Rejoining would be a disaster. We’re ready to stop him, with your help.
Andy Burnham wants to talk about rejoining the European Union. After 11 weeks in the job he’s given up on his devolution agenda and landed back in the Left-wing safe space of centralising power again in Brussels.
His cynical political calculation is obvious, especially after the raid on pensions he signalled at the Labour conference last week. He’s trading older, white working class voters for younger, city-dwelling left-wing activist-types.
He desperately wants to beat Zack Polanski and his Green Party in the Holborn by-election this week, and carry that momentum through to a general election which I believe he’ll have to call early next year.
Why else would his Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband and his Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood have caved in to the ‘free Palestine’ mob in the past week, especially straight after the RAF Fairford incident?
It is pure political posturing from a man who who just three months ago told Makerfield voters he would not “re-run” Brexit arguments.
Well, as someone who spent two decades in the European Parliament, no one knows this issue like I do. And if Burnham now wants to re-hash the big issues of sovereignty, independence, and EU contributions, I say bring it on.
Rejoining the European project would cost Britain anywhere up to £40 billion a year when you consider the new proposed EU budgets and projected inflation between now and 2028. Think about that. When we voted to leave in 2016, we were paying £19 billion, and we had a rebate!
But there’d be no rebate this time. Only more free movement of people, more demands for Britain to throw in our defensive lot for a Europe-wide military project, and it is highly likely they’d demand we join the Euro, too. Even just implementing that would cost up to £60 billion. There’s no way this country could afford to pay such a price. We just don’t have the money.
Even if we did, if Burnham took us crawling back to Brussels the EU would use every bit of leverage to force us to fund their increasingly unstable economies.
Reentering the Single Market would mean accepting EU diktats that strangle small businesses and crush domestic innovation. We would likely immediately lose the right to set our own tax rates, control our own energy policies, or sign any more trade deals.
Nigel Farage
