YOU ARE EITHER PRO-BRITAIN OR PRO-BRUSSELS – YOU CANNOT BE BOTH

THERE are two conflicting and contrasting mindsets in what Malraux called “the human condition” and they are very present in our country. By “mindset” I mean attitude, tendency, inclination or predilection.

One is to appeasement, to capitulation, the mindset of the genuflector to all that is foreign. The other, without being aggressive or xenophobic, is to the reverse – to a gut feeling that this old country of ours is worth standing up for.Years go by without positions ever needing to be taken. But over Brexit the clash has become unavoidable.You can now be for Britain or for Brussels – but not both.

The genuflector may be highly educated, politician, civil servant, judge, lawyer, academic, tycoon or showbiz luvvie. Or just someone deferential to all of the above.

But he will have no objection to this country being a devoted member of an international grouping of other nation states in which we are beyond a peradventure subordinate to the counsels and laws of the others, constantly outvoted and defeated in council. Such has been Britain in the EU for many years. Those with no objection to this voted en masse for “Stay” during the referendum of June 2016.What they utterly failed to recognise was that beneath the surface of seeming obedience by the toiling rank and file of the “ordinary” people was a quietly seething belief that subordination was not our people’s natural posture.

The 52 per cent versus 48 per cent was for the snooties like a kick in the whoopsadaisies. “How dare they?” was the luvvie reaction and it has been so for three-and-a-half years. Well, darlings, we dared and next Thursday I think we are going to get our way.

I have a personal acid test regarding those two opposing mindsets. Take two young men, both aged 20 in the year 1940.Where would they be?Well, one would be halfway up Appeaser Lord Halifax’s trouser leg knitting a white flag. And me? I’d be in the cockpit of a Spitfire and if you read this paper at all I suspect you’d be on the wing strapping me in.