There are increasing reasons to believe that the UK may have “made the right choice” by voting for Brexit, a European Parliament MP has said.
Dr Gunnar Beck, an MEP for the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has said that the UK public’s decision to vote for Brexit may have been the “right choice”, with there now being “increasing reasons and arguments” for leaving the European Union.
The German MEP made the claim while discussing the influence the EU’s European Court of Justice has on domestic politics, with Dr Beck criticising the legal body for allegedly strengthening the power of Brussels at the expense of individual member states.
In a statement to Breitbart Europe, Dr Beck said that Brexit has given the UK the ability to decide on many issues for itself, without the overbearing oversight of EU legal bodies.
“The European Court of Justice and its politically inclined activist judges are constantly reinterpreting treaties,” he explained. “With their court rulings, they are constantly making politics for an EU that is becoming more centralized and more powerful. At the expense of the Member States and their citizens, of course.”
By contrast, the UK outside the EU can in theory avoid a lot of the problems caused by the court, with the German parliamentarian now saying that there are more and more reasons to believe that the general British public made the right decision in voting to leave the union.
“Brexit may not have gone smoothly, also due to the open sabotage by the EU. But there are increasing reasons and arguments to say that the UK made the right choice,” he said, arguing that Britain now has “full independence”, and can make its own decisions.
“The British can now set their own immigration policy, make their own monetary policy and their own security policy,” Dr Beck explained. ” Even left-wing judges of a court devoted to the EU can hardly stop this independent policy.”
Dr Beck’s claim that the UK now has “full independence” may be somewhat optimistic, with pro-Britain unionists in Northern Ireland likely to feel particularly slighted as their region remains under EU influence.
According to rules set out by both the Northern Ireland Protocol and its successor Windsor Framework, the EU will still have some legal controls over the six counties in Ireland that remain under the control of the United Kingdom, with it currently appearing that the European Court of Justice will still have the final say on some matters affecting the region.
It is also becoing increasingly clear that Brexit is not complete, with the United Kingdom still a member of the European Court of Human Rights, a de facto if not de jure part of the broader network of European bodies. The ECHR continues to block the United Kingdom’s attempts to enforce border controls and get a grip on the Channel migrant crisis, feeding growing calls to depart from the body.
Nevertheless, the influence of the European Union in UK life more generally has been curtailed in the wake of Brexit, especially compared to the recent experiences of other EU states that are to be hauled before the ECHR for not acting in a sufficiently subservient way to Brussels.
Hungary for example is to be brought before the court over legislation it passed banning the dissemination of LGBT materials aimed at those under 18, a move that the European Commission has deemed discriminatory.
Meanwhile, Ireland is to be brought before the court over allegations it has not sufficiently enforced EU green rules to do with overfishing, despite this same union granting foreign trawlers 85 per cent of the quota for the total number of fish legally allowed to be caught in the country’s exclusive economic waters.
Nevertheless, even with Britain escaping EU influence on many of these issues, Dr Beck added that the EU appeared to be taking a hostile approach to dealing with the UK in the wake of the country leaving the union, an approach that in his view now needs to change.
“It is time that the EU finally accepted Brexit and treated the UK no longer as a renegade vassal, but as a full partner on an equal footing,” he said.