Tag: brexit

Subversion of democracy a feature of the ‘European Project’ from the outset

Martin Webster
This was first posted on Anglo-Celtic.org in November 2018. Following the cyber attack on our site earlier this year, we are re-posting it because of the importance of the EU-Brexit topic to British racial nationalists.

A couple of months ago an old friend sent me an e-mail asking me to support the campaign for a second Referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU). He is a retired music teacher and cathedral organist who is still on the recital circuit. I was surprised to get his appeal since he had never before expressed any political opinions to me and I had never seen any reason to raise political issues with him.

In the light of the terms of his appeal, and at the risk of damaging our friendship, I decided, to ‘let him have it with both barrels’. The following was devised not just to enlighten him but in the hope that it will serve as a quarry of information and arguments for Brexit supporters to deploy when confronted by Remainers.

The referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union was authorised by an Act of Parliament. That Act granted to the British people the sovereign power to determine whether or not they wished their nation to continue to be a member of the EU. The text on the ballot paper in the Referendum read:

There were no conditions, qualifications, sub-clauses, reservations, small print or other confusions to the stark ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’ choice voters were given.

There was no statement on the ballot paper, or some ‘understanding’ explicit or implicit in the Act that if the electorate or the government or Parliament or business leaders don’t like the terms of Britain’s withdrawal in any negotiation with the EU and/or don’t like the possible economic impact of withdrawal with or without a treaty of withdrawal, then the matter be put back to the electorate in another referendum — or, indeed, further referendums as each sequence of negotiations is concluded and put to the electorate.

No such qualifications appeared on the ballot paper because, as the saying has it: “That way lies madness”.

‘Project Fear’ warned us before we voted

It cannot be said that the British people were not warned that there would be some extent of economic turmoil in the event of a Leave vote and the implementation of that decision. Those dire and excessive warnings were issued to the British people on a continuous basis by ‘Project Fear’ for weeks prior to the Referendum.

Many of the predictions of ‘Project Fear’ have been shown to be propaganda hogwash. There was no collapse of the Pound Sterling, no huge increase in unemployment and no need for “an emergency Budget within days in the event of a Leave vote”, as the then Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne assured us.

Since the Referendum the British economy has done rather well and unemployment has gone down.

I recollect a BBC ‘Breakfast’ TV interview with Lord Digby Jones, a former head of the Confederation of British Industry, on the morning that the Referendum result was made known. (See here). Just see the first five minues of the interview.

He made it clear that the British electors had heard loud and clear all that the ‘Project Fear’ propagandists had been saying prior to the vote, but had gone into the polling booths saying to themelves:

“I rather like the idea of electing the people who rule over me, unlike the set-up in the EU Commission. I put freedom first, and if I costs me a few shillings in the first instance, then so be it.”

So there is no legal, political or moral basis for a second referendum — on the contrary, there is a substantial legal, political and moral basis for insisting that the verdict of the British people, by a clear majority, be carried out.

The Leave majority would have been huge if only indigenous Britons had voted

Note that if only native Britons — people born of indigenous British stock — had voted in the referendum, then the Leave majority would have been huge.

As it was, a sustained attempt was made by the Remain camp to mobilise foreigners to frustrate the will of the indigenous British people on a crucial issue which affected the destiny of their homeland.

I regard that Remainer ‘mobilise the foreigners’ campaign to be not merely misguided, but an act of treason…. but, at base, that is what “the European Project” is all about: Treason, that is, subordinating your country to the will of another country or supra-national authority. There is no other word for it.

Whatever became of the oath which Parliamentarians and other public servants have to swear:

“I promise to bear true allegience to the sovereignty of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors, according to law”?

Can Remainer MPs, Peers, senior civil servants, members of the Armed Services and the Police swear that oath in good conscience, or do they cross their fingers behind their backs and wink at each other when they do so?

But the Remainer reaction to the Leave vote appears to be — at first glance — less sophisticated than treason, a sulky child’s refusal to accept the outcome of a democratic vote. “We don’t like the result and so we’re going to kick up, complain, drag our feet, have hysterics until the Leave people back down and we get our way!”

Imagine if any losing party in a general election were to campaign against the result on that basis! Such a party would be dismissed by the electorate as a serious contender for power for many elections hence. Foreigners would be forgiven for thinking that Britain had evolved into a Third World ‘banana republic’ kind of a country.

The Remainer campaign provides a justification for terrorism

The Remain ‘Second Referendum’ campaign is the astonishingly un-British and undemocratic reaction of that portion of the population which considers itself to be “Elite” and finds itself contradicted by those it regards as intellectual and social inferiors.

The Remainer campaign of subversion has been reinforced by the European Union’s negotiators, by Britain’s treasonous Civil Service and, not least, by ‘our’ Prime Minister Theresa May.

Their joint strategy from the outset was to delay-delay-delay, to get the Leave decision trapped and buried in a bog of complexity of their making in the hope that the Leave majority would throw up their hands in despair and give up.

In the past, we have often been assured by those in authority:

“There is no good reason for anybody in the UK to resort to terrorism because everybody has the vote, anybody can set up a political party, there is freedom of speech, the right of assembly, etc., etc.”

But that argument is a two-sided coin.

The other side is that if the results of votes and other attributes of democracy are denied to us, then there is every justification for a resort to terrorism. The Referendum was the biggest exercise in democracy Britain has ever seen. More than 17 million voters put their ‘X’ against the winning “Leave” option.

As has been remarked by others, including parliamentarians: “The Remain campaign to frustrate the referendum vote is playing with fire.”

Subversion of democracy a feature of the ‘European Project’ from the outset

The Brexit vote constitutes a kind of book-end to my political life. I began political activity in 1960/61 as a 17 year old in the Mill Hill (North London) branch of the Young Conservatives. I was already opposed to Britain joining what was then the European Economic Community (EEC).

I met another lad in the YCs who was also a member of the Anti-Common Market League. We asked for a debate on the issue. We were fed up with being asked to debate inane issues such as: “Are moving pavements a thing of the fuure and, if so, are they a good idea?”

Our request was resisted by the constituency Agent, a paid servant of Conservative Central Office. Eventually the Agent conceded because a lot of YCs were keen on having a debate about something important. However, we were unprepared for the cynical tricks he was willing to deploy at the last hurdle to frustrate democracy.

Nobody could be found within the YC membership to oppose our motion: “Britain must not join the EEC”. Ignorance of the topic and shyness is forgivable in teenagers.

The adult association was turned to, but nobody offered to speak against us. This is because they were either ignorant about the topic or cowards unwilling to engage in controversy of any kind — in most cases, probably both.

In the end, a Mr Rose from Golders Green, an adult from the adjoining Hendon & Finchley Constituency Association, had to be imported to advocate the pro-EEC case.

My friend (the Proposer) and I (his Seconder) relied on simple patriotism to advance our case: Our nation had never done well when entangled with Europe and had prospered when it secured its independence via a global mission. Did we fight two world wars in order to be ruled by foreigners?

Mr Rose’s case was mainly to do with avoiding further wars in Europe and talk of a huge home market. He was seconded by a YC who knew nothing of the issues and who said nothing beyond: “I Second Mr. Rose.”

“It’s now time for the disco….”

It was evident that my friend and I had captured the imagination of the audience and that Mr Rose had not impressed. It was going to be a landslide. Just as the vote was about to be taken, the constituency Agent, who had been evesdropping, stepped into the room and announced:

“You’ve all had a debate — but we’re all Conservatives here. We’re not going to divide ourselves, so there will be no vote. It’s now time for the disco….”

The Agent’s intervention prefigured and epitomises the pro-EEC/EU/Remainer attitide to being contradicted via the democratic process. It was that undemocratic fiasco which disillusioned me with ‘Establishment’ political parties and prompted my foray towards nationalist politics.

There is and never has been anything democratic about “the European Project”. It does not have and never has had “the full-hearted consent of the British Parliament and people”, because the British people have always known that Edward’s Heath’s assurance: “Membership of the EEC does not involve Briain in any loss of essential national sovereignty” was a plain lie — which he later admitted (as being “necessary”) — soon before he died.

The British public were never consulted either in a general election or via a referendum before we were taken into the EEC by Edward Heath’s Conservative government.

The referendum staged by Harold Wilson’s Labour government was a fraud in all sorts of ways, e.g.: the Remain and the Leave camps were both funded to issue to every household a booklet stating their case — but the government also issued its own “official” booklet, which was thoroughly Remain in content. The mass media was largely — and the BBC was wholly — pro-Remain.

I hope to see my country free before I die.

Brexit Countdown: Leave, Remain, “No Deal” and the Establishment’s betrayal of the British People

Philip Gegan

U.S President John F. Kennedy, 1963 (AP Photo)

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible…. make violent revolution inevitable.” – John F. Kennedy

Everyone agrees that the British Government is making a complete mess of Brexit. The only question is whether it is fortuitous or deliberate.

In order to understand what has happened we have to recognise a few home truths about

  1. the European Union,
  2. British politicians, and
  3. the British electorate.

1. The European Union

As racial nationalists we know that from its very inception in the late 1950s the European Union (then known as the “Common Market”, or European Economic Community) was but a staging post on the Global Elite’s march towards a multi-racial “World Government”.

In the early twentieth century, a leading global elitist of the day, James Paul Warburg, a US financier, stated that, “We are going to have a World Government. The only question is whether it will be by conquest or consent.”

Ordinary folk, of course, aren’t meant to know anything about this. Who in their right mind, whichever (Western) country they live in, would want to live under the rule of a “World Government”?

If freedom consists in part of limited government, then a World Government, and even a European Government (which is what the EU will shortly become), is the exact opposite of freedom.

A World Government, by definition, would be a tyranny. If just one nation were allowed to leave (just as we are trying to leave the EU) then it would be a World Government no more. So if we leave the European Union, then the future of the EU itself is under threat. How can it call itself the “European Union” without Europe’s most powerful nation in its ranks? No wonder the EU’s eurocrats and our own peculiar Euro-federalists are desperate to prevent us from leaving.

A Political Entity

Until the 1990s European Federalists could argue with some conviction that the set-up was a purely economic arrangement. Their case was that European countries had to pool their economic resources in order to compete with the likes of the United States and Japan. Of course, that argument was flawed in that both those countries were individual nations and not “communities” of nations. But in terms of population numbers and market size it had a veneer of credibility.

With further Treaties being signed by the leaders of the “member states” – Maastricht in 1992, Lisbon in 2007 – the surreptitious transformation of the former EEC into a political union gained pace. The conspirators (for that’s in effect what they are) have a clever ploy. They hold a grand meeting at which a pre-prepared “treaty” is signed by the various career politicians misrepresenting each “member state”. Each “treaty” has far-reaching implications, and takes vast swathes of sovereignty away from “member states”. But the date it comes into effect is invariably one or two years into the future, by which time the mainstream mass media will have conveniently forgotten about it. Few critics will pick up on exactly what is going on.

At Maastricht the conspirators felt confident enough to come out into the open and proclaim their precious entity the “European Union” consisting not of sovereign nations but of “member states”.

All along the policy of the Global elite has been to make it more and more difficult for any country to leave this “Union”. The “Customs Union” was the core part of the original EEC established in 1958 and the “Single Market” and the over-riding jurisdiction of the so-called “European Court of Justice” were concepts introduced in 1993 and extended in 2007. As we’ve seen over the last 31 months, any attempt by a “member state” to leave the EU can now be made so complicated that most ordinary people will give up trying to understand what it’s all about.

So we have the absurd arguments over whether we should leave the “Single Market” or the “Customs Union” as well as the EU, and over whether there should be a “hard border” or a “soft border” between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Oh, it’s all so complex.

Or is it?

A One Way Street

No. It’s not complex at all. Not once you realise that you’re supposed to be confused. Once you grasp that the EU has always been designed as a one-way street. As the wolf’s lair to which there are many footprints going in, but none coming out.

The EU’s leading politicians – Jean Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk, Guy Verhoffstadt, Michael Barnier and all the rest – believe they can bully the UK into remaining a “member state”, in defiance of the express wishes of the British people. They have a timetable, and they don’t want it delayed. For example, by 2022 they want the pound sterling abolished and the Euro to be the currency of all “member states”.

National armed forces together with NATO (ostensibly) provide for the defence of European countries. But the EU wants a “European Army”, the only purpose for which can be the suppression of internal dissent within the EU. It wants control over our financial services, fisheries and oil supplies, and more within a few short years. It wants the process of continuous and endless centralisation and federalisation to continue until no European nations remain.

European Arrest Warrant vs Habeas Corpus

These things are never talked about by the Remainers. This is especially true of the so-called “European Arrest Warrant”. This charming little surprise will be foisted upon us shortly if we don’t break free. Many of our historic rights guaranteeing the freedom of the individual are enshrined in Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus. These will be quietly abolished under the “harmonisation” of European laws – a process that has been under way for many years now, though limited thus far to various aspects of commercial law.

The European Arrest Warrant will give legal force to the arrest of any British citizen in his home, and his removal to custody, which could be in any European country. The pretext could be the alleged transgression of some Euro regulation or other, quite possibly on the unsubstantiated allegation of anyone else, perhaps politically motivated. Perhaps, even, for simply questioning the official narrative of the “Holocaust” story. This happens regularly in European countries.

There the British citizen could languish in a prison cell for months or years while the Euro authorities search for evidence to use against him in court. This is the situation in most European countries. They’ve never had Habeas Corpus, so it doesn’t much matter to them. If our Remainers are so sincere in wanting European integration then why aren’t they prominent in telling their European friends to adopt safeguards similar to our Habeas Corpus, instead of going along with their calls for the abolition of ours?

Has anything like this been used by our negotiating team to strengthen their hand? That the rest of the EU should have similar standards of protection against tyranny? After all, these Europeans are forever banging on about “human rights”. Perhaps they don’t mean OUR human rights.

2. British politicians

The two leading politicians involved in the Brexit betrayal are (1) David Cameron, the former Tory Prime Minister who made the promise of a referendum in the run-up to the 2015 General Election, and (2) Theresa May, the current (as of January 2019) Prime Minister, who has taken it upon herself, as someone in favour Britain remaining in the EU, to lead the nation in withdrawing from it (click here for a summary of the top 40 horrors lurking in her so-called Brexit “deal”).

Cameron was an Establishment politician from the start. He entered Parliament in 2001 and in less than five years he was the Leader of the Opposition. To say that he “won” the 2010 General Election would stretch the imagination somewhat. The 1997-2010 Labour government became so unpopular with the electorate, that it would have been difficult for the Tories to lose that election. But they nearly managed it, largely on account of the refusal of Cameron to listen to the real concerns and worries of ordinary British people.

Eton-educated, a former member of the notorious “Bullingdon” Club at Oxford University, and born into considerable wealth, he is one of those people who take for granted that they are part of the ruling class and that they know better than ordinary folk. He should have been ditched as Tory leader following the election, for not having swept to power with a triple-digit majority. As it was, he had to crawl into bed with the Lib-Dems in forming a coalition government.

Cameron’s “Cunning Plan”

From 2010 to 2015 he became concerned about the increasing popularity of UKIP. Large numbers of Tory members and voters, disillusioned with the wishy-washy policies of the Conservative Party under Cameron, were defecting to UKIP. So he had a brilliant idea. Why not prevent a disaster at the 2015 election by promising voters a referendum, just as campaigned for by UKIP?

He believed he could neutralise UKIP, attract badly needed ex-Tories back to the fold, and get a decent majority, all in one go!

On top of that, he would be able to use it to squeeze a few “concessions” from the EU and present them to voters as a good reason to vote to remain a member. The mainstream media and the rest of the Remain Establishment could be relied on to launch “Project Fear” and cajole the electorate to vote to remain. The awkward issue of membership of the European Union would be kicked into touch for another forty years, by which time we would be so entangled in the Euro super-state that there would be no chance of ever leaving it.

Cameron felt so confident that this bold move would work that he went on television to announce that it would be a simple “Yes” or “No” vote decided by a simple majority and that it would be binding on the government (provided it was a Tory government, of course). Not only that, but that leaving the EU would also mean leaving the Single Market and all the other sub-departments of the European Union, such as the European Court of Justice. There would be no half-way house. And if the result was to leave the EU then he, David Cameron, would carry out the wishes of the majority of British voters.

Nigel Farage

Let’s take a break here to consider another leading figure in all this – Nigel Farage. He was the leader of UKIP for many years, is the leader of the UKIP MEPs, and has his own radio show on LBC. While he is by no means a racial nationalist, he deserves great credit for forcing Cameron to hold the historic 2016 referendum. He is a fluent advocate of our exit from the European Union and must have had a tremendous influence in getting us the successful result. Future historians will undoubtedly identify him as a key figure in helping Britain regain its freedom and independence.

A Crippling Blow To The Global Elite’s Plans

We all know what happened. By 52 per cent to 48 per cent, a majority of over one million, the British people voted to leave. So did Cameron honour his pledge to take us out? He was a career politician, remember, so he cut and ran, resigning as Prime Minister, and soon after as an MP as well, in order to take his place at the feeding trough of retired Establishment politicians.

That left the stage open for the appearance of Theresa May.

Remainer PM + Brexit Negotiations = Farce

There weren’t many suitable contenders to lead the Tory Party (and thereby become Prime Minister) that could command the support of a sufficient number of Tory MPs. That’s how Theresa May managed to secure the keys to 10 Downing Street. She had, for political career purposes, kept a low profile during the referendum campaign, but for all that was at heart an ardent Remainer.

One of her first comments as Prime Minister was that “Brexit means Brexit”. What she meant, of course, was that “Brexit means Brexit means whatever I want it to mean.”

Theresa May had just completed a stint as the longest-serving Home Secretary. As such she had tremendous influence over immigration policy. Under her tenure the flood of migrants from the third world continued unabated, in spite of regular promises by her to stop it.

She turned out to be just as remote from the ordinary British public as Cameron was. Her husband, Philip May, is a past Chairman of the Oxford Union and a relationship manager for investment firm Capital International, a firm handling millions of pounds’ worth of investments for private wealthy clients the world over. One of her and her husband’s closest friends is the Chief Rabbi. They dine regularly together. Presumably the food is kosher.

At the time of writing the process of “negotiating” a withdrawal of Britain from the European Union, as directed by a majority of voters, has taken a staggering 31 months. All this because we’ve been told that we can’t just leave – we have to have an “agreement”, or “deal”, with the EU. The trouble is that the EU negotiators obviously won’t give us one. They are not acting in a bona fide manner for the reasons we’ve discussed.

They know our party politicians as the cowardly shower that they are. They believe they can extract billions of pounds from us and then not give us a proper withdrawal. They will make sure the UK is still tied to the European Union for years and years. Until a future date when some event will happen whereby the vote to leave can be forgotten. Then Britain will be officially back in the fold as nothing more than a “member state” – the term the EU contemptuously uses to describe formerly sovereign nations that have foolishly succumbed.

Democracy will have failed to deliver, and the social consequences of that are potentially devastating, as former U.S. Presidential election candidate Pat Buchanan explains on his blog here.

A Deliberate Mess

The so-called Article 50 process, the decision to seek a “deal”, and now the prospect of Parliament passing a law outlawing a “no deal” departure (more on that in a moment) are all ways designed long ago to frustrate the process of withdrawing from the EU. And that’s what May has intended all along. She is a false leader, an Establishment stooge, and she has faked the whole Brexit process from the beginning. She has engineered, or has gone along with the Establishment traitors who have engineered, the mess that Brexit has become.

Why? So that the majority who voted in favour of leaving the wretched EU will throw up their hands in despair and say to themselves, “We’re never going to get out of the EU, so we may as well accept it and make the best of it that we can.” And then, if there is a second referendum, the Establishment and the Euro federalists may be able to scrape a bare majority and claim ultimate victory, keeping Britain tied to the EU against the wishes of the majority, but all perfectly “democratic”.

The EU negotiators are cynically encouraging our own fifth column of Euro federalists, or Remainers, into forcing the Government into outlawing a departure from the EU without a “deal”. This notion is, of course, absurd. If we are unable by law to leave without a deal – any deal – then we are bound to accept whatever “deal” the EU throws at us. Further comment on this little ploy is surely superfluous.

3. The British Electorate

The British electorate deserve a special kind of praise. For a hundred years and more they’ve endured having their country ruled by a coterie of career politicians. They’ve been betrayed on every important issue. They’ve been taken into two disastrous and pointless world wars. They’ve seen their country over-run by uncontrolled mass migration of inassimilable third-world blacks and Asiatics, with sovereignty surrendered to the Euro Super-State.

During the referendum campaign they were subjected to an unprecedented avalanche of “Project Fear”. Lies and propaganda designed to frighten them into voting to accept the surrender of their ancient freedoms and sovereignty to the European Union.

And yet the British people resisted. They had the courage to defy the threats and warnings coming every day from the Euro federalists and their friends in the European Union, and they voted to leave.

If there’s one thing that the British people can be criticised for it’s for being too trusting in their politicians. The majority voted to leave the EU in 2016, and they fully expected their politicians to deliver promptly, as promised by Cameron and others during the campaign. They waited patiently for the various procedures that they were told were essential to be carried out. But now they expect what they voted for – an exit from the European Union.

The British people are slow to get over-excited about anything. They will take a lot of nonsense from upstart politicians before they lose patience. But when the tipping point is reached, when their anger has passed a certain point, there is no stopping them. Career politicians who don’t realise this fact carry on betraying the British people at their own personal peril.

EU Gravy Train

The European Union is a massive gravy train, and British people don’t like gravy trains. It has around 113 buildings, 65,000 employees (all with salaries, pensions and other benefits ordinary people can only dream of) and over 100,000 other hangers-on, mostly corporate lobbyists who live in and work from Brussels or Strasbourg. It has a far larger bureaucracy than the British Empire had at the height of its power – and that ruled a quarter of the earth’s surface without the aid of modern computer technology.

The fact of the matter is that the EU cannot afford to let us go. That’s another reason why “negotiating” with them is a waste of time and resources. They need our money. They know that if we manage to extricate ourselves successfully then other “member states” will follow our example, and the whole massive structure will collapse in on itself. Just like its forerunner, the Soviet Union.

It’s clear that we need more than just a referendum to leave this whole sorry setup. We’re going to have to fight our way out. And the first line of enemy defence to overcome is right here on British soil – the Remainers and other corrupt Establishment stooge politicians who have been betraying us for so long and feeding from the gravy train. Once they are taken out the way will be clear to do whatever is necessary to take the fight to the EU itself and “take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.”

Future generations of Britons, yet unborn, are waiting to see if we are up to the level of our noble forebears in defending their birthright.

The Brexit Vote Still Stands as a Massive Blow to Our Enemies

A Review of Niall Ferguson's 'The EU Melting Pot is Melting Down', published in the Sunday Times of June 17th 2018. Please note that this review was originally posted in June 2018.

There is a danger at the present time – more than two years after the historic Brexit vote – that the 17.4 million who voted out, including genuine patriots and racial-nationalists in Britain, could feel a sense of frustration. And that is exactly what the liberal establishment, still reeling from the 2016 referendum result, wants us to feel.

But behind all their talk of how impossible Brexit is going to be and their confusion tactics of “hard Brexit”, “soft Brexit”, “Customs Union” and so on (none of which were ever mentioned in the run up to the referendum) they are rudderless, adrift in a sea of their own despair.

This is the distinct message I have from reading what one of the leading pro-remain figures in Britain has just written in the Sunday Times of June 17th 2018.

Titled “The EU Melting Pot is Melting Down”, Niall Ferguson’s article displays a number of interesting insights into the mind of someone who is both a fanatical liberal and a believer in the innate superiority of international organizations like the so-called European Union over nation states.

He starts by enthusiastically telling us about the infamous play written by the “British” author Israel Zangwill called “The Melting Pot”, first staged in Washington and New York in the early years of the twentieth century.

Israel Zangwill – He hated the White race

 

This play extols the virtues of racial suicide, at least for the White race, and looks forward to the day when the White race that created the United States has perished and all the other races of “mankind” have fused into a kind of multi-racial slush, where nobody has any sense of identity any more, and no ancestry to be proud of or even interested in.

This, of course, is the logical result of the multi-racial, multi-cultural, society. It’s what the global elite want to bring about. They and their descendants, who will have carefully avoided the fate of the White race and will have retained their own peculiar identity, so far as they have one, will be in a position of unassailable dominance over all other humans on earth. Their victims will comprise the millions, or billions, dispossessed of their own racial identity, and who comprise a bit of black, some yellow, some Arab, some native American Indian, some Asiatic, oh, and even in some cases a bit of White.

Niall Ferguson and his wife

Ferguson, described in Wikipedia as “a conservative British historian and political commentator”, seems to be personally involved in this. Having been married to a White lady, Sue Douglas (admittedly not a great choice – she “worked on a legendary anti-apartheid newspaper in South Africa and [has] been one of the few women in Britain to edit a national paper”), he now has a new wife in the form of a “Somali-born Dutch-American activist, feminist, author, scholar and former politician” by the name of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali is also, it seems, the unfortunate subject of a fatwah for having strongly criticised Islam, in particular over its treatment of women.

So how does this relate to the current situation relating to the betrayal of 17.4 million Britons who voted for Brexit?

Well, to liberals like Ferguson, the wonderful thing about the EU is that it is fusing all the peoples of Europe together into one super-state, with no borders internally and only nominal borders externally. And it threatens to abolish the concept of the nation state. Just like what “The Melting Pot” envisages happening across the Atlantic. But there is a problem.

You see, where you have a European super-state with an “open border” policy, which broadly is what the EU is meant to have, you get millions of migrants from Africa and the Middle East flooding into the countries comprised in that super-state. These are mostly war refugees fleeing from the US-instigated carnage inflicted upon their countries (though whether Ferguson and his fellow liberals can connect the dots is questionable). And once they’re in then it doesn’t matter which country they first entered – they can travel, using the “free movement of labour” law, to whichever country best suits their requirements.

Why is that a problem? It’s not, of course, because these millions of migrants are non-White, because they will ultimately out-breed the native White population, or because the inevitable miscegenation will bring about the end of the White race and of civilization in those countries.

Though these things will inevitably happen if drastic measures are not taken, that’s not a problem to Ferguson and his fellow race-mixers. The problem to them is that the mass migration is on such a large scale and taking place so quickly.

With so many millions of alien peoples flooding into Europe (and the US, as we discuss below) in such a short period of time, there’s a real possibility that a critical number of White people will wake up to what’s really going on in the world. They’ll realise what their vassal politicians and liberal commentators and opinion-formers (like Ferguson, for example) have been up to. They’ll switch off the TV, cancel their season tickets to the football, and then who knows what will happen?

It would almost certainly mean the end of “that loose alliance between moderate social democrats and moderate conservatives/Christian democrats on which the past 70 years of European integration has been based”, as Ferguson so tactfully puts it.

And that’s what he and the rest of the liberal elite are afraid of. They would much rather have the process slowed down, so that the same result could be achieved without the danger of those beastly White folk acting to bring about the end of this little plan.

This may already be happening. Apart from the shock of the Brexit vote, we have the rise of populist parties across Europe opposed to further European integration and non-white immigration, and actually ready to take on the so-called “European Union”. These range from the AfD in Germany to the League and the Five Star Movement in Italy. Hungary already has a populist-nationalist government that is almost ready to defy Brussels and leave the EU. Poland could follow suit very easily, and other countries like the Czech Republic, Austria and Greece are close behind.

All the pro-EU governments such as that of Angela Merkel can do is to “limp onwards” (in Ferguson’s words), with coalitions of their centre-left and centre-right parties shoring up a crumbling edifice, devoid of any meaningful ideology or strategy. So, for example, we have the Conservative Party in Britain, more a coalition than a party, divided into Brexiteers and Remainers, and with little to keep them together in one party save for a mutual desire to carry on existing and enjoying all the trappings of office.

The trouble with national leaders like Angela Merkel, according to Ferguson, is not that they are opening the floodgates of non-white immigration into the European heartlands and endangering the future of the White race. It’s that they are doing it in such a way that they are almost bound to fail. They don’t really understand the issues. “European centrists are deeply confused about immigration”, he wails.

What he means, no doubt without realising it, is that they’ve had any concept of race brainwashed out of them. They ought to take a seat at one of the theatres showing “The Melting Pot” so they can adapt their strategy, employ more stealth, and deepen their deception of voters so as to accomplish the task of abolishing nationhood and murdering the White race without any effective opposition.

But Ferguson and his ilk are not the only people commenting on the situation in Europe today.

For example, take Pat Buchanan. He is a long standing conservative political commentator, author and former presidential candidate in the United States. He’s the author of “Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War”, “The Death of the West” and other books giving an alternative view of recent history. Writing in his blog on 19th June, two days after Ferguson’s article was published, he covers the mass non-white migration problem from a US perspective.

The US has had a similar problem for many years now. Millions of Mexican and Hispanic migrants are knocking at the door of the US every year demanding entry. American liberals are wringing their hands because young children are being parted from their parents during the process of detaining these illegal migrants under President Trump’s immigration policy.

A question has been raised. Is this cruelty caused by a desire to maintain the demographic make-up of the US (ie to keep it still mainly White)? Or is it caused by allowing a situation to arise whereby millions of non-white migrants take it upon themselves to risk being split up as a family in order to enter the US illegally and benefit from its superior welfare system?

In Europe, where recently a boat loaded with 629 illegal migrants from Africa was turned away by the Italian authorities and eventually allowed to disembark in Valencia, Spain, the issue is one of whether to allow illegal migrants to drown in the Mediterranean Sea or to allow them entry into Europe.

But the essential issue is the same. To be weak and “humanitarian” by allowing millions of third world migrants into an advanced, industrialised country that was built by White people for White people when they were a comfortable majority. Or to be strong and shut them out, protecting our White children and remoter descendants in the long term, but thereby causing distress and suffering to those would-be migrants in the short term.

Taking a sufficiently strong stand against the hordes of migrants now coming day and night into the US from Mexico and into Europe from Africa and the Middle East would unavoidably mean detaining them in camps pending removal. In many cases such detention would separate children from their parents. It’s easy to publish pictures of tearful children and grief-stricken parents, and to get the sympathy of people not directly affected by the migrant crisis.

But safeguarding the future of the White race and expelling all non-whites from White countries takes precedence over any such emotional issues. We have our grandchildren and their grandchildren, yes and their grandchildren too, all along down the line, to protect.

And we struck a massive blow for our national and racial survival with the Brexit vote. Perhaps some of us who have been in the vanguard of racial nationalism over the years can allow ourselves a little satisfaction at the small part we have played in alerting our fellow Britons of the dangers of internationalism and multi-racialism.

So let us take heart from all this. All these problems of migrants, detention centres, and camps are of the enemy’s own making. Whilst we cannot be idle in pursuing the world of our dreams, at the same time we may be able to pause for a minute to relish the despondency and misery that is currently flourishing in the enemy camp.

Brexit – Is the UK really free from the EU? Part 4 – Fisheries

This series of posts takes a closer look at the Agreement that was arrived at between the UK and the EU and signed on 24th December 2020.
Editor's Note: The use of the expression, "TCA" in this series of posts refers to the "Trade and Cooperation Agreement" signed between the UK and the EU on December 24th 2020. This series of articles was first written in early 2021, so please bear in mind that some of the content may appear somewhat dated.

Philip Gegan

[Click here for Part 1]

[Click here for Part 2]

[Click here for Part 3]

Our fishing industry has been among the worst hit of all our industries as a result of membership of the European bloc. It’s endured 48 years of having our fishing waters plundered by foreign vessels. Fishing businesses that have been in the same family for generations have been decimated by Brussels dictats, red tape, and remorseless over-fishing by EU-based trawlers.

The EU’s brilliant answer to over-fishing and depletion of fish stocks is to list every conceivable species of fish, from Alfonsinos to Whiting (Celtic Sea), issue quotas, and require any excess fish caught to be thrown back into the sea, even though such fish are long since dead by the time the catch is weighed.

In Scotland a third of fishing boats are now tied up at their harbours. The Scottish fishing industry is estimated to be losing £1 million per day. This seems set to continue for a long time before the creaky wheels of the British civil service gets around to doing anything about it.

Throughout the withdrawal negotiations, the EU negotiators sought to keep full access to British fishing waters without making any concessions in return. So far, they’ve succeeded in doing just that.

The whole subject of fisheries is dealt with not only in Heading 5, which has nineteen articles. It’s also covered in four Annexes, occupying six pages. Anyone needing to refer to the Agreement’s provisions for our fishing industry has to shuttle to and fro between pages 261 and 899. Let’s take an in-depth look at what these say, to gain an insight of what the rest of the massive Agreement is like.

Loss of sovereignty illustrated

Article 1 confirms that the sovereign rights of coastal states are limited already as they have to conduct their fishing in accordance with the principles of international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982. As all parties have (regrettably) signed up to that Convention then it’s puzzling as to why it should be repeated here.

Article 2 contains “objectives and principles” that both sides should follow (so we’re not free to make our own rules and standards). These cover the painfully obvious for the most part, such as not destroying fishing stocks by over-fishing, following the best available scientific advice when making management decisions, and co-operating with each other to ensure the conservation of shared fish stocks. This Article occupies a full page of the Agreement. We should note here that it is European fishing vessels that have become notorious over the last few decades for recklessly plundering the fishing stocks of wherever they happen to be fishing, including UK waters.

Article 3 deals with definitions (another page and a bit) and Article 4 covers Fisheries Management, which contains much of what I always refer to as the “bleedin’ obvious”. An example of this is where it refers to each party enforcing the “objectives and principles” of Article 2 in its own waters, saying

“A Party shall not apply the measures referred to in paragraph 1 to the vessels of the other Party in its waters unless it also applies the same measures to its own vessels.”

So one party can’t ignore the rules in its own waters and yet try to insist that the other party obeys said rules. As I said, the “bleedin’ obvious”. I really do believe the EU will one day set out regulations covering how its citizens may breathe.

Tied to the EU in perpetuity

Article 5 is equally superfluous. Under it, each party has to give the other a list of vessels that it wants permission for to fish in that other’s waters. After that has been done, “the other Party shall issue authorisations or licences to fish”. So there seems to be no power to refuse such a request. As very few British vessels fish in European waters, and yet there are massive numbers of European vessels always fishing in British waters, we know in whose favour this article works.

Article 6 commits the UK to annual “consultations” with the EU on such matters as agreeing the “total allowable catches” (“TACs”) for each party. Naturally, each species of fish, or “stock” is listed in a separate annex to the Agreement. Three annexes, actually, this being the EU we’re talking about. Either side can demand an additional such consultation at any time if it thinks fit.

There’ll soon be more Eurocrats talking about fishing than there will be European fishermen fishing illegally in UK waters. This article is another example of how the UK is tied to the EU in perpetuity. We never had to have these regular “consultations” before we were taken into the EEC in 1973, so why do we need to have them now?

Article 7 provides for the aforementioned “provisional total allowable catches” in any year in the event of the sides failing to come to an agreement in the time allowed. Different provisions, of course, apply to “special stocks”, which then have to be defined.

Each party, in effect, sets its own “provisional TAC” (“which shall not exceed its share as set out in the corresponding Annex”) but then has an obligation to tell the other party what it is in each case. How’s that for regaining our national sovereignty and freeing ourselves from EU bureaucracy?

Annual consultations, the “specialised committee”, and more loss of sovereignty

Article 8 commits both parties to further annual consultations (and additional consultations as and when called for by one or the other) to agree the extent to which each side will grant the other access to its fishing waters. How much will all these “consultations” cost, and who will have to pay the bill? This article alone binds the UK indefinitely to the requirement that we adapt our fishing practices to accord with what has been agreed between two lots of bureaucrats, supposedly each lot representing their side’s fishermen.

Article 9 covers a situation where one party refuses to allow the other party access to its fishing waters. The parties have to consult under the auspices of the “Specialised Committee” and an arbitration tribunal has to be appointed. How are the members of this tribunal selected? The answer, presumably, is in Article INST.14 [Arbitration procedure] of Title I [Dispute settlement] of Part Six, without having recourse to consultations in accordance with Article INST.13 [Consultations]. Got that?

Some of the Whitby Fishing Fleet in harbour. Photo by Michael Jagger, reproduced here under Creative Commons Licence Conditions.

 

Article 10 has special provisions relating to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, none of which islands should be of any further concern to the European Union with regard to fisheries or anything else. In short, if the UK wants certain provisions of the Heading relating to fisheries not to apply to any of these islands then it has to apply to the “Partnership Council” for a ruling. More loss of sovereignty.

Article 11 provides for more red tape for fishing vessels from the Channel Islands landing fish in EU member-states’ ports.

Article 12 commits both parties to seek advice from the “International Council for the Exploration of the Sea” (ICES) within six months of the Agreement concerning the “alignment of the management areas” and other matters. More loss of sovereignty, and not just to the EU.

EU retains control via “joint committees”

Article 13 covers shares of TACs for “certain other stocks”. As these shares may fluctuate from time to time, each side has obligations to notify “the relevant States and international organisations” of its shares each time they change. This Article, though short, is drafted in an extremely shoddy manner, with undefined references to “relevant multilateral fora” and to the “Partnership Council” having powers to amend the Annexes that define the various types of fish that the whole Fisheries Heading refers to in the first place.

Article 14 covers “remedial measures and dispute resolution”, of which this Agreement promises plenty. As with other parts of the Agreement, everything conceivable is covered whilst at the same time leaving the door open to ample cross-interpretation and dispute.

Under Article 15 we are bound to share data with the EU (as it is with us, supposedly) so as to enforce the whole fisheries heading, “subject to each Party’s laws” (our laws being different from those of the EU, what could possibly go wrong?).

The “Specialised Committee on Fisheries”, referred to in Article 9, is given extensive powers under Article 16. It may “adopt measures, including decisions and recommendations” on a wide variety of matters. Who would expect anything else?

It is another example of how the EU has presumed for itself the power to retain control over vital areas of British policy through the establishment of joint committees, consisting of members from the EU and from the UK, and for the retention of such committees indefinitely.

You may think that, because it’s a joint committee, the UK’s sovereign rights will be safeguarded. Let’s hope they will be, indefinitely into the future, and that all our representatives on these various committees will be as fierce and committed to the preservation of our national sovereignty as we ourselves would be. Personally, I’m not going to bet any money on it.

EU wants our Channel Islands

There’s a ray of hope in Article 17. It covers how the Heading itself can be terminated. “Each Party may at any moment terminate this Heading, by written notification through diplomatic channels.” The amount of notice required is eight months plus the remainder of the then current year. This could mean nearly 20 months in practice. Why not adopt a simpler way of expressing the amount of notice required? But remember, again, this is the EU we’ve been dealing with. Again, extensive provisions apply to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. Do I detect a measure of envy on the part of the EU on account of the Channel Islands belonging to the UK when they are unarguably closer to the Continent? Blame William the Conqueror for that!

Article 18 provides for the implementation of the Heading to be reviewed jointly “four years after the end of the adjustment period referred to in the Article 1 of Annex FISH.4”, and then after every subsequent period of four years. And you thought the period from the referendum until we “finally left” on December 31st 2020 was long drawn out! Complete extrication of our country from the clutches of the EU is a long, long way off. The EU negotiators here are clearly signalling that they expect the UK to be back inside the EU before long.

So that’s it, right? Not so fast. There’s a final Article in this Heading. Article 19 is headed “Relationship with other agreements”. Yes, this part of the Agreement has a relationship with other (existing) agreements! Needless to say, it supersedes or replaces any such.

It’s funny how we never needed agreements like this before the EU came along. But then that was in the days when national governments were sovereign, and made laws for the benefit of their subjects, without any hidden agenda remorselessly driving us all in the direction of a one world government.

Just as if Brexit had never happened

In summary, this part of the Agreement keeps us tied to the EU indefinitely. It’s true that in theory we have the power to terminate it unilaterally (as does the EU), but how likely is it that the career politicians in Parliament and Downing Street will defy all the pressures that would inevitably be applied to them at the first sign of such a rebellion?

You have to look at “ANNEX FISH.4” for some of the small print. This is on page 899. It establishes an “adjustment period” lasting from 1st January 2021 until 30th June 2026. During that time it will be, for fishermen of both sides, just as if Brexit had never happened.

Forty eight years of subjugation to the EU have ruined our fishing industry and brought it to the brink of collapse. The Heading and Annexes on fisheries, taken together, is a clear example of how the EU has dominated the drafting of the Agreement, and in doing so has treated the UK as if it were still a “member-state” that has to be regulated so as to be subservient to the EU itself.

It didn’t take long for the EU to display its vindictiveness towards the UK over fishing. In the opening days of 2021, for no reason, it imposed a ban on live shellfish exports from the UK. For some reason all shellfish caught in British waters has for a long time been sent to the EU for processing, and the EU Commission saw its chance. This shellfish remained the exact same product as it was up to December 31st 2020.

Wearing us down

If this is how the EU is going to behave towards us in the post-Brexit world then perhaps it’s time for us to retaliate. For starters, we could ban all EU fishing vessels from operating in UK waters, and do our fishing industry a huge favour at the same time.

Unless this whole “Trade Agreement” is repudiated then it will be used to gradually wear down the people who have to abide by it in one way or another until the prospect of surrendering our national sovereignty to the EU again will seem like a blessed relief.

In Part 5 (the final part) of this series of posts I will be taking a look at what we can expect from the EU now we’ve supposedly left it.

Brexit – Is the UK really free from the EU? Part 3 – Nothing “free” about this free trade agreement

This series of posts takes a closer look at the Agreement that was arrived at between the UK and the EU and signed on 24th December 2020.
Editor's Note: The use of the expression, "TCA" in this series of posts refers to the "Trade and Cooperation Agreement" signed between the UK and the EU on December 24th 2020. This series of articles was first written in early 2021, so please bear in mind that some of the content may appear somewhat dated.

Philip Gegan

[Click here for Part 1]

[Click here for Part 2]

In this part I am looking at how the Brexit “Trade and Cooperation Agreement” (“TCA”) affects trade in both goods and services between the UK and the EU.

Trade in goods

In 2019 the UK had a deficit of around £97 billion in trade in goods with the EU. The EU wants to keep it that way, and the agreement provides for just that. The UK negotiators let the EU have its cake and eat it. It gave us the dubious privilege of remaining the dumping ground for surplus EU products, made possible by a gross undervaluation of the Euro. And we’ve paid for this liability by agreeing to obey all EU rules on trade in goods. That includes any changes to those rules, in which we have no say, in perpetuity. So much for regaining our national sovereignty. The EU thereby managed to protect the integrity of their precious Single Market. What did our negotiators secure for us in return?

Very little, it seems. We should not be surprised here, because the UK’s negotiators, like all mainstream politicians of any Western country, believe in the fundamental goodness of free trade. They believe that all forms of protection of the home market – tariffs, preferences, and so on, are bad. Unregulated competition from foreign countries, however, is good. Even though that may mean the decimation of home industries, the closure of factories and mines and the throwing of good working men and women onto the unemployment scrapheap.

In order for us to grasp what the TCA does for trade relations between the two parties, we have to understand what exactly free trade means, both to its proponents and to everyone who has to live with it. In the absence of clear thinking, it means different things to different people.

Any free trade agreement involves an infringement of national sovereignty. It has superficial attractions to naive career politicians, but beyond that it is just a chimera.

An unworkable system

The popular conception of free trade is of goods and services freely moving from one country to another without hindrance in accordance with the laws of supply and demand. Everyone is happy. Consumers because they can purchase goods cheaply from the source with the lowest price, and manufacturers and suppliers because they have a much larger market to sell in. That’s how ignorant politicians, economists and broadcasters see it.

But in reality it’s nowhere like as rosy as that. It’s an unworkable system. Quite aside from the depressive effect on wages, which ultimately keeps most people as poor as the poorest in the free trade area, there are restraints on natural development and progress.

If one party to a free trade agreement is more inventive than the other parties, or becomes more efficient, or less prone to wasteful practices, they thereby acquire an advantage over the others. They become more productive and therefore more prosperous and they are rewarded with a higher standard of living.

But this is at the expense of all the others who are a party to the agreement, whose standards of living, on average, will tend to fall, whose balance of payments will suffer, whose industries will wither and factories close. It causes an imbalance, and this imbalance will increase with time until the cost to the other countries is too high and the whole agreement becomes unworkable. Those other countries, if they wish to survive, will have no choice but to raise tariffs and destroy the agreement.

Further restrictions on our freedoms

But if there are bankers and financiers profiting handsomely from the free trade agreement, as they are bound to do, then there will be pressure to keep the system going artificially by destroying the ability of the successful party to be successful. Everything depends on absolute equality, including equality of poverty and equality of inefficient working practices. This leads to the stifling of any form of inventiveness or enterprise on the part of a more successful signatory to the agreement, and acts as a break on human progress.

This artificial equality is built into modern free trade agreements, and it is right there in the TCA. If a situation such as I’ve just described arises then what’s called “the level playing field” concept kicks in.

This artificial concept provides that no party should have any advantage over any of the other parties, even though such advantage has been obtained honestly and fairly by prudent investment (e.g. government subsidies), technical ability or other such property that any other party could have utilised if they had had the ability and foresight.

Under the rules of free trade, the cry will go up, just like the children in a playground where one of the participants in the game is perceived as having an unfair advantage. “That’s not fair! The playing field isn’t level!”

So it can be no surprise that there are countless restrictions on our freedom to conduct our national affairs in the TCA.

The “level playing field”

For example, any sovereign nation has the right to extend financial support to any section of its economy that is in difficulties. But if we want to do that in the future, for any section of our economy that is involved in trade with the EU, we have to abide by EU rules so as to ensure a “level playing field” and eliminate so-called “unfair competition” (TITLE XI: LEVEL PLAYING FIELD FOR OPEN AND FAIR COMPETITION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT). The sole beneficiary of this arrangement is the EU and its “Single Market”.

The Single Market is the EU’s own incarnation of a free trade area and the preservation of this artificial construct was one of the issues at the forefront of the EU’s considerations during the negotiations. They were desperate to preserve the status quo, so that in the event of the UK becoming more competitive than EU member-states in any area of productive industry, it would be easy for them to use the TCA to reverse the process and make it difficult to impossible for British companies to sell competitively inside the EU.

All kinds of rules, regulations, and mechanisms were therefore embodied in the Agreement to cover such an eventuality (see, for example, Title XI, Chapter two: Competition Policy). Especially in a situation where one side (the EU) is seeking to punish the other side (the UK).

Looking at the Agreement itself, you can see where various “member-states” of the EU have successfully lobbied for the protection of their own important industries during the long-drawn-out negotiations. Hence we have special Annexes dealing with motor vehicles (Germany, France), wine (France), and chemicals (Germany, Italy).

The UK negotiators have agreed on our behalf that neither side can create for itself an advantage over the other. This is the “level playing field”. Moreover, there will be a dispute settlement mechanism on state aid, with both sides able to impose tariffs unilaterally, if the “level playing field” is upset, ostensibly to protect against “unfair competition”.

“Confidentiality”

If there’s one thing the EU is famous for, other than corruption and bureaucracy, it’s secrecy. So under the TCA decisions will be the subject of often-confidential discussions, while dispute resolution and arbitration will be subject to absolute and discretionary rules of confidentiality (See, for example, Article INST.29: Arbitration tribunal decisions and rulings, and Article INST.30: Suspension and termination of the arbitration proceedings).

That’s not part of the British tradition, which places great importance on openness and transparency in all court trials and hearings, and other decisions that impact on our citizenry. Secrecy and “confidentiality” are part and parcel of the doings of the EU. They evidently don’t want the workers and management of British companies put out of business by the decisions of the Partnership Council to know the identity of the individuals responsible for it.

The “level playing field” concept illustrates the hypocrisy of the EU perfectly. It’s all for free market competition when it benefits thereby, but when it has to face the reality of not being able to compete successfully, it resorts to the “level playing field” to keep in the game. This neatly brings us to the next item to consider, which is trade in services.

Trade in services

When it comes to trade in services, in 2019 the UK had a surplus of around £18 billion with the EU. In stark contrast to goods, the EU negotiators refused to come to any agreement on services. Any future agreement would have to be sanctioned by the EU Commission, which is not known for giving consent on these matters easily.

The TCA generally makes trade in services between the UK and the EU much more problematic than it need be. For example, service agreements can no longer be between the UK and the EU. They have to be signed by the UK and each individual “member-state” affected by such trade, i.e. be on a “country-by-country” basis. This adversely affects service companies in the UK more than it does their EU counterparts.

Yes, the EU Commission don’t mind returning a little national sovereignty to each of its members if, thereby, it can gain a little revenge against the UK for its blatant defiance in going through with the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

There’s still plenty of scope for contrariness on the part of the EU going into the future. Under the TCA, although the EU cannot impose tariffs it can impose “non-tariff measures” to trade in services. These can be, for example, additional proposed regulations that will have to be followed if a particular service trade is to be allowed to continue. Again, it has to be said – this isn’t what we voted for in 2016.

EU threatens UK services sector

There’s more (you didn’t think that was it, did you?). If the UK government wants to make subsidies to any of its service industries, such as finance, then it will have to follow the rules of Part Two, Title II of the TCA. As we’ve observed earlier, there must be a “level playing field”. So if the EU is behind us, for example, in the field of expert advice on some aspect of concern to the construction industry, and companies and authorities in the EU wish to purchase such expert advice from a UK company, then all parties, including the UK company, will have to follow as yet unwritten rules that will be dreamed up by Eurocrats in Brussels.

The EU is being so obstructive in the matter of service industries that UK service industry chiefs are now talking openly of the need to withdraw from the EU market and seek new markets elsewhere. The resulting loss of foreign earnings will doubtless be put down to “Brexit” by Remainers, using their usual simplistic logic and ever determined to find no fault at all with the EU.

Share trading

A good example of how the EU have outflanked the UK’s negotiators is in the sphere of share trading. London has long been the largest stock exchange in the world. Before this TCA was signed, anyone wanting to trade in European equities would most likely have traded on the London Stock Exchange, regardless of which country they operated from.

Post TCA, a UK investor can choose to trade in either London or one of the EU stock exchanges, but an EU investor can only trade on an EU stock exchange. This gives EU stock exchanges a vital advantage, and investors based in the UK will invariably choose to trade in the EU, where all their portfolios can be managed from the one platform.

Our negotiators were assuming that the EU would grant the UK what is called “equivalence”, i.e. the practice and procedure would be the same as it was when the UK was still a “member state” of the EU. But the EU have refused to grant equivalence. This should have come as no surprise. Switzerland had a disagreement with the European Commission in 2019. Equivalence was withdrawn by the EU and Switzerland, having done their best to compromise, are still waiting for it to be reinstated. Woe betide any independent nation that crosses the European Union.

Professional qualifications

Next is another good example of how the EU works. I’m referring to the Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications (MRPQs). It is the mechanism that allows professional people such as doctors, lawyers, engineers and architects to have their qualifications recognized all across the EU.

Such an arrangement shouldn’t be necessary if the EU was run on the basis of common sense. But it can’t allow anything like that to go unhindered by rules and regulations.

So the MRPQ came into existence. It was, surprisingly, an arrangement that worked tolerably well for many years, helping to facilitate trade, mainly in the services sector. In the negotiations this arrangement should have been little more than a formality to agree on. But the EU negotiators refused to agree.

As a result, our services trade with the EU is suffering due to uncertainty over whether professionals who become involved will have their professional qualifications recognized (and therefore their services paid for) in the EU. All the TPA does (in Part Two, Heading One, Title II, Chapter 5, Section 2, Article SERVIN.5.13: Professional qualifications) is to refer the whole matter to the Partnership Council, which can then “within a reasonable time [undefined]…. develop and adopt an arrangement on the conditions for the recognition of professional qualifications” which can then be shoved in as another Annex to the TCA itself.

In the meantime most UK service industries are in limbo as far as supplying services to any country that is a “member-state” of the EU is concerned. It would probably be easier negotiating a trade deal with the Mafia.

In Part 4 I will be looking at how the TCA affects our much maligned fishing industry.

Click here for Part 5 in this series, “What we face from the EU post-Brexit”.

Brexit – Is the UK really free from the EU? Part 2 – The “Trade and Cooperation Agreement”

This series of posts takes a closer look at the Agreement that was arrived at between the UK and the EU and signed on 24th December 2020.
Editor's Note: The use of the expression, "TCA" in this series of posts refers to the "Trade and Cooperation Agreement" signed between the UK and the EU on December 24th 2020. This series of articles was first written in early 2021, so please bear in mind that some of the content may appear somewhat dated.

Philip Gegan

[Click here for Part 1]

One moment before we examine the “Trade and Cooperation Agreement”. Note carefully the title. The ordinary Brexit supporter was expecting a withdrawal agreement. Those of us who followed the course of the long-drawn-out “negotiations” were expecting a trade agreement. But a Trade and Cooperation Agreement? Let’s see what is meant by “cooperation”.

Was such an Agreement desirable?

In 2016, when over 17 million people in the UK voted to leave the EU in the teeth of Operation Fear, these people just wanted their country to get out. Whether there should be an agreement or not was of little interest to them. Given the extensive artificial ties binding the UK to the EU, it is not surprising some kind of agreement should be deemed desirable by both sides.

An appropriate agreement would have been one that provided for an orderly and timely transfer of powers and sovereignty back to the UK from the EU. The UK would then treat the EU and its member states in a similar way to, for example, the United States or the Russian Federation. The EU would treat the UK in the same way as it does, for example, Japan or Australia.

An appropriate name would have been “Withdrawal Agreement”. But at an early stage it was termed a “Trade Agreement”, or even a “Free Trade Agreement”. Bi-lateral free trade agreements are very fashionable these days. Britain has recently signed such agreements with Japan, Canada, Cameroon, Jordan and Mexico, among others, and is on course to sign more with the United States (subject to the irregularities of the Biden regime), Australia and New Zealand.

Trade vs Cooperation

Remainers, as we know, were anxious to put as many obstacles and as much delay as possible in the way of the Brexit process. They latched onto the concept of a trade agreement being an essential component of Brexit in the hope that negotiations would flounder and the British people would eventually abandon the idea of leaving the EU.

So a trade agreement was acceptable in principle to most Leavers and most Remainers. But it took over four and a half years (a period longer than the duration of the First World War) before agreement was reached, and when it was published, it had become the “Trade and Cooperation Agreement”.

Trade between sovereign nations is, by its nature, mutually beneficial. But the concept of cooperation takes it a step further. Trade is something that takes place one unit at a time. Someone has something to sell. Someone else wants that item. A sale is agreed, and the goods or services and the money are exchanged. That is the end of it until next time.

But cooperation implies commitment. It assumes that the parties are going to have an on-going relationship, with ongoing rights and obligations. It impinges on national sovereignty and is something that was rejected in the referendum.

Moreover, cooperation is something that should come spontaneously, not as a result of contractual obligations.

As we shall see, this little, seemingly innocent, amendment to the name reflects a change in the nature of the document signed on 24th December 2020.

The Agreement Labyrinth

The Brexit process has given the EU a golden opportunity to spawn a whole new extension to its already bloated bureaucracy. And it gave the bloc a chance to produce a massive, intricate and tortuous document designed to make any meaningful interpretation impossible and to keep the UK tied to the EU into perpetuity.

The “Trade and Cooperation Agreement” (TCA) is 1,246 pages long and contains a Preamble and seven Parts. Part One contains three Titles; Part Two contains six Headings, the first four of which contain 18 Titles. The fifth contains four Chapters and the sixth ten Articles. Part Three contains 13 Titles, and Part 4 contains two. Part 5 contains two Articles and five Chapters.

Part Six contains three Titles, and Part Seven contains 10 Articles with rather strange names, in which sometimes the numbering is rather questionable, so that Article ‘FINPROV.3: Review’ is followed by ‘Article FINPROV.7: Integral parts of this Agreement’. One can well imagine the draftsmen drifting off to sleep whilst assembling this monumental work of verbiage and doublespeak, and losing track of the numbering.

There are 49 Annexes with names like ‘ANNEX ENER-3: NON-APPLICATION OF THIRD-PARTY ACCESS AND OWNERSHIP UNBUNDLING TO INFRASTRUCTURE’. All these Annexes have Chapters and many of those Chapters have Articles.

There are three Protocols (not including the Northern Irish Protocol, which is in a separate document). The first Protocol has five Titles. Title I has Articles 1 to 6, Title II has four Chapters, containing Articles 7 to 19, Title III has four Chapters containing Articles 20 to 38 (though Article 24 is, for some reason, not within any of those Chapters).

Title IV contains Article 39 and Title V Articles 40 and 41. Naturally, this Protocol has its own Annex, containing three Sections, the third of which contains six Articles plus a number of model forms, such as “Uniform notification form providing information about notified document(s) (to be transmitted to the addressee of the notification)” Quite so.

A Bureaucratic nightmare

It establishes, in Part One, Title III, an “institutional framework”, consisting, at the top, of a “Partnership Council”, whose job is to “oversee the attainment of the objectives of this Agreement and any supplementing agreement”. Rather strange, since the whole point of Brexit was for the UK to break free of EU bureaucracy and regain its sovereignty, not get entangled in new commitments.

Of course, I get it. We can have our independence, but naturally the EU has to make sure that our enjoyment of it doesn’t upset their Customs Union, Single Market, level playing field, and “Court of Justice”. And to ensure that, of course, we need an expansion of the existing EU bureaucracy.

The EU has always been a bureaucratic nightmare for small businesses.
Image: Harald Groven – Creative Commons Licence

At the top of the pecking order is the Partnership Council, supervising the operation of the TCA “at a political level”. The Partnership Council itself is run by the two-member Secretariat – one member from each side, naturally.

Under the Partnership Council are no less than nineteen committees, all of them “specialised” except for the “Trade Partnership Committee”, which seems to be regarded as the most important, being listed above all the others. Why do we need a “Trade Partnership Committee”? We’re supposed to be trading freely with each other, not going into partnership.

Below these committees are four “working groups”, each with the power to “set their own rules of procedure, meeting schedule and agenda by mutual consent”. These working groups, like the committees, consist of an equal number of members from the EU and from the UK, with co-chairmen, one from each side. They are the dogsbodies of the committees, who in turn are the gophers of the Partnership Council.

Then there is the “Parliamentary Partnership Assembly”, consisting of members from the European Parliament and from our own dear Parliament. It’s a forum to “exchange views on the partnership…..request relevant information regarding the implementation of this Agreement from the Partnership Council…….be informed of the decisions and recommendations of the Partnership Council, and make recommendations to the Partnership Council”. Pretty useless, then.

Next up are the “domestic advisory groups”. These comprise “a representation of independent civil society organisations including non-governmental organisations, business and employers’ organisations, as well as trade unions, active in economic, sustainable development, social, human rights, environmental and other matters.” Each party to the TCA has to consult with these groups at their annual get-together.

Each party also has to publish a list of the organisations comprising its own “domestic advisory groups”, with contact points, and also to “promote interaction between their respective domestic advisory groups, including by exchanging where possible the contact details of members of their domestic advisory groups“. So the pointless and corruption-ridden “twinning” schemes between towns in the UK and towns in the EU is set to continue.

We’re not done yet. The TCA sets up a new “Civil Society Forum” “to conduct a dialogue on the implementation of Part Two of this Agreement” (“Trade, Transport, Fisheries and Other Arrangements”). Isn’t that nice?

Oh, and just in case anything goes wrong (perish the thought!) we have the charmingly named COMPROV.13, which provides that, “For greater certainty, an interpretation of this Agreement or any supplementing agreement given by the courts of either party shall not be binding on the courts of the other party”. So each party can interpret the TCA in whatever way they like, regardless of how the other party does so. What could possibly go wrong?

Remember that all of this is in stark contrast to what happened ninety years ago, when Britain and the White Dominions got together, in the face of the Great Depression, and formed a trading system that was known as “Imperial Preferences”. It was this that saved Britain and its Empire from the worst excesses of the Great Depression that ruined whole countries elsewhere.

Did Britain and its White Dominion partners need to engage in a wrangle-fest that went on for four and a half years, and to form a Partnership Council (with Secretariat), numerous committees, a Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, “domestic advisory groups”, and so on? Did they need a series of agreements, the main one of which alone totals over 1,200 pages?

Of course not. It’s amazing what progress can be achieved when both sides are bound by a common purpose, common ancestry, the common law, and, above all else, common sense. And, on top of that, actually trust each other.

How can anyone trust the European Commission of failed and corrupt politicians?

In Part 3, we’ll be looking at the actual “trading” sections of the TCA.

Click here for Part 4 in this series, “Fisheries”.

Click here for Part 5 in this series, “What we face from the EU post-Brexit”.

Brexit – where are we now?

Philip Gegan

Brexit. This post was first published in November 2019, before the General Election of the following month swept the bulk of the Remainers out of the House of Commons and gave Boris Johnson a mandate to "get Brexit done" no matter what.

Brexit – We’ve heard so much in the news about

(a) the need for a “deal”; Remainers in Parliament have even passed a law prohibiting a “no-deal” Brexit;

(b) how a second referendum would “let the people decide”; and

(c) if we do insist on leaving, the need to follow the procedure set out in Section 50.

What are we to make of all this? At this time, only two things are clear.

(a) The majority of people in this country want us to leave the EU without any further delay. This includes the “Single Market”, the “Customs Union”, the “European Court of Justice” (sic) and all the other myriad institutions and bodies set up (both before and after the 2016 referendum) in order to make leaving the EU, for any “member-state”, impossible.

(b) The Establishment is determined to prevent us from leaving. If it goes along with Boris Johnson’s “deal” then that will only be because, although considerably better than Theresa May’s deal, it is still not a genuine withdrawal.

Do we need a “deal” at all?

Contrary to what many supporters of Brexit say, we do, strictly speaking, need a deal of some kind in order to continue trading with member-countries of the European Union.

The over-riding problem is this. Over the years the EU has gradually absorbed more and more powers and functions that were formerly exercised by the sovereign nations that were foolish enough to surrender such powers. One of these powers was the ability to conclude trade deals with other countries, both inside and outside the EU (the Customs Union and the Single Market saw to that).

This power is a fundamental component of national sovereignty. Now, no member of the EU can conclude such deals; they’ve lost the power, along with their national sovereignty.

This is an unfortunate fact, but the key difference between it and what the Remainers would have us believe, is that the correct order of events should be not to negotiate a deal and then leave the EU, but to ignore Section 50, leave the EU and only then negotiate a deal.

Let it not be lost on us that individual European countries would invariably be pleased to negotiate a trade deal with us, if they still had the power. But the EU has usurped that power, and will undoubtedly use it against us instead of for the common good of all. They do not want us to thrive outside the EU, and they are not interested in giving us a deal. All they want to do is to try to coerce us into re-applying for membership.

Negotiate from a position of strength

The next problem is this. Any dispute involving two “member states” of the EU, or involving a “member state” (which is what the UK still is) on the one hand and the EU Commission on the other can only be resolved by the EU itself through its Court of Justice (ECJ).

Such a system is contrary to natural justice and to common sense. The ECJ will always rule in favour of the EU. That’s what it’s there for. For that reason alone, the procedure of trying to negotiate a deal whilst still inside the EU is madness.

We should have placed ourselves in the same position as Canada, Mexico, or Japan. That is, outside the EU, and negotiating from a position of strength, free from the jurisdiction of the ECJ.

Another tool to try and stop Brexit

There’s another important point about not leaving the EU without a “deal”. I’ve covered this before, but it’s worth mentioning again. If you go into negotiations of whatever kind loudly declaring that you won’t come away without an agreement with the other side then you seriously need certifying. Yet this is what the Remainers have done, time and again.

You have to reserve to yourself the option to “walk away”. For anyone claiming to be compos mentis to vote in favour of a law making a “no deal” Brexit unlawful is simply absurd.

In reality, these people knew exactly what they were doing. They were using all this nonsense as another tool to try and stop Brexit altogether.

Remainer hypocrisy about
a “Second referendum”

Now let’s deal with all the Remainer pressure for a second referendum.

There’s a very important reason why a second referendum should not take place. A referendum in UK politics is a very rare event, and rightly so. Up to 1975, when the first referendum took place over whether we should remain in what was then the EEC, there had been no referendums in our history.

The 2016 referendum was the first nationwide referendum in the UK to have taken place since 1975. The device has been used as infrequently as it has because it has been universally recognised that too many referendums would weaken the government and tend to make the country unstable.

It is completely unacceptable to have another referendum on the same question (whatever the question may be — not just Brexit) so soon after the original (the same applies to the proposed second referendum for Scotland on “independence” from the UK).

The reason is that if there is a second referendum it would completely undermine the whole concept of referendums. Not only that, but,

(a) if the result is the same as the first one, then it would be shown to have been a complete waste of time and money, and

(b) if the result is different then which result should prevail? And who should decide?

If the first result, then why have the second referendum at all? If the second result, that would almost certainly lead to civil unrest, as supporters of the first result will rightly feel they have been gravely wronged and deprived of the result they worked and made sacrifices for.

The end of referendums?

In either outcome, it would fatally weaken the concept of referendums (as well as democracy itself), as the next time a referendum was proposed people would be inclined not to vote at all on the basis that, “if we vote the wrong way they’ll simply make us have another one until we vote the way they want us to vote“.

And they would be right. The concept of referendums would thereby be section 50destroyed.

In any event, calling for a second referendum is intrinsically hypocritical. Had the result in 2016 been the other way round and Leavers had called for a second referendum then you can imagine the avalanche of derision and mockery we would have had to endure at the hands of the Remainers and the mass media. They would have pulled no punches in telling us to grow up and accept the result.

When the 1975 referendum produced a “Stay in the EEC” outcome, we who had campaigned to leave stoically accepted the result without calling for another referendum, even though we still continued our opposition to UK membership of what was then the European Economic Community (EEC).

Do we need to comply with Section 50?

This article was signed up to, on our behalf, by Tony Blair, in December 1997 as part of the Lisbon Treaty, which was ratified by Parliament in 1998. Blair and his government had absolutely no mandate to bind this country in such a way, and it’s especially ironic that this nonentity of a former Prime Minister now struts around pretending to be a “democrat” and telling us that we can’t leave.

The truth of the matter is that such a clause would never be upheld by an impartial court. It would most probably be held to be unnecessarily burdensome, so there was no need to comply. We could have parted company with the EU before the end of 2016.

Boris Johnson’s new deal

Now Boris Johnson has a new deal, essentially the same as Theresa May’s deal, though with a few concessions in our favour. It has got rid of the Irish backstop, but at a price. The EU will have powers to station customs officials (all of them, of course, immune from prosecution) at our ports to ensure that goods shipped to Northern Ireland (and therefore not subject to any excise duties) are charged duties as if they were going to the EU.

Only when they have arrived in Northern Ireland will they be de-bonded and the excise duties made liable to refund. Northern Ireland businesses selling their goods to the mainland will have to complete a customs declaration. What a charade!

And all, of course, subject to the over-riding jurisdiction of the “European Court of Justice”.

Ongoing obligations under the “deal” inhibit our ability to modernise industrial infrastructure and practices by requiring us to prevent them from acquiring any competitive advantage compared to similar industries in the EU.

Using this part of the “deal”, the ECJ can step in at any time and sabotage any trade deal we are about to sign with an outside country, e.g. the US. So much for regaining our national sovereignty.

It must be said, however, that Johnson has been far tougher than May (who basically agreed to everything the EU demanded). For example, at least Northern Ireland is staying within the UK’s customs territory, and not ceded to the EU as it would have been under May’s appalling deal.

The coming general election

Until recently, hopes have been high in the Brexit camp that the Brexit Party would do sufficiently well in the coming General Election to win at least several seats, and possibly hold the “balance of power”. Johnson would be forced to implement a genuine Brexit in order to save his political career.

If only it were this simple. Those of us hardened racial nationalists who were around in the heyday of the National Front, in the 1970s, know just how difficult it is for a new political party to make any impact at a General Election.

In by-elections and European elections voters are more prepared to vote for the party or candidate or party leader that they most prefer. Minority and new parties often do well.

But in a General Election it’s different. The electorate, at a General Election, vote negatively. That is, they tend to vote against the candidate, or the party leader, or the party, that they hate and fear the most. There’s too much at stake to do otherwise.

The likely outcome

It’s never wise to try and predict the outcome of a General Election. Probably most voters currently hate and fear Labour and Jeremy Corbyn most, and want to keep them out of office. Sadly, in most constituencies the only way to do that is to vote Tory. This doesn’t bode well for the Brexit Party, and Nigel Farage knows this.

That, and not wanting to risk splitting the pro-Brexit vote, is probably why he has decided not to contest seats won by the Tories in 2017. It is alleged that some other Brexit Party candidates have been bribed by the Tories to stand down at the last minute.

As a result, it looks increasingly likely that the Tories will be the largest party after December 12th, and possibly have an absolute majority. As a political party, they will be united, on the surface at least.

The pro-Brexit faction will think the UK is free from the EU, while the Remainers will smirk in the knowledge that secret entanglements prevent a genuine withdrawal, and in the meantime they will work secretly to facilitate the UK’s re-entry into the EU in a few years’ time when a suitable pretext arises.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media will be able to convince us that democracy prevailed and that the strings still tying us to the EU and neutralising our sovereignty were authorised by the Tories’ convincing win at the polls. The fact that hardly anyone knew about them until afterwards will be ignored.

Johnson’s real motives

Johnson is a chancer by nature, and he took a chance in early 2016 when, with the referendum taking place in a few months, he threw his hat into the “Leave” camp, resigning from David Cameron’s Cabinet in order to be free to campaign.

Since then he has been careful to take advantage of all the in-fighting in the Conservative Party over Brexit so as to (eventually) manoeuvre himself into the leadership of the party and, as such, the post of Prime Minister.

So for Boris Johnson it’s all about his career in politics, his position as Prime Minister, and the success of the Conservative Party in the forthcoming General Election. He’s happy for most Brexit supporters to carry on believing that his “deal” with the reptilian “European Union” is the real thing, as long as he wins the election and retains his role as Prime Minister. He’s riding a tiger and he’s betting everything he has on staying on top of it.

Hope for the future

Boris Johnson’s deal is far from being a genuine Brexit, but we can console ourselves in the knowledge that it is merely the start of something much larger. Just think – if the Remainers had won the referendum then without a doubt further centralisation of powers in the EU, and further transfers of national sovereignty and power to the EU would have swiftly followed.

Even now we would most likely have the reality of a European Army, the Orwellian “European Arrest Warrant”, and the pending abolition of sterling, to be replaced by the Euro.

Even entrenched pillars of our ancient system of common law would be eroded by now, with the abolition of such guarantors of our liberties as the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta, and Habeas Corpus (in the name of “harmonising” our laws to EU law).

So we have much to be thankful for. We have managed to avoid having the doomed Euro foisted upon us, and we also kept out of the Shengen Agreement. And key parts of our ancient liberties remain more or less intact.

Under the deal, we’ll be free of the ECJ at the end of the transition period, in January 2021. That alone is a massive blow to the Euro-federalists.

All these things, together with the Soros/Merkel backed Afro-Asian “refugee” invasion of Europe, the economic downturn the more prosperous European nations are now facing, and increasing Europe-wide opposition to Brussels, will lead to even more EU instability.

This in turn should encourage other Euro-sceptic nations, such as Hungary, Poland and Italy, to follow Britain’s example in regaining their national independence.

The days of the European Union are now surely numbered.

Brexit – Is the UK really free from the EU? Part 1 – Do we have a genuine Brexit? From Triumph to Betrayal

This series of posts takes a closer look at the Agreement that was arrived at between the UK and the EU and signed on 24th December 2020.

Editor's Note: The use of the expression, "TCA" in this series of posts refers to the "Trade and Cooperation Agreement" signed between the UK and the EU on December 24th 2020. This series of articles was first written in early 2021, so please bear in mind that some of the content may appear somewhat dated.

Philip Gegan

After four and a half years of negotiations, on December 31st 2020 at 11:00pm, Britain finally completed Brexit – the process of leaving the European Union with a “free trade deal”.

Yes, Boris had “got Brexit done”. Since the 2016 referendum delivered an unexpected body-blow to the plans of the “Global elite”, the British people had been treated to

  • all the delaying tactics, the manoeuvrings, and downright betrayal from Remainers both inside and outside Parliament,
  • betrayal by our judiciary,
  • sanctimonious humbug from former failed prime ministers,
  • the subterfuge and weakness of former Prime Minister Theresa May and her government and their attempts at total sell-out,
  • a well-funded lawsuit that sought to give Parliamentary Remainers the power to frustrate the referendum result,
  • the threats and lies about what would happen if we actually went ahead and insisted on leaving,
  • and all the other spiteful tactics that the Remain camp, the mass media and the EU itself could throw at us.
It took the Euro elections of 2019, and two general elections sandwiching them, in all of which the parties and factions supporting Brexit triumphed in the teeth of determined and well-funded opposition, to get to a position where we are a free and independent nation once more. That is, free and independent from the European Union.
Or are we? This series of posts takes a closer look at the Agreement that was arrived at between the UK and the EU and signed on 24th December 2020. The full title of the Agreement is “Trade and Cooperation Agreement”, and I am going to refer to it for the most part as the “TCA”.

Twists and turns of the Tory Party

The Tory Party, having hitched itself, for the time being, to the ‘Leave the EU’ cause, was especially pleased with itself. This is the party, remember, that was happy to have the arch-traitor, Edward Heath, at its head as Prime Minister, when the disgraceful negotiations to join what was then the “European Economic Community” went ahead without any mandate in 1971. The same party, without doubt, most of whose members applauded as Heath signed the Treaty of Accession the following year, surrendering our country’s sovereignty to Brussels. That subjugation was to last nearly fifty years.
It is sobering to think that, since the end of the Second World War, our nation has been a vassal state of an artificially constructed, anti-democratic European super-state for 48 out of less than 76 years. What would our fighting men have thought if someone had been able to whisper that into their ears as they departed these shores in 1940 to fight yet another European war?
But back to the present day. We are now, on the surface, no longer in the Euro superstate that the original European Economic Community had become. This is due to a number of factors, including long-standing opposition from minority parties such as the National Front of the 1970s and, more recently, Nigel Farage’s UKIP and Brexit parties. Nigel Farage himself has to be credited with having the single-minded resolve and determination to see through the whole campaign right up to the 2016 referendum and beyond. Let’s hope he receives some kind of national recognition for his achievement.
The Tory Party were always heavily pro-EU until UKIP and, later, the Brexit Party, threatened to keep them in permanent opposition. Of course, there always were plenty of Tory “Euro-sceptics” as well. They didn’t like the idea of our country being sold out to Brussels in the first place but went along with it for career reasons. Now they are celebrating our departure from the EU and congratulating themselves on getting our nation’s freedom and independence back.

Does the CTA “fully achieve the goal of Brexit”?

Let us take one of them, Andrew Bridgen, Tory MP for North West Leicestershire and member of their “European Research Group”, as broadly representing them. He wrote a piece in the Daily Mail of 30th December 2020 headed “I see no traps… that’s why I’ll seize our day of destiny”, heralding “a new era of free co-operation in place of the former dominance by Brussels”.
Bridgen is satisfied that the deal “fully achieves the goal of Brexit”.
Under the agreement, according to Bridgen, “free movement will end, as will the jurisdiction of the European Courts and the vast contributions to Brussels’ coffers”.
Try telling that to the good citizens of Northern Ireland.
“The biggest obstacle,” Bridgen writes, “was fishing rights, since control of our waters is a symbol of nationhood. But here too I am satisfied…”.
Try telling that to our fishermen. We have a further period of five and a half years before we see the last fishing vessel from mainland Europe cease from plundering our fish stocks.
EU membership has been a disaster for Britain’s fishermen

No worries, according to Andrew Bridgen. “The transition period…. will provide time to rebuild coastal communities.”

So all is well, according to populist politicians.

Sadly, all is not well. Before examining the “deal” in detail, let’s briefly recap on how things turned out this way.

The Brexit “negotiations”

May’s negotiators, at the start of negotiations in 2016, immediately announced that the UK would be giving the EU £39 billion as a “sweetener”, to give the negotiations the best chance of success for both sides. May’s team thought that this would be sufficient to induce the EU into granting a Canada-style free trade agreement that would be even better than Canada’s.

The EU negotiators immediately trousered that, and then acted as if it was the least we should have offered. They then scuppered any prospect of a Canada-style agreement with the UK. They realised that Canada is on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The UK is just 22 miles away from the French coast. That fact, of course, only affects the fisheries part of the negotiations, but that’s the excuse they used.

At this point, if the UK’s negotiators really meant to protect our interests, they would have reciprocated by demanding the return of our £39 billion. There was absolutely no legal requirement for the UK to pay a penny for leaving the EU, and the fact that this money, and a whole lot more, has been paid is nothing short of a national humiliation and scandal. Withdrawing the offer of money would have signalled to the EU that we weren’t going to be pushed around any longer, and done wonders to make them more reasonable in the negotiations.

But May’s negotiators were Remainers at heart, and it was only taxpayers’ money. They were all too easily hoodwinked by Barnier and his cronies in the EU’s negotiating team. They had no real interest in securing a fair deal for the UK. Their main concern was to reach an arrangement that looked genuine to anyone who didn’t look at it in detail, and would make it as easy as possible for the UK to be re-admitted to the EU at an early date in the future.

They colluded with the EU negotiators and Remainers in Parliament and the media to bring about a phoney deal. A deal that would in reality bind us to the EU forever and make life so uncomfortable that public opinion would swing behind a move to re-join, just to relieve the pain.

Remainers fight to frustrate the Brexit vote

It wasn’t just the UK’s negotiators who were working secretly to frustrate the wishes of the British people expressed in the 2016 referendum result. As we’ve just seen, Parliament itself, even after the 2017 General Election, was dominated by Remainers. Nearly all these Remainer MPs had promised during the 2017 election campaign to honour the referendum result and play their part in securing Brexit. Almost to a man, they broke that promise and instead obstructed the process in every way they could.

One of the most blatant moves was to pass into law a provision that made it unlawful for the UK to leave the EU without a “deal”. I’ve commented before on how this move gave the EU’s negotiators tremendous power in making unreasonable demands of the UK and refusing any compromises.

The House of Lords was even worse. I’m not going into the history of treachery and betrayal over the period from the June 2016 referendum to late 2020 in Parliament. The important point is that until the 2019 General Election Remainers, both in Parliament and on May’s negotiating team, were openly and brazenly defying the referendum result.

Boris’s negotiators, headed by Lord Frost, were a little better, but not much. Their main fault was that they appeared to treat the EU negotiators as if they were genuine in wanting a deal that was mutually beneficial. That was a mistake. The EU wanted everything and didn’t want to have to give anything in return.

At least by this stage the UK’s negotiators had the prospect, and soon the reality, of a UK Parliament that had a pro-Brexit majority. It was only when Parliament repealed the notorious law requiring a “deal” and passed a new law binding the UK to leaving the EU by no later than 31st December 2020, with or without a deal, that the EU negotiators reluctantly eased their unreasonable demands and started to compromise in some areas.

Even so, the process of extricating the UK from the morass that the EU has become, was lengthy and complicated. Further months of negotiations followed. Deadlines came and went. There had to be a deal, if a “no-deal Brexit” was to be avoided, by no later than 20th December 2020.

Everything is covered

Negotiations still regularly ground to a halt. The EU seemed to enjoy displaying itself to the world in its true colours – an oppressive, intolerant, stiffling and anti-democratic bureaucracy. In the end Boris had to meet in person with Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, and smooth things out. The Agreement was announced on Christmas Eve 2020 to tremendous applause from the populist media.

That gave only a week, including the Christmas holiday break, for the Agreement to be scrutinised for any sign of a sell-out. The Conservative “European Research Group” instructed its “Star Chamber” of “top lawyers” to examine the document – all 1,426 pages of it – to determine if it really did deliver the Brexit promised.

This was duly done, or so we’re assured, and the genuineness of the Brexit deal negotiated was pronounced.

If Tory Brexiteers like Andrew Bridgen did actually read the full text of the TCA as they claim to have done, in the space of just a few days, then it was indeed a superhuman achievement.

The Agreement itself must be one of the most verbose, tedious, long-winded and unreadable documents ever produced in history. Page after page of it contain tables which in turn contain lists of things such as all the species of fish and animals likely to be affected by certain provisions, constituent parts of industrial products, agricultural products, medicinal products, and more, that have rules, and exceptions to those rules, for us all to enjoy. On and on it goes.

The Brussels bureaucrats who drafted the agreement sought to cover every possible permutation of every possible eventuality in all the minutia of commercial life that could possibly be imagined. Nothing has been left to chance. The problem with an agreement like that, as every lawyer knows, is that by defining everything you end up defining nothing. Rich pickings lie ahead for lawyers, especially those in the UK who specialise in European law, and those in Europe who specialise in UK law.

In the next part of this post, I will be looking at the TCA in some detail while at the same time attempting to preserve the sanity of my readers.

Click here to read Part 2 in this series, “The Trade and Cooperation Agreement”.

Click here to read Part 3 in this series, “Nothing ‘free’ about this Free Trade Agreement”.

Click here to read Part 4 in this series, “Fisheries”.

Click here to read Part 5 in this series, “What we face from the EU post-Brexit”.

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