Tobias Ellwood speaking in Salisbury 23rd June 2023: Part 1

Tobias Ellwood speaking at the house of Edward Heath, Prime Minister of the UK from 1970-1974 in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral. He was the Prime Minister who took the UK into what was then called the Common Market, which later morphed into the EU. He was also a Sinophile, who favoured links with the PRC, visiting Mao Zedong in 1974 and 1975, and who enjoyed a close relationship with Deng Xiaoping.

Ellwood spent much of his speech talking about Ukraine, Russia and China, but bookended it with Brexit. In my view, he clearly would like us to rejoin, given his views on what he sees as our place in the world and the Single Market.

He seems to be of the view that the war in Ukraine is the sole cause of food price inflation; nothing to do with shutting down the world economy, disrupting supply chains, and paying people to stay at home for the best part of 2 years then.

" The shameless transfer of consequences from Covid and Ukraine to Brexit, is of course routine, as are untruths (the UK does not have the slowest economic growth in the G7). Remainers are also impervious to their own culpability in the disarray in parliament through their attempts to subvert the result of a legally-conducted referendum. With the resignation of Boris Johnson, they now feel well on the way to over-turning the Referendum. As O’Toole says, “[Johnson’s] great project, Brexit is melting like yellow snow in the merciless heat of reality”. It is up to us Brexiteers to expose such shameless exaggeration and untruth and to persevere just as the Glorious Revolutionaries did in the face of Jacobite fightback."
https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/remainers-becoming-increasingly-desperate/

"Tobias Martin Ellwood VR (born 12 August 1966) is a British Conservative Party politician and soldier who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bournemouth East since 2005. He has chaired the Defence Select Committee since 2020 and was a Government Minister at the Ministry of Defence from 2017 to 2019. Prior to his political career, Ellwood served in the Royal Green Jackets and reached the rank of captain. He transferred to the Army Reserve and has gone on to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel in the 77th Brigade."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Ellwood

https://www.tobiasellwood.com/

"The Westphalia area of north-western Germany gave its name to the treaty that ended the Thirty Years' War, one of the most destructive conflicts in the history of Europe."
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/treaty-westphalia

"From the mythic origins of the Chinese dynasties to the eventual fall of the last imperial house, Chinese emperors have long fought to maintain control over one of the most enduring empires on Earth. The rise and fall of various imperial families oversaw waves of innovation and cultural advancement."

"Opium has a complicated global history as a remarkably effective medicine and an instigator of moral panics. As historians Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun write, in China, this intersected with complex international and class politics"
https://daily.jstor.org/opiums-history-in-china/
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/imperial-chinas-dynasties/

""Often protrayed as a 'Golden Age' before the advent of such catastrophes as Mao’s Great Famine (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), this book uses a wealth of newly opened archives to show that the first years of the regime were an era of 'systematic violence and calculated terror'...
Massive support from the Soviet Union, which invaded Manchuria in 1945, determined the outcome of the civil war between the communists and the nationalists from 1946 to 1949."
https://www.frankdikotter.com/books/the-tragedy-of-liberation/key-arguments.html