In Britain it is often felt that we specialize in losing: we delight in destroying our sense of self, the good parts of our history, and especially our winning ideas, either by letting others steal and sell them, or by terrible follow-ups – from beginning to end. We did it with Blair’s noble drive to topple Saddam Hussein, the monster of the Middle East, and now we’re doing it with Brexit.
I was a Remain voter, but I found the arguments for Brexit interesting, especially the sovereignty arguments. I don’t understand why so many people find this a topic to snicker about or assume it’s just a cover for “xenophobia and racism.” After all, Britain is one of the least racist countries in the world, according to the 2023 World Values Survey.
For a while, I began to suspect that those who mocked the little people’s desire for “dominance” were actually using it as cover to exercise their own bigotry against the white working class. But maybe they really, really don’t care if they have any say in who governs them.
After all, eight years after the Brexit vote, Remoans will not give up their hysterical continentalism. And now that Labor has escaped the “Lexit” contingent, or at least found the will to ignore it, it is rapidly falling back into type. Sentiment in the party appears to coalesce around an insidious longing to return to the warm, undemocratic and increasingly authoritarian embrace of the EU.
Sir Keir Starmer, our likely next prime minister, appears to be busily preparing to undo as much of Brexit as possible. He has been less than secretive about this goal: speaking in Montreal last September, he took a simple stance on Europe: “We don’t want to diversify, we don’t want to lower standards, Destroy environmental standards, standards for working people, food standards and everything else.” .”
Meanwhile, Labour’s senior leaders have begun to confirm Starmer’s plan to rejoin the EU. Starmer insisted he would not rejoin the customs union, single market or open Britain’s borders. The FT quoted a Labor Party figure as saying: “The red lines will be in the manifesto and will not change.” “But are we assertive behind these red lines? Of course we are. “We want to deepen our relationship.”
There may be a lot behind this “but”. Former EU trade commissioner Lord Mandelson told a private meeting last month that Labor could take steps towards dynamic alignment or give the European Court of Justice jurisdiction over the UK, the FT reported.
There are now signs that Britain is moving in this direction. Just the other day a Labor Party spokesman announced that the Party was interested in “seeking a veterinary agreement to overcome trade barriers” and “mutual recognition of professional qualifications”. Other reports suggest the Party may try to do something suspiciously similar to a customs union, with a more voter-friendly name.
Looks like Brussels is listening. The EU is now dangling a tempting offer before Labour’s sights: a freedom of movement-style deal for 18-30-year-olds under which young people could cross the channel by working, traveling and studying for up to four years.
Britain certainly suffered from the exodus of European waiters, baristas and babysitters; so it’s hard not to salivate at this, especially given the mutual freedom of British youth. We have similar programs with Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and Iceland, so it wouldn’t be anything unprecedented. But there’s a problem when it comes to Europe: Every new embrace will lead to the formation of more binding ties.
Few people doubted the benefits that EU membership would bring. The problem was that a large portion of the electorate, many of those who benefited from them, realized that these conveniences did not outweigh our fundamental principle of maintaining control over our own laws and trade agreements, and more specifically, control over those who make them. Gains in the economy were overshadowed by the democratic deficit.
And even now, we occasionally get a rude reminder of why staying away from the EU’s power structures is so important for democracy, both in the short and long term.
It is increasingly clear that beneath the surface of the bloc lies a set of controlling tendencies that are smugly authoritarian and ideologically skewed towards the worst aspects of leftism – rabid greenism, distrust of hard work and the “anti-racism” that encourages massive immigration. communities’ mockery of Western laws and values.
These tendencies are why rule-makers in the EU’s service are often uncomfortable with legal freedom of expression when they are Right-wing. Just look at the fiasco that unfolded in Brussels last week.
I have little time for the agenda of the National Conservatives, who hold or attempt to hold their annual conference in this city. But like any sane person, I was shocked to see police descending on the venue during Nigel Farage’s speech; He was instructed to close the event if “provocative and discriminatory” views were published that were deemed “homophobic and disrespectful”. People and minorities”.
Really? This was not the “far right” as any European should know. Natcon’s main crime is to criticize the bloc, to be curious about nation and other standard features of the traditional (not “hard”) right (family, kin, religion and community).
Do we really want to rejoin a vast “closer and closer” union that cannot see the difference between a neo-Nazi rally and an innocuous conference? Freedom of trade and fast airport queues are tempting, but the British people chose freedom instead. Labor forgets this at its peril.