The Financial Jigsaw – Issue No. 29

My unpublished (100,000 word) book “The Financial Jigsaw”, is being serialised here weekly in 100 Issues by Peter J Underwood, author 

Last week we took a quick overview of the EU and this week we can move on to more detail about how UK got to be a reluctant member: here is the link to last week:  Issue 28 

In this Issue more revelations arise about the way the UK elites manipulate the public and care little about individuals and their economic wellbeing if it goes against the general trends and policies that have been defined. We are already seeing this methodology playing out in the current negotiations for Brexit and my prediction is that the UK parliament will reject Mrs May’s current plan which will cause a major call for a further 2^nd referendum which in turn will enable Britain to stay in the EU and cancel Article 50.  

CHAPTER 6

The European Union 

            “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” Albert Einstein [who might have been commenting on Brexit]

“Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred; and always stronger than internationalism”.

George Orwell

Composition of the European Union as a Common Market

In 1957, six countries signed the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community, (EEC) establishing a customs union.  In 1967 the ‘Merger Treaty’ was signed in Brussels. It created a single set of institutions which were collectively referred to as the European Community, (EC).

In 1973 the Community grew to include Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom. (Norway had negotiated to join at the same time but Norwegian voters sensibly rejected membership in a referendum). In 1979, the first direct, democratic elections to the European Parliament were held and there are now 28 nations within the EU of which only 17 share a common currency, the ‘euro’.

Britain’s negotiations to enter the EEC began in 1970 and the files relating the Edward Heath Government’s application to join the ‘Common Market’ were made available in 2001 under the 30 year rule. “The long-term objectives of economic and monetary union”, it was made clear to Mr Heath by our Civil Service, “are very far-reaching indeed”, going “well beyond the full establishment of a Common Market”.

Such a political and economic union would thus involve a massive loss of national sovereignty but privately, Her Majesty’s Government had no objection to the political union that was being proposed (PRO/CAB 164/771).  The only real concern of Mr Heath and his colleagues was that this plan should not be talked about too openly in public, because this might so inflame public opinion that it would be much harder to persuade Parliament and the British people that it was in their interests to join what, they were being assured, was no more than a ‘common market’, intended to boost trade.

The British establishment cover up the implications of membership of the EU

In a BBC interview, Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, FZS, a high ranking Private Secretary, frankly admitted that, although worries over Britain’s loss of sovereignty had been “very much present in the mind of the negotiators”, the line had been “the less they came out in the open the better”.

This indicates how politicians and civil servants had been party to a quite deliberate attempt to hide from the British people what Britain’s entry into the Common Market would really mean.

The British involvement with the “European project” has introduced an element of deliberate deceit into UK politics which, in its depth and scale, has no historical parallel.  For forty years British politicians have consistently tried to portray the EU to their fellow citizens as little more than an economic arrangement primarily concerned with creating jobs and prosperity and which could help preserve the peace in what otherwise might prove to be another European holocaust.  The released (after 30 years) document by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office is shown here: http://www.theeuroprobe.org/2017-040-the-1971-fco-301048-heath-knew-it-was-treason/

The original EEC evolved in the 1990s into the “European Union” (EU); Britain’s politicians continually go through a process with which we are now so wearyingly familiar.  First they express opposition to much of what their continental partners are proposing; then find themselves having to agree to more than they intended; and finally have to hide from the British people just how much they have given away.

Few features of our political scene have in recent years been more curious than the way in which our politicians and civil servants try to hide how deeply our political system is now enmeshed with that of the EU and how much of the legislation, which rules our lives, now emanates from Brussels.

But ultimately this culture of concealment, which is far more prevalent in Britain than in any other country in Europe, derives from that same basic act of deception: the pretence that the nature of the ‘European project’ is something different from what it truly is; ultimately a Federation of States much along the lines of the USA.

This gives amazing advantages and benefits to the ruling elite and adds yet another higher level of oligarchy to that which we have seen in the last Chapter.

The mechanics of UK establishment methods

In his book: The Throw That Failed – 1995, Lionel Bell based his studies on Cabinet papers which reflected discussions in the months leading up to the application to join the Common Market in the summer of 1961.

What was striking about the documents Bell uncovered was just how frank the Prime Minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC, FRS,  and his colleagues had been in private, even at that early stage, over where the Common Market was heading.

They were in little doubt it was intended to be just a first step towards eventual political and economic union. Yet this, they decided, should be kept hidden from the British people, because otherwise it would not be acceptable. The Common Market had to be presented as no more than a commercial partnership.

By the time Mr Heath came to launch his own, successful application to ‘enter Europe’ in 1970, he was already well versed in how to pretend that it was something other than what it actually was.

Over the next five years, up to the time of the referendum in 1975, Parliament and the British people were constantly assured that entry into the Common Market was simply a matter of trade and jobs. In no way would the British way of life be changed or Britain’s right to be master of her own destiny altered.

But so determined was Mr Heath and the political elite to push their own agenda that Britain simply accepted the illegal new fisheries policy insisted upon, as part of the terms and conditions of entry, even though this would mean handing over one of Britain’s greatest renewable natural assets and would spell disaster for a large part of the fishing fleet.

The British fishermen got some idea that they were about to be sacrificed, and in the closing months of 1970 various MPs for fishing constituencies wrote to ministers asking about what was being proposed but they were greeted with evasive replies. And as the recently released papers show, civil servants eventually worked out a careful form of ‘weasel-words’, intended to reassure the fishermen that “proper account would be taken of their interests”.

However, behind the scenes, as a Scottish Office memo put it on 9^th November 1970, ministers were being told how important it was not to get drawn into detailed explanations of just what problems might lay ahead for the fishermen because, “in the wider UK context, they must be regarded as expendable”. 

To be continued next Saturday

Author: Austrian Peter

Peter J. Underwood is a retired international accountant and qualified humanistic counsellor living in Bruton, UK, with his wife, Yvonne. He pursued a career as an entrepreneur and business consultant, having founded several successful businesses in the UK and South Africa His latest Substack blog describes the African concept of Ubuntu - a system of localised community support using a gift economy model. View all posts by Austrian Peter