Thursday , March 28 2024

The Poisoned Chalice

The loud voices of the Remain camp get louder and more shrill as the endless machinations of Brexit grind inexorably on with yet another chapter in Project Fear. It’s probably up to Mark 3 with the latest of food stockpiling and medicine shortages so we don’t get hungry or ill between now and our eventual departure. Whatever you do, don’t arrange to fly over the Atlantic as The Republic of Ireland will close her airspace to the U.K. Never mind though, the army will step into the breach and issue us all with wartime rations so we should be alright in the medium term. If nothing else it will solve our obesity crisis.

Just writing this nonsense makes me want to laugh or cry in despair at how stupidly the Metropolitan elite of London is now behaving. This is Great Britain we are talking about here. A country with a 2000 year history of surviving invasion from Vikings, land grabbing French kings, an Armada from Spain, Roman expansion and two world wars against the Germans. All of whom we, eventually, roundly defeated and went on to create one of the greatest trading nations the world has ever seen. A nation built on a never say die spirit of innovation, science, medicine, engineering, exploration and the answer to the very riddle of life itself and the development of the human species.

Somehow, according to the cowardly Remain group a nation built on such solid foundations should now cower away in our own little corner of the continent of Europe and beg forgiveness of unelected clerks, pen pushers, and bureaucrats in a God forsaken city of Europe called Brussels that to any right minded person couldn’t even hold the tiniest sliver of a candle to the great city of London. A city that is home to the greatest monarchy, the mother of all democratic parliaments, the centre of a financial world that allows the ill fated Euro to at least function and has provided insurance services and trade deals the world over for hundreds of years.

For those hundreds of years Europe has been The Poisoned Chalice that Britain must suffer as a near neighbour. Either through the invasions of which I spoke before or as a continent of dozens of languages, cultures, ethics, economies and politics, few of whom have ever lived comfortably side by side with one another and none of whom have had any real great love for Britain. Yet most of Europe has been grateful at one time or another to be bailed out by Britain from one calamity or another. Think of the French in 1914 or the French (again), Dutch, Belgians and Balkan states in 1939.

Against a backdrop like this after another disastrous European adventure into continental domination by the Germans (please don’t say Nazis, the Second World War was perpetrated by the peoples of Germany who had elected Hitler to Chancellor with his Nazi Party), the French poodle sought safety in numbers from the constant threat of oppression by her neighbour, the German Rottweiler and started talks with her neighbours about trading alliances initially based on coal and steel, the raw materials of armed expansion. This was the same France whose leader in exile, Charles de Gaulle came here in the early stages of WWII to suggest to Churchill that France and Great Britain should unite as one country! Needless to say, Churchill gave this short shrift as did de Gaulle’s own people back in France. Amazing how much France needed us then.

For the full background on what then followed for over 60 years, I must urge you to watch the BBC’s documentary of 1996 that you can find on YouTube called The Poisoned Chalice. The receptacle in question being the EEC and then the EU. The deadly poison held in this cup was so sufficiently toxic that it cost Macmillan, Heath, Wilson, Thatcher and Major their jobs. The duplicity of the witches stirring this toxic brew from France, Germany, Holland and Italy was of such Machiavellian intent as to make a John le Carre novel look like a children’s bedtime story.

Famous names involved in this included Jean Monnet and de Gaulle himself as well as Jacques Delors, Pompidou, Mitterrand and other leaders of France, Schmidt and Kohl of Germany all supported by the duplicitous Heath and Wilson from the U.K. and latterly by Major with the Maastricht Treaty. The Maastricht Treaty should have never been signed without going to the country for a Referendum on the true contents of that Treaty. We were never told, however, what the true contents of the planning agendas were for the EEC. Heath lied to the British people when he said it was a simple coming together of nations to trade freely with one another. No it was not. It was in fact the first substantial building block of not only the European Union to come but a staging post on the way to a United States of Europe with a common currency, common economic policies to include agriculture and fishing, common budgets and taxation and central political control mandated by a President of all Europe. Individual parliamentary sovereignty and national control was/is to be ceded to this monolith. Who could possibly argue that the centre of this monolithic control would not be based on Germany? After all, we already have evidence of that particular building block in the monstrous euro currency based totally on the German economy. Its failure can be seen throughout southern Europe with huge unemployment, economies in a downward spiral, no ability to devalue the currency for international competitiveness, no real terms GDP growth in any of the countries except, surprise, surprise, Germany. And yet the EU mandarins in Brussels still continue with the same sinister planning of the Delors and Kohl era towards that same goal of a United States of Europe. The first building block is broken and yet these current people in Brussels and in the Remain camp in Britain think the rest is a worthy goal! Central budgets, central taxation, central law making, central political ideals and policies.

Can you seriously imagine turning out to vote on a Sunday (European elections happen on a Sunday) for the President of the United States of Europe and putting your cross in the box against Frau Merkel or, God forbid, Tony Blair? When you have finished watching The Poisoned Chalice on YouTube you will totally understand that that is the direction that the EU wants to go and, by definition, so do the establishment elite of the Remain group. If any of them try to deny that, then it is very clear that the Grieves, Soubrys and Morgans, don’t have a clue about the developmental history of the EU. Amazingly, Thatcher didn’t. She was so intent on endlessly arguing the toss about our rebate of funds that when she signed up for the Single Market she didn’t seem to notice that the clause in previous treaties allowing for individual nation state veto (hence very little action or growth in the EEC) had been quietly replaced by a majority vote clause. Britain therefore became isolated and constantly voted down.

The Remainers in the House seem to think that Brexit is about single markets or customs unions or borders with whomever. It is about total capitulation of parliamentary sovereignty not only in this country but throughout Europe and our audacity at daring to question this monolith in Brussels needs to be punished in the same way that we were punished in the 70s and 80s for being so awkward in signing up to the EEC by paying more into the EEC coffers than any other country. That de Gaulle had vetoed our membership for years didn’t seem to matter. Remember, this was the same man that proposed to Churchill that France and Britain should become one country!

My anxiety now is that May is drinking from this same Poisoned Chalice. The nonsense that is the Chequers White Paper is evidence of this. The slyly slipped in paragraph in that by Robbins of a rabidly Remain Civil Service that we should be party to a “common EU rule book” is symptomatic of the same trap that Thatcher fell into with the Single Market Treaty on majority voting. By agreeing to that clause alone in our Brexit policy, we will become the vassal State the EU wants us to become along with the EU27.

That cannot be allowed to stand and if May doesn’t understand that the country won’t accept it, then she must be replaced by someone who does.

About Ian Pye

Ian is grammar school educated although he briefly flirted with the idea of becoming Britain's answer to Breaking Bad's Walter White with a short sojourn at university. The constant smell of hydrogen sulphide caused the break up of that partnership and thereafter he pursued a career in sales culminating in partnering with his second wife for many years in their own recruitment business. When the second marriage came to an amicable end, so did Ian's allotted time in the world of commerce and he became a retired person of no means but a still active brain. He lives on the outskirts of the great metropolis of Manchester and has close affinity with the red side of the football city being a United fan of over 50 years. He has deep interest in British politics, is conservative by nature and persuasion as well as reading much on aspects of religious theology particularly the works out of Albuquerque, New Mexico of Richard Rohr and hitherto Richard's mentor, Thomas Merton. Ian has three children, two of whom live in London and the third in Toronto as well as four adorable grandchildren

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2 comments

  1. Barbara Moody

    Excellent read Thank you

  2. Right on the button Ian, I think you have been downloading my thoughts of late. Now the question is, how do we get this article out into the manstream because millions will want to read it. In fact 17.4 to be precise!