WHAT`S GOOD FOR US ..

I`ve tried, my God I`ve tried, to keep away from all the sound and fury of the General Election campaign.  But it`s not easy when something like Tony Blair comes back to haunt us.  Like millions of others, I will never forgive this self righteous chancer for taking us into the Iraq War and so when he takes to an election platform I suppose I am automatically put on my guard and likely to dismiss anything he says as highly dubious.  

Yesterday, when he gave his `speech,`I was not disappointed.  He warned us that David Cameron`s pledge to hold a referendum on Britain`s EU membership would cause economic "chaos."  Cameron, he said, had put "exit on the agenda" by pledging a referendum and that leaving the EU would threaten the UK`s position as a "great global nation."

Now, I`m a simple soul and I confess to a large dose of naivete when it comes to the world in general and politics in particular and I like things to mean what they say.  For example, I thought I knew what democracy meant.  My dictionary tells me that democracy is "government by the people or their elected representatives."  Sounds fair enough.

But in Blairland it clearly means something else.  Yesterday he suggested that the question of Britain`s membership of the EU was too important to be left to a democratic vote.   In other words, people like Blair think they know what`s good for us and so they seek to deny any chance that we might have to express our own opinion. 

So, when he suggests that it would be a disaster if we had an EU referendum and an even bigger disaster if we voted to leave the EU altogether, he forgets that, in my simple notion of what democracy means, the biggest disaster of all would be to deny the people the democratic right to determine their own future - a right that has already been denied to them for over half a century.  I think that what would be really good for us would be for Tone to just go away, count his money and leave us all in peace.