LEO McKINSTRY:
THE hour of freedom is fast approaching. We are just past the halfway point on our journey to independence. It is now 508 days since the British people voted to leave the European Union, only 501 days until the rule of Brussels comes to an end in March 2019.
That verdict has been implemented in law by the decision of Parliament to embark on our withdrawal from the EU under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.
Yet in a remarkable demonstration of contempt for democracy the alliance of Remoaners and Eurocrats still refuses to accept this outcome.
Their neurotic worship of Brussels means that they do all they can to undermine the cause of Brexit, hoping that the process will break down amid public disillusion and political turmoil. Intimidation, fearmongering and obstruction are their weapons, national surrender is their goal.
The war against the democratic will of the British people is now being waged on every front. From the EU comes the relentless bullying by the bloc’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier over the so-called “divorce” bill, which is now reported to have reached a preposterous total of £60 billion.
With an arrogance bred of his involvement with the EU’s ruling oligarchy, Barnier declared on Friday that he would give Britain just two weeks to make concessions, otherwise there would be no further talks on a trade deal this year.
BUT the EU’s insolent, power-crazed stance shows exactly why we were right to vote for Brexit. Barnier’s method smacks of escalating extortion rather than genuine dialogue. But that is because the EU is obsessed with money with which to sustain its lavish bureaucratic empire. The British Government cannot give in to Barnier’s blackmail. If it does then it will lose all leverage in further trade talks.
Just as sickening as the cash demands are the persistent attempts to smear the Leave campaign. That impulse could clearly be seen yesterday in the orchestrated hysteria over a leaked letter that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, two of the leading Brexiteer Cabinet ministers, sent to Theresa May urging her to implement our EU withdrawal effectively without an endless transition period.
From the overblown coverage of this letter it might have been thought that Johnson and Gove had tried to execute a coup d’état against the Prime Minister. They were accused of operating a “junta” and staging “a putsch” to impose their “Orwellian” plan. In truth the two men were just asking Theresa May to uphold government policy and carry out the wishes of the people.
It is the Remoaner-EU nexus which is the real menace. Nothing is safe from their Machiavellian manoeuvres. Last week the European Commission made the new demand that Northern Ireland would have to stay in the single market and customs union because of its border with the Irish republic. It was another cynical argument designed to wreck Brexit and weaken the United Kingdom’s integrity. The question of the Irish border could easily be resolved with goodwill, imagination and flexibility but none of those is a quality that distinguishes the pro-EU ideologues.
The same determination to smash Brexit lies behind the moves in Parliament by the Remoaners to block the EU Withdrawal Bill, which begins its passage in the Commons this week. Their chosen tactic has been to submit a deluge of amendments, which will both waste government time and thwart the legislation. In a newspaper article yesterday Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tried to justify such behaviour by claiming that his party needed clarity on Brexit because the “flip-flopping” and “incoherent” Tories had executed “so many U-turns that no one knows which way they are facing”. Corbyn’s hypocrisy is laughable. His words could be an exact description of Labour’s desperate, inconsistent opportunism on Brexit.
Just as absurdly, Corbyn described the Withdrawal Bill an “undemocratic power grab” by the Government. But Brexit is the very opposite. It means the restoration of national democracy from an unelected foreign cabal.
The only power being grabbed is by the British people from Brussels. That is why the Government has no need to be defensive about the implementation of Brexit.
FOR too long the Remoaner-EU coalition has been allowed to set the agenda with all its alarmist gloom. Ever since the referendum they have told us that the economy is about to collapse yet figures last week showed that growth in the latest quarter was up 0.5 per cent, higher than expected.
Manufacturing output has risen for five months in a row, exports have increased by 5.4 per cent and unemployment is at a record low. One typical Remoaner scare, continually recycled by the BBC, is that the NHS has been haemorrhaging EU staff since the Brexit vote. This is just another deception. In fact EU recruitment to the health service went up in the year since June 2016 by more than 3,000.
The future can be bright when we are liberated from the EU’s financial, protectionist and regulatory straitjacket. One recent estimate by City analyst Bob Lyddon is that the true price of membership to the British economy could be as high as £980 million a week. Yet as a truly independent nation we could make our own deals and begin “a new free trade era of global economic growth,” in the words of the respected think tank the Legatum Institute
The opportunities for prosperity are there but ministers need to show the guts to embrace our liberty instead of being scared by it.
‘Ignore the smears of the pro-Remain cabal’