The Telegraph
If Europe’s policy elites could not quite believe it before, they must now know beyond much doubt that they have lost Britain. This island is no longer part of the European project in any meaningful sense.
If Europe’s policy elites could not quite believe it before, they must now know beyond much doubt that they have lost Britain. This island is no longer part of the European project in any meaningful sense.
British defenders of the status quo were knouted on Sunday. UKIP won
27.5pc of the vote, or 29pc after adjusting for the negligence - or
worse - of the Electoral Commission in allowing a spoiler party with
much the same name to sow confusion. Margaret Thatcher’s Tory children
are scarcely more friendly to the EU enterprise.
Britain’s decision to stay out of monetary union at Maastricht sowed
the seeds of separation, as pro-Europeans fully understood at the time,
though almost nobody expected EMU officialdom to clinch the argument so
emphatically by running the currency bloc into the ground with 1930s
Gold Standard policies and youth unemployment levels above 50pc in Spain
and Greece, and above 40pc in Italy.
European leaders must henceforth calculate that the British people
will vote to leave the EU altogether unless offered an entirely new
dispensation: tariff-free access to the single market along lines
already enjoyed by Turkey or Tunisia; and deliverance from half the
Acquis Communautaire, that 170,000-page edifice of directives and
regulations that drains away sovereignty, and is never repealed.
Ideological hardliners would prefer to see Britain leave rather
tolerating any reversal of the one-way Monnet Doctrine, and some talk of
shutting British goods out of the European markets. They are fanatics.
Others know that the EU’s global credibility would be shattered if one
of its largest states - and twin-leader in projecting military power -
were to walk away in disgust, as Germany’s Wolfgang Schauble has
repeatedly warned.
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