The Fourth Reich is here

The Fourth Reich is here - without a shot being fired

The arsenal of fear must almost be nearly exhausted. Those daring to vote to leave the EU will inflict on Britain collapsing house prices (according to George Osborne and Christine Lagarde of the IMF, who should worry about the EU’s unemployment-soaked economies); a “technical” recession (Mark Carney, a “technical” Irish-Canadian with a long record of error, who for this disgraceful political interference should be kicked back to Ottawa); and, of course, the Third World War (Mr Cameron). It’s clearly a Corporal Jones moment for the Remainers, though any cries of “don’t panic” come far too late: they are manifestly drowning in it.  Anyway, two can play at this game. What must we fear if we stay? Not merely relentless uncontrolled immigration (and the lies told about it), putting such burdens on our schools, hospitals and infrastructure that UK citizens suffer, but the inevitability of our nation’s destiny being increasingly subject to the wishes of foreigners whom we don’t elect. I am not talking about the amorphous idea of “Brussels”: I’m talking about Germany.

Five years ago I wrote a piece referring to the control Angela Merkel exerted over Europe as “the Fourth Reich”. I was accused of a horrible breach of taste. However, when one looks at German power today one realises that, when I wrote, she had hardly even started. The key to German success is this: it participates in a weak currency (whose value would collapse without it) enabling its exports to sell far more cheaply than had it retained the Deutschmark. Therefore, it continues to grow in economic strength relative to its partners – including us – but especially those in the eurozone, notably France and Italy, who would benefit greatly from restoring the Franc and the Lira.

Any net exporter in the EU – which we are most certainly not, given our £24bn trade gap with our partners in the first three months of 2016 – also benefits hugely from the vast and incomprehensible welter of EU regulations on products and employment law, which keep external competitors at arm’s length and pile costs on them if they wish access to the single market. Germany is so rich, and getting richer at the expense not least of its partners, that it can afford to pretend globalisation isn’t happening. We are not so fortunate, and leaving the EU to avoid all these regulations and take proper advantage of the wider world is not the least reason why we must vote to get out.

If we stay in we are going to suffer immense collateral damage from two crises that the Germans will precipitate. First, there will be one in the eurozone. My friend Dr Savvas Savouri, chief economist at the leading investment business Toscafund, predicts a “detonation of devaluations around the periphery of the eurozone” in his latest briefing to clients. So incapable are non-eurozone countries such as Hungary, Romania or Poland of competing with the German-dictated economic model that devaluation and the instability that will bring are their only options. So anyone who thinks our staying in the EU is like buying a ticket to a place of permanent prosperity wants his or her head examined.

Worse for Britain, Dr Savouri predicts Germany’s economy “will not come off lightly”, not least because its clients and customers will find its goods suddenly more expensive. And when Germany starts to struggle, God help the rest of the EU: because when the German chequebook closes, economies it is shoring up – such as Greece’s – will be on their own. And Greece’s economy is one-eleventh the size of France’s, which is a basket-case, and cannot go on as it is.

Dr Savouri also points out that if we stay in the EU there will be huge costs for us from all this chaos, despite being out of the eurozone. “Having renewed our vows to remain in the EU 'through sickness and in health’ we will be required to contribute to funding the fiscal efforts being applied to our ever more sickly EU partners,” he writes. The costs will be huge, and once we have committed ourselves to remain we will be forced to join the communal effort to save ailing partners. He calls it “the EU’s version of a Rooseveltian New Deal.”

He also argues that such a wave of economic hardship will propel more impoverished Europeans across open borders into the UK: and don’t forget what Iain Duncan Smith disclosed last week, that Mr Cameron deleted a passage about controlling immigration from a speech he made because he was told it would upset the Germans. That is the reality of our relationship with the EU: if we choose to stay in, the Germans will ensure that we become ever more obedient to their policies – so stand by for their next project, Turkey’s admission to the EU, and all that would entail.

It was not just deeply offensive, but ironic, that Mr Cameron should last week have evoked the idea of another world war in his latest intelligence-insulting act of hysteria aimed at making us vote to stay in the EU. It is not just that our fathers and grandfathers fought in two world wars to allow Britain the right to continue to rule itself, rather than to be ruled by Germans: Mr Cameron plainly won’t admit that German domination of the EU means it has conquered without war, and signing up to the EU is signing up to the Fourth Reich.

Ask the Greeks if you think I exaggerate: Germany runs Europe without firing a shot. It forces far weaker partners to stay in a currency zone that is crippling them, and uses its economic muscle to dictate immigration and other key policies. And if you believe the Germans won’t take a UK vote to stay in as a signal to continue and intensify their control over the EU, and to make us help pay for its baleful effects, then you aren’t paying attention. It’s not war we should fear, but what the Germans do in peace.

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Christina 

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