Posted by On the morning of 19 June 2017 the then British Prime Minister Theresa May held a press conference with the new Irish Taoiseach while her officials held the first meeting in Brussels with EU’s Brexit negotiators . Having given notice in April that we would be leaving the EU in two years’ time, it was necessary to sit down and agree how this should be implemented.
There was trepidation among Brexit supporters. May herself had recently been politically enfeebled by her decision to call a snap General Election which ended badly for her. The campaign had been a disaster. In the space of just a few weeks, she had managed to convert a seemingly invincible poll lead into a near losing position. The election brutally exposed her limitations as a leader and campaigner. She came across as wooden, boring, lacking vision and incapable of inspiring anyone. Incredibly, she managed to make Jeremy Corbyn look charismatic.
The election cost her what little remained of her already slim Commons majority. With the help of the Ulster Unionists she managed to cling on. But her administration was fatally weakened. As a result, it was no surprise to see duplicitous remainer MPs in her own ranks sense the opportunity to try and derail Brexit, with help of Speaker John Bercow and the opposition parties.
Negotiating hell
For two dreadful, painful years that followed, we witnessed the British Government’s humiliation in the face of a bullying, vindictive EU leadership in Brussels and at the hands of a shameless, quisling Parliament at home. It was obvious that May was terrified of actually leaving the EU and that she totally bought in to the view that we could not survive as an independent country. Her negotiating tactic was to roll over to anything the EU demanded of her.
This culminated in the dreadful withdrawal agreement reached with the EU. Described by one of her own resigning ministers as “a failure of statecraft” and rightly derided by the newly formed Brexit Party as “the worst deal in history” the deal was indeed a dogs dinner – all served up by May and her chief “Blob” negotiator Ollie Robbins. It was a Brexiteer’s worst nightmare. Boris Johnson had long since resigned in despair at May’s disasterous strategy.
It was clear that May never had any intention of honouring the referendum result in any meaningful way. Her deal tied the UK to Brussels’ bootstraps. It was the worst of all worlds – the UK would be permanently trapped within the EU’s rule-making orbit, unable to exit without EU approval. Meantime, the vanishingly small influence we had left over EU lawmaking would be gone altogether. Britain would be a vassal state of the EU, meekly following the directives of the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. The Brexit vote would have been for nothing.
The fall of Theresa May
Fortunately,May’s deal was so bad that even diehard remainers in her own party hated it just as much as the strongest Brexit supporters did. As a result, despite trying repeatedly to secure the support of MPs, she failed again and again to have her deal approved in Parliament.
In the face of this potential crisis,, Nigel Farage took over the Brexit Party and harnessed the people’s anger at May’s betrayal. The new party swept to an overwhelming victory in the European Parliamentary elections of 2019. More significantly still, in those elections Conservative voters expressed their disgust at May’s abandonment of Brexit by deserting in droves. The Conservative share of the vote slumped to a catastrophic 8%. The writing was on the wall.
Finally grasping that they were heading for electoral oblivion, Tory MPs belatedly lifted their collective hands from the sand.. Within months, May was mercifully gone and replaced by Boris Johnson. (Though not before she had managed to inflict one further disaster on the country – the commitment to achieve net zero by 2050).
Project Fear exposed
It had all seemed so different back in June 2016 when the country woke up to the incredible realisation that voters had rejected Project Fear and voted to free us from the EU.
Despite an increasingly desperate – and relentlessly negative – campaign and with millions more £s at its disposal, the Remain campaign had failed miserably. This was also in spite of enlisting the help of everyone from outgoing US President Obama to our own Treasury. Indeed, the Treasury report published a month before the referendum entitled “ The Immediate economic impact of leaving the EU“ stands as a fitting monument to the ludicrous scaremongering of remainers. This document – laughably describing itself as a “sober and realistic assessment” of what would happen immediately and within two years of our voting to leave – proved wrong on just about every prediction it made. But not just slightly wrong: totally wrong. How many people who would otherwise have voted Leave were persuaded not to do so by its doomsday predictions?
The realisation over the next two years that the dire predictions of Project Fear were unfounded and that the sky was not going to fall in if we left the EU, marked the moment when Remainers’ realised the game was finally up. They must have known that they couldn’t hoodwink the public into reversing Brexit. But that didn’t stop them doing all they could to try. What followed was nothing less than an attack on democracy..
Brexit endgame
When he finally took over the reins as Prime Minister in July 2019, Boris Johnson faced an almost impossible situation.
By now, aided by a rogue Speaker prepared to tear up all Parliamentary conventions, the Remain Establishment was running riot in Parliament, trying everything in its power to sabotage the referendum result. Astonishingly this even led to the passing of legislation over the head of the Government designed to destroy the Prime Minister’s negotiating position with the EU. The notorious “Surrender Act” removed the one crucial bargaining chip Boris had with the EU – their fear of a no deal Brexit. The likes of Sir Kier Starmer were prominent in these weasel attempts to frustrate the will of 17.4m voters.
The shameful shenanigans in Parliament were finally ended by the 2019 election. Johnson, having somehow miraculously persuaded the EU to modify Mary’s terrible deal so that only Northern Ireland would remain trapped in the hated “backstop”, secured an 80 seat majority. Brexit would finally get done. Or so we all thought.
But that was not the end of the saga.
Under May’s pathetic deal, the process of “leaving” was to be strung out further for a “transition period.” Fortunately, Johnson brought that to an end as soon as possible and we were finally out.
After we finally left on 31 December 2020, the sky did not fall in. The plague of locusts did not materialise. Just as in 2016 when they had predicted instant doom from our just voting to leave, so the merchants of Project Fear Mk 2 were proved wrong. There was no economic meltdown from our exit.
Instead, rather, other more significant events were to hit the country.
In March 2020 a pandemic gripped the world and the Government embarked upon the fateful and ruinous policy of lockdowns to combat it. This, together with continued money printing by the Bank of England created the perfect conditions for a resurgence of inflation. Then, when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, it exacerbated an already deteriorating situation in the energy market and global supply chains. The result was economic turmoil and inflation on a scale not witnessed for over a decade.
The Remainers’ Brexit blame game
None of this of course had anything to do with Brexit. But for diehard Remainers, it has been too good an opportunity to pass up. During the pandemic hey had weaponised Covid in their deranged campaign of revenge against Johnson – their nemesis. Eventually, they succeeded, helped it must be said by some grievous errors of judgment by the man himself.. But Just as Covid gave them an opportunity to endlessly attack Johnson, so the inflation and energy crises that have followed have done the same for their unceasing efforts to falsely discredit Brexit.
Shamelessly, they have sought to pin the country’s economic woes on our leaving the EU and to argue that we should rejoin as the solution to all our problems. They conveniently ignore what is actually happening in the Eurozone. They take no account of what it would cost us to rejoin. They gloss over the appalling behaviour of the EU towards the UK (has everyone seriously forgotten the way in which Brussels threatened to steal our vaccines when they messed up their own programme?).
Blaming Brexit has become the new pastime for a humiliated mainstream media and Remain Establishment which even now still cannot come to terms with how their views have been repeatedly rejected by voters at the ballot box . Now, having forced out Boris Johnson through a cooked up Parliamentary witch hunt and Kangaroo Court, they believe that with a likely Labour victory at the next election they can finally turn the clock back and return the UK to the purgatory of EU membership.
Their endless lies and fearmongering before and after the 2016 referendum failed. Their attempts to trample on the constitution and block Brexit in 2019 failed.
They may have got rid of Boris Johnson – for now. But just as they failed so spectacularly before, so their latest campaign of lies, falsehoods and smears deserves to fail again.
We’ve left. We’re not going back.
Voice of Reason 