A Conversation With a British Euroskeptic
This coming June 23, the people of Britain vote on whether or not the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union. British Prime Minister David Cameron is arguing that Britain should stay, but a lot of Britons want out, including political economist Rodney Atkinson. A widely published commentator, journalist and author—as well as a former political candidate and ministerial adviser—Atkinson has argued against Britain’s part in the EU for decades.
Trumpet: How would you summarize your main problems with the European Union project?
Rodney Atkinson: Well, any objective observer today of Europe would find disturbingly too many comparisons between today and 1941, which was the high point of the Nazi and Fascist domination of the European Continent. This might sound incredible, and indeed, it should be unheard of, but in fact because of the surrender of democratic sovereignty by so many nations of Europe to this notion of a United States of Europe, the desires of the Nazis and Fascists in the 1930s and ’40s have, to a large extent, been reproduced in what was supposed to be a peaceful alternative to that very same fascist Europe.
There’s so much about Europe that has the appearance of democracy. You’re arguing very differently.
Indeed, because the sovereign rights of the peoples of Europe emanate from the national parliaments, and all those national parliaments today are pretty well powerless. Instead we have a German- (at best a German- and French-) dominated technocracy or bureaucracy in Brussels, which, thanks to international treaty law in which all the 28 members have signed away their democratic rights to this bureaucratic center, there is very little democracy left. The form of the European Parliament … is grotesquely undemocratic by any normal national standards. And of course, the 17 or 18 of those 28 countries have, in addition, surrendered their currencies to the euro, and of course, once you surrender your currency, you cannot really exist as a sovereign country.
Do you view the popular discontent and unrest in Greece, Italy and other European Union nations as kind of a certain justice, or that there’s a certain inevitability to the average citizen feeling like they have really lost something?
Yes. It’s taken rather a long time for them to realize it, 20, 30, 40 years depending on how long each country has been a member, but now of course the economic and democratic conditions are so horrendous that even the average person has begun to realize what a mistake it all was. I mean we have 23 or 24 million people unemployed in the European Union. That’s over 10 percent of the population, and this level of unemployment has gone on now for decades. And if anyone had asked the people of Europe, “Is this what you want?” they would all have said years ago, “Of course not. We wouldn’t tolerate this.” Because it’s not just the unemployment; it’s the social decline, the collapse of health and social systems, the mass migration of young people, particularly from the Mediterranean countries to the center, to Germany and Holland and Luxembourg in the north, which are doing reasonably well by the standards of the European Union, but not, of course, by anyone else’s standards in the rest of the world, who are racing ahead of the European Union. So we’ve seen a social, economic and, of course, democratic collapse due to this hubris, this grotesque imperial idea, which has been dressed up as a peaceful solution after the Second World War.
Maybe you could give us a more specific sense of how it is that this represents a modern manifestation of Nazi ideals.
Well, if we look at the 1941-42 plans of the Nazi regime for the whole of Europe—which they called the European Economic Community, which is exactly the name given to the European Union when it was first founded in the late ’50s. Of course, they always start off, these imperialists, in the same way: They have the trade agreements, and then customs unions, and economic union, and then it gradually becomes political union, and then, of course, they’ve created an imperial state. So that process has been going on since the 1950s.
And at that time many of the leading founders and indeed some of the leading managers of the European Union had been open Nazis and fascists during the ’30s and ’40s. Indeed, the first president of the European Union was a man called Walter Hallstein, who had been a convinced and rather unpleasant Nazi, who had been a member of intellectual Nazi groups, as well as university-teaching Nazi groups, legal Nazi groups. He was really one of the Nazi elites, and what happened after the war? In 1957, he becomes the first president of the European Union or European Economic Community, as it was then. And there are many other characters like him; I won’t go into all the details, but far too many for anyone with any sense of history, not to smell a big rat here.
And then, of course, on top of the individual political animals, we have all the corporations. And we’ve noticed a number of these corporations in recent weeks threatening Britain about what would happen to us if we left the European Union—companies like Siemens and bmw and Ford, Bertelsmann, General Electric. These were all great supporters of the Nazi regime. Americans may not know anymore how important Henry Ford was to the Nazi regime. A great supporter; he personally contributed to Hitler’s election funds, and he was awarded the Nazi regime’s highest civilian honor, which was presented to him in New York in 1941. Similarly, companies like Siemens, who were involved in a lot of the Nazis’ leading industrial projects and who were instrumental in once again supporting Hitler in his election ambitions—and they were recently threatening the United Kingdom that if we chose to reestablish our democratic sovereignty, then it would be a great threat to us. Barely disguised threats, in other words, from companies which had been great supporters—fanatical supporters, indeed—of the fascist Europe of the 1930s and ’40s.
You’re making the pitch to British voters that the drawbacks to staying in the EU far outweigh the advantages. What are your main arguments?
Well, of course, Britain always had a completely different world-trading structure to its economy before we entered the European Union. In the 20 or 30 years before we entered, we did far better than in the 30 or 40 years since we entered the European Union. And this should come as no surprise to anyone who knew anything about political economy. You know, our friends and our trading partners round the world were in America, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand—and of course, we were attaching ourselves to a continental power dominated by Germany, who twice in the first half of the 20th century had sought to subjugate the rest of Europe, and who then chose, along with leading fascists in France and Italy, to find a more peaceful way of achieving very similar ends. And certainly they’ve achieved it. If you look at Europe today we see it looks remarkably like the Europe of 1941, which was the sort of height of Nazi fascist aims and ambitions.
We see for instance the breakup of Yugoslavia into Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, with many names from the fascist period being used by the modern-day activists. We see the breakup of Czechoslovakia, just as we did then, into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. We’ve seen a move to overturn a democratically elected government in Ukraine, just as in 1941 of course Hitler assembled the biggest army in history, 4 million men, to invade Russia through Belarus and Ukraine. And we see today, after these decades of mass unemployment and bankruptcy, how Germany now dominates Europe. Because 28 nation-states have been destroyed democratically. Twenty-eight constitutions, 28 parliaments have effectively no power. Nineteen currencies, 19 central banks have been disposed of. And the German dominance is through the Frankfurt European Central Bank and its currency. Germany has one of the biggest trade surpluses in history: 8 percent of gdp. It’s a massive surplus. And that, of course, is reflected in the massive deficits by other parts of the world and other parts of the European Union.
And of course, this economic power has given Angela Merkel enormous political power. We’ve just seen how she’s bulldozed Europe into coming to an agreement with Germany’s old ally from the First World War, Turkey. And of course, we see the nervousness of Russia and Putin, who rightly sees what most East Europeans also see, which is a movement to the east by a German-dominated superstate, not accountable to democratic control because the cradle of democratic control has always been the nation-state, and those nation-states have effectively been eliminated.
People say, “Well, hold on. If there were this chaos, what about this chaos? I mean, surely that wasn’t planned.” Well, actually, in a way, it was. A friend of mine is a leading British economist, and he was in Frankfurt about 20 years ago, just before the foundation of the euro, and he said to leading Bundesbank people at Frankfurt, “Well, you realize that this euro is going to cause utter chaos. You just can’t impose this on 17, 18 countries.” And the interlocutor said, “Oh, well, yes, good. If we have chaos, then we will be able to do things politically which we otherwise would not be able to do.” And of course, if I can quote someone who said, “The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.” And who said that? The Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Incidentally, we’ve just had bmw telling us in this country that we must not leave the European Union, and who are, you know, the principle family owners of shares in bmw are Goebbels’ step-grandchildren.
How much is Germany able to do what it’s doing simply because of the ignorance of the people?
Well, it’s principally the ignorance of the political leaders. … In Britain, you know, which is one of the cradles of democracy, we have a democratic constitution which in various forms challenging the absolute rule of the king, goes back 800 years to Magna Carta in 1215. … It’s interesting that the freedoms that were granted then to the people of England by the barons forcing the king to sign Magna Carta … also arose out of the conflict between King John, who signed the Magna Carta, and the pope in Rome. Of course, the Vatican then—as now, incidentally—does not hold much truck with independent nation-states. They don’t like the idea of individual countries going their own way. Indeed, most of British history is a litany of attempts by the Vatican to destroy the sovereignty of the British people. Of course, there was a time when sovereignty just meant the sovereignty of the king; now, of course, it means a democratic society—the democratic rights of the people to appoint, to vote for, their own lawmakers. So you need to know history, preferably 800 years ago.
And you also need to know what geopolitics is, the movements. If you don’t understand why Russia is nervous today, then you don’t understand elementary geopolitics and how this rising force, however weak and disastrous it is internally, is nevertheless a force which is expanding into the east. East Europeans know this. Russians know this. And gradually, thank God, more and more people in Britain and the rest of Europe know it, as well.
Unfortunately, they tend then to vote for extremes of one side or the other, in desperation. But that’s precisely of course what happened in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s in the Weimar Republic. They were desperate, and you’ve got millions of people joining the Nazi Party and then they were disappointed with them, and they then joined the Communist Party, then they went back to the Nazi Party, and they had this enormous swinging pendulum. And you’re getting exactly the same today with extremist parties like Syriza in Greece, like Podemos in Spain. We are quite lucky in the United Kingdom that the alternative is the United Kingdom Independence Party, which is not extreme in that sense. But it’s nevertheless something new, and it has to be, by definition, a bit amateurish because it is the spontaneous rising of people against the established parties, who have become more and more like each other and more and more statist, more and more corporatist, more and more anti-democratic, more and more contemptuous of Parliament. And this happens to be precisely what European corporatist fascism has been looking for, and we have provided it over the last 30 or 40 or 50 years.
A lot of people have called for a referendum on Britain leaving the EU for a long time. What has changed, in your view?
Well, these protest parties have become more and more powerful, more and more threatening of the establishments. In the case of Cameron, his conservative party’s claim to represent conservatives has been challenged. Certainly the UK Independence Party appeals also to socialists, who no longer have faith in the socialist party, the Labour Party in Britain. And this has now risen to such a crescendo that the established parties are worried. In the case of Cameron, what he’s done in order to stop this challenge is to say that he will renegotiate a membership of the European Union, and hold a referendum. He started off with all sorts of demands. He basically was told, “No. You can’t have that and you can’t have that.” In which case he then said, “OK, well, I won’t ask for it, then.” So by the time he’d finished, he asked for virtually nothing, and even that he didn’t really get. So there’s absolutely no credibility. It’s just a great big fudge to try to pretend he’s done something to present it to the people, hoping that big business and big government and the European Union can force or buy or bully or manipulate the British people into agreeing to stay in the European Union.
And of course, we must remember that it is the European Union is the issue, not Europe. And there’s no way in which the European Union, with Britain leaving, would refuse to trade with the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is the European Union’s biggest export market. If there were any serious conflict about trade, it is the European Union that would be devastated by a breakup of that trade. But of course, they’re pretending that if Britain left, then we wouldn’t be able to trade any more, and therefore we’d lose jobs. Of course, it’s quite the opposite, in fact. Because we have paid hundreds of thousands of millions of pounds into the European Union in budget contributions, and we’ve had hundreds of thousands of millions of pounds of trade deficit for all that contribution. Also the regulatory burden is probably about 4 or 5 percent of gross domestic product. So altogether it has been an absolute disaster economically, democratically, constitutionally, socially, and there’s no disguising it if you’re objective and look at the facts.
But there’s an awful lot of manipulation, particularly by the media in Britain. You’ve got to remember that the principle political medium in Britain is the bbc, the British Broadcasting Corporation. And the British Broadcasting Corporation was the worst appeaser of Nazism and fascism in the 1930s. Indeed, its director general, Lord Reith—after whom even today they name the bbc lectures; important lectures every year are called the Reith Lectures—Lord Reith himself was a great admirer of Hitler. For instance, when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, Reith wrote in his diary: “What a magnificent assertion of Mr. Hitler’s power.” And of course, the bbc also prevented Churchill from broadcasting before the war. Between 1937 and 1939 the bbc kept Churchill off the air. Churchill was, of course, the principle exposer of the Nazi regime and its aims, but he was deliberately silenced in Britain by the bbc, who were the only broadcaster at that time. Today, we have a bit of competition, but in those days, they were the only broadcaster, and so what Churchill have to do? He would have to go to a radio station called Radio Normandy, which was based in Normandy, in France. That was the only way he could broadcast to the British people, such was the bbc’s appeasement of fascism and its silencing of anti-fascist people like Churchill. So we have the same people today pursuing the same agenda as they did then. Now, all these things you see, you’d never hear this in any medium in Britain, and the censorship today is really quite horrendous.
How optimistic are you about the outcome of that referendum? What might the effects be if Britain says it wants out?
Well, first of all I think no matter what way the vote goes, the pro-EU side has lost because they’ve never had such opposition as they have today. We have really quite substantial leading members of the Conservative Party, also of the Labour Party, actively campaigning to get our country back, to leave the structures of the European Union. And I think the British people will vote to leave. I think it will be very close. I hope it will, and I think it will. But even if there’s a narrow victory for staying in the European Union, things will never be the same again, and effectively the Euro-fanatics will have lost even if they’ve won.
Earlier you were talking about how when the European Union project was established, it was essentially established with failure in mind, and that crises were basically a means by which they would be able to basically force union where people wouldn’t stand for it otherwise. So many people right now are very pessimistic about the future of the EU. But in a very real sense, the people who were behind this project to begin with expected what we see today. What are your thoughts on the future of the EU?
Well, I don’t think that people who founded it in the 1950s thought there would be chaos, but certainly these people who instituted the euro in 1999, many of them were aware of the fact that this would cause enormous tensions, enormous problems, and those problems would only be solved through supra-national means, so they thought. So that’s slightly different from the political constitutional foundation in the ’50s, versus the economic chaos today.
I think the other point about those who pursue this: There are many people who ask me all the time, “Why are these politicians giving away their country?” And a friend of mine used to say, “Well, what a politician loves to do is dance on a bigger stage.” He doesn’t really care about democracy or geopolitics or prosperity in the long run. All he sees is his name, his image on the television, his picture in the paper, his pronouncements quoted by journalists, and he wants to be getting on and doing something new. New legislation, a bigger stage, and what bigger stage can you get when you’re managing a country than a supra-national stage like the European Union? So there are sort of non-ideological, purely personal psychological reasons why politicians have pursued this.
And of course, the more they have pursued it, the more it has failed. The more people have suffered, the more they say, “Ah, but I’ve got a greater, even better solution,” and so they expand it more and more, and every expansion fails, so then they justify the failure to expand more. …
When Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia, he said to the Czechs, “The Czechs don’t realize that they’re on the railway track, they’re in the train, and the points are set, and there’s no choice. They’ve got to do it.” In other words, the Germans used, Hitler used, and even Angela Merkel has used it recently, they talk about Schicksal. Fate. It is the fate of the Germans to lead Europe. It is the fate of Europe to become one. Now, this is grotesque metaphysical, ideological nonsense for the typical American or British political observer. You know, if anyone stood on a platform and banged and said, “It’s our fate! It’s our destiny!” people would think they’re a little bit nuts. Although, funny: One of the people who said that in Britain was Tony Blair. He talked about destiny and fate and talked about a thousand years of Europe, and so on.
Somehow that sounds different coming from the mouth of a Tony Blair than it does from a German politician.
It does, exactly. It does, but no less dangerous for that.
So what do you think the future for Europe is?
Well, it will gradually break down. It’s already broken down. I mean, this massive migration crisis has led to the re-imposition of national border controls. The economy: the European Central Bank today has agreed to another great wave of money-printing. They’ve reduced interest rates even more, from minus 0.3 percent to minus 0.4 percent I think. This is all economic nonsense of the highest level. Because it’s not lack of money in the system that’s the problem. It’s the lack of money in the pockets of the people to spend—that’s where all industry and commerce and prosperity begins. Without people to spend money, business has no reason at all to borrow to invest. That is an elementary thing. And of course, they’ve destroyed the distribution of capital in Western economies. They’ve concentrated it all in the kind of big businesses who are now dictating to us that we have to stay in the European Union. …
The whole system has got out of kilter because democracy has been destroyed, and democracy’s been destroyed because nation-states have been destroyed. And the very people who were so supportive of Hitler personally and the German Europe of the 1940s—the very corporations—are back again today in support of the European Union, which is also collapsing.
