Like a rattlesnake, the EU can bite us long after it gets the chop

WE LEARNED last week that a rattlesnake can still bite and kill you long after you have cut off its head. The European Union is just as dangerous. I am amazed at how relaxed so many people are about leaving it. They think it will be like some Harry Potter film where you pronounce the magic spell, and are free.

How silly. The EU has spent nearly 50 years burrowing into this country, and sucking power and wealth from us through a million tiny channels. Its tentacles are deep into Parliament, the Civil Service, the diplomatic service, industry and commerce, universities and schools and, of course, the media, especially the BBC.

So did you really think (yes, I think some of you did) that, thanks to a rather close referendum, we could just walk out, wave goodbye and start again as an independent country? As I wrote in February 2016, in words which I nowadays find being repeated by a lot of other people: ‘You read it first here. The EU is like the Hotel California. You can check out. But you can never leave.’

I said that a number of supposed Leavers really just wanted a renegotiation of our membership, under the guise of departure. And I’ve been very interested, in all the mind-numbing wrangles over borders, markets and customs, that everyone has forgotten what – to me – is one of the single worst aspects of the EU.

The European Arrest Warrant, under which some magistrate in Bucharest can order a British police officer to arrest you, and which fundamentally weakens British liberty, is still going to apply here after our alleged exit.

THIS matters far more than the glorious freedom to import and eat American, chlorine-washed chickens, or whether we can do some supposedly luscious independent trade deal with Malaysia. No doubt the Malaysians would be frantic to buy British goods, if there were any. But the EU has wiped out most of our home industries, so I suspect such deals would just mean importing more stuff from Malaysia.

Then there’s the M20 problem. I don’t know for certain what will happen at the ports of Calais, Ostend, Antwerp and Rotterdam if we leave the Single Market. But from what I can understand of the ‘third country’ rule, things could be very bad. Non-tariff barriers, myriad complex regulations which must be applied to non-EU goods under international trade law, are simply bound to delay the entry of British goods to these EU ports. And we must also apply these regulations (again, by international law) to goods from the EU.

So what if the scare stories are right, and the M20 does turn overnight into an enormous lorry-park, backed up for miles with immobilised trucks? It seems perfectly possible to me. Is anyone who claims that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ prepared to give a written, personal guarantee that they will resign for ever from any public office if this is what happens? I have been in favour of this country leaving the EU for many years, in times when plenty of today’s noisiest and most prominent Leavers were either silent on the subject or actively pro-EU.

And I think we should be very careful. Here is my nightmare, a little like what happened to Jeremy Sutcliffe in Lake Corpus Christi, Texas, who beheaded a rattlesnake with his shovel and thought he was safe. Ten minutes later, he picked up the apparently lifeless head to throw it away, and it bit him. He nearly died. Well, what if the EU bites back after we think we’ve left it? We go for a gung-ho exit, and it turns out badly, with blocked ports and an economic meltdown? What I fear is that the massed ranks of Remainers will then demand, and get, their second referendum, and a panic-stricken British populace will vote to return.

AH, YES, the EU smiles, you are welcome to come back, provided you now accept the euro, abolish the pound and what remains of your border controls. And so we end up worse than we started, locked and sealed in ever-closer union. All this can still be avoided by the sensible, workable compromise I’ve urged here before and which MPs – if they have any wits about them – will support in the coming days.

Go for the Norway option. Leave the EU, get back a large measure of migration control (yes, you can, in the EEA), get rid of 75 per cent of its interference in our lives, but take no economic risks.

We may still be stuck in the Hotel California once it’s done, but we’ll be in the luxury suite, not in the miserable damp annexe with a view of the wheelie bins, which will be our lot if the fanatics get their way.

EVERY time I hear of a seemingly fortunate person killing himself or herself (and it is often, nowadays), I look to see if that person has been taking ‘antidepressants’. Their friends and relatives will say ‘we had no idea she felt this way’. In a week when doctors were told to stop using homeopathy because there is no proof it works, people need to understand how little hard medical evidence exists that ‘antidepressants’ help people who are depressed. But the correlation between suicide and their use is very strong indeed – so much so that in the USA a warning about it is sometimes printed on the packaging.