The Sunday Express, January 3, Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP
We have finally thrown off the shackles of the EU which had so dominated everything we do and are now a sovereign nation, making our own laws and finally out of the EU Customs Union and its Single Market. This has been a long journey for many of us. When I entered Parliament 29 years ago, I decided the Maastricht treaty was a monumental power grab by the EU and couldn’t support it.
I said that the UK would one day be forced to leave the EU because it was becoming a superstate. With each treaty that followed, centralising more and more power in Brussels, different UK governments became experts in misleading the British people, claiming that they hadn’t given up power when they had, feeding the EU’s insatiable appetite for more control.
In 1975 I, like many others was persuaded that the UK was just going to join a marketplace which would help grow our economy. Yet many in the political establishment knew only too well that the real purpose of the EU was to create a supra-national state of Europe. In 1947 Lord Thorneycroft expressed this view when he wrote that, “The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into the abandonment of their traditional economic defences, not asked.”
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