Its all a silly game ET. Particularly the one the ardent Brexiteers are playing, but they won't pay the cost of the game. That's left to the poor, gullible, hard-of-thinking who were convinced that their woes were caused by the EU and not Tory doctrine-driven austerity. A very sad game.
I don't know whether you refer to it as a 'meme' or a cliché, but the currently fashionable leftlibremain one by which Cameron/Osborne austerity is in some kind of divine isolation responsible for brexit is of course utter cobblers. The British public have a had a major, and increasing, issue with the European project since Cameron and Osborne were still hanging on their respective mothers' teats.
As a complete aside, don't let it be forgotten that the EU were the standard bearers of austerity. The EU institutions used it to preserve their precious project (a doctrinal one, incidentally) when it was under threat, rendering millions out of work and driving people to poverty in both youth and old-age, and sometimes to suicide, in the process.
We all, in some way, make choices between independence and wider interests. Sovereignty is a conceit which is of diminishing relevance in an increasingly globalised world. Sacrifice implies a loss which we would prefer not to suffer.
All this therefore ignores the customary horse-trading of power and influence that has gone on between nations, states and blocs, since these were a thing. If we’re looking for famous quotes ‘no man is an island’ which acknowledges that nobody has complete autonomy. Countries are no different. I do think it is incumbent on those who set such store by these things, to explain what we have lost, and why it was not worth the trade for what we gained in return.
I take your point - or points - though they seem to comprise a sort of cobbled together mish-mash of quotes and vague ideals. To begin with, sovereignty is very much more than a 'conceit', a word that seems almost designed to belittle the monumental efforts of countless people, some of them justifiably famous, many more unknown, who strove both to protect the people of these countries (and in the process, most of the European ones) from brutal dictatorship, and who fought for universal suffrage in the first half of the 20th century. This is important, for sovereignty belongs to the people, and it is they who gift it to our representatives in Parliament, who are elected at the ballot box in regular plebiscites. Political authority therefore belongs to those who govern
only through the consent of the people. This fundamental principle has been at the core of the development of great societies since the ancient Greeks, and undoubtedly beyond, and was confirmed again and again by almost anyone of note in the political arena in the last three centuries, from Lincoln and Jefferson through to Churchill. You will find plenty of famous quotes to that end, including indeed your own, which implies not that sovereignty lies with one man, but with the collective. The converse, or inverse, of this, is dictatorship, even if it is merely a relatively benign dictatorship by ideologically-driven bureaucrats and technocrats.
Societies evolve around a set of customs, habits, rules and a sense of shared history and folklore. Countries are societies to which people have a sense of belonging, of responsibility, of control, and of a sense of safety. Such societies evolve, and the collective increases in size and even geographical scope, but only at a human pace, measured at least in generations. This evolution cannot be forced, because to attempt to do so will bring a sense of alienation, and of loss of control, and there will always be a reaction.
I would argue strongly with your statement that sovereignty is of diminishing importance in the globalised world. The events of the last 6 months or so particularly, and indeed the spasm of which brexit is, I think, just one manifestion, have shown very clearly that sovereignty is alive, well, and extremely fashionable. And in a globalised world essentially run by enormous, faceless corporations which write their own rules and the individual counts for nothing beyond commodification, people need more than ever to have something over which they retain some sense of belonging and control.
Horse-trading between countries has indeed always happened. A cumbersome and virtually autonomous technocratic proto-dictatorship of Europe is not necessary for that horse-trading to continue as it always has done. Indeed, the the horse-trading between individual states continues
despite the EU, and perhaps because of it too. Have you not watched it happening in the past half year?
Your post seems to insinuate that Heath didn't lie, because he used the word 'sacrifice', and we sacrificed nothing.
I disagree.
