EU treats Britain with utter disdain
PLEASE do not tell me we are all going to have to read page after page of the nightmare negotiations in Brussels every breakfast hour for the next year and a half. The NHS would simply collapse under the burden of the nervous breakdowns. Already the mind boggles trying to work out who swore at whom, insulted whom or called whom a liar. Already I hear David Davis is having to restrain himself from awarding Jean-Claude Juncker one of those neck-chops they taught him at Hereford when he was a slip of a lad.
The fact is we are talking to the wrong people. The EU negotiating team comprises Barnier, who can’t stand the Brits anyway, Juncker (ditto because we fought against his appointment from the start and lost of course), Guy Verhofstadt and a few more.
Most of them seem to come from mini-states with bought-and-paidfor democracies (Juncker was prime minister of Luxembourg for 18 consecutive years) which without the EU would be flyspecks on the map of the continent. Hence the unifying passion for the European Union. They are all therefore also united by an absolute horror at the idea of our departure from it succeeding.
For Britain to sever the subordination and live on, sovereign and prosperous, would set an example which up to another half-dozen might wish to imitate. So the EU negotiators live like medieval monarchs in paid-for luxury, waited upon hand and foot with a job for life, doing all they can do which is shuffling from committee to committee.
OF COURSE they don’t want it ever to end. If you wanted to create a team guaranteed to ensure that any talks would fail in acrimony, these are its members. The reason they are still there and warmly underwritten by the UK government is simple. They have passionate allies in the form of the British Foreign Office, a pro-EU fifth column if ever there was one and a Prime Minister with a torrent of problems right on the floor of the House.
Is there anything we could do? Certainly. Recognise that we are far stronger than at first appears. Out there beyond the borders of the EU we have potential trading partners who collectively possess economies larger than the entire EU many times over, and they are all eager for a mutually profitable free-trade treaty with us. They would love to replace the multi-billion-pound annual trade between the UK and the EU, which presently runs at a £70billion per annum trade surplus in favour of the EU.
They know, as do we, that there is not one limousine or widget imported by us from Europe that could not be replaced from a different source. To our east are India, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. To the west the US, Canada and Brazil. The Anglosphere alone is economically bigger than the EU.
These countries have oil, gas, every mineral known to man, and ever-growing high-spending middle classes right across the planet. They too have chambers of commerce, employers’ federations, industrial tycoons, all happy to trade and prosper under World Trade Organisation rules. So far they seem to have been discreetly silent. Surely we should quietly encourage them to speak out. Offers of huge one-onone trade treaties?
If only we were allowed. But even if they were made, parallel talks would have to begin. Enough to frighten the pommes frites out of the gravytrainers of Brussels. We are as usual being too diffident, too timid. So Barnier and Juncker can insult us and our representatives as they see fit. Our forefathers would never have tolerated this.