Juncker’s insult to war dead

LEAVE campaigners should visit Europe’s war cemeteries as they have forgotten the EU’s role since the Second World War, the president of the European Commission said yesterday.

Jean-Claude Juncker said that Europe is ‘a major project for peace’, adding that he hoped the issue of Brexit ‘could as quickly as possible be put in the attic of world history’.

But the Vote Leave campaign said Mr Juncker’s remarks were ‘crass and an insult to the sacrifice those cemeteries represent’.

Tory MP Liam Fox, a former defence secretary, said that instead of ‘lecturing’, Mr Juncker should examine whether the EU is ‘fanning the flames of nationalism and the rise of the political fringe once again’.

Mr Juncker, an ex-prime minister of Luxembourg who heads the EU’s bureaucracy in Brussels, said in a speech at The Hague: ‘Whosoever does not believe in Europe, who doubts Europe, whoever despairs of Europe, should visit the military cemeteries in Europe.’

The politician boasted about how David Cameron had been forced to grovel to him for help with the ‘self-created problem’ of Britain’s EU membership renegotiation, despite the Prime Minister having unsuccessfully tried to block his appointment two years ago. Mr Juncker ruled out further renegotiations if Britain votes to leave, adding: ‘If we had to deal for years with this topic, everything will go wrong in Europe.’

Explaining his criticism of Eurosceptics, Mr Juncker said ‘peace is never a sure thing’ and that it would be a ‘mistake’ not to remember the circumstances that led to EU’s formation.

Dr Fox said: ‘The military cemeteries of Europe are testament to the failure of the Continent to control extremism in the 20th century. If Britain had not been a free and independent nation, we would have been unable to intervene.’

Robert Oxley, a spokesman for Vote Leave, said: ‘It is Nato and British diplomacy that have kept the peace on the Continent, not un-elected officials like Juncker.’