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I do hope this doesn’t come across as a rant. Because it isn’t supposed to be. It’s just an honest statement: I find the EU’s actions to be taking the biscuit now. They’re going too far with their shenanigans, punishment beatings and strategies. They are behaving like a Commandant in some sort of WWII Prison Camp, as the Foreign Secretary had forecasted before. I pride myself on being a considerate and patient person, but the Commission is pushing me too far. I suspect they are pushing most of us too far. While they cannot be responsible for other people’s actions, they have harried the British public throughout our period in the organisation, especially after the treaties were signed which began to construct this dystopian superstate.
And that’s before we consider the Fifth Column at home which seems determined to stop Brexit at any cost.
I acknowledge that there are a great number of people who have been pushed too far, and who are now what the opposition loves to refer as “Brextremists”, but let us consider why. Why are there so many people they disparagingly refer to as g*mmon? If we are told by ‘Those Who Know Better’ that we must see why British Muslims become jihadis and radical Islamists, surely we also should try to see the other side to the “Brextremists”? But it just goes to further suggest that there is a blatant double standard in the British political world. Personally, I suspect it probably won’t be too long before the Rotherham scandal (And the one in Rochdale, and the one in Oxford and the one in Newcastle) is blamed on the victims.
Let us take a step back and see why there may be such a level of opposition and frustration to the EU and the renegotiation. The first step would be, I think, to acknowledge that the EU is the primary offender in what a great proportion of Britons feel as the slow loss of their country & culture. Just as how Tony Blair became the public whipping boy for the Iraq War, so too the EU has become one too. This is not to say it is unfair: on the contrary, both were the biggest “offender” in the process and are, as such, rightfully seen as the primary actor.
The great majority of those who have now become “offensive”, “racist” and “bigoted” probably never were to begin with. I recall a YouGov poll that suggested 55% of Britons felt that Islam was incompatible with British culture (and presumably the ubiquitous yet undefined buzz term “British Values”). These people do not, almost certainly, say that all Muslims are incompatible with British culture, but rather there are key differences that need to be dealt with. The most blatant of these is doubtless the values and rights of women and children. These then see the arrival of Islamist violence; primarily terrorism, religious police, and rape gangs, and demand that something be done. The establishment refuses and declares that everybody who feels that way is a racist, bigoted Islamophobe, which is clearly not the case. Yet as they are pushed out to the fringes of society by being told their views are unacceptable, they begin to stew in the injustice they see being done. And retained anger and hate is a very dangerous thing. I believe medical and religious leaders say that retained hate and anger leads to an actual change in how the body functions. It is certainly the case in how the mind responds.
A person operating out of hate and the sight of double standards and tolerated injustice becomes a hard person. He or she becomes sharp, scarred and always ready to fly off the handle. They become isolated and partisan and limit themselves to a clique of like-minded people, who further feed off each other. They are also likely to resort to physical violence: There have been two foiled terror attacks by such extremist, national-socialist groups by MI-5 in the past few years. While this is small, compared to the 23 Islamist terror attacks in the same time, but it is still a threatened attack.
By no means am I suggesting that the British Nationalist-Socialist parties (such as the BNP or Britain First) are entirely an effect of the establishment. (Further, they are absolutely not right wing – they are clearly left-wing in their protectionist policies: The word ‘Nazi’ is a German contraction of National Socialist). That would be clearly and blatantly untrue: There are real racists and bigots in the UK. People who always were; people who hated black people simply because of their skin colour, or Chinese for a similar reason. But these were a minority – a small minority – who have been propelled by the arrival of a mass band of ordinary, patriotic, Mondeo Men who voted for UKIP in the 2014 European Parliament Elections. These are the famed “I’m not a racist but…” people who have been told that their opinion and concerns are automatically racist and bigoted. These are people like General Charles James Napier who declared that any groups who practised suttee (the ritual of widow burning) in the part of colonial India he was in charge of would be hung. Doubtless, General Napier, had he lived and espoused such a policy today, would have been accused of cultural insensitivity and superiority.
So let us return to the EU. The first issue with the EU is that they are the supreme legislature and judiciary. That in itself means that we have lost our legislative and judicial independence. For many Britons, this is an anathema. We have built our Common Law up from what was universally held to be common sense from the time of Saxons onwards. This is clearly not its beginning, but likely went back to the Celts and whoever was here before them. I believe the current theory is that it was a strand of the Beaker People. The concept of the Rule of Law and Parliament – a body of and for the people was a forerunner of individual freedoms. While other nations had similar, most notably Iceland, few developed the concept as much as the British did.
Further, the EU demand we give up the control of our borders. This also has national and historical ramifications. Not only is this a blatant loss of sovereignty, it also means that invasions-by-migration are possible. I do not see this as likely, but if we consider the invasions of the UK, they were nearly all mass migrations which displaced the existing settlers. And they were all from nations or areas now inside the EU.
And this is the key problem. I have no problem with the arrival of Poles. I have no problem with the number of Poles who have arrived. (My village was garrisoned by a squadron of Free Polish fighter pilots during WWII: we see the Poles in a friendly light). My problem is that I want to be able to control the arrival of Poles. I will go so far as to say I think EU migration has been beneficial for the UK. I have no problem with the arrival of Germans. But the last Germans who forced their way into the UK despite the wishes of the British people have a suspicious lot of ties to those who started a lot of this free movement business. Most of them were flying He111 bombers and Me109s. The Luftwaffe was remarkable in their enjoyment of European freedom of movement until the RAF, VVS and USAAF curtailed this “right”.
In short, uncontrolled and unrestricted immigration of people can often look suspiciously like an invasion. The key thing to remember is that this is not personal. I would have a similar issue if all my friends decided to move into my house and stay indefinitely. It would indeed be fun, but also very disconcerting and worrisome. I have lived in Sweden and Belgium and holidayed in Italy, France, Spain, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark. I love the culture of Europe; I count the people of Europe as my friends; but still I feel I must have the right to determine who comes into my house. In 1628, Sir Edward Coke recorded the ancient law that stated: “A Man’s home is his castle”: the EU overrules this law.
Now we come to the crux of the issue. We the British have said that, while we like the Europeans, we dislike being ruled or governed or overseen by the European Union – a vast unelected beaurocratic machine (with suspicious ties to WWII collaborationists), but if they do, good for them. It isn’t like Napoleon, or Hitler, or the Kaiser, or King Ferdinand: If Europe likes the EU, then good for them. We’re happy for them. But please just accept that we don’t want to be in, just as much as we accept the fact you want to.
But the EU has refused to accept this. They are determined to turn Brexit into a cold war between Britain and The Continent. I resent this immensely. They have dragged on the negotiations to an impossible length, have demanded impossible concessions and charged us absurd bills. It seems everything from Brussels costs £100 billion, and whatever money we have put into the EU has been lost forever.
As far as I am concerned, the EU is playing with fire. They should not be pushing us this far on every conceivable issue. Even those who favoured remaining in the EU are getting frustrated by the EU’s ‘punishment beatings’. They are destabillising the UK government too, which many feel has been too lenient in their negotiating with the EU. They risk creating a British public irreversibly opposed to them, and a level of tension cannot easily go away.
I remember during the independence campaign, two years ago, one of the most popular phrases was “We want our country back”, and this was clearly the case. It also continues to be the case. A great many Brexiteers are small ‘c’ conservatives & classical liberals, who may vote for a variety of different parties, but maintain a similar outlook. They probably have no problem with anybody who wishes to come to the UK and become British, but have a problem with those who come but do not want to be British, but seek to change British culture. They see themselves as being isolated, disenfranchised, and pushed out of the political sphere, and who were given one real try to say how they felt, voted to leave and take part of their country back from the EU and now see the results of the election being slowly yet clearly overturned by the establishment in the House of Lords, a number of parties, and a vociferous number of backbench Tory MPs. (In passing, I wonder what type of a conservative MP you are when you’d rather risk bringing in Marxists into No, 10 & 11 Downing Street, but that is not an issue for this article.)
In conclusion, the issue can be easily stated. There must be an immediate end of the conflation of those who demand “Britain for the British” and those who say “Britain for those who want to be British”. It is a very sad day indeed when those two groups were officially merged by the Establishment. It was the day when patriotism and love of one’s own country started to become banned. Ours is a proud and powerful nation, a nation whose strength is that we are not all the same, but we all pull together for the common good. Not only did the action legitimise true racism, but it isolated a great proportion of the British public. They spoke on the 23rd of June 2016, nearly two years ago, and are still patiently waiting to see the results of their answer. But for how much longer? And at what cost?
Can we all try to listen to each other and consider what the other side has to say? And can we at least try to keep our patience with the European Union’s negotiating strategies? And can’t the government – nay indeed Parliament as a whole – work towards what the nation voted for two years ago? In any event, I feel the government needs to reconsider their modus operandi in these negotiations as they are not getting us anywhere, selling out the nation’s assets, bribing our way out of the EU, appeasing the Commission and growing further tension, anger and frustration at home. All while being undermined by MPs who claim to be Conservatives.
