Britain is losing friends – and making enemies

Whatever way you voted in 2016, I suspect that many of us have the same image of post-Brexit Britain. It is easier to capture in a cartoon than in prose but it looks something like this. A chap tries to make a leap across a canyon, falls ever so slightly short and as a result gets wedged in a crevice. And there he is – stuck. Neither on one side or the other and gaining the benefits of neither ledge.

The Conservative party obviously carries a large amount of responsibility for this – not least for the fact that European law still dictates our insane migration policy. But the current government must also take its share of responsibility. If we were run by competent men and women of vision then getting out of the spot we are in could be possible. Instead it appears that Labour policy is to actually push us further down the crevice.

Because of the Labour party’s obvious attraction to the EU, they will not take this country an inch further away from it. Keir Starmer and his party have already signalled that if a trade war were to erupt between the US and the EU, then the UK would side with the EU. But at the same time, Britain has never been more unlike our European friends. Right-wing politics dominates the continent and is only rising. And it’s not just ‘right-wing politics’ as it might be defined by any remaining producer at Newsnight, but proper right-wing stuff of a kind that even causes me to make a whistling noise at times.

Geert Wilders is now the head of the largest party in the Dutch parliament. This is a man who was idiotically refused entry into the UK by a Labour home secretary (the hopeless Jacqui Smith) because of his ‘divisive’ and ‘extreme’ views.