We either leave the EU now or spend the next two years, as one suspects Mrs May is contemplating, negotiating our way back in without voting rights. If she delays long enough ratification will become an election issue, with Corbyn offering us a surprise ‘Leave’. [pullquote]The Autumn Edition of the paper magazine is now available to download by existing subscribers or purchase – Fifty five pages of politically incorrect articles, book reviews and cartoons.[/pullquote]Faced with a choice between Marx and Brussels, it would be game set and match to Mrs May. If however we were to invoke Article 50 and leave now there would be no need for complicated manoeuverings. We could tear up Lisbon and the other treaties we made with the EU and rely on WTO tariffs and await a further fall in the pound. The benefit would be to us.
It would take political courage. The EU has erected a Berlin Wall of tariffs against the world. Following our exit a German truck carrying a load of eggs would be waved through any EU border but a British truck with the same cargo might apart from duties have to undergo an expensive inspection to ensure all the eggs were the same size. Fake EU ‘standards’ pay for the £180 bottles of wine on Junker’s table, the inflated salaries and allowances of 165,000 civil servants in Brussels, the tax free perks, the limousines and all the other paraphernalia of a corrupt mafia. It is also completely unnecessary. We could still trade with the remaining 27 states on our old EU terms, excluding free movement of workers with hardly a letter of the old agreement being changed. Instead we are talking protection money.
The cost of buying into this tariff wall would be huge, close to what we pay now and we would have to accept free movement. The only way out of it is a trade war, a 30 per cent tax on German car imports and ten day customs inspections until they see commercial sense. Brussels thinks we don’t have the bottle. Only Mrs May can answer that.
As for people movement we have already said we will guarantee all EU nationals who were legally in Britain on or before June 23 rights of residence. In future we will only take whom we like and need. Nor should British nationals in Europe fear for their residence status unless Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Greece want to provoke a housing smash of all housing smashes engulfing their economies. Do the Spanish really want to see their foreign house owners, many of them their best customers – without whom whole swathes of Spain will become economic deserts – suddenly up and leave?
What about the only two benefits of the EU; mobile phone tariffs and the EU Health Card? Britain entertains some 30 million visitors yearly from the EU; who would not be pleased to see their health cover vanish. All it would take would be a series of deals with the remaining 27 member states of the EU to reinstate the old rules. As for the phone tariffs we merely peg them to those with Europe, or make them, to annoy Brussels, a bit cheaper.
There remain the problem of asylum seekers and our new land borders, one in Ireland and one in Scotland if the latter leaves the UK. As in Calais now, asylum seekers would be processed on the Scottish or Irish sides of the border by English border guards. This would stop them setting foot on English soil and claiming perpetual refugee status. Scotland could settle them in the Highlands or on the plenitude of islands along her west coast where very comfortable accommodation could be arranged, while at the same time offers of free flights with a £5000 pound resettlement grant paid on arrival back in their native countries would always be available. Two summers of midges might prove a powerful incentive to take up such an offer. Ireland too is blessed with a number of islands on its west and south west coasts, but unlike Scotland, bogus asylum seekers in Ireland do not have an easy time getting into the country in the first place. The Irish, a generous and open-handed people, have a sharp nose for being conned.
How will we know if Theresa May and her smooth, joking Boris Johnson as well as the pair of political geldings she appointed as trade minsters are not negotiating their way back into Europe? If there are no serious rows between Brussels and London over tariffs in the next two months, if instead it is all fine wines at Mr Junker’s table then we are being sold down Tariff river.
When Theresa May assured us that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ she also said ‘There will be no second referendum’. That means we have to accept the deal she strikes with Brussels. Are we going back in on her terms, or Whitehall’s terms? Is there a difference?©
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