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3 Jun, 2016 14:30

Brexit: Necessary for saving democracy in Europe & stopping war

Brexit: Necessary for saving democracy in Europe & stopping war

In the last few days the British public became witness to an interesting performance: Tory MP’s calling for the resignation of their own prime minister for what they called his lies about the Brexit referendum.

Two rebellious Tory MPs, Andrew Bridgen and Nadine Dorries, said that even winning the referendum would not prevent Cameron from facing a challenge in the summer. Bridgen, in an interview to BBC, called Cameron's statements to persuade voters to remain in the EU “outrageous.”

He said the PM had in effect lost his parliamentary majority. Dorries told ITV that Cameron was not telling the nation the truth in his EU referendum campaign and that she had already submitted a letter of no confidence against the prime minister within the party.

If Tory MPs accuse Mr. Cameron of lying, then who doesn’t?

In fact, Britain still has a whole month to go before the Brexit referendum, but the British people are already the subject of outrageous intimidation by big business and big Government to stay in the European Superstate.

David Cameron and his finance minister George Osborne in their opinion piece for The Daily Telegraph are busy doing exactly that – intimidation. How else can one characterize their claim that “Britain would be worse off to the tune of £4,300 for every household every year by 2030.” Neither Mr. Cameron nor Mr. Osborne bothered to explain what was the basis for such a gloomy forecast. They simply asserted that Brexit would chop off 3.6 percent of British GDP, never explaining why it would not be 3.7 percent or 0 percent.

But there are other statistics, a lot more reliable, which show that we would have lived much better now if Edward Heath, the then prime minister of Britain, had not signed the accession Treaty in 1972, making Britain a part of the so called European Community. Since we are talking here about past mistakes, reliable statistics are much more readily available, than Mr. Cameron’s and Mr. Osborne’s outageous predictions for the year 2030. Here are the figures.

In 1980 the member states of the European Union formed the fastest growing economic region in the world, with 31 percent of world trade done through the current member states of the EU. Now, after 36 years of increasing "integration" the EU can boast of no more than 17 percent of world trade, with 10 percent of the EU’s population of the working age unemployed (24 million in 2016).

Only 6  of UK companies export to the EU and only 12 percent of our economy is traded with the EU, and this part of our economy is massively loss making. But to “enjoy” this trade, 100 percent of our economy is burdened with EU regulations and external tariffs which cost us far more than any tariffs paid by non-members of the EU! No wonder that in the last 20 years there are 27 non-EU countries whose exports of goods to the EU grew faster than the United Kingdom’s.

Now you can understand with what feelings the British people read Cameron’s words about a NO vote during the Brexit referendum. In his article, Cameron said the Leave campaign wanted to make Britain exit “not just Europe, but the single market,” creating a “do it yourself” recession.

As if the current recession had nothing to do with Britain’s decision to enter the future EU in the first place! Mr. Cameron writes that a Brexit “would mean turning our backs on the largest marketplace in the world – something Margaret Thatcher helped to create and Britain championed ever since.”

Nothing could be further from the truth about Mrs. Thatcher, who was known for her stubborn defense of British sovereignty against the European Superstate - “No, No, No” she said in Parliament! In fact, that defense was the principal reason for her replacement in the early 1990s by an intellectually challenged and supine Prime Minister John Major, who allowed Britain to be sucked into a more and more intrusive European Union and went down to the worst election defeat for 80 years.

This was not only against the will of Mrs. Thatcher, but also against the will of the late Prime Minister Winston Churchill who said about Europe: “If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea. We are with Europe but not of it. We are associated but not absorbed.”

Association, not absorption – such should be the slogan of the day on British-EU relations. Unfortunately, we are long past the stage when association started transforming itself into absorption - and takeover. Let me cite an interesting historical fact illustrating that process.
In 1960 the then Prime Minister Edward Heath asked the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, to advise him on joining the European Economic Community (as the future EU was then called). The reply was never published and it was suppressed for over 30 years as the gradual surrender of the British nation to the European State gathered speed.

In the late 1990s that letter was published. Parliament, Lord Kilmuir wrote, would no longer govern in Britain for which there “was no precedent” and the surrender of self-government to a foreign power was a serious offense that “ought to be brought out into the open.”

But Heath took no notice of the Lord Chancellor and surrendered not just our country, but also our courts. Under British Constitutional law the undermining of the constitution is a treasonous act (Norris McWhirter and I wrote a 1994 book on that). And for over 40 years the British people have been gradually deceived - by treaties signed by Ministers (under the authority of the Queen) and then effectively forced on Parliament. So, the subjugation of our laws and customs to the bureaucratic corporatist EU norms was never truly approved by the true sovereigns in a democracy - the voters!

The British State, through the utter failure of its education system to teach the foundations of the nation, the Law and democracy, had produced just the kind of ignorance among voters and MPs which made this surrender to a bureaucratic elite in Brussels so easy.

As the left moved right (under Tony Blair) and the right moved left (under John Major) these two mediocrities finally met. They agreed on a model of authoritarian corporatism which unites big business on the right with deniers of individual freedoms on the left. Neither of these had any sympathy with countries, national parliaments, cultural and racial identities or entrepreneurial businesses. Families and communities were spared even less, as something “obsolete” and “standing in the way of development.”

So, the words of Mr. Cameron about the EU as the “largest marketplace in the world” are right for corporations, but not for the people. Corporations see not peoples but only units of production and the more the peoples of the world are forced to move to where big business wants them, the cheaper are the costs of labour. That makes corporations’ profits greater, but it does not help the providers of labour and that certainly destroys communities and national economies, which become volatile and dependent on corporations. So long as national democratic governments and their borders can be bypassed and their parliaments made irrelevant, the fewer the number of politicians and bureaucrats who need to be lobbied for favorable legislation. Such convenience for lobbyists for corporatist and State socialist lobbyists goes hand in hand with the collapse in the power of the individual voter - whether he goes to the ballot box or the (now monopolistic) market place.

This disenfranchisement of the European voter is now to be extended to others – that is the secret process behind the latest stage in the creation of supranational government - the TTIP and the TPP.

The statist, authoritarian left is as active as the corporate right in this process of disenfranchisement. It helps the corporations to impose the will of supranational elites on the “stupid voters” who might not approve of, for example, massive energy taxes, or the feminist and homosexual transformation of the family.

The British people, having stood alone from 1939 to 1941 in the struggle against the corporatist fascist Euro-state (supported then as now by large US, German and British corporations) and enjoying uniquely in Europe a continuous emancipating history from Magna Carta in 1215, instinctively reject the idea of a superstate and realize they were deceived by two generations of politicians.

The result in Europe of over 60 years of the destruction of nation states, their parliaments and communities has been economically and politically catastrophic.

My own books since 1989 (see freenations.net) have warned of the return to those precise corporatist elements, both within the UK and in continental Europe, which brought Britain to war in 1939 - and Russia in 1941.

Breaking every agreement with post-Soviet Russian leaders, NATO and the European Union has pushed ever eastwards, taking over embryo democratic nation states and absorbing them into the new corporatist supranational Euro-State.

NATO/EU, having destabilized Ukraine, is pushing troops towards the Russian border setting up “defense shields” in Poland and Romania and threatening war. The British will, I sincerely expect, realize that leaving the European Union is not just about saving ourselves but about saving democracy in Europe and preventing a war.

As the former Labour Foreign Secretary, Lord Owen, has said “We have the opportunity to leave the EU before the temple comes crashing down.”

Rodney Atkinson, for RT

Rodney Atkinson is a businessman, academic and political economist, as well as an occasional adviser to Ministers and MPs. He is the founder of the freenations.net website and author of 7 books on macroeconomic policy and the EU.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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