Cameron’s Exodus

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Maybe Prime Minister Cameron thinks Moses should have stayed in Egypt. “Our membership of the European Union,” he said this morning in laying out his hopes for staying in the EU, “gives us free trade agreements with more than 50 countries around the world. Trying to recreate all of these deals from scratch on our own would not be a quick or easy process. So we should be clear that leaving the EU is not some automatic fast track to a land of milk and honey.”

Then again, Moses didn’t land on some automatic fast track either. We don’t want to press any inappropriate analogies (there are lots of differences between the Israelites and Britons and Europe is not Pharaoh’s Egypt). But Moses wandered in the desert for 40 years. What would be left of the Jews today if Moses had descended from Sinai to warn them that there was no fast track to the land of milk and honey? They’d have been slaves for the rest of time, if they survived at all.

We don’t doubt but that is what is going to happen if Briton flinches from standing for its freedom in the coming referendum. It is clear that Mr. Cameron thinks that he can make everything right by negotiating with the EU. Even if he gets his demands, though, they strike us as weak beer. He laid them out in a “Dear Donald” letter to the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, that is shocking in the high ratio of blather to principle.

“Economic governance” is the first of his “proposals for reform.” He wants to make sure that the taxpayers in Britain, one of nine countries that has stood apart fro the euro, don’t get trapped into supporting the “Eurozone as a currency.” No mention in the letter of the real reason he should worry, which is that the euro is nothing but another irredeemable, electronic, paper ticket money that has no connection with anything of value. That’s what needs to be reformed.

Growth in the economy is Mr. Cameron’s second area of reform. He wants a “scaling back of unnecessary legislation.” Fat chance of that; unnecessary legislation is the very purpose of the European Union. The last British leader to grasp this was Prime Minister Thatcher, who warned in 1988: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.

Sovereignty is another of the areas Mr. Cameron wants to reform. He told Mr. Trusk that he wants to “end Britain’s obligation to work towards an ‘ever closer union’” as it was set out first in the Treaty of Rome. “It is very important to make clear that this commitment will no longer apply to the United Kingdom,” he huffed. “I want to do this in a formal, legally-binding and irreversible way.” If Britain gets that, the rest of the EU countries are going to turn green with envy.

The Sun, for its part, has long since stated its hope that Britons will vote to leave the EU. It never belonged in it in the first place. But it’s not in our principle line of work to lecture Britain on what to do. What we try to focus on is what is logical for America. President Obama has already said he wants Britain to stay in the EU. By our lights the logic is for America to reach out to Britain and offer the chance to formalize and strengthen our special relationship.

That is, to hold out the prospect of a stronger special relationship among liberty-loving countries. No one expects that kind of initiative to come from the Democrats, who are now several kiloparsecs to the left of Woodrow Wilson. But where are the Republicans? They are mounting a primary campaign without so much as a particle of discussion in respect of Britain’s potential break with Europe and the opportunity it holds for America, which itself has been called a land of milk and honey.


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