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After Brexit

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Britain somehow carries on:

Ever since David Cameron announced a referendum on Britain’s EU membership in February 2016, the British people have been issued the direst imaginable warnings. Before the referendum, the then–chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, among others, predicted an immediate recession in the U.K. if the voters were unwise enough to disregard his instructions and vote to leave the EU. But we did disregard his instructions, as we did those of the prime minister and the heads of all the other major parties. We disregarded everybody, in fact, who warned us that our future would be darker, poorer, more ignorant, and more insular. In June 2016 we voted to leave the EU.

For a variety of reasons that arose after that decision (not least the ineptitude of Theresa May’s government and her minority rule after the 2017 election), the scare stories stepped up. The warned-of recession was claimed to have merely been deferred. And the financial threats were the least of it. The media and politicians on the Remain side upped the volume on all their dire warnings. Disappointment and rage about losing the referendum were transferred into a number of vitriolic behaviors, but most prominent amongst them was the claim of increased insularity.

Media, including a new, strange propaganda paper called the New European, offered the British public “farewell tours” to the Continent. Such publications strongly suggested that once Britain left the EU, we Brits would be unable to visit again. We would return to where we were before we entered the Common Market in 1975. And as centuries of literature and history attest, until 1975 nobody from Britain ever went to the Continent. In fact, prior to 1975 we had been a strange, hobbit-like people, famously incurious about abroad and choosing never to visit the place.

RTWT

5 thoughts on “After Brexit”

  2. ”The dire predictions look alarmist now.”

    Yes. So does NR’s hand-wringing and lamentations about then-citizen Trump, from precisely the same era.

  3. My UK Remainer friends seem caught up in a fantasy of “being part of a group of liberal democracies,” and that Brexit will guarantee “little England” will fade away. It’s as if they think England is equivalent to Luxembourg or Slovenia (or perhaps Massachussetts). They get angry when I point out “little England” is most of the UK, with an economy comparable to Germany and France, and that it’s the only large military power in Europe (other than Russia). Absent the UK, the EU’s military might consists of France’s “Force de Frappe.”

    1. Good point about the EU’s post-Brexit “military strength.” The militaries of the former Soviet colonies, now members of NATO and the EU, are in passably good shape, but are also small as are most of the countries in question. And they have their hands more than full with facing off against the nearby and resurgent Russian Bear.

      Of the Western EU, only France and, to a degree, Belgium any longer have militaries with an ability to fight effectively beyond their own territories – the wretched state of affairs in many of their former African colonies have given both nations sporadic opportunities to maintain combat skills.

      The Scandinavians, Dutch and Germans have all become flower children, militarily. The recent “military experience” of the former two consists entirely of ineffectual “peace keeping” for the U.N. The brief and inglorious showing of the Bundeswehr in Afghanistan – which I have characterized here and elsewhere as more an exercise in adventure tourism than a combat deployment – must have their martial ancestors in the mead halls of Valhalla now joining their Scandinavian brothers in grimly contemplating a future entirely devoid of fresh arrivals from their native lands.

      1. Add Romania to the Visegrad Group and you’ve got the beginnings of a bulwark against a resurgent Russia. I don’t know that it’s possible to save the remains of Ukraine. The main thing is, an expanded Visegrad Group could be built up separate from NATO and taken out of EU. And maybe hope the French come to their senses (unlikely, but not impossible).

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