Well said Sammy - nail on head!
DUP's Wilson: May must show EU she is prepared to walk away
by
Sammy Wilson MP
The referendum result was a surprise to the complacent elite in the UK and the EU who were convinced that the population would never dare to ignore the scaremongering tactics used during the referendum.
Nor did they believe that the people of the UK would have the optimism to believe that we did not need our hand held by the unelected patronising bureaucrats in Brussels in order to succeed in the world.
There was always going to be a fight back to overturn the referendum result. After all that is what the EU and its cheerleaders have done in every country where the people dared step out of line. Since June 2016 there has been a guerrilla warfare being conducted by the EU fifth columnists in the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the chattering classes and the various sectoral groups who are in hock to the EU.
Northern Ireland has been thrust into the front line in this battle. The border with the RoI has taken on a significance it does not warrant in an effort to keep the UK in both the EU Customs Union and the Single Market. The argument that the land border between NI and the RoI would become a back door by which the EU’s ring of steel against cheaper and often better non EU goods would enter is nonsense.
Given its nature and the arrangements already in place to deal with the fiscal, currency and regulatory boundary which already exists the Irish border could be better controlled and would be far less porous than EU boundaries in Eastern Europe or the Mediterranean countries. Every day excise duty and VAT is collected from cross border trade in Ireland without a vehicle being stopped. Are we seriously supposed to believe that when the UK leaves the EU this ability will suddenly disappear?
To check on cross border trade we are told that there would have to be a hard border and this would leads to as renewal of terrorist violence and would be against the Belfast Agreement.
First of all what do those who talk about a hard border mean? Checkpoints, army and police patrols, watchtowers, road closures. What would be the point. We had 50,000 troops in NI during the troubles and they couldn’t seal the border. It is a fact that no matter how hard the border it would not achieve the result that the EU wanted ie.. the exclusion of goods from outside the customs union.
Secondly, both the EU and the Irish government have consistently dismissed out of hand all suggestions as to how trade could be monitored using the existing infrastructure on the border, trusted trader arrangements, electronic monitoring of trade, GPS technology in vehicles the only equipment being required is the driver’s phone and a range of other methods which the Permanent Secretary in HMRC,his counterpart in the RoI, former Irish Prime Ministers and a host of experts have said would avoid any border checks. Furthermore these methods could be applied at ports in the UK where the potential for disruption is far higher because of the volume of trade compared to the minor amounts of trade across the Irish border.
Thirdly, the real conflict with the Belfast Agreement lies with the EU and Irish government proposals because in effect they would remove NI from the UK. A vital part of the Belfast Agreement was that the constitutional status of NI could only be changed by the consent of the people of NI not by EU dictates or Irish mendacity.
The real interests of the Irish lie with keeping open markets with the whole of the UK. More Irish trade goes to GB than to the whole of the EU and loss of that market would ruin their economy. On top of this 80% of its EU trade has to go through GB and the Irish can’t afford delays on this route, so the important border is the Irish Sea border rather than the NI border. That is why the current Irish government are mad to act as agents for the EU arguing for a hard line to be taken with the UK in these negotiations. They ought to be arguing for a trade deal which causes no disruption to trade.
It is now time even if it is late in the day for the PM to put her foot down and make it clear that even though it is not the ideal outcome, if the EU and the Irish continue to dismiss all the reasonable suggestions made by the UK government and keep using every device to keep us in the EU in all but name then she will walk away.
That would leave the EU without the £40bn it so desperately needs from the UK. It would shut the agri food industry in the RoI out of its main market putting tens of thousands of jobs on the line. It would disrupt huge sectors of the German, French, Spanish and Italian economies and would quickly bring the intransigent, bullying, and arrogant EU negotiators back to the table. It is time for the PM to show if she has the steel of Margaret Thatcher. Time to get her handbag out and start swinging.
