Stopping Brexit ‘would be worse than Suez’
BREXITEER TORY MP Jacob Rees-Mogg has likened opponents of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union to a Japanese soldier who refused to surrender after spending 29 years in the jungle following defeat in 1945.
Mr Rees-Mogg, who chairs Tory pro-Brexit European Research Group (ERG) said reneging on the referendum result would be a national humiliation worse than the Suez crisis of 1956.
In a provocative central London speech, Mr Rees-Mogg said: “With one year to go before the technical date of departure, this is the challenge to the decreasing number of Remainers who model themselves on Mr Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who finally surrendered in 1974 having previously refused to believe that the Second World War had ended.”
Mr Rees-Mogg also accused of Remainers trying to stop Brexit of being “cave dwellers” and claimed the EU would be “insolvent” if Britain left without an exit deal.
And he claimed he would not have contested the referendum result had it gone the other way in June 2016.
The Conservative MP for North East Somerset said: “I had looked up that there was a Trappist monastery in Leicestershire.
“It was my intention to see if they would accept a visit from me, not on a permanent basis but at least an interim basis because I thought, that line of Attlee to one of his Ministers ‘a period of silence on your part would be welcome’ would be something the winners would have been entitled to expect.”
Mr Rees-Mogg also suggested Britain had been “hiding behind the skirts” of German chancellor Angela Merkel in global politics.
Stopping Brexit “would be admitting as a nation that we simply did not cut the mustard, we were not up to taking our place in the world and we were so fearful, fretful of the future”, he added.