As an enthusiastic supporter of Brexit, I was surprised to be told that I had been asked to write this essay because EW wished to publish a “contrarian view”. Supporting the will of the majority is hardly contrarian, and for it to be widely regarded as such highlights the propaganda success of the real contrarians, the powerful and arrogant section of the British political, academic and media establishment (including the once proudly independent BBC) that has no respect for democracy and likes to justify its attempts to undermine Brexit by claiming that those who voted to leave the EU are “ill-educated”, the lumpen proletariat. Having a Cambridge doctorate, a professorship and a career in international banking and finance, I rather resent this! In the nitty-gritty of negotiations, its easy to forget the principles for which the British people voted for Brexit. Quite simply, we want our independence, which is something that people in India will not find difficult to understand. We want to govern ourselves, have no interference in our legal system, control our own borders, trade with whomever and on whatever terms we wish, and stop paying huge net contributions to a vast, wasteful, self-perpetuating, unelected and anti-democratic bureaucracy in Brussels. What the EU has become with its call for “ever closer union” and a “United States of Europe” is far removed from the innocuous European Economic Community (EEC) that we joined in 1973. Nicholas Ridley was sacked from Margaret Thatchers cabinet in 1990 for saying that European economic and monetary union was actually a “German racket”, a means for Germany to achieve its ambition of dominating the continent without firing a shot. But he was right. Anyone with a sense of history knows that Britain is not really part of Europe at all. General de Gaulle, the arrogant and ungrateful Free French leader, who was hosted by Britain during World War II and became Frances first post-war president, was nevertheless right when he vetoed Britain’s first application to join the EEC: “England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her interactions, her markets and her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries… She has, in all her doings, very marked and very original habits and traditions”. Historically, our involvement in Europe has meant appalling wars and loss of life and wealth. Its only outside Europe that we have succeeded so brilliantly, not only in material prosperity but in giving so much of the world our durable language and our parliamentary, legal and commercial systems that help to explain why the sun is rising again so brightly in the East. The trading and commercial opportunities for Britain unshackled from the EU are huge, but establishment propaganda dwells only on the dangers of leaving Europe, despite the fact that all prognostications of economic disaster have been proved wrong. On the contrary, it is the EU that is doomed, and we should get off the European Titanic before it hits the iceberg.…
