by John Ward
We are beginning to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the term ‘Brexiteer’. Only Francois, Cash, Redwood, Hoey and a handful of others still deserve the monniker. The Prime Minister’s “deal” will produce fractious EU trade, continuing obeisance to EU Law, loss of military independence, potentially endless Stage2 trade negotiations and severely limited restrictions on our trade beyond the EU. Above all, it is a purgatory from which we could very easily be returned to Hell by a future British Government.
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The weather down here is beautiful at the moment, and so (after having heard that MPs were unable to smell the Elephant in the Room called “Leave Now”) I went to The Times yesterday morning and saw they’d been equally incapable of deciding between various wrong things to do. So I thought ‘feck-it’ and went outside.
Outside in the fresh air, your Correspondent (once called “a dangerous neo-Nazi member of the Conservative Party in Kent” by Peter Mandelson) tackled a pile of seasoned twigs and stacked them in the restored pig-sty, sawed through fifty or so small logs, mowed an acre of grass, raked the mulchings into a neat pile, changed into shorts and ventured forth to the local bar.
[Just so we’re clear about this, by the way, I have never been a member of the Conservative Party in Kent or indeed anywhere else, I have never suffered from neo, crypto, minor or tertiary Nazism, and the furthest Left in Party membership I ever went was the 1980s version of the SDP. I do occasionally have Nazi thoughts about hanging Mandelson by a piano wire, but being a pacifist, I am never the one doing it in such daydreams. It’s always someone else. Like Owen Jones, for example. Or Boris Johnson. And just occasionally, Harriet Harman.]
I stayed long enough in the bar to read La Dépeche, chew some of Maria’s delicious peanuts and swap small-to-medium talk with some Portuguese mates before returning to the house, taking a brief kip and then ringing a Westminster contact.
He didn’t have a lot to say beyond the obvious (like most of us, he’s given up the business of debating with opponents) but the paper I’d been reading in the bar did tell me that President MacroNapoleon – not content with alienating the Senate and the Electorate – is now pointing his one-eyed trouser snake at the civil service he hates. This is odd because he’s an ENARC graduate himself: but the French Civil Service thinks only about what’s best for France, whereas Macron is a rabid federalist global commerce freak who has never read a social anthropology volume in his life.
Needless to say, all the ENARC trade unions vociferously oppose the President’s attempt to have his private sector chums take their place.
In France socially, Italy fiscally – and now, Germany economically – the EU is a cess volcano about to shower shit on us all. It also faces revolt in Hungary and Poland, and the most anti-Brussels vote of all time in the coming May elections
All of which, inevitably, loops back into Brexit and its importance in the battle against fascists like Macron, Verhofstadt, Tusk, Juncker, Merkel, Barnier, Soubry, Hammond, Cooper, Umunna, May, Blair, Campbell, Cable et al.
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As the readers of this blog are generally well-informed and (if not always up to the minute with news, then at least sensitive to ramifications and consequences) I am unlikely to surprise most of them when I point out the growing groundswell for the “Deal” on UK withdrawal from the European Union to be passed by the House of Commons. It is to be debated today.
Indeed, honourable members and ostensible Leavers I have never trusted like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg now say they may well be minded to support the Prime Minister’s “Deal” as negotiated by the unelected Fat Cat and federalist zealot Olly Robbins.
What Mr Robbins (left) and his fellow democracy underminers would nevertheless like us all to forget is just how multiply appalling the “May” Deal is. For months now, the narrative promoted by the British Establishment has been that the only sticking point in the Withdrawal Act is that contention involving the Irish Border backstop.
This is piffle, and reflects only the preposterous degree of Parliamentary power given to the Ulster Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) while temporarily propping up the government of an Alt State robot in Number Ten. The backstop itself is something of a non-issue; the very real problem is how many ways the EU can exploit the backstop – still open-ended – and use it to keep Britain doing as it’s told in terms of trading rules.
Looking instead at the plight of United Kingdom citizens as a whole, the Withdrawal Agreement foolishly signed by Theresa May as Prime Minister is infinitely more oppressive than one border which has (before Michel Barnier took a cynical interest in it) been an unadulterated success in relations between the British & Irish Governments.
As I write, MPs will soon be debating in the Special Sitting of Parliament to consider the Withdrawal Act alone without the element of a Political Declaration within it. I regard this as nothing more than a subterfuge to get our bent Speaker to allow it’s debate and subsequent vote on it….which he has already granted.
The key thing now for all Brits who want A Clean Sovereign Brexit is to focus on why the Robbins/May Withdrawal Agreement must be defeated.
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It is not enought to damn it as “a bad deal”. This is the Labour Party’s position, but it is hypocritical, and an excuse to present political point-scoring as some kind of desire to honour the 2016 Leaver victory: given the chance, a majority of Labour MPs would love to revoke Article 50. But they know that such would be electoral suicide. And so they go along with this ridiculous charade, knowing full well that even the May/Robbins deal is “too” Brexit for them. They are internationalists, and completely taken in by the lie of peace, eternal prosperity and social democracy the Brussels shower peddles.
The Withdrawal Agreement (WA) to be debated for the third time tomorrow is nothing more or less than a right foot inside the European Union, and a left hand tied behind the back, for the United Kingdom.
There are the nine reasons why this is so, but the first one below is (in my humble opinion) the most important.
- Although MPs will not debate the Political Declaration (PD) element mentioned above today, it is bonkers to suggest that Brussels will accept a WA without the PD sooner or later. We will have to face up to both of the terrible twins, and the PD talks very openly about a “balance of rights and obligations” between the EU and the UK (my emphases):
‘This balance must ensure the autonomy of the Union’s decision making and be consistent with the Union’s principles, in particular with respect to the integrity of the Single Market and the Customs Union and the indivisibility of the four freedoms.’
The only exception we are being offered in ‘the four freedoms’ is freedom of movement across borders. This is an important one, but if we want “frictionless trade”, then the EU can still invoke the indivisibility of the Four as a reason not to comply.
You see, frictionless trade is a benefit solely and only available to full EU members.
The EU is giving itself a licence here to dick us around forever and a day in terms of the so-called “second stage” of negotiations – viz, the actual preference they give to members over non-members.
We could of course retaliate; but if we do, this will be billed by the Brussels gargoyles as “bad faith”.
Put simply, the Political Declaration is, in and of itself, a carte blanche for the Commission to delay trade deals ad infinitum.
But it doesn’t end there – or indeed, anywhere near it.
2. Passage of the Withdrawal Agreement would spring an inescapable trap, because it has the already recognised international standing of a full-on Treaty. If passed this Friday, it would hand control of gigantic areas of policy in the UK to unaccountable officials in the EU….who are very bit as likely as Olly Robbins and his Band of Merry Men to abuse such power.
3. The WA mandates that any permanent trade deal must build on the ‘single customs territory’ created by the backstop. That means that, as long as we are still in the backstop, the only deal the EU will accept will be a customs union – the most economically damaging deal for the UK which requires full implementation 0f the EU’s trade policy and tariffs with no say. The very fact that the EU refuses to make the backstop finite within the WA should arise the suspicions of every realistic Brit.
4. The WA proposes a defence arrangement which would subordinate the UK’s defence and security structure to EU control and endanger UK security ties with its main allies. Bear in mind that, during the 2016 referendum, the Remain camp and the Commission lied over and over again about the EU intention to develop a standing army under the tutelage of Signora Mogherini, NATO’s gal in Europe. We will be tied to Russophobia forever, and be unable to stop the stationing of EU troops on our soil.
5. The WA would allow the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to prosecute the British government for any perceived breaches of EU law for up to four years after the end of any transition period, with judgments and fines binding on the UK.
6. The restrictions imposed on us would be ruinous for British farming, as the WA limits aid to British farmers while allowing more highly subsidised EU imports to enter our home market.
7. Martin Howe QC has shown conclusively in his Brexit Central articles that dismissively languid arguments and assurances given by the government and others concerning the WA are legally unfounded.
8. The Pacific is the fastest growing economic region of the planet economically – and Britain has longstanding close links to a number of the members of the Pacific Free Trade pact – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and other countries. Under the technical legalese of the WA, they could stop us joining the PFT – and not only claim we had broken an international treaty, but also levy upon us punitive trade tariffs. Again, we could retaliate.
9. Under the terms of the WA, if the EU completes a trade agreement with an outside country such as India or China, Britain would have to match concessions made by the EU….but those extra-EU countries would NOT be obliged to reciprocate in favour of the UK. If ever there was a permanent lose-lose, then that’s it.
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Where is the promised “frictionless trade” in all this legalese? It is a recipe for obstruction, revenge, resort to expensive international law, protectionism, and perhaps above all, a lesson for others who might wish to leave the European Bunion.
This is really what we Brits must deal with and recognise: despite all the bromides issued by mendacious politicians, this is not going to be an amicable divorce….and was never intended to be such.
The overriding hope of every unthinking globalist collaborator in the House of Commons – and remember, 3 in 5 of them have monied skin in the game of Remaining – is that Brexit will one day be reversed without trial.
I can only conclude with this seminal observation from Wednesday’s Slogpost:
Brexit is a mere skirmish. The War we are engaged in here is between the individual citizen’s right to control a creative personal destiny, and the totalitarian systemic processes of the insane corporacrats.
WA3 must not pass today. If it does, the current Parliament will have ceded our trade sovereignty for a lengthy period, and ceded our military sovereignty forever. The final step in our scrotaloctomy would be joining the Zombie euro. If a change of Government after the coming General Election is more minded to revoke Article 50 (and that will happen unless We the People exert direct tactics and pressure at constituency level) then such will undoubtedly be our fate.
Despite the airy dismissals of it all by Remain zealots, none of the above is “Little Englander hysteria”: it is a recipe for fiscal disaster and rule by Gauleiters.