Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Boris is right about Brexit and Ukraine

(Getty images)

Boris was right to compare the vote for Brexit with the struggle for freedom in Ukraine. And here’s the thing: deep down, his fulminating critics know it. It’s why they’re so angry, why they’ve been lashing out so furiously against the PM. Because Boris has drawn attention to something that they would prefer to leave in the shadows – the fact that the very same members of Britain’s chattering classes who are currently cheering the Ukrainian people’s fight for national sovereignty waged a reactionary crusade against the British people’s vote for national sovereignty back in 2016.

The hissy fit over Boris’s comments has been mad. You could be forgiven for thinking he had said that Brussels is indistinguishable from Putin, that being in the EU is akin to being invaded by Russia, and that the 17.4 million of us who voted ‘Leave’ in 2016 were behaving as bravely as the Ukrainian people currently are. Only he didn’t say that. All he said is that both the vote for Brexit and the Ukrainian uprising against Putin’s barbarous invasion are expressions of people’s yearning for freedom. And he’s right, they are.

Addressing the Tories’ Spring conference in Blackpool, Boris said it is ‘the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom’. He then gave a ‘famous recent example’ of British people choosing freedom: 

‘Boris, your words offend Ukrainians, the British and common sense’, said former European Council president Donald Tusk

‘When the British people voted for Brexit, in such large, large numbers, I don’t believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. It’s because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself.’

That was it. Brexit was a vote for freedom, the fight in Ukraine is a fight for freedom, and they are both good things.

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