The Great British Revival

Over on the other side of the pond Great Britain seems to have recovered its sanity. We recall that those who opposed the 2016 referendum removing the country from the European Union uttered the most dire warnings of impending apocalypse. Now, apparently, all has been forgiven and Britain is exiting the EU, today.

The dire prophecies resembled nothing if not climate change hysteria, with Chicken Littles running around declaring that the sky was falling and that Britain could never survive on its own. It also resembles the leftist reaction to the election of President Trump, namely that it was the end of civilization as they knew it.

Being caught in the same self-contradiction as many American leftists have cultivated, British Brexit opponents pulled every lever of political and judicial power in order to undo the results of a national referendum-- in the name of democracy. Apparently, they believed that the only valid election result would have been the one they favored.

Will the real enemies of democracy please stand up.

Now, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Tory party crushed his Labour Party opponents in the most recent parliamentary election, it all seems to have healed. Brexit opponents have shut down and shut up.

It is a strange political phenomenon, one that we are tempted to attribute to the simple fact that Johnson was a far better politician than the hapless and hopeless Theresa May.

Writing in the Spectator USA, Rod Liddle explains how the British ship of state has righted itself. Considering the dire prophecies of imminent listing, it is remarkable indeed. (via Maggie’s Farm)

Apparently, the British version of American tribalism was more show than substance:

The remarkable thing is that since December 13 the great national divide over Brexit seems to have mended almost completely. One of the most frequently expressed opinions these past three years of commentators from both sides — although especially from the Remainer side — is that the UK was sickeningly split into two warring tribes and that this would take a generation to repair. I never quite bought into this argument. There seemed to me to be a furious rump of Remoaners unable to accept a democratic decision and — well, the rest of us. The vast majority of those who voted Remain have long since accustomed themselves to us leaving — a point never really reflected in the mainstream media, which of course prefers dissent to accord and still thought the whole thing was up for debate.

Factional divisions took approximately two weeks to heal. Liddle grants credit to Boris Johnson. Apparently, Britain did not need the EU as much as the EU thought. 

By the by, today’s news is reporting on the latest EU effort to field something resembling an army. The German military, until recently led by now-EU president Ursula von der Leyen, is so underequipped that its tank commanders must engage in battlefield exercises with their own automobiles… because the German military has no functional tanks.  Why would any self-respecting nation want to be part of such a boondoggle? How does it happen that someone who showed such manifest ineptitude in her last job received a promotion.

Perhaps we should continue to worry about the decadent and degenerating European Union. Perhaps Britain got out just in time.

Liddle reports from Great Britain:

As it happened, that cleft did not take a generation to heal — it took about two weeks. Since Boris Johnson’s remarkable victory, the fugue of complaint has been effectively silenced — except for on that lunatic wing. There is even a certain gung-ho optimism at large, and not simply from Brexiteers. Not a single one of those egregious Project Fear predictions has come true, not one. Inward investment stock in the UK was more in 2018 than in France and Germany combined, at almost £1.5 trillion ($1.95 million) — no. 1 in Europe. The UK’s economic growth is predicted to outperform the entire eurozone, with Germany — only recently sidestepping an official recession — heading towards stagnation. Unemployment is the lowest it has been for 45 years and the unemployment rate just a little more than half of that for the eurozone as a whole. Wages are at last rising. The pound is comparatively buoyant. Then there is this. Will Brexit render your home worthless, as the then-chancellor George Osborne kindly advised in 2016? Nope, quite the reverse. Since Brexit was assured by that general election victory in December, British house prices have risen at their fastest rate since 2002, according to the property website Rightmove.

Those who believed that Brexit would cause the British property market to fall apart are now obliged to admit that the ill-effects felt by said market were a function of the uncertainty that was ginned up by Remainers:

If anything had dampened the property market prior to the election, it was an uncertainty about whether we were going to leave or not, which was solely a consequence of that rump of the defeated side not accepting the decision of the people and using every possible recourse to prevent it. A paralyzed parliament and a concomitant lack of direction was far more damaging to our country than a timely withdrawal from a bureaucratic institution riven by internal division and economically floundering would have been.

We can only hope that America’s three year old nightmare of internecine warfare will meet a similar fate. Somehow, we are not very optimistic. And yet, you cannot read the next paragraph without seeing some stark parallels. 

All of this petulant, alarmist gibberish — far more egregious than an erroneous slogan written on the side of a bus — accompanied us for three long years, from June 23, 2016 to December 13, 2019. A shrill screech of idiotic fury from people who did not like being gainsaid and thought they knew better than the rest of us. Because of course — pace Pullman — we were all thick. Those false jeremiads were far more damaging to our country than simply leaving the EU. And now, for the most part, they have gone silent.