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Be very afraid. That is not advice, it is an order. It is issued by the Establishment that rules you; by the “experts”, by the wise men in Government and the media, by those whose unchallengeable entitlement gives them the right to direct your lives, your speech and, increasingly, your thoughts.
Your crass irresponsibility in voting to emancipate yourselves from the thraldom of the European Union was grossly presumptuous and you will be punished for it. Who do you of the lumpen electorate think you are? You understand nothing of Brexit (have you ever, even once in your life, read the Guardian?) and yet you had the impertinence to vote for it.
Well, when Britain falls over the cliff edge into WTO Brexit, the British sandwich becomes a remote historical memory and much of the population is forced to resort to cannibalism, perhaps you Leave-voting ignoramuses will regret your stupidity. All you senile, middle-aged has-beens needed to do was consult the wisdom of any 18-year-old on a pre-Oxbridge gap year to educate yourselves in the evils of xenophobia and war-mongering that a Leave vote represents.
But soft! All is not lost. There may – just possibly – be a path back to rehabilitation, to reconciliation, even to economic solvency. The road to Canossa lies open. If the delinquent electors of Britain were to make an act of perfect contrition, by voting overwhelmingly in a second referendum to return to the paternal hearth of Brussels, those prodigals would surely be forgiven.
On this occasion, naturally, there would be no fatted calf, we could hardly expect that. Certain sanctions, such as joining the euro currency, forgoing former financial rebates and acceding to an integrationist agenda would be a small price to pay for readmission to the single market and customs union. The derision and obloquy heaped upon Britain by the rest of the world and total loss of credibility for a generation would be more than offset by the privilege of full membership of the European project and further enrichment of our culture under the free movement of accelerated numbers of migrants…
And so on. Project Fear 2 is robustly asserting itself, mandated by the Prime Minister herself to “scare people witless”. The re-launch of the Grande Peur originally promoted during the referendum campaign was dampened by the leaking of some of the contents of the 70 dodgy dossiers commissioned from the civil service by the Remainer Tory Government to spread alarm and despondency over Brexit. Apparently this infantile exercise was intended to act as a constant drip-feed of pessimism over the next few weeks, but may now be compressed into one day to minimize official embarrassment.
The mounting surrealism of the anti-Brexit scare stories, ranging from the death of the sandwich to an epidemic of super-gonorrhoea, illustrates the extent to which the elites have lost touch not only with the mass of their fellow countrymen but with basic reality. Recently, the more demented Remainiacs who have been neglecting their medication have begun agitating for a second referendum.
To appreciate the full insanity of that proposal it is necessary, momentarily, to indulge the delusion and consider what would happen under that scenario. Let us stretch credulity and imagine that the British people were to be so craven, credulous and lacking in self-respect as to vote, albeit narrowly, to reverse Brexit. Britain would find herself trapped in the tunnel of Article 50, leaving herself utterly at the mercy of the Brussels hoods. With the UK government newly mandated to remain in the EU but Britain locked into Article 50, Brussels could exact any condition – even joining the euro – as the price of reversing the Article 50 process.
Do Michel Barnier, Jean-Claude Juncker, Guy ‘Mad Dog’ Verhofstadt et al. strike you as men whose political worldview embraces Churchill’s maxim “In victory magnanimity”? With Britain delivered supine at their feet by our treacherous politicians and elites, the Brussels junta would squeeze her till the pips squeaked. Adoption of the euro currency could be just one of the conditions imposed for the annulment of Article 50. Terms such as “vassal state” used rhetorically by Brexiteers would become inadequate to describe the condition of abject subordination to which the United Kingdom would be reduced. A recaptured slave can expect no mercy.
A second referendum, to any sane person, is unthinkable. Would we ever re-run a general election that has had a decisive outcome, in response to lobbying, even before the new government has been formed? The contempt for the electorate displayed by those who promote this ludicrous proposal is monumental.
But contempt for the overwhelming majority of the people of this country is the fundamental mentality of the establishment: “Get into that polling booth right away, undo the harm you have done, then go off and watch football, or whatever people of your class do – and never again presume to meddle in matters that are the province of your betters.”
What has happened is quite simple: the electorate, in the most massive expression of public opinion in the whole of British history, has voted for an outcome uncongenial to the globalist establishment. So, the political class, the judiciary, the media, etc have united to intimidate and obstruct, in collaboration with a foreign power bloc, the will of the British people.
If that Axis of Entitlement is permitted to overrule and bully the electorate we no longer inhabit a free society. There is more at stake here even than Brexit. Is Britain a democracy or an oligarchy? If Brexit were either reversed or emasculated to near-nullity, such a humiliation would reduce Britain to a global laughing stock.
The United Kingdom is a nuclear power, has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and is the fifth-largest economy in the world. Yet our supine government representatives, for two years, have submitted to every pummelling that Barnier and Co have doled out to them. Theresa May’s two chief aides are Philip Hammond and Oliver Robbins, the two biggest uber-Remainers in the country – in charge of Brexit. This farce must end.
As for dire warnings of disruption under a WTO Brexit, yes, the initial stages will be chaotic. The fanatics in Brussels will not give ground; they will wreck their own EU member states’ economies in order to punish Britain. But last year the UK took £341bn worth of exports from EU countries and despite a £28bn surplus in services our £95bn deficit in trade in goods left us with an overall trade deficit with the EU of £67bn. If Eurocrats disrupt a dripping roast like that for EU businesses they will provoke the wrath of member states and there are EU elections next year. For Britain, other trade deals will be available (how do the 165 countries that are not members of the EU survive?)
The fundamental question that arises is this: is the European Union a totalitarian entity from which no sovereign country is permitted to depart in good order and by mutual agreement? If, as the past two years have indicated, the answer is yes, then that sprawling, fiscally and culturally unstable behemoth is the new Warsaw Pact, doomed to the same outcome.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.