Why Vote Leave by Daniel Hannan

Author:Daniel Hannan [Hannan, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784977092
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd.

Britain finds herself isolated in the EU, not because of any conspiracy against her but because she differs from the others politically and economically. In a union where decisions are made by majority, and may be imposed on dissenters, members will suffer to the extent that they diverge from the mean. No country diverges as much as Britain.

The divergence, as we have seen in this chapter, is partly economic, and partly political. As Denman, the civil servant who steered us in, lamented near the end of his life, ‘We are happy with a trading arrangement, a common market. But we will not count until we make a political commitment. We have never faced up to the fact that we would have to trade power for power.’

There being no sign that the British people are any readier to become patriotic citizens of Europe, that isolation will continue. Britain will carry on being outvoted and ignored. The precious ‘influence’ which EU supporters keep conjuring will remain a wholly notional concept, one that we are somehow never able to exercise. Influence, in the mind of the British Eurocrat, can only ever be stored, never spent. The moment the United Kingdom asserts herself, the talk of ‘influence’ is replaced by talk of ‘intransigence’.

But it is not only Britain’s history and geography that set her apart, not only her ties of kinship and migration to other Anglophone states, not only her service-based, open, deep-water economy. Perhaps the single biggest obstacle in the path of her integration with the EU is a difference in how her citizens relate to her government – a difference rooted in the twin concepts of common law and parliamentary supremacy.

1Daily Telegraph, 15 December 2015

2Martin Schaad in Contemporary European History, 1998

3BBC broadcast, 2 January 1973

4EU Competitiveness Report, 5 November 2004

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