2024 – OUR NEW YEAR’S MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIRMAN
A happy new year for 2024 to all our supporters and to the British people who are the heroes who rightly voted for us to leave the European Union in 2016.
Last year, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the European Foundation with a widely televised event and our pamphlet “Completing Brexit: A Democratic Necessity” (please refer to our website “Completing Brexit: New launch of the European Foundation, 31/1/2023).
As ever, we continue to entrench and consolidate our restored sovereignty, our democracy and our freedom, in line with our logo, which is “sovereignty is democracy”. I have challenged Remainers and Reversers in the House of Commons to answer a simple question: will you publicly ask your constituents, and would they ever agree to the following – Would you want to return to our country rejoining the Members of the European Union whose laws are made not by your elected Member of Parliament in the House of Commons, but by the Council of Ministers by majority vote of 27 Member States behind closed doors and without even so much as a transcript, as we have in our Parliament?
Not once have any MPs ever dared to reply to my question. The sheer fact is that these issues are about who governs the United Kingdom and how voters hold the Government to account in their Parliament. It cuts across every Government department and every law that is made and impacts every single person in every aspect of their daily lives. It is the most important democratic issue of all.
We have been vigorously pressing the Government for control over our borders and against illegal migration. This came to a head in the Second Reading of the Rwanda Bill on which I spoke, as did David Jones, our Deputy Chairman, calling on the Government to guarantee the sovereignty of the laws passed in your Parliament and its democracy. This is in line, as I mentioned, with all the preeminent jurists for generations and judgments of the House of Lords and the Supreme Court up to and including the judgment in the Supreme Court in November. We are now engaged in discussions with the Government on these fundamental principles and the mechanics of the Bill, which will require amendment. We engaged in a mass abstention at Second Reading to give notice that we were dissatisfied, but that the Government could yet, during the rest of the Bill’s passage in Parliament, rectify the deficiencies that we pointed out and to give the Government time to do this. We are now involved in intensive discussions and negotiations with the Government about how to achieve our objective, which is “to make the Bill work”. To have voted against the Bill, at that time, would not have been successful. The Government now has the time and opportunity, as do other Conservative Members of Parliament, to realise what needs to be done, as set out by the Star Chamber, of which I am Chairman, on 11th December (please read the Star Chamber report here).Star Chamber 11th December 2023 Report
Furthermore, at that point in time, many Members of Parliament needed time to consider our report and absorb the deficiencies of the Bill whilst the Government was bringing people back from every corner of the world on a rushed timetable, and before we could muster the numbers that were required to force the issue.
As the General Election approaches, we will continue to engage in and intensify our research into the evolution and origins of Brexit in Parliament and outside, and its overwhelming advantages democratically and economically in our national interest. This includes diaries, pamphlets, books,memoirs and other records old and new, now and into the future, as the consolidation of Brexit beds down into our constitutional arrangements and the functioning of Government with the new freedoms that Brexit provides. We also continue to work with other likeminded thinktanks, such as the Bruges Group, to whom I spoke at their recent ‘Brexit and the National Interest’ Conference, and at which I recalled my creation of the Friends of Bruges Group in Parliament itself. This was the springboard to the Maastricht Rebellion against John Major’s Government and against the Treaties of Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon under Tony Blair’s Eurofanatic Government. The Maastricht Referendum Campaign began a continuous campaign for a referendum and a whole series of Referendum Bills and amendments to legislation which I and my colleagues promoted. All this culminated in the decision to leave the European Union in June 2016, followed by the legislation necessary to restore the sovereignty of Parliament and the new opportunities this brings in the national interest.
These new opportunities are already apparent in the comparison between the United Kingdom and the European Union since we left. For example, it is becoming clear that Britain will outgrow Germany for years to come as the Eurozone falters and as the continent faces a deeper recession with higher interest rates. Indeed, Germany is in the midst of a budget crisis after its Supreme Court ruled that the Government broke the law by using the money for Covid to fund net zero spending. Even the International Monetary Fund indicates that Germany has been losing its manufacturing dominance and that the United Kingdom will be outgrowing Germany from now until 2028 at least. Our own economy, according to Deutsche Bank, has been very resilient and our household and corporate balance sheets are extremely strong. By contrast, the Eurozone is already regarded as being in recession – so much for project fear, run by David Cameron, George Osborne and those who wanted us to remain in the European Union during the referendum campaign. In the meantime, across the whole of Europe, as I have predicted for decades, the European Union itself, like a Ponzi scheme, is imploding under the economic and democratic tug of war in all the major Member States and is increasingly under pressure from the voters.
Running parallel to this is the work of the European Scrutiny Committee (of which I have been Chairman since 2010 and a Member since 1985) and its archives, which are in the public domain and, of course, Hansard itself.
Inevitably, we are now also engaged in a Brexit fightback against the Remainers and Reversers, who obstinately and perversely refuse to recognise the progress that has been made in the UK since 2016.
It is therefore important at the beginning of this new and vital General Election year of 2024 to reflect on what has been achieved since the creation of the European Foundation and the Maastricht Referendum Campaign.
I founded both the European Foundation and the Maastricht Referendum Campaign in 1993, which were the origins of Brexit, with the help of valiant volunteers and MPs as part of the Maastricht Rebellion in the Commons. MPs were supplied with essential briefs and research explaining how the Maastricht Treaty was creating European government and must be opposed. Its objective was step by step to protect UK sovereignty, which had been abandoned when we entered the European Community in 1972. I became a member of the European Scrutiny Committee in 1985 and put down my first amendment in 1986 to reverse the erosion of our sovereignty in the 1986 Single European Act, but was refused even the right to debate it. The European Foundation, of which Margaret Thatcher became the patron and donor, has led the continuing battle to successfully and uncompromisingly restore that sovereignty ever since. She wrote herself that “The work of the European Foundation in researching and publishing information about European issues is vital both to the Conservative Party and the country”.
Sovereignty is the right whereby a nation can govern itself through laws made by the electors’ own MPs in a free democracy. Sovereignty is therefore democracy. The real effective and definitive decisions and laws are made in our own Parliament.
The Referendum route was vital to obtain the vote of the electors to bypass the collusion between the front benches who were determined to stay in Europe at any price. A referendum could only be done by a sovereign Act of Parliament. Margaret Thatcher voted in her last Commons vote in favour of one of my many Referendum Bills and amendments. During the Maastricht Rebellion, I tabled in my own name hundreds of amendments in the Commons for resisting European government and the Maastricht Treaty and voted 49 times against a three-line whip, and also throughout the Treaties of Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon up to 2009.
Success at last came in Parliament with the Referendum Act in 2015, achieving victory in 2016, despite the misrepresentations and lies of Project Fear, which never materialised. In 2019, the 28 Spartans voted against May’s Third Withdrawal Agreement, forcing her resignation and ending parliamentary paralysis, leading to Boris Johnson’s premiership and the Conservative victory with a massive majority in 2019, endorsing the 2016 Referendum result. This could only be done successfully in Parliament itself by passing the necessary legislation which, of course, could not be achieved by any other political party with no Members of Parliament and no prospects of ever having a majority in Parliament to secure these historic objectives in the national interest. This remains true today and will remain so at the General Election. All they can do is to let in the Eurofanatics and economic busting Labour Party, and on top of that, promoting a policy of proportional representation, which means that we would never achieve the benefits which Brexit offers. Proportional representation will create deadlock and lead to electoral paralysis, dominated by Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and the Green Party – nothing but compromise and stalemate. However, the Government itself has to do much better in delivering Conservative policies, as advocated by the New Conservatives group under Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger, and as set out in David Jones in his article for the Daily Mail on 31st December 2023 (please refer to the Daily Mail article here).Safari – 4 gen 2024, 14:19
My negotiation of the passage of Section 38 of the Withdrawal Agreement Act 2020 with Boris Johnson guaranteed in law UK sovereignty and expressly provided for overriding the WithdrawalAgreement and the Northern Ireland Protocol, through the now famous “notwithstanding” formula,which binds the judiciary, precisely because it is express wording.
The passage of the Retained EU Law (REUL) Act, under the guidance of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, in June 2023 was also a fundamental necessity. The laws imposed on us by the European Union when we were members, can now be disposed of, although we need even more revocation and reform in the coming months, on which the European Scrutiny Committee is currently reporting. This Act followed a report by the European Scrutiny Select Committee and papers which I delivered to the Prime Minister personally. The report insisted on the removal of the principle of supremacy of EU law and of the European Court and the removal of those laws. These laws were imposed on us when we abdicated our right to veto these laws under Section 2 of the European Communities Act 1972. This was despite the White Paper preceding that Bill, which dishonestly guaranteed we would never give up the veto “in our vital national interest”. However, those negotiating our entry into the EU covered up and admitted later that they had totally failed to understand and explain the deliberately undemocratic system devised by the legal framework of the European Community, in the making of laws to which we were subjugated in 1972.
Indeed, the Chief Negotiator, Sir Con O’Neill, in his 1972 report, which was only published in 2000, to the then Foreign Secretary on the outcome of the negotiations between 1970-1972 stated that negotiations were “peripheral, accidental and secondary… what mattered was to get into the Community… we had to get in”. On whether we got a good bargain, he said “I am on the whole rather complacent”, later admitting he “failed to grasp” the European fundamental “political objectives in mind”, adding “I am sorry to say we probably also thought that it was not fundamentally important”. This astounding undemocratic subjugation and state of affairs is what the Remainers are now defending, in defiance of the Referendum and the 2019 General Election.
Not one single law since 1972 was ever rejected by our Parliament before we left the EU. It is clear that the self-government and democracy we have historically restored in leaving the EU isillustrated by the following examples. We were ahead of the world with our vaccine, which saved hundreds of thousands of British lives. The EU even passed a regulation to prohibit these vaccines. Another glaring example was the Ports Regulation, which was fruitlessly opposed by all the employers, unions and the Government at the time, to no avail. We are now embarked on a systematic plan to repeal swathes of EU laws. The fact we have left the EU has enabled us to pass the Online Safety Bill, very soon to receive Royal Assent, to protect children from online harm, which is very significantly stronger than EU legislation to which we would have been subjectedhad we not left the EU. The EU Digital Services Act falls very far short of what we are doing in our own Parliament. The list of legislation which we are passing to reclaim our statute book is growing every month and there is further evidence from press reports and commentaries of the economic advantages that we regain from leaving the European Union.
The same applies to all legislation, such as on immigration, which we are now able to pass on our own terms as an independent nation. It is this issue of sovereignty and success which lies at the heart of our concerns about the Rwanda Bill, and this is why we are conducting intensive negotiations with the Government to improve it and to “make it work”. The European Foundation is compiling an analysis of the legislation we need and what EU legislation needs to be disposed of to increase competition, enterprise and business opportunities, as well as other legislation relevant to all Government departments. The expertise of the European Foundation and our allies in other thinktanks complements the work of the European Scrutiny Select Committee, which is engaged in its own enquiry into Brexit and its consequences and advantages.
Once simply and properly explained, the British people will never revert to being governed by 27 other countries, with laws made by majority vote of the Council of Ministers behind closed doors without even a transcript. It may suit many member states, but it manifestly did not suit the UK,with its long history of democratic independence.
Constant negativity and bias in the media permeating our society creates a false narrative that it is Brexit which has caused our current problems. In fact, it was external global factors, such as the Covid pandemic and Putin’s war on Ukraine which generated concerns among voters in the rise in the cost of living, inflation and the impact on mortgages. A House of Lords Committee recently confirmed, contrary to the falsehoods of Project Fear (including the infamously biased £10million Government pamphlet published during the Referendum in 2016), that “London has retained its position as the world’s second largest (or most important) financial centre and the most important inEurope”, and as confirmed by the Governor of the Bank of England. As we laid bare the false assertions of Project Fear, we must now expose with campaigns the false assertions being portrayed in the media and prove that it is now demonstrable from official statistics that Brexit is working. For example, our GDP growth rate for both 2021 and 2022 is higher than that of the EU(2021: UK 8.7%, EU 5.7%, 2022: UK 4.3%, EU 3.4%).
The European Foundation has already launched a vital examination of the myths and misrepresentations (as we did during Project Fear) currently promoted by Remainer/Reverser forces. The Foundation will use properly sourced accurate data and statistical analysis, both domestic and external, to provide a platform of accurate information to demonstrate the advantages of Brexit and to expose these misrepresentations. This data will be generated with respect to all Government departments and commercial and business opportunities. These include global international trading (BEIS), Defence and Security, including AUKAS, farming, agriculture and fishing, transport, energy, including North Sea licences and electric battery manufacture, inward investment and economic policies to reduce inflation which is caused by external global factors (by Covid and the Ukraine war), with its impact on cost of living and mortgages. The European Foundation is also engaged on dispelling woke and its Marxist origins.
We must look to the future against the background of this historic revolution of Brexit, and explain this by research, analysis and publications, which we are doing – and thereby, show the relevance of all this to our democracy, freedom and sovereignty as it evolved, and its impact on our daily lives, what and who we were up against and are still up against now.
We need growth, productivity, tax cuts and true Conservative economic policies. The removal of REUL creates new and exciting opportunities for competitiveness, new technologies and innovation (which by common consent, the United Kingdom leads globally and with investment). We no longer have to make large contributions to the EU. As promised NHS spending has increased, by more than the savings from Brexit so far. We no longer have to accept the accumulating debts and liabilities of the EU. Since we left, the EU has started to borrow large sums in its own name to spend mainly in the financially stressed countries of the Union, which is now in recession. All that debt becomes a burden on the taxpayers of all the member states, the only source of money to pay for it.
There is also the absolute need, on which the European Foundation has campaigned continually since 1993, to insist on complete impartiality in the BBC (The Royal Charter Purpose 1, which I proposed to the Government in 2015) and in OFCOM, who are the regulator for all visual and oral media.
But all this is not enough. The European Foundation is therefore now engaged in a seminal fight back in good time against the Reversers/Remainers before the General Election. Our advisory board includes pre-eminent Parliamentarians, economists and writers in the media. Many Reversers have embedded themselves in critical and unelected parts of our national life and public service,including the Civil Service. Of course, the same applies to the Labour Party, whose leader and policies cannot be trusted on Brexit, nor can any of the other political parties who cannot deliver a majority in the House of Commons, which is essential in order to govern and to pass the necessary legislation. In pursuit of all this, we will organise meetings, campaigns and conferences with preeminent speakers from the print and broadcasting media, and from academia and thinktanks, with whom we will be working closely on a united front – as well as our continuous commentaries on our website.
It is through the European Foundation and its allies that the Conservative successes and commitment to the Brexit process, which originated in the 1980s, generated the historic revolution toleave the EU.
We are determined to reinforce and maintain this success in the national interest. Our past record over many decades is guaranteed evidence of our future success in this mission. We are deeply grateful to those who have supported us over the years and look forward to receiving their continued support into the future.
A very happy new year to you all!
Chairman, European Foundation
