Remainer Conservatives like Anna Soubry are worried that the party is being infiltrated by right-wing entryists from UKIP and elsewhere and that this may lead to Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister and Britain securing full Brexit.
Yes.
That is the point, you pillocks.
That is exactly what the majority of people want.
Trust in politics will evaporate if Brexit were not delivered. https://t.co/EpdJhdIto5
— Jacob Rees-Mogg (@Jacob_Rees_Mogg) August 28, 2018
If democracy means anything at all in Britain, then Theresa May must deliver on the promise made by her predecessor David Cameron and honour the decision made by 17.4 million people in the EU Referendum.
That means: no Customs Union; no Single Market; no freedom of movement; no lunatic judicial interference from semi-literate Euro judges; no blood money; no Frenchmen nicking our fish — and absolute freedom to do whatever the hell we like politically and economically thereafter.
But obviously she is not going to, as even her former handler Nick Timothy quietly concedes in his Daily Telegraph column.
Nick Timothy is the senior prime ministerial advisor responsible for the extended suicide note — aka the last Conservative manifesto — that saw Theresa May lose her working majority in the last General Election. If even he has lost faith in her ability to deliver an effective Brexit — and clearly he has — then the writing must surely be on the wall for her tenure as Prime Minister.
First, Timothy indicates why May’s useless Chequers Plan, sell-out though it is, is never going to find favour with the EU negotiators:
But Chequers was never going to be acceptable to the EU, because it drives a coach and horses through its core principles. It seeks to cherry pick the rights ministers have decided they want – so far, de facto membership of the single market in goods – without accepting corresponding obligations, such as the free movement of people.
Then, he indicates — albeit more politely than I’m about to — why the thick, stubborn, unimaginative May is completely lacking in the skills to extricate herself from this mess.
The danger is that the PM, having expended so much political capital on Chequers, will feel unable to diverge from the course she has set. But even if she does, Remainers in the Cabinet, notably the Chancellor, will try to impose further compromises. If that happens, Britain’s negotiating position will be well understood in Brussels: any deal, we will be saying, is better than no deal.
So what next?
Timothy bores on, as so many political types do, about his preferred option. His is something called Canada Plus.
But do we care?
I don’t. Perhaps this makes me a bad person – or at least an unsophisticated person who doesn’t understand all the key issues or the electoral arithmetic or any of the other reasons regularly advanced by “experts” as to why we can’t get the Brexit for which we voted.
It seems to me, though, that in my thinking I am much closer than these “experts” are to where the majority of people in Britain are.
That is, we’ve been presented with this Gordian Knot which all the “experts” tell us is impossible to undo. And what we’re all thinking is: “Well sod that, then. Let’s just cut it!”
Part of the problem, I think, is that the political class really haven’t learned the lesson we tried to teach them on June 24, 2016. Mentally they are still stuck in the status quo ante – that nannying, Social Democratic mindset which has dominated Western politics since the war whereby the political elite goes ahead and acts in its own interests while wearing the fig-leaf of democracy.
What they haven’t understood is that we live in revolutionary times. See if you can spot what’s missing from the opening paragraphs of Nick Timothy’s piece:
Remainers might not have noticed, but the European Union is suffering from a sickness that has grown worse since the Brexit vote two years ago. Hungary and Poland are governed by illiberal populists. The far-Right sits in governing coalitions in Austria and Italy.
In 10 days, Right-wing populists are expected to surge in the Swedish elections. Nationalists have prospered in elections across Europe including the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany and the Netherlands. And the trend is likely to continue this year and next in elections to national parliaments and the European Parliament.
What’s absent, I think, is an understanding of the whereabouts of the right and wrong sides of history.
Timothy, like so many in the Westminster bubble (see also the DC swamp), is on the wrong side.
He views with abhorrence the “populist” revolutions taking place across Europe — and, by implication, the one in Trump’s United States — when in fact they are a vital and much-needed correction to decades of democratic deficit.
History moves in waves. Run with them and you surge forward. Try to resist them and you simply get swamped or roiled or crushed.
All those people who say Brexit (I refuse to use the term “hard Brexit” because it concedes the possibility that there might be any other acceptable kind) cannot be achieved because… fill in complex excuse here…are in serious danger of being on the wrong side of history.
And I’m not saying it in that menacing way used by Marxist revolutionaries like Owen Jones. I don’t mean it as a threat, only as an observation.
It has happened in the U.S.; it has happened in Italy and Hungary; it nearly happened in France — and may yet still, if these allegations of gay sado-masochistic affairs at, ahem, the highest levels of government are in any way accurate.
If Brexit is what the people want — and they do — then Brexit is what they are going to get.
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