OBAMA'S EU HYPOCRISY

United States President Barack Obama thinks that the UK should remain within the European Union, and he's making sure that we know it. An article in the Daily Telegraph plus a forthcoming speech will tell us which way we should be voting on 23rd June.

The blatant hypocrisy of this stance by a President who will be an ex-President in 9 months time, is breath taking but utterly American. Ever since the end of the second world war, when the rest of the western world was bankrupt, the USA has become the major economic and political force in the West, if not globally. It has become used to telling every other nation what to do while doing whatever it wants itself; it has ignored the views of others and batted away all criticism of its own policies and actions.

Over the last 70 years, the USA has engaged in wars, or armed conflicts, all over the world. It has invaded numerous countries, including Grenada, a sovereign territory of the United Kingdom, while it refused to allow British forces access to its bases during the Falklands War. Since 2002, the USA has maintained a gruesome prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a place where hundreds of prisoners have been held without trial, routinely tortured and denied all human rights. The USA has habitually ignored the complaints of the international community about its assorted activities in many places. Would they welcome being told to be subservient to the wishes of, say, a group of other American states such as Canada, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica and El Salvador ? Of course not, and they'd be outraged if anyone told them this would be in their own best interests.

However, Obama is quite happy to come to Britain to tell US what we should be doing. How dare he ! The UK is not a dependency of the USA and Europe is not an American fiefdom. What Obama wants, as does every American, is what is good for America, not what is good for anyone else. If Obama thinks that keeping the UK within the European Union is good for the USA, fine, let him say so. What he has no right to say is that it's good for the UK. That is a decision for British voters to make, based on the arguments put forward by British politicians, businessmen and others; it has nothing to do with any nation outside of the European Union and especially nothing to do with an interfering, dead-duck American President.

Mr Obama, give Her Majesty your birthday wishes for her by all means, but stay out of our politics.