‘The EU’s policies are suicidal’
Ross Clark on why Brexit Britain must not go crawling back to Brussels.

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Five years since the UK officially left the European Union, the British political class remains convinced that cosying back up to Brussels is the answer to all our woes. It’s as if none of our leaders have noticed that the EU is in a serious crisis. As Ross Clark points out in his new book, Far From EUtopia, Europe’s economy is flatlining, public discontent is simmering, and the anti-democratic nature of Brussels means that there is little prospect of things changing. Ross was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.
Brendan O’Neill: What compelled you to write a book about the EU?
Ross Clark: Since the Brexit vote, week after week, we’ve seen news reports blaming everything that’s going wrong in the UK on leaving the EU. It’s true that our economy is flatlining and that we’re running up higher debts. But that has nothing to do with Brexit – no British government has balanced the books in more than 20 years.
The whole narrative that the UK is stuck in economic decline, while the EU is sailing off confidently without us, relies on us not looking too closely at what’s going on across the Channel. Germany is about to enter its third year of recession. France is up to its eyeballs in debt. And we saw what the Italian healthcare system was like during Covid.
Britain and Europe are still locked in this cycle of low economic growth. We have an opportunity to escape from it and put ourselves on a higher trajectory of growth, but we haven’t taken advantage of our Brexit freedoms.
O’Neill: Even some EU leaders have started warning that Brussels is overregulating industry. What difference does EU regulation make in practice on industry and innovation?
Clark: The EU takes a heritage approach to industry. It looks at an industry, and its first instinct is that it must be preserved, and defended against competition from abroad. The US, where economic growth remains significantly higher than Europe, has taken a very different approach. It embraces new things. If that kills off old industries, then so be it.
The issue of genetically modified crops is a prime example of this attitude. More than 20 years ago, Europe and in particular Britain were very well placed to take the lead in what was then an emerging industry. But it was killed off by EU regulations, which made carrying out field trials virtually impossible. So the industry went elsewhere.
A similar thing has happened with fracking. Europe didn’t quite outlaw it, but it made it very difficult. As a result, the UK is heavily reliant on imported, fracked gas from the US.
O’Neill: We were often warned that the UK would become a racist hell hole if we left the EU, but isn’t Brexit Britain far more tolerant than continental Europe?
Clark: It’s interesting to look at what has happened in Europe in recent years. Germany has reintroduced border controls, quite against the spirit of the Schengen Agreement. Spanish towns are beginning to rise up against tourism. Hungary has built a Trump-style razor-wire fence in order to keep out migrants.
Europe is not exactly espousing the civilised values that we were told we would lose after leaving the EU. I don’t think many people in the UK are waving pitchforks at tourists. And the UK is very happy to import its food, which many EU countries would rather not do.
O’Neill: There have been a number of recent occasions when the EU has wielded its power to punish national populations for voting a particular way. Do you think this gives the lie to the image the EU likes to project of itself as a defender of democratic values?
Clark: If you want to understand the difference between the European approach to democracy, and the American approach to democracy, I recommend reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and comparing it with the European Convention on Human Rights. Both documents were drafted at around the same time, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But the UN document was heavily influenced by American lawyers, while the European document was drawn up by British and European lawyers.
Tellingly, there is one phrase in the UN document that appears nowhere in the European version. It is that the government shall be by the will of the people.
After the war, Europeans were, in a way, frightened of democracy, because they blamed it for what happened in Nazi Germany. They constructed institutions to protect against what they viewed as excessive people power.
There is a democratic deficit in the EU, which is much less evident in the US. In Europe, if a country votes against a referendum that the EU wants to succeed, they will tell that country to go and vote again. That’s why the slogan for the Leave campaign was ‘Take Back Control’.
O’Neill: Do you think Trump’s return to the presidency will have a positive or negative impact on Europe?
Clark: It’s going to deepen the gulf between the EU and the US way of doing things, particularly when it comes to energy. Europe seems stuck in a suicidal energy policy, where it’s putting Net Zero above all other economic considerations, and is happy to lose its manufacturing industries and impoverish its people as a result.
America was never going to do that. Even during the Biden years, it followed an aggressive policy of energy security through the exploitation of fossil fuels.The price of wholesale gas is about five times more expensive in the EU compared to the US. That gulf is going to increase, and it’s going to benefit the US relative to the EU.
Ross Clark was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here:
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