Toby on Tuesday

 

"It's beginning to look a lot like..." 

 

 

“England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.   In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.”   That was George Orwell, author of ‘1984’, ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ and ‘Animal Farm’, writing in 1941.   And if it was true 75 years ago, then it is many times so today when the Left has had three generations to colonise many of those institutions.   The narrative of our news outlets, in particular the BBC about which I wrote last week and Channel 4, and their palpable sense of anger and loss over June’s Referendum result, is all too clear.   And while the need to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty is now seen as inevitable, the campaign to negate June’s vote has moved onto more sophisticated ground with arguments over the Single Market, the Customs Union, the Internal Market or whatever name you choose to describe the relentless power grab of the EU institutions.   This ignores deliberately the simple truth that what ordinary British, and especially English, men and women voted for in June was to get back their unique country, the land of Shakespeare and Newton, Nelson and Churchill, of Elizabeth 1 and indeed our own marvellous Queen, the wonderful country that had been taken away from them by all those self-styled intellectuals, so well described by George Orwell in 1941.

 

And as the whole Brexit process unfolds, there will be five simple tests to gauge whether Brexit does indeed mean Brexit:

 

1.  Will we have control of our borders?

 

2.   Will we be able to make our own laws?

 

3.   Will we be able to negotiate our own trade agreements?

 

4.   Will we have to continue paying into the Brussels budget?

 

5.   Will we be able to reclaim our North Sea fisheries?

 

And of these five, the final one, the return of our fisheries is of huge psychological importance.   The EU knew just what it was doing in 1972 when it took away our fisheries, for it was saying that Britain would no longer be a maritime, open trading nation any more, but rather it would become just one more Continental country, part of the European land mass.   And only by the return of our fisheries can that error be put right and our role as a maritime nation be reclaimed.  Now it is by these five tests that Brexit will be judged post-next year’s invocation of Article 50.   My belief is that those who were defeated in June will seek to ensure that not one of them will be properly fulfilled and that Britain will remain within the EU by some other name.  So this is why a strong and united UKIP under Paul Nuttall’s leadership is now needed more than ever.  And as the year draws to a close, it’s just worth remembering those splendid lines of Rudyard Kipling on Danegeld, the tribute once paid to the Danes to stop them invading England:

 

“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!”

 

Have a very happy Christmas and until next year!

 

Toby