In fairness to Col, Yorkie, he has a point. If one takes a step back for a moment, ignoring whether one is a Remainer or a Brexiteer, surely any supporter of a democratic process can see the absurdity of the situation. We’ve had a referendum in which the electorate voted by a majority to leave the EU. This is an indisputable fact.
Of course, ardent Remainers will say that any basis upon which the U.K. leaves the EU is a bad one. I respect that position. But to have the state of affairs that we now have, where parliament is effectively rejecting, or at least failing to agree, which route out of the EU we take is frankly absurd.
Like most of the electorate I very much doubt many of the MPs have even bothered to read the proposals fully, or would be able to grasp the complexities if they did. But this is no reason to abandon the whole thing. Whether legally binding or not, the electorate was asked what they wanted and it is parliament’s duty to deliver this or step aside.
My idiot conservative MP, Caroline Noakes, didn’t even vote last week for any of the options. How can that be representing any of her constituents. Maybe I’ll cut her some slack and assume she abstained because she didn’t understand it enough and/or was bored. She looks like a horse, so maybe that’s all one needs to know.
Anyway, I digress.
I’ve said before that the referendum was the wrong way to go about Brexit. What we should have had was a General Election with a party campaigning for withdrawal from the EU that the electorate could have chosen to vote in on a clear manifesto. They were called UKIP and were unelectable.
To give us a referendum was, at least for people like me that want to leave the EU, the only chance we’d ever get to bring this about. So we took it. We’d never get such an opportunity again, would we?
May’s folly was not to form a coalition. Leaving the EU is a serious business and any politician putting country before party or self would’ve done this, then called a GE after delivering it. Rather like Churchill after the war. We’d have got a Brexit by now had she done this.
Adopting the Norway model would’ve been fairly easy too.
Alternatively, we could’ve gone for a gradual Brexit, effectively leaving this month, but with most of the EU provisions intact, then gradually retreating from or tweaking them over the course of a number of years. This was wholly do-able and fairly damage-free and would’ve given both sides - the U.K. and the EU - time and space to consider each facet carefully.
But, we are where we are. The unavoidable fact is that the majority of British people want to leave, so parliament has to make this happen. Or they can step aside.
