EU loyalists are crowing about their defeat of Prime Minister Theresa May in the House of Commons yesterday, with many gloating openly that Brexit can now be stopped.
Tory rebels, aided by the left-liberal opposition parties, passed an amendment to the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill which hands Parliament a veto over the deal Britain negotiates with Brussels, without — as previously planned — the country reverting to a ‘No Deal’ exit if they reject it.
“First step towards defeat of Brexit,” gloated Lord Adonis, an influential Labour grandee and one of the “Unholy Trinity” of Hard Remainers who recently attended a closed-door meeting with top eurocrats in Brussels, along with Ken Clarke from the Tories and Nick Clegg from the Liberal Democrats.
Under the old Labour government, Adonis was a key ally of former prime minister Tony Blair — now a key backer of the so-called ‘Remain Resistance’ calling openly for the Brexit vote to be overturned.
First step towards defeat of Brexit. And this is before the Lords has got going on the National Betrayal Bill.
— Andrew Adonis (@Andrew_Adonis) December 13, 2017
Theresa May’s former chief of staff Nick Timothy chimed in to suggest Adonis was “dreaming”, but this prompted a buoyant Anna Soubry — a leading Tory rebel who claimed her mother “wept” when the Leave vote was announced last year — to say it was Timothy who was talking “nonsense”.
This rather implies the controversial politician does see May’s defeat as the “first step towards [the] defeat of Brexit” — contradicting her previous public protestations that she respects the outcome of the referendum.
https://twitter.com/mk1969/status/941024209949659137
Other Remainers were equally triumphant. Labour’s Stephen Kinnock, recently humiliated when footage of his wife publicly upbraiding him was broadcast on national television, declared: “Now that really is what taking back control looks like!”
He also echoed the odd boast of many MPs that the vote was a display of the “Parliamentary sovereignty” which Remainers have eagerly delegated to EU for decades — leading some to question whether constitutional reforms might be necessary to make it clear that sovereignty really belongs to the people, and MPs have a duty to execute the public’s will when demonstrated in a national referendum.
480 MPs declared for the EU prior to the June 2016 referendum, compared to only 159 to who said they would vote to leave.
Parliamentarians from both Houses of Parliament also recently voted Nick Clegg’s book How to Stop Brexit their book of the year in a secret ballot — even though both the Tories and the Labour Party campaigned on manifesto promises to deliver a full, clean Brexit from the EU, its Customs Union, Single Market and associated Free Movement regime in the June 2017 snap election.
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