Giving Up

As I write this, the Prime Minister is in Belgium begging for a short extension to the Article 50 period. She has actively insulted every single member of parliament for doing their jobs, and there’s a petition for revoking Article 50 with 969,974 late edit: or over 3 million signatures. Somehow, there is still the idea from certain parties of ‘you lost, get over it’, which ignores the passage of time. The Speaker of the House of Commons has been vilified for doing his job and upholding the rules of Parliament.

A delay beyond the EU elections in May is not possible without it being for much longer after. A delay at the moment is not possible at all because it makes life for the rest of the EU very difficult, and so the other leaders in the European Council are quite rightly blocking it.

Three years ago, Parliament fell for “Politician’s Logic”:

Something must be done
This is something
Therefore we must do it.

As I have said before, this was the message of the referendum. Something must be done; 52% of the population wanting change definitely mandates doing something. Arguably, what must be done is better education about how the EU works, and stopping British politicians blaming the results of their personal agendas on the EU in the interests of saving their own necks. Something does not, however, mean that you should throw all caution to the wind and flounce out in a cloud of red, white and blue smoke, making us a laughing stock in the process. There was exaggeration of both sides in the referendum, and this has weakened every argument in the interim, but as soon as the Electoral Commission started to investigate Vote Leave for malpractice the entire process should have been stopped until a ruling was made.

What matters is that we deliver the result of the referendum.

Theresa May, on several occasions

Two years ago next week, Parliament was reckless in activating Article 50, with no agreement as to what we actually wanted to achieve. The “European Research Group”, which is a euphemistic title if ever I have heard one, does not believe in delivering the best for the people who actually live in this country, but because they are a very loud movement within the Conservatives seem to be the only group worth keeping happy. The result of the snap election is being used to legitimise their point of view; that most people voted Labour or Conservative, and both parties stood on a platform of delivering the referendum result. This ignores the structure of our democracy. We have a two-ish party system. For most of the country, the only options are to vote for one of the two major parties, or else risk accidentally electing the largest minority. I, in fact, voted Labour as the least of three evils and in spite of being a dyed in the wool liberal, because I believe in my local MP and apparently did not think it through. When there’s very little functional difference between the Government and the Opposition, you cannot blame the electorate for trying to navigate First Past The Post.

Brexit is not, and was never, deliverable.

The risk of civil war in Northern Ireland is very real, because the Good Friday Agreement is built on the freedoms central to the EU ideal. The confidence and supply agreement the government has with the DUP has already risked peace in Northern Ireland. The DUP, as it happens, represent the very worst of humanity, and the very worst of protestant Christianity. We have all too quickly forgotten that our minority government is propped up by a group which spearheaded a campaign titled “Save Ulster from Sodomy”, and yet the Conservatives claim to be good for LGBT+ people in this country. I refuse to support a government whose decisions are passed thanks to an agreement with a party which believes that I should be illegal.

So much of our infrastructure is designed on the assumption that a hard customs border was never going to be reimplemented at the ports of Dover and Folkestone; the latter was built to serve the channel tunnel, a project only finally achieved because of the EEC.

So much of this, until this week, was at least somewhat funny. We could see the bright side of the parliamentary inconsistency because the consequences were in the future, and this gave Maybot time to work out that trying to push through the withdrawal agreement was just going to alienate both sides. Apparently, this hasn’t happened, and now we are simply staring into the abyss. I wish more MPs were like Wera Hobhouse (Liberal Democrat MP for Bath), who stood up in parliament and stated that she does not believe her job as an MP is to surrender her judgement to the whim of the electorate, but to use her experience to judge for what is in their best interest. Theresa May has surrendered her judgement for the repetition of infuriating sound bites to keep the backbenches of her party happy.

I believe in a supranationally united Europe with individual countries willingly working together for the universal benefit of all. I believe in a fully federal United Kingdom in which all people feel represented in their government. I can’t say whether the economic predictions of the post-Brexit world will be true, but the social disaster is guaranteed. We enjoy easy travel. We enjoy getting to know Europeans who choose to live here and learn more about ourselves in the process. We gain perspective because we must think of other cultures when we make decisions, and because those other cultures are included at the negotiating table. We have enjoyed a long period of European cooperation, and the EU survived the financial crisis, stronger than before. It’s just everso easy to push complaints up the chain to the larger, seemingly more faceless body instead of dealing with the unrest at home.

I do not have confidence in the Government; then again, I never did.

Mhairi Black, MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South during the debate for the Vote of No Confidence

I have grown up as a Citizen of the European Union. It has always said that on the front of my passport, and of it I am proud. I have never been ashamed to be European, but to be British is to throw your hat in with the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nigel Farage; the two-faced, the self-interested, the manipulator of public opinion for some bizarre and unknowable nationalist agenda. We should all be ashamed that people like this represent our country on the world stage.

The result of the referendum was that something must be done. We have now done something. Can we leave it there?