Why the EU will fail

David Cameron was okay. He looked quite good – big, shiny baby face aside - and he was easily likeable unless you were so cloaked in bitter tribal hatred that you could see no good because of the man’s political clothes. But, ultimately, he stood for nothing so much as his own epithet ‘heir to Blair’. When it came to the big decision to stay in or leave the European Union he was revealed as very much Brussels’ man. But at least he made some inroads into reining in the excesses of the previous administration and regaining our grip on reality.

Reality is a quality that doesn’t tend to trouble the policy-makers on the left which is why last week’s council elections looked like nothing so much as Labour dreamers waking from a deep and troubled sleep. A sleep in which humanity was reduced to equality; given the range of abilities and aspirations of mankind, the only true equality is in misery. But now they see those empty dreams for what they are; Corbyn is no redeemer and the lisping gaffe-magnet that is Diane Abbott has made such an idiot of herself, so many times, in full public view, that even the most deeply branded child of Labour can surely have no illusions that she has been promoted through competence, rather than tokenism.

But despite all the left-wing frenzy, the foaming fury of hatred and the repeated insistence that the Tories are some rapacious, multi-headed hound from hell, the truth is different; and it is boringly benign. During the Tory years the NHS has not failed, nobody was evicted directly because of ‘Tory cuts’, nobody who needed it was left short of care, any more than they were under Labour and no matter how hard they try to use the discredited statistics, people are not dying in their thousands ‘because’ they passed a fitness to work assessment. Of course, the system isn’t perfect, but it is barely different from what it was under Blair, Brown and Co.

The facts are simple; only so many people can be supported in idleness and you can only tax working people so far before they start to resist. Branding people as far-right when all they did was vote to end the crippling profligacy of socialism is a desperate tactic of a failing campaign. And that oft-quoted soundbite that debt has tripled under the Tories plays to a wilful ignorance of the difference between debt and deficit; it was Labour who left us with both. Even those living perpetually on welfare are beginning to see that the well has run dry and that the books need to be balanced; nobody believes the left can ever do that. In June, Britain will return to its centre-right norm.

EU: "We don't see what the fuss is about."

So the EU, trying to exploit a non-existent lack of direction in Brexit, has no chance. The direction is clear; away from the hated EU. And as we leave others will follow. The tiger’s teeth have been pulled, its claws clipped, its appetite curtailed by gastric band and its capacious maw wired shut. Whatever happens in the French elections today, France is slowly waking up to the same truths; you can’t keep taking out, the pot is not limitless and the EU dream is a great big lie. Watch those tottering dominoes topple... and smile.