mtbc | (Reply)

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My objection to EU membership is far more fundamental.

We don't have a written constitution in the UK, but we do have an overarching sense of propriety.

If I lend you my lawnmower, you make sure you can return it when the time comes. You don't give it to a Belgian.

Similarly, when we elect a government, it should make sure that when it leaves office it can return to us the powers that we have temporarily vested in it. Saying "sorry, we signed those powers over to the EU" is unacceptable.

And yet, that's what happened with the Maastricht Treaty, which is the point at which I started to feel we ought to leave the EU. The Lisbon Treaty fiasco cemented this view.

We are faced with an EU that wants to take powers from our national government, and a succession of national governments that are willing to hand them over. Sure, we could try to put things on a legislative footing where that can't happen any more, which requires a referendum before powers are ceded, but I'm worried about remaining in a political union which has such intent. We don't want to spend our lives fighting bureaucrats who are looking for loopholes.

The late great Tony Benn put it rather well: "The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights."