Sammy Wilson, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) spokesman on Brexit, has rubbished claims by Chancellor Philip “Remainer Phil” Hammond and others that a “No Deal” exit from the European Union would plunge the United Kingdom into a post-apocalyptic situation.
In an impassioned but humourous speech to a Leave Means Leave rally featuring speakers from the business world as well as a broad range of political parties, the East Antrim MP took Remainers to task over claims a clean break with the EU would lead to shortages of all sorts of vital items.
“Unlike those who are spreading hysteria at the moment, I don’t believe that leaving on [World Trade Organization] terms, leaving without an agreement with the EU, will be a disaster,” the Ulsterman confidently declared.
“We’ve been told that there’ll be no food in the shops, no medicines in the hospitals, no Mars bars — I could do without that anyway for a wee while,” he quipped, prompted laughter from the crowd.
“We’ll be starving — now, I don’t understand this,” he continued. “For six years during the war, U-boats, the Luftwaffe, the Wehrmacht, couldn’t starve us out.
“And yet we are told that a bunch of bureaucrats from Brussels, armed with the European code of customs, are going to stop all of our trade, are going to starve us out?
“In the words of the old Dad’s Army theme, who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hammond, if you think we’ll for that?” he finished, aiming squarely at Mrs May’s thoroughly europhile Chancellor, to cheers from his audience.
It is certainly the case that other advanced countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland have managed to avoid food and medicine shortages despite lacking membership in or tariff-free access to the EU’s Customs Union.
Wilson also discussed the particular implications of the Theresa May’s enormous Withdrawal Agreement with the EU — which he observed had cost the United Kingdom around £700,000 per page, given the £39 billion she agreed to pay the bloc to get it — for his native Northern Ireland, and its place within the British Union.
“I’ll tell you, from the point of view of Northern Ireland, we are not going to accept, in the words of the Attorney-General, a situation where we have to regard the rest of the United Kingdom as a third country, where we find ourselves cut off from our main market, where we find that we can’t take part in [United Kingdom] trade deals, where we find that forever we will have our laws made in Brussels without any input or any ability to change them, regardless of how damaging they are,” he said, referring to deals “backstop” provisions which would see Northern Ireland effectively annexed to the EU’s Customs Union and Single Market in order to keep to the border with the Republic of Ireland open.
“That’s not democracy, that’s dictatorship — we’ll not have it,” he declared.
Northern Ireland held a referendum on its constitutional status in 1973, with residents voting to maintain their place in the British Union and rejecting a merger with the Republic of Ireland by 98.9 percent, on a turnout of 58.7 percent — despite fears polling stations could be attacked the then-active Provisional Irish Republic Army (IRA) terror group.