Jonathan Freedland - After this staggering defeat for May, our country is left lost and adrift
This was a defeat on a scale without precedent in the era of universal suffrage... For at least three decades, “Europe” served as the all-purpose bogeyman of British politics. Cheered on by a Europe loathing press, itself fuelled by an endless flow of straight banana-type lies, many of them concocted by a Telegraph correspondent in Brussels by the name of Boris Johnson, politicians of all stripes found it convenient to blame Brussels for any and all ills.
How easy it was for
British politicians to say they’d love to act on this or that issue, but their
hands were tied by those villains in the EU. Every summit was a “showdown”
pitting plucky Britain against the wicked continentals. Both of the main
political parties played this game. Recall Gordon Brown’s reluctance to be
photographed signing the Lisbon treaty. (In
the end he signed the treaty in a small room, alone – an early
metaphor for the Brexit to come.) Given how long, and how bitterly, the fight
against Europe had been fought, what’s remarkable is not how few Britons voted
remain in 2016 but how many.
Or you could go
further back still. The Suez fiasco of 1956 was meant to have cured Britain of
its imperial delusion, but what’s clear now is that many Britons never quite
made that adjustment. Underpinning Brexit, with its belief that Britain should
separate itself from its closest neighbours, is a refusal to accept that we are
one part of an interdependent European economy. For the Brexiteers, Britain
remains a global Gulliver tied down for too long by the Lilliputians of
Little Europe.
It is a fundamental misreading of our place in the world.
Perhaps, though, the
seeds of the vote were planted in the rubble of Britain’s wartime experience.
Never occupied, many Britons never understood the intense need for the EU as
continental Europeans feel it. In 1984, at a ceremony to honour the fallen of Verdun,
François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl held hands, in a powerful gesture of
Franco-German reconciliation. According to her biographer, Margaret Thatcher was unmoved,
instead mocking the sight of two grown men holding hands.
This has been
Britain’s European story, repeatedly seeing what was a project of peace,
designed to end centuries of bloodshed, as a scam designed to swindle the Brits
of their money. .. read more:
