OUT —and into the World
How many people believe that those who have been shouting about democratic rights, if they Were in charge of our affairs, if they were in charge of the affairs here, but no I wouldn't be here, nor would most of the people in this audience, nor would most of the people who want to stand up and have an independent voice and you'd be in no doubt about that at all, you'd be rigging all the ballots like Mr Scanlon.
Thus the voice of the Rt Hon. Roy Jenkins, Home Secretary, Chairman of Britain in Europe, and one of our supposedly distinguished moderate politicians. His voice was ragged and semi-hysterical. But its own fear, and the fear it sought to evoke, and the lies it uttered, have all been integral parts of the pro-Market campaign now moving into its closing phases.
At no time during the campaign have the Opponents of our membership of the European Economic Community been remotely as unbalanced, as hysterical or as deliberately personally insulting as those In the opposite camp. Naturally, as in any Vigorously fought campaign, there have been some fibs and half-truths on both Sides; and each partisan has looked eagerly at evidence which may have several possible interpretations in order to find material that will support his cause. But nothing on the anti-Market side has even begun to equal the tirade of personal Insults, and the sickening appeal to fear, that has characterised everything the pro-Marketeers have done. More: though the pro-Marketeers of both parties have, in every major House of Commons debate in Which they needed support from waverers, stressed that the object of negotiations With the EEC was to see whether a deal advantageous for Britain could be done, and though they insisted on our ability to go it alone if necessary, their current emphasis is on the weakness, poverty and Inability of Britain. Never has the country seen so systematic a campaign of denigration of its people and their capacities by so many senior politicians.
It is now too late in the campaign to resume all the practical arguments on either side: the subject of membership of the EEC has been before the people for Years; and however inadequately or dishonestly the arguments have been presented there has certainly been, and there now is, more information on the subject before the people than is commonly available — about any party — at a general election campaign. There are, however, three points of a general nature Which should be emphasised before this week's decision is finally taken.
The first relates to our experience of the Common Market. We have been members of the organisation for two and a half Years. It is true that, during that time, there have been a number of events, both in the world and in the domestic economy and its Management which have conspired to damage our interests and increase inflation. Even allowing for these, however, and, so to speak, setting them on one side, it is virtually impossible to see any advantage that has emerged from mem bership of the EEC. Even the sums doled out — with the obvious intention of influencing the campaign — to Ebbw Vale and Johnnie Walker, represent only a small part of the payments Britain has made to the Market; and, welcome though they no doubt be to the recipients, they represent the outgoings of a system that seriously distorts the nature and the interests of the British economy; a system which has begun to, and which will increasingly, draw British industrial investment from this offshore island to the centre of Europe, to the Golden Triangle.
The second general point relates to the effect of membership on the present, and likely future, level of food prices. Britain could undoubtedly do a great deal more for herself in the way of food production; and the question of how she can must be gone into very thoroughly in the near future, whether we stay in the EEC or come out of it. But we are likely for the future to remain a net food importing country. The predominant characteristic of the Market is that it favours, and favours heavily, net food exporters; and, while world food prices move in cycles, the object of EEC regulations is to build and maintain a permanently high-priced agricultural structure. To the trap that that structure represents, continued membership condemns Britain forever.
The third and final general point is that concerned with sovereignty. The arid and abstract argument about sovereignty can be disregarded: of course membership of various international organisations, and accession to treaties, limits a country's freedom of action. But the commitment to a European Economic and Monetry Union which has just been repeated by various European statesmen — with however many qualifications, because of the necessity in this campaign to conceal their true ambitions from the people, they hedge it about — means a commitment to a single European state. None of these men can really be trusted; nor — despite sterling work by Mr John Davies and his fellow members — has it proved possible for the Parliamentary Committee concerned with the scrutiny of--EEC legislation and the submission of some of it at leiirto the House of Commons, seriously to examine all the important items in the huge flood of directives and regulations from Brussels. And while Parliamentary inadequacy in that respect has already been amply demonstrated, the British courts are required, by the Treaty of Accession and the legislation whch ratified it, to act for all practical purposes in British courts as though EEC directives and regulations become, in the moment of their issue, integral parts of British law. This is a process which has already done considerable damage, damage which will be hard to undo even in the event of withdrawal. If we stay in, however, the process will ensure the gradual extinction of British law.
There are, then, three general trends, which will accelerate if Britain votes to stay within the EEC, and which conspire both to impoverish Britain, and to end, however long or short a time it takes, the independent identity of this country. For a thousand years Britain has never been conquered; and such invasions of her territory as have taken place have been easily repulsed. At many points of that long and glorious period, moreover, it has been Britain who has stepped forward to the defence of liberty and to the assault on tyranny on the Continent. No European power can display a record remotely comparable to ours in consistency or enlightenment; each — and especially the major powers — has had long and dark periods of revolution, dictatorship, instability and war hunger. Yet, so the pro-Europeans insist, it is to a coalition of the ideas and institutions of these powers, within a framework designed twenty years ago for their interests, that we must submit ourselves : for such a system we must abandon all that has made us great.
There has, of course, been a steady contraction and diminution of British power in the last generation. Even the glorious moments when we have recovered our past and the spirit of our past, have been exceptions to what, on the whole, has been an experience of growing comparative weakness. It is perhaps, at the deepest level, a genuine and fundamental nostalgia for the days when Britain was the greatest of the world powers, attended to with deference because of her might, her experience, and her Empire, which moves the pro-Marketeers into clamouring for Britain to abandon an identity that seems no longer lustrous for part of the identity of something bigger.
But many of Britain's greatest historical moments, many of the greatest achievements of her people, have occurred when this country was small. The experience of worldwide Empire was, in the context of the thousand years, a brief one. For most of the time since the Norman conquest ours has been a vulnerable country, earning its living and its glory with wit, courage, cunning and a deep sense of herself and her own identity. Perhaps the greatest period of British history — considering cultural along with the political and military achievements — was the Elizabethan; and it was then that Britain confronted the massed might of a Europe bent on her extinction, and threw it back from her shores. It may, of course, be that that long experience, those many struggles, have now drained the British people of their will to survive, prosper, triumph; of, indeed, their sense of themselves. That will has certainly weakened; but there is no evidence that it is yet extinct. Our ability to survive and grow strong again depends above all on our ability to rediscover our sense of ourselves, our sense of who and what we are; and it is impossible for us to achieve that recovery within the maw of a European bureaucracy bent on turning our eyes in on the cape of a continent, and away from the perspectives of the wider world. An affirmative vote on Thursday is, in the strictest sense of the world, a suicidal vote: it would be one in which the great Island Race voted to end its own existence.
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