Image: diamond geezer, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
When the European Parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, described the UK government’s proposal this week for an interim customs agreement as a ‘fantasy’, as Euronews reported, it highlighted how the view of Europe from the home counties is very much at odds with the view of the UK from the European mainland.
Yet amid the welter of coverage of Brexit in the British media, the view from the other end of the telescope is very rarely adopted. Take a simple example. Throughout the referendum campaign in 2016, no commentator—or even partisan from the Remain side—asked the obvious question: why has the European Union grown from the six that the UK joined in 1973 to the 28 of today and yet only the UK has even considered leaving the club, never mind voted so to do? What is it, in other words, not about ‘Brussels’ but about Britain, which makes it so alien?
