Lord Owen: It will get ugly if Brexit is blocked

PARLIAMENT faces an ‘ugly’ backlash from the electorate if it tries to block Brexit, Lord Owen warned yesterday.

In a blunt message, the veteran former Labour foreign secretary said MPs and peers were creating a ‘very dangerous’ situation by trying to ‘thwart Brexit’.

Lord Owen, a long-time Eurosceptic, said many leading figures in Parliament viewed EU membership as a ‘religion’.

And he said they were willing to stoop to almost anything to get their way.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Lord Owen said: ‘Within our own Parliament, people are determined to block the whole process. They lie through their teeth, saying it’s this problem or that, but really they just don’t want to leave.

‘I think they were gripped by a religion and they can’t stop believing in it. And they have really managed to convince themselves that they are entitled in a strange way to thwart Brexit. They forget that they voted for the referendum.

‘Parliament has to accept that it’s gone out of their hands. But they can’t accept it.’

Lord Owen suggested Parliament was playing with fire by watering down Brexit. ‘I believe it’s very dangerous,’ he said. ‘It won’t even be a slow fuse. They [Leave voters] will know that this is just Brexit in name only. [ Former Ukip leader Nigel] Farage will pounce. The mood in the Brexit cities and towns will start getting ugly.

‘These people don’t believe a word their politicians say. There’s an elite and they’re just not listening.

‘The Leave voters were fully aware of the fact there would be some economic downsides. They were not voting for prosperity. They were voting to have more control over their affairs and challenge London dominance.’ Lord Owen also criticised Theresa May’s Chequers deal, saying she was ‘in grave danger of ending up with Brexit in name only’. Predicting further concessions, he added: ‘If she stopped now I think most people could just about live with it, but it won’t stop there.’

He warned that the UK faced a ‘very, very serious political situation’ following the aftermath of the Prime Minister’s unpopular Chequers plan. ‘It’s no longer a matter of personal preference,’ he said.

‘It’s that Brexit is this mess, so we’ve got to sort this damned thing out and fast.’

Lord Owen was once a committed supporter of the EU and campaigned to stay in during the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership. But he threw his weight behind the Leave campaign in 2016 after concluding the EU was a failing institution.

From 1992 to 1995, he served as EU peace negotiator in the former Yugoslavia, but he is now fiercely critical of the way both Brussels and the UK have handled the Brexit negotiations.

He said it was not surprising Brussels was making it difficult to leave, saying the European Commission would ‘never willingly let us out’.

Lord Owen said Mrs May had been ‘given an extremely difficult hand’ and had shown ‘courage and persistence’.

But the Brexit negotiations needed to be led by a Leave supporter to be successful.

‘It is a great shame we didn’t have a Leaver as PM,’ he said.

‘The public has been outmanoeuvred. It is so obvious what is going on. What is going to come out of her bespoke negotiations is bad.’

‘The elite are not listening’