Opinion: Leave vs. Remain caricatures have only added to Brexit’s messiness
Pro-Brexit demonstrators gather for a speech by Nigel Farage in London on Friday. By Megan McArdle Megan McArdle Columnist Bio Follow Columnist March 29 LONDON — Outside Parliament, I met a man who said he had come there “to blow my shofar for the nation.” A shofar is typically a ram’s horn, used since antiquity in Jewish religious services and, in modern times, by certain Christian sects.
That message had set him on a crusade that eventually led him to the street in front of Parliament, where Leavers and Remainers were doing their best to outshout each other. Religion aside, he was in many ways a typical British Leaver, with a broad Midlands accent and a broad distaste for the globalist-yet-Eurocentric outlook that dominates Europe, and London. He spoke unashamedly and at great length about the glories of the British Empire.
Too, the extraordinary beauty of Britain’s Parliament building reminds us that Britain already has a long experience with being part of a powerful trading zone, one so vast that within its borders, the sun never set. Britain was reaping gains from cross-border aggregation long before the rest of Europe got into the act.
So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that Patel was so fiercely attached to the old, singular Britain, though I confess I was. I was even more surprised to find that the Leave demonstrator next to him was an Irishman, though a resident in England for some 30 years, who said he would surrender his passport and apply for British citizenship if Brexit went through.
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