When, ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum, then US president Barack Obama warned that leaving the EU would leave Britain at “the back of the queue” for a US trade deal, Brexiteers were apoplectic at a foreigner poking his nose into our affairs.
Nigel Farage, then leader of UKIP, decried it as a “shameful” example of a foreign leader “doing Downing Street’s dirty work”, while the future international trade secretary Liam Fox said the views of the president of the United States of America were “irrelevant”.
Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, wrote a heavily publicised piece for The Sun calling Obama’s stance “perverse” and “hypocritical”. He wrote: “Americans would never contemplate anything like the EU for themselves or for their neighbours in their own hemisphere. Why should they think it right for us?”
Future Brexit secretary Dominic Raab said,“I don’t think the British people will be blackmailed by anyone, let alone a lame duck US president on his way out”, arguing that “the reality is the US has failed and Barack Obama’s biggest trade failure has been in not being able to secure a trade deal with the EU”.
Other Eurosceptic MPs, like John Redwood, hilariously suggested that if surrendering sovereignty to foreign bodies was such a fantastic idea, Obama should propose creating an “American Union” with its neighbours.
And what of today, when a US administration of a rather different hue continues its meddling in domestic UK affairs?
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Reacting to Henry Nowak’s horrendous murder, the US Department of State posted on X: “Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline. They must be rejected across the West.
“The United States sends our condolences to the family of Henry Nowak and the people of the United Kingdom at this troubling time.”
That too looks an awful lot like a foreign administration poking its unwanted nose into our affairs – yet curiously none of Farage, Fox, Johnson, Raab, Redwood nor indeed any of the Brexiteers have had anything to say about it, remaining acquiescently silent. Double standards much?
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