davywavy | Thoughts on that Europe Referendum

I’ve always regarded voting as being rather like sex, in that I get to do it once every four or five years, usually by myself, in private, and it doesn’t take very long but the consequences always seem to haunt me for some time afterwards.
And, quite frankly, I can name a large number of people whom I do not think should be allowed to do either ever again.

However, I cannot hide my pleasure at Tony Blair’s recent U-turn announcement that there will be a public referendum on Europe. Despite Tony’s insistence, only last year, that he has ‘no reverse gear’, the scale of this U-Turn is impressive, Then again, it’s long been clear that the relationship between words and their meanings holds little interest for members of the current government and so I suppose we can’t be too surprised when they end up doing the exact opposite of what they say they’re going to. I’m sure that the students reading this will be only too delighted they voted labour last time round, secure in the manifesto assurance that Blair remained ‘irrevocably opposed’ to top up fees. After all, it’s not like they’re going to have to pay them, is it now?
I’m getting off topic. Europe.
A lot of people reading this will be too young to remember a time when Europe and its constituent members were an attractive proposition, but such a time there was and I’m glad that the British government has, only perhaps fifteen years behind the times, moved to recognize this. I can remember the relative merits of Europe getting a lot of debate when I was at school, back in the late 1980s’. At one stage we even mounted a small and ineffectual campaign for a vote on this very subject. You might be surprised at the sophistication of a bunch of sixth-formers but believe me, the knotty question of whether Joey Tempest was sexier than Jon bon Jovi was an oft-argued one in our common room.
It’s taken a while for the government to come round to looking at the same problem. It’s a shame it didn’t happen four or five years ago when a millennium re-release of ‘The Final Countdown’ barely made a dent in the charts, but still we finally get what we radical students were campaigning for, fifteen years ago. An answer to the eternal question: Just who are better? Europe, or Bon Jovi?