The state this country is in was truly exemplified by prime minister Theresa May tonight. Having spent over two years negotiating a truly terrible deal to leave Europe, including a backstop agreement to avert a hard border in Ireland, she now accepts an amendment to the Bill before parliament which will remove the backstop and she has no clue what to put in its place. If this wasn’t so embarrassingly awful, it would be funny. But hang on: it is funny. We are at a stage where we had might as well laugh lest we cry.
The Sun, that bastion of accurate newspaper reporting, says tonight that the chief liar and shyster Boris Johnson launched into a rant at tonight’s Tory 1922 committee demanding what it was May wanted from Brexit. May, of course, would be the last to know and merely repeated she was going to “battle away”, for what and who we know not. This is what it has come to.
Worse still, as the country blunders into a catastrophic no deal Brexit, the Labour so called opposition can barely contain its giggles for this is exactly what the hard left plotters and fixers who now own and control Labour wanted all along. They are disaster socialists who see an economic calamity as being their opportunity to bring about socialism in one country. You know, like Venezuela. That went well.
It is hard to believe this is all happening. We no longer have factions in parliament: we have fractions. There are not two opposing views, there are loads of opposing views. We now have people seriously arguing that when they voted to leave the EU, they expected no deal. Of course, they did. That’s why they talked about nothing else at the time, especially when the likes of Farage and Johnson always told us before the referendum that we would not leave either the single market or the customs union. Turns out they were lying, just like they were lying about everything else.
Cameron and the remain campaign deserve all the flak that still comes their way. Their campaign was a negative, scaremongering effort, even though much of the scaremongering is beginning to come true. They never made an effort to project the EU as an overwhelmingly good thing for the UK, which it has been. It is not so much a surprise that leave attracted 52% of the votes to leave than it is that as many as 48% voted remain given the long, ugly, negative campaign against it.
Rather than more of the ‘told you so’ in the years ahead, when things really start to go to pot, the argument needs to be made and won that the fault lies not with remainers who desperately tried to minimise the damage and even try to stop Brexit, or even the EU itself which never wanted us to leave. Theresa May’s idiotic red lines ensured we got a terrible deal and the likes of Johnson, Farage, Gove and co, with their promises of free money and an endless summer pulled the wool over our eyes.
Brexit represents a failure of our politics and a failure of our politicians. We will have years, perhaps decades, of disruption when and if we leave the EU and it will dominate the news for us older people for the rest of our lives, as we desperate seek to gain new deals with countries with whom we already had perfectly good deals through the EU. And people like the disgraced former defence secretary Liam Fox, who left office previously because of a serious breach of the ministerial code, who said leaving the EU would represent the “easiest deal in human history” has failed to secure a single trade deal, despite clocking up millions of air miles at our expense.
The people who got us into this mess simply must be made to own Brexit. They should be held account for what happens and always reminded of how they pulled up the drawbridge to the rest of Europe, to the absolute delight of every hard left and hard right fruitcake on earth and tyrants like Vladimir Putin, stole freedom of movement from our children and made us worse off.
