DAILY MAIL COMMENT: This President is last man we should heed

The tone was patronising, the language menacing – and the message not only hypocritical but, frankly, insulting.

Certainly, Barack Obama has every right to say he thinks it’s in America’s best interests for Britain to remain in the EU, if that is what he believes.

But he has no business to come here and preach that submission to Brussels is good for the people of the UK.

Barack Obama has every right to say he thinks it’s in America’s best interests for Britain to remain in the EU, if that is what he believes. But he has no business to come here and preach that submission to Brussels is good for the people of the UK

Barack Obama has every right to say he thinks it’s in America’s best interests for Britain to remain in the EU, if that is what he believes. But he has no business to come here and preach that submission to Brussels is good for the people of the UK

By arguing that a Britain outside the EU would be at the ‘back of the queue’ for a trade deal, to Number 10’s delight, Mr Obama displayed contempt for voters and left little doubt that he sees the special relationship as a one-way street.

Has he forgotten he leads a nation founded to proclaim independence from overseas control, whose citizens died for the right to make their own laws?

Will he not admit that the US wouldn’t agree in a million years to join a body like the EU, putting the Supreme Court in Washington under the thumb of foreign judges? Or that freedom-loving America wouldn’t tolerate for a second the statist edicts spewing daily from Brussels?

Why, then, does he abuse the UK’s hospitality by urging Britons to remain in a relationship his own people would never countenance?

Mr Obama’s grasp of history is shaky, too, if he believes the EU can take credit for seven decades of relative peace.

Yes, a new spirit of friendship between European nations sprang up after 1945. But this had far more to do with memories of the horrors of two world wars than with any Brussels institution.

No, the true peacekeeper has surely been Nato, whose shield protected the continent from the Soviet Union’s might during the Cold War – while our intelligence-sharing arrangements, on which our security from terrorism depend, have nothing to do with the EU.

Which brings us to Mr Obama’s own sorry record as Commander-in-Chief and architect of America’s foreign policy.

This is the man who made way for the rise of IS by his reckless withdrawal from Iraq. He has failed even to honour his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay. And his chief foreign policy ‘success’ has been a deal with terrorist-sponsoring Iran.

In the spirit of ‘friends who have no fear of each other’, to borrow his words, aren’t we entitled to ask why Britain should take advice from this President on how to conduct our own affairs?

 

Blair's immoral greed

We have long known Tony Blair is happy to sell his soul for cash – with his principles thrown in free (if he ever had any).

But until today, we didn’t know his asking price for putting his experience and contacts as ex-Prime Minister at the service of brutal and corrupt dictators.

In office, Mr Blair vandalised the constitution, politicised the civil service, fiddled figures, dumbed down exams, sold honours and ducked vital reforms of welfare and the public services. 

Mr Blair asks a cool £5.3million a year for his firm to advise Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev (pictured)

On pages 14 & 15, the Mail reveals the answer. Mr Blair asks a cool £5.3million a year for his firm to advise Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev on such matters as putting the best spin on his regime’s massacre of striking oil workers.

In office, Mr Blair vandalised the constitution, politicised the civil service, fiddled figures, dumbed down exams, sold honours and ducked vital reforms of welfare and the public services.

Out of office, his treacherous greed continues to bring shame on our country.

 

As a champion of making work pay, Iain Duncan Smith cheered when George Osborne announced the National Living Wage. But on Page 8 today, he admits a huge drawback. With pay in Britain five times higher than in poorer EU countries, he says, the further rise will lead to another ‘stampede to our borders’. 

As leaked papers reveal EU workers account for 75 per cent of growth in UK employment, isn’t this powerful evidence that the best hope of improving living standards for Britain’s poorest lies in pulling out? 

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