Author Archives: Arnold Kiel

To paraphrase a man whose name I shall never again say or write.

The UK cabinet, with collective responsibility supposedly fully restored, made the following statements within 24 hours on no deal: “make sure that there’s adequate food supplies”, “obviously an attempt to try and ramp up the pressure”, “that kind of selective snippet that makes it into the media, to the extent that the public pay attention to it, I think is unhelpful”, “well, I think that’s a rather irresponsible thing to be coming from the other side. We ought to be trying to reassure citizens on the continent …

No leading Brexiter has problems with goods, services, and capital flowing freely. They even want to leave the “protectionist club” EU, even though part of the leave-vote in deprived regions has been caused by the capital exodus that replaced local industry with imports. I will nevertheless focus on the leaver-“concern” people.

The borders of any island are “controlled” by the departure- and arrival- (in case of expulsion) approvals of countries across the water. In a rule-based order, e.g. the EU, other countries execute the UK’s wishes, and thereby underpin the widespread national border-controllability-illusion. The growing refugee-crisis should make the contingent nature of these conventions abundantly clear. Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, etc. will not absorb Millions of people forever. Ironically, an island-mentality impedes the realisation that the continent’s physically enforceable land borders are much less reliant on international rules than UK beaches.

Leaving this aside, border control has a pull and a push-aspect: attracting people you want and repelling the others. Brexit certainly has not helped the former, but let us focus on the latter which is widely regarded as the problem at hand.

To inspect the effectiveness of push-strategies, it is instructive to look at non-EU immigration: Despite official hostility, barbaric retentions, unjustifiable expulsions, inhumane income thresholds, asymmetric legal recourse, nonsensical student-counting, and arbitrary quotas, the Home Office has consistently missed its target. The absence of a civilised, sensible, and effective immigration policy where “full control” already exists, is quite remarkable. There must be strong economic and social forces at work that dwarf the means of a committed Government. 

“This is an historic moment from which there can be no turning back.” If the second part of the PM’s sentence had been true, there would have been no need to state it. Therefore it isn’t. Revocation of Article 50 by a British Government would be the ultimate vote of confidence in the EU. Europe would never pass on that opportunity. Therefore the campaign continues.

In the first phase of the Brexit-campaign until now, Leave’s weapons (unsubstantiated dreams, outright lies, fraudulent slogans, the opinion press), were more effective than Remain’s (appreciation of a status quo, plausible but uncertain projections, the information press).

The EU will conduct the negotiations publicly, and thereby also force the UK Government into the open. All dreams, lies and slogans will be exposed; Remain will rearm with powerful, hitherto unavailable or ineffective weapons: facts, realism and truth.

I am a German citizen and UK resident. I am also a fan, but not a member of the Liberal Democrats.

I appreciate your party’s stance on Brexit, but I urge you to go further:

Stop expressing misguided respect for a misguided referendum result. People want and deserve a better life, and you know Brexit will give them the opposite: Brexit impoverishes, endangers, brutalizes, and kills.

An MP voting with the Government on triggering Article 50 against his or her conscience is worse than Johnson or Farage, because he or she will not only be a populist, but will irreversibly go down in history as a legislating populist. MPs must protect the country and its people from harm, also and especially if self-inflicted.