Daniel Kawczynski, a conservative member of the British Parliament, joined SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon on Breitbart News Daily Thursday morning to talk about the upcoming vote to exit from the European Union.
“It’s the most important event, certainly, during my political lifetime, and my biological lifetime,” said Kawczynski. “I was born on the day that we entered the then-EEC, the 24th of January, 1972. So for the last 44 years, we have been in a political union which has morphed into a structure taking more and more powers away from sovereign Parliaments.”
“Now there are plans afoot to create a single European army, single European foreign policy,” he continued. “By the way, the army would compete with NATO. So there are people in this institution who want to create a single entity, a single country called ‘Europe.’ That is not for us. We are a very proud and independent nation that believes in our sovereignty.”
Kawczynski declared:
We’re the fifth-largest economy in the world. We want to get back to restoring our own democracy, accountability to people, and recalibrating our foreign and trade policy around the world – rather than looking, in an insular way, into Europe, which is an ever-diminishing and smaller entity, from a global GDP perspective.
“It’s very regrettable, by the way, that our Prime Minister obviously engineered for your President to come and give his opinions,” Kawczynski said of the rough tactics employed by Remain elites against those who support the Leave position. He continued:
He also said that we ought to stay in the European Union. Actually, his intervention did a great service for us in the Leave campaign because much as we love and admire the Americans, our closest allies, we do not like outsiders coming in and interfering in our referendum – exactly in the way that you wouldn’t want us coming in and interfering in your own domestic affairs.
He said elites, in both Britain and the U.S., supported Remain because “it’s much easier for the political elites to deal with a single entity, which is the European Union, which consists of 28 nations.”
“And, of course, it may be easier for the American president to deal with Britain within the European Union,” he stated, adding:
But, of course, the United States of America would never accept the sort of scenario that we are being forced into. You have your NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico, but you wouldn’t accept what we’ve had to put up with – which is a foreign Parliament interfering in your domestic agenda, free movement of people with uncontrollable immigration coming across the border, and more and more powers being taken away from your Congress. And I know that you wouldn’t tolerate a foreign court overriding your Supreme Court.
“Well, these are all attributes, basic ingredients of being a member of the European Union. So I’m sure that your American listeners, with their pride in American sovereignty and independence, will understand why we in the United Kingdom also feel strongly about these things, and why the time has come for us to pull away,” he said. “We will still continue, of course, to be a very strong member of NATO, and we will continue to work and collaborate with the European Union from a trade perspective. But the political project, which this is, is not for us.
On the question of how immigration has played into the Brexit debate, Kawczynski said that “the most important thing to remember about the British people is that they are extremely tolerant of immigrants and outsiders coming into the country.”
“I was an immigrant when I came into this country in 1978, as a six-year-old,” he recalled. “We fled Communism in Poland, in those dark days when Poland was behind the Iron Curtain, and we were welcomed into this country. And, my goodness me,” he went on, “as a complete outsider, the people of my constituency have voted for me as their member of Parliament, with a completely unpronounceable surname!”
Kawczynski asserted:
British people are very, very warm and welcoming towards outsiders, and that is why your question about immigration is so important. If you have unlimited immigration – which is what happens when you’re in the European Union because there are no controls – that puts a real pressure on local services, on hospitals, on schools, on the amount of houses that we need to construct. And if it’s not balanced, and if it’s not managed, then the British people will start to have concerns. And what I don’t want to happen is for them to start to lose that unique respect and tolerance towards outsiders coming in.
“But that is what will happen within our lifetimes, if we can’t demonstrate to them that we can get a grip and manage, from the benefit of the United Kingdom, the people coming into our country in a balanced and managed way,” Kawczynski warned.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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