RT talks to Lord Alexander Hesketh, who has become the most high-profile defector from David Cameron’s Conservative Party after he rejected a referendum on Britain’s leaving the EU.

­Lord Hesketh was in the cabinet under both Margaret Thatcher and John Major and says over the decades, only the Iron Lady has had the strength to stand up to continental politicians over serious problems Britain has because of its European attachment.

“Every government that we have had, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher’s, has essentially allowed itself to be bamboozled by the civil service into avoiding having a serious discussion with the Europeans about sorting out the problem. And I’m afraid that is now happening to this government,” he told RT.

The British politician says he defected to the UK Independence Party because it is the only party in the country able to tell the EU for what it actually is.

“You cannot deal with the Europeans. Europeans have no desire to negotiate. The EU is a new kind of religion. It is run by people who pay far lower taxes than anyone else in Europe and have their children educated free of charge in like 14 private schools in Brussels. In European Parliament most of the members are paid more three or four times as much money as they would have in any other job that you and I might ever do in life. The system is essentially corrupt and it is unchangeable,” he lashed out.

Lord Hesketh says the mainstream politicians are over exaggerating the damage the UK would suffer from leaving the EU. The figures that show that 80 per cent of British exports go to Europe fail to take into account that many of those products are further re-exported to Russia, Asia the Americas and all other parts of the world. Meanwhile, if an independent UK is squeezed out of European markets by tariffs, Britain may do the same with European goods sold to the Britain, he argues.

“I think this is a rather pathetic threat that you would expect to be manufactured by a combination of the Liberal Party and the BBC on the grounds that neither of those two groups has experiences in the real world,” he said.

UK’s leaving the EU should trigger the fall of the euro, but in the long run it will result in a better Europe, Lord Hesketh believes.

“I think it may be the new beginning, which will be based on fact rather than fiction. Because the problem at the moment is that the EU is based on fiction. It doesn’t have the political reality. The whole problem of this crisis is that it was created by the Europeans themselves. You could not have a single currency without a political union. They knew that couldn’t get away with a political union, so they disappeared to the equivalent of Las Vegas and signed up to a maniac proposition, which is to have a unified currency with no unified policies,” he explained.