Freedom’s at the core of a nation’s soul. But EU chiefs will never get that
FINALLY, after 47 years ( much longer than my own lifetime), we are out of the EU. There were no live Big Ben bongs. No grand international photocalls at an Olympic Games-style closing ceremony.
Just two people signing a piece of paper in Brussels, and Boris Johnson, flanked by a pair of tall Union Jacks, later scribbling his name on the same document in Westminster.
As church bells across the country struck 11pm on Friday, we left. Now we are a free nation.
Not surprisingly, many of the reasons that led a majority to vote Leave have crystallised during the past week. Number one for anyone I met while canvassing over the past four years has always been the precious principle of sovereignty. How sad that those still banging the Remain (now Rejoin) drum have never understood what this means.
True, sovereignty is an abstract concept but it’s at the core of a nation’s soul. To some extent, it means different things to different people.
It can be big issues, such as striking independent trade deals with other countries, or simply not having all those little irritations, such as being unable to buy fruit and veg in imperial measures.
Such viscerally important concerns have always been disregarded by Remainers, who grimly tell us we are stupid, racist little Englanders who didn’t understand the benefits of EU membership – benefits they failed utterly to explain. How typical that last week, as Britain finally left, Guy Verhofstadt MEP, the former prime minister of Belgium, made it abundantly obvious that in his view – one widely shared in Brussels – the sovereignty of a nation state is a bad thing.
He, like all those other arch-integrationists and most of my former MEP colleagues, failed to see Brexit as a siren wake-up call that power needs devolving from unelected bureaucrats to the people. Risibly, to them, the problem is that the European Union is not centralised enough.
In defiance of democracy, Verhofstadt had the gall to suggest the destination of the ‘European project’ means the nation state is obsolete and ‘the world order of tomorrow… is a world order based on empire’. (And there was me thinking that, in today’s world, empires, imperialism and colonial power were considered morally wicked.)
At least Verhofstadt had the decency to admit: ‘It is sad to see a country leaving that twice liberated us, [that has] twice given its blood to liberate Europe.’ But what is democracy unless it comes from the people and is government for the people?
Most distressingly, there are signs elsewhere across Europe of the weakening of democracy.
In the cradle of democracy, Greece, the country’s proud citizens have become pawns in a game of geo- political chess, with their economy destroyed by a Brussels-imposed currency project.
Noble Poles did not escape the suffocating restrictions imposed on them by Moscow to be trampled on by another remote and unrepresentative politburo-style body. And the French, with their long and distinguished history, are fighting to stop being subsumed by a foreign technocracy.
ALL of these independent peoples want cooperation with their neighbouring states – but not to be run by a supranational government. All want peace across the European continent. But they also want to be able to control the direction of their own countries in their own way, reflecting their own needs.
This is sovereignty. This is what the British people called for in 2016 and have now gloriously achieved.
It is a lesson the remaining 27 EU countries would be wise to heed.
It is also a lesson for us in Britain. Nations are made up of individuals. They are not an amorphous blob. No country, state or empire survives ignoring the individuals upon whose shoulders it rests. Politicians forget this at their peril.