Donald Tusk has been ridiculed for suggesting that Brexit marks the end of the British Empire. But he has a point. The 31 January 2020 – assuming the date doesn’t move again – should finally bring to a close Britain’s involvement in colonial delusion. And that is exactly why we are right to leave.
Like the British Empire, the European Union is an exercise in patrician rule and one which is sustained by an unshakeable sense of moral and cultural superiority. How better to sum up its pretensions to be more than a mere trade bloc, or even a superstate, than the words of Tusk himself, in an interview with Bild newspaper in 2016: ‘As a historian I fear that Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also of western political civilisation in its entirety.’
It is more than just a bunch of countries which have banded together for their own mutual interest, in other words: it is a civilisation.
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