BELGRADE, THURSDAY

BREXIT ADVOCATES, who insist that they are now free to propel Britain into a new Elizabethan era, a fresh epoch of glorious achievement which will see provincial Britain rise from its own ashes to take its place among the powerhouses of the world once again, are either ignorant of their own history, criminals, or mentally ill, says an eminent English historian.

“Well first, they’ll have to ditch Scotland, and Northern Ireland,” says Elton Anthony, Cambridge Professor of Brexit Logic, who points out that the Elizabethan era was an English project, that Scotland was an independent kingdom at the time, whose Queen the Elizabethans actually executed, and that Ireland was at war with England throughout much of the reign of Elizabeth 1 because the English were trying to grind it into the dirt. “Yeah, what’s new?, you might ask”

Professor Anthony adds that late Tudor England actually had as its primary strategic goal the return of the English Crown’s French lands, lost a century before in the Hundred Years War. “That project failed miserably. So in essence, Elizabeth’s reign, by her criteria, was really a failure. Only hindsight makes her glorious. She probably didn’t see it quite like that.”

The academic, who insists England’s later overseas success was to some degree a mere consequence of the country’s abject European failure in the 16th Century, explains that loss of its European lands saw the English Crown unable to return to the Continent and having to fall back on the new opportunities of American colonialism and African enslavement, which followed Columbus’s voyage to the New World in 1492.

“It was a case of sink or swim,” he says. “Facing the might of Spain, the great power in Europe then, the best England* could do to survive, was assist Dutch rebels in the Spanish Netherlands, steal from Spanish ships and try and grab some of North America from its natives. We became, in truth, a criminal enterprise. That continued for centuries and then when slavery went out of fashion, we moved into drug trafficking. It’s not a pretty picture. We destroyed India and China and God knows how many other places. We helped ruin Africa and America. And now we want to do it all again? Are the Brexiteers really suggesting we ally with the Mexican Cartels and invade India? It’s laughable. These people need psychiatry.”

*The Armada was a lucky break. Nothing more -ED