I voted for Brexit mainly because I realised contrary
to the Remain argument that leaving the EU would make Scottish independence all
but impossible. EU membership encourages sub-national nationalism by allowing
regions to argue that nothing much would change after independence. If the whole
of Belgium is in the EU and ruled by Brussels, it matters little if Flanders
and Wallonia separate. Who would notice?
I concluded that if the UK stayed in the EU, Scotland
would leave the UK knowing that there would be open borders, similar laws and
free trade with the former UK. I am satisfied that Brexit has indeed destroyed
the SNP argument, for which reason it is now floundering like a beached
Sturgeon.
My other reasons for voting for Brexit were to do with
parliamentary sovereignty. I did not want UK laws and the UK Parliament to be
subordinate to the EU. The USA would not accept being subordinate to the North
American Union with a capital in Managua. It would not allow its laws to be subordinate
to a court based in Tegucigalpa. Neither would Japan wish to be part of an Asian
Union run by Beijing, nor would Australia wish to be part of an Australasian
Union run by Jakarta.
The EU wants in time to be a United States of Europe.
If you don’t want the UK or Scotland for that matter to be a region of Europe
without sovereignty, then you have to vote to Leave.
But in every other respect I can think of Brexit has
been a disappointment even a betrayal. We were promised more money for the NHS,
but the slogan now looks cynical at best with the NHS collapsing. Someone told
me of a man who had badly broken his leg being refused an ambulance because his
condition was not life threatening. But it was agonising to get him into a car
and take him to the hospital.
I had hoped that the UK would undercut the EU by
offering a low tax, low regulation free trade hub that would encourage world
business and trade, but we have made limited progress.
Brexit promised us that the UK Government would have
control over its borders. It may indeed be in part that it does have such
control. But the control that it has used has been to give more visas to those
who wish to come than ever before.
Last year net migration was 504,000, this year it is
predicted to be 675,000. This may be taking back control, but it is not in the
way that most Brexiteers supposed.
There has been a lot of focus on people arriving
illegally in small boats from France. There has also been a lot of discussion
about sending some of these people to Rwanda. This now looks like distraction.
It is a government conjuring trick so that we fail to notice that the vast majority
of migrants arrive legally with visas at airports. Get people up in arms about
the relatively trivial numbers coming in dinghies. Make it seem as if we are
being tough on migration by sending them to Rwanda. Then let in legally more people
in one year than in any previous year in our history.
The key to continuing to allow more than a million
people every two years into Britain is to make it all but forbidden to criticise
it. Anyone who dares to object is immediately called a racist, which is now by far
the worst insult in the English language. It is an accusation that can have
life changing consequences. So naturally we are all very careful what we say.
I believe in treating everyone in the UK as having the
same right to live his life freely and with friendliness and respect from his
fellow citizens. It is quite wrong to have enmity towards someone because of
his religion or background. But the UK is being transformed in a way that no
one voted for. If you had offered voters a referendum in each year since 1945 on
whether they wished mass immigration to the UK, there is no doubt whatsoever
that in each year they would have voted no.
It could be that the Government has looked at the
demographic trends and thinks that the Welfare State, NHS and tax base requires
half a million new people every year. There are economic arguments for why open
borders are beneficial economically. But new citizens who have the same rights
as the rest of us will also require healthcare, schools and pensions and it
will be harder for the rest of us to find housing, access to a doctor and any of
the other public services which we pay for.
More important than any of this is that a country is
not merely a landmass. The UK is not primarily our little island and a chunk of
another, it is the people who have been living here since ancient times. If you
moved all of the millions of British people to Japan and moved all of the
Japanese to Britain, you would not have Britain a few miles from France, you
would have Japan.
Scottish Gaelic and Welsh are protected and supported
because they were spoken by our ancestors going back thousands of years. But
English too although learned now by the whole world, exists in the form that it
does because of our history. If Chaucer had not written in the way that he did
and if Shakespeare and Jane Austen had not developed our language, we would not
speak it as we do now. It is the language of our ancestors in a way that it is
not the language of anyone else even if he speaks English fluently.
No doubt there is room in Britain for half a million
more people a year to arrive for decades to come, but if you look at pictures
of British soldiers in World War One and even in World War Two, if you watch
British films from the 1930s to the 1950s, you will discover a Britain that is
completely unrecognisable compared with today.
If anyone from the first half of the twentieth century
arrived in London or any of the other large cities some of the buildings might
be familiar but everything else would come as an enormous shock. Where did all
these people come from?
I don’t want to be nasty to anyone who arrives in
Britain. Many do vital jobs and will bring with them useful skills which we
need. But if we keep adding half a million new Brits every year we are going to
quite rapidly get to the stage where we don’t have Britain anymore and the
description British will be so contrary to what it meant historically that it
will cease to have any meaning at all.
I fear that this is all quite deliberate. It won’t improve
if Labour wins the next General Election instead it will get worse. There is no
choice. There is nothing that can be done.
It’s not about small boats. It’s not about Rwanda. We
are being conned.
