Prime Minister Boris Johnson has accused Remain-backing parliamentarians of “collaborating” with their “European friends” to stop Brexit.
Prime Minister Johnson made the comments during his first “People’s PMQs” on Wednesday, where he used Facebook to talk directly to the country and answered pre-selected questions from members of the public.
“There is a terrible kind of collaboration, as it were, going on between those who think they can block Brexit in Parliament and our European friends,” Mr Johnson said.
“We need our European friends to compromise and the more they think that there’s a chance that Brexit can be blocked in Parliament, the more adamant they are in sticking to their position,” he added.
The comments come after the pro-Remain former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond said that he was “very confident” that MPs could stop Prime Minister Johnson taking the United Kingdom out of the EU without a deal, after writing in The Times on Tuesday night that a clean, no-deal exit would somehow be a “betrayal of the 2016 referendum result” and insisting: “It must not happen.”
Hammond told the BBC that “Parliament is clearly opposed to a no-deal exit, and the prime minister must respect that” — however recent polls have revealed that leaving the EU without a deal on October 31st is the preferred option over cancelling or delaying Brexit and Britons back Prime Minister Johnson delivering Brexit “by any means, including suspending Parliament if necessary, to prevent MPs from stopping it”.
Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow vowed yesterday to “fight with every breath” any move to prorogue, mreaning temporarily suspend, the parliamentary session, which Mr Johnson is said to be considering as an option to stop the Remainer-dominated Parliament from stopping Brexit, specifically a clean Brexit, on Halloween.
Prime Minister Johnson has maintained that he wants to renegotiate Theresa May’s exit agreement with the EU to get rid of the controversial Irish backstop, which could lock the United Kingdom in permanent regulatory alignment with the bloc, and has refused to meet with intransigent Brussels bureaucrats and EU leaders until they are willing to consider a new deal.
Meanwhile, the prime minister has stepped up no-deal preparations after forming a Brexit War Cabinet of ministers who back leaving the EU as promised.
Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney told talkRADIO that he was not surprised that the “so-called politically neutral Speaker [John Bercow]” was vowing to fight a clean Brexit, remarking: “What we’re seeing here is in Brexit’s darkest hour… the inner machinations of the governmental machine which is uniting in its sole fury to delay and block Brexit.”
“We have a situation now where people like Hammond and especially people like Bercow do not see themselves as our servants but instead as our masters,” Mr Daubney added.