Dan Hannan to Barack Obama: Butt Out of the 'Brexit' Discussion

Daniel Hannan, the outspoken member of the European Parliament from Britain, tells it like it is to the eternal campaigner, Barack Obama:

Let’s imagine it the other way around. Suppose I were to tell you that you must accept the decisions of the Organization of American States as superior to the laws of your country. Suppose I were to add that you should acknowledge a Pan-American Parliament based in, say, Caracas, and having precedence over Congress. For good measure, let’s throw in a Central Bank in Buenos Aires that would administer your new currency, the Pan-American Peso.

How would you respond? I’m guessing that it would be something along the lines of: “Buzz off!” You might be tempted to use a stronger word than “buzz.” You might add that the days when Americans took instructions from overseas came to an end after Yorktown.

And you’d be right. The United States has prospered under her own laws and her own representatives. Few nations that have tried independence have later volunteered to give it back. Indeed, the United States arguably goes further than any other country on Earth in asserting her sovereignty, rejecting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and acquiescing only partially and with reservations in the work of the United Nations.

And yet Barack Obama thinks nothing of telling the United Kingdom that we should be a province of the European Union (EU). Campaigners for our membership want to involve him in the referendum campaign now underway in Britain. Disregarding the convention that a head of government should not intervene directly in the domestic affairs of a friendly democracy, they urge him to repeat his message that British subordination before the EU is both in America’s interest and in Britain’s….

On June 23, Britain will vote on whether to recover her independence. Americans, of all people, should sympathize.

Freedom is a precious thing, easily lost, as the Brits (and the Irish, alas) have discovered in their Faustian bargain with the Bureaucrats of Brussels. The sooner both countries leave the EU and return to their roots in the broader Anglosphere, the happier everyone will be. Go, Brexit!