If Boris Johnson accepts the EU’s offer of an extension, genuine Leave voters will have no choice but to desert the Conservative Party
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Various UK media have been crawling all over the hints and leaks from a Brussels “keen to make clear its neutrality” this morning. It is looking increasingly like a 3-month extension. BUT the clauses in it that I saw last night made brutally clear to anyone who’s awake that the EC is being anything but neutral.
Apart from brief mentions, I have yet to see any newspaper or TV channel highlighting this hugely disturbing form of words….as distributed to EU leaders over the weekend:
“In order to obtain the extension, the UK will be asked to accept officially that no further renegotiation of the Withdrawal Agreement will be possible”
This is a clear attempt to spike the guns of The Brexit Party at the next election. It bears a closer resemblance to a dirty neutron bomb than it does to neutrality. It is also a solid confirmation of what those of even minimal discernment have learned from more than three years of “negotiations”: whatever Brussels says, assume the opposite intention.
From the start of the saga in 2016, those in charge of dealing with Juncker, Barnier, Verhofstadt et al had all the evidence available from the EU’s dealings with Greece and Cyprus three years earlier to arrive at the obvious conclusion: they are gangsters disguised as bureaucrats disguised as democrats.
Attending an EU summit in Warsaw at that time, the US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (aware that Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis had been reassured by French finance head Pierre Muscovici that Athens could achieve “a fair deal” on debt forgiveness) asked a very senior EU political figure – never named – what such a deal might mean.
“Well,” said the pol, “we’re going to take the Greeks and beat them to death with a baseball bat. This way, they won’t see it coming”.
Just to be clear here, I don’t for a second think that the US State would be any more honourable: I did business and negotiations with American corporates for over twenty years, and the only people less trustworthy than them are the Swiss. Here’s a familiar reminder of my position on British Independence:
In the 21st century, no nuclear power with a chemical/nerve weapon stockpile needs military alliances. We are that nation. With a second Russo-Chinese reserve currency slowly taking shape, no nation with a powerful financial sector need fear petrodollar blackmail. We are that nation.
We don’t have to be nasty to anyone. But we don’t have to be a nation of pink-oboe players either.
So, here we are again: another Monday, another “critical” week. What now?
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If we are about to sign an extension tying the hands of future governments in perpetuity (something I suspect is illegal under EU Law anyway) we should not sign the extension.
Is such an action illegal? The Benn Act forced Johnson to ask for it, not to accept it.
If, however, the extension is accepted – which I expect it to be – Parliament should not pass the Withdrawal Agreement – on the simple grounds that it is worse than remaining, worse than May’s WA, and saddles the UK with horrendous future liabilities.
The best route is to revert to a No Deal departure on October 31st. But the independent/Labour/LibDem wreckers have made that impossible.
Soooo….the best course is for a General Election. But Parliament will not grant that to Boris Johnson unless he takes No Deal off the table legally.
The honourable (and best) thing for BoJo to do if he is not granted an election is to resign without accepting the extension.
That will leave three working days for the Revokers (and their unflinching ally The Speaker) to cobble together a way of accepting the extension legally, and in a way that satisfies the EU.
I’m not sure that’s possible.
Thus we will leave without a deal. And Brussels will have a nervous breakdown. And the Dow will fall by 10%. And the Pound will lose 5% of its value. All will be confused chaos.
But Britain will be out.
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Does this all sound terribly foolhardy? Perhaps. But 80% of these very same MPs voted for this to be the default UK negotiating stance. And the consequences of getting BoJo’s deal through would be far, far worse. However, Mr Johnson doesn’t care about that: he’s a neoliberal gobalist and just wants to carry on being Prime Minister.
This new, barely noticed demand from Brussels in return for an extension is what has hardened my attitude since yesterday. Unless Team Boris pulls a rabbit out of the hat today (with something similar to my suggestion, or something eminently more elegant in its effectiveness) then I think – regrettably – that those who really want Sovereign Brexit must now swing behind Nigel Farage single-mindedly….and start taking scientific, planned tactical voting seriously.
Let us just recount for a second here the idiocies, hypocrisy and blatant Establishment arrogance in play:
- The country voted to leave
- There is no reason in existence to be giving these hoodlums £39bn
- The EU has far more to lose than the UK if we leave
- 75% of MPs are hidden revokers
- May tried to bombast a sellout through Parliament
- She let Whitehall behave unconstitutionally in order to try and get it through
- Boris Johnson has failed to get a genuine renegotiation of the WA
- Parliament wants to tie his hands on even getting that BRINO through
- The No Deal default has been reversed without any reference to The People
- Brussels clearly cannot be trusted
- The only man and Party with the balls to make a clean break are Nigel Farage and TBP.
So: it will be interesting to see what the Prime Minister does today when his election call fails.
Stay tuned.
The Slog 