Please see my latest wire as Brexit diarist for The New York Sun, ‘Britain Verges on Defeat over Brexit’:
Mark your calendars for April 12. For the clock is reset on that date for Britain regaining independence. Reaching that date, with Brexit unhampered and unsullied, is the new goal. Nothing stands between Britons and freedom but the political class on either side of the English Channel. Yet with another series of votes tonight, parliamentarians seem determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.Too bad British MPs forgot their Aristotle. He counseled that some political acts “are so called as being evil in themselves.” Politicians cannot “save” Brexit by sacrificing British liberties a bit here and a bit there. “It is not excess or deficiency of them that is evil,” Aristotle cautioned. “It is impossible to act rightly; one is always wrong.”
Brexiteers who buckled last week to support Prime Minister Theresa May’s flawed Withdrawal Agreement, citing the “lesser evil” argument, don’t get a pass from Aristotle, either. To wit: “Nor does acting rightly or wrongly in such cases depend upon circumstances.”
Thus surveying the available candidates to usher Brexit to victory and finding the field wanting in my last wire, I quoted the Psalmist, “Put not your trust in princes.” I add now the verse’s concluding lines. “. . . Nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”
My point is simple. One should never endorse, carte blanche, any political program just because people voted for it. Scepticism and due diligence are always in order. Brexit is the right thing to do not because the majority of Britons voting in the 2016 referendum — 17.4 million — decided to exit the European Union. Brexit is the right thing to do because its principles are laid upon the foundations of justice.
Remarks are welcome on DMI’s Facebook page.
My thanks to editor Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.
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