Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-06-13-Speech-3-201-000"
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"en.20120613.24.3-201-000"2
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"Madam President, almost exactly 100 years ago, from the city of Southampton in my constituency, the Titanic made her maiden voyage. It is an irresistible message for many in this House and to many observers outside.
There are so many natural similes to draw about icebergs and scrambles for lifeboats and the hubris of saying that a vessel was indestructible and so on, but you know me, you have heard me in this Chamber many times before: I abhor the cliché, I disdain the easy metaphor.
Let me instead focus on a different aspect of the sinking of that vessel, which was the behaviour of the band leader, Wallace Hartley, who, we are told from several witness accounts, played a hymn as the ship went under the water, the old hymn ‘Nearer my God to thee’, which had been introduced by his father, who was a Methodist choirmaster, to their Lancashire congregation.
I wonder whether the reason he did that was not because he was soothing himself. In times of great panic, some people run around like ants, but others go back to what is familiar and there he was playing his elegy, his funeral threnody with the notes he had learnt as a boy.
Are we not doing something similar? Hundreds of millions of euro are being withdrawn in a bank run across the Mediterranean. The system is about to crash and we are legislating about a common definition, upon the phobia about company boards having quotas of women and so on. Why are we doing it? Because it makes us feel good. Regulation is what makes us feel good. Regulation is what makes us feel comfortable. Therein is our tragedy."@en1
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