Keep your nose out, Obama! Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage to prospects for world peace in the nearly eight years of your disastrous presidency?
So writes Rev Dr. Peter Mullen as the US President makes his case for us to stay in the EU. Dr Mullen goes on to say:-
“His latest conceit is to use the occasion of his coming to the Queen’s 90th birthday party to tell the British to remain in the EU. “you will be stronger for your belonging to this union,” he said. Imagine his reaction – and the entirely justified fury of the American people – if David Cameron said, “Well, Barack, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The USA would be stronger if you formed an economic and political union with Mexico, Nicaragua and all the other shambolic Latin-American states in your own back yard.” Of course, Dave would never go in for such straight talking, but one of his aides might have a quiet word in the President’s ear and say, “it is not the business of allies to interfere in the domestic policies of those allies.”
This is precisely the line taken by
Matt Ridley when Obama’s secretary of State, John Kerry, spoke in similar terms a couple of months ago. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has also been critical of President Obama, calling him “hypocritical” and stating that it would not be right for the US President “to urge us to sacrifice control” when America would not do the same. Iain Duncan-Smith, the former Work and Pensions Secretary Ian Duncan Smith added “He is asking the British people to accept a situation that he patently would not recommend to the American population… I can imagine no circumstances under which he would lobby for the US Supreme Court to be bound by the judgments of a foreign court.”
Obama’s speech was a truly pathetic effort. The man used the word “friend”, but is this really appropriate for someone like this? A few years ago, when the Gulf of Mexico suffered from an oil spill caused by the sinking of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, the President pointedly referred to “British Petroleum”, even though the company’s full name has not been in popular use for many years. This man is no friend to our country.
Nor is he honest in his claim that TTIP “will advance our values and our interests.” True, it will advance the interests of US pharmaceutical giants, but since when has a top-secret deal to be governed by a text that no one is allowed to publish been a true reflection of anglo-american values?
Quite honestly, his claim that we would be at the “back of the queue” for trade talks hardly ties in with the behaviour of a real friend. Anyway, we already have a healthy trade relationship with the USA without TTIP and world trade is moving away from big bilateral deals towards smaller, limited agreements in specific areas.
He made the security argument, mentioning the threat of terrorism as one would expect. Perhaps a gentle word in his ear that it is the EU that we wish to leave and not NATO might not have gone amiss.
However, it was particularly sickening to hear him talk of “The tens of thousands of Americans who rest in Europe’s cemeteries” who are “a silent testament to just how intertwined our prosperity and security truly are.” Those Americans, like the thousands of our own soldiers who died in World War 2, died to preserve our freedom and save us from tyranny. It is precisely our desire for freedom that drives us to vote to leave the EU. We should not stay in the EU just because it suits America or any other foreign country for that matter, nor should we be put off voting for leave because Mr Putin may like the idea. It is our country’s interests that count and it should be our decision alone what our future should be.
As our President, Edward Spalton has pointed out, In 1950 Clement Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister, refused to join the forerunner of the EU, the Coal and Steel Community. He said there was no way that Britain could accept that “the most vital economic forces of the country should be handed over to an authority that is utterly undemocratic and responsible to nobody”. The decline of our industries and the near extinction of steel production under forty years of EU control testify to his wisdom. Yet President Obama has the sheer cheek to urge us to continue in this subjection – a subjection which he an all Americans would regard as odious and downright treasonable – far worse than anything George III ever did to them!
“For us the EU is a long-suffered wrong, inflicted by our own political class”, said Mr Spalton. “The American colonists of 1776 took up arms for the rights of Englishmen who happened to live in America. Along with Samuel Adams we can now say loudly to our own betrayers – ‘If you love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen‘.
What possible objection could President Obama have to that?”