EU leaders giving us even more reasons to leave
THROUGH unflagging persistence, Theresa May has finally secured a withdrawal agreement with Brussels, something her critics said would be impossible. But even after winning the approval of the Cabinet for her deal, she still faces a far bigger battle in pushing it through Parliament. Democratic Unionists see her plan as a threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom, while Brexiteers fear that Britain may be indefinitely locked into an EU-controlled customs union.
From the other side of the political divide, hardline Remainers have been just as strident in their condemnation.
They view the rejection of the Prime Minister’s deal as the best way to create Parliamentary chaos and thereby force another referendum, which they hope could lead to the 2016 result being overturned.
But their plot is both deeply undemocratic and profoundly deceitful. The Remainers pretend that the alternative to any kind of Brexit is the continuation of Britain’s present form of EU membership. But such a claim is false. The real choice is between Britain’s return to self-governance or the status of a regional province in the EU’s empire.
If the Remainers have their way and Brexit is abandoned, then the UK would be further sucked into the federal superstate.
Our right to national selfdetermination would be permanently lost in the EU’s relentless drive for full political integration, which has always been at the heart of the Brussels regime’s ideology. Indeed, the concept of “ever closer union” is explicitly written into the EU’s founding charter.
IN recent days, as Brexit is debated intensely here, a series of European politicians have provided graphic reminders that the EU is ruthlessly focused on federal unity at the expense of national sovereignty. On Tuesday, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel told MEPs that in the interests of “solidarity” the Continent should embrace not only a “European Security Council” but also a “real, true, European army”.
In this demand, she echoed French President Emmanuel Macron, an ultra federalist who last week proclaimed that Europe needs its own unified military force to defend itself against China, Russia and even America. It was a grotesquely insulting remark, given that the US saved France in two world wars and, in the decades since 1945, has maintained Nato, the genuine protector of Europe.
But the offensive grandiosity of Merkel and Macron is so typical of the EU, which yearns to be a global player with all the trappings of nationhood. That is why it has a president, an executive, a flag, a currency, an anthem, a parliament, a worldwide network of embassies and an international aid programme. Now it wants to add an army to its arsenal of selfimportance, not out of any real security concerns but to project its supposed influence.
That bloated sense of ambition was also displayed in an extraordinary speech at the weekend by the French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, who declared that, to overcome Europe’s economic problems, the EU must become “a form of empire, like China and the USA”, based on fiscal and economic unification.
For years, Brexiteers have been mocked for attacking the imperialist dreams of the European political elite but now the reality has been exposed by Monsieur Le Maire, with his alarming talk of a “an empire”
BUT national rights and freedoms mean nothing to Brussels. Everything must be sacrificed on the altar of the integrationist dogma. So the cherished single currency was never an economic vehicle for prosperity but rather a political tool to enforce unity. The same is true of the EU’s disastrous obsession with freedom of movement and open borders, at a brutal cost to the fabric of European societies. Brussels’ revolutionary goal has been to obliterate national identities, replacing them with the new idea of European citizenship. It is an agenda that has comprehensively backfired, as populist movements sweep across Europe in revolt.
Yet instead of showing any humility, the EU bosses just use the deepening crisis of legitimacy to indulge in more bullying and more power grabs. That is always the way with the EU imperialists. After the financial crisis, Belgian federalist Guy Verhofstadt, now one of the European Parliament’s Brexit negotiators, pronounced that “the only way out” was through “a new transfer of powers to the European Union”.
That is what Britain is up against in its quest for autonomy. By any means necessary, we must haul ourselves out of this quagmire. At the European Parliament there is a plaque which states that “national sovereignty is the root cause of the most crying evils of our times. The only final remedy for this evil is the federal union of the peoples”. There is no hope for our liberty or self-respect if we remain in an organisation that clings to such a creed.