You will be seeing a lot of discussion in the media at the moment about “Soft Brexit” and “Hard Brexit”. Please ignore it, this is just another attempt by the Bremoaners to not give us Brexit at all. Notice they use the pejorative language Hard and Soft to try and win their case. But the reality is that the Brexit that the British people voted for is Hard Brexit. And so called Soft Brexit isn’t Brexit at all.
The Bremoaners have utter contempt for democracy and obviously despise us voters. They are just very bitter bad losers. And people like Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are doubly derisory of democracy, they are ignoring the national referendum and they are also ignoring the will of their own constituents, who voted overwhelmingly to leave.
The first tactic of the Bremoaners was to demand a second referendum, on a series of pretexts. When they realised that they would lose these by an even bigger margin they turned to the House of Commons, forming a “Rebel Alliance” that is demanding Commons votes on anything and everything to do with Brexit. This is a pure play to usurp the decision of the British people and is undemocratic for three reason:
- The House of Commons voted for and passed the European Union Referendum Act 2015. With this act they handed over their constitutional power to the British people. They voluntarily gave up their rights on the matter. For the Rebel Alliance to seek to usurp an Act of Parliament that they voted for is incredible contempt by them for us.
- MPs had their vote on leaving the EU. On 23th June 2016, with the rest of us. This is what was promised in the Conservative Manifesto and it is what was delivered.
- The mechanics of Brexit mean that the House of Commons do get a second bite of the cherry. They must eventually debate and vote for The Great Repeal Bill, which will legally extricate us from the EU. Which makes anything and everything they attempt before then utterly unnecessary and just a blatant attempt to prevent democracy.
Another Bremoaner tactic is to demand a say in the exit negotiations with the EU. This is just another way they are trying to prevent Brexit happening at all. The referendum quite clearly empowered the government to get us out. And anyone who has ever been involved in negotiations knows that you don’t reveal your hand, your negotiating positions, in advance. To do so would be supreme folly.
It is not just the political classes who hate democracy, it is also much of our mainstream media. The BBC has been especially egregious with massive bias (and often distortions of the truth) in every programme they can cram it into. They are in very huge and obvious breach of their charter. BBC’s editorial values have become a joke. They state: “Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest. We are committed to achieving the highest standards of due accuracy and impartiality and strive to avoid knowingly and materially misleading our audiences.”  On Brexit they have totally ignored this. For example many times good new stories are prefixed with “despite Brexit” as they continue their campaign to overthrow democracy. (Click here to see the News Watch report on BBC pro EU bias.)
So what have we voted for? As Theresa May keeps saying “Brexit means Brexit”, we voted to extract ourselves from the EU and all its institutions. Especially we must remove ourselves from the undemocratic EU Commission having any power whatsoever over the British people. Beyond this the two main issues are getting out of the Single Market and regaining control of our own borders.
Economically the Single Market is just cronyism and corporatism at their worst. It prevents the UK having access to world markets and it stops the world having access to British markets. It keeps the price of everything we buy (especially food) artificially high. And it makes sure that the poor countries of the world remain poor because they cannot trade themselves to prosperity. We have a moral duty to get out of this. But, obviously, we will retain some access to it. The EU needs our trade more than we need theirs, we hold the upper hand. 5.8 million EU jobs depend on UK trade, losing these is a price the EU cannot afford to pay.
Controlling our borders means letting in the people we want to let in. And we do want to let people in, the best and the brightest from all over the EU work in the City of London, in engineering, in pharmaceuticals, in the creative arts and in many other economically important areas. They add enormously to our GDP and to our tax take. We also need seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers, because the feckless British benefit monkeys refuse to work. What we don’t want are the many parasites (see above) who come here to abuse our massively over generous benefits system. Not only should we not let these in, we should be kicking the existing ones out. Many Somalis, for instance, first arrive in Holland, which they can get into easily, but once they get EU papers they come to the UK to enjoy our far more generous benefits.
The reality is that leaving the EU is a superb opportunity for the UK, the best thing to happen to us since the 4th of May 1979. We can go out and trade with the rest of the world, with 7.4 billion people instead of just the 510 million of the EU. Fourteen times as many customers. We also don’t want or need to be in EFTA, because that too would limit our freedoms.
People go on a lot about trade agreements. Currently our WTO membership is via the EU, so we will rejoin as a sovereign nation. The WTO and GATT govern world trade and they have massively reduced tariffs and non tariff barriers over the years. We will also very easily make bilateral trade deals. USA and China have already said yes, the Commonwealth contains 52 countries who are clamoring to increase trade with us. Leaving the EU has put us in an incredibly strong position.
And the economic fact is that we can be very prosperous without any trade deals. If we just unilaterally set all our incoming tariffs to zero we would win. Singapore did this years ago (except for alcohol, tobacco and motor vehicles), Hong Kong did the same. And their economies have boomed like crazy as a result, they have gone from being very much poorer than us (on a GDP/capita basis) to be very much richer than us. Whilst our economy was being held back by the EU their economies were booming with free trade. (Singapore $85,382, Hong Kong $56,878, UK $41,499. PPP GDP/capita).
Finally we are very much better out of the EU because it is failing and imploding. Economic disasters in Italy, Spain and Portugal, Germany’s dire banks, Hungary, Poland etc fighting the migrant hordes, Greece needing regular multi billion bail outs, the commission punishing Ireland based companies. It goes on and on, but not for long because it is unsustainable. Once it has gone it will be replaced with a conventional free trade area, which we would probably join.
Permalink
The problem I have with only having a vote on the repeal bill is by that point we’re already far down a path without an option of turning back. Now, if everyone could call on the government to seek an agreement from Europe that until the completion of the Article 50 the UK has a right to unilaterally withdraw from the process and remain in Europe, then I’m sure there will easily be a majority of MPs and Lords willing to pass a motion to trigger Article 50.
The logic for that is firstly to get things moving forwards, and secondly to ensure that we are not in a badly compromised negotiating position. If we get offered a bad deal having triggered Article 50 but our only option is WTO Tariffs which would be worse, then we’ll be forced to take a poor deal. There’s not much incentive for Europe to play nice, given that they have their own nationalist parties to fend off and want to discourage further departures from the union. If the EU decides it doesn’t want to make a deal at all, then Britain doesn’t have any options to choose between – it’s stuck with WTO tariffs and no other options on the table.
If Britain secures a unilateral right to cancel Article 50 before the end of the period, then we can start the process, work out what deal we can get, and then vote on whether it’s a good one. It won’t be holding up the process further, it will be strengthening our negotiating position to try to make a success of Brexit. Whether the package looks good or bad I’d expect there to still be a vote to confirm this along with the great repeal bill. Whether this would be a soft or hard Brexit is unknown.
However, I would say that 48% of the country would definitely prefer a soft Brexit to a hard Brexit, because it’s closest to the Remain position. What’s entirely unknown is what proportion of the remaining 52% want soft or hard Brexit. While I’d be confident the majority of these want hard Brexit, it wouldn’t take many who more wanted control over primary legislation rather than control over immigration to make soft Brexit preferable to the majority. If as few as 1 in 20 Leave voters want a soft Brexit then in the population as a whole that’s the preferable option for the majority. If so, then if the government decides on a hard Brexit agreement then a final vote may actually side with cancelling and remaining in the EU, by majority verdict. Hard Brexit voters would be far more likely to vote for Soft Brexit than No Brexit, so you’d expect such an option to get a majority vote unless it’s a particularly bad deal.That would make compromise more likely, but is it really fair to declare the wishes of the 48% completely irrelevant and only consider the majority view of the 52%? I’d want to make sure a deal fairly balances the spectrum of opinions across the 100%.