On the Record | Boris Johnson emerging as Brexit’s biggest booster

Please see my latest wire as Brexit diarist for The New York Sun, ‘As Tories meet in Britain Boris Johnson is emerging as Brexit’s biggest booster’:

Brexit. Brexit. Brexit. And Boris Johnson. That’s what’s on as Britain’s Conservative Party meets this week at Manchester, England. Poor Theresa May, prime minister and leader of the rancorous Tories. She is persona non grata for many delegates, although most are too polite to say so. Once enjoying the respect, if not the love, of the party whose lead she assumed when David Cameron resigned office to let others oversee the United Kingdom leave the European Union, Mrs. May is now reviled as the leader who called an unnecessary election that was hers to win and then to lose.

Which left her humbled before Parliament to manage a minority government propped up with discordant Irish unionist support. The embattled Prime Minister is routinely dissed as the one-time “Remainer” who seems set to bottle Brexit. Into this leadership maelstrom swirls the Foreign and Commonwealth secretary, Mr. Johnson.

A Telegraph article in mid-September was Boris Johnson’s first salvo over No. 10’s transom, in which he lays out his “glorious Brexit blueprint.” He conjures up all manner of exploits, from regulatory and tax reform to technical and financial innovation, where Britain will triumph again. And he drives home the case for Brexit, as the patriotic response to an evolving Euro-federalism — “an attempt not just at economic but political integration of a kind that the British people had never bargained for” — that was the impetus for the “Independence Day” referendum results of June 2016. “That plan is simply not for Britain,” Mr. Johnson writes, “and we should have been more honest about it years ago.”

Read more . . .

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

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Readers of these DMI updates will be aware that yours truly has been away on ‘sabbatical’ since early August — momentarily setting aside my journalistic responsibilities to devise a scholarly agenda (focussed on natural law and ‘spontaneous order’ in the political and economic realm) for research planned in the months ahead. But as the summer heat beats retreat at autumn’s advance, it’s time to re-enter the fray. Brexit, as much else in the Anglosphere political world, is ‘hotting up’ once more.

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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.

Read more . . .

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