On the Record | Is Britain Really Going to Leave?

Please see my latest wire as Brexit diarist for The New York Sun, ‘Is Britain Really Going to Leave?’:

“Is Britain really going to leave?” This is the question put to Boris Johnson from people around the world, the former foreign minister informed the House of Commons last night, during debate on the Government’s proposal to withdraw from the European Union.

“Do we really have the courage and the self-belief to deliver what people voted for?” Mr. Johnson pressed. “And to seize the opportunities? Independent, democratic self-government? Real free trade deals?” Will a liberated Britain have the foresight to institute a tax and regulatory regime that incentivizes entrepreneurs and investment, domestic and foreign, based on “laws made in this country and not in Brussels?

“Are we really going to embrace that future?” BoJo asked.

Mr. Johnson is not alone in putting this rhetorical question before his fellow MPs. G.K. Chesterton raised it more than a century ago. Britons, Chesterton wrote, enjoy “a lonely taste in liberty” that “perplex their critics and perplex themselves.” As the United Kingdom grapples with the fate of Brexit, this latest iteration of perplexity is played out before us.

Magna Carta, the charter in which medieval barons exerted their rights against King John, is considered the benchmark of liberty in Britain. “Magna Carta is the greatest constitutional document of all times,” senior judge Lord Denning opined, “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”

Margaret Thatcher was all in. To a Parisian interviewer who asked during the bicentenary of the Fall of the Bastille, “Are human rights a French invention?,” she replied trenchantly, “No, of course they are not.” The Iron Lady’s riposte to Gallic chauvinism? “We had Magna Carta 1215.”

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My thanks to editor Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.

On the Record | Bastille Day equals Brexit Day

Please see my latest post for The Quarterly Review, ‘Bastille Day equals Brexit Day’:

Freedom lovers around the world celebrate Bastille Day (14^th July) in recognition of the rights of man and ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’. As many on the Continent believe, the French Revolution was the pivotal event in the rise of the individual against the entrenched power of the Crown, the aristocratic court, and the privileges of the Roman ‘Gallic’ Church. But the irony is lost by those who fight Britain’s exit from the European Union, particularly the leadership in the devolved regions of Scotland and Wales, whose preference, it seems, is to live under foreign-dominating EU law than the domestic laws of the United Kingdom.

For Brexit minister David Davis, the process is merely procedural. ‘We’re bringing into law 40 years of law. It is putting into British law what was European law. So then, after that, we can change it if we want to,’ Davis told a BBC interviewer. ‘Any material change will be in primary legislation. It’s only technical matters that will go through the statutory instrument and even then the House of Commons will have its say.’ But critics are less accommodating, calling it a ‘naked power grab.’ Most annoyed are leaders of two devolved regions, Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon and Carwyn Jones in Wales. They argue that the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill returns authority from Brussels to Westminster and sidesteps their assemblies, contrary to assurances of co-operation from the Government — which is under no legal obligation to consult them. (Far better for prime minister Tony Blair, during the Westminster devolution period, to have returned more power to the people and rethought the wisdom of setting up additional power centres among the ‘united kingdoms’.)

One cannot help but marvel that this leadership was against Brexit, and now wishes to remain under the EU jurisdiction of the Single Market and Customs Union. But the irony of choosing to live under the European legal yoke would not have been lost on Margaret Thatcher.

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My thanks to editor Dr Leslie Jones of The Quarterly Review.