We might have won the battle but we are losing the war. In a big way. Anyone on the Brexit side who thinks otherwise is simply deluding themselves.
It is pointless for loyalists to put a brave face on it or to keep parroting optimism about the wonderful new trade deals that will open up to us once out of the Single Market or Customs Union. They, like the Government’s negotiating team, have been sent down a blind alley.
Brexit was never about trade, as former Chancellor of Exchequer Nigel Lawson recently reminded us. The reason why we are leaving the EU was and still is political: ‘The EU is a political entity whose objective – . . . [a] political union – we do not share . . . [It is a] bureaucratised monstrosity with an inbuilt contempt for democracy . . . [in which] we were doomed to become increasingly marginalised.’
He went on: ‘What never occurred to me was that we would need to renegotiate a trade deal with the EU. Because we don’t. The WTO system is perfectly acceptable.’
It is the failure of Mrs May (and her team of Brexiteers) to start from this simple truth that accounts for the morass into which she has let the Brexit talks sink.
This is what the Remainers and their BBC allies have so successfully exploited.
Lawson can exhort May to ‘get up off your knees’ till he is blue in the face. But there is little chance she will listen. The much heralded May, Johnson, Fox and Davis speeches promise to leave the government’s Brexit goal as elusive as ever. Only if they go back to the drawing board (one that trade is taken right off) can they rescue the country from the purgatory of permanent talks, ever-extended transition periods leading inexorably to a vassal status outcome (paying for everything and getting nothing), which is the seemingly inevitable position the Remain camp have manoeuvred them into.
Make no mistake, Remainers are clever, and determined people.
In face of this ‘no win’ deal, and the daily ignominy of British ‘rinsing’ at the hands of bullyboy Barnier, no wonder public opinion is veering towards staying in the EU https://whatukthinks.org/eu/opinion-polls/uk-poll-results/.
The Remain establishment must be laughing all the way to their EU bank.
Their non-stop negative campaigning couldn’t have been more effective leaving our political Brexit class ever fearful of being left out in the cold on the margins of political respectability.
First they were hit by Project Fear. Never mind that all those on the ‘Remain’ side that the BBC wheeled out as ‘proof’ that Brexit would spell immediate disaster for the British economy were proved wrong, the BBC has never let up on the disaster forecasting.
In case of any doubt, Remain wheeled in more ammunition for the BBC to deploy.
Project Smear.
The Brexit vote, Remainers told us to the BBC’s delight, was down to stupidity and ignorance. Not only were ‘leave’ voters ill-educated, they were racist too. No holds were barred. The BBC had it that the Brexit vote not just responsible for an outbreak of hate crime but for an actual Brexit race death. Never mind that it was a myth, the BBC remained unperturbed by their fabrication.
If the British public have withstood such aspersions cast on their character, their ‘leave’ representatives in government have proved less resilient.
Whether out of fear or shame or – as in the case of Mrs May and Philip Hammond – because of their prior Remainer sympathies, they’ve succumbed to group-think, by which I mean the dominant Remainer paradigm. They’ve accepted the trade definition of Brexit and are singing to its tune, while protesting their pro-immigrant (to prove they are unprejudiced) credentials.
Now scenting blood, the Remain camp have moved to the final stage of their campaign, Project Discredit and Disrupt.
This is what we have been witnessing over the last couple of weeks – a new and vicious discrediting of the parliamentary Brexit camp, who are not conservatives like the charming Ms Soubry, she tells us, and should be slung out of the party.
Nick Robinson’s disparaging and unwarranted personal attack on Jacob Rees-Mogg on the Today programme heralded this all-out attack.
The starter’s flag up, found arch-Remainiac Anna Soubry on her marks, threatening to quit the party if the Brexiteers took over, singling out for character assassination who else but the far more honourable than she Jacob Rees-Mogg:
‘Somebody like Jacob [Rees-Mogg], with his views on things like abortion, a man who says he’s had six children and never changed a nappy, somebody who says that even if you were to be raped by your father you wouldn’t have a right to choose to have a termination – I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stay in a party led by somebody like him.’
A round of BBC interviews followed as night follows day, which she used to declare her defiance: No, she was not sorry for ‘calling on May to sling out Brexit MPs from the Tory Party’.
‘Listen with Brexit-may-not-happen Anna’ has not stopped since. She’s been on the BBC’s Today, Newsnight, The Week in Westminster and Andrew Marr programmes. On the latter, our true conservative sat in a love-in with Chuka Umunna, her hubris exceeded only by the BBC’s barefaced promotion of her. She cannot have left Broadcasting House since Thursday.
Cue Project Disrupt and an outright declaration of war on Brexit. Stepping out of the shadows and as cool as a cucumber, the man who caused Black Wednesday and cost the British taxpayer £3.4billion while making a trillion for himself announced his multimillion project to subvert Brexit.
This is not George Soros’s first Brexit intervention. But it is his first public outing and we should worry. Normally he lets his ‘philanthropic’ fronts do his subversive work for him.
In September 2016 David Keighley warned that endemic BBC bias could derail Brexit.
Now, with the help of one shameless MP, a megalomaniac oligarch who is said to own the left, and even without the Remainer-weighted House of Lords unlikely to respect the Parliament Act, it has.
