Reasons to be cheerful | 30 June 2016

Noel Malcolm

It may sound both Pollyannaish and paradoxical to say this, but leaving the EU will enable us to have stable, friendly, cooperative relations with all our EU neighbours. Being cooped up in a dysfunctional system, where so much depends on backroom arm-twisting and competing for favours in a zero-sum game, doesn’t produce stable friendships. For those of us who feel (as I do) like real Europeans, it will be so much better to be the friendly next-door neighbour than the unwanted in-law in the quarrelling family home.
Noel Malcolm is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Tony Abbott

I was one of those overseas worthies who advised against Brexit — in my case because the EU needed the UK more than vice versa — whom British voters cheerfully told to mind our own business. Now that the British people have spoken, it’s important to make the most of escaping the suffocating and unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy.