Dear Sir,
An observation in response to the letter from Eileen Brewis about BREXIT in the Newton News of 5th October.
I don’t know the lady’s age and whether she took part in the 1974/5 vote (referendum) which took us into the Common Market.
Unfortunately the people were deceived by Edward Heath the Prime Minister when he told us that we were simply voting for a tariff-free European market in goods and services.
He did not tell us that he had signed up to ‘ever closer union’. Had he done so and explained what that meant I and probably many others would not have voted in favour.
Now we know what ‘ever closer union’ entailed and obviously many people expressed their dislike when asked to vote for our continuing membership of what is now called the ‘European Union’.
Such membership entails: it costs us billions of £s a year; a European Parliament which shunts between two locations at great expense every year, and whose purpose is not obvious; we have an unelected Commission, which has considerable power and influence over our country; supporting the EU we have a huge bureaucracy against which there are statements of incompetence and alleged corruption; sizeable salary and pension costs; and worst of all the ECJ which can overrule our own Supreme Court.
In 1974/5 we were not asked to vote for any of that and we did not vote for any of that. And we speak of democracy!
We have had 2 Referenda on this subject, this time those on the Remain side want another Referendum because they do not accept the result, which did not happen on the first occasion.,
No UK government since World War 2 has received a majority of the popular vote but they still assumed power.
Somebody has claimed that a Macmillan Government in the 1950s did have such a result. As a teenager in the 1950s I was not interested in politics so cannot say whether that is correct.
Mrs Thatcher achieved circa 40% of the popular whereas Mr Blair had 34% but still had a massive majority in Parliament. Those do not reflect TRUE DEMOCRACY and we claim to be the home of democracy.
In none of those elections was there an outcry for a rerun of the vote.
They were simply accepted, but our first example of TRUE DEMOCRACY is now under pressure to be rerun because some do not like the result.
As for all the potentially disastrous predictions of the outcome of Brexit, they are, as usual, exaggerated and should be ignored as usual.
An afterthought occurs to me. We fought the Germans twice in the 20th century to thwart their intentions of overrunning Europe and that cost us many lives and significant debts which we only cleared in 2005.
Those countries we fought to defend are now quite content to be controlled by German power in the EU!
Yours truly
Frank Haylett
Heighington
