EU deal ‘likely’ says Davis... the real sick man of Europe
DAVID Davis yesterday promised that an EU deal was “very highly probable” as he struggled through a television interview with food poisoning.
The EU Exit Secretary was understood to have been taken ill after eating a sandwich but insisted on going ahead with the appearance on the BBC One Andrew Marr Show yesterday.
BBC staff provided a bucket on the set in case the Cabinet minister felt sick during filming.
Mr Davis agreed to be interviewed to mark this week’s milestone of one year until Brexit.
Theresa May is set to embark on a tour of the UK on Thursday to herald the countdown to the official Brexit day on March 29 next year.
Mr Davis said the progress made in talks with Brussels meant it was now “incredibly probable, very, very highly probable” that there would be a final deal between the UK and the EU.
But he refused to rule out Britain walking away from talks, saying “you can’t stop making arrangements” for a no-deal scenario “because that’s one of the things that guarantees the deal”.
He added: “You don’t expect your house to burn down – it’s less than a one in 100,000 chance but you have house insurance anyway.”
Mr Davis also denied that the UK was heading towards a Norway-style relationship that would retain close ties to the European Union.
He said. “This will not look like any other deal.
“It will be a free-trade deal, the most comprehensive one ever – even the EU is using words similar to that.”
THE outcome of the 2016 EU referendum was the greatest popular revolt against the establishment in the history of British democracy. But ever since, the Remain lobby has been trying to overturn the result. Embittered and horrified by the clear verdict of the British people, pro-EU campaigners continually scheme to sabotage our withdrawal from the rule of Brussels.
One element of their strategy is to create such a climate of despair over Brexit that the public will eventually demand a second referendum. To this end, every difficulty is turned into an insurmountable obstacle, every problem into a crisis.
But the Remoaners’ bleak narrative is persistently confounded by events. The economy has not gone into meltdown. On the contrary, it has enjoyed robust growth. Similarly the talks on Brexit have progressed far more successfully and swiftly than the Remoaners predicted.
Last week Theresa May concluded the transition deal for Britain, which opens the way for fruitful negotiations on trade. In contrast to the Remoaners’ manufactured despondency, the mood in Brussels is now positive, with the European Council confirming “its readiness to initiate work towards a balanced, ambitious and wide-ranging free trade agreement”.
BUT the anti-Brexiteers will not abandon their determination to thwart the people’s will. The other, much more sinister strand of their strategy is to question the very legitimacy of the referendum result. They claim that democracy was subverted by breaches of campaign rules and the dishonest manipulation of the electorate. “The Great Brexit Robbery – how the vote was hijacked” ran one recent, breathless headline in a proRemain newspaper.
For a while, a favourite gripe was to complain that Russia was behind the Brexit victory by sending out anti-EU messages on social media from socalled “troll factories”. That nonsense was exploded when Twitter bosses told MPs that Russian-led accounts represented “less than 0.005 per cent of the total of accounts that tweeted about the referendum”.
Undaunted by that failure, the Remoan diehards have come up with two new assertions: first, that the Leave campaign hired computer analysts to trawl through social media and harvest personal data that could be used to target voters; second, that such activities were buttressed by dubious donations to pro-Brexit pressure groups.
Yesterday Shahmir Sanni, a former anti-EU activist who now presents himself as a crusading “whistleblower”, claimed that, shortly before the vote, the official Leave campaign gave £625,000 to the BeLeave organisation in order both to evade the legal spending cap and to pay for data-gathering expertise from the Canadian firm AIQ.
Such charges build on press accusations that the British company Cambridge Analytica was involved in shadowy data exploitation to swing the victories of Donald Trump and Brexit. “People have been lied to and the vote was not legitimate,” Sanni said at the weekend, of the Leave triumph.
All this smacks of a wild conspiracy theory, which says more about the desperation of the Remoaners than political reality. They cannot understand how they lost so they construct outlandish plots involving dark, global forces and computer villains. But their accusations do not stand up to scrutiny.
The Leave campaign has dismissed the idea of any involvement with Cambridge Analytica and said that its donations were twice cleared by the Electoral Commission. In any case, just like so much in Remoaner propaganda, the furore over the use of social media data is grossly overblown.
It is just another version of campaigning, like canvassing, advertising or direct mailshots. When President Obama deployed social media to powerful effect in his re-election bid in 2012, he was hailed as a modernising genius. There was no talk of brainwashing.
The real scandal in the referendum was how officialdom abandoned any pretence of objectivity in its heavyweight support for the EU cause. While the Remoaners hysterically bleat about Facebook and Twitter trolls, the fact is the Government spent £9.3million on a leaflet to every household, full of dire warnings about the consequences of Brexit. Project Fear filled the airwaves with lurid scare stories, such as the absurd forecast that every home would lose £4,300 if Britain left Europe.
IT has been estimated that the various arms of the Remain campaign spent £27million – more than twice the £12million spent by the Leave organisations. That puts the squeals about the £625,000 donation into perspective.
For all the media hysteria it has generated, this latest squalid exercise by the Remoaners has miserably failed to heighten the pressure for Britain to stay in the EU. One poll last week showed that 57 per cent of people want the Government to get on with implementing Brexit and only 22 per cent were opposed.
The Remoaner initiative has not worked because it is a snobbish insult to the 17.4 million people who backed Brexit. Those voters did so not because they were gullible idiots but because they were free Britons who want the return of our sovereignty from an unaccountable foreign bureaucracy.
The referendum was the very opposite of an exercise in mind control. It was a noble step towards real democratic control.
‘Remainers question legitimacy of EU vote’