IT will be no surprise to readers of The Conservative Woman that the Remain campaign, a group of people for whom the day immediately before June 24, 2016, was June 22, have been denying reality for three years. What is surprising is that the regulated broadcast media is complicit in a campaign to overturn the result of the UK’s largest democratic vote. This says far too much about Ofcom. While it is happy to proscribe Jeremy al-Corbyn’s Iranian State paymasters, Press TV, it is looking the other way while what was described beforehand as a gold standard once-in-a-lifetime plebiscite has been degraded to the status of a fixed-term result, all with the minimum of challenge by broadcasters fulfilling what should be their public service obligations. Remainers now want more votes until they get the result they want.
The British public are being lied to by the Remain camp, a group of people who seem to take their orders from those who have done disproportionately well out of Britain’s EU membership by being part of the EU establishment itself. To use the term ‘quisling’ might be too emotive, but Remainers’ affinity to a bloc which wants to be regarded as a foreign power and also to its political symbols makes the analogy compelling.
The poor British public have now been introduced to the latest incarnation of Remainer dishonesty. It is the ‘Remain and Reform’ lie. This lie had already been nailed when David Cameron returned relatively empty-handed at the beginning of 2016 after his letter of November 2015 was all but ignored. However, June 24, 2016, was Day One of Year Zero. Certainly, no reference is made to any preceding events by Remainers.
‘Remain and Reform’ is the New Big Lie. It advocates remaining in the EU to drive a reformist agenda. It promises not just the possibility of EU reform, but its probability. This is fundamentally dishonest, but is also easy to disprove. While it is now over three years since the UK voted to Leave the EU, none of the other 27 countries in the EU has had any success at driving any reform of any significance. The fact of the referendum vote has not induced the powers controlling the EU to think again in the slightest. So it would appear that if the UK remained in the EU on a reform agenda, it would be in a minority of one.
There is not a jot, a tittle, a soupçon, a fleck, an iota, a smidgen, a trace, a touch, a grain, a fragment, a scintilla, a sliver, a mite, a particle or a shred of evidence that the EU is capable of any lasting meaningful reform. No EU leader speaks of it in detail. None of the backgrounds of the new EU-appointed presidents, memorably described by Andrew Neil as ‘a failed German Defence Minister, a failed Belgian Prime Minister, a former finance minister found guilty of negligence in a multi-million-pound euro scandal, and a Spanish politician who has been a cheerleader for repression in Catalonia’ , provide any indication that they will be reformists. If they were British ministers, they would no longer enjoy high office, and would have been ejected by the voters, but standards in the EU are demonstrably lower.
While the Remainers use ‘reform’ as the latest carrot to drive people’s thinking, they do little more than provide sky-high concepts of what down-to-earth EU reform would be like, if it happened at all. Instead, they parade this absurd new slogan and expect people to get behind it. The hard fact is that the EU project is about ‘ever-closer union’ into a superstate large enough to rival the USA and China. It is fundamentally statist in conception, envisaging a Europe divided and conquered by regions in preference to a voluntary union of proud and independent nation-states. It is based on taking power away from voters and politicians and placing it in the hands of a technocratic elite, or in essence undoing 200 years of liberalising progress on the continent. Anglo-Saxon forms of governance, based on common law and liberty, are incompatible with the statist vision that prohibits everything that is not explicitly allowed. There is also the issue of the casual use of political violence by the governments of EU countries, especially in France, where people have lost hands to rubber bullets, and Spain where Catalan separatists were subject to lengthy detention without trial for political offences. There has been no mention of any EU-inspired reform of civil liberties that permit such outrages to persist.
For Remainers, reform is an empty word, a big lie trying to con the British people that the EU can ever improve. The EU is a Franco-German axis, with other countries’ needs seen as peripheral. Reform is demonstrably impossible, or we would have seen some in the last three years. The EU is about the accumulation and wielding of power from the centre, as the Greeks and Italians have discovered far too late when they found their sovereignty compromised and their governments brushed aside. If the EU’s second largest economy voting to leave did not make the powers behind the EU stop and think, then nothing can. Rather than consider their failings, those in power in the EU sneer at this country and seek to impose a punitive departure to deter other potential defectors.
As an economic community of mutual assistance, the EEC made sense. As a political union of sovereign nations, it is a Frankenstein’s monster of incompatible and superfluous body parts. It is not surprising if some of the aggrieved townsfolk are attacking the castle where this freak has been created.
