Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Britain and isolation

The word ‘isolation’ is used a lot in today’s newspapers, as if Cameron walking away from the ongoing EU implosion were a self-evident disaster. Pick up the Guardian and you see Britain cast as a leper, a status conferred on her thanks to a tragic miscalculation by a Prime Minister whose sole aim was to assuage his swivel-eyed Tory MPs and get back on Bill Cash’s Christmas card list. Orwell would have great fun with the language that accompanies the Euro project: trying to suck up to its tiny elite is seen as a country being outward looking. A PM more focused on the people who sent him to office is seen as a parochialist. Spend too much time in SW1 and you may come to believe this yourself.

The truth is that our country has seldom been more integrated with the rest of Europe, by any measure: the amount of the continental workforce we successfully absorb, or our trading, cultural and social links. Technology and globalisation have vastly accelerated cross-border co-operation (independently of the EU). Ryanair has probably done more for European integration than anyone in Brussels. When I take my kids to football training this afternoon, I’ll hear at least half a dozen foreign languages cheering on the other kids. I love that about London. Two of the other football dads are moving to Dubai, where business opportunities are better. People come and go, we’re part of a global economy — and, oddly, this rain-battered island on the periphery of Europe has become a centre of world trade.

Rather than being isolated, Britain is perhaps the most internationally integrated country in the continent. And, yes, I know that CoffeeHousers have plenty to say about that. But if we pull out of the European Union, then the country will remain — if anything — more outward-looking and international than before.

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