With apologies for so many Brexit  postings, but, especially after Theresa May’s pathetic encounter with the EU ministers yesterday, I suspect that any thinking, patriotic and informed person who saw her or his country make such a mindless, incompetent hash of an unnecessary political red herring would also want to express her or his deep  anguish.

The following is courtesy of the London Review of Books:

“The EU is not so much about trade – though it is that as well – as it is about freedom and peace. An extension of ‘we’, not a curtailing of it. Solidarity. Common purpose. Are we – you, they, we – so different? So incomparably better? It’s about being a force for good in the world, a place slightly less rivalrous, less unfair, less short-sighted, less bristling with arms, less overrun by special interests than the places around it. In its weakness is its strength. Its divergence is its coherence.

“At best, at very best, Brexit is a perfect irrelevance. Either it has nothing to do with our – their, your – actual problems, or it will make them worse. Austerity, inequality, lack of foresight, lack of common purpose, democratic accountability. Our difficulties are planetary and grave; for a nation to claim it has – or in Britain’s case, is – the answer, is simply dishonest. A cage or a card or a wall is not the point. Do you trust the Home Office not to cock this up as well? The world is converging. It is mixing, and will continue to mix. This isn’t a great time for nation states. It’s hard to think of one that’s doing well. Not even Canada. Maybe Ireland? Maybe New Zealand?

“The standards, laws, rights, protections and improvements of the last forty years have come from Europe. Whence the strange English faith in the selfless probity, wisdom and insightfulness of their ruling class? What’s this fantasy about being on the outside and retaining one’s influence and one’s freedom to act independently? With one flat-topped aircraft-carrier. So coolly unattached and so desirable, and always nyet? The world needs more internationalism, not less. More co-operation, not less. Remember the ozone hole? Something fixed it, possibly. We fixed it. Now the oceans are full of plastic. Our chemicals are in the air and soil and ground water everywhere.

 “Worldwide, who else apart from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and the late Steve Bannon thinks it’s a good idea? Shouldn’t that worry you – them, us? Have your misanthropic Brexit, and then – what – a tourist industry?

“A mendacious faux patriotism has been promoted: now it’s the scoundrel’s first port of call. It isn’t compatible with English friendliness abroad or solidarity at home. Is Brexit going to happen in some soft form, in some mild way – or ‘be delivered’, in Mayspeak – on 29 March, or later, after some bitterly contested picayune postponement, and we say, ‘it’s all right, we don’t really mean it, we still kind of like you’? I don’t think so. “.

( excerpt, slightly edited, from  “The Little Island that Could”,  by Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books, 7 Feb 2019)