Come on Britain — where’s your ‘keep calm and carry on’?

If you ever want a lesson in how not to conduct a major national policy, Brexit is it, writes Peta Credlin. This whole fiasco is undermining the will of the British people.

While many of you enjoyed a Christmas break bathed in our warm southern sun, I headed to the UK, where the bleak skies and 4.30pm sunsets pretty much summed up the national mood.

If you ever want a lesson in how not to conduct a major national policy, Brexit is it.

It beggars belief that so many in the British establishment have never accepted the people’s vote to leave the European Union and don’t trust their country to make its own way in the world, but that’s the predicament one of the world’s greatest nations now finds itself in.

British PM Theresa May had it right two years ago in her Lancaster House address when she declared that “no deal is better than a bad deal”.

But despite surely knowing that any deal the EU offered would be a humiliation, her government has failed to prepare, hoping that the prospect of chaos would scare MPs and the public into accepting that fully leaving the EU was just too hard.

MORE FROM PETA CREDLIN: Auspol is a mess, but at least we’re not the UK

Was this neglect incompetence, a naive faith in the benevolence of EU leaders, or a cunning plan to sabotage what the people had voted for?

It’s hard to say but, now that the parliament has rejected the only deal on offer, the alternatives are no deal, an extension of time — which would just prolong the agony (or push it to the next election and hope it is dropped) — or a second referendum because the people’s first vote couldn’t be trusted.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has called on MPs to break the Brexit deadlock by conducting cross-party Brexit talks. Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images

With a few notable exceptions, the leadership of the country that’s given us the Mother of Parliaments, the common law, Shakespeare and the world’s common language — and that saved Europe from the Nazis — now think that Britain is incapable of managing its own affairs without the diktats of an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels.

MORE FROM PETA CREDLIN: Morrison must show strength in his Israel decision

How would Australians react to a proposal that our laws on almost everything except national security (but including immigration) should be determined by a group of officials drawn from (say) the nations of the ASEAN region plus New Zealand?

Of course, we’d reject it, which is what the British people did when they finally had the chance in 2016 to vote on whether to stay in a free trade area that had slowly morphed into a supranational superstate.

Like the Australian vote on becoming a republic some years back, British voters refused to take the chattering class’s advice on what was best for them. They held their ground and the Establishment didn’t like it, and still don’t.

Right now in Britain, two and half years on from the historic “leave” win, it’s “project fear” in overdrive.

Trade is the real issue. Britain already does 55 per cent of its trade under WTO rules, so without a special deal with the EU, it just means the EU 45 per cent would have to be this way too. It’s how Australia conducts its trade with the EU, worth $70 billion a year, so I fail to see the emergency here.

Sure, in the event of no deal, there will be a few weeks — maybe more — of delays at the border and some prices might change as tariffs alter; but stockpiling drugs, worries of no food on the shelves?

This is a nation that stared down the Blitz but now baulks at a few bureaucrats in Brussels? Come on Britain — where’s your “keep calm and carry on”?

A pro-Brexit supporter holds up a placard as he demonstrates outside the Houses of Parliament in central London. Picture: AFP

Catching up with a number of political and media contacts, it’s clear that being a part of the EU has infantilised Britain.

They’ve lost their independence mojo, if you like, and it’s as if the last 45 years of EU co-rule has wiped away 1000 years of history when Britain was truly sovereign. The people know this in their hearts, and that’s why they voted for Brexit, but the Establishment are using every political trick in the book to drag this out.

While they dither, Brexit is redrawing the political lines that once divided Labour and Conservative, into “Leave” or “Remain”.

There’s no end of lessons here but above all, it’s about the importance of leadership.

Choices have to be made. Decisions cannot be put off. If people and countries don’t make their own choices, they will have others’ choices forced upon them, and in the end, that jeopardises sovereignty.