It’s not extremist to reject the EU
THERE is something strange happening in the voting booths right across Europe. People are just not voting the way they are expected or desired to. Pollsters and pundits confidently predict the masses will cast their votes one way and lo and behold the inconvenient swine do the opposite.
The classic example here is the way the voters, despite massive official blandishments from Downing Street downwards and against all the odds, voted to get out of the EU. The British have a reputation for disobedience, but we are not the only ones.
In Germany – remember them? The oh-so-obedient Germans?– it looks as if Angela Merkel may well be toppled before her chosen moment in two years. In Italy there is hardly a career politician left in the arena. In each country, as another there-for-life figure is toppled or upstarts chew great chunks out of what is supposed to be an unshakeable majority, we are told the newcomers are of the Hard Right.
But is that just an excuse to explain the unexplainable? A hallmark of the extreme right has always been anti-Semitism. But that now infests British Labour. Here in the UK the British National Party has actually vaporised, the English Defence League is minuscule. Those who voted in their millions to get out of the EU were not hard right at all. They were Mr and Mrs Normal.
So let us try another theory. People are not voting so much for something as against something. Rather than being enthused by Neo-fascism (the easy excuse) they are simply angry at the way they have or are being treated. In short, they are turning against establishments they have come to dislike and mistrust. That alone explains these surges of voteblocks in favour of groups of initials our fathers had never heard of. After the war, as democracy returned to Europe, it was assumed Henri or Heinrich would vote Christian Democrat (Conservative) or Social Democrat (Labour) or maybe Liberal Democrat (not-quite-sure). And so it was – for 60 years.
Who had ever heard of, or could envisage Alternative für Deutschland (Germany) or Five Star Movement (Italy) or Podemos (Yes We Can, Spain)?
But these voter-insurrections have one thing in common. They are not only protests against lofty governor-clubs with a smell under their noses as they gaze down at the rest of us. They are against the loftiest establishment of them all – the EU glitterati in Brussels.
That is why our so-called “partners” in the Belgian capital are not partners at all, as Theresa May’s humiliation in Austria proved. It is crucial for their continued occupation of the five-star lifestyle that Britain, if it insists on leaving, must be seen to fail and fail badly.
FOR Britain to depart and prosper, gaining in wealth, sovereignty and contentment, would light a fuse under the lot of them. Hence also the angry panic of the Remoaners over here. They clamour for a “people’s vote”. But we had one.
It was what we said with it that proved so frightening to our selfappointed governors-for-life.