By Kyle Smith
Saturday, September 07, 2019
London — The
European Union is the new Hotel California: You can check out any time you
like, but you can never leave.
Any hopes that the British government might actually go
ahead and achieve Brexit, after more voters supported it than have ever voted
for anything in the entire history of this formerly great country, were pretty
well dashed this week when Prime Minister Boris Johnson suffered a spectacular
series of defeats in the House of Commons, capped by the utterly humiliating
departure of his own brother Jo, a Remainer, who quit both his brother’s
government and his seat in the Commons rather than be an ally for the Brexit
Johnson has repeatedly promised would occur, “do or die,” on October 31. Jo
Johnson said he was putting “the national interest” ahead of party and family.
After many in his own party deserted him, and, more to
the point, deserted the country, by joining the pro-EU coalition in Parliament,
a bill set to become law on Monday will require Johnson to go on bended knee to
the EU to seek a second extension. After that outcome is secured, a general
election looms.
In proving that it is terrified of a no-deal Brexit,
Parliament has effectively stripped the United Kingdom of all its negotiating
leverage and made it probable that nothing like a clean break with the EU will
occur. What Britain will wind up with will evidently either be continued EU
membership or some sort of sham Brexit like the one that was repeatedly
rejected when Theresa May tried to sell it to the Commons.
How about this idea? “A simple referendum will solve
Brexit,” Tony Blair writes in an op-ed in the Evening Standard. Hang on, I thought there already was one. But no,
you see, that referendum delivered the
wrong result. Britain checked out of the EU in 2016, but it can never be
allowed to leave.
After the massive bipartisan effort known as Project
Fear, backed almost unanimously by the media, failed to scare the British
public into voting Remain in 2016, the British public should be asked to vote
again, says Blair. There is now an even more massive bipartisan effort, led by
an even more nearly unanimous media (the Daily
Mail has switched sides to the Remain cause), to scare the voters about the
prospects of a no-deal Brexit, which few really want, but the threat of which cannot
be discarded if any serious negotiation is to be held with the EU. If no-deal
is off the table, the EU holds all the cards. Blair, deeply desirous that his
own country be subjected to whatever the EU dictates, is urging the U.K. to
hold a “No, but seriously, you really don’t want Brexit, do you?” referendum.
Blair wants a second referendum because he fears that if
Johnson should hold a general election and win a clear majority — and the
Conservatives are well ahead of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, according to the latest
polling — he might actually shove Brexit through. And Brexit cannot be allowed
to happen because Brexit would not be normal.
“The 2017 election,” Blair writes, “should warn us against confusing a normal
election with the not-normal but enormous issue of Brexit.” You might counter
that, in the thousand-year history of Britain, it’s fairly not-normal for the
country to surrender its sovereignty over everything from criminal justice to
immigration policy to regulatory minutiae. You might also argue that it’s
fairly not-normal for a great country to simply ignore what its own voters
clearly ordered because the elites don’t like it.
Ah, but there you’d be wrong! Christopher Caldwell pores
over the anti-democratic European playbook in a superb essay in the Claremont Review of Books. In EU-land,
it’s perfectly normal for referenda to be ignored. In 1992, voters in Denmark
rejected the Maastricht Treaty, then they voted the proper way in 1993. Irish
voters rejected the EU Treaty of Nice in 2001, then in 2002 were ushered back
to the polls, when they voted in accordance with EU wishes. After Ireland
rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008, the voters returned to the polls to
deliver the EU-desired result in 2009. “These do-overs had become a Europe-wide
symbol of contempt for voters,” Caldwell writes. “And that is why Parliament
voted overwhelmingly in March 2017 to validate the referendum, activate the
E.U.’s Article 50, and fix the date for British withdrawal.” That date was
March 29, 2019, which turned out not to be all that fixed after all. The
currently mooted terms would delay Brexit at least another 90 days past October
31, pushing the saga into 2020.
If the EU would provide Johnson with some modicum of
face-saving as he pleads for a slightly more genuine Brexit than the one
Theresa May proposed, in which Britain would effectively have become a vassal
of the EU, the matter could be ended. With his own countrymen and members of
his own party sabotaging him at every turn, however, Johnson’s “do or die”
promise today looks every bit as hollow as May’s declaration that “Brexit means
Brexit.”
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