Muddled May is dragging us into a ‘backwards Brexit’
AS SOMEONE who long wanted an independent Britain, I never cared all that much about the Single Market or the customs union. I see no signs that we will suddenly become a great exporting nation again if we launch out on our own – what have we got to sell after the massacre of industry in the 1980s? We’ll just import more stuff from different places.
But I think the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) is an outrage. I don’t care if it takes longer to extradite terror suspects from other countries. British police officers should not be forced to arrest anyone here on the say-so of some foreign magistrate. Continental law is totally different from ours, and much less fair and more repressive. Nobody should be sent to face a foreign court without a full extradition hearing.
This is particularly important now, as Spain’s government outrageously pursues (and locks up) Catalan nationalist leaders for daring to call for independence. In our tradition that is political persecution, and the police and courts should have nothing to do with it. Yet in Scotland now, a former Catalan minister, Clara Ponsati, is being sought by the Spanish authorities on charges of ‘violent rebellion and misappropriation of public funds’.
Without the EAW, could this even come to court? With the EAW, it has to.
Yet it looks to me as if Theresa May is hoping to keep us in the EAW. In her recent speech in Munich, she praised this nasty arrangement. She boasted that she had ‘successfully made the case for the UK to opt back in’ to the EAW and other measures, after we had been given a unique chance to escape from them. She claimed this was clearly in our national interest. I don’t agree.
And if we end up still subject to the EAW, or something like it, and outside the Single Market, then we will have got our departure from the EU the wrong way round. It was the loss of our ancient liberties that was always the most important disadvantage of belonging to Brussels. If we cannot get them back, why leave?