Just one day to go till Brexit!
Nigel Farage called it exactly right in his good-riddance speech to the European Union: by quitting the EU, Britain is not merely abandoning a marriage of inconvenience; it is getting a long-needed divorce from an ugly brute of a wife-beating loser with bad breath, terrible wind, a tiny penis, no discernible talent and a gambling problem.
Or, as Farage rather more succinctly put it (you’re only allowed short speeches in the EU debating chamber):
It is a bad project. It isn’t just undemocratic, it is antidemocratic.
Precisely. In his 27 years campaigning for Britain to leave the EU, Farage has often been caricatured by his opponents as some kind of Blimpish, borderline fascistic Little Englander given to outrageously overstating his case in order to whip up the frenzy of the ignorant, xenophobic masses.
Even his sympathisers on the so-called ‘centre-right’ have often wished he could tone down his invective, a little.
But Farage’s only sins where the EU is concerned have been telling it like it is and refusing to pull his punches. Maybe if the rest of our political class had been a bit more honest about what an abominable institution the EU really is, Britain would have escaped its clutches much earlier.
How is the EU a ‘bad’ project?
Well, there’s a clue in the fact that once you’ve joined it makes it all but impossible for you to leave.
As Farage noted:
In 2005, I saw the constitution that had been drafted… and saw it rejected by the French in a referendum. I saw it rejected by the Dutch in a referendum. And I saw you, in these institutions, ignore them.
[You brought it back] as the Lisbon treaty, and boast you could ram it through without there being referendums. Well, the Irish did have a vote and did say no, and were forced to vote again. You’re very good at making people to vote again, but what we’ve proved is the British are too big to bully, thank goodness.
Hmm. Can anyone think of any well-run, beneficial, profitable institutions which refuse to let you leave once you’ve joined?
I can’t. Keeping people trapped is what the prison guards at Colditz castle did; what dodgy fund managers like Neil Woodford do when their investments have gone bad and you suddenly find yourself unable to liquidate your holding; what East Germany did when it built the Berlin Wall, actually shooting those of its own citizens who tried to escape over it.
If the perks of club membership are worth the fee then your current members will want to stay and more prospective members will want to join.
Britain voted to leave the EU not because its people were too stupid to understand what a good deal they were getting. On the contrary, the British people voted to leave because they weren’t stupid and knew exactly what a spectacular waste of money it was.
Worse, though, than the waste of money was the EU’s bossiness, its corruption, its political correctness, its bureaucracy, its incompetence, its sheer incompatibility with British values.
You saw some of this in the schoolma’am-ish disapproval of the dreary apparatchik chairing the debate — some harridan of a nonentity called Mairead McGuinness — as she censured Farage and his fellow Brexiteers for waving their Union flags. Sovereignty, good humour, and patriotism are not welcome in the European Union. But they’re an essential part of being British.
(They used, pace McGuinness, to be an essential part of being Irish too. But all that tradition seems to have gone, sadly — erased by glib globalists like Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, a kind of low-rent Justin Trudeau, who have totally sacrificed Irish identity for the greater good of turning the entire Western world into a George-Soros-sponsored, open borders melting pot of mediocrity. It’s why so many of the key figures in the EU are Irish: they understand that it gives them a power they could never possibly have in the political system of their underpopulated island)
Another very good reason why we’re leaving, it became clear from some of the speeches immediately after Farage’s, is that the EU is an extremely low-grade institution which attracts some really low-grade characters.
We saw the not unhilarious spectacle, for example, of Green MEP Molly Scott Cato bursting into tears as she declared:
“I hold in my heart the knowledge that one day I will be back in this chamber celebrating our return to the heart of Europe.”
No, Molly, love. Ain’t gonna happen. Like Farage said – and he knows what he’s talking about – “Once we’ve left, we’re never coming back and the rest, frankly, is detail. We’re going and we will be gone.”
Scott Cato, though, is a fascinating case study of the kind of delusional no-hopers who have always been drawn to the EU project.
Being delusional is an essential prerequisite of being pro-EU: you need to believe, really believe, in stuff that simply doesn’t exist. You need to see rewards where in fact there are only costs; you need to see harmony where there exists only dodgy horse trading and shady back room deals and outrageous stitch ups; you need to fantasise about economic advantages when actually all there is is a rules-laden, bureaucratic nightmare of an ailing, protectionist trading bloc fast going down the pan as it is eclipsed by the new growth economies of Asia, South America and Africa; and crushed, of course, by Donald Trump’s U.S. which refuses to be bound by its suicidal green energy strictures.
Not least among the many reasons to celebrate on Friday is that Scott Cato and her fellow Green MEPs – all eight of them: how did that happen? In the proper parliament, in Westminster, they can only manage one, and only then because she represents a constituency rammed with tofu-munching, Extinction-Rebellion supporting eco-fascist loons – will finally be forced to get jobs more suitable to their talents: assistant kindergarten teachers helping out with the cutting-out and face-painting, maybe.
I’ve never understood why the kind of people who dedicate so much of their lives to virtue-signalling how caring, sensitive, nurturing, inclusive, non-racist, anti-fascist, planet-worshipping and social-justice-aware they are can yet support a project so manifestly corrupt, oppressive and subtly totalitarian as the European Union.
Perhaps it’s because they’re incredibly thick. Perhaps it’s because they’re not nearly as well-intentioned as they think they are. Probably a bit of both.
But now we’re out of that horrible mess, frankly who cares: these losers are, happily, never going to bother us again.