A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money

What price principles? Honour? More appropriate, what price sovereignty?

These questions naturally come up whenever the word ‘Brexit’ is mentioned in my presence.

Now I seldom feel I’m enunciating majority opinion, but in this case I’m sure just about everybody in Britain will agree with me: we’ve had it up to here with all the incessant bickering, wrangling and squabbling about Brexit.

And we’re sick of all that talk about a whole raft of ‘deals’ covering every possible permutation, each propped up by sky-high columns of figures proving that either we’ll end up eating house pets post-Brexit or become rich beyond our wettest dreams.

Such disciplines as history, political science, philosophy, constitutional law have all fallen by the wayside. Accountancy reigns supreme: the whole issue has been reduced to a balance sheet, with the bottom line pointing one way or the other.

Enter the greatest adman who has ever lived, Bill Bernbach, who came up with the maxim in the title above. It’s fully applicable to the situation at hand.

Brexit may make us richer or poorer, no one knows for sure. Actually, now we’re on the subject, I suspect we’ll suffer a bit, for the first few years at any rate.

The EU is bloody-minded enough to cut off its economic nose to please its political face. That vile setup is guaranteed to try to punish Britain even at a huge cost to itself, pour encourager les autres, as Napoleon I said and Napoleon IV, aka Manny Macron, doubtless keeps repeating.

If Britain leaves the EU painlessly and profitably, those dominoes will start falling one after another. And they’ll continue to do so until that awful contrivance is reduced to a single Franco-German state, with Angie as its Queen and Manny as her consort (he fancies older women).

The readjustment of our trading patterns will take a few years, and we may be worse off in the interim. Then again we may not – if I could predict economic trends, I’d be living in the house currently occupied by Roman Abramovich (not that he acquired it thanks to his economic prescience – Google ‘organised crime’ for details).

My point, oft-repeated, is that the decision to regain our sovereignty and to have all our laws passed by our own Parliament should have nothing to do with money. Nothing. Nil. Zilch.

Sovereignty is neither an incremental nor a relative concept. A great nation can’t be almost sovereign or partially sovereign. It can be either sovereign or subjugated.

If the choice between the two is made on the basis of pounds and pence, we might as well not bother.

For, if that’s all it boils down to, we’re already subjugated in perpetuity, Brexit or no Brexit. We’re for ever enslaved morally and intellectually – we’ve already done an Esau and sold our political soul for the mess of rancid EU potage.

A rich slave who fears becoming a poor free man, remains a slave in either case.

This reminds me of the story of a bear born and raised captive in a cage 10 feet square. For years he moved back and forth within that space, 10 feet this way, 10 feet that.

Then he was set free, and what do you know? He continued to pace the same 10 feet back and forth. The cage wasn’t around his body; it was in his mind.

How could any Englishman attach his signature to the Maastricht Treaty? A document that in one fell swoop prostituted Britain’s constitution and debased the memory of the millions who gave their lives defending their country’s independence over two millennia? I don’t know; I’ve only lived here for 30 years.

But I do know that Brexit is an attempt to undo the constitutional catastrophe created by one flourish of John Major’s pen. It’s the only honest thing to do and – for those who understand the vital significance of the British constitution for the British nation – the only intelligent thing.

Yet what do we do? We argue whether acting on sound moral and intellectual principles will make us a few pounds richer or poorer.

Call me an incurable optimist (one charge that’s seldom levelled at me), but I don’t believe the British have become completely corrupt. Partially corrupt, for sure. But not completely.

I don’t believe my countrymen have calculators for brains and spreadsheets for hearts.

The thought that our politicians have neither hearts nor brains comes more easily. But I still believe the nation has enough spunk left to force our spivocrats into acting with a modicum of decency.

And the upshot of it all? Simple. The only good deal is summary exit with no deal – and damn the torpedoes.