UK Voters Exact Retribution for Dodging Brexit

Tories have told Prime Minister May “to set a departure date next week.”

By STEPHEN MacLEAN, Special to the Sun | May 4, 2019

Brexit delayed is Brexit denied. Such logic fueled local elections in Britain, as voters exacted retribution for politicians’ refusal to discharge the people’s desire to exit the European Union and redeem UK independence. Hundreds of ballot papers were spoiled as variations of one word, embodying Britons’ one true choice, were scrawled across them. “Brexit.”

After the worst showing for Tories since John Major’s premiership — 1,334 seats lost and control of 44 English councils — Breitbart London reports that senior Tories have told Prime Minister May “to set a departure date next week.”

If she refuses, Conservatives’ backbench organization, the 1922 Committee, “could decide to change party rules to allow another no-confidence vote this year.” (A similar vote in December failed and, according to current party rules, 12 months must pass before holding another leadership challenge.)

Last month the Committee decided to force Mrs. May’s hand, discussing new rules to cut the moratorium in half and holding a new vote on June 12 (six months after the last contest) but backed off, not wanting to “rock the boat” so close to local and European Parliament elections.

How did that brilliant foresight work for Tories? Further delays only exemplify their unfitness for political office and the people’s trust.

I’m shocked that voters punished Conservatives for their continuing Brexit fiasco. Council members are not offending parliamentarians. Yet they suffer (with apologies to Shakespeare) as Cinna the poet did when mistaken for Cinna the conspirator in “Julius Caesar” — “It is no matter. Their names are Conservative. Vote them out.”

Forgive your diarist for a touch of pique, but this is news to whom? Even as negotiations with the European Union progressed by fits and starts and down several erring byways, Mrs. May enjoyed the benefit of the doubt and was taken at her word. “Brexit means Brexit” and “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

The Chequers plan, an outline of the Withdrawal Agreement, was the final straw — proof positive that the Prime Minister did not believe her own words. She did not intend to honor her commitments to uphold the 2016 referendum result. Mrs. May was lukewarm in freeing Britain from Brussels’ grasp and ambivalent toward delivering British independence.

Instead, Mrs. May said that her deal was a good deal. No other deal would suffice. The EU became complicit in this nonsense when it replied that it was the only deal it would consider. Then it was “nonsense on stilts” when Labor’s Jeremy Corbyn was brought in to confer with the Prime Minister, ostensibly against malcontents within her own Tory party.

Any fool could see that voters, lied to by MPs and treated like erring children in need of correction, would exact revenge the way citizens do in a constitutional democracy — by the ballot box.

Any fool, that is, apart from those who wield political power and think they can hoodwink electors without end and without consequence.

Granted, not all Tory MPs are blind to the developing disaster. Appeals in the House of Commons, in the broadsheets, and on the air-waves for the Prime Minister and the government to come to their senses and simply deliver Brexit go unheeded. Again, who is surprised? After taking her colleagues for granted and treating them as the milquetoast MPs they are, Mrs. May has little to fear. That’s the rub.

Why haven’t Tory Brexiteers abandoned the whip and formed a Brexit ginger group? What do they fear? The only Members with any guts on that score have been those Remainers who turned coat because their party gave lip-service to securing Brexit while merely tinkering toward a Brexit backtrack on issues like the single market and customs union.

No wonder, then, that Britons are taking matters into their own hands. They want Brexit. They will not be so easily dissuaded from regaining national sovereignty.

“As a statesman I should say that it is impossible to refuse popular demands well matured and energetically supported,” Benjamin Disraeli pledged. “If so, let the people be fitted to discharge the functions reposed in them.”

Disraeli trusted the people. The Conservative party does not. So the people will find others to deliver them British independence.

The Brexit party seems prepared to meet this challenge and eager to mete out electoral justice. “It becomes more than a duty,” Brexiteers of all stripes echo Oscar Wilde; “it becomes a positive pleasure.”