15/11/2015
There is no way fully to convey the loathing of the murderous scum who turned their guns on innocent civilians in Paris on Friday night, the killing (of a scale all to familiar elsewhere in the world) made all the more horrific by its proximity.
However, of the many messages of sympathy and solidarity that came from world leaders, none was perhaps more incongruous than the claims made of Angela Merkel's
statement. She was said to have emphasised the need "to send a clear message by upholding and asserting their right to live by European values".
That bit about "European values", apparently inserted by over-zealous copy-writers, jars. Had she actually said that, it would have been a highly political statement every bit as unwarranted and unwanted as the ill-considered assertions that attributed the terror attacks to the EU's "freedom of movement" policy.
What should have been said, and what we will say here, is that terrorism is ultimately defeated by the determination of ordinary people to continue their lives, refusing to allow the acts of a murderous few to change the way they live. The latter is, after all, the aim of the terrorist.
With that in mind, we continue the series on referendum strategy that we started on Monday, even if we do so with a heavy heart and not much enthusiasm, as the news about the horrors of the Paris attack continues to pour in.
The point has to be made, though, that life goes on â it must go on â and while we accept that the media will devote considerable resource to covering the attack, it is also the case that they are overdoing it, as they always do. After a while, the coverage becomes repetitive and obsessive, and other areas of life which require scrutiny go unreported.
One of the casualties of the Paris attack, therefore, is the EU referendum debate this weekend. The newspapers have cleared the decks to report on Paris, and many planned stories have been spiked â never to re-emerge. They have been lost, possibly forever (although some will have a half-life on the net).
But the issue hasn't gone away. Years hence, when this particular attack has become an unpleasant, lingering memory, we will be going to the polls. In between now and then, there will be any number of major events, many of them tragic and all-absorbing for a while. And while we will pause and take note, sharing the sorrows and the grief, we owe it to the gravity of the referendum issue to stay focused.
Nevertheless, no one â including myself - is in the mood for a long analytical post this evening, so I will cut short my piece, with just one observation.
Crucially, even with the discovery of passports which appear to show that one or more of the terrorists gained access to Europe as refugees, coming in from Syria via Greece, we must avoid the temptation to enlist the events of Friday night in support of leaving the EU.
We must remind ourselves â even if some seem to find the point entirely beyond their grasp â that the refugee crisis in Europe is not driven primarily by EU law, but by the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees, and the 1967 Protocol. With or without the EU, we would have these international agreements, and it is those which give substance to EU procedural laws, such as the Schengen
acquis.
Furthermore, the Syrian crisis owes nothing to the existence of the EU, and the likelihood is that eruptions in the troubled Middle East would have continued unabated, with or without European political integration.
Thus, there are no pickings in Paris for the "leavers". No one should attempt to enlist the tragic events of Friday to the cause, and the temptation to gain political advantage from the misery of others should be sternly resisted. Certainly, on this blog, we want none of it.
We will continue the series in the next posting.
