by John Ward
This post was written in a mood of anger I feel no compunction to expiate. One cannot be slightly democratic. No exceptionalism on Earth allows for now and then when it suits us democracy. Such is the EU way. Those who wish to stay in the EU are entitled to their opinion. But in doing so, their membership of the Liberal Democracy Club lapses by default.
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Are you a customs partner or a max facker? A soft or hard Brexiteer? An EU reformer or a federalist USE person? A post-Brexit trade pessimist or an anti-Brexit diehard? An anti-EU liberal democrat or a pro-EU wallet voter? A tentative Theresa or a careful Corbyn?
As of now, the answers to those questions in a market research survey would produce the biggest ‘Don’t Know’ scores in the history of opinion polling.
We started on the road to here with a weak, opportunist and unrepresentative Remainer Prime Minister in a corner. Having failed, he resigned; and so we went into the Brexit negotiations with a weak, opportunist and unelected Remainer Prime Minister crouching behind a circle of wagons.
You wouldn’t have started from there, because otherwise you’d wind up here. And so, here we are….in the normal British situation of muddling through, and winding up all over the place. To use a well-worn analogy, leaving Dunkirk….only this time without the boats. And this time, no Hitler to tell the Panzers they should let us escape.
Let’s focus on some of the key words there: ‘weak, opportunist Remainers’. Why aren’t the gung-ho Leavers running the show, given that the vote was to leave?
And the answer is the same now as it was in June 2016: because MPs are roughly 3.5 to 1 in favour of remaining in the EU; and yet ordinary Brits asked about the the EU were 52 to 48 in favour of leaving it.
But to make matters worse, both major Parties at Westminster are split on many other issues….and so this gives the whip hand to back-benchers in the House who want to leave…but the whip hand is with the Remainers in the Cabinet.
Theresa May is a compromise short of a solution. She is only where she is today because Angela Leadsom royally couldn’t run a bath and Amber Rudd loyally fell on her sword rather than admit she inherited deportmania from, um, Theresa May.
Which is another way of saying, “The Conservative Party has always preferred power to either justice or democracy”.
Constitutionally, the ‘alternative’ to Theresa May is Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy was a lifetime detester of the EU as a pestilence upon the jobs of lazy British workers, and the hiding place of neoliberal fascism in Europe. But then he became leader of the Labour Party, and discovered that his job was to persuade voters to stay in the EU, which he did in the manner of a bloke perpetually backing out of the limelight while talking about anything except the EU.
So we have a Leaver in an impossible position, poking fun at a Remainer trying to negotiate a deal for the Leavers she didn’t support in the referendum anyway, while the Leaver himself has to pretend he’s a Remainer who is nevertheless doing his duty to obey the wishes of The People, with whom his own MPs are absolutely furious for doing the wrong thing by voting to Leave.
Right from the off, Mrs May ignored the advice of the two smartest blokes in Europe when it comes to negotiating with Brussels: Yanis Varoufakis, and me. “Don’t bother,” we told the silly tart, “You’re wasting your time……just give them a leaving date, and walk away”.
But no. The Tin Lady remained convinced she could handle the likes of Drunker, Draghula and Verhofshit. She would bring home, she vowed, a real Brexit. A fair Brexit. A certified, 24-carat Brexit replete with fish, control of borders, reduced immigration and – most important of all – independence for the City in order to keep ‘im indoors and Boris Johnson happy.
What she has delivered so far is the destruction of British fishing, new borders where we don’t want them (and gruyere cheese borders where we do) no deal at all for the City, and another 18 months for the Commission to cook up some other form of homework for us to do before they can allow us to leave through the unctious grace of a piss artist who used to run Radio Luxembourg.
Not forgetting, of course, the £35 billion ‘divorce’ fee that we were never bound to pay to anyone. Yet somehow we did.
As I predicted in 2016, the Commissioners have done exactly what they did with Greece: keep giving the elected Member Government things to do, while they remain focused on (a) saying no (b) here’s another problem and (c) saying the solution to the problem we’ve raised isn’t good enough, you need to do more work.
So now what?
I have devastating news for you: there is no ‘What’.
There is only a map hoarding in Downing Street with a small scrum in the top right-hand corner going round in circles like two demented scorpions, and an arrow pointing to it saying ‘You are here’.
Last October – under the headline ‘We must fire Hammond and purge the Treasury’ – I opined as follows:
‘…..a former Treasury adviser told me, “They’ve been undermining Britain’s position vis-a-vis Brussels since forever”. That same source alleged Philip Hammond “was an appointment tailor-made for them, as a known anti-Brexit fanatic”. But then, this is not exactly news: Treasury Sir Humphreys lobbied hard for Hammond to get the job in the first place, but they were kicking at an open door given May’s determination to have Remainer hands on the purse strings during Brexit….’
Following the General Election in June last year, I wrote:
‘While last night’s result has stopped all power-hungry juggernauts in their tracks, the only genuine loser in the pack was real Brexit: that is to say, one that unequivocally includes vigorous selling to new markets, and total control of our borders. This irony is beyond bitter. UKIP sat out the Fakelection in the hope that the vast majority of their support would hand the election to the Tories. In fact, it has handed the advantage to Remainers everywhere. ‘
In August 2016, I posted this:
‘….most tribes among the Leavers are beginning to realise that the pro-Brussels fanatics have no intention of letting a little thing like a majority of the electorate get in the way of their plans to remain on the SS Eutanic….What we’re looking at here is a cynical “realist” in Number Ten keen to come out of “the Brexit process” with as little merde sticking to her as possible. She can have her people leak that Hammond is out of line, but she appointed him to be 2inC knowing full well his level of attachment to the European Union…’
Now see Philip Hamshank still hard at work nearly two years later in this Slogpost from last week:
‘Arch Remainer Philip Hammond-Organ has ordered around 300 job cuts in Liam Fox’s Brexit Department. Notably, the cuts are largely restricted to those staff working on trade deals outside the EU….’
Now, all you Remainer folks unmoved by Greek socialists being pulped with a baseball bat, or 46 years of EU-Britain having a trade deficit for 45 of them, or vicious leaking by Brussels Komissars, or the by now brutally obvious reality that Alt States called the Civil Service, The House of Lords, NATO, the European Commission and the Treasury are trying to stop a democratic process…..by all means, convince yourselves through the magical process of serial cognitive dissonance that you are in the right.
But do me one small favour: please stop telling me I’ve been wrong about what was going to happen.
And please could you think in a mature, reflective fashion for one minute – that’s all I ask – and give some considered thought to the gargoyles who are on your side: The Lords you want to abolish, The Treasury who stole from 1950s born pensioners, the Mandelson-Campbell-Blair Witch Project you now disown, the tentacles of Goldman Sachs such as Mario Draghi and Mark Carney, the neoliberal propaganda station Blooomberg, the IMF led by financially illiterate fraudster Christine Lagarde…and of course NATO – the delightful organisation that supports using live ammunition against Palestinian protesters….and bombs Syrian civilians based on the clumsy planting and faking of spurious evidence.
There is no ‘what’ beyond these blindingly obvious realities:
- The EU is a lame duck*
- The UK Parliamentary process and electoral system is a bad joke
- British voting is only indirectly democratic, and intrinsically disenfranchising
- The Brexit Brits voted for is a rippling chimera transmuting into a form of ether we can never lasso.