Coinciding the other morning with a piece on The Today programme, where an MP said Brexit should be a moment of "inspiring national renewal", is this article HERE in The Guardian about more or less the same topic. What will we become after Brexit (assuming it happens)? Will it be an inspiration or a "folly" that future generations will look back on in amazement? I am, as you might expect, in the latter camp.
Robert Winder in The Guardian tells us how we are seen across the world with a few well chosen examples from foreign media. They are not flattering:
“What in the world has happened to this country?” asked one Swiss paper, while a German radio station called Brexit the “biggest political nonsense since the Roman emperor Caligula decided to appoint his horse Incitatus as consul”. Britain has appeared in a Polish journal as “an offended, spoiled child”, in a Japanese paper as “an outcast”, and in India as guilty of “utter folly”.
Pakistan described the British lion as possessing “more of a moan than a roar”, while an Austrian cartoon showed a deluded Brit leaping from a plane clutching not a parachute but a union flag. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, a serious paper, has driven the point home by calling Britain “the laughing stock of the world”.
And I know that the list does not include the USA where Brexit has been described in similarly disparaging terms.
One has only to speak to a leave voter to be accused of being a Guardian reader (which I am along with The Telegraph). The article makes it clear that it is not only the British liberal left wing media that thinks Brexit is lunacy.
Brexit represents the precise opposite of what is happening in the rest of the world where countries increasingly recognise the benefits of working together to resolve regional problems peacefully, to increase trade and wealth and to create a common understanding between different peoples. This is why most of the world look askance at Brexit.
