By Michael Skywood Clifford
The EU is already a failed project, but if we remain in, then over forthcoming decades things will get far worse.
First, let me say, I have never had anything in common with the policies of Farrage, Ian Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Dr Fox, Murdock and other far-right Tories. When I see their Brexit documentary, see their faces and consider what they have previously inflicted on the public, I get worried. But nonetheless regarding Europe, I agree seriously with their criticisms.
They are right about the EU. It is not simply a trade organisation; it is a political organisation wearing the sheep's clothing of a trade organisation. There are many successful trade organisations in the world but they do not insist on taking over the sovereignty of its member's nation states and dictating their laws.
Hidden agenda: globalisation
To understand the great danger of the EU one needs to see that globalisation has become a charter which is great for the international hyper-wealthy but very bad for the ordinary citizen.
You will know already how Globalisation operates. Within a nation, citizens are taxed and are penalised for any crime they commit. But it's a different set of rules (or lack of them) for those who move around the international strata. Here crooks are free to seek out the cheapest sweat shops as labour, move untaxed profits all around the world and all without the inconvenience of a world police force to grab their collar or an agreed international judicial system to hold them to account.
The nation state, which captures a strong sense of love-of-homeland and pride in us all (although I am no 'Nationalist') has actually been a mirage for decades, simulated in the mind by cultural and sporting events. Essentially it is cheaper and easier for the world establishment to rule us as a vast economic block. Neither 'small is beautiful' nor 'localism' (which the Cameron professes to uphold) holds sway for these neo-liberal megalomaniacs.
The EU, in its heyday passed laws for the benefits of the people, such as good employment law and the law of Human Rights. But no longer. It is now run by the rich and the influential for the rich and influential. Once big corporations lobbied the EU to introduce the laws in their favour but now corporate agents actively direct and work from inside the organisation. The lunatics are taking over the asylum.
Globalisation is for the benefit of the world's rich. Mussolini himself defined Fascism as control by corporations. Multi-national corporations now run the world, their GDP often bigger than countries. Like Pacman, they are continually gobbling up acquistitions, the wealth accruing more and more and wealth. They are a snowball rolling down a hill gathering more snow. There is nothing that multi-nationals cannot control or buy up, as no one with any vestige of power is free of their bribes or threats. Companies like Phiip Morris International Inc, Chevron Corp, Morgan Stanley, Haliburton, Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum etc. are gobbling up the world. Corporations have bought up the pavements, the roads, the water, the power grids, our public telephone companies, the shopping centres of your cities. For the past 40 years the game of the multi-nationals has been hyper-turbo Monopoly on speed.
It is not difficult for them to get politicians in their pockets, or judiciary in their pay. Anyone who confronts the wants of the multi-national corporation face a juggernaut of the world's most expensive lawyers and will get flattened by them. Most of the world's print and broadcast media are owned by corporations. Their editors are placed because they are well paid cronies who will establish suitable news stories and propaganda. They have contempt for ground floor politics, cleverly allowing the impression of democracy to exist.
To vote remain secures our nation into the hands of the globalists – and it is into this block we become further entrenched if we remain.
We have all witnessed over the past 30 years how the public services of every European nation have been shrunk (sold off to globalists) whittling away at the free public services our families depend upon. As the Neo-Liberal elite get richer and more powerful, ordinary people's options are inversely diminished. Christianity has gone as a state influence to temper the hyper-wealthy; we now live in the world of social Darwinism, and 'it's cool not to care'.
The corporate world does not want any nation state to secede from any of their economic blocks. The southern states of the US wanted to leave the United States of America. Not allowed! Too much money, too much power. This caused the American civil war NOT slavery. YOU cannot leave your economic block. Not Catalan Separatists, nor Greece, nor even Scotland. It's easy to join, we'll even have a multi-national bank fiddle the figures, but remember. YOU CAN CHECK OUT BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE.
Making a decision
To vote to 'Remain' or 'Leave' the EU is a massive decision with unexpected consequences for how our future will turn out. The media is saying that voting 'Leave' is dangerous, but it would seem to me that 'Remaining' is more dangerous as we relinquish our power to distant unknown people, giving them control of our steering wheel.
The referendum commissioned by the British Government will be effectively asking if we wish to totally subsume into Europe. The old UK position in regard to Europe – before Cameron mooted a referendum – was perhaps the best place for us, neither quite in nor out, nor part of the Euro, but with many voting perks. Everything has now changed, these perks have been given up, so if we remain things will be very different.
My change of opinion on the EU
Yes, I once saw the EU as a foil against the inhuman policies of British Tory adminstrations (including Tony Blair's). But now it appears the Social Democratic dream of the EU is fast becoming a Neo-Liberal nightmare of megalomaniacs and fat rats.
Europe is undemocratic
The media and politicians sing the praises of our democracy all the time, but what is British democracy?
Our system of representational democracy is astoundingly UNDEMOCRATIC when you realise that each MP voting on bills in the House of Commons represent the decisions for 876,712 British citizens.
When we consider European democracy, 750 MEPs represent 742,500,000 citizens which means one MEP represents 988681.75 citizens when voting for or against a bill issued from the Commission. Is this democracy? A question asked by UKIP, our largest party in the EU, and which ironically campaigns to leave.
The EU's recent history is hardly shining with democratic events. France, Ireland and Denmark voted against the constitution of the European Union in national referendums. Shock, horror! The Eurocrats didn't like that so each country was given more referendums until they came up with the right answer (or the maybe the election was rigged).
More recently, Greece voted in a referendum to leave the EU. The Greek PM was told by the Troika that if they did, they would send the boys round. He capitulated.
So be warned, if you vote for Brexit, they will certainly try to have another referendum so that you get it right the second time around. Or something worse will happen to stop us leaving.
Do not put all your grandchildren's eggs in one basket. Especially when those who carry the basket are unelected by the populace and whom you will be powerless to remove from office.
"If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you,” said Labour's Tony Benn, “you do not live in a democratic system." He was a lifelong opponent of rule from Brussels.
The EU is a gravy train and its finances are opaque
Consider all the vast amount of money being paid by 28 states going into a central EU hub. For three decades British leaders – on moving on from Downing Street to the rungs of ambition of the EU – have promised to get to the bottom of EU finances. Yet its finances remain as opaque today as ever they were. This is an outfit that has not had its accounts properly cleared for 19 years. If they can't organise that what can they organise?
Is it a surprise that no privileged EU bureaucrat is prepared to tell us the real truth about the gravy train he delightfully sinks his snout in.
Every week the whole EU circus in Brussels, Belgium has to catch a train to Strasbourg in France 200 miles, to vote. This costs £100 million a year. Why? Because the EU consists of several parts that function together. The Commission, where unelected members (chosen by their national governments) sit to create and amend legislation. The European Parliament (which supposed to represent the people). The Council of Ministers which houses all the elected MEPs (which supposed to represent the Government). And the European Court in Strasbourg which passes and amends bills.
The EU has become a byword for institutionalized extravagance, waste and abuse of public money. Eager to create all its own trappings of statehood, the EU has its own self-serving, expensive diplomatic service with offices in Barbados and Papua New Guinea. In fact The EU has 10,000 officials who enjoy a take-home pay higher than a British Prime Minister’s. The EU's vast army of politicos, civil servants, translators and ancillary staff (all on high salaries and no doubt eye-watering expenses) are gobbling up the gravy and don't want us to vote 'Leave' and stop them.
The EU has been described as a barrel of rotten apples, a tower of Babel, that is so snagged up it struggles to actually pass many laws. Consider the crazy case in 2012. A high-level meeting was held in Brussels, attended by 76 officials as well as the President of the European Parliament, to agree to the name for a corridor in one of its buildings. The meeting failed to reach a decision. The EU is failing to come to any decision on any number of problems today, because 28 nation states can never agree!
Sovereignty and autonomy
But the most important question of all is:
'Why we would want to give away our power?'
Only a war-defeated nation does that, and yet we meekly hand over the control of our country for others to control our laws, finances and decisions.
Giving away one's power is what the elderly do when they are unable to look after themselves. Is this the British Enduring Powers of Folly? Think of the the basic freedoms, the birthright to control their own culture and agenda in the future. Did women win the vote in the 1920s to give it away to the Brussels' bureaucrats in the 2020s?
And to say that nation state governments are really in control is nonsense. Cameron's negotiations with the EU were hopeless. Even his modest requests – pitiful little crumbs – have been rejected. Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, said, "What makes me sad and angry is the undertone of national resentment….” It was "not possible" to change the UK's relationship with the EU, said Schulz, adding that Britain "belongs" to the EU.
And how very strange that we PAY distant people BILLIONS to make our decisions for us.
Why did our parents and grandparents bother to fight WWII? Why are we giving everything away just to get better trade deals? Bonkers.
The globalist elite wants to destroy nation states and rule easier-to-control economic blocks. They will DO anything to get you to vote 'REMAIN'. The politics of fear will increase…
The stink of the main-stream media is humming again, Downing Street and its cronies, the BBC and the newspapers (with a few exceptions) are awash with propaganda from Global capitalists and from Downing Street for you to vote to remain in the European Union. Recently Cameron came out with the ludicrous statement that if we vote to leave World War III will start. If there was even a smidgeon of a chance of that risk why did he agree to a referendum? And is he saying that if we remain then there will never be WWIII? Give the guy another buffoon button.
The EU is like a 'Ponsi' scheme, it has to keep attracting new investors to pay out the old ones. And the EU keeps adding more and more countries. Recently the Eurovision Song Contest included Australia. Is that as far as they are heading to keep the money coming in?
Recently on a Paxman documentary on BBC1 it showed a clip of Cameron claiming that the Brexiteers were missing out on joining a European Super State! Well that shows where he's really at. Could Cameron be sending out hints for his next job?
The Neo Liberal establishment, from Downing Street to Broadcasting House, will argue for Britain to remain in the EU, that the loss of our national sovereignty, the degrading of our democracy, is a price worth paying because it is good for business. They are wrong. Don't buy into their stinking culture of fear. Throw your arms around the big beautiful world. Don't be a Little European. Be a brave Briton. Vote to leave.
The EU has a political agenda
The EU is run by politicians with a strong federalist agenda who wish to see a United states of Europe. If we vote to stay in the EU (whatever pre-arranged agreement Cameron may claimed he has achieved about this) federalism will intensify and speed up after the referendum. The deeper we enter in the harder it will be to ever extricate ourselves.
The aims of the EU is simple, One parliament, one flag, one national anthem, one legal framework, one central bank, one currency and one armed force! We cannot remain without all of this affecting us. Political agendas have a tendency to creep up on us slowly, and creep they will. Boil a frog technique. If we left then the EU would have to change a great deal!
If the EU were so good, why has it utterly failed in bringing economic growth, jobs? The livelihoods of millions, especially in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, have been sacrificed on the altar of the federalist creed. Present youth unemployment: Greece 48.9%, Spain 45.3%, Croatia 40.3%, Portugal 30%. Is this a measure of success?
And where is this freedom from wars? We are hearing more about the formation of their own military – which is on the forthcoming agenda. Recently the EU were highly involved in creating mayhem in Ukraine, where they were experimenting with flexing their military muscles.
Free trade?
We want the freedom to make stronger trade deals with other nations. Trade was the first policy area where the European Commission received competence. To this day, compared to the other EU institutions, the formation of the EU’s trade policy is still clearly dominated by the Commission. It is a non-elected body but is, nonetheless, the ONLY EU INSTITUTION that can initiate trade policy, legislation and negotiations. Neither citizens, nor Parliaments, nor EU governments have this right!
This control is held by the leaders of the 28 Euro countries who send their cronies to be commissioners. Again we go back to global control in the hands of very few.
The EU hobbles far behind other regional economic groupings like Nafta (North American Free Trade Agreement – USA, Canada and Mexico), Mercosur (South America) and Asean (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, et al). "None of which," noted Boris Johnson, "has these elaborate sovereignty-sharing arrangements, with a peculiar parliament and court and a vast and ever growing corpus of supranational law." These nations trade for their mutual benefit.
Over the past 40 years the EU has turned the UK into a warehouse for moving corporate goods back and forth to Europe. We can do better than that. Iceland has done very well on its own. Many of the Nordic countries are very healthy without being in the political EU.
The trade block we joined in the early 1970s which then accounted for 36 percent of world GDP, will account for less than 15 percent in 2020. Contrary to historical propaganda we did not join the EEC because Britain was 'the sick man of Europe'. Britain was actually not in dire economic straits in the 60s. There were deeper motives afoot.
How MacMillan began moves to form a world government
British growth sometimes surged ahead of Europe's. In the 1950s Western Europe had a growth rate of 3.5 per cent; in the 1960s, it was 4.5 per cent. But in 1959, when Harold Macmillan took office, the real annual growth rate of British GDP was almost 6 per cent. And 6 per cent when de Gaulle vetoed our first application to join the EEC in 1963.
In 1973, when we entered the EEC, our annual national growth rate was a record 7.4 per cent. The present Chancellor would die for such figures. So the economic basket-case argument doesn’t work.
The reason we joined is that Harold Macmillan and his clique saw the salvation of the world in some form of world government based on regional federations.
Macmillan was a close acquaintance of Jean Monnet, who was also had ideas of federalism. It was therefore Macmillan who became the representative of the European federalist movement in the British cabinet.
Macmillan arranged for a Treaty of Association to be signed between the UK and the ECSC, and it was he who ensured that a British representative was sent to the Brussels negotiations following the Messina Conference, which gave birth to the EEC.
In the late 1950s he pushed negotiations concerning a European Free Trade Association towards membership of the EEC. General de Gaulle who was not a federalist stopped him getting a full British membership.
Macmillan's aim, in alliance with US and European proponents of a federalist world order, was to frustrate the emerging Franco-German alliance which was seen as one of French and German nationalism.
Monnet met secretly with Heath and Macmillan on innumerable occasions to facilitate British entry. Indeed, he was informed before the British Parliament of the terms in which the British approach to Europe would be framed.
Macmillan deliberately misled the House of Commons – and practically everyone else, from Commonwealth statesmen to cabinet colleagues and the public – that merely minor commercial negotiations were involved.
Heath, who followed Mac, arranged for the Tory Party to become a (secret) corporate member of Monnet’s Action Committee for a United States of Europe. Other parties followed.
Meanwhile the Earl of Gosford, one of Macmillan’s foreign policy ministers in the House of Lords, actually informed the House that the aim of the government’s foreign policy was world government.
Monnet’s Action Committee was also given financial backing by the CIA and the US State Department. The Anglo-American establishment was now committed to the creation of a federal United States of Europe.
Today, this is still the case. American officials have already been primed to state that such a Britain would be excluded from any free trade deal with the USA and that the world needs the TTIP trade treaty which is predicated on the survival of the EU.
More issues
And what a price we pay to be in this club. We want to use that money on the things we regard as important; to improve the British economy; to generate more jobs; to create an excellent social security system, to improve our struggling health service; to regenerate Britain’s fisheries.
The Euro currency
Many people in the UK enjoyed the Euro for its convenience but the EURO was considered to be a disaster by the British economists, likely as a result of the fact that we ended up having to bailout a currency we chose not to join. 'Leave' economists say it is a political construct with no basis in economic reality that carries the seeds of its own destruction.
They claim that the problem is that a single currency can never work without a single country – and the single country on the list is the UNITED STATES OF EUROPE. One of the problems with the Euro is that one country has an expensive banquet in a costly restaurant and hands the bill to another country to pay for it. Will this create wars? Will it create the rise of the far right? So far not so good.
And Migration
Hardly anything so perfectly embodies the achievements of European unification as open borders. Yet those open borders have brought us the squalor of the Jungle camp in Calais and the frontier rioting in Macedonia and this ludicrous agreement with Turkey. The Schengen agreement is a complete mess. There is great consternation in Britain that we are not controlling our own borders.
Leaving the EU will not be a solution to the problem of illegal immigration because people moving to better circumstances will always be a factor, and Britain as an island with its expansive coast line is a sitting duck for people-smuggling. Importantly, far less migrants and asylum seekers would arrive if we stopped bombing their countries.
Historically, the reason for legal immigration was to bring in cheap labour and undercut the wages of the indigenous population – supported by all governments since the Great War – since made much cheaper by scrapping import controls. People will always find ways to migrate to places with better living conditions.
Green Issues
It is said that we can only solve green issues if we remain in the EU. That is nonsense.
The Brexit camp in the past were presented as little Englanders: uncooperative, lonely separatists, unable to get together with European friends and neighbours to thrash out mutual problems. It is obvious to any intelligent person that getting together with our European neighbours about dififcult matters such as global warming and green issues is essential. But in so doing, we do not have to be tied to an organisation that takes away our power.
It's nice and cosy to think that remaining in Europe is the communal, more helpful, less risky, more economic and cheaper answer; we will all work together as a happy family. To all get together and be friends seems like the right things to do. But that is naïve. All remaining would achieve is that more people will be ruled by fewer people and those fewer rulers will have massively more power. It will create a situation where less people cooperate. It massively dilutes democracy. The citizen's political influence over the cabal at the top will be made virtually negligable.
The NHS in greater peril if we remain
If we vote to remain in the EU at the referendum, it is likely the NHS will be fattened up with tax payer's money then later sold off to the fat rats; much has gone already.
Hundreds of papers from the secretive trade talks TTIP have been leaked and obtained by Greenpeace of Netherlands. These leaks includes a US proposal to have a committee with representatives from Washington and Brussels to meet each year to review state-owned enterprises and monopolies which includes the NHS. One section of the papers makes it clear that the EU and America would seek eventually to end all forms of state intervention in competition with private sector. In other words the NHS will be killed off.
David Cameroon stated neither he nor his government would privatise the NHS and that it should remain in the public domain. However – as he likely knows – if we remain in the EU he will not be able to do a thing about it. The EU are looking to have the TTIP deal signed by the end of 2016. Cameron, this was the man who said "No top down reorganisation of the NHS" before changing its entire structure in 2013. Not wise to believe a man who was accused by a colleague of putting his penis in a pig's mouth for fun and lies about the financial advantage he gets from tax havens.
Selling off the NHS will be legally impossible to reverse as corporations would be allowed to sue governments if they failed to follow the TTIP law.
End game
I sense that within a few weeks before the referendum, the Remain camp will throw out a few grenades.
Undoubtedly there will be catastrophic financial news: a declining pound, a run on a bank or banks, tales of monies being moved abroad, stock market slump, etc. all these upheavals blamed on the threat of Brexit. This will be orchestrated just before the election to frighten everyone. And this will be coupled with the threat that if we Brexit then Scotland will be forced to leave the British Union.
Conclusion
Brexit will undoubtedly improve the dodgy and corrupt nature of the EU but I suspect, despite everything written here, YOU CAN CHECK OUT BUT NEVER LEAVE.
And right at the end of this article I have to say something quite depressing, which relates to my comments about representational democracy and my reference to the right wing Tories in the second paragraph.
I will vote to leave so that we retain control of our own decisions. But imagine an England run continually by right wing Tories (The SNP will likely split from the Union eventually leaving a small anti-Tory opposition in England).
What we are really being asked is this. "Which of the these tyrannies is the least terrifying?!
This Biblical quote haunts me.
"…When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn." Prov 29:2
I am very concerned that whichever argument wins, the ordinary citizen will still be left powerless and bereft of democracy by the winning side of the global establishment.