Toby on Tuesday

'Once you pay him the Danegeld'

All members of UKIP know their Anglo-Saxon history and all know about Danegeld. This was the tribute paid in the 10th and 11th centuries to the Viking marauders to save our country from being ravaged. Of course it did no good. Kipling wrote a poem about it in which he declared,

“We never pay anyone Danegeld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of the game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”

Of course the modern equivalent of Danegeld is our £13 billion or so annual contribution to the EU budget, similar in so many ways to our bloated Overseas Aid budget. And our EU tribute is soaring while our influence is as derisory as the Anglo-Saxons’ influence on the Vikings. I thought about all this when reading about the latest “Reform or Leave” campaign, this time from Nigel Lawson’s Conservatives for Britain.

Now, Nigel Lawson was a wonderfully gifted Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983 to 1989, determined to reduce the shackles of the state and to energise Britain’s wealth creators. More recently, he has applied his great forensic skills to the global climate change industry. Of course his weakness as Chancellor lay in too great a trust in Germany’s economy, first in his policy of shadowing the Deutschmark and then in his support for the ill-fated European Exchange Rate Mechanism, an absolute disaster which almost obliterated Britain’s economy and drove around a million firms into bankruptcy. So I read his article announcing his presidency of Conservatives for Britain with close interest. What he wrote was,
“…now is the time for David Cameron and George Osborne to set out some red lines. My priorities would be fourfold: the end of the automatic supremacy of EU law over UK law; the ability for the UK to negotiate its own free trade deals with fast-growing countries such as India and China; the ability to control immigration from other EU countries to the UK; and the explicit renunciation by the EU of its absolute commitment to ‘ever closer union’…If we were able to secure those sorts of reforms I would be delighted.”

Now Nigel Lawson is no fool. He must know that these aspirations are in the realms of fantasy, while he makes no mention of our Danegeld, our annual tribute, which must surely concern the Treasury. When Michael Howard was Conservative leader, the party’s policy was to withdraw from the Common Fisheries Policy and to reclaim our coastal waters, with all the connotations of our again becoming a maritime and global trading nation. One of David Cameron’s first acts as Conservative leader was to drop this commitment and, to continue the maritime analogy, he can be relied on to do simply nothing that rocks the Euro-boat. So it just seems a little strange that the clever, experienced, well-intentioned people behind Conservatives for Britain cannot bring themselves to accept that “reform or leave” is not a sustainable position.

No acceptable reform is available and indeed David Cameron is seeking only the most innocuous of changes, as he is psychologically wedded to the whole EU project. Far better for Nigel Lawson and his colleagues to join forces with all those who accept that “leave” is now the only sustainable position, including our friends in Leave.EU, settle any differences and together work for Britain’s independence and prosperity, while the whole doomed EU venture descends swiftly into recrimination and chaos.

Until next Tuesday!
Toby