Tim Newark

bulwark against the Ottoman Islamic Turks.

You only have to spend a few days in any of these beautiful countries to understand how the shadow of Islamic conquest still hangs over them. Many of their museums proudly display trophies captured from the Turks at the siege of Vienna in 1683. The Ottoman Empire remained a threat to them until 1922 when it was dissolved after the First World War.

So it’s not exactly ancient history and neither Hungarian nor Polish governments were going to invite thousands of Muslims to settle within their mainly Christian communities. Of course, to largely secular bureaucrats living in Brussels this seemed absurdly out of date but history matters to nations whose sense of identity has been badly shaken by decades of communist totalitarian rule.

These nations are all now democracies and are entitled to protect their own citizens and culture in their own way. As net receivers of EU subsidies they can see the economic benefits of the union but they are not slow now in rejecting the political diktats of their prosperous, liberal neighbours.

In fact the migrant crisis reinforced the determination of the Visegrad Group – Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – to stand together and reject the demands of the

SO THERE you go, on something as important as national identity and security, no nation within the EU has the ability to protect its own borders if the other nations outvote them.

Since then of course Chancellor Merkel has paid a heavy political price for her open-door migrant policy and any Hungarian or Polish leader would be committing electoral suicide if they backed down. “Security policy is national, not European, competence,” said the Polish interior minister.

It is interesting to note that Hungary is also being taken to the European Court of Justice over laws it has introduced to counter the influence of Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros. Soros is the speculator who made a fortune betting against the UK in the 1992 sterling crisis. A leading patron of the global liberal elite he is now using his billions to fund his Open Society Foundations that spread his pro-migration views around the world, especially in his former homeland.

Needless to say Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is not happy with this and wants to use his domestic law to identify such meddling institutions as “foreign-funded”. Quite rightly so but the EU appears to be more than happy to do the bidding of Soros and prosecute Hungary over this.

It all makes one profoundly grateful that thanks to Theresa May’s negotiations we are one step closer towards Brexit and taking back control of our own borders.

But by insisting on taking a train-crash approach to legal action against Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, it appears that the EU may well be on course to forcing those proud countries to take a deep breath and ditch the EU themselves. We can only hope so.

‘The bureaucrats badly miscalculated’