To listen to the howling and wailing from the political and media elites, you’d think the British people were forcing their government to close all the hospitals and burn all the schools down. The reaction to Britain’s exit from the European Union has been that over-the-top hysterical.
The British Empire survived for many centuries before anyone ever conceived of the EU – which was only established in 1993 – and I think it can probably do just fine once again not being a member of it. But you’d never know it to see the reaction to the Brexit vote. It’s as if no nation ever survived independently without being part of a massively bureaucratic international body that insisted on telling all its member states what policies they were and were not free to adopt.