By Theodore Dalrymple
Theresa May’s
crushing defeat in the House of Commons this week over her plan for Britain to
leave the European Union was actually a great victory for her, provided that
you make a simple assumption: that she and her colleagues never wanted Britain
to leave the EU in the first place.
A majority of the
British legislature is, and always was, opposed to Brexit. Those legislators
who agitated most vociferously for it declined, when the time came, to carry
out the policy, leaving it to a woman already well known for her political
maladroitness.
Her appearance of
negotiating with the EU was merely elaborate shadow-play. She never intended to
produce the complete break that just over half the electorate — but not the
political class — wanted.
The present impasse
will probably lead to Britain never leaving the union. Except for a hard core
of about a fifth of Parliament, all the other legislators are adamantly opposed
to Britain leaving the EU without a deal; and the Union, knowing this, has no
reason to negotiate further.
But the legislators
will not agree to the deal as negotiated, as they have now demonstrated. They
want a second referendum, in the hope that the result of the first will be
reversed. (And if it is, there will never be a third.)
An extension to
Britain’s departure will be granted only if Britain has a concrete proposal to
offer — and the only such offer it can make is to hold the second referendum.
This is, in essence,
the European approach to democracy: If the voters get the answer wrong, either
ignore the verdict or make them vote again until they get the answer right.
Whether the
population will take it lying down remains to be seen, but after three years of
deliberately created political chaos, it is likely that Britons will simply
shrug and get on with their lives.
It should have been
obvious from the first that the EU would never want an agreement that was
anything other than disadvantageous to Britain — for if Britain did not suffer
markedly by departure, it would be a disaster for the Union, already not
exactly at the height of its own popularity.
Nigel Lawson,
long-time No. 2 to Margaret Thatcher, wrote a short but pointed letter to The
Spectator last week. He said that Lord Kerr, the British diplomat who drafted
Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty that Britain invoked to leave the Union, told
him that he had drafted it specifically so that it would be very difficult for
any country to leave.
He was certainly
successful in this aim: for the philosopher-kings of the EU do not want any
damned-fool population getting in the way of the implementation of their
wisdom.
This view accords
perfectly with the founders of the “European project” over 60 years ago; they
wanted to eliminate messy politics through neat, clean administration.
Britain has been
thoroughly humiliated by the whole episode, but history has no end, and
Yugoslavian-style wars of secession may yet, in the distant future, occur.
Theodore Dalrymple
is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, from which
this column was adapted.
https://nypost.com/2019/03/15/brexits-in-trouble-because-britains-political-class-never-wanted-it/
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