I once thought it was a mistake to have retired from politics. Labour's got itself into a major mess since I left and I could have become a member of the shadow cabinet for at least a week. Now I'm not so sure I'm learning that leprosy is better than being a Labour Brexiteer. I dropped into my old haunt a few weeks back to be welcomed effusively by Tory Brexiteers but my former comrades in the struggle for socialism (or whatever it was, memory fails me) treated me like a bad smell, an incipiant fascist, even a friend of Farage -who I've met and liked, though its better not to say so .
Life's no fun any more. The referendum is over but all the organs I once turned to, the Guardian, the Observer, and the New Statresman are still fighting it and proclaiming Remain as the real winner.. The Gurus at whose feet I once worshipped;Will Hutton, William Keegan, Polly Toynbee are all so hysterically anti Brexit they want Labour to use a Parliamentary strength it hasn't got to reject it . When it isn't developing suicide as a political strategy the party of the people is busy telling them they're wrong , stupid and gullible.They should drop their dislike of immigration and follow Lady Curzon's advice to anxious wives "lie back and think of England"It prompts the question "what shall they know of England who only Europe know?"
It's a bit bemusing to see the party of democracy rejecting its verdict and telling the people they're so stupid that they were conned by specious lies ( far less accurate than Remain's fears) and should gratefully accept the European policy of voting again to correct electoral mistakes.In only a quarter of a century we've stood on our heads on the EU but it's still difficult to ignore the fact that a third of our party's people voted for Brexit and seventy percent of Labour MPs took a different view to their constituents.
All this could indicate that our oppositionist mentality drives us to take on the people as well as the Tories. Or it may indicate that a party which can and should do better than the EU for the workers, the unions and for racial harmony has come to believe that it will never hold power again to do it so we should be grateful for any crumbs from the table of an institution which has been so generous to Greece and other failures.
THIS could be animal farm in reverse with us turning into the Liberals and learning to love the institution which drains us of money, jobs and demand so that Labour's new destiny is to proclaim our Euro enthusiasm, join the Euro and leap off the EU's naughty step to lead the whole shambling mess in a British direction which its so obstinately refused to take for fourty years.
Why all the fuss? The judges verdict that Parliament should agree to giving notice under article fifty was treated as if it was the end of Brexit . In fact its only a statement of the bleeding obvious. Parliament should and parliament will consent. It can't deny the verdict of the people and Labour dare not face the early election which rejection would mean. Nor is it a statement that Parliament should dictate the terms of negotiations if only because it can't.To shackle our side is to undermine our negotiators and create a Euro fifth column suporting a Commission which doesn't have a similar disloyal pack hounding its heels and proclaiming that the other side is right in a recreation of Munch's Primal Scream
We could hardly do that and get the best deal for Britain as the people have commissioned us to do. It's only when the negotiating game of two sided bluff produces a compromise that Parliament can decide and the proposals be put to the people to tell us whether it fulfils their desire to take back control.
That will be 2019. Just before an election scheduled for 2020. By that time the world will have changed in ways no one can now foretell I can't predict the outcome Nor can the Rampant remainers who claim to be clairvoyant so they can tell us right now that we'll get nowt. I may not have their powers but I do know that it's better to wait and decide then, rather than indulging now in an over emotional war of hypothetical nightmares which will go on for the next two and a half years. Shut up the lot of you.
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