What Maggie would have thought...
MARGARET Thatcher would have been “deeply concerned” about the progress of Brexit, former Chancellor Lord Lawson said last night.
In a stinging attack on Britain’s second female Prime Minister, the pro-Brexit Tory said Theresa May had got Britain into an “humiliating state of cringe”, begging Brussels for a good deal it had no intention of granting.
Instead she should be preparing to take the country out of the European Union without one, so that it could make the most of its freedom from Brussels diktat. “We must get up off our knees. Enough is enough,” he declared.
The peer was delivering the fourth annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture, at a dinner in London hosted by the centre established in her name to promote the late politician’s life and values.
Lady Thatcher, he said, “while she would have been delighted by the prospect of Britain regaining its sovereignty outside the EU, she would have been deeply concerned at the current state of the so-called negotiations. We find ourselves today… in a humiliating state of cringe, begging for what is both unnecessary and unattainable, a posture which would have been anathema to Margaret Thatcher.
“The time has come to call an end to this demeaning process. We must get up off our knees. Enough is enough.”
Mrs May seemed “to have lost her nerve” since declaring at the start of this year that no trade deal with the EU would be better than a bad deal, he went on.
“And she has allowed herself to be manoeuvred into imagining no trade deal would be a disaster. This is manifest nonsense. It is also the cause of most of her current difficulties.” The World Trade Organisation system “is perfectly acceptable,” he said.
The provisional divorce deal the PM reached on Friday in Brussels was “just about acceptable so far as it goes”, but the crucial goal must be “unfettered” ability for Britain to make its own rules after Brexit, he said.
“It is an essential attribute of national sovereignty, which is what Brexit is all about.”