Speech by Northern Ireland Regional Organiser of the Campaign for an Independent Britain Professor Arthur Noble

at the UKIP Conference, Stormont Hotel, Belfast on 23 November 2013

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First of all I would like to thank your Regional Officers Brian Higginson and Henry Reilly for kindly inviting me to come and outline the beliefs and aims of the Campaign for an Independent Britain (CIB for short), which of course includes Northern Ireland. That is why we have on our letterhead the wider subtitle ‘For an Independent UK’. I am in the process of establishing the Northern Ireland Branch (CIBNI for short), and Brian has been very helpful to me in this task, especially with publicity and advertising. UKIP and CIBNI have very much in common, and I should say at the outset that I am a great admirer of your Leader, Nigel Farage.

Some of our main leaflets have been included in your conference pack, and if you wish to join CIBNI you will find a membership form in the leaflet entitled “Better off out: Britain’s future outside the European Union”. We are also selling the booklet “A House divided” at the reduced price of £2 instead of £2.50.

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The CIB is a cross-party, non-sectarian campaigning organisation. We believe that continued membership of the European Union poses grave threats to the United Kingdom’s liberties, independence, and economic prosperity. We seek the withdrawal of the UK from the undemocratic, obsolete and fraud-ridden European Union. If that Union is to continue, preferably without us, then it should be superseded by modern, democratic structures which enable the peoples of Europe to co- operate without the loss of any nation’s freedoms and way of life.

We believe that the views and resources of the people of Northern Ireland, which (as mentioned a few minutes ago by David McNarry) is surely the most anti-EU part of the UK, can be suitably mustered to help our like-minded fellow-citizens in Great Britain in our mutual struggle for withdrawal from a dictatorial EU which proclaims that its aim is to destroy the concept of the nation state and absorb all member countries into a monolithic European Superstate composed of regions instead of countries.

I am not a politician or an economist; I am simply a patriot. Having spent fifteen years as Professor of German at two French universities (Metz and Nancy), I can assure you that I am well aware of the nature of the conspiracy behind the EU. I lived in France when the Franc was replaced by the Euro: at that time the single currency was promoted as a great invention, but now, of course, we know that it was a complete disaster which has wrecked the economies of the Southern European states and is now being increasingly despised by some of the core EU states, including most recently Austria and even Germany itself.

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I am sure all of us here will agree that the UK was shoe-horned into the co-called Common Market in 1973 by Edward Heath. He told us that we were joining a free-trade area which would (1) boost our prosperity and (2) leave our independence intact. This double assurance was later proved to be a blatant lie – a lie which has characterised the continuing deception of our relations with the EU ever since.

The treachery by our political leaders in submitting to rule from Brussels was a spectacular act of national betrayal. There was a time when they could literally have been hanged for treason. For over four decades now it has meant that our sovereignty has been progressively undermined, our freedoms eroded, our economy weakened and our democracy curtailed.

Parallel to that, the EU is steadily growing in arrogance, bent on its goal of destroying the sovereignty of its nation-state members and creating a federal superstate of regions responsible to Brussels by bypassing national parliaments. Regions of member countries, such as Catalonia in Spain, can now deal with Brussels directly without going through Madrid, and it seems that the Scottish National Party is hoping to achieve a similar goal. During this process of regionalisation Brussels has been utterly contemptuous of public opinion and has even made it officially illegal to criticise the EU.

The mindset of the fanatics in Brussels is intent that nothing shall be permitted to stop the drive towards political unity and the abolition of free and democratic nationhood.

We all know that the single currency has been a total disaster: it has impoverished the Southern European countries, led to severe unemployment, wrecked their economies and caused violent protests; yet despite that the EU is not in the least embarrassed or repentant about the crisis which it has caused, but is actually exploiting it instead to try to foist even greater integration on its members. The disaster of the single currency is actually being manipulated to call for ever ‘more Europe’. The Euro is being thrust down the throats of the Eurozone countries as if it were the medicine capable of curing the illness, whereas it actually caused the illness in the first place.

Former revolutionary communist and EU President Barroso has arrogantly declared that Europe is on “the federal path […] towards political union with a coherent foreign and defence policy”. Barroso has called for “absolute loyalty to Brussels”, something reminiscent of the Nazis’ relationship with their dictator Adolf Hitler; and it is not for nothing that the EU, dominated by Germany, has been referred to in the press of several countries as the “Fourth Reich”. There is in fact indisputable evidence that it was Nazis and fascists who laid the foundations of a ‘European Economic Community’ before the end of World War II when they realised that they were going to be defeated. Several books have described how, when Nazi Germany’s leading industrialists and bankers realised that they were going to lose the war, they devised a plan to secure the future of their enterprises and came up with a blueprint for the EU. This was designed to ensure continuing influence and dominance by Germany in Europe, but without the destructiveness and cost of war. In this context I point you in particular to Rodney Atkinson’s brilliant analysis in his new eBook And into the Fire of how the Nazis were so instrumental in secretly founding the European Union, and to my own articles in the British Church Newspaper on the same subject.

Not only will this New Order in Europe be completely undemocratic. Worse: John Ward in The Slog has warned and predicted that the pivot of power will shift from Brussels to Berlin, and the EU will meekly assume its new role: that of spinning German foreign policy as being European Union policy; but this German policy will itself be answerable to the same economic and financial desires that every other Sovereign State in the West has to obey.

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CIB believes that if the UK remains in the EU, our nation will be destroyed, our national pride trampled, and all patriotic sentiment extinguished. We will be reduced to a status similar to a county council subservient to the diktats of a monolithic superstate. We are already far along the road to that calamity. In 1962, at the time of the first proposal for our membership of the ‘Common Market’, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell warned that joining “would mean the end of 1,000 years of British history”. In 1993, in the House of Lords, Viscount Tonypandy warned that the Maastricht Treaty would mean that Britain would never be the same again and that “the sovereignty of our country is at stake”. In 1995 Margaret Thatcher also warned: “You have not anchored Germany to Europe. You have anchored Europe to a newly dominant, unified Germany. In the end, my friends, you’ll find it will not work. It is Germany’s national character to dominate.” These leaders, though from different sides of the political spectrum, have since been proved absolutely right.

Then we had a series of treaties, on which Brussels forced a second vote if it did not like the democratic outcome of the first vote. The Lisbon Treaty became the ultimate charter of deceit perpetrated on the nations of Europe by its authors, who afterwards admitted their deception with some glee. I have all their statements if you would like to read them. The revised, final version of the Lisbon Treaty was simply a disguised European Constitution. Listen to just one example from a man who helped to draw up the Treaty, former French President Valéry Giscard-D’Estaing:

“Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly. All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way. What was already difficult to understand will become utterly incomprehensible, but the substance has been retained.”1 One wonders if such treaties can be valid in international law if they were passed by deceit and trickery.

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Then we have the shocking cost of the UK’s national demise at the hands of Brussels – an astounding figure of – I believe – £19.2 billion every year. That is more than is spent on policing or social services. Yet the brutal hidden price of being in the EU extends far beyond our direct contribution. A study by distinguished economist Professor Tim Congdon has shown that the EU is costing every British household £6,000 a year through excessive regulation, diktats, fraud, and damage to the economy. He says that the overall bill for the EU’s destructive regime has wiped £150 billion a year off our gross national product.

What are we getting in return for this? Something like three-quarters of our laws dictated from Brussels; hundreds of thousands of pages of EU legislation ranging from prescribing the shape of vegetables and the type of light bulbs to the standardisation of lavatory flushes! The falsely so- called Human Rights Act, which has been misused by terrorists to avoid extradition. West Midlands police detained 12,000 foreign suspects in the past year. As Kalid Mahmood, one of Labour’s Birmingham MPs, put it: “This is a big problem. There is no control on Eastern Europeans arriving here.”

These are all very powerful arguments for leaving the EU. If we remain shackled to Brussels, our nation will accelerate its slide towards the status of a mere colony within a monolithic, fascist European superstate.

What are the positive things about leaving the EU? Outside the EU we will…

• trade freely in world markets, benefiting producers in developing countries as well as British families;
• spend the billions of taxpayers’ money handed over annually to Brussels on health, schools, transport and pensions:
• once again make our own laws in our own Parliament;
• get shot of almost 400,000 pages of bureaucratic nonsense foisted on us by the EU;
• prevent the further decimation of North Sea fishing stocks;
• and regain control over our borders and immigration policy.

These benefits are listed in our leaflet Wanted … for the biggest con in history. We need to get out – and soon.

**1 Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, Le Monde, 14 June 2007, and Sunday Telegraph, 1 July 2007*

I end with a reminder that several elections and referenda are pending or likely in the next few years at which the UK’s membership of the EU will be an issue. These are:

• Elections for the EU parliament in May 2014
• The Scottish independence referendum in October 2014
• The general election in 2015
• A probable referendum on EU membership in 2017 or 2018 (if Cameron can be believed) CIB Honorary Secretary Edward Spalton has written to the Electoral Commission to ensure its impartiality in these plebiscites. It is imperative that participants and interested parties in these votes should be able to assure themselves of the non-partisanship and balance of any information which the Commission intends to publish on this matter in advance of the heat of campaigning. Electoral authorities in most places appear not always to have been as strictly impartial as would be expected in a British vote.

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Many thanks for listening and for your support. If you wish to support us further by becoming a member of CIB/CIBNI, please fill in the application form in the leaflet Better off out – Britain’s future outside the European Union, and send it together with your subscription to the address given.

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Perhaps I should add that I am not anti-German. I love Germany and its wonderful culture. I have taught German language, German literature, German music, German architecture and German history all my life. I never thought that I would see the day when the old German ideas of superiority would surface again.