Anti Common Market League - Winter 1999

It is sad news that, after many years as the League's President, Sir Richard Body MP has announced that he will not be standing for re-election to the House of Commons after the end of this Parliament.

Sir Richard has both inspired and brought together anti-Marketeers by his courage in standing up with a few colleagues to what used to be the Conservative Party Line, and, amazingly, the Conservative Line has changed. He has by his speeches and writings taught many both inside and outside the Party the facts about the way in which the EU affects our traditions and life.

Most important of all, perhaps, during years when many leading politicians are now bringing ridicule on themselves and the party, Sir Richard has in the style of Disraeli and Gladstone, Churchill and Attlee, shown himself a politician of principle, with views based on the facts of economics, of history and of human nature.

And, lest we should become uselessly sad about his impending retirement from Westminster, he has given us a practical and cheerful article for "Britain". He reminds us of the great achievements which the League (and other anti-Marketeers) has accomplished since we started in 1961 unknown and without influence or money. Most importantly he reminds us to carry on the work.

Other Contributors

This "Britain" also contains articles by valued and much liked regular contributors and an article by Mr. William Peters, a new Committee Member.

Our Committee Member, Mr. Brian Rathbone, has submitted to "Britain" a draft speech which was shown to him at the Conservative Party Conference this year by Miss Mary Keenan. He considers it is representative of the feelings of numerous delegates (only 6 out of 46 volunteers, he reports, were given the chance to speak) and illustrates the strength of feeling among the rank and file of the Party who were not able to make their views public at the Conference.

Our Committee Member, Mr. Derek James, has submitted as usual a thoughtful and original article. He suggests the French behav iour on British Beef amounts to rejection of any European Union and an acceptance of national independence.

A new Committee Member, Mr. William Peters, who is an expert at defending British Weights and Measures, has given us an article on this important subject which is already increasing interest.

Readers will miss the usual article from our hardworking chairman. Mr. Peter Dul has suffered a bad attack of 'flu' and we all wish him a speedy recovery. A report of the important speech by Mr. Leolin Price, which took place on 2nd December will, we hope, appear in the next "Britain".

What a long, long haul has it been. For those of us who have been in the League since the dark days of the 1970s - some longer than that - it has been an often depressing journey as we witnessed the freedom of the British people to govern themselves gradually vanish.

Sometimes it was difficult to believe our ears as we heard our own elected representatives condone the demise of our independence.

Most of us in the League have been (more or less) Conservatives, and for us the sight of Tory leaders dismantling our constitution has been particularly bitter.

Transformation!

Yet now what do we see! The Leader of the Party going to Budapest (more in the "heart of Europe" than anywhere visited by his predecessor) to give them a speech that League members could scarcely quarrel with. It is now official party policy to renegotiate the Treaty of Rome, to enable Britain to repudiate the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy and to opt out of policies considered in Britain to be against her interests. As to the Single Currency the arguments against by not only William Hague but others in the Shadow Cabinet are so cogent and powerful that it has become impossible to see how the Conservative Party can ever agree to EMU and the end of sterling.

For those of us who remember the dark days of the Heath era when League members were the party's pariahs, its transformation verges upon the miraculous.

Need to stiffen backbone of Conservative Party

Yes, it has been a long haul. It is not for me to tell League members which party to join. However, I do hope all readers who consider themselves Conservatives will be as active as they can within the Party.

It is vital they do this. Let no one think the Europhiles are packing their bags and about to disappear. I know they are planning how to reverse their fortunes. If we stand by we are helping their cause.

Now that the Labour Party has been taken over by Blairites, Britain's hope of recovering her self-government rests with a future Conservative administration. Obviously it must be one that is resolute about its policy towards the European Union.

How resolute it will be will depend upon the Conservative Party itself. League members within constituency associations will have the influence to stiffen the Party's backbone. Outside their influence will be negligible.

Like the majority of people here to-day I am against a federal Europe. Parts of the media would have us believe that this is a right wing Conservative issue; it is certainly not. I know that there are people like myself who have joined the Party recently after many years of support for the Labour Party. This is a national issue which will affect the lives of every man, woman and child in this country. It is important to engage the people in this debate now. The German Chancellor, Gerhardt Schröder, and the President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, who is appointed, not elected, have made their position very clear: they resolutely want political integration.

What does this mean? It means the emergence of a superstate with Germany at the heart of it. Two things would have to happen for this to work: first, the death of Sterling and the introduction in this country of the euro, which would mean Westminster handing power over taxation to the unelected European Central Bank. Second, the creation of a new constitution and new laws to govern us. This would mean that the fundamental principles which have evolved over a thousand years would be swept aside, including Magna Carta, which King John signed at Runnymede in 1215, and which is the foundation of our civil liberties.

Let us remember that Europe is a continent of which we are not a part; they have a different infrastructure from that of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. For instance, UK pensions are funded to approximately 70%, whereas the French and German pensions are hardly funded at all, but come out of current taxation. What does this mean to you and me? It means that the British taxpayer would be funding foreign pension schemes if we joined the euro.

It is a good thing that it is not only the Tories who want our country to retain its currency and democracy: as Bill Morris of the TGWU said at the TUC on 15 September 1999: "We will not be bluffed and we will not be bounced into the euro."

This is by no means the first time that the idea of a European superstate has been tried out. Charlemagne, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler were all on this path but they did not succeed, because we defeated them all by force of arms. Now their successors are seeking to achieve the same aim by manipulation and insidious words. These may be more difficult to counteract, but, ladies and gentlemen, we shall do so, in order to preserve our democracy and independence.

To quote from Winston Churchill's memorable words; which for lack of time I cannot give in full: "We are with Europe but not of Europe, we are linked but not comprised, and if they ask us to join them we shall reply, 'Nay, sir, for we dwell among our own people'."

An enthusiastic audience of around 50 attended the League's recent meeting on 2nd December at the House of Commons and heard an excellent speech by Mr. Leolin Price, QC. Some extracts from his wide ranging speech may be published in a future issue of "Britain". In the meantime a recording was made of the speech and subsequent questions.

Cassettes of the recording are available at six pounds including postage and packing from the Anti-Common Market League, 28 Highdown, Worcester Park, Surrey, KT4 7HZ

The French Agriculture Minister, M. Jean Glavany, recently accused Britain of anti-French fury and xenophobia. He was referring, of course, to our annoyance at France's refusal to lift the ban on British beef, in spite of a scientific 'all clear', in spite of talks, in spite of an EU ruling. Amazement at his gall - his Gallic gall, indignation and anger are the proper reactions to what he said. A whole string of justified accusations against the French government could be made in response.

We know how much British farmers have suffered, totally unjustifiably, by the beef ban; we know that France accuses us of being 'anti-communitaire'; we know that Britain keeps all the EU rules no matter how much they work against our interests. The least we can expect is that the French do the same. France is, on many counts, definitely in the wrong. The scope for making political capital out of this is considerable. Considerable too is the temptation to fan anti-French feeling. Yet the temptation should be resisted. At the risk of appearing to let the side down, we should welcome what the French government is doing and hope that it doesn't back down. Short term satisfaction is not nearly as valuable as winning the arguments long term.

The French government has - dare I say it? - done what a government should do. It has done what its own people and parliament want it to do, not what the European Commission tells it to do. It has scored a victory for national sovereignty over EU authority. Is that not what we want? Would that a British government had the same courage! If the French government is taken before the European Court we should hope it defies that also. If it does and if it prevails, it will have won a victory for all of us who consider it humiliating and intolerable that the British Ci-own can be judged and punished by a court outside the realm. What is sauce for the French goose is sauce for the British gander.

The action of the French government proves that much of what is said about Community spirit and the obsolescence of national sovereignty is just hot air. It cannot fail to open the eyes of more and more people to this fact, and to the fact that the charade invariably operates against Britain's interests: whether the rules are kept or whether they are broken, it is almost certain that Britain will be the loser.

The more national governments and parliaments defy the decisions of Brussels, the more they demonstrate that we are right - sovereignty does matter. Although some of these acts of defiance - like the French beef ban - will be to oul- short-term disadvantage, they should give us confidence that in the long term national sovereignty will survive.

So the French government is at the moment doing the ACML's work. We should resist the temptation to say, "Down With The French" and sing out, "Vive La France!"

The new year brings an unfamiliar, almost futuristic look to the calendar; it brings us ,a new fun-fair in a temporary tent at a cost thirty times that of refitting Bi-itannia, for which no money could be found; it also brings in a regime in which it is illegal for two British subjects in their own country to transact their own business with each other in their own language as they themselves see fit. Except for temporary mitigations and historical curios like the pint of beer and the roadway (but not the waterway) mile, Britain is now officially and compulsorily metric. Those who use imperial only, or even primarily, now face the full force - if no longer the full majesty - of the law.

We are often told soothingly that the process of metrication is home-grown and was initiated before our acceptance into the "European Union" - or rather, the "Common Market". So it was: but it was not initiated before we first attempted to gain acceptance, which tragi-comic importunities were commenced in 1960. Nor was it initiated by Parliament. The metrication of Britain, like the decimalization of its currency, has been in conformity with the imperatives of European integration. Largely imposed from on high, these decisions were taken strategically and as earnests of our good European inten

From the Wilson administration onwards, our governments always maintained that metrication would be voluntary: since the metrication of packaged goods in 1995, it has been compulsory. This oppressive regime - which enjoys the self-serving collaboration of the supermarkets and the politically-correct, but the support of fewer than one in fourteen of the British people - has been established by means of statutory instruments effecting Brussels directives (evolved through qualified majority voting) and passed after cursory scrutiny by Parliamentai-y Committees which have lacked the will, if not yet entirely the means to reject them. On coming to office the present government proclaimed a "complete reappraisal" of metrication and busied itself in two years of painstaking deception, particularly of the British Weights and Measures Association. The result was published in July under the title The Adoption of the International System of Units as the Primary System of Measurement in the United Kingdom. The government did not see fit even to apply for an extension to the derogation, which has just expired, allowing imperial-only labelling on loose goods. No doubt such "subsidiarity" was deemed "uncommunitaire", and anyway, like Britannia, simply not fit to be part of "New Britain". So: imperial may be used, if at all, only as an inferior ancillary to metric, until 2010. For packaged goods this term will need to be extended perpetually though we may reasonably hope that by then it will be of no relevance to Britain - to facilitate European Union exports to the United States, where customary measures prevail and where dual marking is, and will remain, compulsory.

It was as long ago as 1897 that, in accord with our once-customary tolerance, liberality and respect, the use of the metric system -alongside imperial - was first made legal in Britain. In respect of measurement, metric is now the lingua franca of science, and partakes of the great prestige of science, whose achievements are so manifest, tangible and rampant as almost to command the unthinking deference once accorded the monarch. This is what intimidates some people: they lack the downright and unimpaired certainty that their preference for our customary measures is entirely natural and proper, and not an irrational and anachronistic personal weakness.

We should recall that imperial measurement too has served science perfectly well; that the great cathedrals knew no metric, nor Newton or Wren; nor that explosion of technology to which Britain gave birth called the industrial revolution. Men travelled to the moon with imperial measurement. We should also recall that the purposes of science are not necessarily those of everyday life. Unlike metric, our customary measures are not just so much arid and arbitrary clutter: they are custom-made. They evolved through practical human usage, just as our tools for carpentry, thatching, dentistry, whatever -evolved for each purpose through generations to the virtually unaltering forms we see perfected today. Devoid of human proportion or cultural content, the metric system was designed from scratch and in the mistaken belief that what served for counting numbers would also serve well for counting weight and distance, which - at least for the purposes of daily life - it does not. Hence the metric system has never been adopted voluntarily, nor completely, anywhere.

The British Weights and Measures Association was formed five years ago to serve in the cultural warfare now being fought, and did all such things as it could to prevent what has now come to pass. Its role now is not to "rage against the dying of the light", but by its advocacy and even the fact of its continuing existence, to get the light switched back on. It is encouraging to note that in the United States, a free country but which has its own metric totalitarians, twenty-one states have reverted to imperial units of measurement in the past two years. The BWMA would welcome your support. Membership costs ten pounds annually, which includes subscription to both the Footrule and the Yardstick. The BWMA address is: 45, Montgomery Street, Edinburgh, EH7 SJX. The views expressed in this piece are not necessarily those of the Association.