Don’t let these smug stooges derail Brexit

TREACHERY is a very grave charge. But it is hard to think of any other that adequately describes today’s plot by Remainer peers to deprive their country of its strongest card in the Brexit talks.

In any negotiation, whether over business or diplomacy, the ultimate bargaining tool is the threat to walk away from the table if the terms are unfavourable. As Theresa May has put it succinctly: ‘No deal is better than a bad deal.’

Yet in the most flagrant bid to derail Brexit so far, today’s proposed Lords amendments would rob Britain’s team of this trump card – dreaded by our partners, who stand to lose more than the UK if talks collapse, since they sell much more to us than we do to them.

Instead, they would force our negotiators to keep going backwards and forwards to Brussels in quest of an agreement acceptable to the Europhile majority in Parliament, while opening the way for a second referendum before we can leave.

Thus, anti-Brexit peers seek to remove any incentive for Brussels to offer us advantageous terms.

Indeed, their aim couldn’t be clearer: To keep us in the EU by any underhand means possible, whatever the cost.

Have they no conception of how distasteful they appear – these smug, washed-up, unelected, we-know-best Brussels stooges – conducting guerrilla warfare against the will of the people and rooting for the other side in the talks?

This paper accepts that many of the 48 per cent who voted Remain still worry about our future after Brexit – though we firmly believe their concerns will prove as unfounded as Project Fear’s predictions of immediate catastrophe after the vote.

But the fact is that MPs agreed by a huge majority to let voters decide the issue. And when 17.4million voted Leave, on a 24-year high turnout of 72 per cent, they gave the Government the biggest democratic mandate in British history.

As for the decision to start the two-year countdown to Brexit, this was passed in the Commons by 498 to 114 – while 85 per cent of the popular vote in the 2017 election went to parties committed in their manifestos to implementing the referendum result.

Leave aside that recent polls suggest most voters don’t want a second referendum. Forget, too, that ditching Brexit now would make us the laughing-stock of the world, utterly at the mercy of Brussels.

The ineluctable truth is that attempts by peers to sabotage withdrawal are a monstrous assault on democracy.

More worrying still, there are growing signs of Commons support for the Lords saboteurs. This comes from an unholy alliance between fanatical Tory Remainers and an utterly unscrupulous, opportunist Labour Party.

Having ruled out a second referendum, Labour now says it will abstain on the issue – while after twisting and turning, Jeremy Corbyn is plotting to keep Britain in a customs union. This would destroy much of the point of Brexit by preventing us from striking trade deals in the wider world.

Even Mrs May, admirably firm until now, is said to be considering a ‘customs partnership’ with the EU – a hugely complex fudge devised by her Europe adviser Olly Robbins, who has a history of backing closer union with Brussels.

But the worst betrayal of all will come from Eurofanatical Tory backbenchers in the Commons if they refuse to overturn wrecking amendments from the Lords.

Shouldn’t MPs such as Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry take a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror and ask if they are really prepared to defy 17.4million voters, humiliate Britain in the eyes of the world – and subject us to the risk of a half-baked Marxist government run by Mr Corbyn?

If that isn’t treachery, what is?