Toby on Tuesday

'The Four Horsemen..'

Last week I wrote about two wise men, Archbishop Carey and Sir Richard Dearlove, and their concern over Britain’s migration crisis.   Since then Sir Richard, who is the ex-head of MI6, has stepped up his warnings about what he describes as a “terrorist virus”, in particular from Turkey’s imminent visa-free access to the EU which he describes as “like storing gasoline next to the fire one is trying to extinguish.”   Even the European Commission in a leaked document has spoken of “increased mobility into the Schengen area of criminals and terrorists who are citizens of Turkey, or who are foreigners based in Turkey.”   It has also acknowledged that the Turkish mafia, which traffics vast volumes of drugs, sex slaves, illegal firearms and refugees into Europe will enjoy “direct territorial expansion into the EU.”   Yet despite all this, the European Commission is hell-bent on its policy for Turkey and other desperately unstable countries.

 

Now the “Remain” camp has rightly questioned what a post-Brexit Britain would look like?   The answer is simple – we would become a normal country again with control of our own borders, we would resume our membership of the World Trade Organisation and the European Free Trade Association, we would remain in the European Economic Area and use some of the new funds released to strengthen our commitment to NATO.   We would aim to trade and live well with all other countries, inside and outside the EU, especially our friends and allies in the global Commonwealth.   And we would reclaim much of the sovereignty lost since 1973.   But equally, the “Leave” camp is entitled to question what a post-“Remain” Britain would look like?   Here, there are two crucial reports that anyone serious about our country needs to study.   The first of these, issued on 22nd June, 2015, is called The Five Presidents’ Report.   It appears over the names of the EU’s five Presidents – President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the Euro Summit Donald Tusk, President of the Eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem, President of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi and President of the European Parliament Martin Schultz.   And in essence the report lays out the EU’s strategy for a centralised United States of Europe by 2025.   In language all-too familiar to Euro watchers, the “convergence process should be made more binding through a set of common high-level standards that would be defined in EU legislation.”   Because the Lisbon Treaty is self-amending, a new treaty would not be needed before the creation of this centralised superstate that will subsume Britain should we vote to “Remain.”

 

And the second report, not due to be published until after 23rd June but a draft of which has leaked out, is a German Government White Paper on European security and defence as an alternative to existing NATO system.   It outlines the steps for co-ordination of Europe’s national militaries with permanent co-operation under common structures.   It calls for “the use of all possibilities” available under the Lisbon Treaty’s proposals for a defence union.   It calls for establishing deep co-operation between willing member states, the creation of joint civil-military headquarters for EU operations, a council of defence ministers and better co-ordination of the production and sharing of military equipment.  In the words of Roderich Kiesewetter, a Bundestag foreign affairs committee member, “The creation of a European army is a long way off, but it is a strategic necessity to implement important steps to pave the way towards it now.”   In late June a foreign and security strategy paper will be presented to the European Council.   And on 6th May the European Court of Justice ruled that the European Commission had the legal right to punish any employee who might “damage the institution’s image and reputation”, thereby supressing all freedom of speech within the EU system.   Recently Boris Johnson got into very hot water for language he used in what was really a plea for internationalism and not supranationalism in Europe.   But these two reports make one wonder whether he might just have had a point after all.

 

On 3rd February, David Cameron declared to the House of Commons, “I am not arguing – and I will never argue – that Britain couldn’t survive outside the European Union.   We are the fifth largest economy in the world.   The biggest defence player in Europe with one of the most extensive and influential diplomatic networks on the planet....I rule nothing out.”   Since then, and after his failed “renegotiation”, he has threatened us with war, jihad, President Putin and no doubt soon a plague of rats and the four horsemen of the apocalypse, should we dare to vote “Leave”.   Something must have changed and I suspect that it is his dawning realisation that Britain is being swept up against our will into an aggressive superstate called Europe and he has decided to go along with it.   Even though the security case for Brexit, vividly described by Sir Richard Dearlove, is now compelling, our own vain Prime Minister is so fixated on his cosy telephone conversations with President Obama and Chancellor Merkel that he is prepared to sacrifice our country just so that they can run on for a little longer.   The British people might just have something to say about that on 23rd June!

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'The Canterbury Tales'

The last Archbishop of Canterbury to express his faith in strong, clear language, unhedged with sophistry and politically correct equivocation, was George Carey.   He was Archbishop from 1991-2002.   And it is not surprising that he has called for a “Brexodus”, in which the British people find the promised land even if a time in the wilderness must be endured.   And in an article of great importance he writes, “We are an island people, proud of our heritage and history.   We have been generous, happy to share our riches with newcomers on the understanding that they own our history and share our values.   Yet there is now huge pressure on our population, due to an unasked-for experiment in uncontrolled immigration that has seen millions added to the population of the UK in the past two decades.   We now have no choice but to take back control of our borders.”   And Archbishop Carey’s warning takes on a new urgency after the revelation that for years the Government has been deliberately falsifying the true number of migrants coming into Britain, all with access to our buckling public services.

 

It is now clear that the anecdotal figure of around a million new arrivals a year into the UK is correct, yet our public services have been planned around falsified official figures.   For it has been revealed that the Home Office has deliberately excluded “short-term migrants”, those supposedly planning to stay in Britain for less than a year, from the numbers.   Put simply, the official figures state that just over a million migrants came here from the EU between 2011 and 2015.   Yet in the same period 2,234,000 new National Insurance numbers were issued to EU nationals.   And the Government has finally conceded that the discrepancy is due to the exclusion from the statistics of those claiming to stay here for less than a year.   Last year, 800,000 EU citizens arrived here, so if you add some 200,000 non-EU arrivals then the figure of an annual population increase of around a million is correct.  And this figure can only grow exponentially as the EU expands to take in all those unstable and impoverished countries to its South and East.

 

Last week I wrote about the EU’s decision to offer visa-free travel to nearly 130 million citizens of Turkey, Kosovo, Georgia and Ukraine, as a prelude to their full membership of the project.   Those at the top of our Government are clearly determined to see Britain in a political union with all of these, so we should at least try to learn something of them before 23rd June.   President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, with its population of nearly 80 million, is plainly the most worrying.   He is an infinitely determined man who is using the threat of uncontrolled migration to hold Berlin’s feet to the fire.   When mayor of Istanbul, he was imprisoned for inciting religious hatred by reciting these words at a rally:

 

The mosques are our barracks,

The domes our helmets,

The minarets our bayonets,

And the faithful our soldiers...”

 

Erdogan is also a patient man who is now President of his country, on which his grip is tightening.    And, despite the warning from the good King Abdullah of Jordan that “The fact that terrorists are going to Europe is part of Turkish policy...Turkey keeps getting a slap on the hand, but they are let off the hook”, on 4th May Turkish became an official EU language.   The global elites who are pressing for a Remain vote on 23rd June have their bodyguards and their drivers, their personal security and their protection.   The ordinary men and women of Britain do not.  Recently, Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, declared “Brexit would bring two potentially important security gains:  the ability to dump the European Convention on Human Rights – remember the difficulty of extraditing the extremist Abu Hamza of Finsbury Park Mosque – and, more importantly, greater control over immigration from the European Union.”   For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must all take to heart the advice both of Sir Richard and of the truly excellent Archbishop Carey who, although his language is plain, clearly speaks in St. Paul’s words with “the tongues of men and of angels!”

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Schengen and Shenanigans'

Last week I wrote about the Euro-currency as it approaches its endgame in Greece.   Today I want to write about the endgame of the Schengen zone, that other totem of EU ideology.   For Wednesday 4th May, 2016 will go down in history as the day when the EU finally committed suicide.   For that was the day when the Brussels Commission approved visa-free travel to the 26-nation Schengen zone, and in consequence to Britain and Ireland too, for nearly 130 million citizens of Turkey, Kosovo, Georgia and Ukraine.   All are unstable and dangerous countries, but the most unstable and dangerous is probably Turkey, with its borders onto Iran, Iraq and Syria.   And just to underscore what has happened, on 4th May Turkish became an official language of the EU, while the Commission issued a press release which declared that Turkey’s “accession process will be re-energised, with Chapter 33 to be opened”..before 30th June...”and preparatory work on the opening of other chapters to continue at an accelerated pace.”   And to confirm the legal position, any citizen of all four countries will shortly be able to enter the Schengen zone for up to 90 days for tourism and up to 180 days for business.   And any holder of an EU identity card – not even a full passport – has absolute right of entry into Britain.   

So it’s not surprising that one principal growth industry in Bulgaria and Romania is the creation of fake identity cards and the forgers can expect a rush of new business once all that visa-free travel starts at the end of June, just after our Referendum.   Now it’s well worth reading an article by Adrian Mogos on the Balkan Insight website which reports that, “For a few hundred euros I obtained a new Romanian identity complete with a new name of Turkish origin.   For the next few months I was no longer Adrian Mogos, but Murad Alin Erdogan from Timisuara.   Why choose a Turkish name?   Because most illegal immigrants crossing Romania are Turkish and I wanted to follow in their footsteps.   It was not difficult to obtain a fake identity card, nor to use it”   Now the most celebrated Mr. Erdogan of all is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey, who has already announced plans to create a new Islamic Union, led by Turkey.   So for nearly 80 million Turkish citizens, plus all those who have arrived there from Syria, Iran and Iraq, they can soon have a visa-free jaunt to Bulgaria or Romania, a cheap EU Identity Card and then it’s off to the races in York or Thirsk or Epsom or Aintree, all with the help of the British taxpayer!

And even the EU itself has admitted that there is no system in place to detect visa-free entrants from those four countries who overstay their welcome beyond the approved 90 or 180 days.   So it’s not surprising that the most committed advocates of a “Remain” vote in June are starting to get a bit windy about the EU’s chaotic migrant system where, as with the Euro-currency, ideology is about to hit reality   Even Yorkshire’s sole Conservative MEP, the pro-Remain Timothy Kirkhope, has acknowledged that proper entry and exit checks should be in place before the deal with Turkey gets underway.   As a former immigration minister, he should at least understand what is happening.   In his own words, “Getting a system in place where there is order and discipline is absolutely essential.   Unless you have a system in place to check in and check out, it’s not possible to run any kind of sensible immigration system at all.   It sounds very reasonable to say it is just for 90 days, but how the hell do you know it is just 90 days, and how at the end of 90 days do you locate and remove them?”   Welcome to UKIP Mr. Kirkhope, but the truth is that the EU has no system in place to monitor all those new arrivals, let alone departures, and the policy is firmly underway.

Understandably the nations of Europe are now busy jettisoning Schengen as quickly as they can.   Outside the EU, Norway has reintroduced border checks, while Switzerland now has 2,000 soldiers in tanks patrolling its border with Italy as the migrant route moves there.   And within the EU, Sweden now controls its border with Denmark, which itself now controls its border with Germany.   Austria has built huge fences at four of its border crossings and reintroduced checks at the strategically vital Brenner Pass, while France, Belgium and even Germany have reintroduced border controls.   So much for the Schengen dream of a borderless Europe.   These are the natural responses of countries seeking to survive, but the Schengen dream of a border-free Europe is dead.   I have no doubt that in time sanity will prevail and the great Continent of Europe will recover, indeed Britain’s task as in the past will be to help it towards its recovery.   But the ideological EU project finally brought its own existence to an end on 4th May, 2016 when it opened its borders to so many who wish it harm.   And once Britain has voted for “Leave” on 23rd June, then a sensible Europe can start to emerge from the ashes of the whole insane EU project!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Penelopes and Pepperpots' 

In a world of anodyne apparatchiks and faceless fixers, politicians with a spark of character are a breath of fresh air.   And the air doesn’t get much fresher than with our Minister of State for the Armed Forces, the magnificent Penny Mordaunt.   More bracing than a sea breeze the MP for Portsmouth North, named by her parents after the Leander class frigate HMS Penelope, is a Royal Naval Reservist.   Famous for her salty speeches, she was the Spectator magazine’s Parliamentarian of the Year in 2014.   Unsurprisingly, she is a leading light in the “Leave” campaign.   And interviewed recently, she declared “One reason why I decided to Leave is because I think it’s the only route open to us to get the better deal that we need to thrive – but also to try and wake up the EU from what it’s currently sleepwalking into, which is a disaster.   The suffering that it’s putting on certain member states because it can’t get its act together over the Euro, that forced harmonisation, is horrific, and is just the sort of thing that is going to lead to those countries not thriving, but failing.   Take a look at what’s happening on the Continent now.   The tremendous potential for civil unrest.   The tremendous ill-feeling built up in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, because of the forced harmonisation in the Eurozone, the tremendous austerity...So it is fragmenting.   People are taking back control against the EU’s rules to try and get some control over the situation, to try and protect their states’ interests.   So it is fragmenting now.   The dominoes are already tumbling.   And we need to help Europe realise this and get a grip.”

Now the splendid Penny Mordaunt’s warning could not be more timely when Greece’s Euro-crisis is erupting again and will soon reach its end-game.   To summarise, Greece has £3.5 billion of debt to repay in July and, with debt at 200% of GDP and an economy shrunk by a quarter since 2010, the funds for this just do not exist.   Yet Germany’s Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, is insisting on further cuts in Greece’s public spending in order to maintain the myth that the country can achieve a 3.5% “primary surplus” by 2018.   This is the economics of the madhouse, yet Herr Schauble is determined to sacrifice the Greek people on the altar of a fantasy that the Euro is somehow a functioning and stable currency.   The truth is that all that money lent by Germany’s banks to encourage Greek borrowers to buy BMW’s and Volkswagens can never, ever be repaid.   Debt forgiveness plus devaluation is the only way for Greece to recover, but this will be to challenge the ideological purity of the Eurozone.   Whatever the outcome of our Referendum on 23rd June, both the Eurozone and the Schengen zone are heading for implosion and Penny Mordaunt is right to alert us to this, so that we can be prepared.

And in her interview, the magnificent Ms. Mordaunt went on to say, “I think leaving will not just make us safer, more secure and give us what we need to thrive, it will enable Europe to really start to reform.   And without that is it going to end very badly indeed!”   Of course, UKIP has been saying all this for years, but its is refreshing when one of the ablest of the younger Ministers in our Government has the courage to say these things too.   Portsmouth North is incredibly lucky in its MP.   Now the original HMS Penelope was so famous for surviving so many air attacks and shrapnel holes that she was nicknamed HMS Pepperpot.   One day in 1942 she arrived in Gibraltar with yet more damage from near misses and received the signal from Vice-Admiral Malta, “True to your usual form – Congratulations!”   And today we can all echo the same message to her redoubtable namesake Penny Mordaunt – Congratulations!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Loose Change and Changeability" 

We’ve seen the “Remain” camp’s Project Fear that reached its climax with President Obama’s bullying and hectoring intervention in the Referendum debate, an intervention which will lead countless undecided voters, who object to being threatened, to support “Leave” on 23rd June.   The British people have never taken well to being browbeaten, as our history shows.   And we’ve seen its Project Falsehood, with the tawdry document worthy of Joseph Goebbels that has landed on our doormats at a cost to taxpayers of £9.3 million.   Now I want to write about Project Farce in the form of George Osborne’s and our discredited Treasury’s forecast of every household being exactly £4,328.03 a year worse off in 2030 if we dare to vote “Leave”.   It is the 3p that’s so totally brilliant and makes this great comic document part of our unique tradition of Whitehall farce.

Now, by way of background, the Treasury’s own record of forecasting and economic judgement has always been a national joke.   In 1990, it bounced Britain into joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System, driving around a million small businesses into bankruptcy and leading to Black Wednesday two years later.   Then it persuaded Gordon Brown to sell half our gold reserves for less than $300 dollars an ounce in order to buy Euros just before the gold price rose by over six times.   Its next wheeze was to try to bounce Britain into joining the Euro itself, claiming that UK trade would rise by 50% over 30 years if we did so, a blunder that only Ed Balls with his five tests prevented.   For this decision alone, history will always judge Ed Balls kindly.  And the Treasury’s gift for forecasting reached its zenith between last November when it claimed to have found £20 billion of additional spending capacity, which then mysteriously disappeared by the time of the March budget.   So to forecast everything down to the last 3p in 2030 shows a gift for humour among the Treasury’s mandarins that nobody ever knew existed.   And as our very own George Osborne has accused those who question these forecasts of being “economically illiterate”, I thought that I would try to spell out just three little variables that could cause them to veer slightly off course.

The first variable is that nobody knows exactly who the EU members will be in 2030 and this could possibly have an impact on Mr. Osborne’s predictions.   Only the other day, our cautious and “Remain” supporting Home Secretary, Theresa May, declared, “The states now negotiating to join the EU include Albania, Serbia and Turkey – countries with poor populations and serious problems with organised crime, corruption, and sometimes even terrorism.   We have to ask ourselves, is it really right that the EU should just continue to expand, conferring upon all new member states all the rights of membership?   Do we really think now is the time to contemplate a land border between the EU and countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria?”   Welcome to UKIP, Home Secretary, but then your boss the Prime Minister is hell-bent on Britain being totally absorbed into an aggressive and ever-expanding superstate called Europe!   The next variable is the full extent of the ever-expanding EU budget, to which Britain is after Germany the main contributor.   Now Mario Monti, former Prime Minister if Italy, is Chairman of the EU’s High Level Group  on Own Resources with a mandate for increasing the EU budget to deal with the eurozone crisis, the migration crisis and the terrorism crisis.   And in his own words, “The EU is going through a crisis which leads me and others for the first time to consider whether we are not heading towards disintegration.   Although the EU has developed itself historically through a process of crisis, response to the crisis, and advancement, this time around it may well not happen.”    All of which is shorthand for let’s hike that EU budget again.   And another variable is that the Treasury has forecast just 3 million new migrants arriving in Britain from the EU by 2030, when all the anecdotal evidence is that the true figure is likely to be several times greater.   But we can all sleep easy because George Osborne and his chums have calculated the figures down the the last 3p!

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the admirable Liam Halligan was sufficiently shocked to compare the Treasury document to George Orwell’s 1984, declaring “Those of us backing Brexit aren’t “economically illiterate”, Mr. Osborne.   This Treasury document, though, including no possible Brexit benefits, and entirely ignoring the growing prospect of another systemic eurozone crisis, is deeply disingenuous – doing a disservice to our democracy.   ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’   That’s how George Orwell opened his dystopian masterpiece 1984, calling into question his entire faith in government.   That’s how I felt reading through this disgraceful Treasury document.”   For my part I prefer to see in it the rich tradition of British comedy, with George Osborne playing the part of Brian Rix or of Peter Sellers or even of Edmund Blackadder himself, led astray once more by the Treasury’s Baldricks and all their cunning plans!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'A Lie Becomes The Truth'

“When it becomes serious you have to lie!”   Those were the immortal words of Herr Juncker, President of the European Commission, when discussing the EU’s development.   And his advice has clearly been taken to heart by our very own master of spin, our Mr. Cameron, when combining fear with fiction in his preposterous work of EU propaganda that has been coming through our letterboxes at a cost to taxpayers of £9.3 million.   But of course the original master of spin, from whom both Herr Juncker and Mr. Cameron seem to have learned their craft, was none other than Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Germany from 1933 to 1945.   He was the one who first dreamed up guidance for today’s politicians such as, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”, “Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will” and, “A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth”.   Our own admirably impartial Electoral Commission has ruled that using public money for Mr. Cameron’s document is “not in the spirit of a fair referendum and should not have been done”, which is a telling understatement.   So I thought that I would try a little truth test on the mind-numbing assertions to which we have all been subjected in a document of which Joseph Goebbels would certainly have been proud.

Let me offer you three examples from this work of fiction, which has been decried by our independent Electoral Commission and is an insult to the intelligence of the British people, and also the related facts.   The document’s very first claim is that, “The UK has secured a special status in a reformed EU.”   The truth is that, in the words of Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, Vice-President of the European Parliament, Mr. Cameron’s paltry deal is “not legally binding” and “nothing more than a deal hammered out down the local bazaar” which could soon be rejected by the European Parliament.   Of course it was the same ever-charming Graf Lambsdorff who declared that it was “a mistake to admit the British into the European Union!”   The document’s next fictitious claim is that, “we will keep our own border controls.”   This would be laughable if it were not so serious when 140 million citizens of Turkey and Ukraine are about to receive the right to visa-free travel into the EU’s 26-nation Schengen zone.   And once inside Schengen, EU passports can easily be bought in Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania, three of the most corrupt nations on the planet, entitling the purchasers to come straight into the UK just like anyone else in the EU, obtain National Insurance numbers and access exactly the same benefits as every UK citizen.   And after five years in the Schengen zone they can come here anyway.   Finally, the third example from this work of fiction is that after Brexit we would lose access to the EU’s Single Market, as if the EU were primarily an economic and not a political construct.   The fact is that on 24th June we could rejoin Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein in the Swiss-based European Free Trade Association, a fine organisation founded by Britain, and remain in the European Economic Area with an EU trade deal to reflect our status as its principal customer.   After all, Switzerland exports four and a half times as much per head to the EU as does the UK without needing to be a member.   These are just some of the falsehoods that litter this dismal document and those associated with it should hang their heads in shame.

But to return to the father of modern political propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.   On 22nd April, 1945 with defeat looming in World War Two, together with his wife Magda and their six children, Goebbels moved into the Berlin Fuhrerbunker to be close to Adolf Hitler.   There on 29th April Hitler appointed him Reich Chancellor.   On the following day Hitler shot himself.   Then on 1st May Goebbels and Magda administered cyanide to their children before taking their own lives.   However, Magda Goebbels left another son who survived the war, Harald Quandt, from her earlier marriage to the prominent industrialist Gunther Quandt.   And in post-war Europe the Quandts’ industrial empire went from strength to strength, based principally on their holding of some 46% of BMW, so that they are now thought to be the richest family in Germany.   And the EU’s relentless expansion into Bosnia, Turkey and Ukraine, at huge cost to the British taxpayer, is due in large measure to German industry’s incessant need to obtain and control new markets for its products, not least the Quandt family’s BMWs.   We should think on these things when the tendentious propaganda from Mr. Cameron lands on our doormats.   And the printer responsible for this tawdry document is Williams Lea, now owned by Germany’s Deutsche Post DHL, which itself receives substantial grants from the European Commission.   So welcome to the wonderful world of the new Europe!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'EUkraine'

The Ural Mountains are a range that runs through western Russia from the Arctic Ocean in the north down to the Ural River and Kazakhstan in the south.   And the minerals that they contain are vital to the Russian economy.   Now, in his bombastic speeches which have become all-too familiar, David Cameron has often declared that he wants to see a European Union that “stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals.”   If he wishes us to take him at his word, which presumably he does, then David Cameron is arguing that the EU should absorb not just the whole of Ukraine, once part of the Soviet Union and where the people in the eastern half of the country remain loyal to Moscow, but also much of western Russia.   That is the logic of his remarks and, when combined with the preparations now well underway for the creation of a “European Army”, this must be a cause for serious concern.

Where this is relevant is that David Cameron, along with 26 of the 27 other EU leaders, has recently signed up to a new Ukraine-EU “Association Agreement.”   With a population of 45 million in Ukraine, this takes the EU deep into Russian Europe, offering Ukraine visa-free travel and generous financial incentives funded in large measure by British taxpayers.   In time honoured EU fashion, trade is being used as a pretext for political expansion with Ukraine being offered a “Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area.”   This is a real commitment for Britain, yet it has scarcely been reported let alone debated in Parliament, while our voters will be open to all the risks involved in a partnership with this dangerous and unstable country.   Now, only one country in the whole EU has had the integrity to offer its voters a referendum on this latest piece of EU empire-building and that is Holland, one of the project’s original founder members.

And on 6th April the voters of Holland went to the polls to pass judgment on the proposed EU-Ukraine agreement.   On a low but sufficient turnout, 61.1% of the Dutch electorate rejected the EU’s deal, with just 38.1% in favour.   The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, declared that while the vote was not binding his government would have to “reconsider the deal.”   An official in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, stated that “Dutch Eurosceptics could not take Ukraine hostage to express dissatisfaction with the EU.”   The truth is that, as always, the EU will ignore public opinion and press on with its ambition to create an aggressive superstate running from the north of Scotland down through Turkey to the borders of Iraq, Iran and Syria in the south and right up to Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east.   

The combined population of Ukraine and Turkey amounts to some 125 million, all shortly to enjoy visa-free travel into the EU.   Recently John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007, said, “The European project is fundamentally flawed.   I think its best days are probably behind it and there will be increasing tensions.   Britain can’t control its borders – it’s ridiculous to say it can.   If I were British, which I’m not, I’d vote to leave.   You have lost your sovereignty.”   Now it was John Howard who secured the Queen’s role as Australia’s head of state in his own 1999 referendum.   We should heed his words, vote “Leave” on 23rd June and, supported by our friends across Europe, including Holland, and the Commonwealth, become a free and independent people once more!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby