Remainers are gleefully pointing to our economic problems, but ignoring the crises afflicting much of Europe
Hallowe’en approaches, and across the country unconvincing bogeymen are being manufactured from odds and ends in the optimistic hope of giving unsuspecting neighbours a fright.
One of these is “Project Fear”. As the years have passed, it has changed its shape. In 2016, it threatened overnight economic and financial disaster, with mass unemployment, forced tax rises and a collapse in trade. But when the end of the world proved to be not quite as nigh as predicted, it was reinvented as a slow process of economic decline and international isolation. As one slogan put it: “The Leave campaign want us to quit the single market and be like Albania.”
But it is the EU, following its lamentable inadequacy over Covid, that has again shown itself a nonentity, this time over the Ukraine invasion. Even its own high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, has lamented its diplomatic inactivity, irrelevance and arrogance.
Politically, it is as divided as ever over financial, political and security issues, with no clear pathway out of its array of dead ends. In contrast, the United Kingdom emerged as the chief European defender of the Continent’s security. At the start of the war, it gave Ukraine stronger support and faster aid than all of the EU put together – a genuine leadership role welcomed by eastern and northern Europe.