A customs union would be end of the line for Theresa
THIS weekend, we should all have been celebrating finally leaving the EU and looking forward to a bright future as a newly independent, free-trading nation.
But instead of being Brexit Day, Friday, March 29, 2019 will be remembered as the day that Remain MPs prioritised their own personal views over the will of voters who sent them to Westminster to deliver the referendum result.
And that date will mark yet another milestone in a series of national humiliations suffered by this country at the hands of EU negotiators. The Prime Minister has always viewed Brexit as a damage-limitation exercise. She never had any enthusiasm for the decision made by the British people in 2016, and as a result we’ve been accommodating the EU’s every whim rather than staunchly fighting for British interests.
A total of 17.4 million people gave us the clearest of instructions in the 2016 referendum, in the biggest act of democracy in our country’s history.
They asked us to renew our politics and to take back control of our laws, borders, money and trade. Sadly, it seems the PM has decided to throw away our right to leave the EU without a deal – despite having said dozens of times that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’.
And last week in Parliament, Remain MPs demonstrated that they will upend centuries of parliamentary traditions to silence the voice of democracy and deny the country a real Brexit.
Without being willing to use the critical tool of No Deal and faced with such a desperately negative, cynical and undemocratic Parliament, our vote on Friday was a last chance saloon moment.
Voting for the Prime Minister’s flawed Withdrawal Agreement was, in fact, the only remaining route out of the EU.
Yet it didn’t find support in the House of Commons. The PM’s unwillingness to walk away and just leave the EU may well ensure no Brexit in any meaningful way for now. Tomorrow we will face the gravest threat to Brexit when Parliament votes on whether it wants us to belong to the customs union.
When people voted to leave the EU, they voted to take back control of our trade so that we could do trade deals with non-EU countries. The EU customs union prevents us from doing this.
Being part of the customs union while we’re still in the EU is one thing – at least we had a seat at the table. But being in it after having left must be the most damaging option available.
Under this plan, the world’s fifthlargest economy would have surrendered its trade policy to the EU and we would never have any right to determine our own trading rules.
The Conservative manifesto promised, and the Prime Minister has emphasised repeatedly, that we would leave the customs union and Single Market. Conservatives who vote to remain in the customs union tomorrow will be tearing up their manifesto commitments and doing irreparable damage to our party.
Jeremy Corbyn’s answer to Brexit is to bind us to the customs union without us having a say over the rules and regulations that govern our trade. How could any Conservative MP support that? I hope that the Prime Minister is preparing not only to vote to keep us out of the customs union, but to give a firm instruction to all Conservative MPs to do the same.
This bizarre lack of direction from the leader of our party and country, for fear of resignations, has got to come to an end.
Governance and vision for our great country after a real Brexit has been delivered must be restored. Anything less would be one devastating political choice too many.
It would spell the end of the line for this Conservative Government and brings the real threat of severe damage to our country’s economy, freedoms and successes under a communist Corbyn government.