Deal is the reward for showing a bit of steel
some here, to overcome the bureaucratic opposition.
In the Afghan campaign we needed several score of interpreters. Volunteers came forward, earning the hatred of the Taliban.
Then we pulled out. The interpreters sought sanctuary. It took another campaign to overcome the paper-shufflers.
Now it seems the Americans are following suit. For years the Kurds fought beside them to defeat the fanatical ISIS. Now Donald Trump seems willing to abandon them to those two murderous tyrants – Erdogan of Turkey and Assad of Syria.
What is the point of putting your neck on the line for the West? But the Kurds are keeping thousands of ISIS veterans – still fanatically anti-West – in jail.
Supposing they let them all go with a ticket to Dover or Washington?
THERE will come a time when the utter chaos to which we have all been subjected for the past three-and-a-half years will be examined with hindsight, made sense of and explained. But some things are unavoidable even now. They all date back to the truly extraordinary night of June 23, 2016 – the night they counted the British referendum votes.
Slowly the high-ups, here and in Europe, realised with stunned horror they had all been wrong. The British had clearly voted to leave the European Union. The referendum was totally legal, created by an act of parliament with huge majorities. It was not rigged. Campaigners on both sides had exaggerated but that is true of all general elections – which was exactly what the referendum was.And all political groupings, including today’s Remainers, had pledged to respect and abide by the outcome. And then they got the shock of their complacent little lives and half of them reneged on that pledge. They are still doing so, with increasing hysteria.
OUR media were so obsessed with the situation in the UK they ignored the shock levels in Brussels. Over there it was as if they had stuck their collective thumb into an electric socket. But they recovered and devised an agenda that abides to this day – that if the UK insisted on departing it would do so on conditions so utterly ruinous that no other country would ever consider following suit. That has been the EU’s policy for over three years.
In its pursuit Brussels soon received a gift from the gods. The Tory government appointed the worst prime minister in history to succeed the failed David Cameron.
Predictably the very clever negotiators in Brussels ran rings around her. We have all watched the schmoozing, over-long handshakes, embraces, back-pats and beaming smiles. All phoney as a four-pound note. For the True Believers, here and across the Channel, leaving the EU is not a judgmental error. It is heresy. The complete unification of the continent into one federal nation-state is not a project. It is a faith, a creed, a religion, and we have unforgivably offended it.
Hence the unrelenting campaign to force us to revoke our decision. The diehards of Brussels are not our friends at all.
A key of course has been the deliberately invented and unnecessary Irish backstop, which does not apply to the four Swiss borders with the EU nor Norway’s long border with Sweden. Also invented was the no-deal catastrophe.Add to that the Revoke campaign inside Britain, ardently supported and funded by renegades of all stripes.
This in-house Revoke campaign has steadily grown into a parliamentary majority in Commons and Lords, even though its supporters once swore to respect the referendum outcome.
Then came Boris Johnson, the first Brexiteer from Day One. It took the lumbering Tory party years to finally get there but, despite half the media conducting the most virulent hate campaign I have ever seen, this is where we now are. A true Brexiteer is in Downing Street. The Cabinet Remainers are fired, the backbench ditto are ousted, the people’s ■
A BARRISTER friend who studies these things with a magnifying glass has been examining the Benn Act, dubbed by Downing Street the Surrender Act. According to him this act requires us to surrender to the requirements of the EU in concluding a “settlement” on their terms.
But these require us to break up our kingdom into Northern Ireland with one set of trading rules (the EU’s) and mainland Britain with another.
But that requires us to transfer a portion of the Queen’s sovereignty to a foreign power. Which, he says, would require her to revoke her Coronation Oath in whole or in part. Which is illegal.
Surely another case for the Supreme Court, now by its own choice a fully political court. I do not know the procedure for appealing to the Supreme Court, or how much it would cost. But businesswoman Gina Miller did it twice so why could it not be done in favour of British sovereignty rather than against it? It would only need a few patriots with deep pockets. Have we none left? decision will not be vacated, short of a coup d’état.
It is Brussels, not the British, who seem to have wavered. Behind the arras, the EU economists have warned the political magnificos for four years that a no-deal rupture would be more disastrous even for Europe than for the UK. The calculation was that the British nerve would crack. Wrong again. We did not crack and we were not going to.
The Tusks, Varadkars, Junckers and Barniers started to use the word “maybe”. The old, dismissive arrogance was dithering. With a bit more time and the old steel, we seem to have done it.We have been threatened before. It didn’t work then.Why should it now?