Emmanuel Macron didn’t do much to challenge the stereotype of the haughty Parisian during his state visit to the United Kingdom. He sniffily blamed Keir Starmer for the migrant crisis. He got royal-watchers frothing by walking in front of the king. And worst of all he had a pop at Brexit. Dissing the most enthusiastically voted for thing in the entire history of this country? That’s fighting talk, Mr President.
Brexit is the root cause of the small-boats mayhem, he said. Apparently, us Brits were ‘sold a lie’ by the demagogic hawkers of Brexit. They told us leaving the EU would ‘make it possible to fight more effectively against illegal immigration’. In truth, said the Jupiterian know-it-all, our problems ‘require cooperation’. They require a ‘European approach’ rather than that divisive drivel the ‘populists often sold’.
It’s nothing we haven’t heard before, of course. No sooner had 17.4million Brits made that passionate, peaceful case for leaving the EU than both Remoaners here and Brit-bashers in Europe were noisily gnashing their teeth. Britain is doomed, they wailed. Everything from the migrant crisis to the climate crisis requires ‘cooperative solutions’, they cried, by which they meant the cool, aloof policymaking of Euro-experts rather than the hot-headed demands of the English ‘gammon’.
And yet to hear it from the president of France during his lavish, regal jaunt to the UK was especially galling. Who does he think he is? I’m far from a VIP and even I would never dream of landing in France and saying to random people: ‘What about that storming of the Bastille? How dumb was that?’ For the president of a neighbouring nation to bitch so publicly and so breezily about one of the most important democratic decisions in British history is outrageous.
It was a grotesque offence against diplomacy – worse, against the British people. Imagine if Starmer had the red carpet rolled out for him in Rome and then gave a speech saying Giorgia Meloni sold you idiots ‘a lie’. Or if Trump rocked up to Ireland and ran his mouth about their 2015 referendum in which the people gave the green light to gay marriage. You can bet the woke would have gone nuts over that. Yet when Macron libels the largest electoral bloc in British history as a bunch of dunces who were ‘sold a lie’, they chuckle and agree.
Indeed, Remoaner social media is buzzing with Macron love. It’s the stuff of their wet dreams to see a suave Frenchman fly into Britain to berate its oiks. And Starmer just stood there as Macron lamented our democratic choices. You’re not going to defend us, Sir Keir? You’re not going to put in one solitary good word for the rights and wisdom of the millions of Britons who fairly chose to leave the EU? He can’t, of course. He shares Macron’s loathing for Brexit. He agrees it was a savage act of self-harm carried out by dimwits who’d been ‘sold a lie’.
It was the imperiousness of Macron’s jibe that was most sick-making. We all know what he means when he says we were ‘sold a lie’. We know what he’s inferring when he says we were led like sheep on to a self-destructive path by the myths that ‘populists sold’. He means we’re dumb as fuck. He came to our country, he dined with our king and slept in our palaces, and then he told the riff-raff who will never darken the door of such opulent institutions that we were led astray by the babble of the powerful. It was an absurd libel against the masses.
It is a testament to how commonplace Brexitphobia is in both the British ruling class and the EU elites that no one batted an eyelid over Macron’s public shaming of the British people. There should have been fury. There should have been protests. There should at least have been angry newspaper columns. That there wasn’t is all the depressing proof we need that Brexit-bashing, which is really oik-bashing, is the favoured sport of the post-borders, post-sovereignty elites that think they and they alone should determine Europe’s fate.
Mr President, have you ever considered the possibility that it’s you who’s been ‘sold a lie’? You’ve been wholly sucked in by the conformist and elitist belief that national sovereignty is old hat. You’ve even argued that the modern system of Westphalian sovereignty should be overridden by a new regime of ‘European sovereignty’. That would entail every nation in Europe bending the knee to a higher authority than its own people — namely, the machinations of commissions no mortal voted for. You promote the lie that sovereignty is the problem, whereas working-class Britons gave voice to a truth that everyone, especially Revolutionary France, once understood: that the wisdom of the people is a far better map for the future than the prejudices of the remote.
Macron humiliated Britain. His true audience was not us Brits – we’re beyond hope – but his fellow elitists in the EU. See how easy it is to rebuke this uppity nation that dared to defy us, he was essentially saying. See how cavalierly we can publicly shame it? He was waving a red rag to others in the EU to come and have a go. No way. Next time a foreign leader comes to the UK and mocks its voters, let’s give them a piece of our minds.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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