Dad’s Army rides again

British politicians – especially the two candidates to take over Theresa May’s now vacant position as Conservative leader and unelected prime minister, Jeremy Hunt and above all Boris Johnson – have been trying to force the EU into reopening Brexit negotiations by threatening not to pay the £38 billion (€42 billion) ‘divorce bill’.

Let’s get real about this, Brexiteers. We’re talking about a one-off payment that’s only a fraction of the EU’s annual budget, but equivalent to the UK’s annual budget deficit (something successive Conservative governments had falsely promised Britain would no longer have). In short, Brussels won’t like it if you refuse to pay – but won’t be prepared to make political or economic concessions just to get you out of a far worse pickle of your own making. What’s more, by refusing to pay its clearly established debts, Britain would gain a reputation as an utterly unreliable partner that breaks its promises whenever it feels like it – and after all the hoopla about London being the financial capital of the world (a role it is already fast losing, with banks and other commercial institutions moving their headquarters elsewhere as Brexit looms), that is hardly the kind of reputation any country wants to have. To put it bluntly, Britain – which has so long prided itself on its ‘sense of fair play’, but has just as long been mocked as ‘perfidious Albion’ (see my earlier post with this title) – will henceforth be labelled as a cheat.

An article on today’s BBC online news site entitled 10 things that stopped Brexit from happening – the simple past tense ‘stopped’ (rather than ‘have stopped’) implying that the history of Brexit is already being written – puts nine-tenths of the blame for the failure of the negotiations squarely (and fairly) in Britain’s court. Far from Britannia ‘ruling the waves’, it has tried over the three years since the 2016 referendum to ‘waive the rules’ – and is finding to its cost, and shock, that this won’t work.

Whether or not Britain pays up, the EU will move on – especially once rid of its most consistently troublesome member state. The prospective socialist candidate for the presidency of the European Commission, the Dutchman Frans Timmermans, has hilariously compared Britain’s behaviour in the run-up to Brexit to that of the character Lance-Corporal Jones in the British TV comedy series Dad’s Army (set in Second World War Britain, which unlike the rest of Europe was never in fact invaded). Jones spent most of his time running around in a panic and shouting ‘Don’t panic, don’t panic!’ How tragic that such a comparison should have to be made – and, above all, that it should be so accurate.

Dad’s Army rides again – and, as we all know, it never struck a serious blow for freedom or anything else. Just like Brexit, it was pure bluster.