Excellent letter in yesterday’s Washington Post:
Letters to the Editor
December 19 at 5:26 PM
In his Dec. 16 Sunday Opinion essay, “Britain can’t thrive without Brexit,” Henry Olsen argued that the European Union “holds Britain in contempt.” Mr. Olsen’s claim is at odds with decades of European accommodation of Britain’s demands.
Britain has achieved a unique form of E.U. membership. It is in the European single market but not in the European single currency, it benefits from access to E.U. labor without accepting uncontrolled travel, and it fully participates in the E.U. without being tied into the European project of “ever closer union.” Better yet, the E.U. has given Britain a substantial rebate on its budget contribution every year since 1985 and has adopted former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s notion of a European single market.
The folly of Brexit is that we are now discarding this genuinely “special relationship.”
Porter’s Pensées 
This a true statement, and the EU can not understand how the existing semi-detached status enjoyed by the UK can be seen as a burden, except of course that twenty years of propaganda by vested interests (Murdoch press, Barclay brothers and the Mail group) have created the myth. This has been folded into the other myth of the ‘heroic defence’ of ‘British values and interests’ , such as ‘taking back control,’ a victory conjured out of heroic ‘defeat.’ Sadly, these nationalist myths will cost the people dearly, especially the young, qualitatively as well financially and so will be incalculable.
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Absolutely. I agree with every word.
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