Brexit: Another nice mess

“WELL, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!”

Laurel and Hardy’s catchphrase seems particularly appropriate as Britain approaches Brexit, due on March 29 next year. Few of us can remember a more confused and troublesome time in politics. From Donald Trump’s surprise election as president, to Italy throwing its euros out of the pram; and from Korea’s nuclear threats to the collapse of IS, none of these cataclysmic events has caused as much heart-searching among Britons as the vote to leave the European Union — “Brexit”.

It is important to record two key facts from the start. First, the vote was on the largest turnout in British electoral history, with 30 million voting and a majority of over one million to leave. Second, the very generation that voted for the UK to join the European Common Market back in the 1970s was the generation that voted to quit 40 years later. (Under-40s mainly voted to remain.)

That poses the question: what has changed?

The answer is simply: “Europe”. What Britons joined as a “Common Market” has morphed into something quite different. Today’s EU has taken on all the trappings of a super-state, with its own flag, anthem, currency, budget, courts, diplomatic representation, unelected bureaucracy in Brussels and border police, and is even trying to build its own army. What we see today is not the Common Market Britons thought they were joining back in the 1970s. The electorate was tricked into joining “Europe” — and quite deliberately, too.

We now know from three impeccable sources that what Christopher Booker called The Great Deception was based on a barefaced lie. Heath, the PM who took Britain into the Common Market, lied consistently to the British people about the true consequences of joining Europe. He knew he was signing away Britain as an independent power. He admitted it years afterwards. Moreover, his highly classified Foreign Office briefing notes are now available (FCO 30/1048, April 1971) and confirm his lies beyond all argument. Sir Con O’Neill, the Whitehall mandarin behind this astonishing briefing paper, warned Heath that Britain would, by ceding judicial and executive powers, eventually end up as little more than a vassal state taking orders from Brussels. They knew — and so did Heath. O’Neill advised Heath to “swallow the lot and swallow it now”, according to the hitherto secret official record of the EEC talks.

But, astonishingly, the faceless authors behind the briefing paper made an even more sinister recommendation; they advised ministers to hide the truth from the British public. The result of this deception has been that successive governments have deliberately kept the British public in the dark about what EEC membership really meant, hoping that it would one day be too late to leave. What Heath and the civil service never anticipated was that sooner or later the British public would see though the fraud and vote to quit Europe in a fiercely contested referendum half a century later.

Britons cannot pretend that they were not warned. There can be no doubt that the avowed purpose of the EU has always been to create a single European superstate, governed from Brussels, absorbing formerly independent and autonomous nation states. But don’t just take my word for it. Here are some quotes from European politicians over the years to confirm the point:

“A United States of Europe is our goal.” Arthur Salter and Jean Monnet, 1923.

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.” Jean Monnet, 1952.

“We have sown a seed . . . Instead of a half-formed Europe, we have a Europe with a legal entity, with a single currency, common justice, a Europe which is about to have its own defence.” Valery Giscard d’Estaing, president of the EU Convention, June 2003.

“The European Union is a state under construction.” Elmar Brok, European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs.

“We need a true political union . . . we need to build a United States of Europe with the Commission as government and two chambers — the European Parliament and a ‘Senate’ of Member States . . . European Parliament elections are more important than national elections.” Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission, January 2014.

And our very own Kenneth Clarke, Conservative Chancellor, in a rare moment of honesty from a British politician: “I look forward to the day when the Westminster Parliament is just a council chamber in Europe.” International Currency Review, Vol 23, No 4, 1996.

All this flatly contradicts Heath’s famous 1971 speech on joining the Common Market: “There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty, even that we shall begin to lose our national identity. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified and exaggerated . . .”

If ever there is proof of a lie to the British electorate, the evidence is clear. Heath arguably committed an act of treason. He deliberately misled the British people and betrayed the Queen into breaking her Coronation Oath. Today’s inevitable backlash from a badly mis-sold electorate is what has fuelled the un-civil battle over Brexit faced by Theresa May.

Unfortunately for her, time to come up with a workable exit EU strategy is fast running out. PM May has just six weeks to devise a new, mutually acceptable solution because, since Brussels rejected her Chequers proposals, she is trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place: between her mutinous Eurosceptic party wing and an unyielding Commission, determined not to give an inch for fear of encouraging other increasingly rebellious EU nations. The former “arch ditherer” at the Home Office now has to make a crucial decision. Britain’s timid but stubborn leader must shake off her rabbit-in-the-headlights diplomacy.

As for the Europhiles, Britain must be punished, if only “pour décourager les autres”.

Frau Merkel has said so. She and France’s latest would-be Napoleon, President Macron, dare not back down. To do so would unleash a flood of anti-EU challenges, starting with Italy and its dodgy euro, to be followed by the rebellious “Visegrad Four” nations of former Eastern Europe, who don’t want any more “refugees”, thank you. The EU line must be held, at all costs. The European Commission agrees, warning that the political and economic damage inflicted by Brexit simply presents too great a risk to the EU.

Because Brussels recognises that the defection of the UK could be the capstone that collapses the EU’s arch. The loss of 10 per cent of the Commission’s budget alone is a grievous blow: but the threat of mass defections and an unravelling of the whole European project terrifies the EU federalist elites, let alone the nervous European banks. Their gravy train could hit the buffers.

The irony is that this bitter and protracted struggle to stifle dissent and lock the stable door is caused by an organisation that was meant to foster European harmony. The Europhiles and the Commission appear to have allowed their dream of a united Europe to over-ride the genuine concerns and anxieties of democratic voters in free nations. They don’t understand, for example, that the annexation of Northern Ireland into the EU means political suicide for any British PM.

But what is now clear is that the biggest change to the unwritten British political constitution since 1689 was based on a politician’s lie and the British electorate was deliberately deceived. It was also legally questionable, according to the Bill of Rights.

Whether you agree or disagree with Brexit is immaterial. Brexit goes to the heart of what the UK is: self-governing? Or part of a new federal state?

That’s why it matters.

“I do declare that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath, or ought to have jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority within this Realm.” The Bill of Rights, 1689