Darren Grimes is a political commentator and is content creator at Reasoned UK.
The line parroted at us Brexiteers more times than anything else is back with a vengeance: “You didn’t know what you were voting for!”
Yet no objective spectator could reasonably conclude that we voted for the self-humiliation of accepting EU satellite status in our vote to take back control. A political and media class so blinded by their Boris and Brexit Derangement Syndromes are refusing to accept what is patently not in the national interest.
Brexit is back in the news with this week’s news about Number 10’s plans for the Northern Ireland Protocol in the event of a No Deal Bexit.
Predictably pro-EU commentators are back to dismissing British independence as fantasy. It’s this view of our country and its electorate that saw Theresa May’s Conservative Party slump to its lowest national vote share since it was formed in 1834, and Labour swept from its one-time heartlands.
Whatever one thinks of the current row over future Government policy and international law, there is no fantasy in rejecting demands that the EU would ask of no other independent, sovereign nation state.
Brussels wants EU trawlers access they currently enjoy under the much-hated Common Fisheries Policy, and that wants is to slavishly follow the Unions’s laws to guarantee a ‘level playing field’ for firms in the EU. These demands would bind the UK’s legislative hands to the asphyxiating clutches of the EU’s regulatory orbit. All we’re asking is to be treated like Canada, South Korea or Japan with a low-fat, bog standard Free Trade Agreement.
If not, we trade on much the same terms as our Australian cousins do with the EU. Sure, there’ll be some disruption – and even with a deal there would be disruption in leaving the single market and the Customs Union.
But no self-respecting democracy and the world’s fifth largest economy could accept the sort of concessions demanded by the victor after a war had been won – with a financial penalty, and a surrender document signed and sealed.
Whilst I find comparisons between the election of Donald Trump and Brexit to be intellectually lazy, there are comparisons to be made in the telling response by those who were rejected wholesale at the ballot box, despite the full machinery of the state, the media, the political class, the moneyed elite and every organisation with an acronym swinging in behind them.
In a new book on Trump: You’re Hired!: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President, Casey Mulligan details the administration’s successes, failures and scandals.
The book features Kim Darroch, who was once Britain’s man in Washington until he was booted out for a leaked cache of classified Foreign Office communications, in which Sir Kim described Mr Trump as “radiating insecurity” and called his early administration “inept”.
The book recalls how at a large reception at the British embassy in Washington, hosted by Sir Kim and with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer and blocker of all things No Deal Brexit, Philip Hammond, was the guest of honour.
Hammond is reported as being delighted that “In the past year, we did not exit and you did not build that wall!” Another comment was reportedly that “we don’t know what will be the royal-baby name, except that it will not be Donald!” The potentially damaging comments and disregard for democratic mandates were allegedly made at an event with a dozen or so of Trump’s staff and journalists.
These events highlight precisely what our issue was until December last year. Our vote for Brexit was led by a political class that would sneer at the working class who clearly don’t know what’s good for them in ignoring their sage, sophisticated and high-brow wisdom by voting for Brexit and Trump.
The same sneering set refuse to learn this lesson, time and again. For the last four years they have swallowed every single line from Brussels and used it as a stick with which to beat their own country’s national interest and reasonable request for fairness.
It’s easy to forget just how much better things have got. Boris Johnson saw off the Bercow speakership, a Remain Parliament that was doing all it could to thwart our vote, the Supreme Court decision and much else. Vote Leave is now in Number 10 and determined to deliver on that fundamental pledge to take back control.
With David Frost, or “Frosty The No Man” as the UK’s Chief Negotiator, the EU Commission is riled in a way in which May’s Number 10 operation never riled it. When she would threaten No Deal in an attempt to keep the Brexit spartans within her parliamentary party at bay, the EU Commission would reliably call her bluff. But when Frosty The No Man and Boris Johnson do it, as we’ve seen by the response from Brussels this week, the EU has no idea how this is all going to play out.
One thing seems clear: the bravery of the British people to stand up and be proud of country and place against the Anywheres, against those who told them they’re stupid, ignorant and bigoted for their vote for greater democratic accountability and powers to be brought back closer to home.
It has paid off in the end. The blood-curdling screams of the sneering commentariat are back with a vengeance, revealing to us one thing: this time they know we have a Prime Minister who really means it when he says that No Deal is better than a Bad Deal.