Friday 14 December 2018

EU leaders with false bonhomie

If anything persuades Brexit doubters about their feelings for the EU the atrocious way in which they EU leaders treated Theresa May will be the final screw in their coffin. Full of smug bonhomie and promises to be helpful and nice and then in goes the knife once the television cameras are no longer around. Non, nein, nee, nao, nie, ingen!!! They all said they wouldn't help her at all but had only one message. "Go back to your Parliament and tell them to take the deal we have offered or go hang!" Talk about treachery. All smiles and lovey handshakes for the British Prime Minister for the cameras but totally false. Well it was 27 against one, so she never stood a chance. But if the EU leaders had actually said: "Look we promise that the Irish backstop issue will go away within two years." Mrs M might have been able to return to Parliament with something extra. But they didn't and she won't have a better deal to go back to MPs with and so she's finished, and so are we. Unless of course it's all a giant conspiracy between Theresa and the 27 leaders to persuade MPs and voters that the best and only solution is to stay in the EU. No, I don't think so. I don't believe in conspiracies as a general rule and if there was one and it came out, Theresa May would be literally thrown out of Number 10 Downing Street. The only other scenario is one put forward by David Davis, former Brexit Secretary, on BBC Question Time last night. He said, almost as if he knew something no one else did, that it was only in the next three months that the EU hierarchy would really get down to the negotiating business and that concessions could be extracted out of Brussels during this time so that the UK would leave on March 29 next year with a proper deal that everyone in Parliament and the country would like. I noticed the Green Party MP (the only one in the House of Commons), also sitting on the Question Time panel, mouthing "fantasy". I fear she is right. David Davis was in a frightfully jolly mood and didn't seem in the least bit disturbed when even David Dimbleby, doing his last presenting of the programme after 25 years, took the micky out of him, saying he was the Brexit joke. Davis just smiled and repeated his theory that the EU would give in eventually. Judging by the EU leaders' treatment of the British prime minister on Thursday, all they are working on right now is the relevant laws and regulations and planning necessary for a UK withdrawal without any deal at all. The hardest of hard Brexits. Was Davis worried about that? No, no, no. He quite likes the idea of what he called a "managed no deal". Whatever the hell that means. By the way if the government turns to Option C which is to hold another referendum I can guarantee it will go the wrong way, again. But this time even more people will vote to leave the EU with or without a deal because of those smug faces in Brussels on Thursday. The false bonhomie.

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