BRITAIN: Obama Urges Against Leaving The EU

NBC News reports:

President Barack Obama intervened Friday in Britain’s acrimonious national poll on European Union membership, urging U.K. voters to reject calls to quit the political bloc. British voters will decide in a June 23 referendum whether to remain in the E.U. or leave. The debate over the so-called ‘Brexit’ has divided the country and its political establishment.

In an op-ed article in The Daily Telegraph, published as he arrived in London for a birthday lunch with Queen Elizabeth II, Obama acknowledged that “the question of whether or not the U.K. remains a part of the EU is a matter for British voters to decide for yourselves.”

However, he said the outcome of the vote “is a matter of deep interest to the United States.” “The tens of thousands of Americans who rest in Europe’s cemeteries are a silent testament to just how intertwined our prosperity and security truly are,” Obama wrote.

London Mayor Boris Johnson attacked Obama for his op-ed, referring to the president as a “part-time Kenyan.” Politico reports:

Johnson, a Conservative who has been mayor of London since 2008, attacked Obama in a piece for The Sun published Friday for supporting the British government’s position against a so-called Brexit. Johnson recalled an oft-repeated (and debunked) story about Obama returning the bust of Winston Churchill to the British embassy in Washington upon taking office.

“No one was sure whether the President had himself been involved in the decision. Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire — of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender,” Johnson wrote. “Some said that perhaps Churchill was seen as less important than he once was. Perhaps his ideas were old-fashioned and out of date.”

Johnson, a skeptic of the EU whose decision to back Brexit has roiled British politics, remarked that the United States “would not dream of embroiling itself in anything of the kind.” “The US guards its democracy with more hysterical jealousy than any other country on earth,” he wrote, noting that the U.S. is the only nation to have not signed onto two separate United Nations conventions, on children’s rights and women’s emancipation.

“For the United States to tell us in the UK that we must surrender control of so much of our democracy — it is a breathtaking example of the principle of do-as-I-say-but-not-as-I-do,” Johnson wrote. “It is incoherent. It is inconsistent, and yes it is downright hypocritical. The Americans would never contemplate anything like the EU, for themselves or for their neighbours in their own hemisphere. Why should they think it right for us?”