On the Record | Post-Brexit, British Government Must Allow Entrepreneurs to ‘Boost Themselves’

Please see my February 1^st wire for The American Spectator, ‘Post-Brexit, British Government Must Allow Entrepreneurs to “Boost Themselves” ’:

This weekend, Britain regains its independence from membership in the European Union. After four long years of setbacks, frustrations, and calumny from Remainers in Parliament, think tanks, and the broadcast media, Britons will finally see their 2016 referendum vote to exit the EU vindicated. Cheers are certainly warranted, but don’t pop the champagne corks just yet. We are not at “the beginning of the end” of Brexit, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, but just at “the end of the beginning.”

The Conservative government must now set to business negotiating a free trade agreement with its Continental neighbors. Brussels has already thrown down the gauntlet. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says there must be “trade-offs” for a successful treaty to be signed, while the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier calls for “any free-trade agreement must provide for a level playing field on standards, state aid, and tax matters.” Otherwise, Britain sees its negotiating efforts come to naught.

Though naysayers disagree, remaining tethered to EU regulations — to be adjudicated by the European Court of Justice — is hardly what Britons have in mind. They know what they were signing up for from the start; in this respect only are they “Remainers,” as they cast their votes resoundingly for Brexit (again) and Boris Johnson last December.

So what is the prime minister to do? Johnson himself leaves no doubt on where he stands, stating repeatedly that he will sign a free trade deal with Brussels by the end of this year. EU bureaucrats bemoan a “quick and easy” agreement as unrealistic. The only alternative recourse for Britain is to conclude a “clean break” Brexit. Concessions, beyond those made in good faith and on equal terms, are unthinkable.

Johnson must stick to his guns. He should know by now that EU objectives are only partially economic, if that. There’s more than a hint of rumor that EU officials are as much for sabotaging British enterprise as for frictionless trade with their erstwhile UK partner. Sending a political message to the remaining EU-27, several with robust independence insurgents — France, Italy, and Spain are experiencing populist unrest — is a priority on the EU agenda.

The French are particularly pernicious on this front. France’s Europe minister, Amélie de Montchalin, asserts openly that the demands for alignment are attempts to forestall “a tax haven at the gates of Europe.” Pity. The Gallic mind had once lauded British commercial acumen. “England is said to traffic in everything,” Napoleon once declared. “I should advise her to sell liberty, for which she could get a high price, and without any fear of exhausting her stock.”

Free trade in the ideas of liberty, economic and political, is just what the EU didn’t order from the nation of shopkeepers. No reason, however, why Britain should deny herself the privilege. Brexit trade success, however, will require the government to think less like public servants and more like entrepreneurs. Is it possible?

Read more . . .

Remarks are welcome on DMI’s Facebook page.

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My thanks to editor Wlady Pleszczynski of The American Spectator.

On the Record | Is Boris Johnson the Leader for Brexit’s Darkest Hour?

Please see my latest wire for The American Spectator, ‘Is Boris Johnson the Leader for Brexit’s Darkest Hour?’:

A British politician who lived by his pen, enjoyed a chequered reputation attracting supporters and detractors, warned of an existential threat to his nation, while boasting American antecedents? Many will answer “Winston Churchill.” Full marks, though, for taking a contemporary turn and replying “Boris Johnson.”

Churchill’s dogged leadership during World War II and foresight in its aftermath, when, at Fulton, Missouri, he warned of the Soviet “iron curtain” descending over Eastern Europe, won him heroic status in America — not to mention the rare privilege of becoming an honorary U.S. citizen. His mother was Brooklyn heiress Jennie Jerome (Mr. Johnson, meanwhile, was born in New York City).

Movie audiences of Darkest Hour glimpsed Churchill’s early days as Prime Minister, as he struggled to rescue an army surrounded at Dunkirk and to convince fellow Conservatives and a hostile Commons to fight against German aggression instead of submitting to German terms. Britons would “fight on the beaches… never surrender,” and hold out for, “in one word, victory.”

Britain’s battle today is bureaucratic, but no less existential.

Read more . . .

Remarks are welcome on DMI’s Facebook page.

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My thanks to editor Wlady Pleszczynski of The American Spectator.

On the Record | Brexit is Britain’s Independence Day

Please see my latest post for The Quarterly Review, ‘Brexit is Britain’s Independence Day’:

Independence Day. That was Boris Johnson’s description of June 23^rd last year, as he and fellow Leave campaigners canvassed the United Kingdom for Brexit, making the case to exit the European Union and strike out into the world once more as a sovereign nation. What a year it has been, with much to come before the official break in March 2019. ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end,’ so Sir Winston Churchill described an early Allied victory in the darkest hours of World War II. ‘But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’

Many trace the origins of Brexit to Bruges in September 1988, when Margaret Thatcher declared that ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’

Yet with what hopes did the European project begin. The horrors of the war never far from its mind, and with the Soviet threat and the spectre of nuclear devastation before it, the Continent took a positive step toward removing barriers to trade and opening up new markets for competition, innovation, and productivity. Thus was born the European Economic Community (‘Common Market’) in 1958. Alas! conceived in the bureaucratic mind-set, the EEC soon trod the familiar statist path, culminating in 1993 when it became known as the European Community, signalling that politics was added to its economic remit. Political integration now became the central thrust, but a proposed constitution stumbled when plebiscites in several member countries failed, and sleight-of-hand was resorted to with the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, a constitution in all but name.

UK Eurosceptics took their lead from Mrs Thatcher, and while the Westminster establishment encouraged an inexorable move toward continental union, opponents mounted a rear-guard action. To quell unrest, prime minister David Cameron offered Tory MPs in the Coalition Government a referendum on Europe in exchange for their support. When a majority of Britons voted for separation, Mr Cameron resigned the premiership and was replaced by Theresa May. Although hitherto a tacit supporter of staying in the EU, she assured the country and her party that ‘Brexit means Brexit.’

And, as I conclude:

Much hard work and uncertainty remain, but the Brexit anniversary is still an occasion to celebrate. As a young, failed electoral candidate, Benjamin Disraeli remained resolute. ‘I am not at all disheartened,’ he vowed. ‘I do not in any way feel like a defeated man. Perhaps it is because I am used to it. I will say of myself like the famous Italian general, who, being asked in his old age why he was always victorious, replied, it was because he had always been beaten in his youth.’ From Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech on, Brexiteers have been fighting and have been frustrated for thirty years: they are now battle-tested, and they know that British independence is in sight.

Read more . . .

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

On the Record | Brexit’s Progress

Please see my latest post for The Quarterly Review, ‘Brexit’s Progress’:

‘MPs hand Theresa May the starting gun on Brexit’. That is how the Independent recorded last Wednesday’s ‘second reading’ in the UK House of Commons [1^st February] to permit the Conservative government to begin exiting the European Union. And what a process it has been.

Many will argue that Brexit has been in the works since September 1988, when then prime minister Margaret Thatcher argued that ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.’

This became known as her ‘Bruges speech’, and inspired countless Britons to struggle for UK sovereignty against Continental encroachments. An eponymous ‘Bruges Group’, with Lady Thatcher as its founding president, was formed the next year to continue the fight.

Unrest smoldered under successive Labour governments, culminating in widespread disgust at the passing of the Lisbon Treaty — the compromise alternative when a formal agreement failed to receive sufficient votes from member states to pass, and for critics a ‘constitution’ in all-but-name for a federal Europe.

Attempting to quell dissent among his Eurosceptic MPs, coalition prime minister David Cameron promised an ‘in/out referendum’ early in 2013 and, in February last year, called for a June 23^rd vote — which ‘Leave’ campaigner Boris Johnson called Britain’s own ‘Independence Day’.

Mr. Cameron, who resigned after leading the unsuccessful Remain camp, was succeeded by Theresa May, who vowed to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and initiate talks to pull Britain out of the EU.

But not so fast. Or ‘festina lente’, as the Romans used to say.

Read more . . .

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

On the Record | Trump’s Churchill Moment

Please see my latest post for the Quarterly Review, ‘Trump’s Churchill Moment’:

Donald Trump ‘explained’ Churchill to me. And, after the first Trump-Clinton presidential debate, Churchill reciprocated the favour.

The fame of Sir Winston Churchill, who served in several Cabinet offices and was twice prime minister, left me cold, for which I harboured feelings of shame and regret. His life and times certainly fascinated, but I was by no means a Churchill aficionado. Why did I not revere this Conservative hero as so many others did? Why did I not honour him as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century?

Definitely the man had a flair with words — his political speeches are highly quotable and his numerous biographies and histories written with a compelling simplicity. Indeed, Churchill was awarded the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature for his multi-volume histories of the Second World War and of the ‘English-Speaking Peoples’.

Yet his political record was chequered. In 1900, Churchill entered Parliament as a Conservative representative, crossing the floor four years later to join the pro-free-trade Liberals. Not to be outdone, he re-crossed — and re-joined the Conservatives in 1924, saying famously: ‘Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.’

Fluid party identity was the least of Churchill’s sins. His achievements in government were blemished by failure: inept tactical planning during World War I; returning post-war sterling to the gold standard at unrealistic convertibility; helping to precipitate the General Strike; opposing independence for India; and even losing the 1945 election after denouncing Clement Attlee’s Labour platform for requiring ‘Gestapo-like’ measures. Oxford historian and sometime Tory MP, the late Robert Rhodes James, in his Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939, chronicled the general public’s ambivalent assessment of Sir Winston’s early career. Why, I wondered still, the universal acclaim?

Read more . . .

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The wire above was written before the release of Trump’s ‘locker room’ comments Friday (eleven years after they were caught on a ‘hot mic’) and before his stupendous second debate Sunday night against Hillary Clinton. Public support remains firm.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted after the remarks were leaked ‘found that 74 percent of Republican voters said GOP leaders should stick by Mr. Trump’, The Washington Times recounts, while ‘about 41 percent told the pollsters that they would be more likely to support a candidate who continued to back Mr. Trump.’

Meanwhile, following Sunday’s debate, a ‘stunning’ new poll ‘showed Donald Trump has reclaimed the lead from Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton,’ The Times reports, ‘becoming the latest survey to suggest the GOP presidential nominee has put a bad month behind him.’ This latest CNN/ORC tally shows Trump enjoying a ‘2-percentage point lead in a national four-way race among likely voters’, with Republicans ‘likeliest to vote’ supporting Trump by 90 percent.

The ‘movement’ rolls on . . .

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