Letter to The Editor - We can learn from the UK experience not to be beguiled

To The Australian        Comments critical of Brexit by surgeons planning to leave the UK ("Workers' exodus signals end of a European dream", 4/12) illuminate one aspect of the tragedy involved in constitutional change: a clash of mutually incompatible idealistic dreams. Paolo Mueisan is "disappointed that the European dream of working and living in a borderless world has failed." Oncologist Alfredo Addeo says that a UK within the EU was for him "the prototype of multiculturalism and integration." Neither man shows any awareness of the historical fact that the British were incorporated into the EU by political dishonesty and trickery, notably that of Conservative prime minister Edward Heath. Nor do the two express any sympathy for the alternative dream held by the 52% who voted for Leave in 2016: resumption of an independent and free Britain and escape from a noxious bureaucratic tyranny. There is a lesson here for Australians: idealistic-sounding constitutional changes proposed for us by powerful lobby groups (the republic, constitutional recognition) may contain great disadvantages that would threaten our own traditional "Australian dream." We can learn from the UK experience not to be beguiled.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic