Time for truth on May’s Brexit plan

It is time for the decades of lies that took us into the EU and kept us there to end. It is time to be straight with us, Prime Minister. Britain is a eurosceptic nation. In the 1970s, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson both knew we would baulk at belonging to a Common Market that robbed us of our national independence.

So they hid its true purpose — ‘‘ever closer union’’, leading to a superstate with one currency. The public was reassured our sovereignty would not be surrendered to any meaningful degree. The Tory and Labour leaders both knew this was a lie. But they kept quiet when signing us up in 1973 and when holding the first referendum in 1975. Voters were betrayed from the start. The pattern was set.

And so to Theresa May, the Brexit deal her Cabinet agreed, and Brussels’ crystal-clear intentions to keep us in its vice-like grip. That plan being to lock us into its Customs Union for all time, unable to make our own trade deals, powerlessly swallowing its orders and obeying its rules. Our Government knows we cannot legally escape this central pillar of the EU – which we voted to ‘‘leave’’, remember – without consent from Brussels that it will never give. Yet, knowing exactly what the EU intends for us, the PM still brazenly insisted we will make our own trade deals.

How, Mrs May? We cannot. You surely know it. Come clean with Britain. This deal is not wholly without merit. But let us see it for what it is.