Why I Voted for Brexit and Would do the Same Again

Remoaners like to smear Brexiteers as ill-informed and poorly educated racists and low achievers. The reality is very different. Nobody pulled the wool over my eyes.

This is my personal experience of fifty years. It starts when I was ten years old, in 1973, when the UK joined the European Economic Community (EEC), later the European Community, now the European Union. See how it changed? We went from being a member of a trading bloc to a political construct that was and is on its way to becoming the federal United States of Europe.

Although I was only 10 years old in 1973, I had developed an early interest in politics. My dad was a coal miner and in the previous year, 1972, he’d been on strike. I’d been out with him picking coal from the local slag heaps and chopping down telegraph poles on the nearby disused railway line. We cut them up into pieces small enough to bring home on my sledge, to burn as fuel in our coal fireplace. The experience catapulted me into politics.

In the next few years, politics became for me what football was for my friends and my team was Labour, but in 1973 that was still in the future. I was aware of the arguments about entry to the EEC, but I didn’t have a position. I was 10. I do remember, though, how Heath and other pro-EEC politicians assured us that we were only entering a trading bloc that would in no way interfere with our laws. That Heath gave those assurances is beyond dispute. It is a matter of record, in speech after speech. I didn’t know any of this at the time of course, but I did know it was official Labour policy to oppose entry. In the event, Labour rebels voted with Heath and so the UK joined the EEC.

Now we know that Heath took the UK into the EEC based on a pack of lies, and he and his fellow ‘joiners,’ knew it. They weren’t stupid people. It was no oversight on their part. They knew full well about Van Gend en Loos v Nederlandse Administratie der Belastingen - Wikipedia . They also knew about Costa v ENEL - Wikipedia.

They knew joining the EEC would absolutely impact the UK’s sovereignty. Most of the electorate, though, did not know or understand. The vast majority knew nothing about the Van Gend or Costa cases. Why would they? These were obscure European civil legal cases from ten years before. These days the Internet makes it possible for anyone to research such information, but 1973 was 27 years before the Internet came into wide usage. I’ll bet that not one British citizen in 100,000 knew anything about those cases or their implications. Even if they had vaguely heard of them, they would have struggled to get hold of an English translation. Again, remember, this was pre-the Internet. These days you can look up the text of any Act of Parliament online. Back then if you wanted one you had to go to a bookshop that was an agent for HMSO – Her Majesty’s Stationery Office – and order it on paper. I recall when I was 16, in 1980, having to order a copy of the Public Order Act 1936 from Austicks in Leeds for a court case I was about to fight as a litigant in person against the police. (I won!)

Remember this when you hear Remoaners today saying that “They who voted for Brexit in 2016 didn’t know what they were voting for.” Those who, like me, voted Leave in 2016 knew a damn sight more about the EU than anyone outside the Westminster political and academic classes knew about the EEC in 1973.

Labour returned to power after the February 1974 election, won again in October 1974 with a small overall majority, and in 1975 gave the UK electorate the referendum that Prime Minister Harold Wilson had promised as part of his election campaign. I was 12 and a bit more politically aware after the second national miners’ strike the previous year, which had brought about the February 1974 General Election. In the 1975 referendum campaign, I remember Peter Shore, Barbara Castle, Michael Foot, and others arguing we should leave, and Harold Wilson, Shirley Williams and others arguing we should remain members, but I still didn’t understand enough to have a position one way or the other. I do recall, though, that I asked my mother which way she and my dad would be voting. She told me they’d vote ‘remain’ as the jargon would become in 2016. When I asked why, she said “Because if we come out, we’ll starve. We’ll be like Biafra.” That was a reference to the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970 in which up to 2 million died of starvation. BBC and ITV news in the UK nightly showed pictures of swollen-bellied starving children. So that was why my parents and others voted ‘remain’ in 1975. People really believed that the UK would starve if it weren’t in the EEC. Either that or we’d once again end up at war with Germany.

That too was a genuine concern amongst older people who didn’t understand how the world had changed. All my holidays, when I was young, were in my grandmother’s caravan at Hornsea on the Yorkshire Holderness East Coast. The WWII tank obstacles and pill box were still on the beach with the second line of defence in the farmer’s fields immediately behind Sam Norman’s South Cliff caravan site. When I was 6 or 7 a German ship beached at Hornsea during a storm. There were older people on our caravan site who thought the Germans had been spying. It sounds crazy, but this was less than 25 years after the end of the war. Everyone had been in it or knew somebody who had. There were still people around, my grandparents among them, who’d been through the First World War. One of my mother’s childhood friends, Cyril Capper, had drowned on HMS Repulse, sunk in 1941 in the South China Sea. Her brother, my uncle Cyril Holt, was batman to Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris at Bomber Command HQ in High Wycombe. My paternal grandmother’s brother, my great uncle Charles Powell, was killed in Holland in 1944. It sounds completely crazy now that people could think that way, that they might be worried about another European war or starving like a third-world country, but that was the average level of the electorate’s understanding in 1975.

My parents weren’t stupid, they were just working class. My dad was a coal miner for 46 years, from 1935 aged 14 until he retired in 1981. My mother started work as a daily maid aged 14 in 1939, and later worked in the garment industry, at Burtons in Leeds during the second world war, from 1941, and later at ‘The Town Tailors’ in Castleford, now Burberry. Neither had any formal education beyond the age of 14. They’d grown up reading the Daily Herald and then the Sun. They were average people, hard-working and honest. Neither ever claimed so much as one day’s dole in their entire lives and both were proud of the fact. They were workers. They didn’t have the access to information that we have today. The newspapers they read didn’t report politics in fine detail. My mother read novels borrowed from the library. My dad read ‘True Detective’ magazines. They got their political views from TV, The Sun, and experience. Both were loyal to their trade unions, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in my dad’s case and the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers (NUTGW) in my mother’s, but neither was politically active in any way save for paying their dues and coming out on strike if the union said so.

If anyone doubts what I’ve recorded above concerning Biafra-style starvation scare stories, listen to the lecture ‘Entry into the European Community, 1971-73’ by the Remainer professor Vernon Bogdanor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL5XvrHbwBc . Two minutes into the lecture he quotes press reports of the time that ‘Food Supplies Will Be In Danger.’

Again, remember this when you hear Remoaners today saying that “They who voted for Brexit in 2016 didn’t know what they were voting for.” Those who voted ‘Remain’ in the 1975 referendum knew next to nothing about the organisation they were joining, what it entailed, and what the ‘project’ was all about. Had everyone known then what we know now, I genuinely believe the UK would have voted Leave in 1975 by an enormous margin. But they didn’t know. Unlike the 2016 voters who refused to panic at the scare stories circulated by the ‘Remain’ media and Chancellor George Osborne’s blatant threats, the referendum voters of 1975 were frightened into a ‘Remain’ vote.

So it was that in the 1975 referendum the vote went two to one for ‘Remain’. Unlike the Remoaner tantrums post-2016 however, the ‘Leave’ camp mostly resigned themselves to the fact and those who didn’t could get no airtime. Contrast that with the media’s enormous indulgence of all those who refused to accept the 2016 referendum result. After 1975 it seemed the UK was in the EU to stay. That was it. So what? We were in a trading bloc that made travel abroad a bit easier. People we knew had started going on European holidays and in 1976 I and my parents had our first non-Hornsea holiday. We went on the Wallace Arnold ‘Capital of Tyrol’ coach tour that took us to Innsbruck, Austria, with visits to Brussels, Frankfurt Am Main, Saarbrucken, Oberammergau, and other places, including a side-trip over the Brenner Pass and the Europa Bridge to Vipiteno in Italy. That was where I saw my first Harley-Davidson, a blue Electraglide parked on the pavement outside a café. I decided there and then that I would be a biker and buy a Harley when I was older. I became a biker at 17 and finally got a Harley in 2010. In Brussels we stayed at the Hotel Duc de Brabant, destroyed by fire the following year with nineteen dead including a dozen British holidaymakers.

I attended my first Labour Party Young Socialists meeting in 1977 at a club in Chapeltown, Leeds. That was the first time I’d met any Black people in significant numbers. I lived in an all-white mining village, Great Preston. The only ‘BAME’ people as we now call them were my Indian doctor who’s now in his 80s and retired but still a friend and now a client of mine, the local Sikh newsagents, and the Wong family who ran the ‘Sincere’ Chinese takeaway in the next village, Kippax, whose son and daughter, Michael, and Stella, were in school with me at Brigshaw Comprehensive. I loved the club in Chapeltown. The Black people I met were welcoming, friendly, and fun to be around. It was a whole new world to me. I continued attending LPYS meetings there, but it was more for the atmosphere and the music – full-on 1970s reggae – than the politics. The LPYS was boring and doctrinaire. Two newspapers were obligatory reading, the LPYS’s own paper ‘Left,’ and ‘Militant.’ Looking back, I think they might have had a bit of a circulation war between them, as ‘Left’ carried the slogan on its masthead ‘True Militants Read Left’ (so ‘Left’ not ‘Militant’ then I guess?) I joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) that same year, 1977, becoming at 14 a founder member of the Pontefract branch at a launch meeting where the guest speaker was the Yorkshire NUM President Arthur Scargill. Eventually, the ANL fizzled out, but I re-joined it after it reformed briefly in the late 1990s.

From the founding meeting of Pontefract ANL, I took away with me a box of leaflets and posters. I pinned the posters up on my school’s notice boards and handed out the leaflets at break times. A minority of the lads at Brigshaw were bigmouth racists, and thick and aggressive with it. Until then they’d been the only ones making political points in the classrooms and corridors, parroting National Front propaganda they didn’t understand. My effort was a one-man pushback which soon landed me on the carpet in the Headmaster’s office. Brigshaw’s founding Headmaster from 1972, throughout the time I attended from 1974 to 1979, was Mr C A (Alec) Rollinson. Mr Rollinson was brilliant, humane, liberal, and fun. He had a good sense of humour. He told me to take down the posters “Because otherwise, I’ll have the National Front lot demanding that I let them put theirs up.” That was all. No detention, no lines, no writing an essay on “A day in the life of the inside of a Ping-Pong ball” as one of our teachers liked to hand out. Fair enough. No more posters. He said nothing about the leaflets though so I continued dishing those out whenever I could get a supply.

In May 1978, I joined the Labour Party proper, having helped in the local elections. Officially you had to be 15 to join, and my birthday was in July, but Labour was desperate for young members. The following year Labour lost the 3 May 1979 General Election.

Two days after the General Election that brought Thatcher to power, Saturday 5 May 1979, I went on the ‘Leeds Campaign Against Racism’ (LCAR's) march from Woodhouse Moor, through Leeds City Centre. Arriving back to Woodhouse Moor, we found a large contingent of National Front thugs waiting for us. The first people they attacked were an old couple carrying a small brown banner for ‘The Leeds Society of Friends’ – the Quakers. The first into battle on our side were the old guys from the Leeds Communist (CPGB) Party, not to be confused with the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist Leninist) fans-of-Albania student types, who all ran away as soon as the fighting started. I was the only one there of the Labour Party contingent who was of fighting age. The rest were all older Leeds Labour councillors and activists, nice people like the 'Kes' actor Bernard Atha who’d never thrown a punch in their lives. I’d had scraps all the way through school though, so I got stuck in. It was a general melee with no cops to be seen when it kicked off, but just as I was in the middle of re-educating an acne-faced NF skinhead a few years older than me, I was hit hard across the spine with a police baton, completely knocking the wind out of me and making it hard for me to draw breath. Handcuffed, the cop who’d hit me dumped me to one side. They didn’t arrest any of the NF.

A cop told me I’d be on my way to Millgarth nick for a night in the cells as soon as a police van arrived, either there or the Bridewell under the town hall, one or the other, he said. I'd heard about the Bridewell. West Yorkshire Police were known for beating people up in the cells there, four cops to one prisoner, knocking them from one wall of a cell to the other. Before the van arrived though, the old Commies came to the rescue. To look at them you’d have thought the ‘G’ in CPGB stood for ‘Geriatric,’ but those old guys were tough. Amongst them were veterans of the battles with Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s when they’d been around my age. By the time they’d finished, two cops were looking at a spell of sick leave. They drove me away in a Lada to a CP member’s house in Chapel Allerton where a veteran CP member named Ben Mattison, dead 40 years now, cut off the cuffs with an angle grinder. They tried to convince me I should leave Labour and join the CP. I was polite but non-committal. They’d saved my bacon, but I’d read Solzhenitsyn’s ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ a year or two before, I knew what had happened in Spain and Katyn, and I remembered how the USSR had crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 when I was 5. I did agree though that as soon as I could afford it, I’d visit the USSR to see for myself. “Don’t believe what you’ve heard about Russia,” they said. “It’s all propaganda.” I kept my promise in 1980 visiting Yalta with Ben and his wife Ann, and in 1981 I went back to the USSR visiting Kyiv Yalta and Moscow. It was interesting and I saw through all the propaganda. Ours and theirs. I didn’t join the CP. I did go to meetings though, and I became a client of one of their members, Jack Marks, a Jewish podiatrist who worked from a garret on Eastgate.

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/leeds-couple-and-walk-through-history-1813275

I suffered from ingrown toenails and Jack would dig them out for me two or three times a year, giving me a short course in Marxist-Leninism with each treatment. Jack died in 2017 and his wife Min in 2022. Like all the CPGB members I met in Leeds, they were one hundred per cent sincere in their beliefs to their dying day. If they’d lived in the USSR in the 1930s, none of them would have survived Stalin’s purges.

Why this digression? Remoaners like to smear Brexiteers as racists, but I was fighting racists - literally - before those who smear us were even born. I doubt the likes of Hilary Benn or Lord Adonis would have fought with us against the NF in the battle of Woodhouse Moor. I joined the ANL and AAM at 14. I’ve personally levelled racists who’ve tried assaulting me and my friends. One occasion was a CND meeting in Albion Place, Leeds, circa 1983. The speaker was Labour veteran Fenner Brockway, aged 95 at the time. The BNP started a disturbance, upsetting a table and screaming abuse at the platform and attendees. The stewards ejected them. On leaving the meeting, one violently assaulted me in Albion Place. He started it but I finished it.

All my own history notwithstanding, for voting ‘Leave’ Remoaners call me a racist. If that’s the case, I must be a funny type of racist. My wife is half-French and a large part of her family through intermarriage with Algerians are French Muslims. I had (now deceased) two Polish uncles by marriage who served in the RAF. My future son-in-law is from an Irish traveller family. I have personally experienced racism first-hand from Scots, sad, unpleasant, and unfortunate, but true. Early one morning I was on the receiving end of a racist rant and threats outside the Co-Op here in Castleford, from a gormless local who believed, for whatever reason, that I was Polish. I didn’t enlighten him. If somebody mistakes me for a Pole, I take it as a compliment.

In September 1979 aged 16, I went to Park Lane Sixth-Form College in Leeds to study politics, economics, and history but dropped out that December and got a job with Hill Samuel Life Assurance Ltd, part of Hill Samuel PLC, the merchant bank. I stayed in financial services and am an Independent Financial Adviser these days with my own firm. In 1981 I got my first motorcycle and the following year, in 1982, joined MAG Motorcycle Action Group - Promoting Riders' Rights | mag-uk.org . In 1983 I was the Elmet CLP delegate to the Labour Party’s annual conference in Brighton where I voted for the Kinnock-Hattersley leadership ticket and in 1984 was the Elmet CLP election organiser for the Leeds European Constituency in the European Parliament elections of that year. From 1988 though I was much less active in Labour and much more active in The Motorcycle Action Group, as legislators turned up the dial in terms of anti-biker legislation. In 1988, via MAG, I helped found the Federation of European Motorcyclists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_European_Motorcyclists

having by that time realised that all the worst anti-motorcycle legislation was coming and would come in the future from the European Community as it had by then become. In 1989 MAG’s members elected me National Chairman, as a result of which, by the mid-1990s, I was a regular attendee at meetings in Brussels with MEPs and officials working in the European Parliament and Commission, experiencing first-hand how EU politics worked. I was also having meetings with MPs in the UK about motorcycling matters. Nine times out of ten such meetings were a waste of time. “I agree with you Neil, and I’d like to help” they’d say, “but that rule has been handed down to us from Brussels, it’s an EU directive, we can’t change it here.” And it was true. They weren’t just ducking issues. They really did have less and less power. This was when it started coming home to me just how much the EU had eroded the UK’s sovereignty. At the same time, I realised how difficult it was for ordinary citizens to have any influence whatsoever on EU decision-making.

There were UK Members of the European Parliament who were very friendly toward MAG. They could see the justice of the cases we were making. Most notable were David Bowe MEP and Roger Barton MEP, both Labour, and Peter Beazley MEP, a Conservative. The phrase ‘democratic deficit’ was one I came to know well. They complained bitterly that as MEPs they had extraordinarily little power, and that the Commission did all the real decision-making. We did have ‘wins’ but we could see that the writing was on the wall. The EU was going to do to us whatever it wanted to do, and there was nothing we could do about it. The net result for motorcycling today is that the ever-tightening license regime has reduced the number of new entrants into motorcycling to a tiny fraction of previous numbers, and motorcycling is dying. Even in the early to mid-1990s though, I was still pro-EU membership. If anyone searches the archives, they’ll find an article I wrote for MAG’s membership newspaper ‘StreetBiker’ criticizing the UK government for what I then saw as its half-hearted participation in the EU. I remember that in it I compared the UK to George Best, ace Northern Ireland and Manchester United footballer of the 1960s and 70s, who’d wasted his immense talent through alcoholism.

There was no one event that turned me into a Brexiteer but there were stand-out moments along my journey that impelled me down the path to voting ‘Leave.’ One was a January night in, I think, 1995 or 1996. I was in The Bison, a Brussels pub frequented by office workers from the EU establishment, where a vintage French lightweight ‘Perle’ motorcycle stood on display behind the bar. With me was Simon Milward and other leaders of European bikers’ groups. American Motorcyclist We’d have one of the thrice-yearly FEM – later FEMA – meetings in Brussels every January, working throughout the day on a Saturday before going out for a meal and on to the pubs. Partly we went to drink Belgian beer and have fun, obviously, but also to network with EU workers who might make useful contacts.

That particular evening Simon Milward and I had got talking to a young Brit in his early 20s, 24 at most. I got his brief life story. Privately educated in the UK, he’d gone to Cambridge, and then got a job with the European Commission. He moaned long and loud about how the British government. John Major’s Conservative administration was pushing back feebly, moderately, and with all the usual politeness against the latest EU attempt to push its federalist agenda. I don’t recall the young guy’s exact words, but they amounted to “They are kidding themselves, national governments mean nothing now, they can’t stop us doing what we plan to do, this [Brussels] is where the action is, where all the real decisions are made now, so they should just shut up, accept it, and stop wasting everyone’s time.” That hit me like a thunderbolt. Here was this kid from a privileged background who’d never had to struggle, who had never even stood in an election of any kind, stating flatly that he and his equally privileged equally unelected mates were the ones with all the power now, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it.

That was a turning point for me. I realised I’d become intellectually lazy in assuming we’d be okay in the EU. In, I think 1993, I’d organised MAG’s first ever motorcyclists’ mass lobby of the UK parliament. The most helpful MPs had been Tony Benn and Denis Skinner for Labour, and the Conservative Bill Cash, all three ‘Eurosceptics’ as they were known then, ‘Leavers’ today. Tony Benn told me that we were the first organised group of ordinary people to come to Parliament to complain and ask for its help against EU legislation. They’d seen no end of lobbying by businesses and trade unions, but we weren’t there for a ‘monied’ interest. We were there because we didn’t like the decisions the EU was making that were impacting our lives directly. As the years went by more pieces fell into place.

In 2006 I read Christopher Booker and Richard North’s book ‘The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive?’ Only then did everything finally make sense. I thought back to a bit of biker fiction I’d read years before in the American motorcycle magazine Easyriders, entitled ‘Frog Soup.’ The premise of the story was that if you want to make frog soup, you don’t drop a frog into a pan of hot water because it will just hop right out. Instead, you turn up the heat slowly, so the frog doesn’t notice it. Eventually, before the frog knows it, it can’t get out and you have frog soup. That's what politicians do to all of us, of course, whenever they want to get away with something, anything that they think will be unpopular. They push an inch and if they don’t get any pushback, they push another and another. That’s what the EU was doing to us, the UK, and to all the other member countries. I realised also that a lot of our own national MPs actually enjoyed being powerless over a lot of things, they could let Brussels take the heat, to which Brussels was and is impervious anyway, saying, albeit truthfully, “there’s nothing we can do, it’s come down from the EU” while they carried on picking up their fat paychecks for being glorified town councillors.

I attended FEMA meetings in Brussels as the MAG (UK) representative until 2002. Towards the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s I noticed a change in the EU’s attitude toward FEMA. We’d been a thorn in their flesh ever since we really got organised with Simon Milward as FEM’s General Secretary from 1992 onwards, but the whole FEM - FEMA set-up was and still is, run on a shoestring. The EU saw this and so it started subtly trying to buy us. It did it by offering money for FEMA to run projects like ‘European Young Rider of the Year,’ and for FEMA to do research work. FEMA would get EU money for such projects, but it wasn’t money it could spend on campaigning, it was for the project in question. So, we had officials in Brussels who were working for motorcyclists’ rights but whose time was being colonised by the EU machine. It was a smart move on their part, and our people fell for it. If they were running ‘Young Rider of the Year’ or doing a gargantuan survey of motorcycle accidents or the EU, they weren’t lobbying MEPs or Commissioners.

As well as soaking up FEMA lobbyists’ time though, the EU’s cosying up to FEMA also had a more insidious effect in that the people we employed identified more and more with the EU and its aims than with the people who’d actually employed them in the first place, i.e., national riders’ rights organisations like MAG (UK), MAG Belgium, MAG Holland, MAG Austria and all the rest.

The change in the attitude of FEMA employees was notable. They’d made friends in the EU machine, and they didn’t want their friends to see them as boat-rockers. EU money had a corrupting effect on FEMA from which it has never really recovered. It changed FEMA for the worse. This, I now realise, is what the EU does. It’s its standard operating procedure. It uses European taxpayers’ money to buy up and buy off any opposition that it can’t crush or ignore, and it splashes even more taxpayers’ money around the same way that Al Capone splashed money around depression-era Chicago, ensuring it always has friends willing to advocate for it. When I returned briefly to the FEMA Committee in 2014 for a couple of years after returning to the Board of MAG UK, I hardly recognised it. One of the first things a longstanding FEMA committee member told me was “We are not freedom fighters anymore Neil. Now we work with the EU.”

By 2011 motorcyclists had more than woken up to the threat the EU posed to their way of life. On 25 September 2011 MAG UK organised its ‘EU Hands off Biking’ demonstrations throughout the UK. And the politicians took note. This BBC report of 29 December 2016 by Mark D’Arcy records a briefing circulated by Steve Baker MP in October 2011 which read –

"Do people care enough about the issue? "In every constituency, voters are signing the People's Pledge, promising to support candidates who give them an In/Out referendum. More than twice as many people want a referendum on leaving the EU as wanted one on the voting system. More people attended the People's Pledge Congress on Saturday than have been protesting at St Paul's, notwithstanding the relative coverage. On 25 September, at least 40,000 motorcyclists took part in Motorcycle Action Group's nationwide protest, 'EU Hands Off Biking. The only question that matters today is whether our position in the EU is a proper subject for a referendum. One way or another, all three parties have previously said that it is."

Steve Baker’s dad is Mike Baker, a MAG Member of decades’ standing in Cornwall. Like his dad, Steve Baker is a biker too. Thousands of people all played a part in getting the EU referendum but it’s not an exaggeration to say that bikers in the UK, as Steve Baker noted in his briefing, played no small part in it.

From 6 June 2013 until April 2018, I was an unpaid weekly contributor to BBC Radio Leeds for years providing comments on financial matters and answering listeners’ questions live on air. I’d worked with BBC Radio Leeds on and off for about nine years beforehand. In the run-up to the referendum the BBC asked me if I’d participate in the live on-air debates they were organising from their Salford Quays, Manchester, studios, broadcasting on BBC Radio Five Live. These broadcasts continued for a time after the referendum. During one visit, one of the BBC’s bright young things, a production assistant, asked me what my background was. I gave her a brief summary – on the political left, founder of FEM and FEMA, friends all over Europe. That confused her. “But you’re on the wrong side!” she exclaimed. “With your background, you should be for Remain.” At one of the debates, a green-haired young woman told me that I was personally to blame (because I was a Brexiteer) for the murder of Jo Cox. I had to explain to her that, fortunately, I had a cast-iron alibi, as I’d been in the BBC Radio Leeds studio doing my weekly spot with Andrew Edwards at the precise moment it took place.

When the referendum finally came, I voted Leave. As a British citizen, I voted Leave. I voted for Brexit because I believe in democracy and the EU is not just undemocratic, it is explicitly anti-democratic and designed to ensure that ordinary people can have no influence on events. Race played no part in my decision. Immigration played no part. I am against mass uncontrolled immigration, sure, absolutely, but that did not decide how I voted. Leaving the EU has not solved that problem and nor did I expect it would, though it is less of a problem than it would be, had we remained a member.

I like to have a say in determining who governs my country. I like to be able to exercise an influence, however small, on events. It really is that simple. Remainers always fall back on the argument “But voters elect MEPs” and it’s true, they do, but those MEPs have no real power. They are window-dressing, nothing more, there to make the whole thing look legitimate, well-paid with EU voters’ money to keep them fat, cosseted and placid, reliably playing their part of the colossal con-trick which is the European Union. MEPs have it good. Unlike Westminster MPs over whom constituents can exercise considerable sway, MEPs are untroubled by those they purport, falsely, to represent. Even the most honest and helpful MEPs we dealt with via FEM and FEMA would admit, privately, that their job was the easiest and best-paid work they’d ever done. All it took for them to collect their paycheck was to turn up, sign in and walk out again.

The whole existence of MEPs was and still is a colossal fraud upon the voting public of Europe, but it is still a tiny and inconsequential part of the much greater fraud, the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history, which is the entire entity of the European Union. Because I believe in democracy, I also left the Labour Party in 2017 after 39 years of membership. Labour was trying to cheat Brexit voters of the victory they’d won. At the time it was the saddest day of my life, but looking back, I no longer recognise the party I joined at 14 in May 1978. In the 2019 election, I voted Conservative, and I do not regret it. Who will I vote for in the future? That's difficult, I don't know, but it won't be any party who I believe is capable of selling out the UK to the EU.

Unless the European Union changes itself beyond all recognition, the United Kingdom must NEVER rejoin. Never again must a British government betray the British people.