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“Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic co-operation will not work, not least because it is undermining the single market.”
With those words Donald Tusk, European Council President, read the last rites over Theresa May’s Chequers plan, the Heath-Robinson contraption that our dysfunctional Prime Minister has been trailing around Westminster and Europe like a security blanket. It was high time to bury it: it had been decomposing from the day of its inception at Chequers, in an intimidatory atmosphere reminiscent of Stalin’s dacha (“Everyone sign up now or hump your luggage to the gates and hail a taxi”).
The entire Chequers farce was lunatic from the start, its only concrete outcome being to kill off the political career of Michael Gove, but the lunacy was far from confined to the British contingent in Brexit negotiations. In almost the same breath as his pronouncing the death sentence on Chequers, Donald Tusk said: “As you know, I was very, very sad because of Brexit but today I am a little more optimistic when it comes to a positive outcome of our negotiations.”
Qué? Could anyone follow the logic of that? What is this man talking about? This is the kind of gobbledegook and weasel words we have heard on all sides throughout the Brexit saga. There can be no positive outcome to negotiations so long as Theresa May remains Prime Minister and it appears her emasculated MPs are too afraid of losing their Buggins’ turn prospects of being given the Board of Green Cloth to think about their country and depose the premier who is damaging it so badly.
May, of course, speaks the same language as the guardians of the acquis communautaire. When Tusk says definitively “This is a deceased parrot,” May’s vapid response is that “there is a lot of work to be done”. No, Theresa, you have done your work and your principal task now should be to pack your bags.
Not once, since 24 June 2016, has the EU made the slightest attempt to negotiate with the United Kingdom. It has opposed with total intransigence every reasoned attempt at negotiation. We have gone full-circle since De Gaulle’s laconic “Non” half a century ago. It was, of course, Britain’s fault for walking into the trap of the Article 50 process instead of repealing the European Communities Act unilaterally and announcing our door was always open for trade talks.
The bad faith of the EU 27 was vividly demonstrated at Salzburg when the majority of EU governments – just six months before formal Brexit – demanded Britain hold a second referendum, in the transparent hope that Project Fear would deliver a different verdict from the existing referendum. That betrays their sullen mentality and heads-in-the-sand insistence that Brexit is not really happening.
The chief blame for our opponents’ delusions and the stalemate in the non-negotiations rests with the Tory Party. Why, in the knowledge that the overriding political preoccupation of the next five years would be Britain’s exit from the European Union, did the Conservative Party elect a Remainer leader? Why did she then appoint a majority of Remainers to her Cabinet?
One of the casualties of Conservative infidelity to the nation’s will has been the ending of the ancient doctrine of collective Cabinet responsibility. The most important policy to which its manifesto – and the express mandate of 17.4 million voters – committed the Conservative government was the full, clean and expeditious execution of Brexit. Yet that policy is being obstructed by the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and Cabinet colleagues. What do they imagine such subversion from above is doing to public confidence in our political institutions?
The embarrassing scenario at the Salzburg summit demonstrated that this government will submit to any humiliation from the EU oligarchs to whom it is bound by Stockholm Syndrome. Theresa May was allowed before dinner to deliver a ten-minute party piece on Chequers, like a child brought in to entertain the adults at bedtime, with no response or engagement from her European peers. Can anyone imagine Pitt, or Wellington, or Churchill – or more recently Margaret Thatcher – agreeing to such a charade?
She got her answer – the already known, inevitable, wholly predictable answer – from Donald Tusk, speaking on behalf of 27 EU leaders the following day. Yet even at the press conference she was clinging to the toxic notion of a “backstop” on the Irish border. The Irish border is a non-issue except insofar as it needs to be “hard” – as it was, uncontroversially, in the 1990s – to prevent uncontrolled immigration along the 310-mile length of our sole land frontier with the European Union.
Leo Varadkar is encouraging ever more large-scale migration via Dublin – a spigot that could release a migratory flood ending in London. That must at all costs be prevented. The traffic across all 32 Irish border crossings is less on any one day than through the single port of Dover. Sensible, workable border control is no kind of problem, but the snake-oil salesmen in Brussels have exploited Irish irredentist resentment to discomfit Britain, with Theresa May a soft touch, still spouting the inane mantra “We must secure a soft Irish border.”
Unless the Conservative Party can act immediately to install a pro-Brexit administration, charged with making intensive preparations for a WTO exit from the EU, it is doomed to electoral annihilation. Conservative MPs are taking comfort from opinion polls, as they did before the last election (what was it again, a 22-point lead?). They are oblivious to the explosive change that will occur in public sentiment when the massive debacle they have produced over Brexit, as a consequence of attempting to frustrate the national will, becomes undisguisably evident.
The Tory Party, at one point in its history, was out of power for 69 years: some of its present parliamentary tribunes seem hell-bent on beating that record. Theresa May is leading her party into the Valley of Death. Even those of us who have little time for him are beginning reluctantly to view one of the leadership contenders as Boris the Inevitable.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.