In a longer than normal essay today, The Slog analyses Brexit realities and likely developments in the short to medium-term future. The main thrust of the piece is that rebel Tory Remainers may be in triumphalist mode for the time being, but there is a fatal flaw in their programme of sabotage. Not too far away now is a genuine opportunity for intelligent Brexiteers to target, trap and turf out those who would defy the People. “It won’t make any difference” is no longer a viable position. Stand up and be counted now, or be counted out by the élite controllers.
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‘British business confidence at all-time low because of Brexit” claimed the London Times last Friday. Oh, for a return to wise, properly written and objective journalism.
Dear Times, Brexit hasn’t happened. If the British Establishment gets its way, it will never happen. Therefore, Brexit cannot possibly be causing the low confidence of UK business leaders. You may also have noticed that the House of Commons, its Speaker and most of the media are trying to abort Baby Brexit at 8 months, 3 weeks and 6 days. To completely reverse Monty Python, it is not a Brexit, it is a termination, an abused egg, an unwanted pregnancy. It is a live foetus purely because your knitting needles have so far missed the womb. It is not a live Brexit. It is an unborn child with rebel MPs trying to cork its mother’s birth canal in one last attempt to ensure neither life nor air are given to it. It is a pre-Brexit. It does not exist.
I start in that vaguely combative and darkly comic tone because this week’s extended essay will try and examine three things, with a level of persuasion aimed at three target audiences respectively:
- The real, unvarnished reasons why we are here, the aims of the Brexit abortionists, and why they don’t want the EU to end. (Aimed at the 12% of normal, real people who are genuinely undecided)
- What ordinary citizens can do to stop this (the only coup in town) and what most people will not do, so don’t look for the impossible to happen. (Aimed at intelligent Brexit voters and activists)
- While Conservative and Labour MPs may be not just putting their seats on the line by seizing power from the Executive, they are setting appalling precedents – and acting as unwitting catalysts in the destruction of their own Parties. (Members of Parliament)
The back-street abortionists
Think 1936. Think Weimar Germany. Think the reoccupation of the Rhineland. This is what the German Führer Adolf Hitler said at the time:
“The Versailles diktat forced on the German People was never acceptable to us….the Rhineland is and always has been German. But once the French Government formed an alliance with the Soviet Union, it was obvious that the intent was to further hamper and encircle Germany….so our remilitarisation [of the Rhineland] is a defensive action in the national interest”.
Many Tory politicians at the time saw events as a blunder by the French, and Rhineland reoccupation the act of a reasonable patriot. What followed, of course, was the Austrian Anschluss, the grab of Czechoslovakia, the Nazi invasion of Poland, and a murderous world war.
The main body of the Tory and Labour Parties were wrong about Europe then, and – as I ill develop below -they are wrong about the EU and its British Blackshirt allies today.
What we have seen this last week from Remain is a stage by stage poisoning of democracy. Focus on this, and don’t be distracted by the alleged “reasons” Parliament is presenting for murder by stealth. Future Governance cannot be conducted by a vainglorious Speaker and a triumphalist (but mediocre) Parliament. That is unconstitutional, and represents the second attempted coup in a year….the previous one having been launched by Whitehall in concert with a globalist Prime Minister utterly lacking in emotional intelligence.
Consider how – like Hitler’s European demands – the real nature of “stopping the No Deal coup” has rapidly become clear.
Ten days ago, it was an attack on ‘No-deal-catastrophic-crash-out-life-threatening-coup-by-Johnson’ Brexit. Then it became ‘Demanding-an-extension-to-October-31st-Brexit’…whether we have a deal or not. Now it’s ‘Demanding-no-election-before-we-have-a-Deal’….with or without Brexit. By November it will be “Demanding-a-revocation-of-Article-50’. Then it will be ‘No Brexit’.
Even if the Brexit Infanta gets to be born, it will be clubbed to death by an unholy (and unworkably anarchic) rag-tag of the rich and the power seekers. And on the death certificate, the politico-business-media Establishment will offer one cause of death: Natural Causes.
These people promised to honour the 2016 referendum result. Now they are at the cynical task of breaking that promise. They have claimed the May WA deal was ‘the best deal we could get’. Rubbish: it offers an outcome worse than simply staying in the EU with no change. They have predicted disasters post-Brexit with an evidence-free exaggeration level that beggars belief. They have undermined the Brexit process from Day 1 by deliberate administrative sabotage. They intone breezily about reforming an institution that is unelected, dictatorial, dismissive of plebiscites, unaudited, and the owner of a bullying, illegal track record that daily breaks Citizen Rights set out in the Lisbon Treaty. We would have an easier task reforming the Chinese People’s Republic.
Why do these hypocrites oppose UK independence from Brussels? Confirmed Remainers in these islands as a whole want Brexit stopped for ten main reasons:
- 34% of them have a career, financial, subsidy recipient or positional/pension relationship with the European Union. As always, follow the munnneeeee.
- 90+ percent of the UK’s mass media are owned by neocon globalists, broadcast by Leftlibs, or written by one or the other. They genuinely believe that Britain cannot survive alone. One presumes they’ve never been to Switzerland.
- A large proportion of Labour’s harder Left have an instinctive dislike of the US, and think Wall Street wants to buy the NHS. Even as a person myself who would like to see the UK distanced from American neocon foreign policy, I am bound to observe that this Leftist conspiracy theory is a naive fantasy.
- The great majority of Britain’s liberal (small or large L) persuasion equates continued EU membership with the best guarantee we have of protection from ‘far Right Nationalism’ and the continuation of multicultural Rights. Why they think this of such totalitarian federalists eludes me….and, I suspect, the overwhelming majority of Brexit supporters.
- The UK’s Liberal Democrat Party views the EU in much the same way as the Spanish empire revered the Church of Rome. For them, it is part of a fluffy but nevertheless inflexible ideology-cum-catechism insisting that every Leave supporter or TBP member is a racist.
- The Labour inner leadership is (with the notable exception of serial-changeling man of straw Keir Starmer) secretly suspicious of and antagonistic towards the EU as a rich man’s club doing the bidding of an anti-Left NATO and using freedom of movement as a way to crush the wage levels of the Western EU, whose welfare systems have made them hopelessly uncompetitive. I agree with them: but they follow the mainstream Labour line because they need that support base, and because they want power at any cost – and they stand no chance of power without tough, credible Party discipline.
- They are dyed-in-the-wool globalists who see nationalism as an archaic sentiment in their World Order outlook.
- They are Momentum/Antifa hardline Marxist internationalists seeking their own World Order in which all things British are to be vilified.
- They are Irish politicians (many of whom loathe Britain) who recognise that post-Brexit No-Deal tariffs will be a disaster for their economy.
- They are Scots who want to be both “freed” from the hated Sassenachs and then lovingly embraced by Brussels. Again, the logic continuum here is more elusive than the boson particle.
So that’s the game in play. So far, the most important factors have been the first two – money and power. For example, March 31st could not have been stopped without massive Whitehall and closet Cabinet trees being felled in its path. Equally, the self-censorship of the UK’s MSM about the real state of eurozone econo-fiscality, French street riots and Italy’s banking system has been rarely less than blatant.
Even this week, Macron’s reaffirmation of firm opposition to the very October 31st extension the eurofanatic Brits want was not covered in the United Kingdom until yesterday….by the one pro-Brexit newspaper title, the Daily Express.
Fighting back
Often sounding like a Jeremiah-meets-Job pessimist since 2016, The Slog has maintained consistently that the pro-Brexit camp has been naive about press relations, ridiculously overconfident of ultimate success and – perhaps above all – antiquated in its approach to electoral tactics.
Brexiteers hear Tory MP Remainers spout nonsense about how “Boris has turned the Conservative Party into The Brexit Party”, shake their head with a wry smile and mutter, “I wish”. The true idiocy of the assertion about “what BoJo has done” is made abundantly clear by the ease with which Tory rebel, LibDem and Labour MPs have (with predictable help from a partisan Speaker) tied the hands of the Government, blocking its access to both the agreed October 31st No Deal departure, and a UK election to confirm electoral support for it.
This morning, we may be seeing signs of a thaw in Boris/Farage relations. Better late than never: TBP leader Nigel Farage is extending an olive branch to Conservative Brexiteers, announcing for the first time that he will not stand candidates against the 28 members of the European Research Group (ERG) of hardliners who opposed Theresa May’s Brexit deal with Brussels. I think this is too narrow a pact….but it is a good start.
The reality is that only a firm and branded electoral pact at the next General Election between Tory Sovereign Brexiteers and The Brexit Party will cut the mustard when it comes to fulfilling the dream of a clean break with the controlling, anti-democratic federalism of the Brussels élite and the Franco-German establishment. Without it, every defiant superiority complex in the UK from Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell to Dominic Grieve, Caroline Lucas and Jo Swinson via Tom Watson, Jess Philips and Emily Thornberry will win
But here too, the weakest ethical link in Remain’s defences is given away by the nature of their priorities over the last five days: with the EU’s bluster looking wobbly, they took both No Deal off the agenda (along with a better deal than May’s diktat), and made a coup certain – but without any immediate likelihood of an election.
These are people committed to EU membership, and determined to give the British electorate as long as possible to forget their perfidy.
Unless a Johnson/Farage Front comes to its senses and grows up about the practicalities of alliances and tactical voting under the FPTP system, the problem facing informed Leave supporters and activists will stay the same as it always has been: the United Kingdom has a slim and debatable leaning towards Brexit, while Parliament has a huge and inflexible majority of Remain MPs.
Only changing the political make-up of some 60 to 90 Commons constituencies can break the political deadlock and get us out of the European Union.
And so, of course, this is what the Conservative Party’s disguised Revokers fear more than anything else. Therein lies the reason for their current mood of confidence. They have, to my mind, conned go-for-it Labour hotheads into helping block the Election the Corbyn élite so badly want.
Nevertheless, this puts the responsibility for achieving real Brexit firmly back to where it was in June 2016: with the British People.
I can tell you now that, of the roughly 18 million voters who would probably support Brexit, it’s as much as we can ask of over 95% of them to turn up and do the same at the next General Election. The maths of the situation are far more complex than that, but net-net we are talking of well under a million citizens doing anything of an activist nature. That is to say, the 40,000 Tory Party members who supported BoJo, the 90,000+ who are “registered supporters” of TBP, and at most around 70,000 people I would designate as, broadly speaking, intelligent, compassionate and aware voters who cannot bear to see the triumph of corporacratic neoliberal globalism over an independent Britain.
In round figures, 200,000 citizens prepared to defend the future of thoughtful British liberal democracy in a sense that goes way beyond puerile branding and Orwellian Room 101 fascist assertion.
200,000 united epidemiologists may not seem like many, but spread across the UK, it is about 300 per constituency in round terms…..if one writes off 48 Scottish seats as fairly solid Remain strongholds, that makes nearer to 330 ‘persuaders’ per seat.
Were promises to be forthcoming from pro-Brexit MPs towards the cheated UK female Waspi/Back to 60 State pensioners, that number would more than treble to at least 1100 per seat.
The way to think about this is as a chain-letter for the digital age.
Regular Sloggers will know that myself and the likes of Roger Lewis et al – that is, internet commentators keen to develop a new Web 3 space for P2P revitalisation – believe that the victory of People over Process can neuter Facebook, Google, Twitter and the surveillance State in the same way that Microsoft and Apple turned IBM into a dinosaur.
David and Goliath always looks impossible. And yet it happens – often with stunning velocity – over and over again.
It is crazy to expect often busy, desperate, poor and alienated citizens to spontaneously rise up and vote on their own initiative to reject vassal status for Britain.
But if 200,000 people persuaded ten extra people each to vote for a genuine pro-Brexit candidate in a bid to defeat their least liked candidate, believe it or not that would be enough to put a Brexit Alliance into power, stuff UK Establishment supremacists, and sound a death-knell for the federalists in the European Union…..if votes were tactically driven by constituency.
As Josef Stalin observed, “History is made by those who turn up”. The time is now very close when those with doubts about robotic pc – and a strong preference for valuing every individual citizen equally – must turn up and take responsibility. The political class and their arrogant bureaucrats, the judiciary, the police and the media are all dead set against that goal. Moaning about the inevitability of failure afterwards would be pathetic. Either turn up, or shut up.
Arrogance and the Road to Perdition
But for the moment, there is no election in sight requiring immediate preparation. From now until October 19th, there are in my view but two objectives:
- Make it painfully clear to deniers of our basic constitutional rights that we can tell shit from sugar. Put the fear of God into every Remainer MP in a constituency where tactical would remove them. Start a campaign of serious harassment: this is our civil rights we’re talking about here….let the cops try to arrest all fifty in a group making life unpleasant for these red carpet treaders, see how far that gets them.
- Form a pressure group to persuade this ‘soft middle’ of Remainer MPs that now is not the time for showboating their way along the Media River destined for Footnote Junction. For down that river lies an unforgiving waterfall leading to the rocks below.
For the most of this last section, I will be opining from personal experience. That may seem easily dismissable as “sample of one” but it isn’t, because it’s based on a cross section of some 55 MPs and Ministers I’ve met, pitched to or worked with over the last 38 years.
The most distressing and disappointing thing about those who get into Parliament via elective democracy is how, on meeting them, one is quickly aware of a mediocre mind driven largely by bigotry and received truths.
They are chosen for two reasons – either because they sound amenable, diligent and loyal to the constituency selection committee; or because they have some networking, dynastic and celebrity influence likely to play in their favour….with views that sound ‘on-message’.
They are, in short, conformist creeps.
The vast majority of our “legislators” couldn’t legislate to protect their own heads from rain by remembering to bring an umbrella. They are bombasts unskilled in the art of listening: pompous about the letters after their names and incorrigible rentagobs for the media, they adore intrigue, are usually oversexed, and are often utterly incapable of sketching out a medium-term future beyond the end of a wind-sniffing nose.
Very few of them have had a commercial career at all. Most of them are unemployable beyond Executive directorships on the Board of quoted companies, quangos or charities.
Harold Macmillan once memorably remarked that the collective noun for them should be “a lack of principals’.
There are exceptions to this general pen-picture. Kate Hoey, Denis Skinner and John Redwood are exceptions. John Bercow, Dominic Grieve and Emily Thornberry are archetypes. That is to say, egomaniacal and meddlesome intriguers tumescent at the thought of their five minutes in the limelight. (The staged and televised departure of Tory MP Phillip Lee to the Libdems last week was a classic).
My point here is simple: they don’t give a whole heap of thought to the consequences of their actions, because on the whole they’re too dim and/or lazy to get beyond the immediate gratification of vanity or a long-term obedience to petrified ideology.
Particularly in the middle and lower ranks of the Conservative Party – and in the Speaker’s chair – it is very clear that barely any thought at all has been given to where the current runaway train might well be going.
- For most of the Leave-supporting spectrum, ‘Stop the Coup’ is merely the latest in a trilogy of genuine coups: by Whitehall under May, by Tory Remainers against Boris, and by Parliament against the electorate. The current Conservative MP intriguistas really are on the wrong side of history….and they are, on the whole, easier to defeat electorally than Labour ideologues like Jess Philips and John McDonnell.
- Although presented as ‘a tactic against a wannabe dictator’ (which I’m sure BoJo is) the move to put our political Executive in chains is nothing of the kind. Were it only that, the plotters could’ve left the Prime Minister’s team free to negotiate with Brussels without taking No Deal off the table. The fact is, they are terrified of the likes of Dominic Raab succeeding where May failed. No: this is a putsch by a rabble of Establishment mediocrities and one puffed-up midget to wrest Sovereign power from the Executive. Without a big legislative and structural change in where UK political power lies, such a move – especially one designed to thwart the People’s stated will – is blatantly unconstitutional, and sets a dangerously headless precedent.
- The two most likely outcomes of an October 31st extension are the destruction of the Tory Party on a scale not seen since the Liberals’ suicide in 1924; and the Menshevik Tory power-grabbers letting in a Bolshevist élite backed beyond Parliament by an increasingly violent and intolerant Momentum stuffed with SWP and Trotskyist extremists. (These are not necessarily either ors)
- The flimsy assumption being made by the rebels (and their allies in other Parties) is that they can put off an election for another three years, by the end of which revocation may mean ‘business as usual’….which a clear majority would, I suspect, support. This is not so much a dim idea as a facile assumption arrived at in total strategic darkness. Point the first, it is far from certain that the Brussels Commission will grant an extension. Second, without an election, any attempt to reintroduce May’s agreement (or worse) would simply reform the majority against. Third, introducing that would have to be ruled out of order even by a jerk like Bercow. Fourth, it would be perfectly possible for Johnson to resign as PM, but remain as Party leader. What would happen then? Finally – and far from Least – Labour will not play along with enemy MPs forever: the Labour Party wants an election sooner rather than later….as do the LibDems. Both would just love an election fought against a Tory Party in meltdown.
So in conclusion, the only solution to the impasse (as I’ve been saying since February) is an election….and Opposition ambition will demand it before too long. With or without a Leave Tory/Brexit Party electoral alliance, at core the Conservative Remoanoid rebels – and broadly the Tories as a whole – are running, not just the risk but the probability, of being wiped out by Leaver punishment, letting in the Corbyn Marxists, and seeing the Party vote split in some 30-odd constituencies…for while still Party leader, Boris Johnson will have every right to reaffirm the removal the Tory ticket of the Brexit wreckers. Further, the constituency grassroots workers are 85% pro-Brexit.
Streetwise and intelligent Leave supporters need to organise right now – today, this afternoon – an audit of Tory vulnerability. And then use all available groundforce and media communications to make it clear to every candidate and every selection committee that the consequences of this constitutional power-grab are, when you apply such mind as you have, too horrible to contemplate.
But after that point has passed, some kind of electoral tactics need to be agreed among all shades of Brexiteer.
Enjoy your Sunday.
The Slog 