RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama, Cameron and the Day of the ‘Remains’The president’s entry into the ‘Brexit’ debate included adding to the economic scaremongering.ByToby Young

The debate about whether Britain should remain in the European Union or leave (“Brexit”) took a dramatic turn Friday when President Obama broke off from wishing Queen Elizabeth II a happy 90th birthday to lecture the British people about how to vote in the EU referendum on June 23.

In a joint news conference with Prime Minister David Cameron, who has staked his political future on Britain’s voting “Remain” rather than “Leave,” Mr. Obama was full of surprises.

For one thing, he admitted that it had been his call to remove the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office when he first became president. That was a jaw-dropper, because until now the White House has maintained that the decision was taken before Mr. Obama took up residence and was no reflection on the president’s attitude toward Britain or its “special relationship” with the United States. Only a month ago, Ted Cruz was accused of “lying” when he repeated this story. So it was good of the president to clear that up, although unlikely to endear him to his British audience.

The biggest shock, though, was his affirmation of something the pro-EU camp has been claiming and which is usually dismissed as typical of “Project Fear”—the disparaging name the Leave side has given to the Remain campaign. Earlier this week, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Mr. Cameron’s closest ally, claimed that Brexit would cost each British family £4,300 ($6,200), a figure written off by his opponents as scaremongering.

But Mr. Obama seemed to confirm Mr. Osborne’s pessimistic analysis when he said Britain, if it leaves the EU, would be at the “back of the queue” if it had to negotiate a separate trade deal with the U.S. That sent shock waves through the Brexit camp, which has long maintained that America’s exports to the U.K.—$56.35 billion in 2015—are so valuable that a new trade agreement would be quickly negotiated. CONTINUE AT SITE

What indignation we had from London liberals when the result of Britain’s referendum on the European Union became clear early on Friday. By a majority of 52% in a high turnout, voters had opted to leave the Brussels-based union of 28 European countries.

“Catastrophic!” spluttered Keith Vaz, chairman of the parliamentary select committee on home affairs. Tony Blair suggested the public—the ill-educated dimwits—did not understand what it had just done. A former national political party leader, Lord Ashdown, was so aghast at the result that he lamented: “God help our country.”

The name of the party Mr. Ashdown once led? The Liberal Democrats. Yet here he was complaining after 17.4 million voters gave a clear democratic order to quit the EU, a federalizing union that was unpopular chiefly because, ahem, it was so undemocratic.

Events moved fast. Prime Minister David Cameron, choking back tears, announced his resignation. Mr. Cameron paid the price for leading a rancorous campaign to keep his country in the EU.

Sterling plummeted and the London stock market had an attack of the vapors. The opposition Labour Party announced moves to unseat its own leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who had also campaigned for standing by Brussels. With British politics suffering a bout of the collywobbles, we needed a statesman to bring some stability to proceedings. Enter Donald Trump, who arrived in Scotland on a visit and made a speech in the middle of his Turnberry golf course. Turnberry being prey to notorious breezes, Mr. Trump wore one of his trademark baseball caps.
Not since 1975 had the British electorate been consulted on its membership in the European club. That was before the EU as we now know it existed. Back then it had been the European Economic Community. British politicians assured voters four decades ago that if the U.K. stayed in, there would be no threat to democratic accountability. They did so with the air of parents assuring children that they will like the taste of green beans. Honestly, honey, you really will, once you get used to them.

In 1993 the EEC morphed into the European Union, a far more political undertaking. The EU not only had its own flag and anthem but also a hunger for fiscal, diplomatic and legislative powers. Then came its own currency, the euro. This has caused economic ruin in much of Europe (though not, happily, in Britain, which never gave up the pound).

Now the British electorate has said “enough!” Voters have declared that they want Westminster’s elected House of Commons, not the EU’s commissioners in Brussels, to set British policy—particularly on immigration. Other European nations might look at Brexit with envy. There could well be a domino effect. CONTINUE AT SITE

The British have risen to the occasion, and voted to leave the European Union. They were offered the choice to remain the people they always had been, or to throw in their lot irrevocably with other people. Prime Minister David Cameron and many Conservatives, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and almost the whole parliamentary opposition, the trades unions, the BBC (and how!), the banks and corporations, President Obama and a myriad of other opinion-makers, all applied pressure to stay in the EU, and took every possible measure, underhand or not, to fix the vote in their favor. To leave the EU, they hammered, would mean disaster on the scale of the biblical plagues God inflicted on Egypt.

And it hasn’t worked, it couldn’t work. The EU was a good idea in 1945, but it has long outlived its initial purpose of reconciling Germany and France. What stands out is that heads of state and politicians in Europe have been surreptitiously building a much wider political entity. Voters are not asked for their consent. Absence of legitimacy is the EU’s main feature. Since there is no procedure for the democratic right to throw out the [expletive deleted], the EU has developed into something never seen before in the world, an oligarchy with soft totalitarian symptoms. Conflicting national interests and global economic factors lead inexorably to the hardening of these totalitarian symptoms.

Germans are a most remarkable people and they have remade themselves since the Second World War, but successive chancellors have evidently been afraid that they might go ape again – in a phrase of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s — and they have made themselves responsible for steering the EU through its travails. It is not deficiency of character but just an accident of history that Germany is in the driving seat, turning weaker EU states into protectorates, profiting from the euro while others suffer from it, imposing movements of population that will have demographic consequences, confining free speech, and much besides that is unpopular, not to say alarming. There is only one way out of this predicament, and that is to amalgamate all the nation-states of the EU into a genuine federation, with political and fiscal unity that is even more unpopular and alarming.

The British perceive that this empire must end in full-blown totalitarianism or catastrophic failure, and their vote shows that they want no part of either. Another accident of history underlies the British preference for independence and democracy, never mind if these come at a cost. However, about half a dozen EU countries already look likely to follow the British lead, and if they did so, then the whole mistaken experiment of the EU could fall apart. As long ago as 1805 William Pitt the Younger faced a similar crisis with famous words, “England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.”

Yes, yes, and yes again.

London, England — So, what now?

The immediate answer is: Nothing. As the prime minister made clear in his resignation speech this morning, it will be months before the government triggers Article 50 and initiates withdrawal proceedings, and, even after it has done that, progress is likely to be sedulous and slow. In time, there will be fireworks. But for now there are markets to calm and voters to unite, and there is at least one leadership election to stage. Triumphant as the Leave campaign may be feeling this morning, last night was less akin to Agincourt and more akin to the second meeting of the Great Council. Yes, the United Kingdom has declared its independence; but the fighting has only just begun.

I have seen it suggested — or, perhaps, hoped — that the powers-that-be will simply “ignore” the vote to leave. This is not going to happen. In a strictly legal sense, Parliament is sovereign and can do as it wishes. In consequence, this referendum was technically not binding. Culturally, though, any indication that the government was trying to defy the voters would trigger a catastrophic constitutional crisis. Speaking in front of Downing Street this morning, David Cameron set the tone: “The British people,” he confirmed, “have voted to leave the EU and their will must be respected.” “The will of the British people,” Cameron added, “is an instruction that must be delivered.” Sadly for him, the task of making that delivery will fall to his successor.

As during the General Election of 2015, Pauline Kaelism was on full display throughout the proceedings. Announcing the result last night, most of the TV anchors and pundits looked genuinely shocked. How, they seemed to ask, could the polls have been so wrong once again? After all, nobody in a position of national influence seemed to know anybody who was voting Leave.

As in 2015, the simple answer was that the public lies to pollsters. And who can blame it? I have spent quite a lot of time in the U.K. over the last month, and I have been startled by the condescension, the disdain, and the downright bullying that I have seen from advocates within the Remain camp. That this morning I am seeing precisely the same attitudes on display has left me wondering whether the British chattering classes are capable of learning new tricks. More than 17 million voters opted for Leave yesterday, and yet to take their opponents at face value would be to conclude that this vast and diverse coalition of citizens was little more than a revanchist, hate-filled, antediluvian rump. It is certainly the case that the center-right opted overwhelmingly for exit. But it is notable that the election was won not on the playing fields of Eton or in the leafy gardens of England’s Home Counties, but in the industrial Northeast and the blue-collar Midlands. Indeed, as the Mirror and others have observed, Leave’s margin was provided not by a surfeit of conservatives, but by working-class social democrats who traditionally vote Labour but whose concerns are increasingly out of sync with the rest of their party. (This, incidentally, is another reason that Parliament could not get away with ignoring the result of the referendum: Because UKIP is nipping at Labour’s heels throughout the country — and because there is strong anti-EU sentiment among at least a third of Labour voters — the Labour party’s leadership knows that to sign onto any coup would be to sign its own electoral death warrant.)

A mob of starving people advanced on the presidential palace chanting, “We want food”. They were met by soldiers and police dispatched by the tyrant from his lavish palace decorated opulently with a golden sun, giant rock crystal mirrors, sparkling chandeliers and towering oil portraits.

The scene wasn’t 19th century France, but 21st century Venezuela.

And if you are wondering why you haven’t seen it on the news, it’s because Venezuela is a Socialist disaster area that was once being used as a model by the left. Now it’s a place where the vast majority of people can’t afford basic food staples and a third are down to two or fewer meals a day.

Obama laughed and joked with deceased monster Hugo Chavez, who handed him a copy of the anti-American tract, “Open Veins of Latin America” that had even been disavowed by its own author. Obama called the book a “nice gesture”, but Eduardo Galeano, its author, had told an audience that the left “commits grave errors” when in power.

Venezuela, once a wealthy oil state, where the doctors offering “universal health care” have no medicine and starving people loot government stores looking for food, is yet another example. 50 people are dead in the latest food riots. Their graves are yet another “grave error” of the left.

Obama has not appeared too concerned at the meltdown in Venezuela. Unlike Syria, there are no threats of intervention to remove Maduro, Chavez’s successor, and the rest of the leftist regime illegally clinging to power while slaughtering Venezuelans, smuggling drugs and aiding terrorists.

When Hugo Chavez was killed by the wonders of Cuban medicine, a remedy that American leftists recommend to others while they obtain the best private health care for their own ailments, Obama offered a vague statement of support calling Chavez’s passing, “challenging”.

It was certainly that.

The United Kingdom has always had Europe’s most robust democracy, and with Thursday’s vote to leave the European Union it has given its Continental peers a powerful example of the meaning of popular rule. Now we’ll see if the British have the wisdom to make the best use of their historic choice.

We argued earlier this week that Britain should remain in the Union. But we also acknowledged that it was a close call, and we did so more out of concern for the EU’s future than for Britain’s.

The Brexit vote deprives the EU of its second-biggest—and most dynamic—economy, with the strongest growth rate among Europe’s major economies and a record-setting employment rate of 74%. Government spending as a percentage of GDP has also come down to pre-financial crisis levels, again disproving the Keynesian doomsaying about the perils of fiscal “austerity.”

Brexit may encourage other states—the Netherlands is often mentioned—to debate their membership in the EU, especially if Britain does not suffer the economic and diplomatic catastrophes forecast by the Remain camp, starting with Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne. Norway and Switzerland have shown it’s possible to have prosperity and security in Europe with less nannying by Brussels.

If the EU wants to prevent other countries from catching the Brexit bug, our advice is to avoid the temptation to punish the U.K. with an arduous renegotiation of terms for its re-entry into the common market. The perception of EU high-handedness is what alienates public opinion across the Continent. Brexit ought to be the wake-up call the EU needs to return to serving as a common market that encourages growth and competition, and not—as it has become since the late 1980s—an innovation-killing superstate obsessed with regulatory harmonization, tax hikes, green-energy dogma and anticompetitive antitrust enforcement.

London will have its own challenges. To adapt a line from Margaret Thatcher’s famous 1988 Bruges speech on Europe, Britain has not voted to free itself of a European superstate to see it return in the form of the nanny state exercising dominance from Westminster. CONTINUE AT SITE

London, England — I have been in England for only one-and-a-half days, and it is already clear to me that the Brexit debate has by no means represented business as usual. Customarily, British political affairs are milquetoast affairs, with little of the vitriol or panache that marks American politics. This one, though, is different. It is bitter. It is bad-tempered. And, for want of a better word, it is rude. All told, the British seem thoroughly fed up with the proceedings in general, and even more fed up with those who disagree with them as to the ideal outcome. Whatever happens tomorrow, reconciliation will be a protracted affair.

Almost all of my more cosmopolitan friends are for Britain’s staying in, and, when I express the opposite view, have a tendency to condescend. “Really?” they ask, eyebrows raised. “Really?” And then, their irritation rising, they look at me with a sort of detached fascination, as if I had just suggested putting erotically shaped ice cubes into the Pinot Noir. One woman, who has been a friend since we were both eleven, told me over coffee that I should reconsider my position because “all the smart people” are pro-Remain. Another, an extremely sharp pediatrician whom I would trust with my life, has been berating her pro-Brexit siblings for “canceling out” the “sensible votes” that she and her husband hope to cast. The charges of smugness, it seems, have not been overblown.

Nor, I notice, have the reports of reticence from the other side. Perhaps because they are expecting precisely the reaction I got, the Leavers of my acquaintance tend to start their explanations with an apology. “I’m sorry,” they say, “but . . . ”; “I just think that . . . ”; “I understand that this is tricky, however . . . ” Such is the cultural power of the BBC and the political class — both of which have done their level best to make Brexit seem outré — that some people I speak to pretend that they are on the fence when they are clearly not, and relax only when I volunteer that I’m pro-leaving and have been for as long as I remember. “Oh,” they say with a furtive look around, “well in that case.”

On the train from Huntingdon to London, I see these divisions in full bloom. Almost everyone is reading a newspaper — it feels a little as if I’ve stepped backwards in time, to the 1950s — and their choices betray their politics. Running my eyes across the carriage, I feel as if I am attending a bizarre, hyper-ecumenical protest march, at which anybody with a strong, 40-point-font opinion is welcome. From seat level, the front pages resemble low-slung protest signs: “Leave!” “Remain!” “Leave!” “Remain!” “Leave!” It is possible, I suppose, that the people sitting behind these slogans are less sure of their views than it appears, but you certainly wouldn’t know it from their conversations with each other, full as they are of hard-headed assurances and mild exasperation at any expression of dissent. The phrase, “no, but you see” is used a lot, along with the insistence — repeated as if by rote and used by both sides — that “they are just trying to scare you.” On the surface it is all very polite, as Britons typically are. But there is an edge this time — an edge I haven’t seen for a long time.

Last June 8—four days before the terror attack in Orlando—two Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank opened fire in a Tel Aviv café, killing four and wounding six.

Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai, a member of the left-wing Labor Party, was quick to respond—by blaming Israel.

Saying that Israel was “maybe the only country in which another people is under occupation and in which these people have no rights,” Huldai continued:

We can’t keep these people in a reality in which they are occupied and expect them to reach the conclusion that everything is all right and that they can continue living this way…. I know the reality and understand that leaders with courage need to aspire to reach [an agreement] and not just talk about it.

Considering that Huldai is a public official, mayor of a major city, it is putting it mildly to say that his words were full of ignorance and distortions. Israel is not an occupier in the West Bank. There are, however, numerous occupied peoples in the world. Palestinians in the West Bank have the prerogative to elect their own government and many other rights. The large majority of Palestinians—and certainly the terrorists among them—reject any Israeli claim to any land. So many attempts—by Israeli, American, and other leaders—to reach an agreement with the Palestinians have been turned down cold that any realistic Israeli leader understands that, at least for the time being, it’s an impossible goal.

But beyond those points, there’s another: shooting up people in a café is a crime, known as murder. No claim of political grievance is exoneration for murder. That point is widely understood in civilized societies—though not by the mayor of Tel Aviv.

Huldai’s words, which sparked fury, would be less significant if they were an aberration. Unfortunately, statements of that ilk are typical of the Israeli left—including, amazing as it may seem, in the case of left-wing politicians seeking to gain public favor.

Ehud Barak, a lifelong Laborite, is a former prime minister and defense minister. Before leaving politics in 2013, he was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense minister for four years. He was seen as Netanyahu’s close ally and fellow hawk on the Iranian issue, and worked hard—even dividing his party at one point—to keep Netanyahu’s coalition in power.

In a speech on June 16, Barak—who, as Netanyahu’s defense minister, had warned steadily that time was running out to stop Iran’s nuclear program—said that Israel faced “no existential threats.” He went on to accuse Netanyahu of “Hitlerizing” all threats to Israel, saying:

Hitlerization by the prime minister cheapens the Holocaust…. Our situation is grave even without [comparisons to] Hitler….

Not to say ‘I told them so’, but in June, 1975, I wrote to lament Britain’s dismissal of old friends, traditions and, indeed, national self-esteem itself. All these years later, as UK voters make their verdict known, I yearn to hear that decades of folly and false promise are finally at an end.
On June 4, 1975, I sat down at my clattering typewriter in the offices of the Daily Telegraph in Fleet Street and embarked on a melancholy task. As one of the leader-writers opposed to Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (as it was then called), I had been asked by editor Bill Deedes to write a fairly light account of the referendum campaign that would appear on morning of the vote. Bill said he wanted my squib to offset the solemnity of the editorial, but my suspicion was that he was a secret No voter who wanted it to offset the Telegraph’s admonition to vote Yes.

In principle Bill could have ordered a “No” editorial, but pressure from the establishment for an endorsement of Britain’s EU membership was so overwhelming in 1975 that it would have seemed eccentric, unpatriotic, even treasonous. So I read through “the files” of the previous month and started bashing it out:

From the Establishment and the respectable anti-Establishment, from the Economist and the New Statesman, from the Lord Feather [of the TUC] and Mr Campbell Adamson [of the CBI], from Mr Wilson and Mr Heath, from the Royal Commission Volunteers to “Actors and Actresses for Europe”, from the farthest reaches of the civilized West End, the same advice, the same dire predictions of life outside the Market (“God, it was hell out there in 1972”), the same comforting assurances of a bright future inside, less ecstatic admittedly than similar forecasts before we had entered (“Come in, come in, the water’s lukewarm”) have been proclaimed with an almost religious fervour.

Religion itself had been conscripted for the European cause. The Bishop of London, preaching in St Paul’s, had said that those concerned about sovereignty were guilty of the heresy “My Country Right or Wrong” which was “essentially selfish and inward-looking”. As for Big Business, that spoke with one voice: the CBI’s Ralph Bateman declared that it would be “madness” to leave the EEC, and Mr Barrie Heath told the workers at Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds that membership of the EEC was not a political issue at all.

“Is he Sir Barrie?” asked Mr Enoch Powell, the leading right-wing campaigner for a No vote. “No? Well, he soon will be.” He was too—given a knighthood three years later “for services to exporting”.

Australia played a discreet part too:

There was a commendable reluctance on the part of overseas dignitaries to interfere in Britain’s internal political arguments. Mr Gough Whitlam, for instance, revealed how he had virtuously resisted the blandishments of certain anti-Marketeers to call for Britain’s withdrawal. Why had he refused? Because he did not wish Britain to lapse into the sad decline of Spain, he declared in neutral Australian tones.

But that, of course, might have been delivered in the spirit of “Let them have what they want—good and hard” in revenge for Heath’s betrayal of the Antipodes and the Commonwealth in the European negotiations. At least I sort of hope so.

In Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian novel, Submission (2015), which takes place in an imaginary France ‎in 2022, when the Muslim Brotherhood has won elections and rules the country in alliance with the Socialists, the non-Jewish protagonist, a professor at the Sorbonne, tells his Jewish student, who is escaping to Israel with her family, that there ‎can be “no Israel for me.” This is one of the most poignant observations in the book.‎

Another is the protagonist’s reflection that the increasing violence, even the gunshots in the streets of Paris as a ‎civil war threatens to explode during the run-up to the elections, has become the ‎new normal: something that everyone is resigned to as an inevitable fact, barely reported in the ‎media and treated as unremarkable by his fellow lecturers. Even after the Muslim Brotherhood wins the ‎elections, and the Sorbonne is turned into an Islamic university, with all that this entails, his colleagues treat ‎this development as nothing out of the ordinary. Houllebecq’s indictment against the silence and ‎complicity of his fellow intellectuals in the face of the Islamist encroachments on French society is ‎scathing. As a matter of course, in the new France, where freedom of speech comes at a prohibitive ‎price, Houllebecq now has to live under 24-hour police protection. Submission, by the way, was published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks.‎

The resignation and the precarious pretense that everything is normal in the face of rapidly deteriorating ‎circumstances, is a predictable human reaction, testimony to the sometimes practical but lamentable human capacity for adaptation to most circumstances, whatever they may be. ‎Historically, Jews have excelled in this discipline, simply because they had no choice. Just like Houllebecq’s ‎protagonist, they had nowhere else to go. However, whereas there “can be no Israel” for the lost ‎professor, today, unlike the last time Jews were threatened on a large scale in Europe, there is an Israel ‎for the Jews. Uniquely among all the peoples of Europe, the Jews have a welcoming place to go. ‎Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Western European Jews choose to stay put in Europe.‎