The spectre of liberty in the post-Brexit world: Statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the Palace of Westminster
The spectre of liberty in the post-Brexit world
By David Semple
i. Britain and Europe
There is a spectre haunting Europe in the post-Brexit age. The spectre of English liberty and freedom. For centuries, continental Europe has brought forth many enemies of liberty, most of whom have tried to stop the winds of freedom blowing across the English Channel.
Every time continental powers have tried to dominate the European continent, whether it be under Phillip the Second of Spain, under Louis the Fourteenth of France, under Napoleon, under Kaiser Wilhelm the Second of Germany, under Hitler’s Third Reich and under Soviet Communism, the English nation, and later Great Britain, often in alliance with other great powers, stood in the way of tyranny and brought about the defeat of these enemies of freedom.
Historically, the role of English and British governments has been to maintain the balance of power in Europe, in order to defend smaller nations from foreign domination.
Modern freedom and democracy emanates from 17th century England and not from any country in Europe. In earlier centuries, England had come under the domination of Rome, first under its empire and then under its church. During the Plantagenet Age, England was part of the continental feudal system run at the behest of the Catholic Church in Rome. The Anglo-French Plantagenets were succeeded by a Welshman named Henry Tudor, who finally brought peace to the English nation and ended centuries of continental wars and civil wars.
European Feudalism came to an end in England, followed by the demise of five centuries of Papal domination when Henry Tudor’s son, King Henry the Eighth, declared himself to be the head of the Church of England.
The march towards the establishment of English liberty began with the Magna Carta in 1215. The English Civil War was the turning point, at which an English Republic, called the Commonwealth, was established. Although Oliver Cromwell disposed of the divine right of kings, the parliament recalled the monarchy in 1660.
Ever since, the protection of the liberties of the nation have been vested in Westminster Parliament. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, together with the Bill of Rights, put England at the forefront of the struggle for freedom and liberty throughout the world.
By contrast, continental Europe has given us feudalism, the Spanish Inquisition, antisemitism, communism, Nazism, the Holocaust and fascist corporatism. Each of these ideologies subverts the rights of the individual in favour of a higher authority or ideology.
Karl Marx, Kaiser Wilhelm, Vladimir Lenin, Alfred Rosenberg (an influential ideologue of the Nazi Party), Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin, in addition to their acolytes and followers, are responsible for the most terrible crimes against humanity, including the mass murder of almost one hundred and fifty million people across the globe. Such was Europe’s gift to the world during the 20th century.
Nazism and communism failed, primarily because of the leadership of several great men of the democratic age, most notably Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
Churchill was correct in June 1940 when he predicted that the rise of Nazism in Europe would be accompanied by “a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
That new Dark Age to which Churchill referred started with the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, and only ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But even with the collapse of Sovietism, Europe remains overshadowed by Marxism, antisemitism, the Far Right and Islamism.
To make matters worse, the New World Order of peace and co-operation to which President George W H Bush referred in 1990, has failed to bring democracy and freedom to the nations of the Arab Middle East and Africa.
Instead, there has been a regression, with the erosion of freedoms brought on by soulless superstructures such as the European Union, which is fast becoming the first post-Cold War failure in building a model for global governance.
ii. United Europe
After the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill called for the creation of a “United States of Europe.” He did not intend that Britain should be a part of this new Europe, yet he thought that Britain should support it.
After the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which created the supranational European Economic Community, with its goal being the creation of an “ever closer union,” Britain formed an alternative European Free Trade Association under prime minister Harold Macmillan. However, Macmillan lost confidence in post-imperial Britain and later tried to join the EEC.
The Commonwealth nations, with which Britain conducted most of its trade, raised objections and French president Charles de Gaulle correctly came to the conclusion that Britain would not fit comfortably into the EEC, largely due to its special relationship with the United States.
There were two French vetoes of British applications to join the EEC before Conservative prime minister Edward Heath signed the Treaty of Rome in 1973. This was a very controversial decision that did not have the full support of the British people, yet had the democratic consent of the UK parliament.
Since 1973, Britain’s relationship with the EEC and the European Union has been stormy to say the least. Only two prime ministers were convinced Europeans: Edward Heath and Tony Blair. The rest have been Eurosceptic at best. It took Margaret Thatcher almost ten years before she declared her rejection of the supranational institutions of the EU, after which she was removed from power by Heathites.
John Major, Gordon Brown and David Cameron also tried and failed to carve out a role for Britain outside the “ever closer union” as part of a two-tier Europe. This, however, amounted to wishful thinking on the part of British leaders. Even though Britain is not a member of the eurozone, it is impossible to have true independence from the supranational law of the EU.
During the Cold War, Britain played a decisive role in the creation of the European Single Market. Then in 1991, the Soviet Union came crashing down almost two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Communism was finally consigned to the scrap heap of history in Russia and eastern Europe.
In western Europe, however, creeping socialism began to take possession of America’s NATO allies through the growing power of the executive branches of the European Union, following the reunification of Germany.
Within twenty years, the new bureaucratic Europe began to resemble a “soft” communistic version of the former Marxist superpower.
In an attempt to offset the power of Brussels, British officials encouraged the former Soviet Bloc states to become members of the EU. However, by the close of the last decade, Germany clearly dominated Europe, both financially and politically.
There was now no longer any way in which Britain could maintain the balance of power in Europe, with the rise of German political and economic power, and the relative decline of French influence after the reunification of Germany.
iii. Brexit
Ironically, it was always the Conservative Party, the party of empire and the United Kingdom, that was at the heart of Britain’s integration with the European Union. Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher played the key roles in Britain’s integration with the Union.
Although Labour’s Harold Wilson tried to get Britain into the EEC, he opposed Heath’s European Communities Act in 1972 from the opposition benches. And Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell opposed Macmillan’s bid to join the EEC, calling it “the end of a thousand years of history.”
In the 1970s, Labour was more divided on Europe than the Conservative Party. The former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, headed a rump of Labour Europhile MPs to support Heath’s policy, while the bulk of the Labour MPs voted against it.
Thus, when Wilson found himself back in government again two years later, he decided to renegotiate the terms of British membership, then called a referendum on the EEC, solely for the purpose of reuniting the Labour Party.
It worked. Wilson supported EEC membership in the June 1975 referendum, campaigning on the same side as his rivals, Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath. Wilson and Thatcher lied to the British public about the true nature of the Treaty of Rome, which was an agreement to form a political union, not a free trade zone.
Thus, Britons voted to support continued membership of the EEC in June 1975 based upon their understanding that Britain had joined a free trade zone and not a political treaty to create an “ever closer union.”
Just as Harold Wilson held a referendum to unite his party in 1975, so David Cameron called the referendum on EU membership to keep his party united which was as divided on the issue of Europe as Labour had been in the 1970s.
David Cameron was a Eurosceptic when he was elected leader of the party. Then he changed his mind. His pre-referendum renegotiations this year were as unconvincing as the renegotiations carried out by Harold Wilson in 1975.
There is a moment in every prime minister’s career when the politics of principle turn to the politics of lies. This is what happened to Mr Cameron this year. He did not even make a serious effort to change Britain’s relationship with the EU. He came back from Brussels and pretended he had made substantial changes, including the exclusion of Britain from “ever closer union.”
This, of course, was not true. The renegotiation exercise was smoke and mirrors. Nobody believed Mr Cameron when he said that if Britain had not already been a member of the EU, he would gladly join on the new terms he had negotiated.
The truth is that Mr Cameron is a faithful European, committed to the EU’s existing political institutions, to its expansion and to the inclusion of Turkey. That’s why he lost the referendum campaign. The public no longer believed him. He found himself selling the same used car that Wilson and Heath had flogged before.
Despite the support of the British establishment and global financial institutions, Mr Cameron could not convince the majority of British voters that remaining inside the European Union would restore the political sovereignty of Westminster and stop uncontrolled immigration, which is changing the cultural face of the nation.
Boris Johnson, the former Mayor of London and a political rival of David Cameron, became the public face of the campaign to leave the EU, much more than Ukip leader Nigel Farage, whose party had frightened Mr Cameron into calling the referendum in the first place.
In perhaps the most exciting political campaign in Britain since the days of Gladstone and Disraeli, Mr Cameron and Boris Johnson became the great rivals who took the battle for Britain in or out of Europe to the public from city to city and town to town across the whole of the nation.
The British public took to the EU referendum campaign as they had not taken to any other political campaign. The country tuned into debates in libraries, town halls, television studios and book shops. But Britain was divided. Families and friends were split over the issue.
By the end of the campaign the divisions between the Remain supporters and the Leave supporters were greater than at any time during our forty-three year history in the EU.
The Brexit debate was intense, sometimes angry, always passionate and very lively. Mr Cameron was rightly accused of resorting to Project Fear, pulling out all the statistics that showed Britain would suffer financial disasters if the country left the EU.
Mr Cameron did not try to sell a positive vision of what our future we be like if Britain were to remain in Europe.
Boris Johnson, on the other hand, called for Britain to leave the EU. He wanted to impose sovereignty at the level of Westminster, not Brussels. He called for British independence. This message was more positive than the message emanating from the Remain campaign.
That’s why the Leave campaign won by nearly one and a half million votes. Against all odds and all opinion polls, the British people voted to leave Europe. Independence was more attractive than continued membership of the EU.
(This is hardly surprising given that Europe is confronted with serious financial problems, mass unemployment and the ongoing legacy of the social and political crisis created by Angela Merkel’s decision to let in millions of Muslim migrants from all over Africa, the Middle East and Asia.)
David Cameron’s political career ended in failure. Everything he hoped to achieve failed. He resigned on the morning the referendum result was announced, on June 24.
Boris was the obvious choice to succeed Mr Cameron in No 10 Downing Street. But a week later, the man who won Britain its independence dropped out of the Conservative Party leadership contest when he was betrayed by colleagues from the Leave campaign.
Boris had not joined the Leave campaign to become prime minister. He campaigned for independence because he believes in Britain. Indeed, he has a greater understanding of British history than his rivals. His day will come, perhaps, in years to come. But he found his moment of greatness in helping to convince the British public that independence and freedom is more important than compromising our political values for the sake of a few trade deals.
So what does the future hold for Britain outside the European Union? Britain’s role in Europe is to make sure that no tyranny can dominate the small countries in Europe. This nation has played that role for four hundred years. Since Elizabethan times, England and Britain have been the defenders of freedom against the likes of Phillip the Second of Spain, Napoleon Bonaparte and Hitler.
And now we need to watch over Europe once again as greater tyrannies from the Middle East threaten the continent. We need to spend more on defence so we can become America’s partner in the defence of Western freedoms. And we need to watch over the affairs of the European Union and assist any countries who decide to leave by following in the footsteps of Brexit.
The European Union is headed in the wrong direction. The migrant crisis is causing a revival of Far Right parties across the continent, raising xenophobic fears of mass immigration that can only lead to more racism.
German domination may eventually become overbearing for the rest of Europe. A strong Britain outside Europe will be better able to use its diplomatic skills to help change Germany’s political direction away from empire building and back towards peaceful cooperation.
Germany has overplayed its hand in the political machinations of the European Union and this will only cause other countries to follow Britain’s Brexit example.
The most important role Britain can play, with an independent foreign policy (free of the collective European moral compromises made within the EU) is to bring the United States back into the defence of the Mediterranean so that the Islamic threat to Europe is reduced.
But Europe is not the centre of Britain’s world. These islands have always looked outwards. There is a whole world out there with which to trade and in which to invest Britain’s talents. In order to guarantee that this world is open to freedom of the seas and free trade between nations, Britain’s role in NATO is the most important role we play.
There is a spectre haunting the Eurocrats in Brussels, the spectre of freedom and sovereign independence which Brexit may bring to the nations of Europe. Long may the spectre of liberty haunt those who wish to bury it.
David Semple is a Manchester Tory and film maker/broadcaster from Canada. He is currently writing a book called Jerusalem and the Fall of British Imperialism. With JMA’s Richard Mather he is co-writing a radio play called Jerusalem 2017: Imperial Sunset.
