The EU has declared war on British sovereignty

During her Tory leadership campaign Liz Truss was asked if President Macron of France was a friend or foe. She indicated it was too early to tell [1]. President Zelensky must have harboured similar doubts at various times.

Today, however, the question is not whether France is our friend or foe but whether the EU as a whole is. For this week, at the end of a meeting with Latin American states collectively known as Celac, the EU issued a communique which called the Falkland Islands the Malvinas. Regarding their sovereignty the EU merely noted the historical position of the Latin American states on the issue and backed a peaceful solution to the dispute.

Frantic British objections before the communique were simply brushed aside. If Britain had remained an EU member, we were told, a British minister could have vetoed the offending sentences. Pull the other one!

Clearly all member states had discussed the matter before agreeing to the communique and backing the Hispanics. So couldn't one minister or even the High Representative for Foreign Affairs have vetoed the offending sentences? Are British sensitivities not worth more than those of a group of often hardly democratic states?

The EU must have known that the Argentine claim is baseless [2]. There has been a British colony on the Falklands since 1833. There has never been an equivalent Argentine one.

We fought a war to retain the islands in 1982, where 255 British servicemen died. In 2013 in a democratic referendum 99.8 per cent of the population voted to remain British. The EU knows all this but chooses to ignore it because, since Brexit, we are now its enemy.

It wishes to humiliate us whenever possible. The defence of democracy matters little to it. Indeed, witness its initial stance towards Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

The role of Spain in the Celac negotiations is ominous. On Sunday there will be a general election there after which the Right-wing parties, the PP and Vox, are expected to form a coalition government. The manifesto of the former calls for talks over the "sovereignty" of Gibraltar.

Vox, meanwhile, sees Gibraltar as "occupied territory". The chances are therefore that the post-Brexit negotiations over the rock, which were fraught to begin with, could be abandoned and Gibraltar possibly cut off from Spain [3]. Franco did this in 1969 with the loss of 10,000 Spanish jobs and it was not till 1985 that links were restored.

Yet Gibraltar is like the Falklands. The Spanish seized it from the Moors in 1462. The British conquered it in 1704 and acquired it permanently by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

So it was Spanish for 242 years and has been British for 319 years. Moreover a referendum in 2002 showed 98.97 per cent of the population rejected joint sovereignty with Spain. Another in 1967 had shown 99.67 per cent wanted to remain British.

Now though, we can expect the new government to blame the situation on Brexit and push again for "sovereignty" talks - with the full support of the EU. Our Brussels Fifth Column here will simply echo the charge. The EU is not our friend.

It is only nice to us when it needs us - to join Macron's European Political Club or to entice us into a European army. This is aimed at subverting Nato from the inside thus fulfilling Macron's desire for a European strategic entity. Not that the MoD sees this.

The EU's true colours have been shown over Northern Ireland, too. There the Windsor Framework was supposed to solve trade disputes by creating a "green lane" which would allow all goods from the UK headed only for Northern Ireland free and frictionless transit. Yet the EU has imposed such a burden of regulation on the "trusted traders" supposed to benefit from this that many have given up trying to use it.

In short the EU is making Northern Ireland a foreign country. And it is doing so deliberately. It wants to subvert and reverse Brexit which remains a dreadful model for others.

All Britons must reject this.

Alan Sked is emeritus professor of international history at LSE.

His latest book is The Case for Brexit

References

^ too early to tell (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^ Argentine claim is baseless (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^ possibly cut off from Spain (www.telegraph.co.uk)