US-HUNGARIAN billionaire George Soros has denounced Brexit as an ‘immensely damaging process’ for both the United Kingdom and the European Union, and has arrived in the UK announcing that a campaign for a second Brexit referendum will be launched within the next few days. Soros made this pledge at an event held by the European Council for Foreign Relations think tank in the French capital Paris on Tuesday.
The Hungarian-American said the prospect of London’s prolonged divorce from Brussels could help persuade the British public by a ‘convincing margin’ that EU membership was in their interests.
Soros has reportedly donated some $555,000 to ‘Best for Britain’, which was set up last year by anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller. Soros said the campaign would start ‘in the next few days’.
However, Soros has not fared too well politically in the EU. His non-governmental foundation has been run out of Hungary by its EU government, with its staff claiming that ‘persecution has made its work impossible.’ His Open Society Foundation (OSF) will relocate its operations to Berlin over the summer. Meanwhile Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose Fidesz party won last month’s election by a landslide, is pushing legislation that will make printing leaflets with information for asylum-seekers and offering them food or legal advice a criminal offence!
Soros remains loyal to the EU despite this. However, he was not always so loyal to the EU, especially when he could make a speculative billion or two. The currency speculator, now a US citizen, became known as the ‘man who broke the Bank of England’ after he bet against the pound in 1992, forcing the UK out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) on Black Wednesday 16 September 1992, making over a billion profit in the process!
All new EU members, after the signing of the Maastricht treaty in 1992, were obliged to adopt the euro under the terms of their accession treaties. Representatives from 12 countries signed the Treaty on 7th February 1992 – Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. However, the last of the five economic convergence criteria, which need to be complied with in order to qualify for euro adoption, was the exchange rate stability criterion.
To participate in the ERM, Ireland had to break the Irish pound’s parity with the pound sterling in 1979, because the pound sterling, which was not an ERM currency, appreciated against all ERM currencies shortly after the launch of the ERM.
The United Kingdom entered the ERM in October 1990, but was forced to exit the programme within two years after the pound sterling came under major attack from currency speculators, led by George Soros. The ensuing crash of 16 September 1992 was subsequently dubbed ‘Black Wednesday’. Soros made a billion out of sabotaging the drive for the UK to become a member of the single currency, the euro!
The UK spent over £6 billion trying to keep the currency within the narrow limits of the ERM with reports at the time noting that Soros’ individual profit of £1 billion equated to over £12 for each man, woman and child in Britain. This is how he earned his title, as the ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’.
Now he has the nerve to demand of the UK’s workers that they must remain in the EU, while at the same time admitting that the EU is now in ‘an existential crisis’, complaining ‘its attention is diverted to negotiating a separation agreement with Britain.’
With Hungary prosecuting migrants, with the EU encouraging the President of Italy to appoint a ‘Mr Scissors’ to slash and cut and smash Italy’s democratic process, with massive struggles developing in France to prevent the privatisation of the rail system, and with permanent austerity in the UK, UK workers are more determined than ever to quit the bosses’ and bankers’ EU. They will scornfully reject Soros’ propaganda and will demand that the UK leaves the EU at once, and begin a campaign to replace the bankers’ and bosses’ EU with the Socialist United States of Europe
