The Tory group’s European parliament presidential nominee has embraced an absurd scare tactic in the party’s attempts to frighten the British people away from the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and any thought of leaving the European Union.
Sajjad Karim, a former Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament who defected to the Tories in 2007, claimed yesterday that if Britain left the EU, it could be forced to surrender its seat on the United Nations Security Council. Yet the UN Charter shows this is impossible.
Karim outlined a fantastical series of events which he claimed would follow any vote by the people of Britain to leave the EU. He said these events would end with the UK being forced to lose its permanent seat at the UN Security Council.
This scare technique has been identified by the EU historian and blogger Dr Richard North as “FUD” – the policy of the British political establishment in spreading “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” in their campaign to secure a “In” vote in any referendum on EU membership.
Karim gave his UN Security Council “FUD” in an interview with Euractiv, an online Brussels journal with close connections to the EU establishment.
The MEP, whose European Conservatives and Reformists group has just admitted a Dutch MEP whose party does not believe in female equality, as reported by Breitbart London on Tuesday, claimed that after any vote by Britain to leave the EU “a huge question mark will once again arise over the UK’s unity.”
England, he claimed, would be left as a single country because of “discontent” in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, so the United Kingdom would be forced to surrender its permanent seat on the Security Council: “I don’t see a scenario in which the likes of China and Russia will allow that seat to be maintained by England alone.”
Article 23.1 of the UN Charter says unequivocally that the UK and four other nations “shall be permanent members of the Security Council.” Karim’s contention relies on the highly unlikely scenario that the United Kingdom would cease to be.
Furthermore, the Charter also lists the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the old USSR, as holding a permanent seat on the Security Council. But even after 14 of the 15 Soviet republics fell away from union with Russia with the dissolution of the USSR, Russia retained the USSR seat.
The only way the UK’s permanent membership of the Security Council can be changed in the charter, the foundation document of the UN, is by amendment. Article 108 shows that amendments to the charter cannot come into force unless ratified “by two thirds of the Members of the United Nations, including all the permanent members of the Security Council.”
In short, even if the United States and the other permanent members of the Security Council wanted the UK to leave – and why would they? — the UK can block any such amendment by refusing to ratify it.
But Karim does not mention that. He, like the rest of the Cameron establishment, wants to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
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