Will Brexit Be Betrayed?

Could Britain — again — lose its status as an independent country? We ask because of the latest from Gideon Rachman, star columnist of Nikkei’s London Financial Times, predicting that Brexit could be reversed. In support of this forecast he cites a column, by Lord Daniel Hannan in the Daily Telegraph, warning of “a plot to overturn Brexit.” As the headline puts it, a “Europhile blob is trying its best to return the UK to the European fold.”Our own view is that this would be a tragedy for Britain, not to mention America. What gets us about Mr. Rachman’s column, though, is the inversion of history. He eyes the matter through the lens of the English civil war of the 17th Century. He compares Brexit to the 11 years of the Interregnum, during which England was ruled by the Puritans. He likens the prospect of Britain rejoining the European Union to the restoration of the Carolean monarchy.We’re not so sure that computes. It seems to us that the left-wingers who run the European Union are more like the Puritans who ran England during the Interregnum. Like the mandarins of the EU driving Britons crazy by regulating their tea kettles and everything else, the Puritans were meddlers of the first water, banning theater and gambling, curbing holidays, and raising taxes to the level of what historian G.M. Trevelyan called “an intolerable outrage.”By 1660 “the English decided they had made a mistake and restored the monarchy,” as Mr. Rachman notes. We’re a republican paper down to the ground, yet at that time, Trevelyan noted, the office of the King was intertwined with the rule of law and custom, so “a restoration of the monarchy was needed if the nation were to enjoy its ancient rights again.” So it was that Charles II’s accession marked the restoration of the true England and its constitutional monarchy.That is the England that has endured, despite the best efforts of the anti-Brexiteers to put the nation under the thumb of the continental superstate. So we fail to see why Mr. Rachman backs a kind of Puritan Restoration now. He laments it might “take a generation before Britain” can rejoin the EU. He even appears to welcome subterfuge to bring it about. Noting Lord Hannan’s fears of a plot “to rejoin the EU by stealth,” Mr. Rachman sighs: “If only!” Lord Hannan, though, is not suggesting a formal conspiracy, but rather warning that “the Rejoiners’ plan is a longer-term one.” This speaks to the wiliness, and ideology, of the faction that opposed Brexit and that fears an independent Britain. In the meantime, the Remain faction is dragging its feet on taking the steps to assert Britain’s sovereignty by, say, scrubbing its law books of any lingering measures from the EU.This faction, too, wants to prevent Britain from “diverging from the EU’s technical standards,” Lord Hannan warns — in other words to keep the same web of trade regulations that prevailed under EU membership. Next, Lord Hannan, speculates, an anti-Brexit ministry “will argue that, since our right to set our own regulations is theoretical,” Britain “might as well formally adopt EU standards in exchange for easier exports.”Lord Hannan also anticipates there will be calls to “rejoin the customs union,” which “could be presented to voters as an almost mechanical step, a simplification of paperwork for businesses.” Such is the slippery slope that would lead to the reversal of British independence. Cheering on such an effort are arch-remainers like Lord Michael Heseltine, who crowed, upon Prime Minister Johnson’s resignation, “if Boris goes, Brexit goes.”“Brexit is not irreversible,” Lord Heseltine observed as the year opened. He condescends that the British “will never match the technologies and capabilities” of the “major powers” and dreams of restoring “Britain’s position in the corridors of European power.” Contrast that vision of vassalage to the EU’s Puritans with the ambition of Charles II, who, if not a great king, at least grasped the ideal of a sovereign Britain: “I wish to be the man of my people.”_________Anti-Brexiteers are the faction that wants to put Britain under the thumb of a continental super-state. This was misstated in the bulldog.

Will Brexit Be Betrayed?

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