Undoing Brexit Begins With a Break From Tyranny
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has more than enough moral and economic force at his disposal to declare that it’s best to rejoin the European Union.
What would John Bull say?
Photographer: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
When he helped draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Benjamin Franklin summarized the stakes with a quip immortalizing America's first inventor and founding father: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Franklin's warning to the 13 colonies resisting British tyranny is relevant to the UK nine years after the vote to leave the European Union and two weeks after the Trump administration imposed taxes on imports higher than those levied under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 that deepened the Great Depression. As Brexit presaged Vladimir Putin's interference in free markets, free elections (including conspirators sabotaging the 2016 US presidential race) and in Ukraine, where as many as 40,000 civilians and prisoners were murdered since the 2022 Russian invasion, Britain and the EU have every incentive to strengthen their shared democracies with a shared economy.