No deal Brexit is the best solution

With the Brexit deadline looming and second referendum campaigners becoming daily more deranged, it is possible to discern the likely tactics of Theresa May and the anti-democratic majority in the House of Commons. In essence, it looks as if the bar-stool indiscretion of Olly Robbins was substantially correct: the game will be to take things to the wire and, on the pretext of having secured some pathetically cosmetic “concession” from Brussels on the Irish backstop, present Theresa May’s servile “deal” again to the House of Commons.

Why would MPs vote for this dog’s breakfast after rejecting it by a margin of 432 to 202 on the previous vote? Because, the Tory government calculates, by then the sole alternative will be “no deal” – the propagandist term for exiting the EU on WTO terms, against which MPs have neurotically set their determination. Loaded terms such as “crash out” and “chaos” have been freely bandied around inside the Westminster bubble and beamed outwards at the public in an attempt to brainwash the electorate.

MPs’ real objection is that a WTO Brexit would restore Britain’s status as a sovereign nation state and repudiate the culture of managed decline that is the worldview of the liberal globalist political class.

The Cabinet’s hope seems to be that even Theresa May’s tattered instrument of surrender might reluctantly be endorsed by a majority of MPs as the alternative to Britain regaining sovereignty – Heaven forefend! In fact, Remainers would be endorsing the most squalid abdication of sovereignty to which any free nation has ever submitted, other than after defeat in war.

Leaving aside the notorious Irish backstop, the May confection is an infamous surrender. If, under its terms, Britain would be leaving the EU, why does Article 6 state that “all references to ‘Member States’ and competent authorities of Member States… shall be read as including the United Kingdom.” That is a clear admission that we would be shackled by so much EU authority as to remain de facto a member state, though Article 7 excludes us from EU summits.

The European Court of Justice would be the highest court, adjudicating the Withdrawal Agreement, and disputes under the agreement would be adjudicated under EU law only, in terms of Article 168, to the exclusion of international law. We would be subject to EU law on VAT until 2025 at the earliest.

There is also shameless entrenchment of Eurocrat privileges. Former EU officials could never be taxed in the UK on EU salaries and pensions. Most outrageously, in Article 101, Britain is bound not to prosecute EU employees who are, or might in future be deemed, criminals. (You couldn’t make it up.)

UK foreign policy would be “bound by the obligations stemming from the international agreements concluded by the Union”, but with no input into policy. Britain would continue to be liable for future EU lending, capital projects approved by the European Investment Bank, a party to the European Development Fund and the European Union Emergency Trust Fund, disbursing largesse to immigrants in Europe. As for sums owed to the EU, we needn’t worry our petty little heads about such matters – it will all be calculated by Brussels but, in the meantime, a bung of £39bn is already due.

The withdrawal agreement would be policed exclusively by the EU. A Joint Committee, with a battery of sub-committees, would oversee the agreement, including matters relating to “Sovereign” Base Areas in Cyprus and Gibraltar. Does that sound like an arrangement in which a genuinely sovereign state would acquiesce? Or does Article 39: “the persons covered by this Part shall enjoy the rights provided for in the relevant Titles… for their lifetime”?

Last, but by no means least, there is the notorious backstop, under which the UK would remain in the EU Customs Union and Northern Ireland in the Single Market not only until the end of the transitional period in December 2020, but after that until a trade agreement can be negotiated – over which Brussels would have an absolute veto – potentially leaving us trapped for decades, while our trade and economy wither, cynically strangled by a revanchist EU determined to demonstrate that no member state can survive outside the Brussels empire.

It is Theresa May who has supinely furnished Brussels with the propagandist means of lending credibility to that otherwise fatuous notion. It beggars belief that a prime minister of the United Kingdom laboured daily, for two years, to produce such a comprehensive deconstruction and humiliation of her country.

Daily, the public becomes more reconciled to a “no deal” Brexit as its synthetic terrors fade. This week one of the biggest bogeys – the supposed crippling of UK clearing houses dealing with EU clients – was removed by the European Securities and Markets Authority (Esma) announcing that they could continue servicing such clients even under a no-deal Brexit.

That is how things would be resolved under a clean Brexit, by financial and business interests quietly but firmly taking control of processes and making them workable, over the heads of swivel-eyed revanchist politicians such as Guy Verhofstadt. Trade and commerce of all kinds are bi-partisan: both parties want to do business and the electorates of the economies for which they act as wealth creators will not tolerate ideologically motivated politicians impeding that process.

Nobody with a scintilla of British patriotism should, under any circumstances or under any inducement whatsoever, vote for Theresa May’s infamous capitulation. If MPs commit themselves to such an extravagant act of national self-harm, they will deserved to be punished by the public mercilessly. The future existence of the legacy parties is increasingly in doubt: the mechanisms for relegating them to the dustbin of history are already emerging.

The best solution for Britain now is departure from the European Union under a no deal Brexit. The alternative would be twenty years of vassalage and impoverishment, with our politics reduced to trench warfare as we struggle to remove the strangulating tendrils of the Brussels leviathan from our economy and constitution. We can avoid all that, unless the House of Commons invites its own destruction by defying the democratic public will. The only game in town now is a WTO Brexit.