Anti Common Market League - Spring 2000

Mr. Leolin Price, Q.C.

Our main objection to the European community has always been that we cannot tolerate being subject to centralized Government from Europe which can override our laws. Our own national laws embody our own well proved traditions and enable ordinary people to control the politicians whom we elected to office. This argument is more important, because ordinary people easily understand it, than the equally valid, but more complicated proofs that being in the EU causes us financial loss Clear arguments that we do lose economically by being in the EU are constantly appearing in the newspapers, for instance the leading letter in The Times of 8th March from Dr. Richard North points out clearly how much British agriculture loses.

This quarter we are fortunate to have edited extracts prepared by Mr. John Rattray, from the important speech which Mr. Price delivered in December 1999 at the House of Commons to an ACML meeting. Leolin Price objects forcefully to any attack on our liberties. It is a point which we need to make again and again, and Mr. Price's vigorous and topical words bring the whole subject to life again, and relate it to the present plans for expanding the EU.

Mr. Derek James

Mr. James in "Fifty Years On" meditates on the sufferings endured by our fishermen, and on the changes that one M.P. has lived through during the last fifty years, and for which he shares in the responsibility.

Mr. Jeffrey Titford is the UKIP M.E.P. for the Eastern Counties, and has recently issued a Campaign Leaflet pointing out that many lawyers including Mr. Michael Shrimpton, consider the regulations which now exist on the use of the Metric system are entirely invalid. The founders of the ACML were Conservatives and so are a host of present members, and so now is Mr. Shrimpton. But Conservatives are not alone in defending the British way of life. So we are pleased to publicize the leaflet obtainable from the UKIP office at 1 and 2 Rochester House, 145 New London Road, CHELMSFORD, Essex, CM2 OQT. The pamphlet deserves the careful consideration of the many shopkeepers who do not like the idea of having to alter, at great trouble and expense, the weights and measures of the goods they sell.

A number of our members are also members of the Campaign for an Independent Britain. They are reminded that C.I.B. will be holding its AGM at BIRMINGHAM this year at 11 a.m. on Saturday 1st April, 2000 at the Cans Lane Church Centre, Cans Lane, Birmingham.

The AGM is for members only, but there is a Public Meeting in the afternoon at the same place, at which the speakers will be Frederick Forsyth CBE, Richard Shepherd MP and Lord Shore of Stepney.

The League still has a small supply of lapel badges in the shape of a pound sign. Many of our supporters find wearing one of these badges to be a discreet yet effective means of advertising our cause. These badges are available at one pound each from the League.

Save Our Sovereignty are organising a March and Rally 23rd April, 2000 (St. George's Day) Assemble: Thames Embankment under Hungerford Bridge 1 pm; Rally: Trafalgar Square 3 pm Speakers include: Nigel Farage, MEP (UKIP); Michael Shrimpton, Constitutional Lawyer; Lindsay Jenkins, author; Marc Glendenning, Democracy Movement. Tel: 01453 885141

An essential of our constitution is that our liberties are protected by our Parliament and by our Law. John Wilkes discovered that the judges of the day accepted the proposition that there was no special right for the government or members of the government to go into the Englishman's castle without a warrant of sufficient particularity to justify the invasion of the privacy, the liberty, the freedom of the individual. That freedom, protected by habeas corpus and other quite ordinary things which we take for granted, is not matched in countries which don't derive their attitude to the relationship of the governed to the governors from the common law and the history of the development of our constitution.

Without reform of the Treaty of Rome, without reform of the whole system, there is an essential incompatibility between membership of the European Community and our constitutional position and rights. Under the Treaty of Rome, as amended particularly at Maastricht and Amsterdam, the arrangements under which we are governed increasingly include arrangements under which our government has no control over laws that are made.

The Community must, to be acceptable to me, no longer attempt to be a state or nation with domineering, centralising, intrusive and unaccountable institutions of government. It must be a place where member states debate, discuss matters of their common interest and, if they reach agreement, go away and implement the agreement. They must persuade and agree rather than override with qualified majority voting. On that basis, the European Community could be acceptable.

Our masters now, collectively an engine of unification, of harmonisation and all the other things of which I totally disapprove, will no longer, if those reforms could be made, behave like the manipulative supreme court which they have become, capable of overriding and overruling our Acts of Parliament, capable of telling us what our government must do. There is an opportunity for acceptable reform.

There is an opportunity for reform now because enlargement, which is in prospect, should not be, on a sensible view, an opportunity for deepening and strengthening and making the European Community into more of a state, which is what Mr. Prodi and most of the major actors on the other side of the Channel want. That is not a sensible objective for a Community of twenty or twenty-five or more states with all their different languages, all their different traditions, all their different attitudes and, in many cases, only able to speak together in English. Instead the reality of enlargement is surely this: it will be impossible in an enlarged Community for a centralised government to operate efficiently. There will be more of a shambles if the unitary or federal state is the model, more of a shambles than the extraordinary shambles which already exists in the functioning of the European Community. It will, I suspect, explode if they attempt to follow that path. The Community's ramshackle power-hungry institutions will no longer govern us if enlargement is sensibly addressed.

The Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Heath has just completed fifty years of uninterrupted service as an MP - only the second person to do so in the last 100 years. Readers will no doubt consider that something to ponder rather than celebrate.

In general, however, it is sensible to commemorate anniversaries, and a fiftieth one is a good time to take stock. Next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of the 1951 Festival of Britain. The official guide to its centrepiece - the South Bank Exhibition - makes interesting reading. Two short quotations from it provide considerable food for thought: -

We do not know what Mr. Heath, as an MP of one year's standing, thought of such sentiments in 1951, but we may assume that neither he nor most of our current MPs would echo them today. On every conceivable occasion they break through the defences of our freedom rather than the defences of its enemies.

One man, however, who never ceases to probe the weak spots in the defences of the contemporary enemies of our freedom is Christopher Booker. Week after week in The Sunday Telegraph he exposes the follies and 'crimes' of the E.U. and its apologists.

On 27th February he exposed the scandalous situation in which fishermen on both sides of the Irish Sea find themselves. The thirty inshore fishing boats of Fleetwood in Lancashire have been ordered to tie up until April, to conserve cod stocks, while a dozen large Belgian trawlers are allowed to continue hauling in far more cod than the Fleetwood boats could ever catch. While banned from earning their living, they still have to pay harbour dues without any compensation from the government which, they understandably believe, wants them to go out of business.

The fishermen of Portavogie in Northern Ireland are angered that Irish boats are allowed to hang nets miles long across the path of the cod as they swim north, catching them before they ever reach their spawning grounds. Some were so angered by the officiousness of inspectors when they reached port that they chased them down the quay and forced them to barricade themselves in their office!

Mr. Booker writes:

"Our fishermen are not just angry at the lunacy of conservation rules that forbid them to fish while far more destructive forms of fishing are still permitted. They also cannot understand why our Government refuses to draw on EU funds designed to compensate fishermen for loss of livelihood, under which, for instance, 4,200 Spanish fishermen are getting £77.7 million - including £10 million from British taxpayers ..."

Now, who committed this country to the lunacy of the Common Fisheries Policy agreed only hours before Britain joined the EEC? The Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Heath, of course. It is interesting to speculate on whether the young MP elected fifty years ago was hoping for such a legacy as he took his oath of allegiance to his sovereign for the first time.

How much longer can Tony Blair pretend that the intention is not to create a European Super State?

Intergovernmental Conference now meeting

An Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) is now meeting to produce, by the end of the year, a Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, which will be integrated into a new European Union (EU) treaty.

The real point, however, is the massive transfer of power this would entail, since if such rights are to be enforced the EU must be given the power to adjudicate between (EU) citizens and to enforce its decision. Thus will the legal and political authority of the member states be overthrown and their sovereignty disappear. The President of Italy has described it as the new 'constitution of Europe', and he is not alone in doing so. In addition the IGC will bring into being a European Public Prosecutor to 'protect the financial interests of the Union', and a Europe-wide system of criminal law. There will be further moves towards a European army, and a common European foreign and defence policy. Majority voting in the Council of Ministers will be extended to tax harmonisation and many other areas.

The justification of these powers is said to be that it will prevent one country blocking the will of the majority. A further proposal would allow a group of member states to act in the name of the EU but not subject to the usual rules. It would give carte blanche to Germany and her satellites to wield unfettered power including military power.

It can be seen that power in the European Super State will be exercised without democratic accountability. Laws will be made in secret by the Council of Ministers with no opportunity of national parliamentary veto. Powers generally will be shared between unelected bureaucrats in the Commission, unelected European Central Bankers in Frankfurt, and unelected judges in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

The European 'Parliament' will not enjoy supreme legislative power, and there will be no government accountable to it (a strange sort of parliament - more a rubber stamp). It will truly come into its own as a home of cronyism when the Europe-wide party list system is introduced. The party apparat will be able to maintain a firm grip on who is elected, there being no link (e.g. constituency) with the voters who are thereby marginalised. It could not be clearer that the objective is full political union.

Joining the EEC

Joining the EEC (as it then was) was a political act with economic consequences, not the other way round, although Edward Heath and others have deliberately misled the electorate about their true aims. During Harold Macmillan's premiership Heath even deliberately withheld an adverse analysis (of the consequences of joining the EEC) from the Cabinet sub-committee.

It has often been suggested by Europhiles that if only Britain had joined at the beginning she could have led Europe. As Jean Monet made clear this was always an impossibility since Britain wanted what the others did not, a Europe of nation states. Britain could have stayed with EFTA (the European Free Trade Association), the Commonwealth and free trade. Indeed Harold Wilson was at first against British entry. He favoured an Atlantic free trade community to include the Commonwealth, Latin America and Japan.

However it was Heath who forced through membership, his government's White Paper of July 1971 talking of "no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty". The overriding and essential criterion for being a member of his government (150 MPs) was to be pro-membership.

Two slipped through the net (one being Sir Teddy Taylor) and resigned. Despite a Labour three line whip Roy Jenkins, Shadow Chancellor and Deputy Leader, led 68 MPs into the Yes Lobby. He did not resign until 6 months later over the issue of a referendum. In 1996 it was revealed that there had been secret collusion between Jenkins' Labour group and the Conservative Whips to make sure that each division gave the right result.

The subsequent Referendum on membership in 1975 was lost because the Government's pamphlet emphasised Britain's membership did not affect its sovereignty or its parliament (both untrue) and raised the fear of being outside the EEC tariff wall.

The British electorate were never asked whether they wished to join a European Union and be reduced to 12 regions (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and 9 English regions including London) of a Super State. Worldwide tariffs have dropped enormously Since 1975 tariffs worldwide have dropped enormously. The result has been that the USA increased its merchandise exports to the Single Market over the period 1992-1998 faster than the UK did despite being inside the single Market! [IMF Direction of Trade Statistics Yearbook 1998] American companies paid in 1998 an average 3.6% tariff to export goods to the EU (there are no tariffs on services and investments income).

However because of Britain's huge net budget payment to the EU the effective industrial tariff paid by the UK to Brussels was 5.7% [UK net contribution £5.5 billion divided by UK's merchandise exports to EU '14' of £96 billion equals 5.74%] Free from the EU corporate UK would be 37% better off than it is at present. The 5.7% which the British Exchequer would no longer have to transfer to the EU would be available to pass on to UK businesses and individuals as tax reductions, leading to lower ex-factory costs and higher domestic demand.

Of course free from the EU the UK would be able to negotiate bilateral tariff-free arrangements with the USA, the Commonwealth and other traditional trading partners, not excluding the EU countries, who need the UK market far more than the UK needs theirs. The net result would be further reductions in costs for UK exporters and importers.

Mr. Blair an economic illiterate?

Fear has been used in the past by the Europhiles and the First Lord of the Treasury (Tony Blair) has been at it again by claiming 3 million jobs depend on Europe. It would be worrying if he actually believed it. How many American jobs depend on Europe given that total US merchandise exports to the EU are bigger than the UK's?

N.A.F.T.A.

Whilst there is no doubt the UK as the fourth biggest economy in the world would have no trouble prospering on its own as a global trading nation outside the EU, the idea has been fostered in people's minds by deceitful British leaders that the UK could not survive without membership. The fact is it cannot survive with membership since it will be broken up into 12 regions under the Maastricht Committee of the Regions.

One way to overcome this fear would be to provide an alternative. Leaving the EU and taking membership of NAFTA would not involve the extinguishing of sovereignty, and indeed would involve restoration of full parliamentary self-government and the restoration of the primacy of our common law. Being a free trade area and not a customs union (as the EU is) we could immediately institute free trade with Australia and New Zealand.

A few years of this with a concomitant restoration of self-confidence may even result in a desire for complete independence. US authorities are presently considering an invitation to the UK to join NAFTA. Given the further push towards a European Super State the present IGC represents (and which will in December culminate in another Treaty) the 'window' through which to withdraw peacefully will not be there for much longer. Only two-fifths of British exports (including invisibles) go to the EU, almost 80% of our foreign investments are with the rest of the world. Our cumulative deficit in trade in manufactures to 1998 at 1998 prices was £350 billion. We must leave, and leave now!