The time has come to face the truth about the EU. There are 193 countries in the UN and 90% of economic growth is not happening in the EU28. Rejoining the Rest Of The Growing World is not a cliff-edge; it’s a massive opportunity we need to embrace, something the EU also recognises in its recent attempts to conclude trade deals with third countries, like CETA, TTIP, South Korea, Mexico, South America, Australia, Japan and New Zealand. Unfortunately, the EU is a reluctant free trader, preferring protectionism, and is very slow to make deals, which tend to be of the superficial, lowest common denominator-type that can be agreeable to 28 Members with 28 different vested interests and lobby groups.
British voters never wanted to be in this Club. They weren’t asked in 1972, because polls showed only 24% wanted to join. They were cheated into remaining in 1975 by Labour’s New Deal of a Common Market ‘without EMU’, which Labour pursued behind voters backs in 1978. They weren’t asked subsequently about surrendering our Veto in the Single Market, the transformation into a federalist EU with Maastricht, Monetary Union, Enlargement, or the Constitutional/Lisbon Treaty. Indeed, decades of denying voters a say on this avalanche of change revealed a political class increasingly detached from basic democratic norms that have profoundly damaged trust between ordinary people and their rulers. The Referendum vote wasn’t decided by the slogans on a Red Bus or Project Fear. It was decided by decades of mounting discontent with the arrogance of politicians who ignored, abused and insulted millions of concerned voters, people who overwhelmingly voted UKIP in the 2014 European Elections that finally panicked the Conservatives into offering a Referendum at the 2015 General Election.
During this period, Britain squandered hundreds of billions on membership fees, more than our North Sea Oil dividend, and a great deal more in regulatory, procurement and other costs. In return for that reckless generosity, membership gave us rigged exchange rates and interest rates that resulted in repeated boom and bust downturns, and price-fixing cartels in food, fisheries, manufacturing, energy, VAT and other basics that raised costs of living, and reduced competitiveness. EU membership also involved treating our Commonwealth friends to European barriers for no better reason than they weren’t European and never could be. Initiatives like the Internal Market, Customs Union, Enlargement, and EMU were sold to voters as economic matters, when in reality they were intended to forge a United States of Europe that had costly uneconomic consequences. Between 1990 and 2017, our National Debt increased from 150 BN, the lowest debt to GDP ratio since the 19th Century, to 1,700 BN, accounting for more than 50 BN each year just in Debt Interest payments, one billion every week we cannot spend on other public services or lower taxes, and debts our children’s children will still be paying in the 22nd Century.
The EU is not a peace project borne out of the horrors of WW2. That’s a myth made in Brussels. The pan-European Movement started in Austria after the defeat of the Central Powers in World War 1 to recreate the lost empires of Germany and the Habsburgs to confront their mutual enemy, Russia, and also envisaged a similar Japanese empire in the Far East to compromise Russia from the Pacific, two ideas that were subsequently reflected in the war aims of the belligerents in World War 2. It is NATO, the UN, non-EU America, non-EU Russia, and a nuclear World that has kept the peace in Europe since 1945, and it is the growth of technology and trade around the World, particularly in Asia, that is bringing countries closer together. The EU is an ethnocentric imperial idea that doesn’t belong in a World where discriminating against people for accidents of birth is rightly condemned. It is plain wrong to impose tariffs on Africans, Asians and Americans purely because they aren’t European, and never can be.
Brexit is a moral, democratic and economic necessity. Britain needs to pursue a future of genuine free trade and non-discriminatory co-operation open to the whole World, adaptable to change, and responsive to voters concerns, something liberals used to believe in more than a hundred years ago when they opposed our discriminatory Imperial Preference. Fortunately, our European cousins have already set precedents for free access to their Single Market, as well as new initiatives for streamlined electronic customs and borders (REX and ETIAS), and Britain will be able to start any new relationship from a position of regulatory equivalence and strategic partnership. There is no reason why it cannot succeed, as long as we can avoid the politics of regime-change still being pursued by Remainers and their influential vested interests in business, the media and big finance.