Finally, someone has said the quiet part out loud. French prime minister Jean Castex has penned a letter to the European Union demanding that it make an example of Brexit Britain. Addressed to Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, Castex’s angry missive calls for an official EU response to Britain and Jersey’s refusal to grant a few dozen French boats the licenses they need to fish in waters around Jersey. It is imperative, says Castex, that Brussels backs Paris in this fishing spat, and that it reprimands Britain in some fashion. Why? Because, he says, it is ‘indispensable to show European public opinion that… it causes more damage to leave the EU than to stay in’.
There it is. In black and white. The thing many of us Brexiteers have been warning of for the past four or five years. Namely, that some European leaders’ relentless agitation against Brexit Britain, their determination to impose a humiliating deal on us, wasn’t only motored by an instinct to preserve the integrity and competitive advantage of the Single Market against this newly independent powerful economic force on the Union’s west coast. No, it was also about demonstrating to the people who live under the writ of the Euro-oligarchy that they leave the EU at their peril. That if they do what us Brits did, and strike out on their own, their lives will become harder. M. Castex has done us all a great favour – he has confirmed the punishing urge and existential angst that lies behind European officials’ fury with Brexit Britain. Merci, prime minister.
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