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Brexit is a bewildering act of self-harm

So why did Theresa May choose to make an already difficult path more difficult still?

by Paddy Ashdown / March 15, 2017 / Leave a comment
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Prime Minister Theresa May outside No 10 ©Lauren Hurley/PA Wire/PA Images

Oscar Wilde said “In a democracy, the minority is always right.” This thought has given me much comfort during nearly half a century fighting for liberalism.

But the post-Brexit debate has been different. A minority we still remain—but only slimly so and that has been wonderfully comforting.

I am fairly certain (Liberals don’t do certainties) that history will marvel at Brexit as the most bewildering act of national self-harm knowingly and willingly committed by an advanced nation in full possession of its faculties. And yet that is the decision we took and we must now enact—at least for the foreseeable future—unless and until the worm turns.

But the Brexit decision is only one of the puzzles we have had to deal with these last few months.

The other is why did Theresa May—again willingly and knowingly—choose to make a difficult path much, much more difficult?

Any good prime minister inheriting a country so at war with itself as we were after the referendum would have placed healing national division as their first priority. But from her first unwise Conservative Conference speech with its demonisation of the “liberal elite” and the assertion that those who see themselves as citizens of the world are citizens of nowhere, May has, quite again deliberately, sought to widen the divisions between the 52 per cent who voted “Leave” and the 48 per cent who voted “Remain.” She followed this divisive rhetoric with divisive action, choosing a Brexit that puts the country as far away from Europe as it is possible to get (for which she has no mandate whatsoever), moving her party onto policies indistinguishable from Ukip and atte…

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Comments

  1. J Castles
    March 15, 2017 at 23:36
    Relax Paddy. The EU will disintegrate. I just came across a paper presented in 1992 by one Boris Novak, a Slovene, who states 'the word Europe has become a magic key for the paradise lost, a symbol that was valuable for us - not only on the cultural, but also on the economic and political level. Our belief in Europe grew more and more religious.... It seems to me that the only existing common denominator in the process of European integration is the economic interest.' I note that I marked up the paragraphs containing these extracts all that time ago. He is right about the EU becoming the religion called 'Europe', with its pope J C Juncker.
  2. Hugh Gentry
    March 20, 2017 at 11:16
    Still waiting for someone to explain to me what is the upside of Brexit. Even the much vaunted 'getting our country back' is looking a bit hollow given the possible loss of Scotland and Northern Ireland from the Union. As for sovereignty, well that's been exposed by having an unelected PM and a rabid press calling for the disbanding of the Lords and the judiciary. Just why are we doing it again???

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