Collegian City News editor Philip H. Devoe, who is interning at the Wimbledon Guardian in London, England this summer, experienced the build-up and reaction to the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” vote first-hand. So as Americans celebrate their nation’s independence this July 4, Devoe encourages them to follow the example of the UK and prepare to fight for freedom in a country that’s “falling astray” from where it once was.
On the night of June 23, 64 million people fell asleep in the European Union. The next morning, they woke up in the United Kingdom. They are scared, they are confused, but they are free, and they are happy.
Many UKIP and Conservative Party leaders I spoke with Thursday, June 24, as an intern for the Wimbledon Guardian told me that nothing regarding the referendum results would affect the people for the next two years. I have found that to be utterly false after just one day in free Britain.
Through tears, my host family greeted me the morning after the vote with a loud shout of “Happy Independence Day!”
A man in a truck was flying Union Jacks and loudly playing Queen’s “I Want to Break Free,” a song that has become synonymous with Britain’s Independence Day.
A woman had lowered an EU flag and was stuffing it into a shoe box, a final rejection of the unelected parliament that had regulated her business from a building a country away.
“The sun is shining on a new Britain! Rule Britannia!” the receptionist at my building answered when I asked him how he was.
While many pro-leave leaders, such as the Conservative Party’s Boris Johnson and UKIP’s Nigel Farage, are correct in their statements following the vote that no economic or geopolitical effects will be felt by the people immediately, they are wrong to say there will be no effects at all. The English spent Friday, June 24 enjoying the indescribable and once-in-a-lifetime euphoria of freedom that comes with declaring independence.
I have felt overcome with deep jealousy and great happiness for my British coworkers and friends in the wake of their independance. As an American, I feel a connection with those who choose freedom from oppression and wish I could have been present 200 years ago in Philadelphia when my ancestors did the same.
It is important to note, however, that citizens of the UK were not necessarily unfree prior to the June 23 EU referendum vote. The freedom I’ve observed is much like the freedom gained by an 18-year-old moving to college and out of his house. Though his economic situation has a questionable immediate future and he risks breaking ties with his friends back home, he chooses a world that is uniquely, and exclusively, his.
As our forefathers knew, and as the UK will soon know, self-government is worth any risk and any fight.
By leaving the EU, the UK has gained the ability to make its own laws governing migration and foreign trade, shed the requirement that it share its natural resources and economy with other member states, and rid itself of an unelected, non-English parliament that ruled its fate from a foreign country. The UK now approaches a new government that is uniquely, and exclusively, British.
The parasitic European Parliament had been eating away at the UK’s natural resources and economic stability for 30 years, not out of allegiance to its stated goal of ‘European unity,’ but due to a contractual obligation to prop up failing nations on the shoulders of successful ones.
For example, many UK citizens residing on their nation’s vast coastlines eagerly voted leave on Thursday because of the devastating effect of the EU’s shared-responsibility laws regarding fishing. When the Common Fisheries Policy of the EU went into effect in 1983, it restricted a member nation’s fishing to just 12 nautical miles off its coast, leaving remaining waters open to other EU states. It also installed limitations on how much fish each nation could take.
These policies have wreaked such havoc on the economies of the small fishing towns dotting the English coastline that according to statistics compiled by British news site iTV, 70 percent of British seafood value now enters the supply chain from foreign fishers.
Following the vote, residents of these towns are not only celebrating the promise of renewed capital from seafood, but also the reclamation of their freedom to fish, something they argue they never should have lost in the first place.
In the U.S., progressive American politicians have been pressuring Congress to establish parasitic policies similar to those of the EU, but rather than taking high levels of fish from the oceans and redistributing them to landlocked countries for private sale, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hope to withdraw money from the hard-working and redistribute it to the non-working.
Even if you disagree politically with Britain’s exit from the EU or believe their exit has dangerous economic ramifications, remember your history. Remember the colonists who gave their lives to secure the self-evident freedoms being torn away from them. Remember that all humans want to be free, but that not all have the courage to take the leap of faith into sovereignty.
America took that leap 200 years ago, and now that Britain has followed, America is falling astray.
By all means, join Britain in celebrating its independence, but prepare to fight for your own.
