Pointing out the obvious

Sometimes you have to be tough or controversial. What happened yesterday in Belgium was a terrible terrorist outrage and it ill bodes anyone to make political points out of such a catastrophe.

Still – and I must declare here I’m a Brexit supporter only for the cack-handed reason that I’m hoping rid the UK of the whining ‘chip on their shoulder’ Scottish nation (and by the way the Welsh can go next if they wish) – since everyone else has refrained from saying it, I’m going to …

One of the main arguments regularly deployed by the ‘Remainers’ in the EU Referendum campaign was that, if we left the EU, we’d lose the ‘in-built’ EU facility for cross-border sharing of useful data on jihadists and other criminals. Well, it was either that, or else such sharing would be infinitely slower and/or that extradition cases etc. would take an age to happen if we were to leave the EU.

However.

Now that the aforementioned ‘wonderful set-up within the EU’ – as demonstrated by the Belgian authorities, who had the mastermind of the Paris attacks living about two blocks down from the Brussels town hall for four months until his arrest last Friday, and after yesterday seem to have been well behind the eight-ball on their intelligence and surveillance work – has proved so inadequate, can we presume that we’ll be hearing slightly less crowing about the EU’s police/counter-terrorism authorities’ cross-border cooperation from the ‘Remain’ campaigners over the next couple of months?