Just when you were beginning to wonder whether we have done the right thing, along comes Jean-Claude Juncker to remind you exactly why Britain voted for Brexit. It is ‘not going to be an amicable divorce’, he tells us.
Why can’t it be amicable? We’ve decided that we’ve grown apart, not run off with the milkman. There’s no need to put the car keys down the drain and upload some naked photos onto the web. It isn’t so much Ukip who are exploiting the politics of hate; it is Juncker. In his desire for revenge he is demonstrating the contempt for democracy that has been the bane of European Commission ever since it was founded.
The Remain camp just can’t seem to see why so many voters are fed up with the bullying attitude of the EU. They are suffering from a mass outbreak of Stockholm syndrome – where hostages begin to feel sympathy with their captors. So much of the Remain campaign focussed on nasty things that the EU might do to us if we voted to leave. It was as if they had been snatched by a gang of armed robbers, tied up in a basement and had started to feel pathetic gratitude towards the robbers for refraining from putting bullets through their temples.
In time, cooler heads will prevail. German industrialists have already had to counter the call for a punitive approach towards Britain in Brexit negotiations. Remarkably, share prices fell further on the main German and French indices on Friday than they did on the FTSE – suggesting that investors believe those country’s exporters would come off worse if Juncker had his way and there was a hostile divorce. In the end we will get a good trade deal with the EU because it will be in everyone’s interests that it should happen. But the more Jean-Claude Juncker and his unelected colleagues talk about Britain in such hostile terms the more relieved we are going to feel about having undone the ropes with our teeth and done a runner through the air conditioning duct.
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