All that we ordinary
humble people can do is to keep highlighting what a bunch of vermin we have
ruling over us – at national and European Union level.
We also need a way of
saying “NO” – we need to stop as much money as we can going to our government
and the European Union.
Here are those
comments left on the EU Referendum blog, concise and totally realistic; read it and realize how hopelessly imprisoned we are:
•
It’s unnecessary
We went into the EEC in 1973
without a referendum, so we should come out without one (none of the party
manifestos at the 1970 general election promised entry)
•
It won’t go the way you
might think
Not long before the 1975
referendum on continued EEC membership, opinion polls showed – as they do now –
that people were 2-1 in favour of leaving. But when it came down to it only 21
per cent of the electorate voted to leave and, out of all those who actually
voted, over 66 per cent voted to stay in. The result today would be the same
and we'd again be cemented into the EU for the foreseeable future.
•
You cannot hope to win
without at least some mainstream political support
In 1975, Harold Wilson, the PM,
and Margaret Thatcher, the new Tory leader, as well as the four surviving Tory
ex-PMs campaigned for us to stay in. All party leaders would do so again today.
•
Unlike in 1975, no one
in Cabinet supports withdrawal
Before that vote, several
Cabinet ministers campaigned for Britain to be independent – and it still
didn’t help. Today, none of them would.
•
And you won’t get
support from much of the press
On the day of the 1975 poll,
one newspaper’s headline warned of the aftermath of voting to leave the EEC: “A
day in the life of Siege Britain: no coffee, wine, beans or bananas till
further notice.” Perhaps surprisingly, that was the Daily Mail. It hasn’t
changed its tune as much as you might hope. Its leader column on 14 March 2011
said: “The Mail doesn’t support a wholesale withdrawal from the EU.” Nor does
the Telegraph. Only the much less influential Express does. If you can’t count
on the Mail, your campaign is missing a key ally, one that would be as
important as any of the three oldest parties – and none of those is on your
side.
•
… Or
the BBC
Do you trust “Auntie” to cover
both sides of the debate equally and fairly on all three of its media platforms?
•
Big business would
support the other side
It long ago understood that it
needs the EU’s permission for various activities and it also twigged that it
can more easily absorb all the absurd regulations, which destroy smaller
rivals.
The electronics firm Intel, for
example, gave hundreds of thousands of euros to the Irish “yes to Lisbon”
campaign. Ryanair even flew a EU commissioner around the republic to campaign
before the vote.
After the 1975 referendum –
when the yes side outspent the no side nine times over, as it would today – the
yes side’s treasurer said: “Money rolled in.
The banks and the big industrial
companies put in very large sums of money.” They would do so again.
•
Propaganda from the EU
would be torrential
In the unlikely event of a
vote, the EU would pump out one-sided bumf.
Buckets of shiny pamphlets from
Commission president Mr Barroso would spill through everyone’s door.
A 16-page “information” supplement
prepared by the Commission accompanied every Irish newspaper five days before
the country’s 2009 Lisbon poll. (It had been funded by the very people it
sought to influence and the EU was anyway acting illegally.
Then under the Nice Treaty, the
EU was a child of its signatory nations and it could not tell them or their
peoples what to do regarding international treaties.
It was illegal pester power,
but the EU is above rules.)
Recently, MEPs voted to grant themselves the
“right to participate in such campaigns as long as the subject of the
referendum has a direct link with issues concerning the European Union”.
So people might also receive
communications from the president of the European Parliament as well as
hundreds of MEPs.
Perhaps even the EU’s (and your) overall president, Herman
Van Rompuy, might send you one of his haikus urging you to do the right thing.
When voters have been lied to
by people and organisations that they fund – the BBC, the European Commission,
hordes of rent-seeking MEPs, the Church (an unholy number of bishops in the
House of Lords voted for Lisbon), Her Majesty’s Government and Loyal
Opposition, their newspaper, famous charities – no one should be surprised when
the impressionable opt for EU membership. It’s happened before.
•
If the Lib Dems have
ever offered it, you should be suspicious of it
Between 2007 and 2009, the Lib
Dems were touting an in-out referendum.
Nick Clegg even walked out of
the Commons when the Speaker wouldn’t grant him one.
But when Labour MP Ian Davidson
proposed a two-question referendum – one on Lisbon, the other in-out – Clegg realized
that his bluff had been called and whipped his MPs to abstain.
He calculated that people would
probably vote to remain in the EU out of fear – but certainly would not endorse
Lisbon, which he, a former Commission official and MEP, wanted to be passed.
Later, the House of Lords
rejected a proposal for an in-out vote tabled by Ukip’s Lord Pearson. The Lib
Dem peers abstained.
They said that they did not want to “give succor” to
eurosceptics and that they wanted an in-out referendum only from a “pro-European
stance”.
•
If pro-EU MPs such as
Keith Vaz want it, you should be suspicious of it
The ferociously europhile
former “Europe” minister, who was once suspended from the Commons, supports an
in-out referendum.
•
Referendums tend to
reinforce the status quo and so people vote to carry on as they are
People opt for the known over
the unknown, “to keep a-hold of nurse/ for fear of finding something worse” in
Belloc’s poem.
The result in 1975 declared
that we should remain in the EEC. It was a “passive” vote; the country was not
voting to join – nor, unfortunately, to leave – which would have been an
“active” vote.
The Danish no to Maastricht in
1992, the Irish no to Nice in 2001, the Danish and Swedish no to adopting the
euro, the French and Dutch no to the Constitution in 2005, and the Irish no to
Lisbon were votes against change.
A vote on UK membership would
probably result in yet another vote against change, as in 1975 (and in 2011
regarding AV)
•
Even if Britain voted
out, it might be made to vote again
Remember the countries that
were forced to go back to the polling booth after their bouts of false
consciousness: Denmark (1993 for Maastricht) and Ireland (2002 for Nice; 2009
for Lisbon)?
Can you be certain that you
wouldn’t be made to vote again until you came up with the right answer?
•
The turkeys will not let
us vote for Christmas
For us to get a referendum,
our MPs would first have to vote to give us one, as they did in 1975 (and for
the AV vote).
If they’re prepared to do that,
they might as well vote to repeal the European Communities Act; they know that
that’s the wish of most of those calling for a poll. But they won’t do either.
David Cameron has often said he wouldn’t introduce the legislation necessary to
activate a poll. On that you can trust him.
•
The good news: there is
a kind of referendum coming up
You can vote to leave the EU.
There will soon be a general
election (long before there’s ever a referendum).
If you want to leave the EU,
don’t vote for anyone who wants to keep you in.
If over half the MPs elected
want the UK to be free, we will be free.
It’s tempting – for reasons of
tribalism or because “the others haven’t got a chance” – to vote for the three
oldest parties. But doing so means that the most important questions – the
economy, the health service, immigration, our energy supply, how we treat the
environment and how we trade with the developing world – will more and more be
answered by people in Belgium whom one cannot elect or eject.
A vote for any of the "Big
3" is ultimately a vote to disenfranchise oneself, even if it feels
seemingly rational to vote to remove the villain of the day
(Major/Brown/Cameron etc).
