"Globalisation, which benefits only multi-national companies and takes away all sense of local or national pride and identity, is the biggest threat facing all the member states of the EU"
About this Quote
There is a locker-room clarity to Steve Blake's line: pick the villain, name the stakes, rally the team. As an athlete, he frames politics the way sport often does - as a contest with a clear opponent and a scoreboard. "Multi-national companies" become the away side with deeper pockets; "local or national pride" is the home crowd, the thing you play for when your legs are gone.
The intent is openly defensive. Globalisation isn't treated as a complex web of trade-offs but as a one-way extraction: profit flows upward, meaning drains outward. That absolutism ("benefits only") is doing rhetorical work, not economic accounting. It turns a messy argument into a moral one, where the injury is not just lost jobs but lost belonging. The phrase "takes away all sense" is the tell: the fear isn't borderless commerce, it's borderless identity - the suspicion that culture can be franchised, that a town becomes a brand extension with the same shops, the same ads, the same future.
Dropping the EU into the crosshairs widens the target. It hints at a common Eurosceptic frustration: integration as a project that speaks in market language while communities speak in memory, ritual, and place. "Member states" is bureaucratic diction, almost deliberately cold, as if to mimic the institutions he's accusing - a subtle way of saying the system already sees countries as administrative units, not lived-in stories.
It works because it fuses economics and emotion into a single threat narrative: if you let the market write the rules, you don't just lose control of policy; you lose the feeling that your life is rooted anywhere.
The intent is openly defensive. Globalisation isn't treated as a complex web of trade-offs but as a one-way extraction: profit flows upward, meaning drains outward. That absolutism ("benefits only") is doing rhetorical work, not economic accounting. It turns a messy argument into a moral one, where the injury is not just lost jobs but lost belonging. The phrase "takes away all sense" is the tell: the fear isn't borderless commerce, it's borderless identity - the suspicion that culture can be franchised, that a town becomes a brand extension with the same shops, the same ads, the same future.
Dropping the EU into the crosshairs widens the target. It hints at a common Eurosceptic frustration: integration as a project that speaks in market language while communities speak in memory, ritual, and place. "Member states" is bureaucratic diction, almost deliberately cold, as if to mimic the institutions he's accusing - a subtle way of saying the system already sees countries as administrative units, not lived-in stories.
It works because it fuses economics and emotion into a single threat narrative: if you let the market write the rules, you don't just lose control of policy; you lose the feeling that your life is rooted anywhere.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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