Bill Carmichael: Play safe and vote to leave EU's rotting corpse

Only months after flinging her arms – and Europe’s borders – open wide in welcome to all-comers, the German Chancellor has performed a spectacular U-turn.

She insisted that instead of moving to Germany and other countries in northern Europe as she promised, the refugees should instead stay in Greece – a country that can barely feed its own people after its economy was deliberately destroyed by the European Union.

“There are accommodation possibilities in Greece, they should be used by the refugees,” sniffed Mrs Merkel, conveniently overlooking the fact that she invited them to Germany in the first place.

As a result the Greeks – and the migrants – have been stuffed like a plate of dolmades. The borders northwards are being firmly shut and Greece is rapidly being turned into a giant refugee camp. Those “accommodation possibilities” turn out to be sleeping rough in freezing temperatures with little food or medicine.

Oh, how different it was last September when Mrs Merkel was hailed as a humanitarian saint for offering refuge to any Syrian – or anyone who claimed to be Syrian.

She generously added there would be absolutely no limits on the numbers and there would be no security checks on people arriving from the jihadi hotbeds of the Middle East.

As a result an estimated 1.1 million people – overwhelmingly young men of fighting age – poured into Europe.

I mean – what could possibly go wrong? Well, we soon found out when Islamist terrorists used the open borders route to Syria to carry out attacks in Paris that killed 130 people.

Following that atrocity and the mass sex attacks allegedly carried out by migrants in Germany on New Year’s Eve, public opinion swung decisively against Mrs Merkel – hence her radical change of tone this week. She said: “There is not a right for a refugee to say ‘I want to get asylum in a particular country in the European Union’.”

“Au contraire” as our friends in Brussels might say.

Mrs Merkel clearly does not understand the EU’s freedom of movement rules. Because once a refugee is given the right to reside in any EU state, they have an unassailable right to live, work and claim benefits in any of the other 27 member countries, no questions asked.

In fact I wouldn’t blame Greece if it simply handed Greek passports to every migrant entering the country. That would give the migrants the right to enter any country in the EU – and it is quite clear that they do not want to stay in Greece.

Neither do they want to go to Poland, Romania, Hungary or Bulgaria – that’s why the EU’s idea of operating a quota system to distribute migrants across the EU was doomed from the start.

The migrants want to head for Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK where jobs are plentiful for those who want to work and the benefits are generous for those who don’t. And the numbers are set to increase massively.

Already migrants are entering Greece at 30 times the rate of a year ago. Once the weather improves in the spring, those numbers will rocket.

The result is an existential crisis for 
the EU for which it seemingly has no answer.

Thanks to the euro, we have already seen the economic collapse and impoverishment of half the continent – and now we are witnessing a political and social collapse because of open borders and uncontrolled immigration.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea if David Cameron and the rest of the pro-EU crowd addressed these urgent problems in the UK’s referendum debate instead of spouting ever more hysterical scare stories as part of Project Fear?

This week, for example, we’ve been told that if we leave the EU Britons will be banned from holidaying in Europe and won’t be able to buy BMW cars or French Champagne.

Seriously, do even the most swivel-eyed Euro-fanatics believe this nonsense? Can’t we have a proper grown-up debate?

At the moment it is clear that the real “leap in the dark” would be stay in the EU as it disintegrates in utter chaos.

The far safer choice is to cut ourselves free from the rotting corpse and go it alone.