Gina Miller Admits Defeat in Brexit Battle — But Next Remainer Fight Is for Soft Exit

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AP Photo/Matt Dunham
Victoria Friedman

Anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller has admitted defeat, but said Remainers’ next battleground will be to campaign to make the UK’s exit from the EU as soft as possible.

Businesswoman Gina Miller — who launched legal action against Prime Minister Boris Johnson for suspending parliament earlier this year — admitted defeat as the Conservatives won an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons last week.

She told the BBC: “This is very much a decisive win for the Conservatives, and very much gives them a mandate to pass their deal which I think will happen very quickly.

“I think the Withdrawal Agreement will go through by Christmas. And then it’s law, and it’s ratified in January.

“Once that bill is passed, it’s passed. We have got nowhere else to go.”

As Breitbart London reported Monday, passing the withdrawal agreement and leaving the EU by January 31st, 2020, is not the end but the beginning of another process. The UK will then be in an 11-month transition period with the EU where negotiators will work on a trade agreement for a future relationship. The UK will not leave EU institutions properly until the end of that time on December 31st, 2020.

Miller, who does not hold any elected office but who led the tactical voting campaign Remain United, now thinks the next field of battle will be over the future trade deal with the European Union.

She continued: “Part one is getting the Withdrawal Agrement done, or [it] will be done by the end of the year. Then, we move on to part two which will be the future relationship.

“That’s where I think the battleground will move to — those parties will come together on the Remain side to influence both parliament and the campaign groups outside to try and make that as soft a Brexit as possible.”

A deal that leaves the UK too closely aligned to Brussels’ institutions could stop the UK from signing free trade agreements with other third countries like the United States and Australia. Brussels Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and Remain campaigner Tony Blair have admitted that the UK departing EU institutions without a deal and trading on World Trade Organization (WTO) was still possible and even the most likely outcome as the UK will wish to diverge and deregulate.

The former Best for Britain campaign chief had claimed in 2017 she has never been anti-Brexit when she won a High Court challenge that stopped the Conservative government triggering Article 50 — the legal mechanism for leaving the EU — without a vote in the then-Remainer-dominated parliament. In July 2019, she had vowed to take the British government to court if it tried to take the UK out of the EU without a deal.

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