Flying Free (8 page)

Had this been any other contract, it would have been null and void because entered into on the basis of wilful misrepresentation. Had it been a marriage, it would have been annulled. The seducer lied throughout his wooing in order to get his hands on Britain's wealth, body and obedient service.

Peter Thorneycroft, Heath's colleague in the Royal Artillery and in the Conservative Party, openly declared their shared contempt for the democracy to which they owed their positions: ‘It is as well to state this at the outset – no government dependent on a democratic vote could possibly agree in advance to the sacrifices which any adequate plan for European Union must involve. The people
must be led slowly and unconsciously
into the abandonment of their traditional economic defences,
not asked
[my emphasis].'

Or, in other words, ‘The people are morons. We are intelligent. We have no intention whatever of serving them. They have elected us because we cleverly conned them, but they cannot be relied upon to run their own lives. We will therefore lie to them.'

If this is not a valid parsing of Thorneycroft's words and the European integration policy of both Labour and the Tories to this day, I would be very grateful if a senior politician of either major party would afford me an alternative interpretation.

They know my address. I am not holding my breath.

My blood was by now boiling. Just who did these people think they were by their own admission to blindfold their masters and lead them into sacrifices which they would never otherwise be willing to make? How could men afforded huge power and wealth by democratic process so sneer at democracy and use that power to undo it?

So determined was Heath to win his place in the history books that he gave away without mandate or popular sanction the entire British fishing industry and the world's richest fishing-grounds in exchange for British membership of the EEC.

He and his ministers lied about this too. The convenient acquisition of 80 per cent of Europe's fish-stocks and the destruction of a British industry employing not merely 30,000 fishermen but their wives, children and all
engaged in boat-building and maintenance, fish preparation and curing and related trades was not even included in the treaty.

It was thus a totally illegal bribe – part of the
acquis communautaire
as they politely called it – given by a British public servant without the authority of the British public in order to obtain his own way. It was as if a valet had given away his master's Rembrandt in order to get laid.

The loss to the British economy, to traditional communities and to employment was far greater than that suffered because of pit closures in the mid-eighties, and, where British mines were genuinely unprofitable, British waters were still teeming with fish and demand was higher than ever. Where British mineral deposits remain undamaged, giant French and Spanish trawlers now hoover up the contents of the oceans, destroying
fish-stocks
built up and nurtured over millennia, and British fishermen throw back, dead, up to five times the number of fish that they land.

Viruses do not exterminate their hosts. Farmers and fishermen do not destroy their own stocks because they know that they will provide a livelihood to their descendants. When let loose in others' territory, however, why not use slash and burn rather than husbandry?

It has been an ecological cataclysm and a wanton destruction of a priceless natural – and national – resource.

It was not necessary for me to be a bolshy bugger or a dedicated
sea-angler
(though I am both) nor to feel obscure frustration with my life to date (which, it is now plain, I did) for me to become very angry at all this. I – we, my children – had been cheated and betrayed for someone else's dream.

OK, OK. Take a pull, Farage. That was a shameful historical fact like, say, slavery. There are quite a few of them. We must indeed live with them and move on.

But slavery was long since proscribed. This was – this is – still going on. Year after year, more powers of self-determination were signed away to the corrupt, monolithic project, and we taxpayers are paying £45 million a day for the privilege.

The Tories modelled themselves, it seemed, on their most famously unsuccessful leader to date – Neville Chamberlain. They kept returning from negotiations in Europe waving scraps of paper and claiming that they
had won great victories – only for us to discover that they had in fact conceded more sovereignty.

The Lib Dems were wholly sworn to the European project – surely inconsistent in a party claiming ancestry from the Whigs, a party with those two words in its name, a party whose heartlands are the farming and
fishing-dependent
West Country and a party professing ecological concerns.

And Labour? Well, Labour were initially quite properly opposed, but who now remembers Tony Blair's sincere pledge to his electors in Sedgefield in 1983 that he ‘would negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC, which has drained our natural resources and destroyed jobs'? Certainly not Blair when once elected. His conversion really was overnight. He did not even, like the Tories, pay lip-service to British sovereignty.

Under Kinnock, Labour underwent a miraculous transformation similar to Blair's. It was apparently somehow left wing and right-on to be pro-EU and thereby right wing (very possibly fascist) to be opposed. Thus is the language reconstituted. It is now right wing to assert the power of the people and left wing to kowtow to unelected oligarchy.

The trick here is brilliantly simple and depends upon a two-party system. The Tories will strike anti-EU poses, make anti-EU noises and promise referendums whilst remaining committed to the cause of integration and signing the bulk of the articles of surrender. Labour will more aggressively and openly side with Brussels.

Euroscepticism thus becomes a feature of Conservative old fartery and Europhilia an espousal of modernity and egalitarianism. (Modern? A
prewar
trading-bloc run by authoritarian bureaucrats? Egalitarian? A
self-perpetuating
, dirigiste oligarchy which explicitly rejects democracy? Pah, and maybe even – yes, why not? – pshaw!) The electorate therefore swings from one to the other, with the young and idealistic who reject Toryism forced into the Europhile camp whilst Toryism offers a spurious refuge to those seeking security in the old ways and values. (Old ways? An unelected body assuming power over our people as surely as any invader?)

There was no other way on offer.

I grew angrier and angrier. No one – not one of the parties purportedly representing the will of the British people – was offering a voice to the view 
which I heard daily expressed at work, in bars and in the sporting-field. The newspapers and the other media simply disregarded the plaints of the farmers, fishermen and small business people losing their livelihoods due to the EU. The subject was like race or death. It was taboo. Its very discussion was embarrassing and disreputable.

And, as has been established, if a subject's very discussion was embarrassing or disreputable, I wanted to discuss it. In depth.

Yes, but what about the much-vaunted advantages in trade? Here above all I was surely qualified to judge. London, after all, was the world's biggest marketplace and I a coster at its heart. I traded with the entire world. Telephones shrilled like ululating squaws in those days. Each time I snatched up the receiver I had no idea whether the caller would be in Stockholm or Santiago.

And just as a tsunami of new technology was making global communication and trade instantaneous, these political Cnuts were leading us into a restrictive trading-bloc which ignored the wider world! What advantages could we possibly derive from that? This was Wellingtonian Toryism in the face of progress. Britain has yet to find a Brougham.

Mexico, I discovered to my fury, actually had a better trade deal with Europe than we, yet it had not conceded its power to make its own laws or to set its own interest rates.

I made deals daily with an independent Switzerland which had declined not only membership of the EEC but even of the European Economic Area yet still traded freely with every other nation in the world.

In fact, all four members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) – Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland – do more trade per capita with the EU than does Britain. Switzerland, like Liechtenstein one of the world's great financial centres, does twice as much trade, yet was not paying billions a year to be bogged down by regulations and pointless paperwork and sacrificing democratic government.

We had sold our birthright for a mess of potage.

And fifth-rate, stinking, mass-produced, toxic potage at that. 

In the European elections of 1989, I voted Green.

Well, why not?

Thatcher by now resembled a hard-pressed aurochs beset by bull-terriers, barely able, for all her might, to lumber through the forest for the Howes, Hurds, Heseltines and other bloated terriers nipping at her heels and dangling from her throat. Her anti-integrationist stance was admirable but futile whilst the rest of her party persisted in ‘denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands’ as per Toynbee’s prescription.

I might have been a Thatcherite but I certainly was not a Conservative if this was what Conservatism entailed. Labour and the Lib Dems both dutifully sang the old tunes of their respective clans but had abandoned the massed choirs to perform their own inharmonious descants.

The only party then avowedly Eurosceptic and consistently principled were the Greens, not least, perhaps, because they had never had a sniff of power in Britain.

Besides, I am a green at heart. I firmly believe that we should all cultivate our own gardens and that the greatest danger comes from those so alienated as to be bent on saving the entire planet according to one philosophical or political prescription.

People always scoff at nimbyism, but, if everyone were nimby and nurtured and defended their own with the love, dedication and knowledge
only possible for locals, the entire world would be at once vibrant, diverse and healthy. A mother loves her own child and knows its peculiar needs. She can only vaguely wish well to children in general. A farmer loves his land and stock. He can only hope for the best for an entire planet or for animals in general, and trust that those who understand specific species and habitats will care for them as well as he.

Supranationalism has been justified and billions spent on the decidedly dodgy premise that human activity is responsible for global warming. Whilst I’m all for common sense and buying local and seasonal (blessed diversity again), I am firmly convinced that all that time and money should have been devoted to allotments, sinking wells and teaching children to skin Thumper and eat ears and trotters rather than insisting on imports of hormone-stuffed patties made with prime cuts thousands of miles away.

Again, I suppose I come back to the same thing. The individual and his or her own community are best able to react appropriately to their own circumstances in accordance with their needs, priorities and conventions.

I still find it incredible that anyone purporting to be green can subscribe to standard provision for multiple diverse habitats with peculiar needs, but, of course, the Greens, having attained considerable clout in the EU Parliament, have also now become ardent supporters of the empire.

After casting my vote, I popped into the George and Dragon in Downe. When Bob Brett, the local Tory organiser, heard of my change of heart, he very nearly collapsed and had to be revived with ardent spirits.

My vote was, personally, a hugely significant break with the past. I was striking out on my own, no longer finding refuge in the compromises offered by conventional parties. I was drawing inspiration directly from values which I had cherished since childhood, regardless of the disapproval or incomprehension of my peers. So much at least had been changed by the accident and the illness.

My new-found convictions did not, of course, mean that I no longer sought the company and support of my fellows. I simply married the two things. In that same year, I founded a luncheon-club called the Column Club. We met at Simpson’s Tavern in Cornhill on the first Monday of every month. The criteria for membership were an appreciation of things
British (with particular reference to cricket), a resilient liver and a hearty appetite, and a deep mistrust of the European Union.

Aside from this new-found restlessness and a conviction that something must be done (which did not yet equate with ‘I must do something’) little in my life had changed. I was making a great deal of money. I was drinking and gambling it away as fast as I made it. I was still screwing up my marriage because I simply forgot it 90 per cent of the time. I was occupied and preoccupied.

So successful was the slow-creep strategy of the EU’s planners that at least 80 per cent of my friends and associates broadly agreed that it was a baleful influence upon our lives but for all that accepted it, much as we might accept the existence of an epidemic – not worth fighting save with a rabbit’s foot and a prayer.

I think it was then that I first became aware of the truth contained in Milton Friedman’s phrase ‘the tyranny of the status quo’.

It was not until 1991 that I encountered others who not only felt as I did but were prepared to do something about it.

Our second son, Tom, was born in that year. Our marriage, I think, was already dying.

How could it not be? I was never at home.

Commodities trading is like trench warfare. On a quiet day – and there were sometimes quiet weeks – there was a breathless hush in the
trading-rooms
and, although we stayed close at hand, we were out in the pubs, drinking, spread-betting on just about everything and playing practical jokes on one another.

Then the bombardment started. And all hell broke loose. Phones shrilled for split seconds before they were snatched up and millions were fired about the globe. Larynxes and nerves were worn threadbare as hour succeeded hour and deal succeeded deal. Oh, it was very heaven.

But then, I was twenty-seven. What on earth had made me suppose that I could be a devoted husband and father at that age when death or glory
awaited me on the field of battle and companionable carousing with my comrades when at last the New York silver exchange shut its doors at 7.25 in the evening?

Oh, yeah? You’re forty-five now. And you’re fit for marriage and parenthood, are you?

Look, I enjoy a good heckle, but these ‘some’ are getting on my nerves. Could you lock the doors this time?

Thatcher had been ousted and Maastricht loomed, a treaty which would enormously enhance the powers of the European institutions and effectively destroy the sovereign status of member-states.

Consider. It established European citizenship and laid down the agenda for the introduction of a European currency. It actually ceded in perpetuity the sovereign powers of the Queen in Parliament to an unelected body in Brussels.

It turned the entire British constitution on its head.

Now, it is grammatically nonsensical and wholly illegal for a constitution to be altered by a constitutionally elected government. It can be altered only by the will of the people who gave those temporary leaders their power.

And no British political party intended to challenge these impertinent usurpers who were about to sign away what was not theirs. Some Tories dared to object, but John Major called them ‘bastards’. In the words of Sir Peter Smithers, secretary general of the Council of Europe, ‘When the Maastricht Treaty was before Parliament, John Major forced it through by ruthless whipping and unacceptable personal pressures.’

So much for the ‘niceness’ of a Prime Minister principally remembered only for that quality and for adultery whilst espousing ‘back to basics’ to the people. So much, too, for democratic representation.

When, therefore, I saw an advertisement in the London
Evening Standard
for a meeting of the Campaign for an Independent Britain at Westminster Central Hall at which Labour’s Peter Shore and the Conservative John Biffen would be speaking, I went along in hope that I might learn 
something new or that someone could reassure me that I had read the whole situation wrongly.

Shore was a superb speaker. There were several hundred people in the audience. So far from reassuring me, he confirmed all my worst fears. The forthcoming treaty, he warned, would sound the death-knell of democracy. He advocated voting Labour. Biffen was less impressive but agreed that the treaty was an irrevocable renunciation of Parliament’s powers and of democratic process. He said that we should vote Tory. Both men declared the EU to be a distant, inefficient, unresponsive and unrepresentative system of government.

The meeting was thrown open to questions from the floor.

‘If we’re all agreed that the system is wrong,’ said one man, ‘why don’t we simply get out and return to governing ourselves?’

There was a deal of shuffling and mumbling on stage. Biffen gave it as his opinion that we should reform the EU from within rather than talking of withdrawal.

At that, another man sprang to his feet. He would later become a close colleague and loyal friend. He was a Sussex maths teacher, by name John Harvey. ‘Exactly how are we meant to reform the EU when we have a joke Parliament that refuses to represent its people?’ he asked. ‘And how can we make our will count for anything when qualified majority approval is needed for any change? I will stand as an Independent in the next election. It’s not much, but it’s all I can do.’

There was a cheer and an outburst of applause.

Another man stood. Scruffy but suited, with a pink marshmallow face, a boyish smile and a shock of surprisingly black hair, he declared above the hubbub, ‘No need. I intend to start a party which will lead Britain out of this mess. If you professional politicians won’t take that responsibility, we will.’

Soon afterwards, the meeting broke up. I, in common with many others, made my way towards these two men. I was inspired to meet for the first time people who not only shared my convictions and my awareness of the urgency of the situation, but were prepared to do something about it.

I shook the black-haired man’s hand and murmured something about helping if I could. I ascertained from those around that his name was Dr Alan
Sked. He lectured in European history at the London School of Economics and had written quite a lot of books which I hadn’t read, including
Great
Britain and the Continental Revolutions of 1848 and The Decline and Fall of the
Hapsburg Empire,
1815 –1918
. I felt still better about my own incredulous research. Here was a man who should know better than most others the nature and the extent of the EU threat, and he was taking it as seriously as I.

Sked was persistent and persuasive. Every halfway personable enquirer was at once recruited to stand for his ‘Anti-Federalist League’. These were the founding members of the General Committee, which soon became and which remains the National Executive Committee.

Some, notably John Harvey, who has been the party’s most adept fixer and editor of the newsletter and Gerard Batten, a BT sales executive who is now my colleague in the European Parliament, are still prominent in party affairs. Others such as Sked’s academic colleague Dr Helen Szamuely (who fancies that she was just Sked’s token female and whose sharp brain was a sore loss to the party) soon fell by the wayside.

For all his bids to obtain active supporters, the League was Sked’s invention and was intended to be made in his own academic image. Its name was modelled on Cobden and Bright’s Anti-Corn Law League, an organisation so successful that it achieved its ends and so its effective demise in the 1840s. Cute, and no doubt impressive to Sked’s colleagues, but not, perhaps, an allusion which would find resonance with the British public.

This, I confess, was my stated reservation from the outset. Sked seemed bright, sincere and affable, but soft, unworldly and strangely spoiled. He was accustomed to the autonomy of the academic – self-reviewing, unaccustomed to being edited or criticised save by his acknowledged peers – and I doubt that he acknowledged peers outside his own field. He was autocratic in style and a seriously bad organiser.

Hugh Moelwyn-Hughes, a solicitor from south Wales and another stalwart of the party from the outset, met Sked in 1992 and was at once asked to draw up a constitution for the then League. He did so with professional meticulousness, taking care to cover all the bases and assuming that many of the clauses would be amended in the course of subsequent debate. Sked
took one look at the impressive finished document and declared it ‘far too complicated.

‘So I went away, and this time I wrote the whole thing in the form of one-liners. Gross oversimplification, of course, but again I assumed that discussion would supply the necessary detail. I was asked to present it at a meeting at the LSE, and turned up to discover that Sked, without telling anyone, had invited members of the public along. He had also failed to tell the technicians that we would need a table and some chairs, so I had to sit on a dusty stage like a student at a poetry reading, proclaiming what had been intended to be a discussion document to an audience of complete strangers. One Tory heckler there jeered at my every word. It was the most embarrassing evening of my entire life.

‘So that version of the constitution was also rejected out of hand and the solution was that Sked wrote his own, which was very self-serving indeed, but was passed by a new and nervous committee.’

Others claim that Sked was a good orator. Again, I disagree. He was brilliant at exposition but wanted passion and responsiveness. He did not listen to others or venture into milieux other than his own. He therefore found it difficult to translate his high-flown theories into terms which reflected popular concerns. I shared his convictions and applauded his initiative, but the League seemed to me destined to be yet another
short-lived
special interest pressure-group.

I was considerably more impressed in truth by John Harvey and by another supporter, Major Michael Kelly, a charming and able man who knew a great deal more about administration and motivating all ranks than Sked and who would certainly have contested the leadership of the League had he not been struck down by a heart attack.

I was merely gratified to have my conclusions confirmed. I returned to work.

I noted with interest that Sked stood on an Anti-Federalist League platform in Bath in 1992 against the then Tory Party chairman,
arch-federalist
and later EU Commissioner, Chris Patten. Patten was trounced by the Liberal Democrat candidate, which was cause for celebration, but Sked, though attracting far more indulgent attention from the media than
we were able to command once an organised political party, was trounced by everyone, polling just 117 – 0.2 per cent – votes.