Sir Michael Caine is not a happy bunny.
The British cultural icon and two-time-Academy award winner, has used the premiere of his new documentary, My Generation at the Venice Film Festival to make his feelings on Brexit known. The film contains interviews with Caine and discusses life in Britain in the 1960s.
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Speaking at the film festival, Michael Caine roasted president of the European commission Jean-Claude Juncker. Juncker was formerly president of Luxembourg before being selected for his current role in 2014.
Caine claimed Britain was “being run by a man called Juncker”.
Up until I was 20, I thought Luxembourg was a radio station. I didn’t even know it was a country and now he’s running my country – and he doesn’t seem to like us.
The sheer weight of political insight here is pretty difficult to comprehend.
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By GlobalDataThe 84-year-old actor went on to repeat remarks he made at the outset of the Brexit debate. He seemed uninterested in the potential economic fallout of the move to take Britain out of the EU, saying:
I’d rather be a poor master of my own fate than a rich servant of someone else’s’.
Considering Michael Caine is estimated to have a net worth of around £57.5m, it seems unlikely that he’d ever feel the brunt of Britain becoming a “poor master of its own fate”.
Caine’s views are notably at odds with the younger generation (those under-25 in 2016) who’ll live to see the full extent of Brexit’s results: 71 percent of this demographic voted to remain in the EU.
Still, perhaps Caine’s comments shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: 64 percent of over-65s voted for Britain to leave the EU.
Michael Caine’s other Brexit comments
This isn’t the first time that Michael Caine has trumpeted his support for Brexit.
The actor was one of the first celebrities to side with the Leave campaign. He revealed his reason for choosing to vote Leave back in April:
I voted for Brexit.
I’d rather be a poor master than a rich servant.
It wasn’t about racism, immigrants or anything, it was about freedom.
In politics you’re always going into areas you’ve never been before, so you’re going to get lost and then you’re going to find your way, and then it’ll be all right.”
At the time, Michael Gove hailed Caine as “the kind of expert I like”. Caine is, notably, an actor, not a political expert.
Caine has been made famous for his political scandals in the past though.
The actor left the UK for the US in the 1970s in order to avoid paying higher rates of income tax.
He also criticised Gordon Brown in 2009 for putting income tax up again for the top earners and threatened to leave the UK again. In July 2014, Caine was reported to have been a celebrity investor in Liberty, a tax avoidance scheme.
Maybe if the rest of Britain was as wily as Caine has been with their money we could all relax about the thought of being “poor masters” of our own fate.
