WHO ARE THE EXTREMISTS?
Let Us Suppose...

 PRESS REPORTS on the second Congress for Democracy concentrated on rebukes to Howard Flight, Conservative front bench spokesman, for being no more than honest and intellectually consistent in observing that if the UK declines to join the single currency it would mean that our relationship to the EU would be fundamentally changed and that it would be the first step to leaving the organisation altogether. This provoked the Euromaniac Simon Buckby, Britain in Europe's campaign manager, into declaring that Mr Flight "has revealed the secret agenda of those fanatics hostile to the single currency". Of course this statement reveals Mr Buckby to be singularly ill informed, even for a Europhile, as the agenda of the Campaign for an Independent Britain, UKIP, the Campaign against Euro Federalism and many other like minded groups is not secret but is shouted from the rooftops, as anyone with any intelligence knows full well. If Mr Buckby would like it repeated again:

 CONTINUED MEMBERSHIP OF THE EUROPEAN UNION WILL SPELL DISASTER for the prosperity and democracy of the United Kingdom. We want a future as a self governing parliamentary democracy, an independent nation and a member of the world community, not as a province of a European federal superstate, ruled by an unelected and immovable bureaucratic elite. As no degree of reform can change the essentially anti-democratic nature of the EU we seek the COMPLETE WITHDRAWAL OF THE UK FROM THE EUROPEAN UNION".

 I TRUST THAT STATEMENT sets Mr Buckby's mind at rest as to our aims. He should note that we do not seek to be anti-European, but anti-EU, and that we are quite happy to trade with all nations, including those within euroland, but that we do not feel the need to surrender our sovereignty in order to do so.

 THE OTHER FEATURE OF THE ATTACKS on Mr Flight were accusations, by Mr Buckby, and other EU apologists, was the claim that those who dare to oppose the received wisdom about the supposed benefits of EU membership were variously maniacs, fanatics or extremists. These epithets, coming from those whose devotion to the mad cause of Euro federalism, are laughable, as can be illustrated by the following:

LET US SUPPOSE THAT, in the 1960s, a politician had made the following proposition:

The UK should, over the next fifty years:

• Sign up to a Common Fisheries Policy which would place British fishing grounds at the disposal of the rest of Europe and would lead to the destruction of our own fishing industry...

• Sign up to a Common Agricultural Policy which would distort our countryside, create vast wine lakes and wheat mountains, cause the average British family to pay twenty pounds a week more for their food than would otherwise be necessary and allow others to determine whether our products could be sold around the world...

• Stab our friends and allies in the Commonwealth in the back in order to ingratiate ourselves with the French and Germans...

• Allow thousands of laws and regulations to be made by unelected Brussels bureaucrats and imposed on the UK without the right of our own elected representatives to prevent such a thing from happening...

• Sign up to an economic and monetary union which would transfer, inter alia, fiscal control, the right to levy taxes and the setting of interest rates to bankers in Frankfurt...

• Accept the imposition of the inquisitorial Napoleonic code in place of our Common Law, ending the rights of trial by jury and habeas corpus, and giving foreign courts the right to remove Her Majesty's subjects from the UK, without interference by our own courts...

• Sign up to a common defence and foreign policy which would prevent us going to the aid of those such as the Falkland Islanders, commit our troops to a European army to fight wars which have nothing to do with us and to give up our place on the UN Security Council...

• Give up our electoral system for one in which the party managers determine who are to be the "people's representatives", a rotten system, endemic in Europe...

• Transform our independent nation in a province (or rather a series of administrative regions) within a federal state, ruled from Brussels and dominated by a bureaucratic dictatorship.

 SUCH A MAN WOULD NOT have been regarded as an extremist, merely as one who was clearly mentally ill and who should be consigned to a lunatic asylum for his own good.

 WE ARE NOW IN THE SITUATION that the lunatics are running the asylum and that those of us who point out that the Emperor has no clothes are derided as extremists while those who seek to achieve the objectives listed above are within sight of success, having attained some and being well on the way to others. As Lord Shore said in his speech to the second Congress of Democracy, "If to believe in democracy, freedom and the independence of my country makes me an extremist than I am happy to be so regarded". Of course it is not Lord Shore and the Eurorealist movement that is extreme but those who worship at the altar of Eurofederalism and who would sacrifice everything good about this country in order to create the federal superstate of which they dream.

 GEORGE ORWELL KNEW ALL ABOUT the way in which language can be distorted in order to deceive and there is no doubt that our opponents are experts in the use of 'Newspeak'. If you seek extremists and fanatics look to the Europhiles, not to those who speak for the vast majority of the British people in their desire to protect all that has been gained at such cost over so many centuries and which is now at such risk.

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