What The Big Brexit Question Tells The World
As the United Kingdom votes on whether to cut ties with the European Union, former Senior Advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, Steve Hilton, says the most important question facing U.K. voters is who’s really in control?
“In Europe, the people who initiate the legislation impose regulation on all the countries, including on immigration, aren’t elected by anybody – and that’s why this really is a question of democracy – about who actually controls and runs a country – the people of that country or some amorphous system of bureaucracy and regulation that no one really can control,” he told the FOX Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo.
Now living in America as a tech firm head, Hilton said the “experience of working in government” and the amount of regulation and legislation coming from the EU moved the needle to vote leave.
“At one point it was over half of the actions that the British government were taking, were actually driven by the EU – and they were things that the British government didn’t actually agree with but we had to concede in order to win other arguments in Brussels. So it really made the job of governing a country, the elected government, kind of impossible and I thought that was fundamentally un-democratic,” he said.
Even though he remains at odds with Prime Minister David Cameron, Hilton says they have remained good friends. He also explained how the vote will send signals to the rest of the world.
“It’s not easy for me to be on the other side from him but I think in the end, this is a really big question that is bigger than any one general election. It’s going to have an impact here for generations and I think an impact around the wider world because it will send a signal that this centralization of power that you can see going on everywhere – people have had enough of it.”