From the Guardian:

The foreign secretary called (the EU) a “teleological construction” that was “ends driven”. He said the founding fathers of the common market decided to create a “new sense of political identity by legal means” – but claimed this went against liberal thinking. “(John Stuart) Mill would say that the national group, the group that most associate with each other, govern each other. But this was a new idea to try to transcend that.”

Such is the spin ahead of a major speech by Boris Johnson this week, billed as an attempt to unite Remainers and Brexiteers.

Boris’ language seems to inherently raise the white flag in the argument as to whether we’d be better off saying in the EU:

What I would like to see is this country taking advantage of the people’s decision, to get the best economic result from that decision, and do the best we can do.

But the largest white flag BoJo raises seems to be through using the memory of someone who died 41 years before the First World War, let alone the Second World War which led to the creation of the Common Market, which led to the European Union.

We’re used to the shroud of Churchill being taken up for all sorts of causes. But it is quite a first for Boris Johnson to clothe himself in the shroud of John Stuart Mill.

I wonder if Boris is familiar with this excerpt from “Representative Government” by Mill?:

Whatever really tends to the admixture of nationalities, and the blending of their attributes and peculiarities in a common union, is a benefit to the human race. Not by extinguishing types, of which, in these cases, sufficient examples are sure to remain, but by softening their extreme forms, and filling up the intervals between them.

There’s an interesting article on Mill and the EU on the LSE blog by Corrado Morricone.

* Paul Walter was a supply chain manager with a leading international IT firm from 1981 to 2016. Paul is a Liberal Democrat activist. He is one of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.