Dr Denis MacShane, a former Europe minister, has called on Conservative MPs to tell the truth about Brexit, stating that the policy has failed the country and needs to be reversed. In a letter published in response to Timothy Garton-Ash’s column, MacShane argued that the Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch is as monomaniacally anti-European as British communists and Trotskyists were from 1950 to 1990.
No Tory MP willing to stand up to Farage and Musk
MacShane noted that while Labour figures like Roy Hattersley and Shirley Williams were willing to break ranks over Europe, he cannot identify a single Conservative MP willing to stand up to Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, and Elon Musk regarding the EU. He warned that Britain, like 18th-century Spain, has opted for slow, steady decline into economic weakness and geopolitical irrelevance.
Reconnection needed to reverse decline
Reversing this process requires a reconnection to Britain’s trading partners and fellow democracies, MacShane argued. But that will not happen without a single Conservative MP able to tell the truth that Brexit has failed the country and needs to be put out of its misery.
Chinese observer: Britain has made an enemy of its own neighbourhood
Zhengli Zhou of Liupanshui, Guizhou, China, contributed a letter drawing on Chinese history to argue that a state that makes an enemy of its own neighbourhood has already lost. Zhou wrote: “Brexit was a man sawing off the branch he is sitting on. Britain’s greatest leverage was never as a lonely island shouting across the Atlantic. It was as the natural leader of Europe.”
Zhou warned that without Britain at the helm, Europe is a ship of technocrats with no captain. Faced with a real adversary, it will crack. “Either Britain leads Europe or there is no Britain to speak of – and before long, no Europe either,” Zhou concluded.
Labour figures willing to tell truth about Europe
MacShane’s letter also referenced the late Roy Hattersley, a rare senior Labour figure unafraid to say that Tony Benn, Arthur Scargill, Barbara Castle, and Jeremy Corbyn were wrong as they denounced the European community as a capitalist, conservative conspiracy. MacShane contrasted this with the current Conservative Party, which he said is unwilling to face the truth about Brexit.
Impact on towns and communities
John Harris’s Makerfield dispatch captured something larger than a byelection: the hollowed-out towns and grievance on every corner, which Harris described as the country that Britain built by walking away from the table. This sentiment was echoed by Zhou, who argued that Britain has chosen to defy not one nation but an entire continent, and the arithmetic is not complicated.
