U.K. voters strike a blow for freedom
in EU election
A mouse instead of a lion roared in London this week.
The United Kingdom Independence Party, heretofore confined to the
fringes of British politics, scored a resounding showing in the European
parliamentary elections, winning 17 percent of the vote and quadrupling
its number of seats.
The surge in vote share for this party was animated by an intense
opposition to further progress down the slippery slope of regional
integration and the surrender of the U.K.’s powers to act independently
in economics, finance or diplomacy, or in defense of freedom.
The U.K. Independence Party, of course, opposes the euro and the new
proposed European Constitution, but it also calls for British withdrawal
from the European Union itself and the renegotiation of a free-trade
agreement in its place.
Why should we in the colonies care?
Because the forces that have hijacked the EU are steering it straight
into a socialist economy, an appeasement-oriented foreign policy,
a jury-less judiciary and a move away from government by democracy
toward rule by bureaucracy. Under the guise of “uniformity”
in European laws, the EU is insisting that other nations raise their
corporate tax rates — personal rates will doubtless follow —
to the high levels currently in force in France and Germany.
The Brussels government of the European Union is unelected, and the
vast bureaucracy it has spawned lords its power over those who are
elected by the voters.
The elected members of the pathetic European Parliament, for example,
cannot introduce legislation and must only vote up or down the measures
sponsored by the bureaucracy.
It has been my pleasure to work with the U.K. Independence Party in
helping the British regain some measure of freedom and control over
their national fate.
Otto von Bismarck said it best when he noted that whenever anyone
urged him to act in the name of Europe, “it was usually because
they wanted me to do something they would not be able to ask on their
own.” The goals of France and Germany for regional domination
proceed now under the cover of European unity,
disenfranchising the British people and relocating all vital decisions
to Brussels from London.
Europe has high taxes. U.K. taxes are about 20 percent lower. Europe
administers justice while Britain uses juries. The Euro-heritage is
one of microeconomic regulation, with labor laws that prohibit dismissals
and require gigantic vacation and other fringe benefits. Britain hues
more closely to the US model.
The quasi-socialist governments on the continent find Britain, with
its low taxes, low regulation, low unemployment and high economic
growth rates, a threat to their ideology. In the name of European
integration, they seek to assimilate Great Britain into a socialist
union on the continent.
The role of political parties on the continent, particularly in Germany,
is not primarily to achieve political power but to mediate the needs
and demands of the voters so that they can be accommodated within
a nominally democratic context.
The very nature of a parliamentary system, devoid of checks and balances,
limits the individual’s freedom. The orientation of European
governments to rule by bureaucracy and to intensive government regulation
has found a natural home in the EU.
But Britain has yet to surrender to this high-tax, intrusive, regulatory
economic framework. Insisting on keeping its own currency, the U.K.
has resisted homogenization, to the discomfort of its own political
leaders and the Euro-homogenizers. Now the voters of the U.K. have
taken matters into their own hands and turned their backs on the three
main political parties that continue to urge participation in the
EU. Almost a fifth cast their lot with the U.K. Independence Party,
saying, in effect, that a free-trade agreement is useful and important
but regional integration is quite another story.
For the United States, bereft of reliable allies in the Paris-Berlin-dominated
Europe, the move toward Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher policies in
the U.K. can only come as a positive omen for the future.
Dick Morris is the author of Rewriting
History, a rebuttal of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) memoir,
Living History.
