Leo McKinstry: “The EU is one of history’s most spectacular failures”

The below is a transcript by Tom Bayley of a speech given by Leo McKinstry, a Northern Irish journalist and former Labour councillor, at an event hosted by Voices for Britain, on 2 March 2016.

The debate about the European Union is utterly surreal, a flight into absurdist fantasy.

To hear the REMAIN campaigners talk, you would think that the EU is a vibrant, healthy, well-run institution which serves our national interests by promoting prosperity and peace.

But that is a grotesque delusion bred of the most desperate wishful thinking. In reality, the EU is one of history’s most spectacular failures. It is a wholly dysfunctional, utterly mismanaged organisation where ideology and bureaucracy have replaced efficiency and democracy.

It is an ill-conceived experiment which has gone horribly wrong for decades, yet its supporters continue to insist that we must continue to be part of this gigantic project, even as it threatens the very existence of European civilisation.

Dream turns into nightmare

The dream of the federalist unity has turned into a nightmare for so many citizens of Europe. In a speech last year, the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, proclaimed:

To my mind, hardly anything so perfectly embodies the achievements of European unification as open borders.

Yet those same open borders have brought us the squalor of the Jungle camp in Calaisand the frontier rioting in Macedonia.

Similarly, the federalist zealots’ obsessions with unrestricted free movement and cultural diversity brought the horrors of the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

Catastrophe on every front

It is the same story of catastrophe on every front where the EU operates.

• The European single currency, essentially a political initiative to drive further integration, has entrenched mass unemployment on an appalling scale. The livelihoods of millions, especially in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, have been sacrificed on the altar of the federalist creed.

• The EU is rightly a byword for institutionalized extravagance, waste and abuse of public money. This is an outfit that has not had its accounts properly cleared for 19 years yet has 10,000 officials who enjoy a take-home pay higher than our own Prime Minister’s.

• EU regulation on the “Marketing of Hazelnuts” contains 2,509 words, compared with just 70 in the Lord’s Prayer. In 2012, a high-level meeting was held in Brussels, attended by 76 officials as well as the President of the European Parliament, to agree the name for a corridor in one of its buildings. The meeting failed to reach a decision.

• Eager to create all its own trappings of statehood, the EU has its own self-serving, expensive diplomatic service with offices in Barbados and Papua New Guinea.

Wrong then, wrong now

Full transcript here

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/leo-mckinstry-the-eu-is-one-of-historys-most-spectacular-failures/