Skip to main content

8. May's folly


Why did May ever think the EU autocracy would show her any more respect than it did Cameron? He trotted off to Brussels in early 2016, supposedly to re-negotiate a better deal for the UK, ahead of the referendum. He got nothing. Juncker and the rest of the panjandrums swatted him away like some annoying street urchin.

That was before the referendum, when it would have been easy to give Cameron at least something to take back to the British people. Had Brussels been prepared to bend, to offer some meaningful concession on freedom of movement, it would have been possible to guarantee the outcome of the referendum. But it didn’t. In time-honoured EU fashion it choose to ignore the impending deadline, confident in its belief that Cameron and his team of prefects would deliver the correct result – and, besides it was just a referendum, the result of which, if needs be, could be easily overturned as had been the case in Ireland and Denmark.

So, why on earth did May think that the panjandrums and apparatchiks were ever going to offer her any sort of an acceptable deal that came remotely close to satisfying her hopes for a new and mutually beneficial EU-UK relationship?  

15 Jan 2019 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10. The people are not to be trusted.

  There is one simple reason why we, as a nation, have struggled for the best part of 40 years to reconcile ourselves to the concept of the European Union. That reason is democracy. At its heart the EU does not believe in ‘democracy’ in the way that we do. Ultimately, the EU does not trust ‘the people’. The self-appointed elite that governs from Brussels does not consider it safe to allow ‘the people’ to decide the important issues – or indeed to have any meaningful say at all in the affairs of the EU. It’s not hard to fathom why this is so. Germany and France, have both suffered deep national trauma as a direct result of allowing ‘the people’ to decide. Hitler did not seize power in March 1933 – the people voted him into office. He didn’t stage a coup. He didn’t ‘hijack’ the German state. He formed a legitimate coalition government in March 1933 having secured overwhelming popular support from the German people at the ballot box. In the three federal elections ...
Post a Comment
Read more

13. Farage - what next?

Now that his Brexit party has won the European elections with 32% share of the vote, Farage should do two things: 1. He should stop talking about an immediate General Election. An early election is not in the interest of anyone who voted Leave in June 2016 - other than possibly, Farage himself. 2. He needs to start explaining why a 'No-Deal' Brexit, is not something we should be afraid of. To do that he needs to focus on the detail and he needs to articulate the economic rationale for a 'no-deal' - and why it could actually be the best thing that has happened to this country in decades.
Post a Comment
Read more

14. The push for a second referendum

Anti-BREXIT forces are clearly aiming to bring about a second referendum with the question skewed in favour of remain - i.e. something along the lines of: "Do we leave the EU with no-deal" or "Do we remain in the EU"? They (and the EU leadership) know that they can only be 100% certain of winning a second referendum if the question is loaded. The current battle for the Tory leadership is rapidly turning into a war by proxy for a second referendum with the likes of Hammond and others declaring that they will not support any candidate who insists that 'no-deal' should still be an option. The simple facts are: 1.              IF 'no-deal' is not left on the table, we will never know what deal the EU might really have been prepared to offer. Johnson is right when he suggests that any negotiating team, which genuinely wanted to achieve the best outcome for the UK, would be stupid to rule out 'no-deal' at the outset. 2.        ...
Post a Comment
Read more