Independence or Extinction: No Middle Way
Alfred The Great
S F Bush (1990)
published by
Plan of page
Sections
- Preface
- Failure of Leadership
- Continuity of our Nationhood
- The Basic Reason for Industrial Weakness
- Establishment Fear and Defeatism
- The Way Back to Industrial Strength
- Abdication by the Middle Classes
- Pressure by the European Community
- A Renewed Commitment to our National Future
- The Supreme Issue
Figures
- Figure 1: Capital Cost per ton/year of Ammonia
- Figure 2: Cost of Information Technology
- Figure 3: Decreasing Cost and Increasing Performance of Computers
Tables
Preface
Received wisdm is that it is inconceivable that Britain should leave the European Community, despite the fact that the political leaders of the Continental countries are determined to create a United States of Europe, which would leave member states with less power to order their affairs than Florida or California. The member states would cease to be sovereign countries in the eyes of the world and would naturally have to give up claims to separate representation in world bodies such as the United Nations.
This is the prospect facing Britain, one which was made quite explicit by the founders of the European Community 35 years ago, however much British politicians try to pretend the contrary. These same politicians frighten the British people by defeatist talk of Britain’s being shut out of Europe, leading to a massive loss of jobs. This is total nonsense and the politicians know it. Free trade has applied across all of Western Europe since 1977, not just within the EC. In any case most of Britain’s huge trading deficit arises from trade with the EC so that any tariff war would be enormously to the disadvantage of the EC, and they know that.
It is clear that any further steps by Britain down the road to economic, monetary and political union (the three are quite inseparable) will require the Queen’s signature on one or more Acts of Parliament which will effectively abolish that Parliament as a sovereign body. Sovereignty rests ultimately with the British people and it is not Parliament’s to disclaim. Every Member of Parliament voting for such Acts would not only dishonour their own Parliamentary Oath, but also be voting to persuade the Queen to breach her Coronation Oaths Act, 1953. Such Acts would also be in contravention of Section 1 of the Bill of Rights 1989 and Clause 39 of Magna Carta itself, the basis of freedom and self government for the whole English-speaking world.
It need not happen and this paper says why it must not be allowed to happen. Britain can withdraw and prosper, letting the EC go its own way to Union. Britain can then trade freely with all of Europe, both East and West, arrange its own trade agreements with other countries once again, reduce its own food bills and trade deficit at a stroke, support its farming and countryside and it sees fit, and exploit its unique links of language and history with that 95% of the world which lies outside the European Community.
You may ask how can you help to achieve this change. Simple: write to your MP making it clear that you will not vote for him if he votes for any further European Treaty obligations placed on Britain. Ask him to sponsor the repeal of Section Two of the European Communities Act 1972, which is the key section allowing European Community directives to bypass our Parliament. Make him listen to you. Do not let the sacrifice of those one and three quarter millions who died in two World Wars to keep our country free be in vain.
Failure of Leadership
For a people which has through the Public Schools put much store by the concept of a leadership class, for most of this century we have as a nation been extraordinarily reluctant to face squarely the great issues and take appropriate decisions. Vacillation before the First War, Appeasement between the wars, allowing Immigration to build up to transorm whole sections of our cities afte the Second War, are perhaps to date only the most striking examples. Each arose from fudging and prevarication, a reluctance to make a choice about what we as a nation can do and cannot do – in a word a total failure of leadership.
During 1991 Britain is being forced to attend two “European Community (EC) Intergovernmental Conferences” similar to that which drew up the misleadingly named Single European Act (1986). The British Government said repeatedly it did not want these conferences – but it has gone along with them nonetheless.
The purpose of these Intergovernmental Conferences is to decide the principles of new Treaties to bind EC countries into a political, monetary and economic Union – a common currency and economic regime controlled in practice by a united Germany. If we were to acquiesce in this process, the disappearance of the Queen’s head from our currency and the substitution of a foreign currency, the Ecu, would remind us daily of the fact of our disappearance as an independent country. The Queen would still be the supreme symbol of law-making in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but no longer in Britain itself.
These Intergovernmental Conferences constitute the cross-roads at which we must decide if we wish to continue as an independent country or be absorbed into a United States of Europe, governed nominally from Brussels, but in practice from Berlin. This means we would be incorporated without any choice in the matter into a State with a republican form of government, its own president, its own flag, anthem and laws, in which our Monarch, symbol of our national existence since the bery beginnings of our national journey, would rapidly come to mean no more than the King of Bavaria did in the second German Reich frmed in 1871.
I want to persuade you, the reader, or reinforce your own view, that as a people we must find the simple courage to say no, we will not go down this road, but instead maintain the thirteen hundred years of marvellously creative independent national existence which we are heirs to.