At a press conference this lunchtime (20th July) Michel Barnier welcomed the receipt by the EU commission of the British White paper on Brexit. This is not surprising since before taking it to the House of Commons Mrs May flew to Germany to lay it before Frau Merkel. A considerable amount of planning went into the timing to ensure the House will be in recess while final negotiations with the EU take place. Not that it really matters as these will be in name only as Berlin has already decided the terms, the only substantive difference being an agreement on services.
At present Britain retains control of our service industry including the hugely lucrative City of London. Without it we would be practically bankrupt, who else would pay for the millions of illegals living off social security in Britain ? Soon there won’t be any money. Holding up his mobile phone this morning Michel Barnier declared that as 40% of it consists of services, ‘the services agreement will have to be negotiated.’ (For ‘agreement’ read ‘surrender.’)
By this definition even a Grimsby kipper contains a proportion of services.
Could Boris Johnson get rid of Mrs May before she does us further harm? Unlikely. While it is reliably rumoured that 48 letters of no confidence in her have been received by the 1922 committee, a senior Tory went on TV last night to say that by the time his party gets around to holding a vote there will not be enough MPs present in the country to do so. Bringing them back from all over the world would be simply too expensive.
To add salt to our wounds this morning Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar threatened us with a ban on our aircraft entering Irish airspace unless we allow Irish fisherman to fish in our territorial waters after Brexit.(Thanks Ireland we gave you 7 billion pounds during your banking crisis a few years ago). This afternoon in the House of Commons a government minister was careful to assure the House that we would retain absolute control of our territorial waters – she made no mention of who we might give permission to fish in them.
What does all this add up to? An absolute determination by a unified political class, Labour and Conservative, mainly Conservative, to frustrate the will of the people while insulting them with pantomime negotiations with the EU. I will be surprised if there are more than a hundred Tory seats after the next election.[pullquote]
Free speech isn’t free – Make a donation to the Salisbury Review
[/pullquote]
There’s a wise old saying: “If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it.”
We fools, we poor fools, we thought that voting to leave the EU would result in our leaving the EU. The day after the most glorious vote in the whole history of voting, my friends and neighbours and I were wandering around, perhaps not entirely sober, with optimistic smiles on our faces, because it was the first time anybody could remember when voting seemed to have changed something for our benefit. It seemed that Chesterton’s notoriously silent “people of England” had started to speak (and be listened to!) at last.
But those happy smiles have now been replaced by expressions of baffled resentment. How did we ever come to believe that voting would change anything? And what can we do about this latest Great Betrayal? Probably nothing, as always. There aren’t enough of us, and our numbers are diminishing daily.
What a bloody mess!
And to think what could have been: An England of about 40 million ethnically homogeneous people, living together in trust, virtually crime free, prosperous, peaceful, on our beautiful island.
Instead you have what you have; no need for me to describe it.
The tories will be defeated in the next election, as they deserve to be. The people will follow their habit and vote against, rather than for, something. Unfortunately the labour govt. formed by Corbyn will be completely dysfunctional, there just isn’t the intellectual firepower in the modern labour party to form a govt. and address the issues facing Britain, (this is also true of the tories).
If the intent had been malign, had the purpose been to achieve the actual destruction of Britain, it is difficult to see a worse result. And it is not over yet, by a long chalk.
And the worst of it is: you’re right!
Appeasement? Does this mean that we are expecting a war in a year or so?
I cannot believe that many ordinary Irishmen or women applaud what the creature Varadkar is doing.
Jesus wept.
A hundred Tory seats? That many?