Resist the ‘Fourth Reich’
THOSE of us who believe in democracy (with all its faults) are seeing and hearing with growing frustration the never-ending stream of propaganda and misinformation emanating from those who are doing grave harm to the interests of the UK as they stop at nothing in seeking to frustrate the result of the UK Referendum, out of self-interest or political naivety. There are more than we need of such people here, as in the UK, therefore I feel driven to take issue with a resident of the Republic of Ireland when he has the presumptuousness to urge us to seek to join the EU as an ‘independent entity’ so that we may reap the ‘benefits’ of being members (Mr Aston, Open Lines, 11 January.) The EU will not bail us out to the tune of £3.25bn that the UK contributed to the bail-out of Ireland by The Loans to Ireland Act 2010.
My wife and I had our car vandalised because it bore a ‘Vote Leave’ sticker when we were campaigning in England in 2016, had obscene messages fixed to it and we faced the insults of ‘remainers’ on the street. When Mr Aston talks of ‘thuggish’ behaviour, he should remember the adage that ‘those who live in glasshouses should not throw stones’.
He recommends that there be a second referendum. Why should British patriots believe that the UK government will not rig it like it tried to do last time? Indeed, it will seek to learn from past mistakes and will throw at it even more of voters’ money, as well as that of Brussels and self-interested industrialists and financiers, than it did last time. In any case, why should the British follow Ireland’s example when the Irish people’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty was treated as the ‘wrong’ answer and its government capitulated to the demands of Brussels that the people vote again?
As with so many of his persuasion, Mr Aston talks about those Britons who consider themselves Europeans. It may surprise him to know that we Britons have always been Europeans. The British were Europeans before they were deliberately deceived into becoming part of the EU and always will be. It is just that we do not subscribe to the propaganda fiction that you are only European if you are a subject of Brussels.
Talk of an ‘historic obligation to provide with France a counterbalance to Germany’ displays a sad lack of historical knowledge. In historical terms, Britain’s always uneasy partnership of convenience with France was relatively short-lived compared with the centuries that went before, when Britain saw its interests more aligned with the Germanic peoples than the French. That 20th century rapprochement with France was fractured when France threw in its lot with Germany and the euro in order to escape the disastrous decline in value of the franc due to the mismanagement of its economy.
If it is true that the majority of Germans ‘do not want the EU to become another Reich’, they are only fooling themselves, just as many did in the 1930s, because the construction of the Fourth Reich began in 1945, when major German industrialists and far right politicians, recognising that they could not conquer Europe by force whilst America interfered in European affairs, decided to build the next German empire by gaining economic control. As that arch Europhile Nicholas (now Lord) Clegg boasted to the BBC in 2016, ‘Germany is now the supreme power in Europe’. Why would Channel Islanders, who have already suffered German control within living memory, wish to submit voluntarily to the ‘supreme European power’ once more? They will, no doubt, have to do so eventually if Britain remains in the EU.
MICHAEL A WARD.