Bernard Ingham: Our pro-EU establishment has questions to answer

We are in for an ear-bashing about the damage Britain would suffer if it left the EU and how we are dicing with death by frying because of our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

It is all bunkum. For the last 20 years the Greens have annually blasted away about the dire fate that awaits us as successive UN environmental conferences approach.

Yet this endless swanning around the world has achieved as little remedial action as there is evidence for the duvet effect of CO2.

As it has become utterly predictable, I shall concentrate on Britain’s relationship with Europe since we can do something about it. Not that I expect the current Labour and forthcoming Tory party conferences to clarify our option.

Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, never uttered truer words than when he told his conference last week that the political establishment wants us to stay in the EU.

David Cameron has always been clear he wants to remain in a reformed Europe without specifying what reforms he is seeking. And Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, seems to have had whatever Euro-scepticism he possessed knocked out of him by his Shadow Cabinet.

The British Establishment will try to keep us more or less in Europe – give or take a single currency and border or two – perhaps for no better reason than it prefers to cling on to its federal nurse for fear of something worse – i.e real democracy.

It is an amazingly limp attitude when you consider how Brussels undermines (where it does not replace) the Westminster Parliament. Moreover, the EU has never been in a worse state with the Eurozone in its inevitable mess and migrant Africa and Arabia knocking down its gates to get its hands on what is left of Europe’s goodies.

It hasn’t a clue how many are genuine refugees or economic migrants or terrorists. One thing is for sure: Angela Merkel is a serious threat to Europe’s nature and stability after welcoming 800,000 migrants to settle in Germany only to find her towns and cities unable to cope.

You might have thought she would have established the available resources first. God save us from our European leaders.

In these circumstances, the time has come for the British political establishment to answer five sets of questions:

Geopolitics: How could Britain’s exit weaken the West when it would remain the European mainstay of Nato while France and Germany try to cobble together a rival EU army that seems likely to be about as useful as the EU’s pretentious foreign policy? The migrant crisis has exposed its utter incompetence. And how will Europe be weaker if other nations prosper by following Britain into a looser relationship?

Democracy: Are British Europhiles content to have their Parliament rendered largely irrelevant by Brussels? Are they willing for the unelected Euro-elite to continue its long march towards ever closer union – a federal Europe – regardless of the people? Do they accept that its stance is calculated to fragment Britain and wreck its political system?

Economic: What is so attractive 
about the EU when the single currency saps its strength and condemns 
millions in southern Europe to unemployment, bringing serious 
political dangers? Why stick with a 
failing social democratic Europe when free market Britain is a resurgent economy – always assuming Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell do not get their hands on it? And why should the EU deny us a new trading relationship when we are a major customer for its goods?

Regulation: How can British tycoons moan about EU regulation while campaigning to stay in the EU and when a new relationship could permit us to trade with anyone we like? Why remain in the clutches of a Euro-apparatus that is guaranteed to raise costs?

Influence: Please explain how we shall lose influence over EU policy when we currently have only eight per cent of the vote. Not even a robust critic like Margaret Thatcher could stop the EU juggernaut in its drive to create a United States of Europe and reduce the UK to the status of an offshore region.

Don’t expect either Corbyn or Cameron to answer these questions. At this stage, it does not matter much what Corbyn thinks or says. It does matter if Cameron still fails to come clean about his demands.