BY ALEX STORY

The blind can now see.

We live in a time of miracles. That which was hitherto hidden lies fully exposed.

The European Union has acted as puberty blockers for the godforsaken countries that live under its malignant authority—or those, like Great Britain, being inexorably sucked back into its deadly orbit with the approval of their feckless ‘leadership’ class.

Nothing showed how far European nations have fallen more than seeing von der Leyen, and later Starmer, sitting next to Donald at his golf course in Scotland.

When the Big Orange spoke, all understood:

• Europe must pay.
• Immigration is destroying Europe.
• Energy should make money—ergo, wind power is a “con”.
• Free expression is a must.
• Taxes should be low.
• And, as an aside, Sadiq Khan is a “nasty little man”.

Simple, uncontroversial points, delivered with the legitimacy of elected office. He carried the constitutional voice of the United States—and, further, he spoke with her interests in mind.

When Ursula spoke, all switched off. She spoke, as she always does, in technocratic verbiage designed to triangulate—being, as she is, the last in a long line of compromises, standing simultaneously for the interests of all and none.

When Starmer spoke, we laughed—with a lingering sense of the deepest sadness. We saw how far we had fallen as a nation. Indeed, the titles and positions both carried as they travelled to see Trump in Turnberry were stripped of any lingering meaning by the time they left. Such was the epochal humiliation.

This deal was the European Union’s equivalent to the UK’s long list of retreats and surrenders—not least Chagos. The EU is paying to give away. Trump walked away with the loot. He won “bigly”, as he might have said, while the entire EU elite Korp howled in protest.

The European Union—and our country—knelt in capitulation, kissing the ring of their new emperor, paying tribute to the higher power much as barbarians did in ancient Rome.

It is, of course, not Ursula’s fault—though it is Starmer’s, and the long list of failed Conservative prime ministers before him. While he is the elected prime minister of a formerly great country (which he is bent on dismantling), she is merely the president of a rootless, paper-based organisation—existing only because of treaties.

In short, she is in charge of a dangerous fiction.

Dangerous because our experts have wasted enormous amounts of real capital, resources, and energy forcing powerful mid-sized European nations to transition into regions of a half-baked, Frankenstein federation. Without popular approval, this transition could only be achieved through a brutish accumulation of centralised—and therefore corruptible—regulations, known as les acquis communautaires, in which “turning the clock back” is understood as the greatest sin.

In other words, the EU was designed not to be reformable.

In the institution’s view, the peoples of Europe—deeply wedded to their nations—are the constant problem. If the goal is “ever closer union”, they must be bypassed.

As Charles de Gaulle, the last great Frenchman, remarked, the organisation is filled with people who are “appointed by governments but who immediately swear not to take any instructions from them, and who therefore are not even accountable to those governments”.

It is designed to work against the interests of the nation-state and for those of an artificial collective. What was once called treason was thereby institutionalised.

Further, before building an institution and granting it powers, the general opined: “One must first know who is responsible for what, and to whom.”

The answer to de Gaulle’s half-asked question is this: The European Union, and those who swear by it, is responsible to no one—and dedicated mainly to its own aggrandisement, to the detriment of its component parts.

Pooling sovereignty, it turns out, is merely throttling it—reducing, in the process, the whole continent (once the light of the world) to rubble. It is caught in a vicious cycle of slow but cruel and manifest decline.

We must be ready for ever-greater humiliations.

More than half a century of experimentation—and costly transitional surgery on the body politic of Western Europe—has left us neither beast nor fowl.

Trump’s simple bluntness showed beyond doubt that the European Union—and the deluded vision to which our homegrown internationalist fifth columnists (now in control of Great Britain) still cling—has been a civilisational catastrophe.

Not so long ago, in 1980, the nine countries that made up the European Community (as it was then called) had combined economies equal to that of the United States. It was a dynamic, multi-currency group of nations still focused on their individual interests. The cancerous tumour was there, of course—but it was benign. The patient was still in fine form.

Now, the US is nearly 50 per cent bigger than an expanded European Union, with the per capita difference closing in on 90 per cent—or $40,000 per year. An average American earns:

• 56 per cent more than an average Brit,
• 70 per cent more than a Frenchman,
• 107 per cent more than an Italian.

In short, when Trump met Ursula—and later Starmer—he smashed the EU fiction to smithereens with one great pair of real stones, finally forcing our elites to take note.

The staunchest supporters of the European project, such as Draghi, can see the problem. As he wrote in his report on competitiveness in September 2024, the European Union is failing on all fronts. No strategy, only regulation. His solution, however, was to call for a tightening of the noose around the national hostages, not to free them.

Now that the scales have fallen from all our eyes and our servitude has been exposed—such that even the ideologically blinded can see—it is time to take the institution to the back of the shed, give it its last rites, and put it out of its misery.

Once gone, just like the Berlin Wall when it crumbled, it will be remembered as an aberration.

Miracles, we must believe, do happen.

---

Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.