Brexit came at the perfect time! The EU is now imploding,’ writes Bill Cash
Published: 01/02/2024
– 10:06
Writing exclusively for GB News membership readers, Sir Bill Cash says we left the EU at the perfect time
The referendum in 2016 was the biggest democratic decision for the British people for generations. In historic terms, it compares to other great watersheds in British history in times of war and peace: the conflict between the Crown and Parliament in the Civil War and Restoration in 1660; Britain’s development in the eighteenth century into a world power; our defeat of Napoleon in 1815; the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; the 1867 Reform Act that gave the vote to the working class; and with the development of our modern parliamentary democracy.
The issue of Home Rule, the First World War, then appeasement and the Second World War, dominated the first half of the twentieth century. It was at this time that the evolution of an integrated Europe impinged directly on the British people, leading to our joining the European Community in 1972.
What was at the heart of the referendum is simple: who governs us, in war and peacetime, and how, just as it was with these previous landmarks. As a result of the referendum, the essential foundations of sovereignty and democracy have now been re-embedded in our national DNA. From this question of freedom and democracy, everything else flows: our borders and immigration, energy, trade, innovation and our economic policies. On our democracy, all else depends.
William Pitt the Younger in 1805 said: “England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example”. By leaving the EU, we have done just this for ourselves.
We left the EU just in time, as our sovereign Parliament and unwritten constitution (unlike the other Member States), gave the British people the opportunity to decide in the Referendum, and before the EU itself began to implode, then followed by the legislation to implement this democratic will.
The question must be asked: “Would you want to rejoin the EU, where laws are made not by your elected MPs in Parliament, but by the Council of Ministers by majority vote of 27 Member States behind closed doors and without even a transcript?” Anyone with any sense would reject the latter.
There is a massive Brexit dividend in the very fact that having left the EU and having passed the REUL Act, we are no longer liable to the (minimum) 4,640 laws since we left the EU formally. Instead of having laws imposed upon us by the Council of Ministers behind closed doors by majority vote and without a transcript, we make our own laws in our own Parliament in accordance with the wishes of our own voters. There remain issues about UK parliamentary sovereignty over Northern Ireland which the new legislation will confirm. There is also the issue of the Stormont Brake over EU law, which itself is on the agenda today.
Many of the EU Governments are tearing their hair out over illegal migration, with severe backlash from voters, with the EU now imposing quotas and fines. For us however, no EU means no such laws. Many of the Member States will also likely have to have constitutional amendments and referenda, which will take forever. We, on the other hand, have legislation which is made in our own Parliament, although there is more to do.
Another major example is online safety – the EU has the Digital Services Act, which is nothing like as emphatic and effective as our own legislation. Our own Online Safety Act enables the UK to impose up to two years imprisonment on big tech bosses who “wilfully” use algorithms to induce self-harm or suicide, particularly in relation to young people. There are no such severe sanctions under EU law.
Regarding the REUL Act, the laws made by the EU when we were members, can be disposed of, with the removal of the principle of supremacy of EU law and of the European Court. Remember that these were imposed on us by naivety and foolishness when we abdicated our right to veto these laws and under Section 2 of the European Communities Act 1972. This was despite the White Paper preceding that Bill, which categorically guaranteed we would never give up the veto “in our vital national interest”. Not one single law since 1972 was ever rejected by our Parliament before we left the EU. Never forget that we were ahead of the world in our vaccine, which saved hundreds of thousands of British lives because we were not in the EU. They even passed a regulation to prohibit these vaccines. We have and must continue to revoke and reform former EU laws.
Ultimately, the position is that the regaining of our sovereignty is a further massive demonstration of the benefits of Brexit.
While Europe is plunging into recession, we are resilient, and our economy is improving. The constant negativity and bias permeating our society creates a false narrative that it is Brexit causing the current problems. In fact, it was the pandemic, Putin’s war on Ukraine and external global factors which generated understandable concerns among voters in the rise in the cost of living. Moreover, the IMF and Deutsche Bank report that Germany is losing its manufacturing dominance and the UK will soon outgrow Germany and France as they suffer from the failing Eurozone. In these difficult economic times, we are successfully meeting the economic challenges and increases in the cost of living and interest rates. There is more to do, but we have proved and continue to prove that Project Fear was utterly wrong and deliberately misleading.
We are besieged by Remainers and Reversers, including highly organised editorial propagandists in the BBC, paid for by our own taxpayers. But it is not just the BBC, but also those in high places in the Civil Service and members of the Diplomatic Service, who are increasingly openly resisting the democratic will of the British people expressed in 2016 and 2019.
We must look to the future. We need growth, productivity and true Conservative economic policies. The removal of REUL creates new and exciting opportunities for competitiveness, new technologies and innovation.
Brexit was absolutely the right decision for our UK democracy. As Churchill said: “Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried”.
