Bernard Ingham: If only medical science could test for treachery

This piece of scientific research could usefully be extended to Europhiles, and especially to the 11 Tory MPs who voted against their Government over Brexit on the eve of Theresa May going to Brussels for further talks to see if they have any brains at all.

I suspect that if the post-mortem examination finds any vestige of cerebral activity in them it will show a strong tendency towards zealotry bordering on paranoia and a woeful – indeed, an almost suicidal – lack of judgment. It would be a bonus if medical science could come up with a test for an inclination to treachery. Our governance would then be in safer hands.

It could hardly be in more unstable hands, given that one false step by fanatical Tory Europhiles could inflict on the nation a leader of even more suspect intelligence, to wit Jeremy Corbyn.

My interest in the anatomy of Europhiles is longstanding. It goes back nearly 40 years – to not long after I voted to confirm our membership of the Common Market, as it then was.

It stems from experience rather than resentment at being taken into the EU under false pretences by a PM – Ted Heath – who lied about our loss of sovereignty in selling our assets down the river.

By 1979, when Margaret Thatcher asked for the return of part of our disproportionate EC budget contribution, I was asking myself why we were in this club. After all, it had done nothing to rescue our failing economy. Thatcher did that without any European help by neutering the union barons who were grossly abusing their power.

But she could not rescue our fishing industry or reform the Common Agriculture Policy, which, through its subsidies for farmers, inflates the price of land as well as our food bills. Even by then, membership of the EU was looking a poor and expensive deal.

That was not all. As the British spokesman at 31 consecutive European summits, I was troubled by the EC’s fundamental lack of democracy. It made law in private and left it to me – and spokesmen for every other member state, plus the bureaucratic Commission – to tell the world what was going on, or what we thought was happening. It was – and remains – government by PR behind closed doors.

By 1986, it was clear that the EU’s word counted for nothing when it reneged on British provisos in signing the Single European Act by voting measures through by a majority instead of unanimous vote.

By 1989, we knew that an institution conceived in the 1950s as a means of controlling Germany was failing miserably. There was no holding the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, in uniting the two Germanys after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Now Germany is the dominant voice in Europe, even if it cannot form a government.

A year earlier, Thatcher had publicly warned the EC that it was on the wrong path in seeking to establish a federal state. Since then “ever more union” has brought for Britain the costly Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) disaster in 1992 and for southern Europe the economic straitjacket called the single currency.

Yet onward, ever onwards, ploughs the EU towards a super-state and it is now embroiled in a row with Eastern and central Europe over its diktat that they must take Middle East and African immigrants – or else.

It is true that, leaving aside the Balkans, Europe has enjoyed peace for 72 years. Given our history, that is no mean feat. But it is thanks to Nato rather than the EU whose member states have as consistently failed to meet the cost of their defence in full as the EU’s auditors have declined to sign off its accounts.

This is not an edifying report on the state of Europe. And yet the Europhiles ignore it entirely while trying to frighten us to death about the consequences of leaving the EU. Perhaps, not surprisingly, they seem incapable of making a case for our continued membership.

As for claiming they have recovered the Westminster parliament’s sovereignty, they are fully paid up members of hypocrisy since they have not lifted a finger in 45 years to stop the EU making most of our laws.

This, I submit, shows that Europhiles generally and the Europhiliac 11 Tory MPs in particular are deranged obsessives. Their heads need examining.