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发帖数: 1814 | 1 Donald Trump’s politics have arrived in Old Blighty, and Britain may never
be the same. The Mayor of London has joined the campaign for Britain to kick
itself out of the European Union. This terrifies the easily terrified
elites.
Prime Minister David Cameron, making good on a promise to put continued
membership in the EU up for a popular vote, has set the referendum for June
23. He did it reluctantly and urges everyone to vote “stay.”
Mayor Boris Johnson presides over London, and he’s a member of Parliament,
too, and he’s determined to preserve what’s left of the mighty Britain
that once made tyrants tremble and despots squeak. Lately it’s the English,
like the rest of Europe, who squeak under the lash of unelected bureaucrats
who preside over the continent from Brussels.
Mr. Johnson, like the Donald, is a native New Yorker, “born in England,”
he might say, “while my mother was temporarily in New York.” Indeed, the
mayor and The Donald are not personally alike at all and it’s difficult to
compare American and British politics, but they share a skepticism — if not
contempt — for the ruling elites who connive in whittling down the
greatest experiments of government in history.
“The big battalions of the argument [over Britain leaving the EU] are
unquestionably ranged against people like me,” the mayor says. “We are
portrayed as crazy, cracked and all the rest of it. I don’t mind. I happen
to think that I am right. It is a very, very difficult case to make. I have
thought an awful lot about it. I have thought about it for many years.” It
’s impossible to imagine Donald Trump talking that way about his journey in
politics.
Leaving the Union, as Mr. Johnson put it in the column he regularly writes
for the London Daily Telegraph, “is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for
real change in Britain’s relations with Europe. This is the only
opportunity we will ever have to show that we care about self-rule. A vote
to Remain [in the European Union] will be taken in Brussels as a green light
for more [control] and for the erosion of democracy.”
Many Britons, particularly in England, have never considered their land as
part of Europe at all, an attitude summed up in a famous London headline of
a previous century: “Fog in Channel; Continent cut off.” Subjecting the
laws made by the Parliament of Disraeli and Churchill to editing by arrogant
nebbishes in Brussels sticks today in many a British craw.
Reality becomes seriously out of whack. The British military, including the
Royal Navy that once ruled the waves of every ocean on the globe, is still
the largest in Europe and the British economy is one of the largest in the
world, but under EU rules Britain cannot control its own borders, nor can it
negotiate its own trade. This is Little England writ smaller, and Boris
Johnson speaks for the popular outrage.
Announcing his support for the “Leave” campaign, he took pains to pay
tribute to the prime minister. “The last thing I wanted to do was to go
against David Cameron and the government,” he says. But Mr. Cameron
blistered him in a Commons speech in return, anyway.
He intends no slight of authentic Europe. “I am a European. I lived many
years in Brussels. I rather love the old place. And so I resent the way we
continually confuse Europe — the home of the greatest and richest culture
in the world to which Britain is and will be an eternal contributor — with
the political project of the European Union.”
Mr. Johnson, like Donald Trump, is easily recognized by a shock of unruly
blond hair (the Donald’s is only slightly less abundant) and sometimes
boisterous speech. He, too, prefers words with the bark on.
When the Donald, calling for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to the
United States, said certain neighborhoods in London are so radicalized that
the police are afraid for their own lives,” the mayor exploded with
indignation. He called the remarks not just complete nonsense, but “utter
nonsense.” He invited Mr. Trump to London to see for himself.
But he might not want to visit his birthplace in return. “The only reason I
wouldn’t go to some parts of New York,” he said, “is the real risk of
meeting Donald Trump.”
But what they do share, whether the Oxford-educated mayor admits it or not,
is an eagerness to take on the passivity and platitudes of the elites who
are afraid to confront the mortal threat to the consent of the governed, the
example that England once held up to the world, the example followed by the
colonies planted in the new world. |
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