Europhiles who favour the EU must defend their anti-Brexit stance - Bernard Ingham

Heath had one seductive argument: the need to bring Europe together to prevent further wars. But the economic case was pathetic. As “the sick man of Europe” we needed to be within the Common Market. It was a fanciful idea. The cause of our sickness lay at home – in the routine abuse of power by our trade union movement. It got worse after our entry, culminating in “the Winter of Discontent”. It was Margaret Thatcher, not Europe, that

sorted that out.

It is now claimed that Brexit has been a failure in spite of our relatively good economic performance among European nations. We have, they say, made precious little progress since the decisive 2016 referendum in exploiting our new economic freedoms (which, incidentally, the Remainers would deny us).

This ignores four things: i) the persistent efforts by Europhiles to foil a satisfactory Brexit agreement; ii) the pandemic which hit us soon after our withdrawal; iii) Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine and assault on European freedom; and (iv) the EU’s vindictiveness over Brexit and obstruction in sorting out our departure terms, even to the point of effectively annexing Northern Ireland.

Yet we have a substantial movement determined in one way or another to subject us to Brussels’ whim. I have reached the conclusion that Europhilia is an identifiable disease that distorts judgment and leads to offences against the state that are an affront to all freeborn Britons.

But we are stuck with these zealots. The time has therefore come when Europhiles should be forced to defend their stance. To this end I have posed ten questions which should be thrown at them at every opportunity.

1 – How can you justify your claim to be democrats when you wish to overturn a decisive vote by the British people to Brexit and when the Europe Union has a democratic deficit? It may be a collection of 27 elected governments but they have no authority outside their own countries.

2 – How can you defend yourselves from the charge of treachery against the state when you are actually seeking to subjugate us to an institution that pretentiously regards itself as a foreign power?

3 – How can you argue that the EU is crucial to the defence of freedom in Europe when it has a history of backsliding in its financial support for NATO – the real guarantor of Western security? Moreover, Boris Johnson proved beyond doubt that Britain exercises more power outside the EU than within

it in his rallying of world opinion to the Ukrainian and freedom’s cause? He would have been constrained within its ranks by the palsied approach to Russia of Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Golsch.

4 – Why don’t you end this nonsense of supporting European integration – a federal superstate – when it is perfectly clear nobody has voted for a federal Europe and many nations would think twice of doing so? It would strip all governments of their authority. No economic policy; no foreign policy. You do as you are told by a possibly perverse majority.

5 – Is there not at least a case for saying that a loose association of co-operating nation states would have far more influence on the world than a EU that pretends it is something it isn’t?

6 - How can you disagree – the EU being what it is – that it is not only undemocratic but pretentious in its claims to be a world power with the right to sit on every substantial international institution?

7 – Surely, you must accept that the single currency – an early manifestation of integration -has done nothing for the poorer countries who have been debilitated by its operation dominated by Frankfurt? In effect, the EU imposed the straitjacket of a single currency even though it had no democratically-endorsed economy policy.

8 – If you believe in free trade, what possesses you to persist in seeking to return to the arms of the fundamentally protectionist EU?

9 – Is the real trouble that for some obscure reason you have lost all faith in Britain making its own way in the world?

10 – Why put your trust in an institution that has shown it cannot be trusted?