Martin says his biggest ire with the European Union is the Eurozone (which Britain isn’t a part of)
One of the stranger elements to the country’s internal ramblings about the European Union has been the rise of Wetherspoons founder and chairman Tim Martin as a Brexit figurehead, even if he appears to know surprisingly little about one key aspect of the debate.
For many, the EU’s impact on British laws was a key issue in the referendum and Martin is evidently trying to tap into that opinion.
“The main issue for me was you never knew where EU law began and British law ended,” the 63-year-old told The Guardian journalist Owen Jones in a recent interview in a Southend Spoons.
However, when pressed on exactly which laws he dislikes, Martin stumbles, stating: “It’s too dissective to boil it down to that.
“How would I know whether an individual law [is made by the EU]? I’m a barrister, it’s almost impossible to know whether an individual law is made by the EU or the UK.”
Which is an odd opinion to hear from a man currently touring his chain of pubs making speeches advocating a no-deal Brexit.
Later in the clip, Martin gives Jones an example of something he dislikes about the EU, namely the “huge pressure” Britain faced to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which it declined to do between 1979 and 1990. It withdrew just two years later following a crash known as Black Wednesday.
On the Euro currency, Martin claimed: “70 per cent of the people thought it was inevitable that the UK would join. I don’t like the Eurozone, I think it’s very dangerous.”
Chaos descends from there as the personalities clash, leading to Martin denouncing Jones as “rude and aggressive.”
“It’s a childish interview,” he complains. “You’ve been on the Stella!”
