There will be no need for a second referendum if Theresa May is elected Prime Minister. She is of course not Prime Minister yet, there is many a slip between the getting out of the ministerial car and the door of Number 10, but many fear that in talks with officials in Brussels she may reverse almost every detail of Brexit. All however is not lost. Andrea Leadsom is making ground on the outside, and judging by the verbal beating her representative received at the hands of this morning’s Today programme on the BBC, the establishment is intent on stopping her at all costs. This can only be to Mrs Leadsom’s credit, and something grassroots Tories should remember when they come to vote for the next Prime Minister in a month’s time.
Mrs May is Mrs Humphrey Appleby from ‘Yes Minister’ to the very life. Sir Humphrey you will remember was the smooth but reassuring official whose brief was to protect civil service jobs at all costs. Under the May mandate it is likely that talks to disengage Britain from the EU will be described by officials as ‘technical’, meaning secret, underhand and misleading, and will go on for the full two years allowed by Article 50 by which time, Whitehall calculates, most people will have forgotten what all the fuss was about. News is however moving fast. This morning however comes news of an Italian banking crisis, with Germany making the same noises it made over the Greek economy when it began taking a list to port. The union may not last that long.
Not withstanding such a glorious outcome, Mrs May, like Sir Humphrey, is very reassuring indeed. She is able to slip policies past the public which in the hands of a lesser tactician would cause governments to fall. In May this year she approved the setting up of a committee to examine abuses of women by Britain’s large network of Sharia Courts. Such courts have no legal standing in British law but many of them are set out like courts and some operate under various arbitration acts. Mrs May and her Sir Humphreys emphasised ‘that it would look at how Sharia ideas were being ‘misused or exploited’ rather than a broader examination of whether the teaching itself discriminates against women’. It does Mrs May, it does and cruelly too. Notice the use of the phrase ‘Sharia ideas’ instead of ‘Sharia courts’, neatly sidestepping her duty as a British Home Secretary to ban these courts outright. You cannot have two legal systems in one country, especially if one contradicts almost every aspect of the Common Law and denies the sovereignty of Parliament. Never the less, Mrs May went on soothingly, ‘many British people ‘benefit a great deal’ from the guidance offered by Sharia….’ Do they indeed? She knows of course that the committee, stuffed with establishment worthies, will never come out in condemnation of Sharia, instead its very existence will legitimise it by the back door.
If she can do this with The British Common Law, what do you think she will do in Brussels with our sovereignty? There are back doors there too.
Only Sir Humphrey Appleby himself could have dreamed up such a lunatic scenario.
If you are a member of the Tory party already you can stop her by voting her out in the leadership poll. Your annual membership fee will have been £25 well spent. Sadly there is a deadline of three months before new members can vote. However if the last fortnight is anything to go by there may be plenty of leadership elections to come!
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You are misleading your readers I fear: it’s too late for new members to make a difference in the leadership election.
I have changed it, but there maybe plenty more leadership elections to come!