#EUReferendum #VoteLeave My two pennies worth on the EU referendum

For the benefit of anyone who may be influenced by the opinions I express here, I must point out that I am well aware that I will be dead before the worst results of this country leaving or remaining in the EU become apparent. It's a factor which influences my vote in only a minor way but one that is only fair to point out. One further, slightly anarchic, influence is that I would dearly love to see this country's reaction to MPs should they refuse to enact the bills necessary to enable a departure. There is a faction within Westminster which is threatening to do exactly that, believe it or not.

Should it not already be obvious I shall be voting to leave the EU. I voted against joining in the first place and nothing I have seen since has altered my opinion one single iota. It always gave me an uneasy feeling about joining an organisation which was the concept of the pre-war Nazi party. A feeling that Angela Merkel has signally failed to dispel.

I have said elsewhere that I simply do not see the point in forming a small club wherein the benefit lies in exclusivity and then inviting every Tom, Dick and Harry to join as well. Particularly when Tom, Dick and Harry are unwell and wholly unable to pay their way. I am always willing to hear another opinion on this and if anyone can assure me that Albania, Serbia and the other East European proposed entrants will be able to pay the £350 million per week that we pay then I might change my vote. But nobody that I've heard can do that and so those countries and Turkey will be a constant drain on EU resources. There will be bailouts and then refusal to accept the fiscal measures required by the bailouts and then further bailouts to fund the original bailout terms. We've seen it all before with Cyprus and Greece - the figures these countries now owe the EU are astronomical. Anyone with the slightest common sense could have foreseen this happening and surely must question the wisdom of remaining in an organisation run by the kind of people who could not. I have always said that the key factor for assessing the viability of a country is whether it has a sound industrial or commercial base. Granted when Greece was a major shipbuilding country you might have made a case for its membership but it had lost that status to the Pacific rim countries long before joining and Cyprus never had any real economic basis for membership in its entire history. It may grow a decent grape, olive and citrus fruit but this even in conjunction with tourism is hardly a sound commercial justification.

It isn't long ago that Cameron (the lying git) told us that he had obtained an agreement from the EU that we should no longer have to contribute to a bailout fund for any member state if we had vetoed it. Then along came the Greek economic disaster and the next thing is - we are forking out £600 million without the option. Now there are are currently five further countries being talked about as new EU members - Turkey, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania - of which four are already economically unsound or in no position to become so. The fifth, Turkey, is an undesirable member for other reasons. So when those four go belly up you can multiply that £600 million by four which is, of course, £2400 million or nearly 2.5 billion squids. Can we afford that kind of outgoing when there will not be any kind of benefit in return? No we cannot, and there is no possible argument about it.

I say there is no argument but I suppose some would say that other East European entrants such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia have not had any kind of disaster but my response to that is that it is only a matter of time. And you can add Portugal, Malta and Poland to the list of possible defaulters while you're about it. Even if I'm wrong we will still have to fork out hundreds of millions in those ludicrous pre-accession assistance agreements and £640 million for Turkey under a recent deal.

In short I think that the economic prognosis for the EU in the coming years is pretty dismal and I haven't even mentioned the flood of immigrants/economic refugees/asylum seekers which will place a further burden on our dwindling national resources.

Yes I know my reasonings are oversimplified and unsophisticated but they really are all I have to go on. Not much less, in fact, than the majority of the other voters have I suspect.

Now we get to my more personal and esoteric reasons for wanting to get out.
The first of these is that I am instinctively repulsed by any cause supported by David Cameron. I think he is a greedy, self-serving mountebank of the very worst kind. He doesn't even have a nodding acquaintanceship with the truth and the further away from his influence the better this country will be. The fact that his cronies who have supported him with the REMAIN faction have been rewarded in the Queen's Birthday honours list makes me feel infinitely depressed. It devalues the awards given to those people who have actually earned them and is an insult to Her Majesty and this country.

The second reason I have for leaving is that most of those I have seen encouraging and supporting the REMAIN side seem to have personal or business reasons for doing so. I mean if you run a business which depends on European co-operation for its day to day running and commercial success then you might well vote to stay within the Union. But don't write articles in the press or appear on television declaring to one and all that staying in the EU is beneficial for everybody else. This country has stagnated industrially since joining. We've lost coal mining, shipbuilding, motor manufacturing and the steel industry. And this wasn't entirely the fault of the trades union or politicians as a substantial portion of the blame must be laid at the doors of feckless 'captains of industry' who put short term profiteering ahead of the best interests of the workers and of the country as a whole. Why should we believe them now?

The next reason for am immediate exit from the EU can be seen on the left. Yes, Neil Kinnock the dismal Labour Party leader who failed twice in succession to be Prime Minister. All the time as Labour leader he was vociferously against EU membership but he changed his tune when he was unaccountably offered a role as an MEP and he and his wife Glenys, who also took a role, have milked the system ever since. Between them they are reckoned to have amassed £250 million in pensions and other benefits mostly funded by us the taxpayer. When Glenys retired as an MEP she was elevated to the House of Lords where she immediately became one of those peers who enter the house by one door claiming their £350 payment, and straight away exit by another door.
I won't bore you with the activities of their son Stephen and his strange marriage to a former Danish MP who fiddled the Danish taxpayer with the same criminally deluded sense of entitlement as her parents-in-law.

Another personal reason can be seen to the left. How Obama had the cheek and audacity to come here 'advising' the British public to vote to remain in the EU is a mystery and source of constant peevishness to me. And then to threaten us with becoming a back number on America's list of trading partners. It is blatantly obvious that his real reason, far from any economic grounds, was to keep us in partnership with the European Defence Force and thus maintaining the power and influence of NATO.

One final point to consider is that George Osborne (a man whom I put in almost the same league of mendaciousness as David Cameron) has said today that in his first budget after a Brexit vote he will put 2p on the income tax and impose austerity spending cuts. I don't know what makes him think he will have the authority to do that after an exit vote. MPs will probably force a vote of 'no confidence' in Cameron which will mean a general election. In any case a true Brit would never give in to that kind of blackmail - we leave that to the French, Spanish and Italians.

Well that's about it really. As I said before, my ashes will have long been blowing in the four winds before the worst effects of a vote either way will become apparent (I hope). But I shall just add that if the country votes to stay within the EU and when people are queueing for basic supplies, having to wait months for a doctor's appointment and having their state pensions unpaid, you won't be able to say no one warned you.

Today we have lost a part of our national identity with the death of Baroness Thatcher

I often think that you can judge a person by the people who dislike them just as well, if not better than, by judging them by their friends.

Consider, for example, what was said by Sinn Féin politician Danny Morrison in 1982:
"Margaret Thatcher is the biggest bastard we have ever known"
To be hated and feared by scum like the IRA is praise enough by any standard.

Nor was she a friend of the E.U. She believed that the role of the European Union (then the European Community) should be limited to ensuring free trade and effective competition and not as a means of centralising government. I cannot imagine that we would have anything like the problems we currently have with the European court of human rights were she still in power. Abu Qatada and his ilk would be long gone. She was certainly no friend of terrorists whatever their nationality or religion.

I cannot imagine the kind of mess that David Cameron and his bunch of milk sop, u-turning and half witted cronies would have made of the Falklands invasion in 1982. Margaret Thatcher was no friend of aggressive, bully boy tactics.

I have always considered that the increasing power and consequent demands of the trades union has played no small part in this country's economic decline. And Maggie was certainly no friend of unions. When she came to power 1979 29 million working days had been lost due to stoppages and strikes. By the time she left office in 1990 the number of days lost were fewer than 2 million. It is also significant that union membership fell by 25% in the same period.

Of course her support of the highly unpopular community tax was a mistake but, what the hell, nobody's perfect!

All said and done, I would say that Margaret Thatcher had a lot in common with Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. She was certainly someone you would want on your side in a crisis.

RIP Baroness Thatcher - much admired and already greatly missed.

In or out of Europe, neither makes much difference to an old fart like me

The single benefit about being old is that I am free to express nearly any opinion while safe in the knowledge that I'll never have to live with the consequences of being wrong. Which is possibly the way that Cameron feels about promising an in/out referendum on the EU. Maybe he anticipates losing the next election and will never have to comply with yesterday's promise.

I have never been in favour of EU membership. I simply cannot see the point of an exclusive trading club which permits membership to virtually all comers. My EU would never have permitted Greece to join nor indeed Spain and Portugal. Nor Cyprus. And it would have also been a definite NO to any of those East European financial disaster areas. Any country whose economy is based on tourism, service industries or winegrowing would have been precluded.

Nor indeed do I see the point of joining any organisation in which we would be the only member making the slightest attempt to stick to the rules. Just look at what has happened to the fishing and farming industries. Only a fool would not have seen that Spain would totally ignore any rules on fishing and that France would try to destroy British farming.

Whatever! It's too late now. And I suspect it's too late to contemplate withdrawal. Nor do I think that it is a particularly good idea to place such an important matter in the hands of Sun and Daily Mail readers.

However I wish that Cameron had based his promise on what's best for the country rather than on fear of UKIP and his own backbenchers.

I think Miliband has been rather cunning by coming out against a referendum because someone had to take that stance. He would have gained nothing at all by being in favour and at least he has provided those against with a party for whom to vote in the next election.

With any luck I won't have to decide which way to vote as I might well have croaked my last before 2017.

Liberal EU luvvie in loony war forecast

It seems that after the rather strange award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU, the luvvies had to dig up someone to justify it. And they chose Vince Cable who is, understandably, concerned about his prospects of a cushy EU job disappearing as a result of an unfavourable referendum result.

Europe could be plunged into war if the euro collapses, Vince Cable warned last night.
The Business Secretary said the consequences would be 'incalculable' for Europe and 'awful' for the UK but cautioned that there was 'no automatic guarantee' that Europe would not disintegrate into conflict.

If he watched the news reels of Angela Merkel's visit to Greece, didn't he wonder what the result of the EU staying together might be?

Why would the consequences for Europe be 'incalculable' yet only 'awful' for the UK? Do our calculators work better than those in Europe?

There is no automatic guarantee of anything but I put quite a lot of faith in our little fleet of nuclear submarines, our battlehardened troops and our squadrons of Typhoon and Tornado GR4 aircraft as a deterrent to the merely 'awful'