TIM STANLEY

TUESDAY 27 November,2018

Obsessed with migration Mrs May's understanding of Brexit has always been excessively pessimistic

You can tell a lot about a product from the way it is sold

The Government intends to run a general election campaign to get its

WITHDRAWAL DEAL

THROUGH

PARLIAMENT

and its

TWIN WEAPONS are APATHY and FEAR

Vote for this deal and we need never discuss Brexit again! vote it down and we will run out of water and die.

This mix of cynicism and hysteria suggests

WE ARE BEING SOLD A FLAWED DEAL.

by people who never really understood

WHAT BREXIT WAS ABOUT.

Parliamentary critics of the withdrawal plan focus on one fundamental flaw:

THE BACK STOP.

.Once we leave the EU we get two years of status quo in which to negotiate a

NEW TRADE PACT;

IF WE FAIL,

which seems likely,we either extend this expensive transition or we enter a dis agreeable if the

CUSTOMS ARRANGEMENT

a backstop prison wherein the EU sets the rules and we have no influence

The GOVERNMENT insists this is a mere detail, the kind that only nerds and extremists would care about, and that the EUROPEANS will act in good faith anyway.

Well, the last few days have confirmed that we've handed over too much leverage: Spain used a veto threa THEt to force concessionary language on

GIBRALTER

and the FRENCH implied they were coming after our

FISH

the back is thus a legitamate concern and the GOVERNMENT is unwise, in fact rather patronising

to assume

the

VOTERS WON'T CARE ABOUT IT.

Are we

BORED of BREXIT,

 to use Jeremy Hunt's witty acronym?

OH ,MAMA YES. but when people say they want to get BREXIT

"OVER AND DONE WITH"

they don't necessarily at any cost.

its more likely to imply

THAT THEY ARE SICK OF THE ESTABLISHMENT DRAGGING ITS HEELS AND LIKE CANNY SHOPPERS IN THE MARKET, ARE WARY OF ANY DEAL THAT SMELLS LIKE A FUDGE OR A

SELL OUT.

Mrs May's pledge to "settle" Brexit, to put it past us and move on sounds superficially attractive, but we all know it's not that simple: there are several years of trade negotiations ahead, and if thet fail then, thanks to the

BACKSTOP

, we will be left  trapped in the EU's orbit like a dead moon.

This sounds pretty frightening. Even more frightening than whatever depraved voodoo ceremony Mrs May conducted in the No10 garden to raise

PROJECT FEAR

from its grave.

In the past few weeks we have been told the, if Britain fails to get a deal, we will have power outages, a plummet in the pound, a house price collapse, flight cancellations, a Mars Bar shortage, a medicine crisis, the Army on the streets and, this is the latest, less clean water.

Some of these are based on the real threat of bottlenecks at Dover, but the correct response from any government (ie what we pay them to do) would be to reassure the public with competance and invest for all eventualities.

If a no-deal Brexit does ruin the country, it will be the fault of a PM who failed to prepare for it: where is the dramatic expansion of Dover? Where are the alternative trade routes? The Tory manifesto stated that

NO DEAL WAS BETTER THAN A BAD DEAL

 but now we will get two weeks of being told the complete opposite:

If Parliament does not sign off on the backstop, innocents could die. It's not just the EU that is threatening the British unless they agree to its demands. The British Government sounds suspiciously

LIKE IT IS DOING THE SAME.

Mrs May does, however, have one thing to bribe us with:  less immigration. This has been an obsession throughout her career and she obviously sees the referendum result almost exclusively through that prism, which explains why she made that almost her sole red line and was happy to make concessions on so much else that energises LEAVERS. But while some Britons did vote on immigration alone, the essential issue of 2016 was the repatriation of

POLITICAL POWER

-power that could, yes, help control the border but could also revive  our

DEMOCRACY

and

REBUILD OUR ECONOMY.

Mrs May's understanding of politics, even of the voters, at times seems pessimistic, as if she has limited faith in human nature and the capabilities of

FREE NATIONS.

This deal is a triumph of low expectations, delivered at a moment when the sense of possibilities has never been greater.

Her withdrawal deal may yet die the way it has lived, clouded in misunderstanding of what a large  part of the country wants and how democracies function. Mrs May suggests a television debate with Jeremy Corbyn. WHY? We know she hates them: she threw away her majority last year after refusing to go live against Mr Corbyn in a head-to-head.  Mr Corbyn is already committed to voting the deal down, so most of his MPs aren't up for grabs;the audience at home don't get a vote.

The proper place for any substantive debate is PARLIAMENT, where the views of around  90 Tories who can't  let the backstop issue go actually matter

This , then, is pure entertainment, just like the Nick Clegg v Nigel Farage debates of 2014-the difference being that these two men genuinely passionately believed in the cause they articulated. As others have noted. Mr Corbyn probably isn't really for Remain and Mrs May isn't truly for Brexit. Neither salesman believes in the product theyre pitching.

DAILY TELEGRAPH-TIM STANLEY-VOTERS CAN SEE THIS IS A BARGAIN BASEMENT DEAL

 

Letters to the Daily Telegraph-BREXIT SPECIAL, - Tuesday 27 November,2018    Theresa May shows contempt for Parliament by wooing the country with a Remainer Brexit'   Sir -  The Withdrawal Agreement is not yet "legally binding" (Leading Article, November 25) since it has to be ratified by both the EU hierarchy and the UK Parliament. Rather than overt acquisition of power by democratic consent, the EU has accrued power behind an almost impenetrable phalanx of complex structures, lawyers, diplomats, legalese and obfuscation. By creating a system of Byzantine complexity, under guise of the rule of law, the cities of Europe have stealthily subverted democracy and removed power from the people. T M Chairman, J D Wetherspoon Watford, Hertfordshire *  *  *   Letters to the Daily Telegraph-BREXIT SPECIAL, - Tuesday,November 27,2018 [The en [The encompassing tentacles of the Beast  are tightening on the remaining captive ,once free peoples of Europe in preparation for a SOON TO BE A SUPER-STATE.] [COMMENTS IN BRACKETS ARE OURS! NAMES ABBREVIATED INTO CAPITALS-FULL DETAILS FROM DAILY TELEGRAPH. ]   H.F.1676/8

H.F.1754

 As Marx said, history does have the ... A Very British Coup revolved around a conspiracy by the military, the media, big business and M15...

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: So this is what a very British coup looks like

SOME of you will recall the novel

A Very British Coup,

It was written by Labour MP Chris Mullin, published in 1982, and revolved around a conspiracy by the

MILITARY-THE MEDIA-BIG BUSINESS-M15

At the time, the plot was entirely credible, since Britain was riven by strikes and revolution was in the air. I read the book as a young labour and industrial correspondent, and it made sense to me.

 The Bennites were in the ascendancy, Margaret Thatcher was horribly unpopular and it looked as if the wizened Hampstead Leftie Michael Foot-Worzel Gummidge, as Private Eye dubbed him-would be our next Prime Minister.

Mullin's assumptions were based  on hard fact. In the Seventies there had been well-founded reports about the Establishment plot to depose Labour's Harold Wilson.

In some quarters, there were even rumblings of a military coup.

A couple of years ago, when the un reconstructed Bennite Jeremy Corbyn became leader, Mullen talked about writing a sequel. He imagined the Funny  People orchestrating a putsch to thwart a democratically elected Corbyn government.

Trouble is, history has a habit of not working out as you expect. Although, as Marx said, history does have the capacity to repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. That's where we are right now. Except tragedy and farce are running in tandem.

WE are in the middle of

A VERY BRITISH COUP

but not as Mullin predicted. What we're seeing is an elaborate, well-financed and coordinated plot to overturn as extreme Left-wing Prime Minister

BUT

the democratically expressed will of the British people.

It's being mounted by the Government of the day, aided and abetted by Big Business and the Civil Service.

[A repeat of 1970's-again by a supposed Conservative Government.]

THIS is A  Very BRITISH Coup, only written by Lewis Carroll not Chris Mullin. In our new Looking Glass World, words mean-as Humpty Dumpty declared-whatever they want them to mean.

Thus the dwindling band of MPs sticking uo for the

17.4 MILLION who voted

LEAVE

are condemned as plotters and rebels

Those, including Theresa May, who are doing everything in their power to

PREVENT

BRITAIN LEAVING THE EU

and becoming once again a

PROUD SOVEREIGN NATION

are hailed absurdedly as true patriots

As I've said often enough, just because your paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

About the only thing upon which I've ever agreed with Ken Livingstone - apart from cheap Tube fares - was when he wrote a book called

If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish it. The Establishment seems hell-bent on proving him

Right over Brexit .

[The EDP has over decades seen much evidence of this very fact and though continually bringing evidence to the surface nobody appears to be interested whether it is lack of Bobbies -on-the beat - Health Service in crisis-Pot-holes-closed Police Stations...Britons on worst State Pensions in the Europe-even Portugal is marginally more. And a bloated -wasteful and grotesque so-called FOREIGN AID which even some regimes as recipients have requested to be stopped .

I told  you the day after the referendum that the fix was already in . Now they're on the final furlongs

We're being informed, in no uncertain fashion that

OUR VOTES ARE WORTHLESS

that they don't count.

WE'RE TOO IGNORANT, TOO UNEDUCATED, TOO RACIST

To be taken seriously.

Politicians who try to square the circle are vilified.

One minute Dominic Raab, who attempted to make a go of being Brexit Secretary, is a principled pragmatic operator of the highest praise.

The next, when he is forced to resign because Mother Theresa has deliberately undermined his position and then lied about it, he's dismissed as a disloyal traitor. And If I hear anyone else demanding a second

'People's Vote'

I'll scream.

All they want to do is reverse the referendum result or give us three options so they can split the

LEAVE VOTE

To be honest, I can't take much more of this patronising guff. The Beeb's idea of discerning commentators these days seems to extend no further than 'Baroness' Shameless Chuckabutty, Potty Toynbee and Mad Alastair Campbell, the author of the dodgy dossier which took into an

ILLEGAL WAR IN IRAQ.

As I believe I may have observed before. Campbell is the only bloke I know with a certificate to prove he's sane.

And don't get me started on the CBI which throughout my career has been wrong about everything from joining the euro to the Thatcher reforms. The CBI speaks only for monopolistic, multinational megacorps, not the small-to-medium businesses which are the backbone of our economy and always get the rough end  of the pineapple from Brussels - even though they don't sell so much as a brass washer outside British borders.

Twenty-five-odd years ago, covering a CBI conference in Glasgow, I watched the chairman of Dunlop taking the stage wearing a kilt and waving a Union Jack, as part of an I'm Backing Britain campaign. The following week he sold the company to the Japanese.

These are the same people bnow claiming to have British interests at the heart of their determination to

KEEP US SHACKLED TO THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC EU

The final straw came when the arrogant Amber Rudd was restored to Government over the weekend and immediately demanded loyalty and unity around Mrs May's 'deal'.  Her commitment to 'loyalty' hasn't stopped her trashing Cabinet colleagues in the past.

This fanatically pro-EU women who oozes an inter-galactic sense of  entitledment from every pore, is the sister of the PR spiv Roland Rudd, who is paid a small fortune to run

PROJECT FEAR

on behalf of his well-healed clients.

Just imagine if one of Boris's siblings was cashing in on

BREXIT.

The calls from Remainers for the police to investigate would be deafening. By Sunday, I'd had enough and reached the point where I came over all Tom Robinson.

I've given up reading the papers,

I've given up watching TV.

And I do think the prospect of a Marxist Corbynista government is too horrible to contemplate.

But I also believe its 1992 all over again. This is Mother Theresa's

BLACK WEDNESDAY

THE TORIES

ARE SHOT TO PIECES.

All trust and confidence in them has drained away and we're looking at a Labour government by default whenever the next election is called

Most of the 17.4 million who believe they have been betrayed will simply stay at home, or drift back to Labour. Democracy will be the ultimate casualty of this shabby debacle.

The pathetic defeatest dog's breakfast of an agreement

 which Mother Theresa is trying to force down our throats isn't worthy of the description 'deal'.

It is a monstrous capitulation and will be etched on her political gravestone, even if she does manage to get it, or a version thereof, through Parliament.

Where do we go from here?

I haven't a clue.

But at least we now know exactly

what a

Very British Coup

LOOKS LIKE.

FULL ARTICLE

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: So this is what a very British coup looks like

*  *  *

NOVEMBER 20,2018

H.F.1747