[pullquote]Editor. Salisbury Review. Despite Brussels’ protestations that the EU Referendum is a once-only offer, without Britain the EU cannot survive. If Britain votes by a narrow margin to leave Brussels will be forced to ask us to reconsider. The danger is that David (double-talk) Cameron will remain PM by offering to negotiate a ‘better’ deal. There will be a leadership contest which, hopefully, Boris Johnson wins.[/pullquote]
Boris Johnson’s speech May 9th 2106.(extracts) “I am pleased that this campaign has so far been relatively free of personal abuse – and long may it so remain – but the other day someone insulted me in terms that were redolent of 1920s Soviet Russia. He said that I had no right to vote Leave, because I was in fact a “liberal cosmopolitan”.
For many of us who are now deeply sceptical, the evolution has been roughly the same: we began decades ago to query the anti-democratic absurdities of the EU. Then we began to campaign for reform, and were excited in 2013 by the Prime Minister’s Bloomberg speech; and then quietly despaired as no reform was forthcoming. And then thanks to the referendum given to this country by David Cameron we find that a door has magically opened in our lives.
….We can see the sunlit meadows beyond. I believe we would be mad not to take this once in a lifetime chance to walk through that door because the truth is it is not we who have changed. It is the EU that has changed out of all recognition; and to keep insisting that the EU is about economics is like saying the Italian Mafia is interested in olive oil and real estate.
…..It is true, but profoundly uninformative about the real aims of that organisation. What was once the EEC has undergone a spectacular metamorphosis in the last 30 years, and the crucial point is that it is still becoming ever more centralising, interfering and anti-democratic.
….You only have to read the Lisbon Treaty – whose constitutional provisions were rejected by three EU populations, the French, the Dutch and the Irish – to see how far this thing has moved on from what we signed up for in 1972. Brussels now has exclusive or explicit competence for trade, customs, competition, agriculture, fisheries, environment, consumer protection, transport, trans-European networks, energy, the areas of freedom, security and justice, and new powers over culture, tourism, education and youth. The EU already has considerable powers to set rates of indirect taxation across the whole 28-nation territory, and of course it has total control of monetary policy for all 19 in the eurozone.
…In recent years Brussels has acquired its own foreign minister, its own series of EU embassies around the world, and is continuing to develop its own defence policy. We have got to stop trying to kid the British people; we have got to stop saying one thing in Brussels, and another thing to the domestic audience; we have got to stop the systematic campaign of subterfuge – to conceal from the public the scale of the constitutional changes involved. We need to look at the legal reality, which is that this is a continuing and accelerating effort to build a country called Europe.
…It is very worrying that the European Court of Justice – Luxembourg, not Strasbourg – should now be freely adjudicating on human rights questions, and whether or not this country has the right to deport people the Home Office believes are a threat to our security; and it is peculiar that the government is now straining at the gnat of the Convention and the Strasbourg court, whose rulings are not actually binding on UK courts, while swallowing the camel of the 55-article charter of Fundamental rights, which is fully justiciable by the European Court in Luxembourg, when you consider that it is the rulings of this court that are binding and that must be applied by every court in this country, including parliament
..The Five Presidents’ report makes it clear that as soon as the UK referendum is out of the way, they will proceed with new structures of political and fiscal integration that this country should have no part in, but which will inevitably involve us, just as we were forced – in spite of promises to the contrary – to take part in the bail-out of Greece. They want to go ahead with new EU rules on company law, and property rights and every aspect of employment law and even taxation – and we will be dragged in.
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