Life in the remoaner bubble remains as surreal as ever. The Guardian newspaper has publiushed an article by David Cameron’s former tutor Vernon Bogdanor, claiming that “A second Brexit referendum is looking more likely by the day.” Wishful thinking perhaps? As we have pointed out on numerous occasions, Mrs May and the Tory Party dare not row back on their commitment to deliver Brexit. Not only would it be as good as handing the keys of No. 10 to Mr Corbyn, but it would precipitate the worst crisis the party has faced since the split that followed the repeal of the Corn laws in 1846. What Bogdanor fails to take into account is that now Article 50 has been triggered, we are on the way out. Even EU sources have suggested that it may not be reversible. Furthermore, Mrs May shows no sign of conceding a second referendum, not to mention the fact that no one in their right minds would want to go through that gruelling campaign again, especially given the lack of interest among the general public
Still, it’s the silly season aka the Parliamentary summer recess, so editors have to be a bit more creative in trying to fill the columns. The Financial Times, another bastion of remainiacs, is no better than the Guardian. In a piece entitled Brexit reveals Britain’s enduring flaws, Simon Kuper claims that the idea of leaving the EU was hatched in the Oxford Union in the 1980s by the likes of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, because “This generation of mostly former public schoolboys didn’t want Brussels running Britain. That was their caste’s prerogative.” No better proof of the decline in the standards of journalism can be found than this once respected newspaper giving space for such utter tosh. Is Mr Kuper completely unaware of the long-standing opposition to EU membership within the Labour Party? Or of the Campaign for an Independent Britain, which was set up in 1969 to oppose our accession – before Boris Johnson or Michael Gove were old enough to go to school?
True, both articles acknowledge that the Brexit talks are not going as well as David Davis and his team had hoped, but widely-reported differences of opinion within the Cabinet over the “hardness” of Brexit does not mean that Brexit isn’t going to happen. Whether it is seamless is another matter, of course, but happen it will. I wouldn’t normally quote Jean-Claude Juncker approvingly, but he does seem to have the measure of the mood in the UK (including the government) and has distanced himself from those Brexit sceptics who are expecting a big back-pedalling “My working hypothesis is that it will come to Brexit”, he said.
Meanwhile, our attention has been drawn to a piece by Jonn Ellidge in the New Statesman, which claims that a recent YouGov survey proves that Brexit voters hate their own children. The reason for this astonishing statement is because:-
“A healthy majority of Leave voters, it found, claimed that ‘significant damage to the British economy’ would be a price worth paying for Brexit: 61 per cent, compared to just 20 per cent who disagreed. More bizarrely, when the question was made more personal, and respondents were asked would it be worth “you or members of your family” losing their jobs, 39 per cent still thought Brexit was totes worth it – slightly more than the 38 per cent who, like normal, sane people, replied ‘obviously not’”.
So QED, Brexit voters, which the author equates to retired baby boomers “who are prepared to crash the economy because they don’t like Belgians” are a selfish generation who must hate their offspring because “when asked directly whether they’d swap the wealth and security of their own children for a blue passport and the ability to deport Polish plumbers, they said yes in huge numbers.“
As blogger Samuel Hooper says, Ellidge’s claims are “vile” and totally ignores the real reason why a significant majority of older voters supported Brexit. “Does he not realise that the counterfactual, unrecorded by YouGov (who did not bother to probe more deeply) is that perhaps these older people – rightly or wrongly – thought that by voting for Brexit they were preserving some other vital social good for their descendants, something potentially even more valuable than a couple of points of GDP growth? I would posit that the supposedly hateful Daily Mail-reading generation of grey haired fascists scorned by Jonn Elledge actually do not have any particular desire to inflict economic harm on their children and grandchildren, but simply realise – through having lived full lives through periods of considerably less material abundance than those of us born since the 1980s – that other things matter too. Things like freedom and self-determination, precious gifts which were under threat during the Second World War and the Cold War, and which the older generations who remember these difficult times therefore do not casually take for granted.”
Absolutely, but no amount of debunking is going to stop the blinkered fanaticism of the remainiacs. Among the chief of these is the European Movement, which is ramping up its campaign to stop Brexit altogether, linking up with other like-minded groups including Scientists for EU, Healthier IN the EU and Britain for Europe to try to stop Brexit. I debated with a few members of the European Movement and although I didn’t always win, it was fun to embarrass them by mentioning the funding they received from the American CIA during the 1970s. A recent e-mail has encouraged recipients to join this iniquitous organisation which sees itself as able to “represent the groundswell of opinion against departure from the EU.”
Sorry, European Movement, but the ground isn’t swelling round here. If even I, as a political “anorak” and long-standing opponent of our EU membership, am getting fed up with all the debating about how badly the cabinet is divided, how much we will have to pay to leave, trading arrangements and so on, Joe Public is even less interested. He cast his vote a year ago and whichever way he actually voted, he was never really very excited by the EU, never really understood what we had joined and just wants the country to move on. Hopefully on March 29th, when we finally leave, the European Movement and its fellow-traveller remainiacs will move on – preferably to well-deserved oblivion – but I’m not holding my breath.
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