“You’re wrong,” Farage supporters tell me. “He has been talking about the EU Army for years.”
In a typical media report, “Emmanuel Macron calls for ‘real European army’ to protect EU from Russia and even AMERICA as Nigel Farage’s fears come true”. We are told “Farage was Right”.
Apparently, according to the article, “Nigel Farage, photographed here at the Channel 4 Brexit debate Live last night, has warned that Euro bosses are plotting their own army.”
And here is the rub. He has indeed been warning of an ‘EU Army’ for years, in the full knowledge there is no EU Army, and the EU has no plans to build an army.
Calling what the EU is doing an ‘EU Army’ is diversionary. People who hear Farage speak in these terms inevitably write to their MPs using the same terms.
MPs, unaware of how to respond, pass constituents’ questions on to the Ministry of Defence, where Earl Freddie Howe is rolled out to respond.
Earl Howe’s response usually follows a template: “The Prime Minister has made it clear that the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU will not lessen our commitment to European security and defence … NATO is the cornerstone of UK defence … The EU has no plan to build an EU Army.”
By insisting on using the language of an ‘EU Army’, Farage diverts his electorate away from the correct description: #EUDefenceUnion, and this offers politicians of all political hues the get out of jail free card of plausible deniability.
Why is Nigel Farage doing this?
I don’t know the answer to this question. I can perhaps speculate by asking why he would want the UK to leave an ‘organisation’ which has funded his lavish lifestyle for twenty years?
What I do know, for a fact, is that he is fully aware of the implications of #EUDefenceUnion. I also know that he believes that to include defence union in the Brexit discussion now would be ‘confusing’ for the electorate.
Of course, when he says it would be confusing for the electorate, he does not mean they would find the concepts behind defence union confusing. He means they would be confused as to why he isn’t talking about it accurately.
They would also be confused about why defence is not part of the Brexit negotiations at all, and this is another fact you will not ever hear Nigel Farage speak about.
Britain’s future defence arrangements with the EU are not part of Brexit. The European Commission has agreed with the UK government that security and defence should be a completely separate package of negotiation.
Think about how clever this whole Brexit thing has been:
- By separating the ‘divorce’ from the ‘future relationship’, government can claim ‘Brexit’ in the full knowledge that deal or no deal there will be a ‘future relationship’ which will see is back into many, or all, the institutions we had left.
- By separating defence into a completely different negotiation, it can be kept out of the public discourse completely.
These two bullet points define Brexit, which as I have said since 2016, is a completely fraudulent process. We will not leave, and Nigel Farage knows this.
And so does Francois Fischer, Head, Intelligence Analysis Division, EU Intelligence.
