by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Obama said that Brexit would put UK at ‘back of the queue’ for trade deal in huge EU Referendum intervention
Speaking at a press conference in London alongside David Cameron, Obama said: “First of all, let me repeat, this is a decision for the people of the United Kingdom to make. I not coming here to fix any votes. I’m not casting a vote myself. I’m offering my opinion. And, in democracies, everybody should want more information and not less. And you shouldn’t be afraid to hear an argument being made. That’s not a threat. That should enhance the debate.
Particularly because my understanding is that some of the folks on the other side have been ascribing to the United States certain actions we’ll take if the UK does leave the EU. So they say, for example, that ‘well, we’ll just cut our own trade deals with the United States’. So they’re voicing an opinion about what the United States is going to do and I figured you might want to hear from the President of the United States what I think the United States is going to do.
And on that matter, for example, I think it’s fair to say that maybe some point down the line there might be a UK-US trade agreement, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc—the European Union—to get a trade agreement done.
And the UK is going to be at the back of the queue. Not because we don’t have a special relationship but because, given the heavy lift on any trade agreement, us having access to a big market with a lot of countries, rather than trying to do piecemeal trade agreements, is hugely inefficient.”
Either way it is blackmail and should be seen as a threat and should be rejected as such. The US President has no right to interfere in the affairs of this country unless Britain is not a sovereign nation but just a US colony. I will leave the reader to make up his or her own mind about this latter issue.
Fact is that President Obama wasn’t just talking about his views but issuing a direct threat about the consequences of the referendum. What we are seeing here is more textbook Project Fear than platitudes about what is in the American and British interest.
It fits in perfectly with the tone of the Remain campaign, sowing doubt in voters’ minds about what will happen to the British economy if the country votes to leave. But it will also agitate those Eurosceptic Tories who are already furious about the way the US President has been harnessed by the In campaign.
In some speeches and references to the British EU referendum a couple of weeks back the current POTUS also implied that it would hurt the “special relationship” if the British people should vote to leave the EU.
What is this “special relationship” actually, we should ask here, and how did it come about and who actually benefits from it. The greatest benefactor from it is and has always been the US, whether it is with regards to extraditions of people the US views as criminals or other issues.
To understand how this “special relationship” came about and how it is that the US has such an influence over the UK we have to go back some 70 years or so to the time of the Second World War and the agreement between Churchill and the United States as to American help in this war against German fascism. It was there that Churchill had to grant the US certain rights and privileges over British sovereignty and had also to sign away the colonies to enable to US to become a “world power”, which before that it definitely was not. And in this light this blackmail threat has to be seen also and especially.
© 2016
