Posts Tagged ‘Guy Verhofstadt’

Brexit Is Served

Saturday, February 1st, 2020

After four years of unrelenting sabotage by the chattering classes, the United Kingdom has finally left the European Union.

Here is the BBC 2 minute video summary of why it took four years to get here:

Fair enough, though it leaves out the obstinacy and duplicity of Remainers and the threat Nigel Farage’s UKIP and Brexit represented to the Tories.

Speaking of Farage, he was part of the huge crowd in London celebrating Brexit:

There was no stratagem too silly for Remainers to deploy if it had any chance of blocking or delaying Brexit. No wonder the UK electorate got tired of the endless squabbling and foot-dragging and handed Boris Johnson the biggest Tory parliamentary mandate since Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 landslide.

Michael Brendan Dougherty explains why Brexit was necessary and long-overdue:

If the European Union were merely the European Market, Brexit would be foolish: The United Kingdom has enjoyed a kind of privileged access to the Common Market because it retains its own powerful currency rather than the Euro, which in reality is managed on behalf of Germany and against the interests of Southern Europe. But the European Union is not just a market but a political project, really a kind of institutionalized utopian project.

European Council president Donald Tusk said, “I fear Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilization in its entirety.” It’s easy to point and laugh at such an extravagant statement, but Tusk was verbalizing the incredible challenge Brexit presents to a certain kind of European mind, a mind conditioned to the idea that democracy inheres not in popular sovereignty — democratic peoples governing themselves — but in the elite administration of human rights, insulated from democratic passions and prejudices.

It is this worldview that has shaped the construction of the European Union. The EU is governed by an unelected Commission and an unelected Court, both joined to an elected Parliament with no real legislative power. Can you impeach a European commissioner? Can you vote for one? Or vote to remove one? No, non, nein!

The European project that the Commission promotes and protects is guided by a spirit of ever-closer union, not the laws and treaties it makes. The European Union does not respect votes that go against that spirit, such as Ireland’s vote against the Lisbon treaty; instead, it forces reruns. It does not respect its own commitments, either: Angela Merkel’s welcome to 1 million refugees and migrants in 2015 totally blew apart the supposedly solemn Dublin Accords. It plays favorites: The pro-EU Emmanuel Macron is allowed to temporarily blow through the budgeting and debt requirements imposed on member states, but those same requirements are enforced with fervor against populists such as Italy’s Matteo Salvini. And it has no qualms about interfering in the politics of its member states: During the Euro crisis, recalcitrant national governments in Italy and Greece were replaced by a combination of pressure from above in the form of the Commission and the European Central Bank, and from sideways in the form of captured native interests.

In short, untethered from real democratic input, the EU at once suffocates European life with regulation and unmoors it with lawless caprice.

The response of the European Union to Brexit isn’t rebuke and repentance, a newfound willingness to accede to the wishes of the democratic peoples within it. No, it’s doubling down. MEP Guy Verhofstadt has said that Brexit has underscored the need to “make it into a real Union, a Union without opt-in, without opt-outs, without rebates, without exceptions. Only then we can defend our interests and defend our values.”

Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Nomenklatur!

That’s what the UK is leaving behind, and good riddance.

A few tweets: