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Photo by Henry Nicholls / Reuters

This is precisely the formula that should have been used from the beginning. Brussels should finally realize that the departure of Britain would be like the departure of Texas from the United States, and when Project Fear is exposed as the fraud that it is (and Carney’s role here has been discreditable), other countries will defect from Europe also; it is not really democratic government. Britain is Europe’s second economy after Germany, and by far its most respected nationality, given its immense contribution to Western civilization and heroic role as a pioneer and principal defender of democracy in the world. Where British political institutions have evolved in a generally continuous manner for 950 years and in a thoroughly law-abiding devolution of events since the return of Charles II in 1660, no other large European country has had the same governmental system for more than 75 years and some of them are in rickety condition now. The correlation of forces between a tottering Brussels and a purposefully led United Kingdom never justified the pompous complacency of Brussels, and of the feckless German and French leaders, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron.

Nor was there ever any rationale for Britain to sacrifice its institutions and foreign policy that served it well for centuries with whatever might emerge from the confusion of Europe. The dream was that Europe had ruled the world prior to the First World War in 1914 and although it had produced communism and fascism and Nazism, it could, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of international communism, dispense with its American liberators and guardians and stand on each other’s shoulders and regain the leadership of the world. It was a romantic but an absurd notion. And within it is the perverse authoritarianism of the Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg Brussels leadership, avenging the frustrations of centuries of condescension from the Great Powers of Europe.