I have not read the full 1500 pages of the Trade treaty between the UK and the Evil Empire. I am sure that buried in the detail are a few dastardly measures from inserted by stormtroopers from the Death Star. I don’t need to fall asleep reading it; I just look at the reactions of those who have.
I note that we will not be able to sink French and Irish trawlers entering British waters for five and a half years. I can wait. But, overall, we can see by the splutterings of incoherent and illogical rage from the Guardian, the Independent, the arch Euro loons at the FT, the SNP and the Lib Dems that this is good news. The BBC reports on events in a mournful tone as if someone or something has died. And thus, I can conclude without doubt, that this is a good deal for Britain.
It would be churlish not to say that Boris Johnson seems to have done the right thing, playing hardball and showing how utterly treacherous and useless was his predecessor Mrs May. Please do not misunderstand me. The eco lunacy inspired by his consort Princess Nut Nuts and the civil liberties and economy crushing and utterly illogical response to Covid and the fawning and handouts to a public sector whose jobs are safe and already well paid, nauseates me as I remember who will pay for those handouts. Despite this Brexit news, this red wall Tory voter from 2019 will not be making that mistake again. Boris is a knob. But this deal is welcomed here.
On that basis, as I did on January 31 2020, #Brexitday, I am planning another bonfire for New Year’s Eve and again on the top of my fire will be a flag of the Evil Empire. No doubt, burning the EU flag – but not the Union Flag – is a hate crime in Wales these days but the Mrs, myself and anyone who wants to ignore Mad Mark Drakeford’s bonkers lockdown is welcome to join me at the Welsh Hovel just before midnight.
For, as you may know, this is in my DNA. My father’s father, Sir John Winnifrith, campaigned alongside his friend and ideological soulmate Tony Benn back in 1975 for the “No” side. And it is from him that I base a lot of my Euroscepticism. The middle-class public sector “working” lefty pals of the Mrs who screamed that all Brexiteers were rich alt-right freaks were met with a response that “I stand with Tony Benn. You stand with the CBI, the NFU, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley”. My grandfather said that the EEC would hike food prices, suppress wages and decimate jobs in industries such as fishing so screwing the working classes, while big business and big farmers prospered. He was completely right and now, 45 years later, we can start to reverse that process.
Oddly, almost all of Sir John’s descendants these days voted the wrong way in 2016. My family are affluent and usually work for the state. I am very much the black sheep in not going on a march for a “People’s vote”. You see, as Sir John did in 1975, I respected the fact that the people had voted. Over Christmas, a good number of my relatives said to me “let’s not talk about the Brexit disaster”. I suppressed a snigger at that point in the interests of family unity. But their horror was, of course, another sign that we had triumphed and the evils that Grandpa predicted can now start to be reversed.
On my mother’s side there was Uncle Christopher Booker who folks such as Nigel Farage have acknowledged as his inspiration. Chris voted the wrong way in 1975 but like Margaret Thatcher, who also voted the wrong way, came to accept that he had erred. He was for many, many years almost a lone voice of sanity exposing the madness of what was going on in Brussels. Laughed at, at first, his clinical dissection of what the EU was up to brought many to their senses and inspired tens of thousands to actually do something about it.
I remember Chris and a couple of businessmen speaking at a CBI fringe meeting in, I think, 1995. I was there. Few others were. The CBI was always a voice of Euro lunacy and in 1995 scepticism was very much a minority view everywhere, but especially among big business. Chris kept the flame alive and for that he should always be remembered.
There are others I shall remember on the 31st with a toast of finest Metaxa. My friend Andrew Bell’s father Ronald was one of the last 39 hold out Tory MPs in 1973. His career never recovered. Andrew, like myself, has Euroscepticism at the heart of his ideological DNA and will, I am sure, be celebrating that little bit more enthusiastically this New Year.
It is often said, by folks like the pals of the Mrs, who four and a half years ago shouted out as one on Facebook to my Mrs, a Brexit-supporting person of colour, that all Brexit supporters were racists, that we Eurosceptics hate Europe. Her pals just assumed, wrongly, that the Mrs was of colour and so must have voted the Guardian way. Patronising fools. But such is the GroupThink in such circles that the Mrs still does not dare to ‘fess up that she did actually vote with the majority back in 2016. But we, in the 52%, do not hate Europe. The Mrs would happily live in Sweden once again if she had the chance. I’d be living in Greece like a shot if the Mrs agreed. I am sure that my most ideologically pure friend from Oxford, the charming Elaine, will go to her French home when, back home in an Independent Scotland, the food starts to run out and the cats start looking nervous. Uncle Chris loved travelling across Europe, like me having a special fondness for Greece.
Many of us love Europe and Europeans more than you can imagine. It is just the EU, the Evil Empire, which we despise and in doing so we are at one with increasing numbers of our fellow Europeans who resent the way that corrupt politicians & bureaucrats collaborate with big business to screw the ordinary man or woman in the street. It is because, unlike the elites, we actually believe in democracy however folks vote, that across Europe we plebs started to revolt in 2016 and that revolution is not finished.
And so, when we toast Sir John, Chris, Ronald Bell and others on December 31, besides a roaring bonfire devouring an EU flag, we will speak not just for most folks here in Britain but also for many across Europe. Those growing band of deplorables can now take heart from the freedom and success that the UK will now enjoy and see that they can follow in our footsteps without fear, whatever the elites and a corrupt media tell them