Even if Britain votes to Remain in the EU Empire on Thursday, the EU Empire is going to fail. It is not long for this world, and Britain should vote to leave the EU Empire on Thursday to protect it from the EU Empire's death throes.
The EU Empire is going to fail. On Thursday, we can protect Britain from the chaos of its death throes
Simon Heffer
19 June 2016
The Telegraph
Before referendum campaigning paused following the tragic murder of Jo Cox, there was growing disbelief among leading Remainers – the careerists, the big businessmen, the Bilderbergers, the Davos groupies and that tragic subset of my own trade that sees the journalist’s job as being to propitiate the governing elite – that polls should show a consistent lead for the Leave camp. It is disbelief born of their almost complete detachment from the realities of life outside London’s more exclusive postal districts.
In their blissfully ignorant private world, they applaud each other’s existences, praise each other’s insights, and rejoice in their smug membership of an elite in which they feel safe because its ways are beyond democratic will: until now. As their presumptions and assumptions have been assaulted and undermined they have flailed about in panic: witness the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a straight face and to the embarrassment even of his supporters, promising an austerity budget to punish the nation should it vote Leave – even though he must have known a combination of his own MPs, the SNP and Labour would never allow such a measure through parliament.
In the real world, as some politicians have belatedly recognised, people want change. They dislike being told that the United Kingdom cannot run itself. They deplore doomsayers who have lost faith in their country. They are angry that their country’s borders are open not just to geniuses with PhDs, nurses, teachers, plumbers, electricians and others who can contribute to it, but to welfare tourists, pickpockets, rapists and murderers.
They resent a foreign power overruling their courts and their elected government. They are frustrated at being unable to change key policies when they vote. They detest contributing £8.5 billion a year net for Brussels to spend in countries less efficient, less productive and more corrupt than ours. They have had enough, above all, of being told that unless the UK concedes in perpetuity to foreign rule it will be worthless, and face ruin, danger and unremitting failure.
A new poll for ITV's Good Morning Britain shows Leave two points in the lead
The ruling elite has forgotten one eternal truth: that the British people don’t like being told what to do, and we especially don’t like being told what to do by those who patronise us or use their clout to control us (as with big business). We don’t like threats; we don’t like having our intelligence insulted, and we don’t like people who try to frighten us. To judge from my mailbag and from people I have met during the campaign, this has all created an upsurge in national consciousness not about British values, but about the value of being British, that we have not known since the Second World War.
Harnessed to this rising sense of consciousness about what sort of people we are, and why independence is our due, is our national sense of humour, which as history recalls, was deployed so effectively in the trenches and in the Blitz to defeat despair. It has turned the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and their smart international friends into figures of fun as they talk with increasing hysteria about the inevitable third world war, the recession, years of grass-stewing austerity, the evaporation of pensions or the end of western civilisation. And when an American president who manifestly disdains us tells us that we shall go to the back of the queue for a trade deal if we dare leave, we show our regard for his opinion by increasing Leave’s standing in the polls. Such defiance is not foolhardy, but enlightened, given what the world offers whether we are in the EU or not.
The polling model is so unreliable that one simply cannot predict the outcome. Anecdotally, the hardening of the Leave vote, for all the reasons I have stated, seems widespread. And talking of the trenches and the Blitz, the deep patriotism of our so-called “ordinary people”, which engendered such heroism then, is to the fore now.
A vast swathe of the Conservative party, appalled at the antics of its leaders, decided to Leave a long time ago; now millions of natural Labour voters, whose leaders have failed to give them any genuine reason to vote to stay in an organisation that has become a byword for anti-democracy, have joined them. They in turn join millions more who have felt disfranchised for years, and who are now seizing the opportunity to speak, without interpretation, about how they wish their country to be sovereign again. Whatever the outcome next Thursday, our politics will change seismically, because people will no longer bear the imperious treatment of old.
But dominating everything is a wider, connected truth: which is that all empires fail. They fail because of over-reach, and because they seek to control people determined to control themselves. The EU is an empire, albeit one not achieved by military conquest; and the signs of its decay have been obvious since long before the current, and insoluable, crisis of the euro. What has happened in Greece – and another instalment of debt repayment is about to destabilise it and the eurozone again – is indicative of why the EU cannot go on like this. Our leaving would not be the cause of that decay and failure; it would merely accelerate it. It should be abundantly clear that there is no point in asking what will become of us if we leave: we shall be quite all right, not least because of the huge trade surplus other EU nations have with us and their urgent need to carry on trading with us. The real question is, what will become of the EU?
Denmark, Sweden and Finland would be the next to seek a way out. Holland will become restless. In France, Marine Le Pen’s Front National will become more militant in its demands for France to leave. French popular support for that policy will ensure Mme Le Pen wins the first round of next year’s presidential election, and does (from Brussels’ point of view) embarrassingly well in the second, in which an establishment candidate will beat her, inheriting an angry and divided nation. Mrs Merkel could be out of her Chancellery by the end of next year; Greece will then be out of the euro, as the bailouts dry up; both Spain and Italy face separatist movements, the former in Catalonia, the latter as the north argues to break away from the south. All over Europe, peoples starved of democratic rights, – and living under an overpriced cartel with high unemployment, low growth and falling real wages – will look at the opportunity the United Kingdom had, and ask for something similar themselves.
It is precisely because of the enviable opportunity we have on Thursday – the most important vote in any of our lifetimes – that we should seize it and use it to secure change. We cannot tackle immigration within the EU, as the Prime Minister says. We cannot reform the EU from within, as the failure of Mr Cameron’s negotiations showed. We are not the only constituent nation whose domestic political culture is at odds with that of those who steer and advance “the project” of federalism and the creation of a superstate. If we have the guts to go, others will follow, and we shall return to a Europe of bilateral deals, alliances, and participation in the wider world. The European empire will fail because the world for which it was created – the world of the cold war, and international Marxism, and pre-globalisation – no longer exists, and European states need a different means to cope with the future.
We should think not just of reconnecting with Hugh Gaitskell’s sonorous and beautiful idea of “a thousand years of history”, important though it be to regain the sovereignty whose loss he warned against in 1962. We should think too of Enoch Powell – whose strictures against potential control by a superstate began in 1969, four years before we joined – and these words of his: “Too often today people are ready to tell us, 'this is not possible, that is not possible’. I say, whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible. We have nothing to fear but our own doubts.”
On Thursday I shall vote for the true interest of my country. I shall vote to repudiate “Project Fear”. I shall vote for the liberation of the United Kingdom and for the reinstatement of its democracy. I shall vote not just for a thousand years of history, but for our future to be in our hands again. I hope and pray the majority of my fellow Britons will join me. This is the chance for our moment of greatness.
The EU Empire is going to fail. On Thursday, we can protect Britain from the chaos of its death throes
PETER HITCHENS: There's a faint chance we may get our nation back one day...
By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday
19 June 2016
The part of the referendum campaign that has angered me most is this: the suggestion, repeatedly made by pro-EU persons, that there is something narrow, mean and small-minded about wanting to live in an independent country that makes its own laws and controls its own borders.
I can think of no other country where the elite are so hostile to their own nation, and so contemptuous of it.
I have spent many years trying to work out why this is. I think it is because Britain – the great, free, gentle country it once was and might be again – disproves all their theories.
Sign of the times: Baseball cap-wearing armed police on duty at Royal Ascot last week
Most of our governing class, especially in the media, politics and the law, is still enslaved by 1960s ideals that have been discredited everywhere they have been tried.
These are themselves modified versions of the communist notions that first took hold here in the 1930s.
But the things they claim to want – personal liberty, freedom of conscience, clean government, equality of opportunity, equality before the law, a compassionate state, a safety net through which none can fall, and a ladder that all can climb – existed here without any of these airy dogmas.
How annoying that an ancient monarchy, encrusted with tradition, Christian in nature, enforced by hanging judges in red robes, had come so much closer to an ideal society than Trotsky or Castro ever did or ever could.
The contradiction made the radicals’ brains fizz and sputter. How could this be? If it was so, they were wrong.
Utopians, as George Orwell demonstrated, prefer their visions to reality or truth.
Two and two must be made to make five, if it suits them.
So, rather than allow their hearts to lift at the sight of such a success as Britain was, and ashamed to be patriots, they set out to destroy the living proof that they were wrong.
They took a hammer to our intricate constitution.
They dissolved the best state secondary schools in the world and then attacked the best universities in the world for refusing to lower their standards too.
They dismantled the most relaxed and generous union of neighbouring nations ever seen in the history of the world.
And while they did this, they moved our landmarks, such as our unique coinage and a human, poetic system of weights and measures, polished in use.
They replaced the advanced world’s only unarmed police force with a baseball-capped, scowling gendarmerie festooned with guns, clubs and gas canisters.
They presided over a systematic forgetting of our national literature, so that a land where every ploughboy once knew the King James Bible is now full of people to whom the works of Shakespeare, Bunyan, Dickens, Wordsworth and Tennyson may as well be written in Martian.
They declared themselves ‘Europeans’. They regarded this as superior to their own country. ‘How modern! How efficient!’ they trilled. I have heard them do it.
They did not notice that the EU was also a secretive, distant and unresponsive monolith, hostile or indifferent to the freedoms we had so carefully created and so doggedly preserved.
They failed to see that its ‘parliament’ does not even have an opposition, that its executive is accountable to nobody. They inherited jury trial, habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights – the greatest guarantees of human freedom on the planet – and they traded in this solid gold for the worthless paper currency of human rights.
If they win on Thursday, the process of abolishing Britain will be complete. If they lose, as I hope they do and still think they will, there is a faint, slender chance that we may get our country back one day.
Read more: PETER HITCHENS: There's a faint chance we may get our nation back one day... | Daily Mail Online
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The EU Empire is going to fail. On Thursday, we can protect Britain from the chaos of its death throes
Simon Heffer
19 June 2016
The Telegraph
Before referendum campaigning paused following the tragic murder of Jo Cox, there was growing disbelief among leading Remainers – the careerists, the big businessmen, the Bilderbergers, the Davos groupies and that tragic subset of my own trade that sees the journalist’s job as being to propitiate the governing elite – that polls should show a consistent lead for the Leave camp. It is disbelief born of their almost complete detachment from the realities of life outside London’s more exclusive postal districts.
In their blissfully ignorant private world, they applaud each other’s existences, praise each other’s insights, and rejoice in their smug membership of an elite in which they feel safe because its ways are beyond democratic will: until now. As their presumptions and assumptions have been assaulted and undermined they have flailed about in panic: witness the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a straight face and to the embarrassment even of his supporters, promising an austerity budget to punish the nation should it vote Leave – even though he must have known a combination of his own MPs, the SNP and Labour would never allow such a measure through parliament.
In the real world, as some politicians have belatedly recognised, people want change. They dislike being told that the United Kingdom cannot run itself. They deplore doomsayers who have lost faith in their country. They are angry that their country’s borders are open not just to geniuses with PhDs, nurses, teachers, plumbers, electricians and others who can contribute to it, but to welfare tourists, pickpockets, rapists and murderers.
They resent a foreign power overruling their courts and their elected government. They are frustrated at being unable to change key policies when they vote. They detest contributing £8.5 billion a year net for Brussels to spend in countries less efficient, less productive and more corrupt than ours. They have had enough, above all, of being told that unless the UK concedes in perpetuity to foreign rule it will be worthless, and face ruin, danger and unremitting failure.
A new poll for ITV's Good Morning Britain shows Leave two points in the lead
The ruling elite has forgotten one eternal truth: that the British people don’t like being told what to do, and we especially don’t like being told what to do by those who patronise us or use their clout to control us (as with big business). We don’t like threats; we don’t like having our intelligence insulted, and we don’t like people who try to frighten us. To judge from my mailbag and from people I have met during the campaign, this has all created an upsurge in national consciousness not about British values, but about the value of being British, that we have not known since the Second World War.
Harnessed to this rising sense of consciousness about what sort of people we are, and why independence is our due, is our national sense of humour, which as history recalls, was deployed so effectively in the trenches and in the Blitz to defeat despair. It has turned the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and their smart international friends into figures of fun as they talk with increasing hysteria about the inevitable third world war, the recession, years of grass-stewing austerity, the evaporation of pensions or the end of western civilisation. And when an American president who manifestly disdains us tells us that we shall go to the back of the queue for a trade deal if we dare leave, we show our regard for his opinion by increasing Leave’s standing in the polls. Such defiance is not foolhardy, but enlightened, given what the world offers whether we are in the EU or not.
The polling model is so unreliable that one simply cannot predict the outcome. Anecdotally, the hardening of the Leave vote, for all the reasons I have stated, seems widespread. And talking of the trenches and the Blitz, the deep patriotism of our so-called “ordinary people”, which engendered such heroism then, is to the fore now.
A vast swathe of the Conservative party, appalled at the antics of its leaders, decided to Leave a long time ago; now millions of natural Labour voters, whose leaders have failed to give them any genuine reason to vote to stay in an organisation that has become a byword for anti-democracy, have joined them. They in turn join millions more who have felt disfranchised for years, and who are now seizing the opportunity to speak, without interpretation, about how they wish their country to be sovereign again. Whatever the outcome next Thursday, our politics will change seismically, because people will no longer bear the imperious treatment of old.
But dominating everything is a wider, connected truth: which is that all empires fail. They fail because of over-reach, and because they seek to control people determined to control themselves. The EU is an empire, albeit one not achieved by military conquest; and the signs of its decay have been obvious since long before the current, and insoluable, crisis of the euro. What has happened in Greece – and another instalment of debt repayment is about to destabilise it and the eurozone again – is indicative of why the EU cannot go on like this. Our leaving would not be the cause of that decay and failure; it would merely accelerate it. It should be abundantly clear that there is no point in asking what will become of us if we leave: we shall be quite all right, not least because of the huge trade surplus other EU nations have with us and their urgent need to carry on trading with us. The real question is, what will become of the EU?
Denmark, Sweden and Finland would be the next to seek a way out. Holland will become restless. In France, Marine Le Pen’s Front National will become more militant in its demands for France to leave. French popular support for that policy will ensure Mme Le Pen wins the first round of next year’s presidential election, and does (from Brussels’ point of view) embarrassingly well in the second, in which an establishment candidate will beat her, inheriting an angry and divided nation. Mrs Merkel could be out of her Chancellery by the end of next year; Greece will then be out of the euro, as the bailouts dry up; both Spain and Italy face separatist movements, the former in Catalonia, the latter as the north argues to break away from the south. All over Europe, peoples starved of democratic rights, – and living under an overpriced cartel with high unemployment, low growth and falling real wages – will look at the opportunity the United Kingdom had, and ask for something similar themselves.
It is precisely because of the enviable opportunity we have on Thursday – the most important vote in any of our lifetimes – that we should seize it and use it to secure change. We cannot tackle immigration within the EU, as the Prime Minister says. We cannot reform the EU from within, as the failure of Mr Cameron’s negotiations showed. We are not the only constituent nation whose domestic political culture is at odds with that of those who steer and advance “the project” of federalism and the creation of a superstate. If we have the guts to go, others will follow, and we shall return to a Europe of bilateral deals, alliances, and participation in the wider world. The European empire will fail because the world for which it was created – the world of the cold war, and international Marxism, and pre-globalisation – no longer exists, and European states need a different means to cope with the future.
We should think not just of reconnecting with Hugh Gaitskell’s sonorous and beautiful idea of “a thousand years of history”, important though it be to regain the sovereignty whose loss he warned against in 1962. We should think too of Enoch Powell – whose strictures against potential control by a superstate began in 1969, four years before we joined – and these words of his: “Too often today people are ready to tell us, 'this is not possible, that is not possible’. I say, whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible. We have nothing to fear but our own doubts.”
On Thursday I shall vote for the true interest of my country. I shall vote to repudiate “Project Fear”. I shall vote for the liberation of the United Kingdom and for the reinstatement of its democracy. I shall vote not just for a thousand years of history, but for our future to be in our hands again. I hope and pray the majority of my fellow Britons will join me. This is the chance for our moment of greatness.
The EU Empire is going to fail. On Thursday, we can protect Britain from the chaos of its death throes
PETER HITCHENS: There's a faint chance we may get our nation back one day...
By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday
19 June 2016
The part of the referendum campaign that has angered me most is this: the suggestion, repeatedly made by pro-EU persons, that there is something narrow, mean and small-minded about wanting to live in an independent country that makes its own laws and controls its own borders.
I can think of no other country where the elite are so hostile to their own nation, and so contemptuous of it.
I have spent many years trying to work out why this is. I think it is because Britain – the great, free, gentle country it once was and might be again – disproves all their theories.
Sign of the times: Baseball cap-wearing armed police on duty at Royal Ascot last week
Most of our governing class, especially in the media, politics and the law, is still enslaved by 1960s ideals that have been discredited everywhere they have been tried.
These are themselves modified versions of the communist notions that first took hold here in the 1930s.
But the things they claim to want – personal liberty, freedom of conscience, clean government, equality of opportunity, equality before the law, a compassionate state, a safety net through which none can fall, and a ladder that all can climb – existed here without any of these airy dogmas.
How annoying that an ancient monarchy, encrusted with tradition, Christian in nature, enforced by hanging judges in red robes, had come so much closer to an ideal society than Trotsky or Castro ever did or ever could.
The contradiction made the radicals’ brains fizz and sputter. How could this be? If it was so, they were wrong.
Utopians, as George Orwell demonstrated, prefer their visions to reality or truth.
Two and two must be made to make five, if it suits them.
So, rather than allow their hearts to lift at the sight of such a success as Britain was, and ashamed to be patriots, they set out to destroy the living proof that they were wrong.
They took a hammer to our intricate constitution.
They dissolved the best state secondary schools in the world and then attacked the best universities in the world for refusing to lower their standards too.
They dismantled the most relaxed and generous union of neighbouring nations ever seen in the history of the world.
And while they did this, they moved our landmarks, such as our unique coinage and a human, poetic system of weights and measures, polished in use.
They replaced the advanced world’s only unarmed police force with a baseball-capped, scowling gendarmerie festooned with guns, clubs and gas canisters.
They presided over a systematic forgetting of our national literature, so that a land where every ploughboy once knew the King James Bible is now full of people to whom the works of Shakespeare, Bunyan, Dickens, Wordsworth and Tennyson may as well be written in Martian.
They declared themselves ‘Europeans’. They regarded this as superior to their own country. ‘How modern! How efficient!’ they trilled. I have heard them do it.
They did not notice that the EU was also a secretive, distant and unresponsive monolith, hostile or indifferent to the freedoms we had so carefully created and so doggedly preserved.
They failed to see that its ‘parliament’ does not even have an opposition, that its executive is accountable to nobody. They inherited jury trial, habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights – the greatest guarantees of human freedom on the planet – and they traded in this solid gold for the worthless paper currency of human rights.
If they win on Thursday, the process of abolishing Britain will be complete. If they lose, as I hope they do and still think they will, there is a faint, slender chance that we may get our country back one day.
Read more: PETER HITCHENS: There's a faint chance we may get our nation back one day... | Daily Mail Online
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook