Bernard Ingham: Don't insult '˜Little Englanders' like me over EU - we are Great Britons

My vote in tomorrow’s referendum has been long in the making – over 40 years in fact.

It is based on the principles of national sovereignty and democratic control and practical experience of the EU at work.

I attended Energy Councils with Eric Varley and Tony Benn before going to 31 consecutive European summits with Margaret Thatcher.

How anyone could survive that experience to vote “Remain” in tomorrow’s referendum defeats me.

It is sadly not the answer to the prayers of such idealists and internationalists as the late Jo Cox MP.

In short, my vote is not a protest about the behaviour of our leaders, who have had their very worst brought out of them by Europe.

Ted Heath sold us down the river and, with Harold Wilson in 1975, kidded us that no loss of sovereignty would be involved in membership of the then Common Market.

Now David Cameron and George Osborne have lost the trust of millions with their “Project Panic”.

I would remind them that I am not a “Little Englander” but, with millions of others, a Great Briton.

Nor am I a “quitter”. I would not be voting to leave if the EU were merely an expanding group of 28 nation states committed to free trade and international co-operation.

But that is what the EU has never been. France is unashamedly protectionist. As Francois Mitterand told Mrs Thatcher, protectionism “is ze purpose of ze CAP”.

Germany, among others, has had competition-stifling rules based on such things as job qualifications. That is why Thatcher signed the Single European Act to try to get into French and German financial markets.

But lying behind all this was the real objective of the Eurozealots – a federal Europe with the ultimate aim of crushing nationality.

Boudicca Thatcher failed to stop it. They ignored her advice in her Bruges speech in 1988 to proceed more slowly and build a wider, looser Europe.

They have certainly built a wider Europe but it is more closely directed towards a federal outcome. A destructive single currency dominated by Germany is topped by a pretentious foreign and diplomatic service and dangerous plans for a European army.

This is the logical outcome of all that I saw in my 14 years operating inside the European project.

It has always been something of a carve up by the integrationist France and Germany who decide, no doubt in cahoots with the Commission, what they want out of summits. What kind of a law-making organisation is it that relied on me, and now on 28 other press secretaries, including the Commission, to tell the world what is going on in its private meetings?

All of them rely on notes from within the meeting in order to secure the best possible presentation for their nation. Summits are a fundamentally undemocratic Towers of Babel.

And what kind of an organisation has the British Prime Minister, rising with the larks to vet Commission proposals, prioritising her objections when she would prefer to ditch the lot?

The average Ministerial Council was like a haggle in a Persian bazaar. You grabbed what Germany, France and the Commission would let you have.

In practice, Europe is still dominated by the Franco/German axis and unelected Commissioners who have the right to initiate legislation that increasingly affects 500m people.

It will not change. Only exceptional people give up power and the Commissioners, in cahoots with the French and Germans, are not exceptional; they are power-mad.

They have organised the so-called European Parliament and the European courts steadily to extend their authority and have bribed all sorts of non-governmental organisations to strengthen their sway.

It would not be so bad – though still unacceptable – if it were a reasonably successful supranational bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, it is failing, not least in its loss of control of immigration.

And Germany, rising to dominance on the single currency, is effectively screwing the southern half of Europe whose shaky economies should never have been admitted to the euro in the first place.

The EU shows how not to organise international co-operation. It is a political menace not just because it is unaccountable, undemocratic, corrupt and pretentious; its nation-destroying purpose alienates ordinary, decent people.

Tomorrow we should say we have had enough of it and, for the sake of future generations, recover our 1,000 years of independence and sovereignty. It is not a sin to be independent and proud of it.