Theresa May and the Rise of the Brexiteers
Ted R. Bromund
Politics, Europe
The path out of from the European Union is marred with parliamentary battles and legal challenges.
When British prime minister Theresa May triggers Article 50 on Wednesday, the clock starts ticking on Britain’s exit from the European Union. Barring an extension of the exit negotiations—which would require a unanimous vote of all EU members—Britain will be out on March 30, 2019, deal or no deal.
In this world of change, it is nice to see that a few things remain the same. And one of those things is Al Gore. Speaking in London last week, the former vice president was kind enough to favor his audience with his own views on what caused Brexit. The villain, of course, was global warming.
Gore exemplifies the definition of a fanatic often, if wrongly, attributed to Winston Churchill: a man who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. But one of the delights of Brexit is watching how people react to it. One of the back-patting claims of the Remainers—or the Remoaners, as the Brexiteers have dubbed them—is that they are tolerant internationalists and lovers of Europe, as opposed to those nasty Little Englanders who voted to leave the EU.
Even on its merits, this is tosh. As Darren Grimes of BrexitCentral put it in his daily email, “Keeping the developing world poor with massive agricultural tariffs while giving people second-class treatment simply because they come from outside a certain geographical area hardly seems very 'tolerant' or 'internationalist' to me.” It’s a wonder to me how the Economist newspaper, founded in 1843 to advance the cause of free trade, manages to get out of bed every morning to acclaim the merits of the EU’s protectionist customs union.
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