For us, the arguments against Britain’s membership of the European Union are strongly persuasive. They are political arguments: for British self-determination; for the continuation of the nation state as a good in itself; for throwing off the burden of dictatorship by corrupt bureaucrats.

But what of the economic arguments? Is it better for Britain to remain in the EU or to leave? Is it better for the world economy for Britain to be in or out?

George Freidman, who founded the private intelligence firm Stratfor, and is internationally recognized as an authority on world affairs, writes at Mauldin Economics:

In looking at Friday’s market decline, it is clear that the investment community was surprised at the outcome of the referendum in the U.K. What is most surprising is that they were surprised. There were two competing views of the EU. One view regarded the European Union as essential to British economic well-being. The other saw the European Union as a failing institution, and saw Britain being pulled down if it remained.

The European Union has been caught in long-term stagnation. Eight years after the financial crisis it is still unable to break out of it. In addition, a large swath of Europe, especially in the south, is in depression with extremely high unemployment numbers. An argument could be made that these problems will be solved in the long run and that Britain should be part of the solution for its own sake. The counterargument is that if the problems had been soluble they would have been solved years ago.

For a financial community, there is a built-in desire for predictability. It can make money in good or bad markets and economies. It has trouble making money in uncertainty. Therefore, the financial community was inherently biased toward Britain remaining in the EU because it gave them predictability. There was a subconscious assumption that everyone had the same bias toward maintaining the status quo. This was not just the view of the global financial community. It was one shared with other elites – political, journalistic, academic and the rest.

Someone I know, who has many friends in Britain, told me that she didn’t know anyone who favored a British exit. That was true. As the graduate of an elite college she is in touch with similar people around the world. This enclosure has profound social indications to consider, but in this case it created a psychological barrier to anticipating what was coming. When everyone you know thinks an idea is rubbish, it is hard to imagine that there is a majority out there that you haven’t met that doesn’t share your views.

There was also a sense of contempt for the opponents. The leaders, like UKIP leader Nigel Farage, were odd from the elite point of view. Their rhetoric was unseemly. And their followers by and large did not come from the places in London where the elite did. Their views were not the liberal, transnational views of the supporters of the EU. They led much narrower, harder lives and did not know the world as the pro-EU people did. So they were discounted. There was an expectation that the elite, who had governed Britain for so long, were dealing with an annoyance, rather than a peaceful rising against them. Thus, in spite of the polls indicating the election would be extremely close, the “remain” supporters could not believe they would lose.

The reporters of leading British media were talking to their European and American counterparts. The politicians were doing the same. And the financial community is on the phone daily with colleagues around the world.

The challenge that was posed in the U.K. referendum is present in many countries around the world, albeit in different forms.

What has become universal is the dismissive attitudes of the elite to their challengers.It is difficult for the elite to take seriously that the less educated, the less sophisticated and the less successful would take control of the situation. The French Bourbons and the Russian Romanovs had similar contempt for the crowds in the streets. They dismissed their lack of understanding and inability to act – right to the moment they burst into the palaces.

The analogy should not be overdone but also should not be dismissed. The distance between what I will call the technocratic elite and the increasingly displaced lower-middle and even middle class is becoming one of the major characteristics of our time. This elite did not expect “leave” to win because it was clear to them that the EU would work itself out. They didn’t know anyone who disagreed with them – a measure of how far out of touch they had become with the real world. And above all, they were dismissive of the kind of people who led their opponents.

Not understanding their own isolation and insularity; not grasping the different world view of “leave” supporters or that they couldn’t care less if the financial institutions of the City moved to Frankfurt; not grasping the contempt in which they were held by so many, the elite believed that “leave” could not win. …

In the end, the financial decline on Friday resulted from the lack of imagination of the elite. And it is that lack of imagination that led them to believe that the current situation could continue. That lack of imagination, the fact that the elite had no idea of what was happening beyond their circle of acquaintances, is a far greater crisis in the West than whether Britain is in the EU or even if the EU survives.

We are living in a social divide so deep that serious people of good will and a certain class have never met anyone who wants to leave the EU or who supports blocking Muslim immigration or perhaps even who will vote for Donald Trump. …

No one had the right to believe that this couldn’t happen. No one should believe that it will be confined to Britain. No one should believe that it won’t happen again. The days when the elite could assert that the EU is going to be just fine in the face of evidence to the contrary are over.

This new wave in politics, this force arising directly from the “silent majority”, is transforming the political scene not only in Europe but throughout the West.

As it is a movement that favors capitalism, it will bring greater prosperity to greater numbers of individuals if it continues to succeed. The next victory needs to be the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Dire predictions that Britain will suffer economically for leaving the EU are not likely to be true.

It is far more likely that the EU will be the worse off for the divorce.

Matthew Lynn, financial columnist, writes at The Spectator (UK);

Share prices in freefall. Pension funds obliterated. A sea of red ink across trading screens. Billions wiped off the value of leading companies. And brokers, or at least the automated trading algorithms that have replaced them, contemplating throwing themselves out of the window, or whatever exactly it is that an algorithm does when it has a really bad day at the office. That is surely an accurate description of the City of London this morning.

Except, er, is isn’t really. In fact, as the financial markets wake up to an outcome they had planned for but never really expected, something far more interesting is happening. True, the FTSE-100 has taken a hit, and bank shares look about as popular as Jean-Claude Junker at a UKIP rally, but on the whole the losses in London have been fairly modest. It is Madrid, Milan, Paris, and Frankfurt that are tanking. The reason? While there will be a short-term hit to the British economy, it will be the rest of Europe that suffers far more from this than us – and investors have already figured that out.

Just take a look at the figures. The predictions were that the London market would go into meltdown if we voted to leave the EU. It would be Lehman Brothers all over again, except probably far worse. The index could lose 20 per cent or 30 per cent of its value we were told. In fact, by lunchtime the FTSE had lost 260 points, or 4.2%. That’s a nasty hit. But it’s only fallen back to its level of, er, last Friday. In effect , a week of gains have been lost. It is still up on the beginning of February. You need a very fevered imagination to describe that as a catastrophe.

The really heavy losses are on the other side of the English Channel. Madrid’s IBEX 35 is down by 12.5 per cent. Milan’s MIB is down by 11 per cent. In Paris the CAC-40 is off by 8.4 per cent and even Germany’s mighty DAX is off by 7 per cent. In short, the losses across Europe are far worse than ours. That is, to say the least, a bit odd. After all, Brexit is meant to be an economic catastrophe for us, not for our neighbours, who have all been wise enough to stay in the EU, and will carry on enjoying all its wonderful economic benefits.

So what’s up? The explanation is simple. In reality, the EU doesn’t make much difference to the UK economy one way or another. We export less and less to it every year, and the Single Market, while valuable in some ways, was never much use for the kind of high-end services we sell abroad. By Christmas, we will have sorted out our political problems, and be growing again.

But Europe faces a real challenge. If the British can come out, why not the Spanish, with youth unemployment of more than 50 per cent? Why not the Italians, with an economy that is now smaller than it was in 2000? Why not the French, who have lost competitiveness relentlessly against Germany, and are stuck in permanent recession? If a relative successful prosperous economy, with lots of jobs, votes to leave, so might others. In fact, the rest of the EU could now face a rolling series of populist revolts, and many of them will be successful, and that will put constant pressure on the euro, and their economies. Our trauma will be over quite quickly but the EU’s has just begun. The markets have worked that out – and investors are quite rightly getting out while they still can.

The ruling elites will do their utmost to reverse the decision of the majority of British voters to take their country out of the corrupt dictatorship of the European Union.

So we learn from the great writer Theodore Dalrymple, whom we asked to comment on Brexit. This is what he told us:

When you read the French newspapers, which mostly air the opinion of the French political class or elite, you realise that the whole European project as they call it is about being large and powerful. It has nothing to do with the welfare of the people or even economic efficiency. It is megalomania pure and simple (and the Germans don’t want to be Germans any more). The result in Britain was a slap in the face for the elite, who never really expected it, and will now set about reversing the result. There are moves afoot to nullify the referendum. 

It has yet to be revealed what moves those are. But it is a certainty that the powers, the principalities, the rulers of the darkness of this world will do their utmost not to let the British decision stand. They know that “the population got it wrong”, as Theodore Dalrymple sums up their stunningly arrogant belief.

Which side will win the battle, now growing hotter in Europe and America, between the common man and the dark powers?

Full of dread, but not devoid of hope, we back the common man.

Donald Trump’s statement on Britain’s EU referendum:

The people of the United Kingdom have exercised the sacred right of all free peoples.

They have declared their independence from the European Union, and have voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy.

A Trump Administration pledges to strengthen our ties with a free and independent Britain, deepening our bonds in commerce, culture and mutual defense.

The whole world is more peaceful and stable when our two countries – and our two peoples – are united together, as they will be under a Trump Administration.

Come November, the American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence.

Americans will have a chance to vote for trade, immigration and foreign policies that put our citizens first.

They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite, and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people.

I hope America is watching, it will soon be time to believe in America again.

May the rafters ring with many rounds of cheers! Britain has voted to leave the European Union.

After hours of anxiety as the polls went on indicating a defeat for “Brexit” (the campaign for Britain to exit Europe), good news came at last – all the more glorious for being sudden and unexpected.

Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, made a very good victory speech:

Prime Minister David Cameron, who had argued passionately for a “remain” vote, has announced that he will resign.

To add to our pure delight, we find cause for Schadenfreude too. The hard Left is bitter and furious. The Guardian, for instance – which recently carried an op-ed by the evil George Soros urging Britons to vote to remain – headlines: “Nigel Farage’s victory speech was a triumph of poor taste and ugliness.” The typical snobbery of the Left on full display as disappointment bites.

And the prospect of yet more joy looms ahead. The (London) Times (which has dispensed with its paywall for 24 hours so its opinion on this enormous event can be easily accessed) promises:

The dream of a united Europe is over. … Britain decided to walk away “without a shot being fired”, as Nigel Farage put it when dawn broke this morning.

Brexit will strike terror into the hearts of European governments and force a dramatic rethink of the organisation which aimed to bind nation states tightly together in the name of peace and prosperity.

Britain, the EU’s second-largest net funder, is the first country to walk away and the fear of contagion is real. Most European leaders also know they would struggle to win an in-out referendum. That is why they are so desperate to avoid one. …

The British referendum had already forced even Jean-Claude Juncker, the arch-federalist president of the European Commission – the institution which proposes all those directives and regulations – to admit that the EU meddled too much in everyday life.

There will be many declarations around the continent today that the show must go on and the British must not be allowed to bring the whole edifice crashing down. …

However, Europe’s ruling elite knows that the EU has to change. …

There were already some signs that senior EU figures grasped the seriousness of the situation. Donald Tusk, president of the European council, the forum for national leaders, said this month that European elites had to awaken from dreams of “all kinds of Utopias” such as the idea that nation states could be banished. “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our euro-enthusiasm,” he said.

Breitbart sees it this way:

Brexit: Britain Votes with Trump, against Hillary, Obama 

British voters chose to “leave” the European Union on Thursday, defying the polls — and President Barack Obama, who had urged Britain to “remain” in the EU. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also urged Britain to stay in the EU. Only Donald Trump had backed the campaign to leave.

Republican strategists had panned Trump’s decision to travel to the UK in the midst of campaign turmoil, and in the wake of his blistering attack on Hillary Clinton earlier this week.

Now, however, it looks like a risk that paid off handsomely, in the currency of foreign policy credibility.

Obama’s advice may have pushed some voters to “leave”. In April he warned British voters they would be at the “back of the queue” in trade with the U.S. if they left the EU. …

Trump, who happens to be in Scotland to open a golf resort, promised in May that leaving the EU would not put Britain at the “back of the queue”, and said: “I think if I were from Britain I would probably want to go back to a different system.” He reiterated that support last week, telling the Sunday Times: “I would personally be more inclined to leave, for a lot of reasons like having a lot less bureaucracy. … But I am not a British citizen. This is just my opinion.”

Perhaps this will prove to be a turning point; marking the limit to the leftward trend which has been taking the West back into medieval darkness; and the start of a return to the values of the Enlightenment.

While we tensely await the outcome of the British referendum which will decide whether or not the country leaves the EU (we hope it leaves*), here’s some British comedy.

PowerLine posted this clip from the marvelous British series Yes, Prime Minister. 

We also pinch from PowerLine the American version of the joke about the newspapers:

The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country; the New York Times is read by people who think they ought to run the country; the New York Daily News is read by people who actually do run the country; USA Today is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Wall Street Journal is read by people who own the country; the Los Angeles Times is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; the New York Post is read by people who think that it is.

There is, however, no American newspaper equivalent of The Sun. It’s the one thing where Rupert Murdoch has let us down.

• Declaration of interest: Our editor-in-chief, Jillian Becker, is a member of the Council of the Freedom Association, a British organization that has been campaigning for years to bring Britain out of the European Union.

Tomorrow Britain holds a referendum on whether to remain a member of the undemocratic and irredeemably corrupt European Union, or leave it.

Those who want to leave it are already calling 23rd. June UK Independence Day.

President Obama went to Britain to tell the British not to leave the EU.

The excellent conservative historian Andrew Roberts comments on this impertinence. He writes at the Wall Street Journal:

On June 23 the British people will be going to the polls to choose whether they want to continue with the present system whereby 60% of British laws are made in Brussels and foreign judges decide whether those laws are legitimate or not, or whether we want to strike out for independence and the right to make all of our own laws and have our own British judges decide upon them.

It’s about whether we can recapture the right to deport foreign Islamist hate preachers and terrorist suspects, or whether under European human-rights legislation they must continue to reside in the U.K., often at taxpayers’ expense. The European Union is currently experiencing migration on a scale not seen since the late 17th century—with hordes of young, mostly male Muslims sweeping from the southeast into the heart of Europe. Angela Merkel invited them in and that might be fine for Germany, but why should they have the right to settle in Britain as soon as they get a European passport?

Surely — surely — this is an issue on which the British people, and they alone, have the right to decide, without the intervention of President Obama, who adopted his haughtiest professorial manner when lecturing us to stay in the EU, before making the naked threat that we would be sent “to the back of the queue” (i.e., the back of the line) in any future trade deals if we had the temerity to vote to leave. Was my country at the back of the line when Winston Churchill promised in 1941 that in the event of a Japanese attack on the U.S., a British declaration of war on Japan would be made within the hour?

Was Great Britain at the back of the line when America was searching for allies in the Korean War in the 1950s?

When America decided to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War in the early 1990s, was Britain at the back of the line when we contributed an armored division that fought on your right flank during Operation Desert Storm?

Were we at the back of the line on 9/11, or did we step forward immediately and instinctively as the very first of your allies to contribute troops to join you in the expulsion of the Taliban, al Qaeda’s hosts, from power in Afghanistan?

Or in Iraq two years later, was it the French or the Germans or the Belgians who stood and fought and bled beside you? Whatever views you might have over the rights or wrongs of that war, no one can deny that Britain was in its accustomed place: at the front of the line, in the firing line. So it is not right for President Obama now to threaten to send us to the back of the line.

Britain is the largest foreign investor in the U.S. — larger even than China— so it makes no economic sense for you to send us to the back of the line. Yet quite apart from your economic or strategic best interests, it also makes no moral sense for America to treat your genuine friends (you also see this phenomenon in the case of Israel, of course) as though they are your enemies, while all too often you treat your rivals and enemies — Cuba, China, Venezuela and others — as though they’re your friends. In what sane world does America put Iran at the front of the line for trade deals, while sending Britain to the back?

President Obama might be very clever intellectually …

Oh? What evidence is there for that? Andrew Roberts is just being kind, we guess.

… but he hasn’t grasped the central essence of American foreign policy over the centuries, which is the honorable one of being a strength and beacon to your allies and a standing reproach and constant source of anxiety to your enemies and to the enemies of freedom.

Fortunately, the best kind of Americans instinctively understand that truth, and outside the Obama administration nobody seems to want to relegate my country to the back of the line. Anglo-American friendship is far stronger than any one administration or government. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve read the obituaries of people who have written the obituary of the Special Relationship. It survives because it lives on in the hearts of our two peoples — who have so much more in common than that which separates us — rather than just in the pages of venerable treaties and history books.

The good news is that the British people don’t seem to have taken much notice of President Obama — indeed, on the day he left the U.K., the Leave campaign actually saw a 2% increase in the polls. (As it’s neck and neck at the moment, perhaps we should invite him back?)

The endless threats about trade deals and GDP per capita from the EU and the IMF and the World Bank and the OECD, instead of cowing the British people, seem merely to have excited their bloody-mindedness. They recognize that they might indeed take a short-term financial hit, but there are some things more important than money.

Imagine if a bunch of accountants had turned up at Valley Forge in that brutal winter of 1777 and proved with the aid of pie-charts and financial tables that Americans would be better off if they just gave up the cause of independence. George Washington would have sent them off with a few short, well-chosen words on the subject — probably derived from the Anglo-Saxon.

Winston Churchill was warned repeatedly by the Treasury that it was bankrupting Britain to continue her lonely and seemingly doomed struggle against the power that utterly dominated the entire European Continent in 1940 and 1941, but he treated all such warnings with his characteristically coruscating ire. That is what people do who love their country, and that is what I hope my countrymen will do on June 23.

And if we do vote to leave the EU on Thursday, I hope that Americans with a sense of history, Americans with a sense of tradition who honor friendship past and future, above all Americans who know what self-government means to a free people, will rally to the cause of an independent Britain.

*

In the leftist Guardian, George Soros the Evil – Obama’s friend – has an article desperately trying to stop Britons voting to leave the EU, on the spurious grounds that the country will experience a disastrous economic crash if they succeed. That should be the final signal to Britain that leaving is definitely the right thing to do.

Pat Condell passionately makes the case for “Brexit” – Britain’s exit from the European Union:

Brexit The Movie:

Long as the movie is, it’s riveting. Find out just how horrible the EU is – and what a loser!

The four devastating mistakes of the West since the Second World War were:

• Establishing socialist welfare states – so creating classes of permanent dependents.
• Creating the European Union – its members thus losing sovereignty and democratic government, and coming under the corrupt and arbitrary rule of unelected bureaucrats.
• Allowing the influx of unlimited numbers of Muslim settlers – a continuing invasion and colonization that is likely to destroy European culture.
• The election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States. In America itself, President Obama increased economic redistribution through a tyrannical health care act, reduced prosperity, and weakened the rule of law. And his feeble foreign policy effected wars, civil wars, massacres, enslavements, and a vast displacement of populations.

Can the West recover?

There is no sign that socialist policies are changing in Europe. But the European Union is under increasing strain. Britain may withdraw from it in the near future, and that could encourage other members to recover their independence. Sovereign states will be able to change their immigration policies – though it is probably too late for any European country to save itself from eventual Muslim domination.

As for America, if another “progressive” (Democratic Leftist) president follows Obama, there will be no recovery from stagnation at home and weakness abroad. But America has a chance of changing for the better if a Republican administration is elected this year.

The fate of Western civilization depends on it.