Remainers are wrong to claim Margaret Thatcher supported the EU - here's why: Yorkshire Post Letters

In response to the letter from Dr OJ Sykes, “Tories should remember Thatcher’s words on single market” (The Yorkshire Post, August 1).

Oh how selective Dr Sykes is in his lame effort to still get the UK to reverse its decisive majority Leave vote by quoting an old statement by Mrs Thatcher when we were about to vote to join the EEC, which was sold to UK voters by Edward Heath as a common market – a trading block.

It was never stated that its aim was to become a political force to usurp sovereign parliaments with a leadership of non-elected bureaucrats. Please look at Thatcher’s later comments on the subject of Europe as she became increasingly disenchanted with its aims and it costs.

Margaret Thatcher backed Britain leaving the European Union, according to the final volume of her authorised biography. She confided to a friend that the UK would be “better off outside” the EU once she had left Number 10, according to the third and final volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Lady Thatcher.

Out of office, Mrs Thatcher had gradually come to think that Britain should find a way to leave the EU and told this to “many people... in the manner of confiding a secret,” Moore says.

So that is what her thoughts were after she had seen the body that evolved to become the EU. The people of the UK were never permitted to vote on it becoming a Union with greater and greater political powers, rather than a mutually dependent trading block. And so we rejected the EU which would appear to be on a slow road to self-destruct.

As for Dr Sykes condemning the use of political advisers in the current government, look at the past to Tony Blair and his umbilically-connected Alastair Campbell. They all have advisers.

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James Mitchinson

Editor