A good Brexit is a hard Brexit

Blackleaf

Blackleaf

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What we learned on 24 June is that the establishment elite are not representative of the country at large. And what we have learned since is that they are not about to give up any time soon…

The most obvious example is this new distinction, endlessly promulgated by the BBC, between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Brexit. No one talked about such a thing in the run-up to the referendum. The only people talking about it now are bitter Remainers trying to frustrate the democratic process. Most of us who voted for Brexit want it good and strong and hard.

This is why I think our ex-Remainer PM Theresa May played such a blinder with her forthright Sunday speech on Brexit.

Coffee House

A good Brexit is a hard Brexit

James Delingpole





James Delingpole
8 October 2016
The Spectator

What you really should have done if you were in Birmingham on Monday this week was skip the not notably riveting Philip Hammond speech, and head instead for the fringe event run by the Bruges Group starring me, Professor David Myddelton and Charles Moore.

I can’t speak for my performance (modesty forbids me) but my fellow panellists were brilliant: funny, incisive and as optimistic as you’d expect of a pair of ardent Brexiteers addressing the victorious home crowd for probably the first time since that happy day in June. (Charles is on stage talking about all of this (and more) in London on Monday, by the way. Tickets here).

‘Which of us here could ever have imagined that we’re actually part of the majority: the 52 per cent?’ I asked. And lots of people clapped at the wonderful warm feeling this gave them. But then I introduced a worm into their apple. ‘What we learned on 24 June is that the establishment elite are not representative of the country at large. And what we have learned since is that they are not about to give up any time soon…’

The most obvious example is this new distinction, endlessly promulgated by the BBC, between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Brexit. No one talked about such a thing in the run-up to the referendum. The only people talking about it now are bitter Remainers trying to frustrate the democratic process. Most of us who voted for Brexit want it good and strong and hard.

This is why I think our ex-Remainer PM Theresa May played such a blinder with her forthright Sunday speech on Brexit. Yes I know there are those — even on the Leave side of the argument — who insist it isn’t possible, that there are all manner of complications which will stop us getting our way on tariff-free trade and freedom of movement. But you don’t go into negotiations conceding the pass before you’ve even begun. Just ask that guy who used to be PM.

One of the things I always loved about being an outspoken Brexiteer was being on the side of the people. It was like that time I served briefly in the Sealed Knot as a Parliamentarian pikeman with Col John Birch’s Regiment of Foot, shouting as we marched off to battle catchy slogans like ‘A pox on the King’ and ‘One King, King Jesus’. Within our ranks we embraced all manner of ideological convictions, from the socialist to the libertarian to the shy monarchist. But one thing we all agreed on: that the rotten establishment needed a proper kick up the ****.

It’s the same I think with the Brexit vote. Since the result, lots of commentators have speculated on what it really meant: was it anti-immigration, was it about a yearning for sovereignty, was it about protest, fish, economics, freedom? And Theresa May has wisely recognised that her legacy will largely depend on how successfully she answers these questions.

I think the solution is more basic than our experts realise: what most of us would really like, for a change, is a state that represents our interests. Let me give you an obvious example of this — one that happily Theresa May has addressed already: the legal harassment of our troops.

Almost every sane, normal person in the country at large has enormous respect for our serving men and women. It’s a brave and selfless thing to trade in your Playstation and Mum’s home cooking for a uniform, military discipline and the real prospect of having your legs blown off in a flyblown land where diarrhoea is a way of life.

What kind of deranged, sadistic, unpatriotic tosser would you have to be to send such people to fight for their country not only with their arms tied behind their backs (in terms of rules of engagement) but, worse, to allow ambulance-chasing lawyers (often representing either lying gold-diggers or murderous terrorists) to pursue them through the courts once they got home?

Whoever created this state of affairs — Tony Blair, presumably — was acting flagrantly against the interests of the British people. Anyone, in any pub or café or hairdresser’s across the land, could tell you that. Yet astonishingly, for years, even with a Conservative government with an ex-foxhunting Old Etonian in charge, this outrageous and inexcusable injustice was allowed to persist. It’s one of the many irritations that I suspect a lot of people would have had in mind on 23 June when they voted to give that remote, smug, complacent establishment one massive boot in the goolies.

Note that it’s not a left or right thing. It’s a plain bloody commonsense thing. Now I’ll give you another example, one this time where Theresa May’s administration has fallen woefully short: the Hinkley Point C nuclear project. If the government really has to get involved with energy infrastructure projects, then it has only one job: make sure the British people get a good deal.

In no wise could this be said of Hinkley. It commits Britain to buying outdated technology, at three times the going wholesale rate for electricity, in what has been described as the ‘worst deal in history’ — to the benefit of almost no one save French and Chinese investors. There may be political reasons behind this but the British people don’t care about political reasons. What they want — and deserve, because it’s their money — is cheap, reliable electricity.

What we can see already is that this administration is going to be a mixed bag of good sense and off-the-scale stupidity. On the latter side, next to Hinkley we can put the all but inevitable HS2 and anything to do with ‘industrial policy’; on the former we can put stuff like grammar schools, the scrapping of the Department for Energy and Climate Change and, with luck, the execution of Brexit. Could be worse, I suppose.

Charles Moore is in conversation with Fraser Nelson in Monday at the Royal Institution, Mayfair. It’s a subscriber-only event. Tickets here, and to subscribe from just £1 a week click here.

This article first appeared in this week’s Spectator magazine.

A good Brexit is a hard Brexit | Coffee House


 
Blackleaf

Blackleaf

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DOMINIC LAWSON: Hard or soft Brexit? Red Ed's Orwellian doublespeak is just a trick to defy the will of the people

By Dominic Lawson for the Daily Mail
10 October 2016

The sheer breathtaking nerve of it is hard to believe.

But it’s true: Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, the biggest double-losers in recent British political history — the former Labour and Liberal Democrat party leaders who were heartily rejected by the voters in last year’s General Election, and again a few months ago when they campaigned for the UK to remain in the EU — have joined forces to insist the Government has no democratic right to implement what they term ‘hard Brexit’.


Ed Miliband said in The Observer: ‘There is no mandate for hard Brexit and I don’t believe there is a majority in parliament for it, either’


Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg: This term ‘hard Brexit’ needs to be exposed for the Orwellian doublespeak that it is

And this week, they are to be joined at the High Court by the firm of Mishcon de Reya, representing an alleged 1,000 lawyers who want to put a block — if necessary via the House of Lords — on Theresa May invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty: the only way in which a member of the EU can formally begin negotiations to secede.

Yesterday, Ed Miliband said in The Observer: ‘There is no mandate for hard Brexit and I don’t believe there is a majority in parliament for it, either’ and he was backed up by Nick Clegg in the same newspaper.

This term ‘hard Brexit’ needs to be exposed for the Orwellian doublespeak that it is.

What Messrs Miliband and Clegg and their followers in the defeated Remain camp mean by ‘soft’ Brexit (as in cuddly, cosy, gentle) is that the UK should immediately apply for membership of the European Economic Area (EEA).

Betrayal

This is the organisation consisting of 28 EU states and three others (Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). All are full members of the EU single market, in return for which they pay substantial contributions to the EU budget, and undertake to honour the principle of ‘free movement’ — that is, uncontrolled migration within the 31-nation area.

This is monitored and invigilated by the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) Court, a faithful little Miss Echo of the European Court of Justice. The very first sentence of the website of the EFTA Court couldn’t be clearer: ‘The aim of the EEA agreement is to guarantee the free movement of persons . . . in all 31 EEA states.’


This is the so-called ‘soft Brexit’ that Miliband, Clegg and defeated but still campaigning Tory Remainers, such as Anna Soubry (left) and Nicky Morgan (right) say the British public were ‘really voting for’

This, then, is the so-called ‘soft Brexit’ that Miliband, Clegg and defeated but still campaigning Tory Remainers, such as Anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan, say the British public were ‘really voting for’ when more than 17 million ballots were cast for ‘Leave’.

Really? A modicum of investigation would have revealed (if they were interested in the truth about what happened on June 23) that the overwhelming majority of pro-Brexiters had a very different — and very clear — idea of what they were voting for.

I recently attended a presentation on this by the country’s most respected opinion poll analyst, Professor John Curtice.

Citing a series of recent polls on the matter, he said they showed that what almost 90 per cent of Leave voters understood by Brexit was that British taxpayers would no longer be paying billions of pounds a year into the EU budget and that the Government would be able to exert some control over the sort of people who would be able to enter this country from the EU. It is hardly surprising this should be the case. The two principal pledges of the winning Leave campaign were to return to British taxpayers the entirety of the £10 billion a year net British contributions to the EU and to regain control of migration policy. Therefore the claim by Miliband, Clegg, Soubry and co that the British people were not voting for what they call ‘hard Brexit’ is self-serving rubbish, if not straightforwardly dishonest.

Or to put it another way: what MiliClegg call ‘hard Brexit’ is what the British electorate meant by Brexit.

And what MiliClegg call ‘soft Brexit’ is what those 17 million and more voters on the winning side would call ‘betrayal’.

Fortunately, by no means all those parliamentarians who backed the Remain campaign agree with the idea that the losers should be allowed to define what the British public meant by Brexit.

Yesterday, Baroness Manzoor, who led the revolt in the Lords against the Government’s proposed cuts to tax credits, announced she was leaving the Liberal Democrats over the party’s policy, under its new leader Tim Farron, to try to frustrate Britain’s exit from the EU.

She said: ‘I could not support the leadership of a party that calls itself democratic and then refuses to acknowledge the will of the people in a referendum.’

Threats


Mrs May’s speech to the Conservative Party conference shattered Remainers' hopes

You might ask why it is that MiliClegg have suddenly launched this challenge.

The reason is that, until last week, they had hoped Theresa May, who had herself been (rather unenthusiastically) on the Remain side during the referendum campaign, would swing the Government behind so-called ‘soft Brexit’. But Mrs May’s remarkable speech to last week’s Conservative Party conference completely shattered their hopes.

She told her adoring party members in Birmingham — and the nation via their television screens — ‘Let me be clear. We are not leaving the EU only to give up control of immigration again. And we are not leaving only to return to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.’

That was, indeed, clear: Britain would not, under Mrs May, apply to join the European Economic Area. By the way, the other reason MiliClegg want the UK to join this group (‘soft Brexit’) is that this organisation was always designed to be the ante-room to full EU membership. In other words, MiliClegg’s cunning plan is that this would make it much easier for Britain to rejoin the EU in the relatively near future.

Mrs May’s speech also explains why the German and French leaders, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, have suddenly begun to make distinctly threatening noises about the ‘price the UK must pay’ for Brexit.

Until last week, they, too, had imagined we might apply to remain full members of the single market — which would, as they rightly added, mean that we continued to commit to free movement.

Yet the British people should not be panicked by these threats, still less by the nearly hysterical Anna Soubry, who, as a business minister under David Cameron, claimed that, if the UK ceased to be a member of the single market, our exports to the rest of the EU would fall to ‘almost absolutely zero’.

Defeat

Leave aside the fact that the countless Chinese products in our stores and homes demonstrate that a country doesn’t have to be a member of the single market to sell billions of pounds’ worth of goods to it: what Britain will aim to negotiate with the EU is some sort of zero-tariff free trade deal.

Canada and the EU have recently done so — and it will not result in that Commonwealth country either paying into the EU budget or accepting free movement of citizens between it and those 28 (soon to be 27) member states. This is what it means — to quote Mrs May’s Birmingham speech — to be a ‘sovereign and independent nation’.


When the Referendum Bill was passed in 2015, the then-Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond declared it meant that ‘the decision about our membership [of the EU] should be taken by the British people . . . not by parliamentarians in this Chamber’

But what of MiliClegg’s fifth column of lawyers who, this week, will try to persuade the High Court to agree to its claim that the Government is not legally entitled to invoke Article 50 by ‘exercise of the Royal Prerogative’ — that is, without first gaining the support of a vote in the House of Commons and the (very anti-Brexit) unelected House of Lords?

It seems the High Court will immediately pass the case up to the Supreme Court, which has indicated that it will make its decision by December at the latest.

If I were a betting man, I’d put a heavy wager on the Supreme Court rejecting the claim that the Government isn’t entitled to invoke Article 50 without first putting it to Parliament.

First, when the Referendum Bill was passed in 2015, the then-Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond declared it meant that ‘the decision about our membership [of the EU] should be taken by the British people . . . not by parliamentarians in this Chamber’.

And second, as that unparalleled expert on the legal aspects of Britain’s EU membership, Martin Howe QC, points out: ‘Article 50 came in as part of the Lisbon Treaty, which took force in British law in 2008. But nowhere in the 2008 Act is there any restriction upon the exercise of the Royal Prerogative to give notice to leave the EU under Article 50.’

In other words, MiliClegg and those attempting to thwart Theresa May through the courts are not just using Orwellian language to trash the verdict of the people in the referendum: they do not even accept the legal order on which our sovereignty rests.

These two-time losers are about to suffer a third defeat. Perhaps then even they will admit it.

 
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tay

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Theresa May will face renewed demands to set out her plans for leaving the EU in a formal white paper when she meets a deputation of more than a dozen Conservative MPs opposed to a hard Brexit on Wednesday.

The prime minister is receiving the MPs in her parliamentary office after Downing Street was stung by the scale of the backbench rebellion over Brexit last week.

Before last week’s vote, some of them had indicated they could vote with a Labour motion demanding a public plan for Brexit, forcing the government to concede and underlining the slim nature of May’s majority.

The group has been characterised as the “new bastards” in reference to the anti-EU backbench rebels who haunted John Major in the 1990s. However, those planning to attend insisted they were not aiming to make trouble.

Tensions over Brexit have been heightened within the party in recent days after an extraordinary public spat in which Nicky Morgan, the former education secretary, was cut from the list of those planning to attend.

Morgan was told not to attend by one of May’s aides, Fiona Hill, following her critical comments about the prime minister’s £995 leather trousers.

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...meet-tory-new-bastards-opposed-to-hard-brexit
 
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Remington1

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I hope that the will of the people is honoured without delayed tactics. Brits were the first to say enough is enough, and I say good for them. It's one thing to bit#ch about the 1% who are obviously making decision strictly based on their bottom line, but the Brits did something about it. I'm sure many around the world are waiting to see 'what and how' the changes will unravel. England is a beautiful country that was certainly doing very well, and will continue doing well with Brexit.
 
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tay

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Ouch, Looks like the hard on has gone soft.......

Last week, the government set out key elements of its strategy for achieving Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. It seeks a soft landing to a hard Brexit. It wants a time-limited transition period after March 2019, when Britain is due to leave the bloc. During that period, the government hopes for a “close association with the EU customs union”. When it ends, Britain will leave the customs union but seek “a new customs arrangement” that preserves “the freest and most frictionless trade possible” and Britain will then seek a free trade agreement.

These proposals are beset with ambiguity and difficulty, although the idea of a transitional agreement has been welcomed by business. Brexiters fear – and some Remainers hope – that at the end of the transitional period it will be found to have been so comfortable that it will be extended. In that case, Britain would, to a significant degree, remain in the EU, but as a de facto satellite rather than a participating member.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ferendum-on-brexit?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet
 
Blackleaf

Blackleaf

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Coffee House

Are those talking down our chances of prospering post-Brexit ever going to stop?

Ross Clark



Ross Clark
1 September 2017
The Spectator

On Tuesday, the FT lead with a confident headline: May’s Hopes for Tokyo Dashed as Japanese Hold Back on Trade Talks – and quoting a Japanese trade official commenting on the Prime Minister’s visit to Japan by saying ‘I don’t think there will be substantial progress’. It also quoted the president of Japan’s Institute of International Affairs as saying ‘we can’t negotiate until Britain is out of the EU’.

Given that at the time the headline was written May hadn’t even met with the Japanese PM Shinzo Abe it seemed a little premature. Yet needless to say it was swallowed whole by Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson who tweeted: ‘May is off to Japan. Hoped for a Trade Deal. Now Japanese say no. Their priority: EU deal. #Brexitreality’. Over on the BBC website a ‘reality check’ by correspondent Karishma Vaswani stated that Theresa May ‘may find that the gap between what she hopes for and the current reality is very wide indeed. The EU-Japan deal is a priority for Tokyo’.

Now, the Beeb’s ‘reality checker’ has had a reality check of her own. Following the meeting between Mrs May and Shinzo Abe it was announced that Japan will, after all, be seeking to replicate with Britain the trade deal it is negotiating with the EU, so that Britain will enjoy free trade with Japan (assuming the EU deal progresses) from the same day as the EU does. In other words, Mrs May has achieved exactly what she had travelled to Tokyo to achieve.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/...of-prospering-post-brexit-ever-going-to-stop/
 
Bar Sinister

Bar Sinister

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Just one question for the Brexit fans, Since a good deal of the anti-EU vote was triggered by anti-immigrant sentiment, what is Britain going to do about its aging population? Without immigration it is not going to get any younger. It is predicted that by 2045 one-quarter of the UK will be 65 years old or older.
 
Blackleaf

Blackleaf

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Bar Sinister said:
Just one question for the Brexit fans, Since a good deal of the anti-EU vote was triggered by anti-immigrant sentiment, what is Britain going to do about its aging population? Without immigration it is not going to get any younger. It is predicted that by 2045 one-quarter of the UK will be 65 years old or older.
Click to expand...

Britain's full and immigration should be reduced from the hundreds of thousands, as it has been since the Blair Administration opened the floodgates in the late Nineties, to the tens of thousands, as it was before the Blair Administration opened the floodgates.

Towns on the east coast of England especially are struggling to cope with the incomers. Boston in Lincolnshire (below) is like a little Poland and it's no surprise that the Brexit vote was strong there. The people are just fed up with their town turning into Eastern Europe.








 
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