IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO SAVE BREXIT
PM can still deliver ‘her vision’ BORIS MAKES IMPASSIONED PLEA TO MAY
BORIS Johnson yesterday issued a passionate plea to Theresa May to tear up her Chequers EU plan.
Instead, he said, she should return to her “glorious vision” of a truly independent Britain.
Calling for her to deliver the will of the people, he told MPs: “It is not too late to save Brexit.”
He added: “We have changed tack once and we can change again.”
Praising the Prime Minister, he declared: “Everyone who has worked with her will recognise her courage and her resilience.” But the ex foreign secretary claimed her current Brexit plan would leave the UK in “a state of vassalage”. His remarks came
in a 12-minute personal statement to MPs about his resignation last week in protest at Mrs May’s proposals for post-Brexit links with the EU as set out in a White Paper policy agreed at a Cabinet summit at the Prime Minister’s Chequers country retreat.
The Prime Minister was absent from the Commons chamber while being questioned by senior MPs in committee as he spoke to a hushed House.
Despite his praise for “her courage and her resilience,” he said she had drifted from the vision of Britain’s future relationship with the EU she set out in her speech at Lancaster House in central London 18 months ago.
Mr Johnson reminded MPs that then Mrs May described Britain as a country eager “not just to do a bold, ambitious and comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU out of the customs union, out of the single market, but also to do new free trade deals around the world”.
He said: “I thought it was the right vision then, I think so today. But in the 18 months that have followed it is as though a fog of self-doubt has descended.
“We never actually turned that vision into a negotiating position in Brussels and we never made it into a negotiating offer.
Dithered
“Instead we dithered and we burned through our negotiating capital, we agreed to hand over a £40billion exit fee with no discussion of our future economic relationship.
“We accepted the jurisdiction of the European Court over key aspects of the withdrawal agreement.
“And worst of all we allowed the question of the Northern Irish border, which had hitherto been assumed on all sides to be readily soluble, to become so politically charged as to dominate the debate.”
Mr Johnson said Mrs May’s original vision had been followed by “18 months of stealthy retreat” to the far less ambitious plan agreed at Chequers.
Rather than promising that the country will be able to make its own laws, the White Paper proposed “ongoing harmonisation with a common EU rule book”.
He continued: “Lancaster House said it would be wrong to comply with EU rules and regulations without having a vote on what those rules and regulations are. Chequers now makes us rules takers.”
Mr Johnson feared Britain would be forced to accept “every jot and tittle” of EU regulation while being left with no say and no way of protecting businesses and entrepreneurs from them.
He said: “We are volunteering for economic vassalage, not just in goods and agri-foods but we will be forced to match EU arrangements on the environment and social affairs and much else besides.”
Warning of a potential backlash from voters, Mr Johnson claimed Government was at risk of “the fatal mistake of underestimating the intelligence of the public” by “saying one thing to the EU about what we are doing and then saying another thing to the electorate”.
He said: “Given that in important ways, this is ‘bino’ or ‘brino’ or ‘Brexit in name only’, I am of course unable to accept it or support it as I said in the Cabinet session at Chequers. I am happy now to speak out against it and be able to do so.”
In a plea to the Prime Minister, he said: “The problem is not that we failed to make the case for a free trade agreement of the kind spelt out at Lancaster House, we haven’t even tried.
“We must try now because we will not get another chance to get it right.”
He emphasised there was time to re-think the UK’s approach saying: “We should not and need not be stampeded by anyone.”
But he urged: “Let us again aim explicitly for that glorious vision of Lancaster House – a strong, independent self-governing Britain that is genuinely open to the world.
“We need to take one decision now before all others and that is to believe in this country and in what it can do.”
He added: “The UK’s admirers – and there are millions if not billions across the world – are fully expecting us to do what we said and to take back control.
“There is time, and if the Prime Minister can fix that vision once again before us then I believe she can deliver a great Brexit for Britain, with a positive, self-confident approach that will unite this party, unite this house and unite this country as well.”
Pointedly, the former foreign secretary spoke just inches away from the spot in the Commons chamber where former chancellor Geoffrey Howe made an attack on Margaret Thatcher days after his resignation in 1990 that led to her downfall soon after.
But Mr Johnson was careful not to make his remarks a personal attack on Mrs May.
Senior backbencher Jacob ReesMogg, chairman of the powerful European Research Group of Tory MPs, described it as “the speech of a statesman”.
Richmond Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith said: “Exactly right, Boris Johnson. There was huge support for PM when she set out our Brexit plans at Lancaster House. “That’s where we need to be.” Change Britain, the pressure group set up by supporters of the Vote Leave referendum campaign, said: “Boris Johnson is right – there is still time to change tack in our Brexit negotiations and deliver a deal that takes back control of our money, trade, borders and laws.”
Tory MEP David Campbell Bannerman said: “Boris’s speech was absolutely brilliant – well analysed, positive, upbeat, appealing to the public at large, serious – great stuff.”
But former Ukip leader Nigel Farage said: “A very well delivered speech from Boris but it is hopeless to expect Mrs May to deliver on any of it.”
Earlier at Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons, Mrs May faced a jibe from former Tory frontbencher Andrea Jenkyns over her Brexit plans.
Squabbling
“Could the Prime Minister inform the House at what point it was decided that Brexit means remain?” asked the MP, who quit as a parliamentary private secretary to campaign for a full break with the EU.
Mrs May told her: “At absolutely no point, because Brexit continues to mean Brexit.”
The Prime Minister last night briefly addressed a behind-closeddoors meeting of the 1922 committee of Tory parliamentarians.
Pro-Brexit Conservative MP Simon Clarke said Mrs May’s broad message to the meeting had been that she was serious about the Brexit negotiations and the EU must be too.
She urged the party to stop squabbling saying the threat of a Jeremy Corbyn government was real.
But another leading Eurosceptic Tory MP yesterday confirmed that at least 35 letters from Tory MPs stating they had no confidence in Mrs May’s leadership have now been sent to Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee.
Under the rules a total of 48 would trigger a leadership contest.
THE Brexit referendum was a decisive call from the British people for the Government to embrace national independence. Yet ever since the vote, much of the political establishment has tried to thwart that decision.
It is this stance of prevarication, pusillanimity and paralysis that has created the turmoil now engulfing Westminster. When so many politicians refuse to accept the verdict of the electorate, a crisis in democracy is the consequence. Without a clear sense of direction Parliament is gripped by bitter party splits and a chronic loss of governmental authority, exacerbated by a lengthening catalogue of frontbench resignations.
The vulnerability of Theresa May’s administration was illustrated by the evening of high drama in the Commons on Tuesday, when the Government just managed to avoid defeat on a crucial Remainer amendment which could have forced Britain to stay in a European customs union.
With 12 pro-EU Tories backing the demand, Government whips had to rely on the support of a small group of courageous Brexiteer Labour rebels to scrape home.
The turbulence was stoked further yesterday by a barnstorming speech in the chamber by the former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, who left the Cabinet in protest at the Prime Minister’s handling of Brexit.
WITH all the charisma and optimism which made him such an effective frontman for the Leave campaign, Boris displayed the kind of bravura spirit that has been sadly missing from the Government’s approach to Brexit so far.
On the other side, the diehard pro-EU brigade is now only too eager to exploit the very crisis that they manufactured. As part of this ruthless campaign, two leading Remainers have come up with proposals that pretend to be solutions to the present mess but are actually new tactical manoeuvres to keep Britain in the EU.
The first, from the former education secretary Justine Greening, is to hold a second referendum on Brexit, so that, to use her words, “the final Brexit decision is taken out of the hands of the deadlocked politicians”. The second, even more radical idea, comes from the noisy Midlands Tory MP Anna Soubry, who thinks that Britain needs “a government of national unity”. Although both schemes are dressed up in the language of democracy, their purpose is to deny the people their democratic wishes.
Greening’s plan is both unworkable and insulting to voters. What she wants is a complex new vote, in which the public would be presented on the ballot paper with three choices: no EU deal; the Government’s negotiated deal; or staying under Brussels.
With voters required to list their first and second preferences, the outcome would be decided by proportional representation, the very procedure overwhelmingly rejected by the British electorate in the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum.
Not only is this hopelessly impracticable but it is also the sort of ugly stunt that the commissars of Brussels like to pull, demanding that electorates are forced to keep voting until they come up with the right result.
That is what happened in Denmark in 1992. After Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty they were required to vote again, just as the referendums in Ireland on the Nice and Lisbon Treaties were rerun after they initially produced anti-EU outcomes.
The demand for a second referendum is based on political deceit. Having wailed at the 2016 result while denouncing Leave voters as ignorant and even bigoted, the Remainers now pose as the new champions of democracy.
But why should we trust them to respect the result of a second poll when they have spent the past two years trashing the result of the first?
Anna Soubry’s demand for an all-party national government is just as misleading. What she really wants is not unity but rule by a faction of anti-Brexit ideologues, whom she laughably calls “the sensible, pragmatic people who believe in putting their country’s interests first”. If Soubry and her gang had their way, Britain would cease to exist as a country, becoming nothing more than a regional province in the EU’s empire. The only unifying force in such an administration would be the collective surrender to the dogma of federal integration.
APART from during the First and Second World Wars there has only been one all-party coalition in British political history, that of the 1931 National Government under Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald. But this was created to tackle a specific economic emergency during the Great Depression, whereas Soubry’s “unity” government would be formed with the malignant purpose of defying the will of the people. Division, not unity, would be the consequence of such a ruse.
Soubry’s all-party vision represents the sort of soggy, Europhile, progressive, establishment consensus that ultimately drove the majority of the British public to support leaving the EU. Brexit was a rebellion against the political class’s programme to destroy Britain’s identity. Soubry’s plan would give that process of betrayal a new impetus.
We don’t need Remainer second votes or doctrinaire coalitions. We just need the Government to get on with the job of implementing the referendum decision.
‘We don’t need second votes or coalitions’