Early political (anti EEC) poetry, letters and connected activities
In view of the present (May 2012) turmoil in the European Union and its Euro currency - predictable, and indeed so predicted by a not insignificant minority before, during and ever since the United Kingdom Referendum of 1975 - I am setting down here a few of my political poems and activities of that period.
Ihad always been passionately against the whole concept of the United Kingdom joining any European super-state for a variety of reasons. It was a tragedy when Edward Heath - without consulting the British people - pushing through the1972 European Communities Act and the United Kingdom joined the then 'Common Market'. This law was passed by a tiny majority. In 1975 the then Labour Government agreed to a Referendum to save face. It is most unlikely the United Kingdom would have voted 'yes' if asked BEFORE the country joined the E.E.C. -Common Market
During this 1975 Referendum, living as I was at that time in Oxford, I had a good overall view of the way the campaign was conducted by the establishment elite who made up the 'Yes' side. Most MPs from the two main parties, with a few honourable and courageous exceptions, the Liberal MPs, almost all newspapers ( the provincial Press allowed a few anti Market letters ) the BBC - particularly the BBC - and ITV, all supported the 'Yes' campaign. So too did many well known names in the establishment worlds of the Arts and Science. Few recognized writers, poets, who might have mocked the Common Market in private, actually supported in public the 'NO' campaign. The 'Yes' groups could also draw on a seemingly unending supply of money from the European Movement and from well paid PR professionals. With this money and these people the country was saturated with misinformation, manipulation of historical facts, scare tactics and often downright lies. The ' No ' campaign relied mainly on small individual subscriptions and voluntary workers.
I stood on the streets of Oxford with a small group of activists trying to counter this massive propaganda war being carefully organized against the ancient nations of the United Kingdom. We were as David against Goliath.
People would come to me as I stood there in the centre of Oxford, ask questions in puzzlement, disbelief or fear. Questions and statements such as - hearing my accent - 'Australia and New Zealand, will not stop sending us beef and dairy products will they’, 'we have our Commonwealth', 'we are a sea nation', 'we are not continental Europeans, 'we fought the last war to be independent of Europe.' Some of these questions I could answer with authority having just returned to the UK from Australia. I knew that Australia was having difficulty trying to find markets in Asia for their produce that was being driven out of the UK by Brussels rules (yes, there were already Brussels rules!) At the same time I knew that Australians were being told that the British were keen to join Europe, forget the Commonwealth, had no need any longer for countries such as Australia.
(Books are still available which give some idea of the gigantic fraud perpetrated on the British people and old Commonwealth countries.)
I can still remember that day in June 1975 when the 'Yes' campaign was declared to have won. The United Kingdom was to remain in the E.E.C. - Common Market. Heartbroken I sat in the garden in our Oxford flat and wrote the following.
After a ‘Yes’ vote for the E.E.C.
In bondage now my people
Shackled to a Lie
ringing in one corner of the world,
All ancient pride spat out
By men who do not understand
The essence of our nation.
Most famous freemen of them all,
Renowned for courage to say nay,
Nourished alone by the sea's embrace.
Broken indeed that temper now
If we dress in other's fashion.
We are servant and have been mastered.
This fawning for foreign features
Makes us silly people
Clowning a part we cannot play.
We have been coerced today
Our British truth has been betrayed
Our evolution halted.
Once 'tiny body with a mighty heart',
Thus our great poet called us.
Now is it to be
Midget heart in a monstrous body.
This the end of a thousand years
Of developing liberty.
Tragic indeed this day
Britons have been made afraid
By sick unnatural men.
We have stabbed our very heart
Been tricked into surrender
Made cowards of each nation.
What future have we now,
As our inheritance
Is shattered.
For like a wave trapped under rocks
We'll sense past freedom gone
And die in stagnant water.
It is dark my people
Shadows slink across the land
Mocking and jabbing reason.
The dance of death is gathering strength
In the cackling Lie of Europe,
War moves all around.
Oxford 6th June 1975
After the shameful way the 'Yes' campaign was conducted there was great anger and contempt amongst the 'No' activists. Some groups reformed and continued to try and fight Goliath. I helped form the Oxford group of the 'Safeguard Britain Campaign' made up of members of several of the anti-Common Market groups, and held various positions in this local group for a few years.
Richard Buckley and I continued to write letters to the local paper, easier after the Referendum - at least in the provincial papers – to have them published! In 1975, 1976 and 1976 we wrote the following;
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I also helped other affiliated groups leaflet and demonstrate against, for example, Brussels rules which blatantly began the eventual destruction of most of the British Fishing Industry. We could see then what was happening but politicians and those who controlled the media were either gullible almost beyond belief, did not care or --------?
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Demonstration against EEC fishing policy on behalf of |
Anne McCosker on left. |
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In 1977 I wrote the following poem which was distributed as a 'Safeguard Britain Campaign' broadsheet for a few years in anti-E.E.C. meetings.
WHY?
When the British Parliament accepted the Treaty of Rome it betrayed the daughter nations of Britain.
My father fought for the Union Jack
In the bloody mud of Flanders,
My father fought for the Union Jack
In the sweaty jabbering jungle.
Twice for a Britain he loved he fought
Twice round him his true mates fell,
Yet now his beloved Britain betrays
His country of birth, Australia.
My great-grandmother of Highland name
Knew and conquered as pioneer
The lonely seas and strangest bush..........
.............
She and her Irish man
Brought up their children as British
Twelve thousand miles from home.
My grandfather rode the Queensland plains
Taking old England with him.
He, gentleman of an ancient line,
Taught to that infant state
The ways of an English education.
His every word and action grew
Prom his own bright youth in Britain
Where he breathed in knowledge of his breed.
..........................
My uncle fought at Gallipoli,
In fragments died at Polygon Wood.
He, blood of Britain, Australia born,
Sacrificed all for his race.
My uncle fought through the Burma track,
Lived out from the Japanese camps
For the Union Jack and the Southern Cross
He faced every cruelty of Man.
My mother loved with consuming flame
The sea-free soul of England,
She gave to her daughters a passion so deep
They flew like swallows through every storm
To live again in their Motherland.
Yet now this England where her grandchildren play
Betrays all she cradled to keep,
Britain has ignored Australia.
And I, born while Britain fought
For her very survival against Hitler,
I ever drew life through my lineage.
English, our literature, was the language in which
We worshipped Christ of the British Isles,
Read stories of our sea heritage
Cheered our Queen when she came to Queensland.
While in every game as British children we played.
We were British and, more than that,
We knew other worlds and ways.
Yet we, the pioneers of Britain,
Were truly the British people.
Within our souls so easily lay
Irish and English, Scots and Welsh,
To us you were not separate peoples
But the British who created me.
Celtic of bone with English marrow
I did not think, when a child at school
Glorying in Ne1son and Magna Charta
Revelling in Shakespeare and Shelley
Sorrowing at the loss of Culloden,
That soon I of Empire would be betrayed,
Betrayed by my own British people
Who thought gold more important than love.
What dark hour lies before us now,
For all this treachery to Truth
Will be in pain found out.
...................
Copyright © 1977 Oxfordshire Safeguard Britain Campaign
Printed by the Senecio Press Limited, Charlbury Oxon.
I also wrote about that time the long poem The Night Mare of Europe or E.E.C. Dream. I have printed a few stanzas, the first one and the last ones below.
THE NIGHTMARE OF EUROPE
OR EEC DREAM
The mare of night is galloping fast
Through minds that are asleep.
Queer throbbing unsettles reason,
Men in sharp fear lie possessed
By unfamiliar phantoms
That seem to speak wise words
Tear out each brain in visions.
.............
.............
The sleeper shudders awake,
Lying for a second in twilight
Between dreadful night and day
The dawn is with light removing
Those stifling delusions of dark.
He sees in sunshine his phantoms
And weeps at their devil shape.
War between Europe and Europe,
That clumsy arrogant union
Ignored most of its brothers. (There were few EEC members)
War between giant states
As rivals fought to find
Which was the master of masters.
War between parts of the union
Which like a hen sat on
Potent eggs of different races.
And civil war.
The rhythm of a common weal
Had been broken by alien forces.
A nightmare indeed in daylight
For the dreamer had constructed
A grand incredible Bedlam
Where the inmates were all mad.
Slobbering tricksters and jabbering liars
Bodies which could only fight
Unable to feel or give Love.
Each day they croaked another part,
The individual had been shattered.
Pricked into limbo without personal past
Men grovelled to a steel-barred sun,
Creation seemed a cracking skull.
What I predicted then, in the late 1970s - in graphic imagery, is surely now coming true.
Since 1975, through the following decades there has always been small, badly finance, but intensely concerned groups of people fighting for the freedom of Nations against the ever increasing power of unelected officials, the stranglehold from Brussels and the ultimate goal, a United States of Europe.
I knew very well years before 1975 what the real goals of the E.E.C. - Common Market were. It was for a United States of Europe. This plan had been openly discussed amongst the establishmentelite since its first conception soon after WW II. It was the whole point of the exercise! Those in power did not bother though to spell out in detail this goal to the subjects of the United Kingdom and citizens of Europe as a whole. There has never been true democracy in the ‘European Idea’.
Looking back over these past decades and at all the leafleting and demonstrations Ihave taken a part in, often in the early years under a different umbrella organization - finally fixed as the ‘ Campaign for an Independent Britain’ - it has seemed at times as if I, we, achieved nothing. And yet--- and yet ---. The United Kingdom did not enter the Euro Zone, and the United Kingdom is still a sovereign nation that can at any time repeal the Act that took us into the quagmire that is ‘BRUSSELS EUROPE', the now called European Union.
Through all the years of pretence that the whole edifice was only a trading bloc and the unelected faceless bureaucrats in Brussels did not want total control of the peoples of Europe, through the various name changes, Common Market, E.C.C. E.C., E.U. - and with the ever present threat of a nightmare Federal Europe Superstate - there were afew of us who were not fooled or intimidated and were prepared to stand up for the nation states not only of the United kingdom but all the nation states of Europe. There have always been the 'Davids' in Europe who have never been deceived. Yeats wrote 'the centre cannot hold'; perhaps in spite of everything it has.
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From the Brisbane Sun, May 25th, 1971 |
