One is often reminded of the salience of the expression, “actions speak louder than words,” and on July 2, Nigel Farage and his new team of Brexit Party members at the European Union showed the world just how salient it is.
According to Natasha Clark, of The Sun, Farage and the 28 other Brexit Party members who recently were elected to serve as Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) did something bold and unmistakable on their first day inside the expensive halls of the EU Parliament Building in Strasbourg, France.
As the self-important politicians around them stood for the newly chosen “EU Anthem”, the strains of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, Farage and his team turned their backs.
Said Farage:
We're not here to cause damage, we're just here to be cheerfully defiant, to stand up for the people of the UK that clearly want to leave.
Epic, and, contrary to so many empty, flash-in-the-pan, gestures, meaningful.
It’s epic for numerous reasons.
First, this clearly meant something to the men and women who joined Farage to turn their backs. They will not abide by standing to attention for the “anthem” of a political creation that they and their constituents three years ago voted to leave.
Second, the fact that pompous blowhards within the European Union that day debuted a piece of music they selected to be their “national anthem” is extremely telling, confirming precisely what so many Brexit supporters have told people for a long, long time.
The organization, originally proposed to be a “common market” has grown into a regulatory, tax-and-spend leviathan that is close to organizing its own military. It is becoming a European Super-State.
This is just the kind of thing that Brexit supporters have protested, as British people shove billions of Pounds into the system and receive nothing more than regulations such as “Codex Alimentarius”, which dictates that Brits could only plant seeds approved by… the EU. (This is something about which even British punk band Killing Joke warned years ago, and which is seeping into United States politics/regulations as well. Next week, the US will be sending a USDA bureaucrat to Switzerland to attend a meeting on worldwide conformity to the Codex.)
It’s the kind of top-down, command-and-control, anti-liberty, forced homogeneity that Farage and his fellow Brexit Party members turned against.
And theirs was a signal to folks back home.
The people who voted for Britain to be free of the EU are fed-up with the delays and lip service and double-dealing in both the EU and their own Parliament. Theresa May is on her way out of Number Ten Downing Street because, as many Brexit supporters warned, all she did was delay and delay until she nearly got England into a position of calling for another Brexit vote when the first was completely legit (as far as votes go), and should have been acted upon two years ago.
Farage and his Brexit Party EU Reps from Britain stood tall and did something that tells the EU bureaucrats they’ve had enough. Like the punk rockers who have warned of the centralizing power of the EU, they showed their disdain for the body that should not have any influence over them or their neighbors’ lives back home.
Good for them.
If we could get the US to turn away from adoption of EU-style rules and regulations, we’d be much better off, as well.