More on the EU Referendum

Perry de Havilland is positively glowing with schadenfreude in this post at Samizdata:

With the decisive French 'Non' to the EU Constitution, clearly the whole project for European super-statist integration has taken a hit unlike any in its history thus far. In many ways the most significant feature of this is that it has made the intellectual and social disconnect between whole peoples in the EU's constituent nations impossible to paper over. In short, the nation called 'Europe' is seen to be a fiction and the 'inevitable march of progress' has been shown to be an illusion.

The only negative on this has been pointed out by Paul Wells (whose post I used as a QotD the other day), in that the majority of those who voted against the EU constitution were voting against free(-ish) markets and (slightly more) capitalism.

Now this attempt to get the UK to vote anyway is really splendid news and I hope that other people who share my views that the EU is an abomination will remember Napoleon's dictum "never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake" as any UK vote will almost certainly be a vote against the EU which will just widen the rift in political cultures between France and the UK.

I'm perhaps a bit of a "Little Englander", in that I've never seen the huge attraction for Britain becoming more integrated with the rest of Europe, so I share Perry's unholy delight in the unhinging of the Eurocratic plan. It will be interesting if the current British government follows through in their own referendum: I think, as Perry clearly does, that "Europe" is not a winning issue to British voters.