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‘Brexit’ echoes the shot heard around the world

It’s odd that, amid the speculative blather from politicians and pundits surrounding Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, none of them seem to recognize the sentiments that prompted it are precisely the same as those that sparked the American Revolution.

Like the 13 American colonies in 1776, the British people are obligated to shoulder much of the expense of supporting an alien ruler (a word I use advisedly) over which they have little direct influence and from whose edicts and regulations they have little or no right of appeal.

In the late 18th Century America the alien ruler was King George III. For the British today, it is the European Union’s all-powerful executive, the EU Commission, or, to give it its formal title, the College of Commissioners.

The European Union is a bureaucratic monstrosity that, in terms of personnel, political muscle, judicial power, and fiscal expenditure makes the U.S. Federal bureaucracy look like the model of financial restraint and regulatory moderation.

Unlike the U.S. President and the U.K.’s Prime Minister, the commission—the EU’s executive branch—is virtually autonomous. As a form of government, it is an absolutist antithesis of the British and American concept of democracy.

Its powers are sweeping: It is solely responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the EU treaties, and managing the day-to-day business of the EU. The only pie in which it does not have a controlling finger is foreign policy.

The commission comprises 28 members, one from each of nations in the union. Their oath, however, mandates them to promote the interests of the EU as a whole to the exclusion of the national interests of their mother countries.

As such, it is the master of the EU’s internal affairs. The member states are obliged to implement the edicts and regulations it promulgates, even when they run contrary to their national laws and long standing traditions of governance. The “Sun King” Louis XIV should, indeed, have been so lucky.

Some opponents of withdrawal, both in Britain and the U.S., claim the vote was an expression of anti-immigrant “racism.” This is simply humbug.

Many Britons, including large numbers of those who voted to remain, are opposed to unrestricted immigration—an issue that is a symptom, not the disease.

While most of Britain’s immigrants arrive from EU countries, by no means all of them are EU citizens. Far from it! The EU’s relative lack of border controls means that anybody with EU travel documents is legally entitled to enter Britain.

It is not the immigration of skilled EU citizens that worries the British. It is the vast, uncontrolled influx of “refugees” who arrive—unable to work; unwilling to assimilate—from other EU nations and who are overwhelming Britain’s notably generous welfare, health and education services.

The Britons who voted for the “Brexit” are convinced that membership of the EU has resulted in their loss of the control of their country. They claim the world’s “Mother of Democracy” is today in the thrall of a faceless, foreign-based oligarchy whose agenda takes little or no account of Britain’s national interests and traditions.

Some 70 percent of Britain’s laws are now claimed to emanate from the EU commission—a cause of considerable disquiet as EU law is drawn from the Napoleonic Code, the legal philosophy of which is vastly different from that of English Common Law.

It is also is estimated that the British Parliament spends the best part of 60 percent of its time affirming commission edicts it has no legal right to challenge. Similarly, EU tribunals can—and frequently do—overrule Britain’s highest courts, and against such verdicts there is virtually no right of appeal.

Small wonder, then, that Mr Michael Gove, the British minister of Justice, has been one of the most influential supporters of the Leave movement.

The parallels between the British government against which the American colonies rebelled and the EU from which the British have voted to withdraw extend beyond matters of taxation and representation. Not least, its vast bureaucracy appears to be a nest of patronage, jobbery, and nepotism.

One might be forgiven for suspecting that the reason it enjoys such strong support among the member nations’ political classes is that it might, unkindly perhaps, be described as a cushy dumping ground for failed politicians.

The pain of being ousted as a government minister or party leader is doubtless considerably assuaged by a top job in the EU bureaucracy and the not inconsiderable perks that go with it.

These include residences in Brussels where the commission is based; Strasbourg where the toothless European Parliament resides; and in the capital of the appointee’s own country—and, naturally, travel expenses to commute between the three.

Such was the fate of Neil Kinnock, who after being ousted as leader of Britain’s Labour Party, served as an EU commissioner from 1995 to 2004. His wife also won a seat in the European Parliament, and their son and daughter were given jobs in the EU bureaucracy.

This sort of thing is not what the British signed on for in 1973 when they joined what was then the European Economic Community, or more familiarly, the Common Market. At that time, despite substantial (and, in the light of events, prescient) misgivings, they became members of what was essentially a custom free zone.

The source of those misgivings in large part arose from the fact that the community’s ultimate goal was to achieve some sort of supranational political and economic union. But even the skeptics could not imagine it would metastasize into what is has now become.

Rather, the British public was sold a vision of a “United States of Europe,” a democratic federation of nation states similar to the American model—a form of government far more appealing to British sensibilities than the EU and its autocratic commission.

The British vote to withdraw from the EU, thus, represents a much belated endorsement of America’s founding fathers and the principle of no taxation without representation—an echo of the cry that fired the shot heard around the world. GPH✠

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