Congratulations to Our British Friends on This Historic and Glorious Day of Independence!

Poland to Vote on EU Membership, Christian Heritage in Proposed Constitution Referendum

If Scotland and northern England could be converted from tiny Iona, perhaps the great Polish people, in the heart of Europe, will one day restore the light of faith to that continent.

Questions on EU membership, support for the traditional family, and Europe’s “more than 1,000-year-old Christian heritage” have been included in referendum plans put forward by Poland’s conservative president.

President Andrzej Duda on Tuesday put forward 15 questions that citizens should be .in a referendum planned for later this year, which will be the first vote of its kind for Poland since it joined the bloc.

Both domestic and international matters are covered in the issues Duda proposed Poles be consulted on in the wide-ranging referendum, which is set to give people a voice on whether to update the nation’s post-Communism 1997 constitution.

Read more at Breitbart >>

Poland’s Incoming Prime Minister: ‘My Dream Is to Re-Christianize the EU’

Hope they will start with the Vatican.

Supreme Court building in Warsaw, Poland. Photographer: NurPhoto/NurP

Poland’s incoming prime minister threw down the gauntlet with the European Union, offering to "help the West with proper values" after his allies advanced a judicial overhaul that the bloc has criticized as democratic backsliding.

Premier-designate Mateusz Morawiecki, tapped to replace Beata Szydlo halfway through the government’s term, rejected threats by EU leaders who have warned that Poland may lose out on the aid that drives its economic growth if it didn’t uphold the rule of law. His comments followed a heated parliamentary debate in which the ruling Law & Justice party approved draft laws to revamp the Supreme Court and overhaul a panel that appoints judges despite warnings from EU officials that the measures may trigger sanctions.

While Morawiecki a western-educated finance minister, has impressed foreign investors as the steward of the EU’s largest eastern economy, he made clear his allegiance is with his conservative party and its vision of returning Poland -- and the rest of Europe -- to its traditional Christian roots. In his first interview since being named prime minister on Friday, he lauded his "great, proud nation" and said it would not submit to "blackmail" from other European leaders.

Read more at Bloomberg >>

Theresa May Betrays the British People

‘Pathetic’ – Appeaser Theresa Makes Heavy Concessions on Money, Regulatory Alignment, and the EU Court as Brexit Deal Struck
 

A deal has been struck between the UK and the EU on phase one of the Brexit negotiations, which hinged on the status of EU citizens in the UK, the bloc’s financial claims on Britain, and the border between Ulster and the Republic of Ireland.

The EU negotiating team has, after many ups and downs, agreed that Prime Minister Theresa May has made “sufficient progress” on their demands, and will recommend the European Council greenlights progress towards trade talks — but leading Leave supporters to believe too many concessions have been made, with the country exiting the bloc in name only.

Details of the agreement published by the European Commission and comments by members of the May government and EU elite suggest a substantial blurring of Britain’s supposed “red line” on the powers of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU/ECJ) in the United Kingdom after Brexit, with environment secretary Michael Gove boasting that the rights of EU citizens will be upheld by British courts, but “of course” they will have regard for EU law when doing so — arguably giving EU citizens in Britain the status of what has been described as a “super-privileged caste”, with superior legal rights to British nationals.

Read more at Breitbart >> 

Treasonous British Political Leaders Betraying the Best Interests of Their Own Country

Britain just needs to go and give the dying European socialists nothing. Her Majesty is the head of state for 16 realms with which Britain can trade, there are 53 nations that belong to the Commonwealth, and Britain has a special relationship with the United States. That is a far more formidable alliance than the EU could ever hope to be and a powerful force for freedom and the good of mankind.

Here Daniel Hannan describes the unholy alliance between the European Commission and treasonous political leaders in Britain siding with foreign interests against the best interests of their own country.

On Today's Brexit Referendum

"There'll always be an England,

And England shall be free,

If England means as much to you

As England means to me."

EU Referendum: Massive Swing to Brexit

Exclusive: polling carried out for ‘The Independent’ shows that 55 per cent of UK voters intend to vote for Britain to leave the EU in the 23 June referendum  

 

Michael Gove and Boris Johnson have helped propel the Leave campaign into a significant lead over their Remain rivals Getty

The campaign to take Britain out of the EU has opened up a remarkable 10-point lead over the Remain camp, according to an exclusive poll for The Independent.

The survey of 2,000 people by ORB found that 55 per cent believe the UK should leave the EU (up four points since our last poll in April), while 45 per cent want it to remain (down four points). These figures are weighted to take account of people’s likelihood to vote. It is by far the biggest lead the Leave camp has enjoyed since ORB began polling the EU issue for The Independent a year ago, when it was Remain who enjoyed a 10-point lead. Now the tables have turned.

Read more at The Independent >>

The Inimitable Daniel Hannan on Brexit

and when Brexit makes this great man redundant, what an extraordinarily gifted Prime Minister he would be!

Daniel Hannan MEP: 'EU Referendum is a Once-in-a-Generation Vote' – Video Interview

Daniel Hannan: Why Americans Should Back Brexit

The campaign is in full swing. On June 23, Britain will decide by referendum whether to leave the European Union (EU). Most of the political establishment, including the leaders of all the main parliamentary parties, are arguing for a “remain” vote. But the country is unimpressed, and opinion polls remain evenly balanced.

Daniel Hannan: If the UK Were Not Already a Member of the European Union, Would We Vote to Join It?

If the United Kingdom were not already a member of the European Union, would we vote to join it?

It’s never easy to answer hypothetical questions; but it’s worth noting how people feel in the Western European countries that stayed out. Perhaps the non-EU nations most comparable to Britain, being neither ex-Communist nor microstates, are Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. In all of them, there are solid and settled majorities against joining the EU.

Here are the latest poll numbers. In Iceland, which formally withdrew its application in 2015, voters oppose joining by 50.1 per cent to 34.2 per cent. In Norway, by 72.0 per cent to 18.1 per cent. In Switzerland, opinion polls on the EU are rarer, because membership was killed off when a referendum in 2001 resulted in a massive 76.8 per cent against reopening accession talks. Still, for what it’s worth, the latest survey shows that 82 per cent of Swiss citizens support their current bilateral arrangements.

Daniel Hannan: Ici Londres – It is Time to Rediscover Our Global Vocation

Daniel Hannan: Small Is Beautiful

What are the two richest countries in Europe? According to the Legatum Institute, which publishes an annual prosperity league, Switzerland noses ahead of Norway. Money isn’t everything, of course. The United Nations runs a quality of life index, which also takes account of literacy, longevity, infant mortality and the like. It reaches the same conclusion: Switzerland and Norway are the best places on Earth to be born.

There has been a great deal of focus on these two chilly, mountainous lands recently. Because they are flourishing outside the European Union, Euroskeptics point to them as examples of how it pays to be a sovereign nation. Supporters of the EU, by contrast, are keen to rubbish their arrangements with Brussels, portraying them as oxpecker birds clinging to the mighty EU hippopotamus, voiceless passengers downloading Brussels laws over whose framing they have no say.

The Pope Joins the EU in a Sad World of Make-Believe

There are two great acts of political make-believe in our time, so all-pervasive that it is hard for us to grasp just how much effect they are having on our lives 

Pope Francis greets the crowd as he arrives for a general audience at St Peter's square at the Vatican Photo: FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/Getty Images

What has a Papal Encyclical calling on the world to end its use of fossil fuels and to pray to God for the success of the global “climate summit” in December got in common with the Greek euro crisis, the ominous rift between the West and Russia, and the shambles Europe is making over the desperation of African and Syrian refugees to find safety this side of the Mediterranean? They are all different aspects of the two greatest acts of political make-believe of our time, so all-pervasive that it is hard for us to grasp just how much effect they are having on all our lives.

When future historians come to look back on our age, few things will puzzle them more than the extent to which our politics became so dominated and bedevilled by two belief-systems, each based on an obsessive attempt to force into being an immensely complicated political construct which defied economic, psychological and scientific reality.

One of these was the peculiar way in which Europe’s politicians, with full support from the US, had set out to unite their continent under a form of supra-national government unlike anything the world had seen before. The other was the way those same politicians fell for the idea not just that human activities were disastrously changing Earth’s climate, but that by taking the most drastic measures they could somehow change it back again.  

Read more at TheTelegraph >>

Pat Buchanan: Is the European Union Dying?

 
By Patrick J. Buchanan

As the European Coal and Steel Community of Jean Monnet evolved into the EU, we were told a "United States of Europe" was at hand, modeled on the USA. And other countries and continents will inevitably follow Europe's example.

There will be a North American Union of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and a Latin America Union of the Mercosur trade partnership.

In an essay, "The E.U. Experiment Has Failed," Bruce Thornton of Hoover Institution makes the case that the verdict is in, the dream is dead, the EU is unraveling, One Europe is finished.

Daniel Hannan MEP: Cameron’s Coming EU Renegotiation Will Alter Nothing

If David Cameron wins the next election, he will secure 100 per cent of his negotiating objectives vis-à-vis the EU. How can I be sure? Because those negotiating objectives have been drawn up in such a way as to make their acceptance certain.

I can think of no other issue where there is such a disconnect between what politicians have said on the record and what reporters and columnists suppose them to have said. David Cameron set out his seven conditions for remaining in the EU in this article last year. Later that day, Nick Clegg popped up to declare that he wholeheartedly endorsed them: after all, said Cleggie, they wouldn’t require a new treaty, so nothing fundamental would change. The following day, Ken Clarke gave his approval on the same grounds.

Daniel Hannan is the New, Great Communicator

Daniel Hannan, MEP

There is no living politician, of any nation, who we admire more than the brilliant and eloquent Daniel Hannan.  A writer and a blogger, Hannan has been a member of the European Parliament representing South East England for the Conservative Party since 1999.  If you haven't read his best-selling Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples made the Modern World, do yourself a huge favor and buy it today.  

Our appreciation for this very thoughtful Tory has only grown since reading his recent response to José Manuel Barroso, an EU bureaucrat who suggested that Britain would be a second-rate country outside the EU. 

Mr. Hannan's smashing response in The Daily Mail follows:

So we've got zero influence, eh? Outside the EU we’d be a second-rate country, would we?

The easy reaction is outrage. How dare José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing head of the Brussels civil service, hector Britain, the nation that, by helping liberate Europe from fascism, made the wretched EU possible in the first place?

But I’d rather take Mr Barroso seriously. Let’s assess the claim that, if it weren’t for the EU, we’d count for little in the world.

Consider, first, the assets that the United Kingdom has.

We are either the seventh or the sixth largest economy on the planet. (Depending on which measure you use, we have either just overtaken, or are just about to overtake, France.)

At a time when the eurozone is stagnant, we are the fastest-growing major economy on Earth. We have — this is a truly amazing statistic — created more jobs over the past four years than the other 27 members of the EU put together. Indeed, on current trends, at some point in the next 30 years, our economy will overtake Germany’s.

While our trade with the EU is in the red and declining, our trade with the rest of the world is in the black and growing.

Nor are our assets purely economic. We have, in London, the world’s greatest city: not just its financial hub but, on most definitions, its cultural hub, too.

Ours is humanity’s most widely spoken language. English has legal status in 37 states, and is used by almost every major international body, from Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (a forum to promote free trade among Pacific Rim countries) to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. It’s even used by organisations whose member states don’t speak English, such as the European Free Trade Association.

Our common law system is universally respected — to the extent that two foreign companies from the same country will often pay a premium to sign their contracts in UK jurisdiction, knowing that, whatever their other faults, our judges don’t take bribes.

We are the world’s fourth military power, one of only five nations capable of deploying force globally. We are one of seven nuclear states, with renowned special forces and a global intelligence-gathering capacity which we share with the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Our institutions and leading figures are recognised around the world, from Manchester United to Wimbledon, from Downton Abbey to the Duchess of Cambridge. Small wonder we are ranked top in the soft power index (based on countries’ influence in terms of politics, diplomacy, business, culture, sport and education rather than financial or military might), edging even above the United States.

We are a leading member of the G20 and the G8, of Nato and the Commonwealth, and one of five permanent seat-holders on the UN Security Council. How much bigger do we have to be, for Heaven’s sake, before we’re capable of governing ourselves?

How does Mr Barroso think seven million Swiss manage, or 320,000 Icelanders? Or, come to that, the 32,000 people of San Marino, who recently rejected EU membership in a referendum, preferring to remain in a free trade area?

Like most countries, we joined what is now the EU out of pessimism. At the time, in the early Seventies, it was Britain’s lowest moment as a nation. It was the era of double-digit inflation, prices and incomes policies, trade union militancy, power cuts and the three-day week. The consensus among commentators was that Britain was finished.

It was against this miserable background that Parliament voted to join in 1972, and the electorate ratified the decision by referendum in 1975.

Would people have voted the same way either ten years earlier or ten years later? I doubt it. We would have lacked the necessary sense of national despair.

Contrary to what the doom-mongers of the Seventies feared, the decline over the past 40 years has come, not in Britain or the Anglosphere, but in Europe.

In the year that we joined, Western Europe accounted for 36 per cent of the world economy. Today, that figure is 24 per cent, and in ten years’ time it will be 14 per cent. Last year, the Commonwealth’s economy overtook the eurozone’s.

Britain is a global trader, linked by history to every continent and archipelago. Yet we have managed to confine ourselves in the only trade bloc on the planet that is shrinking economically.

Mr Barroso says that, outside the EU, we’d lack clout. Really?

Strong words: David Cameron hit back yesterday at Jose Manuel Barroso (left), saying voters were his 'boss'

Consider, as an example of a non-EU state, Norway, with a population of four million. Norway has an active and engaged foreign policy. Its diplomats played a key role in negotiating peace settlements in South East Asia, Sudan and Sri Lanka — as well as, albeit less successfully, brokering the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine.

Norway has the capacity to do these things because, not being part of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, it has diplomatic autonomy.

Are we truly to believe that Britain, a nation of nearly 64 million, a mercantile and maritime people linked to every corner of the world, would have no influence if we had an independent foreign policy?

There is one place, though, where we truly do lack influence: Brussels.

There have been 55 occasions when the UK voted against an EU measure in the Council of Ministers (the figure is deceptively low because, by tradition, countries rarely push matters to the vote when they can see that they will lose). Guess how many times, out of those 55, we succeeded in blocking the measure? That’s right: zero.

That literally is, to use Mr Barroso’s phrase, ‘zero influence’.

Cast your mind back just a few weeks to the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker, the defeated prime minister of Luxembourg, as Mr Barroso’s successor as president of the European Commission.

David Cameron could hardly have made clearer the strength of Britain’s opposition. The PM had precedent on his side: there was a general understanding that such appointments would not be made against the wishes of one of the big member states.

He also had constitutional right on his side: Mr Juncker’s claim to the job rested on a power-grab by the European Parliament that stretched the interpretation of a clause in the European Treaty beyond any normal bounds, and had not been sanctioned by the member states. 

Yet, in the event, how many countries backed Britain? How many of the other 27 states felt that it would be inappropriate to appoint a man who made no secret of his belief in a United States of Europe, who had called for a European army and police force, for pan-European taxes and an EU-wide minimum wage? How many? One: Hungary.

In a revealing aside, Mr Barroso has linked the calls from some Britons to leave the EU with the Scottish independence campaigns.

It’s a telling parallel. Most Scots voted last month to keep the Union because they felt at least some sense of British identity. Three hundred years of common statehood, resting on a common language and culture, have created a shared British patriotism.

Mr Barroso’s analogy confirms that he sees the EU, too, as a nation. People like him wouldn’t talk like this if the EU were simply an international association like the Arctic Council or the World Health Organisation.

Incidentally, Mr Barroso’s intervention reminds us that there is rarely much gratitude in Brussels. He secured his post partly with the help of British Conservative MEPs, though you wouldn’t think it today.

I mention this because there are alarming reports that David Cameron doesn’t want Conservative MEPs to oppose Mr Juncker’s appointment as President in a vote on it in the European Parliament tomorrow.

Having fought the recent Euro-election campaign on the platform we Tories did, opposing these federalists is a straightforward question of keeping faith with our voters.

The biggest complaint people have about politicians and the EU is that we say one thing in our home countries and do another in Brussels.

I’ll be voting against Mr Juncker and his Euro-zealots. I hope other Conservatives will join me.

The Specter Haunting Europe

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Memorial Day will likely bring alarmist headlines in the elite media about a populist fever raging in Europe, and manifest in the shocking returns from the elections for the European Parliament.

Marine Le Pen’s National Front may run first in France, and Nick Farage’s UK Independence Party first in Britain.

What is happening in Europe?

The Single Most Objectionable Thing About the EU (In a Crowded Field)

In our humble opinion, the brilliant Daniel Hannan is a man that Great Britain and the world needs as British Prime Minister.

By Daniel Hannan

Shall I tell you the worst thing about the EU? It’s not the waste or the corruption or the Michelin-starred lifestyles of its leaders. It’s not the contempt for voters or the readiness to swat referendum results aside. It’s not the way that multi-nationals and NGOs and all manner of corporate interests are privileged over consumers. It’s not the pettifogging rules that plague small employers. It’s not the Common Agricultural Policy or the Common Fisheries Policy. It’s not the anti-Britishness or the anti-Americanism. It’s not even the way in which the euro is inflicting preventable poverty on tens of millions of southern Europeans.

No, it’s something more objectionable than any of these things – and something which, bizarrely, doesn’t exercise us nearly as much as it should. Put simply, it’s this: the EU makes up the rules as it goes along.

Just think, for a moment, about what that means. It means that any deal you’ve signed can be arbitrarily altered later. It means that any plans you’ve made, on the basis of what you took to be binding agreements, can be retrospectively destroyed. It means, in short, that there is no effective rule of law.

Time for a Commonwealth Family Reunion

For the past 40 years we have spurned our ever faithful Commonwealth family for the sado-masochistic thrill of a European affair – one that, as with many extra-marital trysts, has proved costly and unfulfilling

From The Commentator
By Rafe Heydel Mankoo

Britain is a cad.  If Terry Thomas were alive today he would probably denounce his beloved nation as a rotter, a stinker and an absolute shower – and rightly so. For despite our innate sense of moral virtue, our unshakable belief in British decency and integrity and our politicians’ unfaltering devotion to family, this nation is an international love cheat.

For the past forty years we have spurned our ever faithful Commonwealth family for the sado-masochistic thrill of a European affair – one that, as with many extra-marital trysts, has proved costly and unfulfilling.