Originally published in Vanguard, January 1990 Print

We Were Right

THE COLLAPSE OF the Berlin Wall, and of the East/West division of Europe, has left the Establishment parties wrong-footed, their policies outdated and irrelevant in a changed world, whilst the traditional policies of the National Front are proved right all along. We are now the only party already equipped with new ideas for the new age in Europe.

Withdrawal of superpower troops. The NF has always demanded that US troops and bases be withdrawn from Britain. Now of course everyone can see how pointless they are. There is nobody for them to fight. The Eastern Communists were never going to risk a nuclear war, destroying both sides, against Capitalists who shared their own multiracialist internationalist ends. But they can't fight any sort of war now, except a civil war inside their rumbling Empire. So there is no excuse for the Yanks to stay. Thatcher's pleas to President Bush to keep his foreign troops on our soiI are the pathetic twitchings of a puppet whose master has discarded it, not needing it any more.

All foreign troops must be withdrawn from other peoples' countries in Europe, Americans from the West, Russians from the East, and of course our own from Western Germany. British troops returning should be redeployed to defend Britain, in Ulster and the Falklands for example.

Scrapping of NATO in its present U.S. dominated form and the Warsaw Pact. Another 23 year-old NF policy, triumphantly vindicated. The Warsaw Pact is a joke today: in a hypothetical war with the West its troops would mostly fight against the Soviets, not with them. Even if reactionary Marxists or Generals toppled Gorbachev, the restoration of national sovereignty in Eastern Europe has gone too far now to be reversed. Any attempt would end in chaos, as Poland, the Czechs and East Germans and Hungary would now certainly now fight as states, with their armies and all together, not as unarmed peoples invaded as before one by one whilst the rest stood by. So the Pact is in effect dead. This means that even the bogus "Red Menace" justification for surrendering our national sovereignty to NATO, and to command of our armed forces to foreign officers, is a dead letter.

However, Europe as a whole does have common enemies. Islam is a growing threat, the more so as it has already implanted a millions-strong Fifth Column in many Western European cities. And the threat from the East, with China, the World's most populous nation, led by brutal old reactionary despots and Japan, the World's leading economic power, sure to turn its wealth sooner or later into military muscle, cannot be discounted either. So we would propose an Alliance of European States, encompassing West and East alike, including Russia itself if it wished, in which the members surrender no sovereignty but pledge to come to one another's aid if any one of them were attacked by an outsider. Such an Alliance would also pledge non-interference by each member state in the internal affairs and policies of other members. It could also guarantee the frontiers of member states, a cause of much legitimate concern in Eastern Europe.

Keeping Britain's nuclear deterrent. It used to be argued that our Bomb would be neither here nor there in an "Armageddon", a massive exchange between the Superpowers, or, as Labour suggested, could be sacrificed by the Western bloc to win disarmament concessions by the East. Now the blocs are dying, and the real value of the bomb to smaller nations becomes apparent. It serves as a last guarantor of their independence and survival, by making all out war against them inconceivably destructive for an aggressor. It has already been remarked that a nuclear-armed France has no fear now of a reunited Germany. Similarly, in the more fluid international world now dawning, the deterrent value of our bomb will be enhanced because we are likely to be manaced not by a global power bloc which might survive all we could throw at it but by individual states which assuredly could not. In a world in which the likes of Libya and Iran are likely to be nuclear powers, it would be madness to throw away such a sure safeguard against being held to ransom by lunatics.

Scrapping the Common Market. As its leaders like Jacques Delors urge the EEC to greater surrender of its members' independence in closer union, shutting out the nations of Eastern Europe, the Common Market shows itself the enemy of Europe, not its architect. The EEC divides Europe, as an exclusive club keeping out the very Eastern European nations who most need economic help. What is needed is a looser-knit, Europe-wide association, free of the stifling bureaucracy and erosion of national independence which made the EEC a nightmare, but co-operating on economic issues, presenting a common face to the rest of the world - especially in keeping Japanese and other Asiatic goods out behind the very common tariff wall the EEC refuses to raise - and collaborating on large scale projects, e.g. in space, too big for any one nation. Mere enlarging the Common Market, even if its Eurocrat bosses agreed, is not on. The nations of Eastern Europe, having newly regained their national independence, have no desire to surrender it once more, to replace the Kremlin with more faceless overlords in Brussels.

US Army in Britain: no longer needed

National Sovereignty. In a Europe composed once more of independent nations rather than power blocs, this concept, once derided as "outdated" but never abandoned by the NF, once more assumes central importance, although in the process reopening a number of "national questions". Primarily, of course, the German Question. We ought not to be afraid of welcoming German reunification, the more so as the sheer unbalancing size and economic muscle of a reunited Germany would further undermine the EEC. Thatcher yet again reveals herself as hankering for the old days of the Cold War when she could be Uncle Sam's pet puppet in opposing this, which is in any case a matter utterly for the German people themselves to decide. Recent polls have shown 61% of Britons, 67% of Americans and 75% of Frenchmen in favour of German reunification. A straw poll on the streets of Moscow conducted by the Washington Post in November also found most Russians happy with the idea.

As a new decade dawns, the NF alone shows the way forward for Britain and, together with our Nationalist allies across the Continent, for Europe. We were right all along, and now our hour is coming.