Such is the terrifying gravitational power of the European Union that it has pulled even Nigel Farage into its orbit. The anti-EU campaigner, who is almost always angry about something or other, made a speech in the European Parliament last week in which he raged at the Brussels authorities for their silence over the repression of the independence referendum in Catalonia. “It is quite extraordinary to realize that this [European] Union is prepared to turn a blind eye,” he told fellow MEPs.
Catalan leaders are saying the same thing, of course, but there’s a difference. Almost all Catalan political parties support a politically integrated Europe. It is natural for them to look to Brussels, which they see as a sort of supranational capital. Farage, by contrast, has spent his whole career arguing that Brussels should keep its nose out of the internal affairs of its member states.
