IT IS very hard to keep up with the pace of the Brexit news. Never since the 24-hour news cycle took over in the 1980s can it have been so easy to fill the airtime without resort to endless repeats of the same information.
Yesterday was a case in point. No sooner than we had got over the reporting of unprecedented (in my memory anyway) scenes of chaos and bad behaviour as Parliament was prorogued than up popped fresh news. Downing Street, the new headline ran, had been criticised for calling into question the impartiality of Scottish judges.
This came after Number Ten basically said it would not take a blind bit of notice of 70 parliamentarians’ successful appeal against a ruling by a judge that prorogation of Parliament was legal. And Number Ten was not without justification. This new Scottish ruling came in stark contrast to judge Lord Doherty’s original dismissal of the challenge against the suspension – which went ahead in the early hours of Tuesday – at the Court of Session last Wednesday, saying it is for politicians and not the courts to decide. Quite so.
The real ongoing story, however, is the persistence of the anti-Brexit establishment, the viciousness of their tactics and the depths plumbed by this latest ‘legal’ effort against our leaving the EU. As John Longworth argued in the Telegraph yesterday:
‘The most recent ruling of the Scottish courts and the phalanx of the judiciary generally, can easily be popped into the same category of “the establishment at work”, albeit the judges are probably the least bad offenders. Nonetheless, an intervention in relation to the executive authority of a PM is a most egregious interference in politics and our constitutional arrangements, such as to render, if taken too far, the country as ungovernable. But that is what many in the establishment want, they want instead to be governed by a technocratic foreign power’.
The rest of his article comes as another stark warning to Boris Johnson:
‘The position of the PM is as yet unclear: is he a true believer in Brexit or will he bend to the will of the establishment, metropolitan left-leaning, Remainer and London-centric as it now is? It is certainly clear that those in the Conservative Party who are confirmed Brexiteers are largely on the “outside”, as they are in the dark as to where all this is going.
‘Whatever the motivations of Mr Cummings, there is no doubt he will not want to be seen as a loser, which is some comfort, and even rewriting future history after the event, possibly in co-operation with Mr Gove, will not save him from this ignominy, unless the government delivers a credible Brexit.
‘If the government were now to pursue a rehashed and repackaged Withdrawal Treaty and Political Declaration, I suspect strongly that enough people would recognise it for what it is – “a pig with lipstick”, you might say. Enough so as to seal the fate of the Conservative Party at the next election.’
He goes on to say:
‘I fear, however, that in the Westminster hermetically sealed never-never land, there are still many Conservative MPs who don’t get it. Even some ministers appear to believe that the electorate are so fed up with Brexit, as indeed they are, that they will accept any kind of exit or end to the whole thing. . .
‘This appears to be the thinking in the Labour Party also, to the extent there is any thinking, with now a proposed choice between a really, really bad deal and remaining. . .
‘Some are pressing still for a second referendum, the same EU establishment stitch-up ploy that has been used so many times before in so many other member states to keep the gravy train on track, leveraging the exhaustion and disillusion of the electorate, asking repeatedly until the “right” answer is secured.
‘Whatever proves to be the correct prediction of sentiment amongst the electorate, I would be surprised if there were not enough voters to severely punish the major parties at least for having the audacity to ignore the democratic will of the people. It only takes ten to fifteen per cent of the electorate and a credible alternative party, such as the Brexit Party, to upset the apple cart in large numbers of constituencies.’
You can read the whole article here.
