Toby on Tuesday 

‘Falsehoods and Fallacies’

UKIP’s greatest achievement so far is to have forced David Cameron into conceding a referendum on EU membership before the end of 2017. Without UKIP, a sense of inevitability would have surrounded our being drawn deeper into the swamp of the whole failing project. And the other day the shape of David Cameron’s negotiating strategy became clear when Andrew Lansley, the former health secretary and strong supporter of the EU, let the cat out of the bag. What he said was that the referendum was planned for September 2016 to avoid a clash with next May’s Scottish, Welsh and council elections. He added that “the government had choreographed a big row with the French after February’s European Council meeting…Public expectations from renegotiation need to be realistic (and be downplayed at the outset) and then be exceeded. Other EU governments should recognise the need for UK ‘wins’, preferably following some ‘rows’!”

Of course, all this nonsense is completely unnecessary, just as our membership of the EU was completely unnecessary in the first place. In essence the EU is a political, and not an economic, project which the British people joined on the basis of a clear deception. In 1960, the UK was a founding member of EFTA, the European Free Trade Association, along with Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland. Iceland joined in 1970, Finland in 1986 and Liechtenstein in 1991. But in 1973 the UK and Denmark left to join the EU, as did Portugal in 1986, and Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995. Yet the truly significant moment came as early as 1972, when EFTA signed its own free trade agreement with the EU. That is to say that, at precisely the moment when we were being told that, to trade in Europe, we had to be an EU member, the EU itself was signing a free trade agreement with EFTA, of which we had been a co-founder. And since then EFTA has itself signed free trade agreements with nations and customs unions across the world, from which the four remaining members, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, derive great benefit.

So with the so-called “renegotiation” underway, the time must have arrived to embrace our EFTA membership once more, an arrangement about which we can be positive instead of carping about the EU in a negative way. And the precedent for the UK must surely be that of Switzerland which has retained all the benefits of trading throughout the EU without losing control of its borders through the deeply-flawed concept of “free movement of people.” All this has been spelt out clearly in a powerful new pamphlet from UKIP’s Trade Spokesman, William Dartmouth, MEP for the South-West and Gibraltar. Entitled “The Truth about Trade outside the EU” and with the sub-title of “Why leaving the EU takes the UK into a world of new opportunity”, the pamphlet will be circulated throughout UKIP’s branches over the coming weeks. It is packed with compelling statistics, not least the chart that shows that, per head of population, Switzerland exports nearly five times the value of goods to the EU as does the UK. As William says, “Our future must not be built on falsehoods”. We must expect to be lied to and deceived to an astonishing extent over the next year by all those with an interest in our staying trapped inside the EU project. The counter-arguments and essential facts are all contained in William’s remarkable pamphlet, which I commend to anyone serious about reaching the truth behind our EU membership!

Until next Tuesday!
Toby