Tony Parsons - EUre Record’s Stuck

Anyone who works in the European Parliament must by now be immune to the puerile tantrums thrown by Britain’s free and fearless press. The EU is a rules based organisation - they codify, follow and enforce those rules. For this, a succession of overpaid and under-researched man-babies in the tabloids scream and rant “bully”, “dictator”, “imperialist”, “swaggering”, “arrogant”, and of course “you treat us like dirt”.

So they switch off when the likes of washed-up has-been Tony Parsons starts to scream and froth, and today he’s been as close to spontaneous combustion as makes no difference. That means this particular man-baby is, as so often, talking to himself.

“European Union acts like a playground bully … our nation treated like a stroppy little colony … an organisation that treats us like dirt … stop acting as if the EU has any interest in fair play … sneering tyrants of ­Brussels … EU has treated us like a rebellious little outpost … an organisation that treats them with such haughty contempt”. It’s like a dribbling old lush sat in the corner at the local Spoons, on his sixth pint before lunch.

That’s apart from Parsons clearly not knowing the first thing about the EU, or Britain’s relationship with it - let alone the benefits it has brought our country. He’s too comfortable, wilful and stupid to even start to understand how the other member states have spent decades bending over backwards to accommodate the whinging British. For him, such details are so inconvenient that he does not bother to cut the abuse to fit them in.

But, even though no-one in Brussels wants to know what a sad bigot at the Sunday Sun thinks, perhaps we should listen to what Tone is suggesting: “let us ALL support our Prime Minister as she does her best to find a solution that unites the 17.4million who voted to leave and the 16million who voted to stay. We all love our country, don’t we? We have been divided - friends, families, north and south, young and old - for too long. We will leave and we will prosper”. That it, is it? We just smile happily and jump off the cliff?

Tell us more. “Make it clear we want to keep trading with our EU friends, Theresa. But warn we will not be ­intimidated. The UK is not going to crawl away, wither and die simply because we had the temerity to leave the EU. We will leave and we will prosper”. You said that already. And if we eventually leave, yes, we may just wither away.

In any case, nobody will give a flying foxtrot if Parsons is going to use language like “And if they want that £39billion, then those rude, arrogant old bastards in Brussels must start accepting that fact”. That rude, arrogant old bastard writing the column is also ignorant to boot. There is no way we avoid settling our obligations to the EU. None at all.

And the thing that divides us, in case Tone missed it, is gobshites like him spreading falsehood, misinformation and indeed hatred against an organisation that is NOT a super state, is NOT an imperial power, is NOT the cause of deprivation in many parts of the UK, and is NOT the reason Sun pundits get stuck in traffic on the school run.

Thus the problem: those who know what the EU is about, and those who work there, tune out wackos like Tony Parsons so he becomes part of the noise floor. Then some who read the Sun actually think he knows what he’s talking about. But he doesn’t.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by adding to its Just Giving page at

www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/zelostreet2