ON Saturday a crowd of 5,128 turned out at Carlisle United’s ground to watch the home side draw in a League Two game against Accrington Stanley.
That attendance might be dwarfed by the gates in the Premier Legue but it was still far higher than the pitiful number of demonstrators who gathered in London on the same day for an anti-Brexit rally.
According to police estimates there were just 4,000 people at this damp squib of an event. Its farcical nature was symbolised when a masked man ran off with the pink beret worn by Eddie Izzard, the transvestite comedian, though the police soon caught the thief and returned the cherished headgear to its owner.
The London flop was not the worst of the Remoaners’ humiliations at the weekend. A “march for Europe” demonstration in Edinburgh attracted little more than 100 people while there was a laughable turnout of just 75 for a similar event in Cardiff.
Once again the pro-EU zealots have shown their hopeless disconnection from the mainstream British public. They lost the argument in the referendum and now they are losing all credibility. But even now, the Remoaners will not give up.
Their worship of the federalist ideology runs too deep, their contempt for British nationhood is too great. Cheered on by their allies in the media, who gave an absurd amount of coverage to Saturday’s miserable marches, the fanatics still fight to keep Britain under Brussels rule.
Apart from court actions, threats of Parliamentary challenges and calls for a second referendum, their new ruse is to demand that Britain should stay within the European Single Market even if Brexit is formally enacted. In the same language they used about the EU, they now present such membership as vital to our prospects.
That was the case set out yesterday by the Tory MP Anna Soubry, a Europhile and enthusiast for mass immigration. Having extolled the supposed virtues of the Single Market in facilitating trade, Ms Soubry warned that key elements of our service sector “would greatly suffer if we left”.
This is just Project Fear reheated, a reprise of the doom-laden propaganda that did not convince voters the first time round. In the desperate hope of thwarting the popular will, the Remoaners have turned the Single Market into their very own Berlin Wall, the last line of defence against the destruction of their increasingly discredited ideology.
But their attempt is bound to fail, for the Single Market is just another part of the sclerotic EU structure which has brought misery to Europe. Like the single currency, the Single Market has been a vast engine of soaring unemployment, bureaucracy and spiralling debt.
Again, like the euro, the Market is not an economic construct at all but rather a vehicle for promoting political unity. That is why it places such neurotic emphasis on the free movement of people, because mass immigration obliterates national identities and thereby paves the way for the superstate.
As Jacques Delors, the former president of the EU Commission and architect of the Single Market once put it: “Europe cannot obtain political union unless it is in control of its economic destiny. That is why we need an organised economic area.”
It is just more scaremongering to pretend that, for the sake of our economy, we must remain in this federalist mess. Continuing Single Market membership will cause real damage.
If we stay, we will have to fork out a huge financial contribution to Brussels, losing all the benefits of the Brexit dividend. We will also have to accept free movement, with all the consequent social upheaval and burdens on our public services.
Every petty-fogging EU regulation and directive will have to be implemented, no matter what the cost to British businesses, while our country will still be under the jurisdiction off the European Court of Justice.
Moreover, the prices of household goods will be kept artificially high by the costs of EU subsidies and external tariffs. Single Market membership is not Brexit at all. It is just the maintenance of the EU regime under a different name.
That is not what the British people backed in the Referendum. The majority wanted independence, not continued subservience.
Contrary to the claims of the Remoaners, we can continue to trade productively with the EU if we leave. Like every other nation that is a member of the World Trade Organisation, we have full access to the Single Market.
China and the US, neither of which contribute to the EU or accept free movement, each sell more goods to Europe than Britain does. Besides, it is easy to exaggerate the importance of the EU to Britain’s fortunes – only six per cent of British firms do any kind of business with the EU at all.
Liberated from Brussels we can take our place on the global stage. Already our new government is lining up trade deals with countries like Australia and India, both rapidly growing economies.
It is also likely that whatever outgoing President Obama says, we will conclude a trade agreement with the US long before the EU does. For the first time in more than 40 years our fate will be in our own hands, not those of an alien oligarchy.http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/leo-mckinstry/707171/Leo-McKinstry-Single-Market-EU-another-name-comment
