2SUNS Special Edition: the EU Referendum

GIVE 'EM

ENOUGH

E

E

U

UROPE

SPECIAL EDITION 4/SUMMER 2016 FREE (US $FREE)

EURO 2016

2SUNS

SPECIAL EDITION

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.


#2: THE EU IS EXPENSIVE

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

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

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


#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.

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

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

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.

This magazine is dedicated to the memory of Jo Cox MP (1975-2016).

VOTE, YOU FUCKERS, VOTE

2SUNS EU Referendum Special Edition, June 2016.

Documents

2SUNS Special Edition: the EU Referendum