The EU makes Britain weak and vulnerable

[Blackleaf]

Today, Britain's membership of the EU weakens our national defence in very dangerous times. Why? Clear-sighted understanding is obscured by four common myths.

I fought for Britain and I know how the EU weakens our defences

The myth that leaving the EU would harm British national security must be destroyed once and for all

Russian Sukhoi Su-34 Fullback tactical bombers, Su-27 Flanker fighters and Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-29 Fulcrum fighters fly over Red Square Photo: AFP

By Maj Gen Julian Thomson
29 Feb 2016
The Telegraph

In a career in the Royal Marines spanning more than three decades, I not only experienced war at first hand, commanding and landing 3 Commando Brigade at San Carlos Water in the Falklands, but also spent years preparing and practising Nato plans for war against the Soviet Union. We now know that the Soviets watched our operations in the South Atlantic keenly and were so impressed by the British performance in that war that it strengthened deterrence for the rest of the Cold War.

Today, membership of the EU weakens our national defence in very dangerous times. Why? Clear-sighted understanding is obscured by four common myths.

Myth One is that the EU has kept the peace in Europe since 1945. Former Commission President Barosso claimed that the EU stops us going back to trench warfare. This is nonsense. Look at the facts. What brought peace to Europe after 1945? The American Marshall Plan was largely instrumental in rebuilding European economies after the Second World War and restoring prosperity to a war-torn region. Secondly, from its inception in 1949, Nato deterred the Soviet Union from attacking; and deters the likes of Mr Putin to this day. And German fascism was burned out by their experience in the Second World War. They are now a peaceful nation. The EU wasn’t there, then. It didn’t start until the mid ‘50s.

But did the EU have a hand in keeping the peace later on? No. More facts: 1959-2011's Basque Conflict – the EEC/EC/EU played no part in resolution. 1968-1998: The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland – the EU did nothing to help end the violence. 1974: The Turkish Invasion of Cyprus – the EEC/EC/EU played no part in resolution.

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So what about the Balkan conflicts of 1991-2013? 1991-1995: The Croatian War of Independence was mainly resolved thanks to the Nato-manned United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). 1992-1995: The Bosnian War was resolved by Dayton Accords giving NATO authority for action. 1997: Unrest in Albania was resolved by Nato. 1998-1999: The first Kosovo War was resolved by Nato. 2001: Insurgency in the Republic of Macedonia was resolved by Nato. 2004: Further unrest in Kosovo was resolved by UN/Nato. 2008: Yet more unrest in Kosovo was resolved by Nato. 2011-2013: North Kosovo Crisis was resolved by Nato. Conversely, when people of EU member states, or of future member states, or of neighbouring nations, needed help the EU failed. There is a pattern here.

Falklands War veteran Maj Gen Julian Thomson

Myth Two is that the Americans want us to stay in the EU. Lame duck President Barack Obama and his State Department may say this; but Mr Obama is not America. I know from recent visits to the US that the message at the sharp end in the US defence and security community is that they want us strong and committed to our NATO alliance, based on deep trust of each other in the Anglosphere Five Eyes Alliance (the sharing of intelligence by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

Myth Three is that if Britain takes back control of her own destiny it will help Putin. The opposite is the case. The mayhem the Euro created in southern Europe gave Putin big openings to make mischief there. The European Union’s persistent efforts, led by France, to up the profile of its own defence aspirations by criticising and downplaying Nato is a distraction and leads to wasteful duplication of missions. There is a tried and tested Nato chain of command with appropriate committed forces and headquarters. We do not need an EU copy.

This constant self-promoting chipping away by the EU weakens deterrence and wastes Nato time and resources. Worse, it was EU diplomatic recklessness that kicked off the Ukraine crisis; and the EU’s wish to spread its influence, a latter-day form of imperialism, has weakened east European support and strengthened the hand of fascists and communists in those countries. This all helps Putin.

Myth Four is that the EU helps us defeat Islamist terrorism. The European Arrest Warrant is often cited. This is nonsense: State-to-State extradition works perfectly well with no added benefit from meddling Brussels bureaucracies. Ill-considered statements by Chancellor Merkel hugely exacerbated the migration crisis. This crisis and the inability of the EU to police its external borders has allowed home-grown Da’esh terrorists to slip back into Europe to launch attacks. By remaining in the EU, we are unable to stop those with EU passports coming to Britain.

Our defence against terrorists depends above all on strategic intelligence shared by the Five Eyes Alliance. For good reasons we do not want to trust most European states, and certainly not the EU bureaucracy, with such sensitive intelligence. We do, however, share tactical intelligence with our neighbours on a case-by-case basis for reasons of mutual self-interest. This is a state-to-state function and there is no place for EU bureaucratic interference.

Finally, some say: "stay in to rescue others as the EU founders." I say we’ll do that better from a seaworthy lifeboat than shackled to a sinking deck.

I know from my lifetime’s experience in the service of my country that delusions about what actually keeps us safe threaten us all. So let us put an end for good to these myths about the EU helping security. The facts show the very opposite.

Maj Gen Julian Thompson commanded 3 Commando Brigade during the Falklands War


I fought for Britain and I know how the EU weakens our defences - Telegraph

 

[taxslave]

Unlikely any sane person would attack your little rock anyway. You should be more worried about the rot that is destroying you from within.

 

[Blackleaf]

Unlikely any sane person would attack your little rock anyway.

Nope. It's unlikely anybody would attack our large island, our part of the island of Ireland and thousands of smaller islands thanks to our nuclear deterrent, which the ludicrous numpties on the left, such as Corbyn, want rid off.

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

Way, way too many generations of inbreeding make Briddin weak and vulnerable.

 

[Blackleaf]

Way, way too many generations of inbreeding make Briddin weak and vulnerable.

No, it's the EU making Britain weak and vulnerable.

Operation Fear? It's more like Operation Pull The Other One

By Dominic Lawson for the Daily Mail
29 February 2016
Daily Mail

Chancellor: Over the past few days, Mr Osborne has adopted his most saturnine manner in an attempt to terrify the British people

With his pale skin and dark hair, and looking slimmer than ever, were he an actor Chancellor George Osborne might have been typecast as Count Dracula in those 1970s Hammer Horror films.

Over the past few days, Mr Osborne has adopted his most saturnine manner in an attempt to terrify the British people: to be precise, he is attempting to terrify us about the alleged horrors we will endure if, on June 23, we vote to leave the European Union.

This, for example, lies behind his warning via the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, that ‘global economic turmoil’ means he ‘may need to undertake further reductions’ in government spending.

And what, Ms Kuenssberg asked, were the elements in that global economic turmoil? Osborne had one in mind: the prospect of Britain’s leaving the EU.

‘A British exit,’ he declared ‘would hurt people’s jobs, livelihoods and living standards — it’s deadly serious.’

A day later, with the behind-the-scenes political skills for which he is justly renowned, the Chancellor of the Exchequer managed to persuade the other leaders of the Group of 20 leading economies to include ‘the shock of a potential UK exit from the EU’ in their communique’s list of international problems.

Immediately after, Osborne pounced: ‘If it’s a shock to the world economy, imagine what it would do to Britain.’

There’s only one problem with this neatly choreographed bit of international politicking: it’s an absurd idea that Britain’s voting to leave the EU would be a ‘global economic shock’. How could it be, exactly?

Here is what happens if the British were to vote to leave in four months’ time. After a brief hiatus to allow Mr Cameron to consider whether he is the man to negotiate Britain’s exit or whether it would be better to resign and leave the job to someone more committed to that task, the UK would invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

This is the official procedure under which countries may secede from the EU. It mandates a two-year period during which discussions about successor trading arrangements take place. During those two years, everything remains in place. Nothing changes, whether in terms of our obligations to the EU or its obligations to us. How big a ‘shock’ is that to the global economy?

Project Fear: Cameron declared yesterday that leaving the EU would be ‘the gamble of the century'

There will obviously be uncertainty as to what that successor arrangement will be. Will it be a series of bilateral treaties of the sort Switzerland negotiated after its people astounded Brussels by ignoring their own government’s firm referendum advice to join the EU? Under its system, Switzerland exports five times more per capita to the EU than Britain does. Not exactly an economic disaster.

On the other hand, the Swiss are struggling to persuade Brussels not to penalise them for implementing voter-mandated cuts in immigration from the EU. So perhaps Britain might prefer something closer to the trade deal that Canada has negotiated with the EU — an arrangement that makes no mention of ‘freedom of movement’.

And — the point that most concerns Eurosceptics — neither country has been required to put its own court and parliament under the sway of the European Court of Justice and the European Council of Ministers.

Finally, if no Free Trade agreement were negotiated during that two-year period — that is, if you believe Germany would not make sure a deal were cut with the biggest export market for its motor industry — we would fall back on the terms already in place under the World Trade Organisation.

Under those terms, the average weighted tariff on goods from outside the Single Market is 3.5 per cent. That’s much less than the currency fluctuation in any year: the sort of fluctuation that exists between sterling and the euro — you know, the currency which many of the businessmen now telling us we’d do much worse outside the EU said we would be mad not to join.

In a newspaper article yesterday, David Cameron argued that ‘falling back on the World Trade Organisation could be crippling for our industries as we’d have to accept tariffs that are sometimes as high as 50 per cent’. That’s a craftily-worded sentence. Which industries within the EU impose such penal tariffs on rivals from outside? Just one, which Mr Cameron carefully didn’t name: agriculture.

In other words, the Prime Minister is suggesting that a principal reason for remaining in the EU is to continue being part of the Common Agricultural Policy.

This, it’s worth spelling out, costs EU taxpayers about £50 billion a year in subsidies — and British taxpayers are the second-biggest national contributors to that monstrosity. I have nothing against the country’s biggest landowners, still less the Queen, but is it really a sensible use of taxpayers’ money to send half a million euros a year in CAP subsidies to Her Majesty?

Last week, Cameron claimed it was essential to stay in the EU because of ‘the prices in our shops. I think there’s a real risk that if we leave we would see higher prices.’

Yet food is, for the least well-off, the single biggest element in the household budget. Perhaps the PM should have a word with the woman who was the EU’s budget commissioner for many years, Dalia Grybauskaite, now the Lithuanian president. She raged that the Common Agricultural Policy forces consumers to pay ‘two or three times more for food than we would pay without the policy’.

The Europhiles would have us believe that Britain's exit from the EU would cause a massive plague of locusts, an outbreak of boils, water turning into blood and darkness spreading over the land

Under what madcap inversion of all the laws of economic logic would Britain’s seceding from this grotesque form of agricultural protectionism be a risk to the ‘global economy’? And if the British family were to pay much less for its food, and Britain were to reclaim its billions of pounds a year spent funding the CAP across the Continent, how would this be a dreadful shock to the British economy?

Yet still, ramping up the rhetoric of Operation Fear, Cameron declared yesterday that leaving the EU would be ‘the gamble of the century’. When you think about it, this is most odd. Until very recently, he repeatedly implied he was not set on remaining in the EU, with the phrase ‘I rule nothing out’. If he wasn’t lying when he said that, he clearly can’t have thought leaving the EU to be a catastrophe.

But if Cameron really does believe it would be an unmitigated disaster, he must also admit to appalling irresponsibility, committing the nation to a referendum whose outcome could plunge not just Britain’s economy but also the world’s into chaos — and only for the sake of appeasing members of his own political party.

How’s that going, by the way?

Read more: DOMINIC LAWSON: Operation Fear? It's more like Operation Pull The Other One* | Daily Mail Online
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[EagleSmack]

Maybe they can imagine more ships.

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

Maybe they can imagine more ships.

And draw them! In crayon!