose empty lives are made more full by exercising these powers over the little people, will take it upon itself to use these powers more and more and for a wider range of situations than was ever envisaged.

And what have the 300+ million people in Europe got to protect them from this? The European Commission, the European Parliament, and the national parliaments that have already ceded power to the above, that's what.

They're fucked, aren't they? Welcome to Stasiland, Istanbul to the Atlantic Coast.