The Sheer Nastiness of the Brexiteers

A chance remark by one-time leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith, irritated me enormously this afternoon. Speaking after the first substantive deal in the long process to extricate the UK from membership of the EU, he said "They blinked first".

This innocuous comment has a huge undertone. For Smith and his ilk, the EU is something to be beaten, to get one over on, to face down and defeat. They reason that if it's good for the EU it must be bad for Britain.  Like the economists of the late 19c, convinced that no further significant technical progress in anything was likely, they see everything as entirely static - if one country is to do better, it can only do so because someone else is doing worse.

I wonder if when Smith, say, takes his car in for a service and is quoted a flat fee, does he rub his hands with glee afterwards and think "I certainly put one over on that garage mechanic, I would happily have paid £5 more" whilst the mechanic thinks "Wow what a  mug, I charged him £3 more than Juggins down the road would have done?". Or could it be that Smith is happy for someone who knows what they are doing to fix his car and the person doing the fixing is happy to be paid for it. In other words, that both parties emerge better off from the trade?

 Britain needs a strong and peaceful Europe and they need us. We should be working closely together towards a common end - the maintenance of societies which live under law, at peace with their neighbours and creating a sustainable prosperity (although I am increasingly doubtful if this latter can be achieved given our current technologies and the increasing despoliation of the biosphere).  The  "all foreigners are only out to get us and deserve a good kicking" attitudes of some in positions of power, given what we need to achieve through the negotiations, is like someone storming out of a tennis club that they have been a member of for many years, saying how stupid and ghastly all the other members are, and then demanding the right to play on the courts anyway but without paying for them. It ain't gonna work, Iain.