YP Letters: An apology for signing away our Great British birthright

HAVING lived and worked in Britain both pre and post EU membership, I think I am qualified to offer this apology to all who exist within our nation today. My generation gave away our nation, our pride, your birthright and our place in the world.

It gave away the sense of personal attachment to national achievement you should have found as a Briton, and your right to self-determine the course that we should take as a nation.

Please help us to forgive and make amends for this gross naiveté by the majority who voted to accept our continuing membership of the European Economic Community in 1975, misled as they were by promises that they were voting on a 
limited trading agreement, but which the more far-sighted among us could see would bring about the demise of our sense of self and the natural sense of justice for which the British people were rightly proud and famous.

I, therefore, apologise for the mistake of my generation, perhaps a generation more easily misled in the euphoria of growth that pertained after the Second World War.

In recent days, a letter has circulated from many “business leaders” purporting to represent the majority of those in trade, while only five per cent of our businesses actually trade directly with Europe. Last October, our trade deficit with the EU had risen to an astronomical proportion.

Your VAT payments go directly to the EU each and every month in order to sustain a bureaucratic and non-democratic organisation.

It has been said to me many times, as an excuse for remaining in Europe, that we now have a Court of Human Rights and extended labour laws that protect the working populace.

It is arrogant in the extreme to suggest that governments since 1974 would not have brought about this legislation, unaided by Europe, as part of our natural progression towards a liberated society.

What has Europe given us? It has given us excuses by politicians who are only too 
ready to quote European legislation as a reason for not doing as the public voice demands, and for not protecting us or our rights from attack by undemocratic, unelected exponents of the “European Dream”. A dream in which I have no wish to share.

My remaining hope is that I shall see the mistake of my generation rectified in a resounding manner by the goodness and common sense of 
a forgiving British public.