In response to Kathy Gyngell: It’s time for you Tory Brexiteers to grow up, PierrePendre wrote:
Which part of ‘no escape clause’ in the backstop agreement is it that supporters and fellow travellers of Mrs May’s deal do not understand? It voluntarily binds the UK permanently to the EU as a second-class subject. It’s their own wrists, and those of their children, that they are proffering for the handcuffs. Why would any British citizen want that?
The backstop is exclusively an EU instrument to ensure the EU gets whatever it dictates in the FTA that is ‘negotiated’ during the transition. In effect there will be no negotiation and the backstop will be invoked before the transition ends. You can bet the bank on that.
The refusal of Remainers, and those Leavers now frightened by their former audacity, to accept this humiliating reality means that the UK will cease to be an independent country as soon as Mrs May signs her withdrawal agreement at the EU summit.
Forget the talk about parliament voting down the deal. The EU will not renegotiate any part of it that is important to its objectives and there is no appetite at Westminster for no deal. What is crucial is that the UK is not allowed to become an independent success outside the protectionist bureaucratic framework constructed In Brussels.
If Germany and France didn’t fear that Brexit would result in a free, reinvigorated Britain that exposed the stagnant EU model daily to the envious gaze of the EU’s remaining captive citizens, they would never have bothered with the backstop in the first place.
If they thought that a clean Brexit was doomed to failure, they would be greasing its path with faux tears of schadenfreude in expectation of the joyous vindication to come.
It was possible during the referendum campaign to take a principled position in favour of remaining or leaving. Whatever one thought then, it is not possible now to take a principled position in favour of the nationally crippling surrender that Mrs May is ramming past the political class with the ruthlessness of a German panzer general.
Her deal is a betrayal pure and simple of Britain and its future.
Everyone is agreed that the Tories will pay a savage price for this unprecedented treachery, which sounds cathartic but misses the point that it will happen after the fact. By the time we get to vote, the irreversible betrayal will have happened and we will be prisoners of the EU with no prospect of parole.
If Boris, Gove, JRM and the rest do not stop her before she gets to Brussels, it will be too late already. Literally every minute counts now.
