That sinking feeling
Reasons for Brexit now stand at 192
The Remain ‘pitch’ has just four rationales: we’re safer in, we’ll be all alone outside, we can reform it from within, and Cameron has effected a reform package to recommend to the British People. These represent disinformation, scaremongering, nonsense and a lie respectively. Since 2012, The Slog’s dedicated page on reasons to leave the EU has built up 192 solid, grounded reasons based on fiscal, libertarian, democratic, economic and geopolitical observations. The piece below is from January 2012. It’s familiarity should act as a sobering reminder that the case to stay in the EU is still, five years on, based on flimsy negativity.
Britain and EU opt-outs: let’s face it, our Prime Minister is a coward.
David Cameron looks more like a hologram with every day
In yesterday’s Times was yet another of those special pleas made on behalf of the UK by David Cameron – we’ve had the Financial Transaction Tax opt-out rationale, now for the Human Rights opt-out argument. Next stop, the Fiscal Union drama.
Now like Cameron, I think the FTT is a daft idea, the CoHR is a lunatic asylum of pc, and Fiscal Union is never going to work…if indeed Merkel makes it even that far. But instead of constantly wanting to opt out of the stuff that goes with being in the EU, why don’t we just get out?
This is becoming a hoary old issue, but I do think it’s time it was put in this way: David Cameron constantly needs to opt out of EU hubris because he lacks the balls to get out of the Union. I can tell him from personal experience, the markets at the moment – on both sides of the Pond – may say nice things to market researchers, but the good ones don’t give the eurozone a hope in Hell of surviving. So that’s one reason not to be in: they clearly don’t know what they’re doing, and pretty soon they won’t have a currency zone in anything like its current form.
Democracy has all but disappeared across the Channel: Four people – Merkel, Draghi, Schauble and Sarkozy – are calling the shots, and that’ll soon be down to three…perhaps even two. So there’s another reason to leave. The age demographics of Europe (and its pension liabilities) make it the worst trading bloc for generating consumption. Here’s a fourth reason: we don’t want their currency and they don’t want ours – and being half in half out is the worst of all worlds. Fifth: the rich thrifty north will never fit with the manana spendthrift south. Six: it cost £118bn a year to remain a member. Seven: We just paid out £37bn in the last eighteen months solving other people’s economic problems. Eight: we have a trade-gap of £58bn with the EU. Nine: don’t hold your breath expecting any help from this shower when brown things hit the fan here later this year. Number Ten, the Brussels bureaucracy is full of corrupt, self-serving nonentities. Like I say, there are always ten reasons.
The EU always was and always will be a Franco-German club wherein the French ignore any rules they don’t like. The debt crisis the EU faces now is a direct result of that mentality. The fact that we weren’t allowed in before 1970 also supports the view: only the decline of Gaullisme gave us an entry ticket…and only then because they saw les Mugs Rosbifs coming.
To say our future is ‘inextricably linked to that of Europe’ is an argument without foundation in the geographic, demographic and economic senses of the word. We are chucking good money after bad here: how can anyone in their right mind argue that a trading bloc the failure of which has frozen our economy solid for the last three months is where our future lies?
The Prime Minister and his colleagues in Camerlot are not real europhiles: they’re agoraphobes. The only thing we have to fear in leaving the European Union is fear itself. This is the problem we face as a nation. Our leadership Establishment consists largely of cowards who talk a good game about ‘British greatness’, but don’t actually believe a word of it.
The Slog 