Trump can help the UK out of the Brexit madness
by Gwythian Prins
| June 03, 2019 12:00 AM
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The slow motion resignation of long-since powerless British Prime Minister Theresa May, who is embarrassingly clinging to office until after President Trump’s state visit, is "interesting" in both senses of the Chinese sage. May’s unlamented departure is "interesting" (good) because it is a direct result of the humiliation inflicted by Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party on the Conservative and Labour parties for failing to deliver Brexit. It is "interesting" (bad) because it is deliberately slow.
This is a time of remarkable records. The departure of the worst prime minister Britain has ever had — worse even than Lord North, who absent-mindedly lost the North American colonies — is the direct result of the rise of Britain's fastest-ever recruiting new party. Farage’s Brexit Party only came into existence when May failed to leave the European Union as law prescribed on March 29. Authentic Great Britain, where I live, outside the metro hubs, blew a collective gasket. I have never, ever witnessed such anger and contempt. The European Parliament election results, an election we should never have had to hold, trumpeted it loud and clear. The clever electorate used it as a confirmatory referendum.
Netted out in percentages and seats, the results pretty much replicate 2016, with "leave" beating "remain." Nothing has changed.
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Not yet two months old, and as its elevator goes up with 29 seats, the Brexit Party is now the largest single national party in the European Parliament, passing German Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU as her elevator plummets down.
The delay in May's departure is bad because it gives time for the "remainiac" ministers and officials who have worked ceaselessly to overturn the will of the people, led by the chancellor of the exchequer and May's closest advisers, to plan and effect their transfer to a new host.
There are plenty of untrustworthy Conservative members of Parliament, led by arch-assassin Michael Gove, who would suit their purpose. The plan? To con or bludgeon a "remain"-dominated Parliament, which history will call both long and addled, to pass May's toxic and Orwellian-named "withdrawal agreement."
Both in its devilish detail and on the recently televised open admission by EU officials desperate to hurt Britain for having the temerity to vote to leave their shaky suzerainty, it is a document of colonial surrender whereby my great country becomes a powerless rule-taker from a fast-collapsing EU. It is the worst treaty ever agreed to by a British government and the polar opposite of what 17.4 million people voted for in June 2016 in the biggest democratic mandate for anything, ever: to leave the EU. This is a "Hotel California" Brexit: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
At its heart is a surrender of sovereignty over intelligence, defense, and security by Europe's premier hard and soft power state to the fast-developing EU Defence Union that French President Emmanuel Macron has declared to be nakedly anti-American. This betrayal, if effected, would sunder the Five Eyes, an Anglosphere intelligence alliance that underpins the security of the free world, threatening the Anglo-American special relationship that is its foundation. The EU has no business whatsoever in these areas, which are the domain of sovereign states and of NATO.
So, President Trump will shortly land on British shores in revolutionary times. As Vladimir Lenin asked of Russia in revolutionary times in 1902, "What is to be done?" Thoughtful analysts agree that maybe the worst strategic mistake that May made, from which flowed catastrophe after catastrophe, was to refuse Trump's invitation right after his inauguration to get on with an Anglo-American Free Trade Agreement.
Steered by her officials who, as subsequent events have shown, were already plotting to lock the U.K. into a permanent customs union with the EU as a means of killing Brexit, timid May reportedly told Trump that it was "too early."
That was nonsense, of course. After the people's instruction to leave, the EU has nothing to say about when or with whom we strike trade deals and especially not with our oldest and most important ally and trading partner. Surrendering the sequencing of Brexit "negotiations" to the EU gave Michel Barnier (who could not believe his luck) the upper hand, when in fact, as the world’s fifth-largest economy, Great Britain holds the most powerful trade, financial services, security, innovation, and geopolitical cards.
Never forget that the next Euro crisis could cause the EU to implode. This is the Eurocrats' waking nightmare. Allowing a Luxembourg functionary to have more say over the future of the U.K. than the British prime minister or Parliament is beyond absurd.
Your history is our history. By and large your enemies are our enemies, and in times of greatest need, America stands by us. As John of Gaunt (via Shakespeare) observed on his deathbed: "With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds, this England that was wont to conquer others hath made a shameful conquest of itself." So Trump's visit could not be more timely.
To save British democracy (the stakes are this high, thanks to May's calamitous premiership), the next prime minister has to do what the people instructed: By Halloween at the latest, in the teeth of opposition from the long and addled Parliament, leave the EU cleanly on World Trade Organization terms.
No deals, no ransom payments. No one voted for any of that. Just leave and trade nicely under normal rules with the EU as with anyone else.
During the state visit, President Trump could perform no greater service as a loyal friend than to offer Great Britain once more the invitation to conclude at once the Anglo-American trade deal that Theresa May declined. It would put a mighty wind in our sails as our new helmsman steers us out of the stale doldrums of May. We would be forever in Trump's debt.
Gwythian Prins is emeritus research professor at the London School of Economics.