Barnier betrays Islington
Now that Michel Barnier the aspiring French politician has publicly admitted that the Brexit negotiating position of Michel Barnier the Eurocrat was nonsense, we can claim some sort of victory.
Well, this is awkward. Michel Barnier, the EU’s former ‘Brexit’ negotiator, has suggested that France should end all immigration from outside the EU for three to five years. Moreover, he believes it is time to rethink the Schengen Agreement, which gives EU citizens the right to live and work in any other EU country.
Some of us said throughout the Brexit negotiations that the EU Single Market’s so-called Four Freedoms (of movement of capital, people, goods, and services) were never as inviolable as the EU claimed. We believed the EU only presented them as sacrosanct to help it extract concessions from Britain.
Now that Michel Barnier the aspiring French politician has publicly admitted that the Brexit negotiating position of Michel Barnier the Eurocrat was nonsense, we can claim some sort of victory.
However, for Britain’s metropolitan liberals, it leaves them in something of a pickle.
Remainers wept bitterly when we Brexit troglodytes ‘took away their right’ of free movement within the EU. They implied that our desire to limit immigration proved we were spam-faced racists.
In sharp contrast to our unconscionable workingclassness, the enlightened Parisians, Milanese and Berliners who guided policy in the EU understood the enriching value of open borders.
And for Islington dinner-party circuit Remainers, nobody epitomised this euro-sophistication more than Michel Barnier.
His undoubted bureaucratic adeptness was the embodiment of Brussels efficiency and modernity. More importantly, Barnier gave Remainers more opportunities than anybody else did to tweet ‘Welcome to Brexit’ and ‘this is what you voted for’ as he demolished British government negotiating positions and smacked naughty Tory bottoms.
For this reason, throughout the Brexit divorce proceedings, Remainers would repeat Barnier’s arguments as though he had brought them down from Mount Sinai, etched into tablets of stone. ‘Thou shalt not have thy cake and eat it!’
So what will fashionably metropolitan Remainers do now? Follow Barnier’s lead and recant the open borders shibboleth? Or accept his betrayal of the cause, and give up on the EU as the utopian ideal?
At the time of writing, The Guardian’s website had not published a single article on the story, so perhaps they’re all still deciding.
