by John Ward
It cannot have escaped anyone’s attention that Theresa May always looks more at home among the Brussels neocons than she does when facing the House of Commons. Perhaps, being a parson’s daughter, she is more at home telling the truth to eurocrats than lying to MPs. In this third and final part of today’s three-parter, we look at the Devil in the detail of the Prime Minister’s less than flexible flextension agreement with the EU.
Part 3: Dirty Dancing with the Dictators
Having coined the term ‘Brextension’, I was somewhat miffed to discover the British MSM had decided that ‘flextension’ – a risible bit of Orwellian Newspeak that emanated from Donald Tusk’s office – was a better description of the new October 31st phoney war. The more I delved into the details of the October 31st extension, the angrier I got. Far from being (to quote the BBC) “a soft extension with no onerous clauses in it of the kind demanded by President Macron”, it is in reality about as flexible as a prehistoric tree.
The degree of British media self-censorship in relation to the Brextension Diktat simperingly accepted by Theresa May on April 11th has been so consistent in its synthetic acceptance of Brussels spin, it cannot be put down to journalistic incompetence or simple idleness. The restraints to which Theresa May has signed up are so numerous – so ever present on almost every page – they couldn’t possibly be missed by even the most drunken tabloid hack.
One is left suspecting (as always these days) the threat of D-Notices all round unless the media behaved. And so, naturally, they did.
Take, for example, Article 50(3) of the European Council Decision (EDC) of last week: (my emphases)
“…the United Kingdom shall facilitate the achievement of the Union’s tasks and shall refrain from any measure which could jeopardise the attainment of the Union’s objectives, in particular when participating in the decision-making processes of the Union.”
This is a truly astonishing codicil which can only be interpreted in one way: either you vote for everything we want, or you are out. There literally is no other understanding of it beyond, “your vote is either for us or worthless”. From the Treaty of Rome all the way through to Lisbon, this is illegal under the EU Constitution.
The supposedly laissez-faire extension continues in the same vein:
“This extension excludes any re-opening of the Withdrawal Agreement. Any unilateral commitment, statement or other act by the United Kingdom should be compatible with the letter and the spirit of the Withdrawal Agreement, and must not hamper its implementation. Such an extension cannot be used to start negotiations on the future relationship.”
The demands of this insistence are beyond funny. “We give Britain all the time it needs to agree completely with us on everything they don’t agree with us about”.
Allegedly, May’s Brextension has been dubbed ‘flextension’ because it allows us to leave earlier if an agreement is reached. Not true: the only circumstance in which we can Brexit early is if the UK ratifies the Withdrawal Agreement. “Tell us how wrong you have been and sign our diktat, and you are free to leave”.
But next up is a real doozey: I wonder what percentage of the British electorate grasp this: there is no exit on WTO terms allowed for in the extension period. In a way, this is really a recognition of what Cooper the teenage Vandal has already achieved in her rushed-through banning Law. But the Prime Minister has now confirmed in a signed deal with the EU that we will not leave without a deal. This will make it ten times more difficult to repeal the Cooper Act. We are now effectively committed to a deal in some form or other until November 1st 2019.
It’s not hard to see the game plan here, because it is classic EU practice: “we will keep on extending until you say yes”. And unless our Political Class allows The People to have a general election (no chance of that one, then) there is nothing The People can do to defend the Sovereign Decision of The People. Um…..
That, folks, is my definition of trussed up in a concrete slab and dropped into the Hudson River….with the proviso, “Good luck – and please feel free to wriggle as much as you like”.
And here’s one final killer punch on the nose for the Cabinet, Parliament, Constitution and People: the agreement was signed on May’s behalf before a single one of them had been allowed to comment on it. The Chief Executive of Britain’s sovereign body signed this Treaty of Compiègne without the approval of any other constitutional officers. Tinfoil Theresa obviously sees herself as a monarch with Divine Right to absolute, prerogative powers. Not even La Thatcher would’ve pulled a stunt like that.
Arise, Queen Theresa I.
Not only did Theresa May – yet again – disguise the real nature of the prison we have come to call Flextension when reporting to Parliament, so keen were the Commons troughers to buzz off in search of the Easter skive, very few of them even bothered to read beyond the sanitised press brief issued by Donald Tooooosk.
I am delighted to recognise that others with sharper eyes pointed me at the full version, and that I have drawn heavily from their conclusions – because I agree with all of them, based on the content therein.
This is the situation that we Brits – allegedly the cradle of modern freedoms – must now come to recognise, but not accept:
- Our Prime Minister is batting for the other side, cares not a fig for our laws, and suffers delusions of religious grandeur. She must be taken down.
- Far from working hard to take The People’s part, Corbyn Labour is negotiating with her clique in order to dilute not just Brexit, but even Brino. It has failed to recognise the federalist EU for what it is – a neoliberal rich capitalist’s club. It has fallen victim to the siren calls of pc fanatics and narcissist minorities….and as such, it no longer speaks for the majority of citizens.
- The great majority of the Conservative Party is very happy to go along with May’s nightmare vision of a neoliberal economy and neocon foreign policy, because it is largely peopled by self-serving nonentities of little foresight who are incapable of independent, contrarian thought.
- The choice for those who value self determination, devolution and Citizens’ control over their destiny remains the same: role over and accept remote control from distant unacountables, or get rid of a Remainer Parliament.
In her unctuous wisdom, Yvetter Cooper has removed the option of WTO No Deal. And her arch enemies the Tory Party have no stomach for an election.
I do not and never will approve of violent demonstrations. But in the current swamp, it must be very hard for ordinary people to summon up a viable alternative.
So well done, Westminster, Fleet Street and Downing street: you fucked us over again.
We have arrived unhappily at the Place Called Here for all kinds of long, medium and short term reasons: lack of good history and civics teaching in schools, pernicious or gullible ideology, 40 years of Brussels lies about federal, fiscal, and military ambitions, weakness among those who followed Thatcher on the subject of EU superpower megalomania, American neocon hegemony, the growing engorgement of military intelligence aspirations, robotic Labour blindness on the nature of free-speech democracy, the irresponsible sociopathy of David Cameron, and the recruitment of Theresa May by the corporacratic globalists.
It took me four months to finally twig what my initial two sources from Spring 2016 had been on about: the slow and steady assurance of the Fat Controllers that public apathy, short memories and wide-eyed trust would allow for even the biggest plebiscite in British history to be reformulated, then diluted and finally poured down the sink….without the slightest chance of any form of telling revolution in British politics taking place.
The point of this unique one day triple-header at The Slog is not to make wild conspiracy theory accusations. Rather, it is to use strange events, unprecedented actions and above all bald facts to reiterate two simple points:
1. Nigel Farage can call his new toy The Brexit Party, but the issue at stake here is infinitely bigger than that, and extends far beyond the British Isles: the issue at stake is a citizen’s Personal Destiny Control (PDC) versus unaccountable Superstate lust for power
2. Disgust, abstention and shouting at the telly are no longer fit for purpose. The sole weapon left in our armoury is The Vote. The sole will required is preparedness to use it intelligently to take away the powers of the élites one by one. If we do get euroelections, then we must do just that.