THE DAY WAR BROKE OUT - BREXIT OR NO BREXIT ?

September the third.

In 1939, this was the day when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made one of the most famous speeches in British history, announcing that a state of war existed between the United Kingdom and Germany. Chamberlain was a man with Victorian and Edwardian ideals who had been completely out manoeuvred and fooled by the far more politically adept wiles of the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. 

Exactly eighty years on and war is threatening to break out again, this time between those in the parliament of the United Kingdom who favour continued membership of a European Union dominated by Germany and those who believe that the UK should be free of such outside control. Notwithstanding that the British people voted in 2016 to free themselves from the EU's shackles, nor that both major political parties made manifesto pledges in 2017 to honour that vote, today there is every likelihood that moves in parliament will succeed in bringing about yet another delay to Brexit, one that will signal to those in Brussels and Berlin that they have almost won this particular war. Their stance will harden still further and the UK will never leave the stifling clutches of the European Union in any meaningful way. 

In 1939, Chamberlain had tried to appease Germany, being ever so gentlemanly in his dealings with 'Herr Hitler' until it was far too late to stop him from plunging Europe, and eventually the whole world, into catastrophic war. In 2019, the boot is on the other foot and the European Union is showing no sign of wanting to appease the demands of the United Kingdom; they have learnt from history that appeasement does not work. Instead they are sitting on the side lines, refusing to budge, while the British parliament does its best to castrate its own government and hand victory to the bureaucrats of Europe.

Should they succeed in this venture it will be time to think of the words, appropriately amended, of another British Prime Minister, the one who followed Chamberlain :

"Never in the field of British history has so much damage been done to so many by so few."