British prime minister Andy Burnham has announced his intention to negotiate Britain’s return into the European Union. With today’s EU, this is an economically suicidal idea. Both Britain and the EU are suffering economic decline that may well be terminal and irreversible; the EU’s bureaucracy would simply allow it to loot Britain further, suppress any opposition and prevent any rescue operation. With Britain attached to a European Union committing economic seppuku, the combined entity’s living standards would rapidly descend to those of the Democratic Republic of Congo, albeit with fewer mineral resources and less capable government.

When Britain entered the Economic Community (which later became the EU) in 1973, I was in favor, albeit with reservations, although in retrospect I may have been wrong. Both Germany and France, the main drivers of the 6-member Community, had enjoyed highly successful periods of economic regeneration after World War II, due to their superlative statesmen Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle. While Adenauer and de Gaulle were both dead by 1973, most of their economic policies were still in place, and appeared to be a very useful tonic against the flaccid declinism of British policy in 1945-73.

At the very least, a sound well-managed EC should provide some defense against the slide into hard-left Marxism led by Tony Benn that appeared likely once Harold Wilson was re-elected in February 1974. In early 1975, the Financial Times share index, down 70% from its 1972 peak, touched a lower level in real terms than after the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk. The downside risks in a fully independent Britain subjected to its lunatic politicians thus seemed extreme, and the EC appeared to offer some protection against them. Only the loss of Commonwealth markets, in particular low-priced Australian and New Zealand meat, which had to be given up for the sake of the EC/EU’s grotesque Common Agricultural Policy, was an obvious and major cost.

In the 1980s, the situation reversed from the one we had expected in 1973. Britain acquired a capable free-market government with the courage of its convictions under Margaret Thatcher. Partly in response, the EU acquired bureaucratic barnacles at an astonishing rate, followed by a Commission President Jacques Delors, whose ambition was to have 80% of decisions taken at the EU level, with the purpose of thwarting Thatcher and her free-marketers and constructing an impregnable socialist centralizing bastion. Thatcher only realized this was happening in 1988, by which time she had devolved fatal amounts of decision making to Brussels through the Single European Market; her attempts to recover something from the socialist maw ended in her ignominious departure in 1990.

Since 1990, both British and EU governments have been utterly incapable, and the pattern of civil liberties in both polities has deteriorated, so that even the basics of free speech are no longer sacrosanct. Implementation of the Brexit referendum of 2016 was probably deliberately botched by successive British governments, with no trade treaty with the United States when a good one was possible before January 2021 and no agreement with Australia and New Zealand to bring in low-cost Antipodean meat independently of the Common Agricultural Policy. Even worse, the Climate Change Act of 2008 was a global pioneer in foolish legislation, mandating “net zero” by 2050, which became a legally binding target through Theresa May’s 2019 amending Act. As a result of exceptionally poor government and excessive immigration, British living standards have risen only around 6% since 2007, compared to the 30-40% that would normally be expected during such a lengthy period.

Outside the EU, Britain has at least some possibility of redeeming itself by electing a competent government. Inside the EU it has no such chance of change, because the central bureaucracy is deliberately set up to thwart it. In particular, the EU has economically and even civilizationally suicidal policies in a number of areas, as follows:

• Immigration. Following Angela Merkel’s disastrous 2015 decision to abandon border control, both Britain and the EU have abandoned control of their borders, with any possible recovery thwarted by the corrupt leftist court systems. The result has been a gigantic influx of Third World lay-abouts, mostly young men, who remind one forcibly what a pity it was that the world did not implement Paul Ehrlich’s population-restricting policies, propounded in 1968 when world population was a mere 3.5 billion, as it is quite clear that the current 8.3 billion global population produces a huge surplus of unemployable, ill-educated and politically radicalized thugs. The welfare systems in both Britain and the EU are exploding from the strain, living standards have been decimated and taxes are being raised year by year in a desperate socialist attempt to squeeze enough out of the middle classes and the few remaining “rich” to support the bureaucrats’ suicidal immigration policies.
• Climate change. This cult sprang out of 100-year computer projections that utterly lack validity and was blown up by leftists seeking control, using a phony scientific “consensus” and current climate statistics that are unalarming and increasingly doctored. Only by measuring the temperature increase from 1780, in the middle of the “Maunder Minimum”, do climate zealots get the net temperature rise to a bare 1.5 degrees Celsius. The effect on British and EU economies of attempting to reach “net zero” by 2050 is however increasingly extreme, worsened by Angela Merkel’s insane (or Communist-inspired) decision to close Germany’s nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, China’s coal consumption to provide cheap if filthy power grows by leaps and bounds. Britain can get rid of this rubbish at the next election, but not if it rejoins the EU.
• Socialist blob. The EU bureaucracy led by Ursula von der Leyen controls policy and has made it a “regulatory superpower” in which its hugely destructive regulations prevent Europe from growing economically or developing new technologies such as AI. The explosion of welfare for illegal immigrants has led to an explosion of budget deficits, currently being covered by borrowing at all levels and by shoddy accounting of such holes as the “Target 2” payments mechanism. Why on earth should Britain wish to rejoin such an obviously corrupt and declining polity from which nothing but gigantic demands for money can emerge?
• China. As an authoritarian state unresponsive to its people, the EU has a natural affinity for China, which it demonstrates by opening its automobile market to Chinese imports, while imposing climate regulations on its own producers, thereby driving out of business the magnificent German and French automobile industries. Conversely, the genuinely free United States has vulgar statues of its President erected in the European Parliament – they would never dare do the same to President Xi! Britain should be on the freedom-loving U.S. side of this increasingly Manichean global struggle.
• Civil Liberties. The EU has introduced a policy whereby all users of social media must identify themselves by passport, and Britain plans to do the same in March 2027. Since only 77% of British citizens hold the expensive British passports, this is already discriminatory. More important, with 60,000 Britons arrested in the last five years for speech offenses, the country has already ceased to be recognizably a free society. Much of the EU is worse; French President Emmanuel Macron declared last week that free speech was an American concept, and that Frenchmen should only be permitted to express state-approved views. With Germany attempting to lock its hugely popular opposition party permanently out of government, the outlook for European civil liberties is dire (and Britain’s little better, albeit still changeable with the right election result). Indeed, in many respects, Communist China may become a freer society than the EU; the forbidden topics there are carefully delineated, which they are not in Britain or the EU.

Britain and the EU are heading rapidly towards perdition. Reform has proved impossible, as has economy in government, although most of the countries in Eastern Europe, which might be expected to behave worst, are notably superior to their West European cousins in economic performance, budgetary control and immigration/civil liberties. France has decayed so far that it is now the only country in the world where average incomes of the over-65s exceed those of the working population – French pensions are guaranteed at an absurdly high level, while job prospects for younger French people have been destroyed by decades of socialism, over-regulation and immigration. No rational Briton, other than an illegal “asylum-seeker” should wish to rejoin the rotting economic and social corpse that the EU has become.

Britons should truly say: Vade Retro, Satana-EU! Ipse Venena Bibas! (Get thee behind me, Euro-Satan! Drink the poison yourself!) and confine the EU’s tyranny to the rejected past netherworld where the tyrannies of Napoleon and Hitler now reside.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)