Britain’s deepening political nightmare

By Melanie Phillips

So here’s how things appear to stand at this point, 34 days before the Brexit general election which is being fought principally on the issue of whether or not Britain wants to get Brexit done.

The Labour party is imploding, with Labour loyalists saying Labour voters should vote Conservative in order to save the country from the unconscionable threat of Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister.

The Brexit party is disintegrating, with even a number of its own former candidates backing the EU deal done by Boris Johnson. This although their leader, Nigel Farage, is correctly stating that the deal is not truly Brexit because it will trap the UK into continued ties with the EU during the expandable transition period and even after it ceases to be a member.

The supposed praetorian guard of the uber-Brexiteer European Research Group has thrown in the towel, stuck its collective finger up to the wind and decided to ignore the words of the Johnson deal, which reveal the trap about to close on the UK, and to ignore the fact that the intransigent EU negotiators would never in a million years agree to terms that were not in its own interests which are to ensure that the UK never poses a threat to the EU by real economic independence. They have chosen instead to believe that Boris will make sure everything’s going to be absolutely fine in the end and the UK will definitely leave by the end of 2020 because Boris has promised them that this will happen and so it will.

Many Leave voters are refusing to look at the words of the Johnson deal and are refusing to believe what Farage is saying about these words. Instead, they are choosing to believe that Bojo’s deal is the only Brexit show in town because he says he’s the only person who will Get Brexit Done.

They are ignoring his brazen falsehood that the trade deal with the EU will be done and dusted by the end of 2020 with no extension of the transition period, whereas in fact any extension decision has to be made by July 2020 when there’s next to zero possibility that negotiations will have been completed and so there’s an overwhelming likelihood that the UK will be trapped in tan extended transition period for two to three years.

They are also ignoring the fact that the “non-binding’” Political Declaration, which commits the UK to ensure a “level playing field” and “non-discrimination’’ it its EU trade agreement, can ultimately be enforced upon the UK by the European Court of Justice.

They are in fact ignoring all the details of the Johnson deal because they’ve had it up to here with this farce and they really, really don’t care if the UK leaves with n0 deal at all or any kind of deal because they just want someone to make sure this interminable Brexit agony just ALL GOES AWAY; and anyway, they’ve got to stop Corbyn so they mustn’t split the Tory vote; and so if Boris is saying vote for me and get Brexit done then that’s good enough for them because they’ll believe that any deal is Brexit just to make this whole nightmare stop.

And so, if nothing changes, the UK is heading for a government headed by a man whose promises cannot be believed for a single second and whose statements about his Brexit deal are patently false, but who will be elected because the country is facing a choice between getting Brexit-lite-even-worse-than-Remain, which will trap it into a continuing EU nightmare – but which enable them to tell themselves that yes, Britain has left the EU – and electing a prime minister who poses an insupportable threat to the security and economy of the country and to its vulnerable Jewish community; and because the public ultimately faces a brutal binary choice.

So this is a deepening political nightmare. But who knows? With nearly five weeks still to go, things may change. Nothing can be predicted in this most volatile and unprecedented of times.

NY SUN

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Prime Minister Johnson proclaims it, yet that fails to soothe sceptics, who fear it as not worth the parchment upon which it is written. Hence Nigel Farage’s offer to Boris of a “Leave Alliance,” focussing electoral fire-power against Labor seats in constituencies where Mr. Farage’s Brexit Party enjoys greater popularity than the Tories. The key condition is that Conservatives abandon their deal and concentrate on a “clean break” Brexit.

“Nothing doing,” has come the reply. Ominously, rumors circulate that the Conservative manifesto will drop all mention of a “no deal” Brexit: thus obligating them to continue negotiating a full treaty according to the EU’s whim.

How would Patrick Henry advise misguided Tories. On the eve of Revolution, he warned the Virginia Burgesses of the “insidious smile” with which the British ministry had received the American petitions and declared his own preference: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

So Mr. Johnson must weigh the evidence in favor of a clean break. No smile that America got from Britain two and a half centuries ago was any more insidious than the smirks Britain receives from Brussels.

Britain’s three years’ negotiating with the EU presage as many years or more trying to settle a trade deal, time in which more than £39 billion will be paid without representation. During which the UK would be “encouraged” to accommodate her future regulatory framework to the EU, and all to be adjudged by the European Court of Justice. (It should be remembered that when John Dickinson took account of the inevitability of colonial separation, he resigned from the Continental Congress and enlisted in the war for independence.)

Today were Mr. Farage’s Brexit Party, in lieu of an alliance, to stand a full slate — to honor its commitment to full, untrammeled Brexit — the Tory hold on power becomes more perilous than need be. Boris’s popularity is doubtless no more impervious than Mrs. May’s when she opted for a disastrous snap election in 2017.

Does Mr. Johnson want another minority parliament? Or is he willing to stake Brexit and Britain’s economic future on a Jeremy Corbyn socialist government? What does the lamp of experience, of which Patrick Henry spoke, tell Britons?

A recent poll, disclosing that 70% of Conservative and 81% of Brexit voters want a “Leave Alliance” shows that putting at center stage a “clean break” Brexit is the way forward. For the democratic politician, Boris is presented with the easiest of climb-downs to save face — fulfilling the mandate of the people for true British independence.