Goodbye to the demoralised past. Hello, world

At 11 pm this evening, the United Kingdom will have left the European Union.

These are words that, throughout the nightmare of the past three and a half years, those of us who were solid Brexiteers feared we might never be able to say.

From the moment in 2016 that Britain voted by 52-48 per cent to leave the EU, the political, intellectual and media Remainer establishment threw everything they had into stopping Brexit and reversing that people’s vote…

For many of those who voted Brexit, the iron has entered their soul. Abandoned by the entire political establishment, vilified, insulted and abused by the media and intellectual nomenklatura as racists, xenophobes and imbeciles, they have now learned they are not powerless against this vicious cultural behemoth. They defeated it, not through violence or extremism but through the simple power of their own voice and vote: through democracy, decency, and rationality…

And now comes a particular danger. The transition period of at least eleven months, during which the UK will remain bound by EU rules while no longer being a member, means that for this period the UK will be at the mercy of anything the EU might do to damage it. For the EU, the battle now merely moves up a gear.

As was entirely predictable, the Eurocrats are saying precisely what they have said throughout: that in any future deal, Britain must guarantee that it will conform to EU regulations in order to prevent “unfair” competition. To the EU, all competition with itself is unfair and thus has to be stopped. But of course, Britain needs to be competitive to succeed in the world: that’s one of the economic reasons for Brexit. So the inevitability of the clash is as fundamental as it was always obvious.

The EU’s purpose has not changed. It remains determined to prevent the newly-independent UK from being successful in order to discourage the remaining EU member states from leaving as well. It will therefore do everything it can to hurt Britain.