Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 13 September 2017. © Richard Kemp
Nelson will be spinning on his column. Under plans the government has been working on for months, if we want to build another naval warship in the future we will have to go cap in hand to Brussels.
When it comes to defence, it is becoming clear that Brexit does not mean Brexit. Judging by a paper released yesterday by the Department for Exiting the EU, which calls for a defence relationship with Brussels ‘closer than any third country’, the government intends to surrender control of UK defence to the EU.
British voters have always been more opposed to this than any other issue. Polls have consistently shown that even among the minority of voters who wanted to remain in the EU, large numbers rejected the idea of an EU army.
The architects of Project Fear, in their desperation to persuade us to vote Remain, assured us no such thing would ever happen. But the British people have been betrayed from all sides. Lied to by the Remain camp, they are now being sold out by the politicians that are supposed to be leading us out of the EU.
Much of this has been done behind all of our backs — including MPs and government ministers. British officials in Whitehall and Brussels have been quietly conspiring with their EU counterparts to draw us further and further into an EU defence union.
Since November last year, five months after we voted to leave the EU, Britain has fully signed up to five separate EU Council agreements which frame a defence union. Although the process has involved UK defence ministers, foreign ministers and the prime minister, the general election as well as intense focus on other Brexit issues no doubt allowed the usual smoke and mirrors to be deployed with even greater guile than usual. Having worked for several years in Whitehall I know well the machinations of the Sir Humphreys on both sides of the Channel. Continue reading