Melanie Phillips: How the 'Remainers' are Undermining Western Security

As you may have noticed, I’ve been taking a break from the political mayhem to recharge the mental and emotional batteries which were in danger of overheating. 

I’ll be getting back to normal posting soon (and doubtless getting back just as soon to yet more overheating); but for the moment I would strongly urge you to watch, read and pass on this absolutely vital and deeply frightening lecture by Professor Gwythian Prins, one of the founders of the invaluable Briefings for Brexit website, which he delivered to the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC yesterday.

In it, he doesn’t just outline the way in which the UK’s membership of the EU threatens to undermine the “Five Eyes” alliance, the lynchpin of western security. He also shows how a cabal of civil service and establishment cultural defeatists that forms the prime minister’s praetorian guard — “the May cell” — has actively conspired to ensure that the security of the UK is thus undermined by the EU.

Worse still, he shows how Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement would lock the UK into this deepening security disaster. Even worse again, he details manoeuvres carried out in autumn last year to lock the UK into precisely this disaster –regardless of the fact that, at the time, Mrs May was purportedly negotiating Britain’s exit from the EU.

Treachery, pure and simple. This is what we’re up against, folks. This is why British democracy is currently fighting for its life as the “May cell” and Remainer-dominated parliament attempt every ruse in the book – and then some – to frustrate the will of the people and block Brexit.

Below, in a substantial chunk of the lecture, Gwythian Prins lays out the perfidy of the British Remainer establishment in undermining the security of the country.

In June 2017, after a disastrous campaign which exposed her flaws mercilessly, Mrs May lost her majority in a General Election which should have given a charismatic and whole heartedly brexiteer conservative leader a comfortable working majority. The strategy towards the EU changed fundamentally and threats to national security suddenly began to appear.

The first crow flapped into sight in September 2017. The Dept for Exiting the EU issued an alarming paper. The “Future Partnership” Paper wished to offer and to obtain what it says on the cover – partnership. This may be good-hearted but it was utterly naïve, betraying ignorance of what the EU is and how it works. Partnership as we might understand it is not on offer from the EU. Participation of any kind is structurally prescribed to be integration, not cooperation. This cannot be stressed too often.

So, thus misguided, the September paper advocated many forms of future structural attachment, notably CSDP (Common Security & Defence Policy) missions and operations under the MPCC (Military Planning and Conduct Capability – an ersatz EU Standing HQ).

The September 2017 DExEU paper was also the place where the May Cell’s ambition “to seek to develop a deep and special partnership with the EU that goes beyond existing third party arrangements” was first stated to be later repeated crescendo fortissimo.

It proposed to pay into the EU defence pot and to subscribe to EU rules, structures and agreements. It proposed staying within “European Defence Agency projects and initiatives…European Defence Fund including both the European Defence Research Programme and the European Defence Industrial Development Programme…”

What was going on? That became plain on 15 March 2018. The Sun newspaper published explosive extracts from a secret tape recording of British officials speaking to a group of EU officials.

First we hear a British official called Victoria Billing 10 of DExEU chuckle as she describes how British officials go through the motions of making a chocolate coating superficially conforming to the Brexit mandate while actually baking layered biscuit from the sort of integrative agreements listed in the September 2017 paper.

Then, on the full tapes which The Sun let me have and which are published on our Briefings for Brexit website as an Annex to my ‘Hotel California’ paper there, we hear Alastair Brockbank from the May Cell making extraordinary statements.

He says that “where we think things should be … and similar to what the EU has put out in their guidelines, is that there should be no gap on CFSP or CSDP (the Common Security and Defence Policy) on exit day.”

He regrets our absence from PESCO (the main organ of Defence Union) and says that “we would see what we can contribute towards PESCO still,” as the EU moves it forward.

Of the list of acronymic EU defence institutions EDF, EDRP, EDIDP etc, he states that on “the capabilities side, um, we are interested in it all.” He wants to remain in CARD (Co-ordinated Annual Review of Defence), even talked about the UK retaining a seat on the EU negotiating bodies while aware that only a proximity role might be possible and suggests that the EEAS (ersatz Foreign Ministry) should have people inside UK Ministries after Brexit!

Like Ms Billing, Mr Brockbank cynically boasts that it is civil servants who “are negotiating the detail of that at the same time as we are discussing the political high-level fluffy bits that will go into any declaration that gets made public:” wool to be pulled over the peoples’ eyes.

He states that the ambition is to lock the UK into and under EU control in the defence, security and intelligence areas by international treaty as soon as possible after leaving day.

To this day he has never, to my knowledge, been censured or sacked. The worst was swiftly confirmed. A murder of crows gathered.

On 24 May 2018 the Government slipped out a dryly named Technical Note on External Relations. It is said that the devil is in the detail. There is indeed a whole pandemonium in there. In Articles 6 and 14 we find ambitions to share intelligence and analysis. This was confirmed the next day in the Technical Note on Exchange and Protection of Classified Information of 25 May 2018 which shows that the May Cell places intelligence sharing with the EU at the core of its offer to “build a new, deep and special partnership with the EU…fundamental to cooperation across the future partnership” (Cls 1-2).

Affirming this, a Cabinet Office paper on security of 28 November 2018 finally conceded that a structural and institutional relationship will be created. That is really burning the boats on the beach. It states that “the UK and the EU have ‘agreed to conclude an agreement.’

Although agreements on classified information exist between the EU and 12 non-associated 3rd counties such as Canada and the United States, the UK’s intention of remaining in the EU’s defence industrial structures and associated policies would necessitate a CSDP-based agreement: so the Technical Note’s claim (Clauses 11-12) that Canada and the USA are equivalent precedents on which the UK can build “but potentially go further” is dangerously false.

The government acknowledges that this relationship would be ‘more than ad hoc’ and governed by the EU’s prescribed Security of Information Agreement for this purpose.

The Political Declaration even acknowledges that the UK and EU “should exchange intelligence in support of CSDP missions and operations to which the UK will be contributing” and which the Government has committed to stay in as a precondition to participation in the EU’s defence industrial landscape and frameworks.

The Political Declaration indicates UK interest in the EU Satellite Centre and space projects all of which are components of the EU’s military construct and CSDP as the SDIP agreements of late 2016 made this so. Yet the EU will exclude the UK – Europe’s principle satellite builder – from access to GALILEO’s secure signal, while letting us pay into the project if our government is so stupid – or disloyal.

Given that, unlike Canada or the USA, the UK will be compelled by the exit deals to apply the EU’s CSDP, since everything is attached to everything else, the EU Global Strategy will rule.

This document calls for a hub-andspoke intelligence arrangement between the EEAS (foreign service) , EU INTCEN (Intelligence Centre) and the national intelligence capabilities of the CSDP states. These are structural, not ad hoc relationships.

So they threaten the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance that is the bedrock of western security. 13 The Government of the United Kingdom, ladies and gentlemen, has to choose between the anglosphere and the wider world or structural subordination to Military EU.

The people have chosen the wider world. The officials and the May Cell have chosen Military EU. This is absolutely the wrong choice. It is therefore an inescapable fact that the Orwellian nonWithdrawal documents pose a real and present threat to UK national security in the most fundamental way possible.

More crows join the murder. In Article 17 of the External Relations ‘Technical Note’ we find ambitions to lock us into subordination with the EU Political and Security Committee and EU Military Committee. Precisely as Brockbank said in the Kit Kat tapes, there, in Article 17 (f), we find the ambition for ‘secondments to the EU Foreign Service’. In 17 (h) (i) ‘UK participation in the EU Operational HQ’.

The documents from the 19 November 2018 European Council place remainiac minister Alan Duncan in the room when it was agreed to give the MPCC the authority of an executive HQ with the legal right to command intervention forces by 2020; to formalise CARD (Coordinated Annual Review of Defence which allows the EU to exert financial leverage on uses of national defence budgets and to increase funding to the EDF which was agreed at 13 billion Euro last month, on 18 April, which compels compliance with EU strategic control: all with the UK under it.

And yet more crows. Article 18 ‘intends to achieve a bespoke Administrative Arrangement with the European Defence Agency’. It ‘agrees arrangements for participation in the Commission’s European Defence Fund’ (all reconfirmed, and more, in Clause 104 of the Political Declaration) . To have 14 ‘the option to participate in PESCO as a Third Party’ and access to ‘commercial opportunities’.

But we have formally stated we will not be in PESCO. Ministers and civil servants clearly do not understand that ‘Third Party’ participation is structurally prescribed as subordination or nothing. Britain did not vote for a ‘deep and special’ degree of subordination more than any other third party country.

And then we get to the truly devilish part in Article 25. ‘We should not wait where we do not need to. The UK welcomes the agreement that future arrangements on CSFP and CSDP could become effective during the Implementation Period.’

This is precisely what Brockbank said in the Kit Kat Tapes – and it would effectively mean that any time after ‘leaving’ in chains, the Government could permanently lock us under EU control in Defence and Security by Prerogative Powers. In effect, it would allow for a very English administrative coup d’état. The Political Declaration does this ‘locking in’ on its own.

… Having successfully prevented the EU from developing a defence role for over forty years, bizarrely, the Government’s Withdrawal Agreement and associated documents threaten to place Europe’s premier defence and intelligence power under EU control. This is the reverse of what the people voted for in June 2016 and is a constitutional outrage. This fact is also concealed. We join up the dots.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE.