The road to Brussels

The Remainers are on the march. The newly ennobled Lord Cameron is back in the saddle as No 3 in the Sunak government and while his first overseas visits were predictably to Ukraine and Israel, his major task is to rebuild economic and diplomatic bridges with the European Union.
    Rishi Sunak has made it clear that he’s not going to do anything to rock the Brexit boat in the run-up to the next election. But the return of David Cameron to the Foreign Office is more than a sop to the Remainers in his ranks. It’s a victory for those sections of the ruling class that want Britain back in the UK and it can only help build their block in Parliament. The Scottish nationalists and the Liberal-Democrats are long-time Returners. So are most Labour MPs. The next strep for the Remainers is to move for the return of the prominenti kicked out by Boris Johnson in 2019 when they tried to stop the no-deal Brexit. This will then, they hope, create enough cross-party support for a second-referendum in the near future regardless of who’s in power at the time.
    The Tory Brexiteers are rudderless. Their self-appointed parliamentary leader was Boris Johnson – now seen for the fool he always was. Their real leader was, of course, Nigel Farage who has abandoned politics for the more lucrative shores of reality TV. Johnson reduced the Eurosceptic argument to a crude choice between the Treaty of Rome and a Treaty of Washington which was a figment of his imagination. Now all these Brexiteers have got left is planes to Rwanda, racism and anti-immigrant hysteria.
    But the European Union isn’t a benevolent society. It’s a fraud, an institution designed solely for the benefit of the oppressors and exploiters. What few benefits the EU has brought, such as increased trade and open borders, could all have been achieved through separate agreements and treaties.
Johnson had a golden opportunity to make Brexit work. He squandered it with all this nonsense about a deal with Donald Trump that was never going to happen. But it still can work if the UK takes Brexit seriously and open its doors to free trade with China and the rest of the world.

The Covid enquiry

The nonsense about “herd immunity”; the callous and incompetent response to the pandemic that led to many avoidable deaths amongst the frail and the elderly and the indifference of a Prime Minister who most of them time seemingly let Dominic Cummings, his Rasputin-like aide, steer the ship of state. It’s all coming out in the Covid inquiry. None of this should surprise us. Johnson’s despicable conduct, and that of his henchmen showed how totally unfit all of them were for high office.
    Johnson counts for nothing in the political arena now. Crawling to the Trump crowd in the United States and grand-standing amongst the Ukrainians is all that Johnson’s got left these days. Johnson is fortunately gone. Sunak will, hopefully soon follow.
    Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, may have jumped the gun when she claimed the UK could be on the path to rejoining the European Union last week. But she clearly reflects the thinking of the European old guard that want to see Britain speedily returning to the European fold.