Why even Remain voters like me find MiliClegg’s attempt to block Brexit so utterly nauseating
YES, I’m one of the 48 per cent who voted Remain. I campaigned energetically for the UK to stay in the European Union. As skills minister in David Cameron’s government, I toured colleges around the country, urging young people to make sure their voice was heard, to get themselves on the register and fight to keep Britain in the EU.
Like most people on my side of the argument, I was disbelieving when the first results — from Sunderland — were announced on the night of June 23, and was plunged into despair when I woke up the next day to find that a clear majority of the British people had voted to Leave.
But even then, in the deepest slough of despond, it was clear what Remain-supporting MPs like me had to do. That’s why, at 7.19am, I sent the following tweet: ‘The people I work for [ie. the voters, not the Tory leadership!] have made a momentous decision. I advised against it. But they call the shots and I will try to make a success of it.’
Astonishing
It’s called democracy, and if MPs don’t respect it then we shouldn’t be in Parliament.
That is why it is depressing to find others in the Remain camp have come to a very different conclusion: they haven’t understood we really are going to leave the EU. In fact, they are doing their damnedest to stop it happening.
The purpose of the guerrilla war being waged by these Remainers is to cling on to as many of the membership arrangements as possible — in the not-so-secret hope a future government of the liberal Left will be able to take us back in.
In the case of Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, of course, they fancy that this future government will be led by people like them — or, preferably, no doubt after a brief pantomime of pretend reluctance, by them.
Following 18 months in which both have been refreshingly absent from our TV screens, it is an astonishing, and frankly nauseating, double act.
In Clegg we have the man who devastated the Liberal Democrats as a political force, taking his revenge on the voters by launching a campaign to neuter the result of the largest exercise in democracy the UK has ever seen.
Having been on the losing side of yet another referendum — his previous attempt to monkey with our voting system was soundly rejected in 2011 — you would have thought a man who styles himself a Democrat might acquire a little humility. But no.
Instead, we find him back on the BBC sofa — where else! — issuing threats that would be blood-curdling if they weren’t so ludicrous, about the catastrophic effect of Brexit on the prices of beef, chocolate and cheese.
How can he predict that export tariffs — of respectively 59, 38 and 40 per cent — will be imposed on those products if we leave the single market?
Clegg said this week that a so-called hard Brexit would ‘lead us off a cliff edge towards higher food prices, with a triple whammy of punishing tariffs, customs checks and workforce shortages’.
These are the kinds of things he was saying before the referendum, as part of what turned out to be the wholly futile Project Fear. And here he is fighting the same battles months after the polls closed.
It reminds me of the French diplomat Talleyrand’s comments about the Bourbons: ‘They had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.’
And who is Clegg’s sidekick in this attempt to delay the triggering of Article 50, which begins the formal process of decoupling from Europe?
It is, of course, Ed Miliband, whose main contribution to British politics was to surrender Scotland to the Scots Nats and meekly relinquish the sorry husk of a once great Labour Party into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn and his motley crew of Trotskyites and anti-Semites.
Not content with destroying his party — and in no way shamed by the fact 69 per cent of his own constituents in Doncaster rejected membership of the EU — Miliband has a spring in his step. That’s because he’s never happier than when he is telling the Northern working classes what’s good for them.
Frankly, as his most admirable predecessor as Labour leader — Clement Attlee — might have said, a period of silence from both of these gentlemen would be most welcome.
Clegg and Miliband are not alone. They have allies in both Houses of Parliament. In public, most of them go through the motions of acknowledging the referendum verdict.
In last week’s Brexit debate in the Commons, every other speech opened with a perfunctory declaration that the speaker accepted the result or even, if they were feeling very generous, respected the result. Strange then that their next word was almost invariably ‘but . . .’
The ‘but . . .’ of the recalcitrant Remainers takes a number of forms. One popular, though spurious, argument is that the referendum addressed only the narrow question of whether the UK should leave the EU or remain — not what we should do about the single market.
Frustrate
The advocates of this position stop their ears to any examination of the reasons why so many people voted to leave or any discussion of the arguments deployed during the campaign about what leaving would entail — even though both sides asserted it would involve leaving the single market.
They calculate the best way to frustrate the referendum result is for Britain to confine itself to a ‘technical’ exit only.
This would mean sliding seamlessly into a position like Norway’s, where we are still in the single market, still bound by freedom of movement laws and still subject to rulings by the European Court of Justice.
For the most stubborn Remainers, it doesn’t matter that we would have gained almost nothing while losing any say over future developments in EU rules.
Other MPs have been attempting to champion the idea of parliamentary sovereignty. ‘I accept the result of the referendum, but Parliament must determine how the Government negotiates Brexit,’ they intone.
This argument is at least superficially respectable. Of course, Parliament must hold ministers to account for their decisions about strategic priorities for the negotiations and must vote on all the stages of the Great Repeal Bill that will formalise our exit.
Stalling
So far, so uncontroversial. The problem is recalcitrant Remainers want to have a parliamentary debate on when we should trigger Article 50.
This is despite the fact our Government was elected on a manifesto commitment to ‘honour the result of the referendum, whatever the outcome’. And David Cameron was clear a vote for Leave would require the immediate triggering of the Article.
Even more disreputable is the stance taken by Baroness Wheatcroft. Appointed to the House of Lords by Mr Cameron after a career as a journalist, she has never subjected herself to the people’s verdict.
Yet she had the brass neck to question whether the British people knew what they were voting for in the referendum and to urge her fellow peers to defy the Commons by stalling our departure from Europe.
Noisy and opinionated though these diehard Remainers are, fortunately there are relatively few of them, at least in the Tory Party. Most of us who campaigned to stay in recognise we have a special responsibility to listen to the voters.
In discharging this duty, we know that leaving the EU does not mean we’re turning our back on free trade or denying ourselves the opportunity to welcome talented and hardworking people from around the world.
The EU was a means to an end, but it imposed constraints that ultimately chafed too much. Now the people have rejected it, we must find other, better ways to achieve our goals for the people we serve.
The sooner Clegg, Miliband and their fellow refuseniks understand that, the better.