PAY UP TO BE IN SINGLE MARKET CLUB

France says City will only get full access if we hand over billions

BRITAIN’S financial sector won’t get full access to the single market unless the UK pays billions to Brussels and follows EU laws forever, Emmanuel Macron said yesterday.

At a joint Press conference with Theresa May, the French President spoke warmly about relations between Britain and France, saying they were ‘making a new tapestry together’.

But he adopted a tough line on Brexit, suggesting the UK will be offered only a limited trade deal unless it agrees to be bound by the rules of the single market – which Mrs May has already ruled out.

He said Britain could ‘be my guest’ if it wanted to retain full access to the single market, but warned it would come with onerous conditions. ‘I am here neither to punish or to reward,’ he said. ‘I want to make sure that the single market is preserved because that is very much the heart of the European Union.

‘So the choice is on the British side, not on my side. There can be no differentiated access to the financial services. If you want access to the single market, including the financial services, be my guest, but it means that you need to contribute to the budget and acknowledge the European jurisdiction. Such are the rules.’

Government sources last night played down the significance of the intervention. One source suggested Mr Macron had been ‘slightly more helpful than usual’ by indicating France would not try to block any sector, including financial services, from a Brexit trade deal.

The Prime Minister insisted the strength of the City of London benefited both sides in the Brexit talks and repeated her call for a new ‘deep and special partnership’ between Britain and the EU.

But former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith accused President Macron of ‘grandstanding’. He said French industry and agriculture would suffer more than their British counterparts if there was no post-Brexit trade deal.

And he contrasted Mr Macron’s bullish language with Britain’s willingness to pay another £45million towards security at joint border controls in Calais – and the offer of three helicopters to assist a French mission against jihadis in Africa. Mr Duncan Smith said: ‘He wants us to co-operate on security and defence and we are decent about that. What we get in return is this stupid game of him strutting his stuff and pretending that we need a trade deal more than he does. They sell more to us than we do to them and the potential tariffs on wines and cheeses would be very high. It is just bravado.’

Mr Macron also insisted a bespoke deal was not on offer. The UK would have to choose between a Norway-style arrangement that would keep Britain shackled to the single market, or a Canadastyle deal with only limited market access. He said: ‘There shall be no hypocrisy in this respect otherwise it will not work or we would destroy the single market and its coherence.’

Mrs May said she was continuing to seek a bespoke deal for Britain, insisting: ‘ I think the City of London will continue to be a major global financial centre.’

n Plans for a ‘clear the air’ meeting between Theresa May and Donald Trump next week have been thrown into doubt.

Downing Street is struggling to arrange a meeting between the two leaders, despite the fact they will both be attending the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The meeting was designed to reset relations after the US President’s dramatic decision to scrap a planned visit to the UK next month. But officials have so far been unable to persuade their US counterparts to clear a space in the President’s diary.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson yesterday suggested Mr Trump believed Mrs May was too busy with Brexit.

‘Slightly more helpful than others’ ‘Stupid game of him strutting his stuff’

As a general rule, the prime minister of Ireland, who is known as the Taoiseach, rarely captures the British public’s imagination.

Recent incumbents, such as Brian Cowen and Enda Kenny, could have walked down a typical UK high street without anybody giving them a second glance.

But Leo Varadkar seems determined to change all that.

after barely half a year in office, the 39- year- old has made more of an impression on British opinion than his two predecessors put together.

Unfortunately, he has done it for all the wrong reasons. Having already indulged in posturing over the Irish border — threatening to veto a Brexit deal over it — Mr Varadkar has clearly decided to cast himself as Britain’s chief critic and the EU’s best friend.

Nothing else can explain the arrogance of his speech this week at strasbourg.

Effrontery

addressing MEPs, he listed a host of supposed losers from Brexit — Britain’s young, farmers and businesses. But he was also ‘very conscious’, he said, of ‘British veterans, very brave people who fought on the beaches of France, not just for Britain but also for European democracy and European values. People like that are always in my mind’.

Where on earth do you start with this?

Well, you might start with the effrontery of a young politician lecturing neighbours about how to conduct their affairs.

Then there’s the excruciating mawkishness of the claim that Britain’s veterans are ‘always’ on his mind.

and there’s the obvious point that people who remember World War II are more likely to have voted for Brexit than anybody else.

When I read Mr Varadkar’s words, though, what really incensed me was the sheer historical illiteracy of his version of a war, in which — in case he has forgotten — Ireland refused to join the allied cause, and in which his predecessor, Eamon de Valera, disgraced himself and his country by personally offering condolences to the Nazi ambassador on the death of adolf Hitler.

The simple truth is that whatever the Irish PM may think, the men who fought on the beaches of France were fighting for Britain. They were not fighting for ‘European values’, because none of them would have had the faintest idea what that meant.

I say this, by the way, not as a hardened Brexiteer, but as somebody who voted Remain. Even so, I am very weary of listening to Euro-enthusiasts who pretend that World War II was a great crusade for European federalism.

During the referendum campaign, the pro-EU camp released a video in which one veteran claimed: ‘We sacrificed many, many men in both world wars and this was to establish a peaceful and prosperous union.’ The EU, he added, ‘reflects the values my generation fought for in Europe during World War II’. But this is simply not true. No British servicemen fought to defend ‘European values’ or to set up a ‘prosperous union’.

When Neville Chamberlain took Britain to war, or when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and rallied the nation after Dunkirk, there was no talk of European union.

Indeed, when our allies collapsed beneath the Nazi war machine in the spring of 1940, many people were actually relieved, because they thought Britain was better off on its own.

‘Now we know where we are. No bloody allies!’ a Thames boatman shouted to a group of MPs. George VI agreed. He wrote to his mother: ‘ I feel happier now we have no allies to be polite to and pamper.’ The only wartime leader who

did talk of a European Union was a Herr Hitler of Berlin, with his dreams of a New Order from the atlantic to the Urals.

It was not the allies who had plans for a European single currency and a central bank. It was the Germans.

In the words of Nazi minister arthur seyss-Inquart, later executed at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, ‘the new Europe of solidarity and co- operation among all its people will find rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic boundaries are removed’.

I don’t mean to imply the EU is a Nazi project. Obviously it isn’t. But it is high time that EU enthusiasts, not just abroad but at home, stopped lying about our history.

To take an especially egregious example, EU fans sometimes pretend Winston Churchill wanted Britain to join a ‘United states of Europe’. again, this is just not true.

Yes, Churchill did speak of creating a United states of Europe after the war. But he never explicitly said Britain should join. Indeed, as Prime Minister in the early Fifties, he kept Britain out of the emerging Common Market.

Opposed

‘We have our own dream and our own task,’ he explained. ‘We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not combined. We are interested and associated but not absorbed.’

His wartime deputy, Labour leader Clement attlee, was even more fervently opposed to European integration.

Like Churchill, attlee had fought in World War I. But his experiences convinced him that Britain should stay well out of the European project.

so when Britain applied to join the Common Market, attlee said he was ‘gravely disturbed’ that we would ‘go cap in hand to the people whom we thought we beat in war’.

‘The Common Market. The so-called Common Market of six nations,’ he told Labour MPs just before his death in 1967. ‘Know them all well. Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of ’em from attacks by the other two.’

as for the young men who fought in the war, they fought to defeat Nazism and to save their native land, not to defend a political project that had not even been invented.

Indeed, among them were some of the most passionate opponents of the EU, such as Enoch Powell, who served in North africa and India, or Tony Benn, who joined the RaF.

Powell always thought European integration would mean the end of Britain as a ‘free, independent and self-governing nation’. Benn was initially tempted, but came to believe it was ‘not democratic… I think they are building an empire and want us to be part of that empire, and I don’t want that’.

Fake

Perhaps all this will be news to the Irish prime minister. But perhaps he doesn’t care, as his real audience is in Brussels and Berlin, where his words will have gone down very well.

The British Euro-enthusiasts who parrot his fake history, however, should know better. If they knew just a little about real history, they might show more humility and understanding about why they lost the referendum in the first place.

as it happens, the moment the Irish PM referred to — spring 1940 — led to the London Evening standard publishing a legendary cartoon by the great David Low. It shows a British soldier, looking out over the Channel, shaking his fist at German planes. The caption reads: ‘ Very Well, alone.’

It was that spirit that fired our young men to save their country from Hitler. It was not some anachronistic, highminded enthusiasm for JeanClaude Juncker and all his works; it was patriotism, pure and simple.

The European elite and their intellectual admirers have never understood that. They sneer at it; they pretend it doesn’t exist; they rewrite their history books to downplay and deny it. But they have never succeeded in erasing it.

and that, of course, is one of the chief reasons they lost.