The price of freedom? A few tins of cat food!

LAST week the BBC solemnly reported the Rand Corporation, an influential U. S. think tank, had concluded the sky would fall in and we’d all be eating rats 15 minutes after Brexit.

They claim leaving with no trade deal – the so- called worst case scenario – would cost us £ 105bn in the 10 years after we left the EU.

It sounds like a lot – and it’s meant to sound a huge, scary number. But, in fact, it’s less than we’d spend on our PETS over the same period.

The Beeb reported Charles Ries, a vice- president at Rand and the report’s lead author, as saying: “The analysis clearly shows that the UK will be economically worse off outside of the EU under most trade scenarios.”

That scares the bejesus out of fat cat business types who see nothing more in life than the bottom line of their balance sheets.

The Remoaners bang on about trade because, quite frankly, it’s the only card they have to play.

Yes, there’s every chance that business with Europe may fall off a bit once we leave the Single Market. But the EU is not just a market for our goods and services.

One of the biggest lies ever told to the British public was that the EEC, as it was back then, was a “Common Market”.

In fact, it was set up in the wake of the Second World War to abolish the nation state and reduce the impact of nationalist politicians, to stop another Hitler.

Now, that was a noble ideal, but the price the founding fathers of the EEC wanted us to pay was the end of our individual national identities and the forging of a new nation called Europe.

That is the goal of the European Union. It’s no secret. It’s in the preamble to the Treaty of Rome.

So when the leader of Germany’s Social Democratic party, Martin Schulz, called for the creation of a “United States of Europe” by 2025, he was not making a new case.

And that, my friends, is why I voted for Brexit. I didn’t vote Brexit to reduce immigration or to get “£ 350m a week for the NHS”.

I voted leave because I believe that Britain should remain an independent nation and not become a province of a continental superstate.

We may have to pay a financial price for standing alone. But freedom always has a price.

And compared to the price our forebears paid to remain free of some form of European Empire, it’s peanuts.

Or a few tins of cat food.