Let Brexit be a lesson to the elite meddlers

They sold them down the river by failing to regulate banks and rating agencies before the GFC; by posing as saviours of the world’s climate using taxpayers’ money; by posing as saviours of the world’s poor using taxpayers’ money; by refusing to control borders; and, by selling out the finest system of law in the world.

Elites were happy to take the plaudits of the Europe project and the jobs that came with it, but they were wilfully blind to euro public finance corruption, timidity in the face of unfettered migration, open access to benefits and naive acceptance of illiberal mores.

Brexit was a magnificent repudiation of these betrayals.

What started in 1951 as a treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community grew to be the behemoth of today, well, last week, until the good old Poms stuck it up ’em.

It was astonishing how European leaders ignored national constituencies. They ignored national referendums declining new powers to Europe, instead declaring the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union 2007 and the Lisbon Treaty in 2009.

Not to mention the arrogance in accepting the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, “based on the stabilising role the EU has played in transforming most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace”.

There never was a chance that European democracies would go to war against each other. But, there is an internal war across Europe that elites ignore. Control of borders, control within borders and reclaiming English law are reasons that Brits voted exit. Not all can be laid at the foot of EU membership, but large parts can.

Burned into the minds of Brits was not the elite concern with “inequality” peddled by Labour leaders but the locals’ concern with law and order, especially the threat from Muslim radicals.

In 2004, the execrable Islamist Abu Hamza, the imam at Finsbury Park mosque, London, was detained on remand by British authorities to try to extradite him to the USon terrorism charges.

Hamza appealed to the European Court under the European Convention on Human Rights. They stayed his extradition because his treatment may have been “too harsh”.

Extradition finally took place in 2012 and he was sentenced to life in prison in the US.

This is the same convention that this year enabled a Norwegian judge to uphold mass murdering fascist Anders Breivik’s claim of being treated too harshly, because he was kept separate from other prisoners. Breivik killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo and shot dead 69 people, mostly teenagers, at a political youth camp.

You think these instances don’t gnaw at the voters’ gut?

In 2008, Michael Nazir-Ali, then one of the Church of England’s most senior bishops, warned that Islamic extremists had created “no-go” areas across Britain where it was too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter.

Nazir-Ali wrote: “One of the results of this (multiculturalism) has been to alienate further the young from the nation in which they were growing up and also to turn already separate communities into ‘no-go’ areas where adherence to this ideology (of Islamic extremism) has become a mark of acceptability.”

In 2014, the chief inspector of the police forces in England and Wales, Sir Tom Winsor, stated that “some parts of Britain have their own form of justice” and that crimes as serious as honour ­killings, domestic violence, sexual abuse of children and female ­genital mutilations often go ­unreported.

He wrote: “There are communities from other cultures who would prefer to police themselves. There are cities in the Midlands where the police never go because they are never called. They never hear of any trouble because the community deals with that on its own.”

You think these instances also don’t gnaw at the voters’ gut? This Saturday Australians will vote with an eye to the UK result. Elites beware. Every appeal to a UN convention, think refugees; every time an international body is invited to tell Australians how naughty they have been, think Great Barrier Reef and Tasmanian forests; every time an official quotes “international law”, is an insult to one of the world’s great liberal and law-­abiding democracies: Australia.

All Green politicians are in the elite camp. Too many Labor politicians are in this camp, as are some Liberal politicians.

Politicians who refuse to secure the borders, and law and order within their borders, must exit.

garytjohns@gmail.com