Toby on Tuesday 

'Gannex and Government'

No one in Yorkshire over the age of 60 will ever forget Harold Wilson, or Lord Wilson of Rievaulx - in our constituency - as he became.   He was the canny Labour MP from Huddersfield who became Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976.   His famous one-liners like “A week is a long time in politics” and “You ask me what’s going on – well I’m going on!” have long survived him.   His trademarks were his pipe, although in truth he was a relentless cigar smoker and the pipe only came out when the cameras were on him, and his Gannex coat, made in Elland by his great friend Lord Kagan who in 1980 went to jail for theft and false accounting.   Harold Wilson was never an effective Prime Minister as, like David Cameron, he thought that once he had made a speech his job was done and no follow-up was needed, but he was a truly brilliant manager of the Labour Party.   His one real achievement was to have kept Britain out of the Vietnam War while maintaining good relations with Washington, something that Tony Blair and his “heir”, David Cameron, should really have tried to emulate.   In the end, however, his heroic consumption of brandy did for Harold Wilson and he stepped down as Prime Minister in 1976.   In 1983 he went to the House of Lords at Lord Wilson of Rievaulx in the heart of our constituency, with which he claimed a family link.   He died in 1995 but, extraordinarily, his truly delightful poetry-writing widow Mary is still with us.   Earlier this month, on 12th January, she reached her 100th birthday and UKIP Thirsk and Malton is proud to offer her many happy returns on her centenary.

 

Now of course where all this is leading is that, for reasons of party management, on 5th June, 1975 Harold Wilson gave our country a referendum on membership of the then EEC.   Like David Cameron now, he offered fundamental reform but in reality made only a few cosmetic adjustments, which all sounds very familiar.   The usual litany of big corporations, the BBC, the Government machine and the CIA all weighed in and, by a two-to-one vote, Britain opted to remain a member.   And, for identical reasons of party management, 41 years on David Cameron is also offering our country a referendum which might take place as early as June too.   In all of this, Cameron is not so much the “heir to Blair” as the “heir to Wilson.”   To remind ourselves, before the General Election David Cameron promised to opt out of EU employment laws and social policies, to repatriate control of criminal justice, to disapply the Charter of Fundamental Rights and to recover control of who could settle in the UK, all aims which have now been dropped.   And a further promise in the General Election campaign was that Britain would never be called on to bail out the failing Euro.   Yet a month after the poll, he was obliged to pledge £850 million to bail out Greece and then three months later he was called on to pay the balance of a £1.7 billion “prosperity surcharge”, based on Brussels’ previous estimates of the value of illegal services such as prostitution and the drugs trade which he had previously described as “completely unacceptable.”    In effect David Cameron won the General Election on a false prospectus, behaviour which in the private sector would have resulted in his sharing the fate of Lord Kagan.

 

Of course the real reasons for David Cameron’s rushed referendum are that both the EU’s migrant crisis and the collapsing Euro are now approaching their critical stages.   The EU’s supporters are trying to prevent reporting of the consequences of both uncontrolled migration from the Middle East and financial meltdown in France and Italy, but truth will out.   For Britain to survive, we need to be a safe haven and to protect ourselves from the fallout of these self-inflicted disasters.   We can only do this if our country votes to “Leave” when the referendum comes.   Of course there will be disruption, but nothing like the disruption that we face if we remain trapped inside the doomed EU ideology.   In 1975 Harold Wilson kept his party together and kept Britain inside the EEC.  The same voices which supported membership then, the same voices which sought unsuccessfully to browbeat us into joining the failed Euro currency are now back in force to bully us into a “Remain” vote.   But here in Yorkshire we all know that the project is unsustainable and that something better, something that is right for our nation, must now take its place.   And I suspect that even canny old Harold Wilson, with his pipe, his Gannex coat and his Yorkshire shrewdness would agree, for above all else he liked to be on the winning side!

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby