Idea that Churchill would have voted Remain is absurd
DISDAIN for history among the federalist fanatics of the pro-EU brigade is as great as contempt for national sovereignty. In support of their dogma these ideologues continually indulge in Orwellian attempts to rewrite the past. The latest effort comes from Belgian politician Guy Verhofstadt, the chief Brexit negotiator for the European Parliament.
During a debate in Strasbourg this week he dared to invoke the name of Winston Churchill to buttress his cause. Claiming that Churchill was an enthusiast for federal unity Verhofstadt told British Eurosceptics that they had “professionally squandered his legacy”. Not content with this historical distortion Verhofstadt also recently argued that, in last year’s EU referendum, Churchill would have “deeply regretted” Brexit.
It is offensive enough that this Belgian zealot should try to requisition the memory of our national saviour for his destructive creed. But even worse is the idea that Churchill, if he had been alive today, would have welcomed our country’s continued subjugation to Brussels misrule.
The reality is that Verhofstadt’s EU regime is the very antithesis of everything that Churchill represented.
ASOLDIER who fought across the empire in the 1890s and in the Western Front’s trenches during the First World War, Churchill was an instinctive patriot with a profound love of his country. It was a spirit of devotion that shone through his magnificent speeches of 1940 when his nation was in peril. In contrast Verhofstadt’s European Union despises any attachment to national heritage or identity, treating such pride as a form of bigotry.
Similarly Churchill was a rumbustious democrat who loved elections and was the longest-serving MP of the entire 20th century. The EU on the other hand is run by an unelected, unaccountable oligarchy that despises the idea of the popular will. Churchill was also a romantic, who cherished the freedom of the individual, whereas the EU is addicted to pettifogging bureaucracy.
Like all advocates of federalism Verhofstadt is a ferocious defender of free movement and open borders as a means of promoting European citizenship.
But Churchill would have been appalled at the social revolution that has been inflicted on Britain through mass immigration. Nor would he have wanted us to become a regional province of an alien empire, particularly not one dominated by Germany. After all, his finest hour came in the heroic battle against the Third Reich.
He did not achieve that victory only for Britain, decades later to end up in a German-led federation.
As a historian and imperial visionary Churchill was a passionate believer in Britain’s unique national destiny. He never thought Britain should be subsumed within any European combination. “We have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe but not of it,” he wrote in 1930. In the same vein he told his foreign secretary Anthony Eden in 1942 that “the only way to run Europe after the war is for Britain and Russia to stay out of it”.
It is true that in the immediate aftermath of the war he came to favour the idea of some kind of federal unity as a means of achieving reconciliation and rebuilding Europe. His plan was set out in a number of highprofile speeches on the continent, most famously in Zurich in 1946 and the Hague in 1948,
THE second factor was that Churchill saw European unity more as a cultural, moral and social force than a political one, aiming to establish a new mood across the continent where old enmities would be banished.
The European movement will “not aspire to compete with governments in the executive sphere,” he declared in 1948. But that is precisely what the edict-peddling, policy-dictating, directive-issuing modern European Commission does.
The real indicator of Churchill’s ambivalence came in his second premiership from 19511955. He then had the chance to put his supposedly proEuropean views into action just at a time when the first institutions of the Common Market were being created. Tellingly, he refused to do so. Indeed one of his first acts was to tell his Cabinet that “he had never supported British membership of an exclusive federal union”. From then on the question was largely ignored by his government.
Today Churchill would have been dismayed how the postwar dream of reconciliation has turned into the nightmare of the EU. From migration chaos to financial meltdown, governance by Brussels has proved a catastrophe. Churchill achieved the salvation of European civilisation. The EU spells its doom.
‘We are with Europe but not of it, he wrote’