STEPHEN GLOVER: What do all those stars who love to denigrate Brexit Britain have to say now their beloved Europe has fallen for the hard-Right? By Stephen Glover for the Daily Mail Published: 21:16 EDT, 12 June 2024 | Updated: 04:28 EDT, 13 June 2024 e-mail 81 View comments Will the rise of the hard-Right in Europe lead progressives to question their conviction that civilisation thrives south of Calais, whereas Brexit Britain is narrow, reactionary and inward-looking? Such prejudices are not new. For at least a hundred years, English intellectuals have looked longingly across the Channel in the belief that in almost every respect life is superior on the Continent. George Orwell wrote about the phenomenon in 1940, famously asserting that ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality’.
He added, accurately, that ‘the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow ’. Dame Emma Thompson, a fervent anti-Brexiteer, who before the 2016 referendum described Britain as a 'tiny, little, cloud-bolted, rainy.
.. cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island' Has anything changed? The war obviously put a slight dampener on the progressives’ certainty that, culturally and politically, Europe had much to teach dingy old Britain.
Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy — not to mention Stalinist Russia, Franco-ist Spain and Vichy France — rather punctured the view tha.
