This is a traditional/Socially conservative view point on Britain’s Membership of the European Union and the upcoming referendum. I have separated this into three parts, economics, Immigration and Democracy, with the latter two being the emphasis of my argument. I am very much of Oscar Wilde’s thinking that many people tend to ‘know the price of everything and the value of nothing’, and so I believe the priceless things must take precedence over the economics in this particular debate. That is not to say that I don’t think Britain will be economically better off outside of the EU.
When we leave the EU, we have 2 years to make the necessary deals before withdrawal, so nothing has to change up until that period has expired. Should we gain the free trade deal, then Britain will have everything to benefit from, as an independent nation. This is highly likely that it will be achievable in my opinion, as Britain trades at a deficit of £50billion with the EU which makes us their biggest customer. We buy a hell of allot more in goods from them than we sell, and indeed one of our biggest exports from the UK is rubbish being sent for destruction or reprocessing. Their reliance on us will force them into making the trade deal, unless admittedly, they see fit to punish us for our withdrawal, but I am more than confident that if they do that it would not be long before their business would be crying out to make the necessary trade deal with Britain.
Since joining the common market Britain has had repeat offers for free
trade with the commonwealth, most recently in 2005, but sadly we have to refuse it as the EU forbids it’s member nations from making its own trade deals. To put the Commonwealth in perspective, it has a GDP of $10trillion as opposed the EU’s $16trillion, which as a starting point is more than enough to be on with, and alongside an EU trade deal Britain could potentially be more prosperous than the Eurozone in a shorter space of time than people may like to think.
I am not overly keen on protectionist policies, however in the way of the steel works we just seen collapse, putting extreme tariffs on Chinese steel would have been a good idea until the steel was sold. Within the EU we have no control on the tariffs they set, and this caused the direct collapse of one of our last industries, not forgetting the dying fishing industry, which even the Remainers agree is being destroyed by the EU.
What’s most important with the economic arguments is that nobody knows what’s going to happen when we leave, and no one knows what’s going to happen if we stay. If they could predict what was going to happen 20 years from now, then they would be making a fortune in the stock market. What we do know however, is that the European Union is the slowest growing economic block in the world and is likely to continue that way for some time.
First of all, it is true that Immigrants have put more into the economy than they take out. The problem with that statement however, is that regardless of who does those jobs they will always be putting more in than they have taken out. They could have just as well have been British born citizens doing these jobs, and if we had never pursued the crazy experiment of mass immigration it could be said that the wages would be higher due to less compression. The contemptible argument by many pro EU persons is that there are jobs that British people won’t do, that immigrants will. Prior to 1997 the cabbages were still being picked, and one might say, that all mass immigration has done in this area is help to hinder the economic libido of young people.
Again, it is true that half of immigration comes from outside the European Union. The Tories in recent years have become a soft left liberal party with neo-libertarian economics that in my humble opinion, uses the EU as a shield and excuse for everything that is left leaning that happens under it’s watch. I will come back to this later, about why it is necessary to leave the European Union to aid the recovery of our two dead major political parties in Britain.
It is said that in the UK we have to build a new house every
4 minutes to cope with current levels of immigration. This is more of an economic catastrophe than people may think, with mortgage rate rising so high that the average person now does not purchase their
first house until the ageof 36. It means they will spend most of their lives paying off their house, money which could have otherwise been put back into the economy in the form of purchasing luxury items or could have been used to start and sustain the nuclear family earlier in life, which conservatives like myself believe is the backbone of western civilization. We are then told that we must import even more people to cope with an aging population. A solution that is only a sticking plaster at best, as it is a pyramid system, and requires bringing in more people in the future to cope with an ever increasing aging population. Because what many on the left don’t seem to understand, is that immigrants also get old. This offers no solution for the decrease in marriage, nuclear family and the birth rate of the native population.
There is a narrative in the media that suggests that places with the least immigration or ‘diversity’ dislike it the most, because they have never experienced it. This is a
manipulation of statistics. What it actually shows is that people who are white British are just as likely to vote for independence as anywhere else across England, and those who are ethnic minorities or immigrants are more likely to feel threatened by UKIP and British Independence. This makes it appear, that in those constituencies multi-culturalism is working. Scotland is an exception as the growth of socialism and pro-eu sentiment comes from the fact it believes it is oppressed by Westminster, whereas England believes it is in the driving seat of the UK. Regardless of this, Scotland is still expected to vote about 40% in favour of leaving the EU. The first piece of supporting evidence for this, is that the demographics of minorities are not spread evenly throughout the UK. If you look at London, most are bunched into little pockets of different cultures, or ‘solitudes’ as they have become to be known. In which people live separate lives, with each solitude being side by side but with their backs turned to one another.
The second piece of evidence to support this, is the areas in which the existence of pressure groups like the EDL and Britain First reside. These groups don’t exist around the monoculural lakes of Cumbria, but in places like Luton, that have seen their entire communities changed. What many on the left don’t seem to grasp is that, to be blunt, not all people in Britain have the capability to cast off their ‘in-group’ preferences like they have. We are social beings, and like all social creatures we have certain tribal loyalties as a defence mechanism. That’s what nations are, advanced versions of tribes, or a pride of lions. For a society to be cohesive, it must tick a number of in-group boxes across the general populace, which is usually to have the same culture, religious morality, language, and patriotism, among other things. In the 1950s we had such social cohesion, we had less police per head in the country, less crime (
The number of unreported crimes in the UK is at an all time high), and the cost of policing was 95% cheaper. With current levels of immigration, our schools are forced to teach universal values as opposed to British values. But if we slowed immigration to a level that we could assimilated, then a number of in group preferences could be ticked, and actually we would find racism would all but dry up in this nation. The people who came over from Jamaica following the Second World War are a perfect example of successful assimilation.
What always startles me in this debate, is that it’s left to conservatives, who are usually religious to point this biological fact out, but people on the left who have a bigger tendency to be atheists simply have faith that mass immigration will just work out, and that people who oppose it are little Englanders or bigoted. So you can imagine the hilarity for conservatives when groups like anti-fa turn out to oppose Britain First rallies, because it’s like watching Frankenstein try to control his own monster. Put simply, those who support mass immigration would not be protesting at Dover for the borders to be opened, had mass immigration never happened. It would not have made their lives better or worse, yet they continue to support a policy that is in my eyes, has proven to cause social unrest throughout working class societies that are subject to mass immigration.
It may be said that my beliefs are derived from the fact I live in an area of Britain that still has an intact monoculture. But what I would say to that is that I didn’t change my mind from being a hard left socialist over a period of two years, to becoming a traditional conservative because I simply wanted to. In fact I hated the change that was taking place and felt that I was betraying my fellow socialists. But I did it because I thought I was analysing situations more objectively, and didn’t want to end up on my death bed having believed a lie because it made me feel good.
The most important topic of this referendum is undoubtedly democracy. We repeatedly hear those from the Remain campaign telling us that England’s coastlines will recede into ‘little England’ should we wake up on Friday with a leave victory. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Many of us care passionately for the rest of Europe, and want to see all member nations regain their democracy, and more importantly to them, their currency. The country in the driving seat of the European Union, Germany, controls the central bank and so all the other members states that use the Euro are subject to its interest rates. If a country is suffering, like Greece, it will have to use the interest rates set by the Germany government, and as John Maynard Keynes and James Garfield said “He who controls the currency, controls the country”.
Another common line from the Remain campaign is that Britain is not democratic, and so because of that we should stay in a political union that doesn’t even give us the mechanism to punish the politicians by having the opportunity to remove them once every five years. In other words, two wrongs make a right. Undoubtedly Britain’s democratic system has some flaws, but it has been the same system that has seen labour and conservative governments come and go for the past century, allowing them to enact all their policies except for the restraints placed on them by a constitutional monarchy. If there were a vote tomorrow to fix British politics, I would vote in favour. But that is not going to happen, and change must come from inside. Leaving the European Union will accelerate this process. The Tory party will split and start reforming itself into something I can hopefully one day vote for, and the Labour party has already started the process of reforming itself into a traditional socialist party. At the moment the people who really run the country reside in Brussels, and the more power we give to them, the move our own elected politicians will find themselves sitting around like spare parts. In regards to criticism of the first past the post, I personally support. It allows for governments to be elected in majority and have the ability to put too work their entire manifesto. A proportional representation system will almost certainly result in a hung parliament each and every time, meaning a complete manifesto will never be enacted. Such changes to the democratic system would have to be put to the people of Britain in a referendum, which leads me perfectly onto my next part.
There are many people, including myself, that believe even if Britain voted to leave, that our political class would not actually allow us to do so. There have been multiple referendums that the EU has ignored in the past by the French, Dutch, Danes and Greeks. But perhaps the most terrifying in regards to the EU being a threat to democracy is the Ireland vote against the Lisbon and Nice treaties. Ireland voted no to both of these and so the EU changed the wording of the treaties and made them vote again. The European Union does not take no for an answer, and democracy is only democracy if they get the right answer. In fact the EU’s unelected president of the commission Jean Claude Junker said of the French referendum on the EU constitution ‘If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'. There are several such dodgy quotes by this man floating around, including one that insinuates the British people should not be told that they are giving up their sovereignty.
One of the major obstacles that the EU has to destroy in order to create its super state is people’s loyalties to the member states in which they live, otherwise those people will never be accepting of the destruction of their country. So what the European Union does is encourage immigration within these member states, and then when the populace complain, the governments tell their subjects that patriotism is a thing of the past and that they are racist to think this change anything other than a virtue to society. Coupling this with teaching universal values instead of British values, we can see in the younger generation that this destruction of patriotism is working. This leaves a void in society and as I mentioned earlier humans have in-group preferences, so something must fill this void. The rise of Scottish Nationalism is in direct link to this, and although Scotland has always been a socialist country, even during the Thatcher era the demand for independence was very low. The European Union likes to carve its member states up into smaller more manageable provinces that will never have the economic strength to go it alone, which is why we see similar movements across Europe such as in Catalonia and Venice. Although we are told that Scotland could break away should Britain leave the EU, I think it is certain that is will one day break away if we remain within it.
In 2014 Nick Clegg told Nigel Farage that an EU army was ‘pure fantasy’, and he would be next telling us the moon landings were faked. However there have been recent calls for a European Army from Jean Claude Junker, followed by Germany creating a document pushing for a
‘joint headquarters and shared military assets’. This is according to the financial times, which is actually backing the Remain campaign. As we already have Nato as a defence force, people are worried that the EU intends to further poke the Russian Bear and inch closer to its borders. This has led to Field Marshal Lord Guthrie changing sides to the leave campaign, calling an EU army ‘dangerous’.
The EU has all the characteristics of a nation state. It has a central back, president, currency, criminal justice system, passport, flag, anthem and no doubt in the future, an army. But it makes no secrets of its desired achievements. In a documentary hosted by Jeremy Paxman, he walked around the European parliament talking to commissioners and MEPs who were all too pleased to announce the fact that they desired a European super state. This is a plan that has been in place for decades, and was actually contained within documents in 1970, before the British referendum of 1975, meaning the public were systematically lied to about the nature of the EEC.
There are many arguments about workers’ rights and mass immigration being abolished if we vote to leave. But these are debates that should be had outside of the European Union. As it stands every law and regulation forced upon us by Brussels cannot be repealed by the British government. I happen to think that workers’ rights would remain intact. This nation was introducing rights long before we joined the EU, the Children’s Charter of 1908 for example was the first ever charter to recognise the rights of Children. And the equal pay act of 1970 was introduced 2 years before Britain signed the ascension treaty to join the EEC in 1972. The question really is, would we see rights eroded upon an exit. I for one do not think that these rights will be destroyed, but the point is that Britain should be able to debate the necessity of them and have the power to remove them if they choose to do so. I am personally not fond of Thatcherite libertarian policies, but that is the right of the British people to decide. It is essential that although we think we are right about our beliefs, we must also be humble enough to recognise that we might just be wrong. And so democracy being what it is, we have debate, and we put our ideas to the public.
It may now sound like a cliché, but people actually died for the continued existence of democracy in this nation and for the rest of Europe. We cannot hand these gifts away wilfully, we can only enhance them or ensure their continued existence for future generations. It is for this democratic argument that I will be voting leave, and when considering what it took to safeguard democracy; I do not believe I have the right to vote Remain.
“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.
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.” – Peter Hitchens
