Dear Reader,
I would like you to close your eyes, concentrate your mind and picture the following analogy:
You rent an apartment where all the rooms are painted a hideous bright red. On the day you move in, you ask the landlord whether you can get rid of the red and have the walls painted in a more appealing magnolia, instead. The landlord is extremely reluctant at first, given that he’s always used the same shade of red. However, he eventually gives in and sends round his contracted painter and decorator – ‘Establishment Decor and Painting Company’ – to give you an estimate. Upon visiting the apartment the CEO, a Mr Keith Starmer, tells you he really shouldn’t be painting your apartment in any other colour but red. You insist, and pay him up front the princely sum of £1,700.40 for the job. When his team returns, instead of applying the paint with a roller and brush, they simply take the tins of paint and throw them against the wall. This results in the walls, doors, furniture and carpets saturated in wet emulsion. When you storm into your landlord’s office and complain, he turns around and blames you for wanting the apartment repainted magnolia in the first place! “I told you I was against the idea”, he says. “If you had left things in the original red, this would never have happened!”.
On this, the fifth anniversary of our actual departure from the European Union, I think the above scenario is highly applicable. I voted Leave in 2016. Actually, I had been campaigning to quit the EU ever since the Maastricht Treaty was signed by John Major in 1992, for I knew then that the limits of this club went far beyond mere trading considerations. I even had several heated debates with my Professor of European Politics at university back in the 90s, who was a passionate federalist. Would I vote Brexit again? Absolutely and in a heartbeat! But that doesn’t mean to say I am not extremely disappointed by the way politicians in this country have implemented it in a half-hearted and begrudging fashion. They were given a simple instruction: Leave the European Union and take back control of our laws, borders and money. What did we get? A negotiating team that saddled us with a £39 billion EU divorce fee without getting anything of assets in return; that left part of our sovereign territory subject to EU laws in 300 areas of goods trading; that bestowed on us an immigration policy (on steroids) swapping Katowice for Khartoum; and a newly-elected government elected on 34% of the vote that is playing the role of those hypothetical decorators in gradually applying patches of red paint over the magnolia mess in the hope it can be done in such an incremental fashion that we won’t notice!
I was sat in a McDonald’s restaurant enjoying a late evening Big Mac meal as the United Kingdom formally left the EU five years ago today. I was filled with a sense of relief that democracy, in a formal and superficial sense at least, had won out. Even so, I had a feeling of trepidation – particularly in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol. During a conversation with my best mate in a bar in Delhi a couple of months before (as we read the news on our phones that a ‘Brexit’ General Election would be called back home), I said I was concerned about a Protocol that could well be used by the EU to prevent the entire UK from exiting its regulatory orbit. As we approached the end of 2021, when the massively overblown controversy of ditching the Protocol was mooted in domestic law (which, as a dualist state, we were quite at liberty to do), I spoke to both Mike Graham on Talk Radio and Nick Ferrari on LBC to state my feeling this was the deliberate intention of the EU taking, as it had done, a sense of implied weakness at best – and overt collaboration at worst – from a British Establishment that had not only failed to come together behind a democratic vote that IT had promised would be delivered, but was also keen to invoke the so-called ‘spirit’ of the Belfast Agreement as a subterfuge to hog-tie the whole country to Europe’s laws! Under Johnson, Sunak, and now Starmer, can anyone honestly say I was wrong? (https://thecritic.co.uk/the-windsor-framework-must-fall-so-that-brexit-can-live/)
Then there’s immigration. Nobody in that clown show we call Parliament could have been under any illusion that taking back control of our borders also meant drastically reducing the inflow of migrants to our shores. Free movement had been putting unbearable pressure on our infrastructure and public services for years. Indeed, it was regularly acknowledged by a whole host of politicos this was the case. Again, in contravention of what we were promised and fully expecting, they decided to gaslight us with unprecedented levels of mass migration, but this time from such wondrously productive, enlightened and inventive little global corners like Cameroon, Sudan and Pakistan! The result is our city centres increasingly look like a giant United Nations General Assembly meeting, and working in the disability health care sector (as I do) means nearly everyone else I meet these days has a name like Chukawuka Ogubougou, Mavhundla Tangybangy or Ahanmisi Odumenya (no wonder I struggle to get a pay rise)!!
A fifth anniversary in marriage in usually referred to a ‘Wood Anniversary’ and, to be fair, the quality of the Brexit we’ve been given has a distinctly (cheap) wooden quality about it. The only way to correct this phenomenally grave injustice is to elect politicians who are sincere about delivering the true outworking of our victory almost nine years ago. That won’t be found in a uniparty system possessing a cunning streak straight out of the teachings of Machiavelli! Furthermore, clamouring to get back into a European Union with even more pathetic growth prospects than our own; and a club increasingly fragmented by the rise of parties dedicated to the sovereign and cultural integrity of their own nation states, is NOT the answer to anything.
Happy Brexit Day!
Views: 47
