Obama faces backlash after warning U.K. against leaving EU

In 1941, when Britain stood virtually alone against Hitler, President Roosevelt dispatched a diplomat called Harry Hopkins to London to help him decide how much support to give the United Kingdom.

Was this a country that America should stand beside in its darkest hour?

On the night before he returned home, Hopkins quoted a Bible passage to Winston Churchill: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go and where thou lodgest I will lodge, thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’

President Obama came to Britain this week with a very different message.

If we vote to leave the European Union, he announced, we shouldn’t expect to negotiate a new trade agreement with America any time soon. ‘The UK’s going to be at the back of the queue,’ he said.

From ‘thy people shall be my people’ to ‘back of the queue’ in one brutal move. Obama was issuing a cold-blooded threat to Britain because he believes it’s in America’s interests for us to remain in the EU.

Never mind that the United States would never countenance giving away any of its own sovereignty, such as removing border controls with Mexico or allowing an international court to strike down its laws. When it comes to Obama and the EU, it's a case of do what I say, not what I do.

Should we be worried?


Well, for one thing our relationship with America hasn’t been all that ‘special’ since Obama came to power.

As he admitted, one of his first acts as President was to remove from the Oval Office the bust of Churchill that Tony Blair had presented to George W. Bush.

When America asked for Britain’s help in its War on Terror in 2003, Blair did not tell Bush to go to ‘the back of the queue’.

On the contrary, we jeopardised our international reputation to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the US then, as we had done for 75 years. But that meant little to the incoming President.

To underline just what a low opinion he had of Britain, Obama said in 2010 that America would be neutral when it came to Argentina and the Falklands.

It’s just as well he wasn’t in the White House when Argentina invaded in 1982.

Now will we grasp that the United States is not our friend, but a foreign country whose interests are often different from ours?

President Obama’s blatant intervention in our internal affairs is not a sudden breach of a soppy ‘special relationship’. The USA’s only real special relationship is with Saudi Arabia, a 70-year-old hard pact of oil, money and power, welded together with such cynicism it ought to make us gasp.

Barack Obama’s open desire for us to stay inside the EU is by no means the first or worst example of White House meddling here in these islands...