Bernard Ingham: My advice to the EU? Ask why we slung our hook

Untold thousands sailed to create the most civilised empire this planet has ever known, taking account of its time in history. The Commonwealth is a living, breathing answer to Corbynistas who think it was the pits.

Domestically, we tend to take a rather severe view of ourselves, our freedoms and what we expect of life in Britain. This has caused us to walk out of a new empire in the making – namely, the European Union.

There is precious little evidence that the EU has asked itself why we – generally a constructive and responsible force in the world – have slung our hook, as they used to say in Hebden Bridge. The governing elite are ever more convinced in their federal ambition and the route to its realisation and deeply recent the pesky Brits for upsetting their apple cart.

The more vindictive of them would beggar Britain if they could in the forthcoming negotiations just as their blessed single currency has beggared the southern half of the EU.

It isn’t as if they had had no notice of our unrest. As long ago as 1988, Margaret Thatcher told the assembled Europhiles in Bruges that they were on the wrong track. We needed, she said, not “ever closer union” but a wider, looser EU of co-operating and supportive nation states. They took not a blind bit of notice.

The Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) that Mrs Thatcher entered almost at her last gasp and against her better judgment blew up expensively in our faces.

Europhiles, who learn nothing from experience, then urged us to join the single currency. Thank God Gordon Brown did something right for a change by keeping us out.

We had successively the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties paving the road to federalism and ever more interference in nation states by an unelected Commission with its penchant for legislating on the minutiae of how we should conduct our business and lives.

Dammit, they are even arrogating unto themselves the trappings of established nationhood – a diplomatic service and an army.

And now we have an Afro/Arab migration, yet they still regard freedom of movement within the EU as the Ark of the Covenant.

You might have thought that against this background Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission president, and his merry men – not to mention Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande – would be holding a probing inquest about where they are going and their chosen route.

Yet, if anything, the more stagnant the European economy becomes, the greater the jobless plight of young Greeks, Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese and the more migrants who escape drowning in the Mediterranean crowd on to the shores of Europe’s southern extremities the more they seek to build a United States of Europe.

Most likely, they delude themselves that in the end the UK will see sense and seek humiliatingly to return under pressure from their pensioned henchmen in the House of Lords and elsewhere.

The time has come for some plain speaking. Europe needs to take on board five things for its own good:

Recognise that the UK has left not on a whim or because of the cost of membership but to recover sovereignty and its ability to govern itself; it is not coming back.

Acknowledge that, unless the EU changes its ways and understands it cannot forever sacrifice millions of its citizens on the altar of an unviable single currency, it will sooner or later blow up or implode.

Understand that 27 co-operative nations are worth their weight in gold compared with their present fractious condition; can’t they see the threat of disintegration looming to the satisfaction only of Vladimir Putin?

Cut out all this juvenile nonsense about screwing Britain in the forthcoming negotiations, appreciate that we are not exactly without the ability to twist arms ourselves; and make the best of what is their bad job, not ours – except in the sense that we have gone along too long with institutionalised stupidity.

Understand once and for all that it is not British politicians who are taking Britain out of the EU but the people. They reflected not a deep knowledge of the EU and all its works but a national instinct that we are on the road to subservience.

And as everybody knows, thanks to the Proms, Britons never, never will be slaves.