Britain to trigger Article 50: Date adds to doubts on Kenny future

HUNGARY voted yesterday on whether or not it would be bound by European Union policy on refugees.

In time, depending on the result, that vote may be recognised as another of the thousand cuts that seem aimed at draining the life blood from the European project. Like those faraway First World War battles fought over what was once the Austrian-Hungarian empire, between armies wearing spectacularly befeathered hats, the import of Hungary’s vote may not immediately stir us but maybe it should. It the opinion polls are accurate it is likely to prove another sad moment when a quickly turning tide leaves the largely liberal, humanitarian values that have sustained European peace and driven social evolution for more than half a century high and dry.

The vote, if it endorses the anti-immigrant hostility of the country’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, seems part of a creeping process rather than a decisive body blow to the EU. However, there is nothing creeping or distant, about yesterday’s announcement by Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May that her government will start the formal process of Britain’s divorce from the EU by triggering Article 50 in March. Even though Britain’s relationship with the EU, especially the stridently isolationist and nationalist Tory eurosceptics, has been strained for decades the formal announcement that divorce proceedings have been given a date for a court hearing must provoke great disappointment.