As a floating voter who has never belonged to any political
party, I'm free to give credit where it’s due. So I say ‘well done’ to Rishi Sunak
for negotiating the Windsor Framework with the EU.
Will the substantial slice of the Conservative Parliamentary
Party blinkered by their irrational hatred of the EU, manage to vote it down? Apparently
Brexit liar-in-chief Boris Johnson did not even bother to show up to hear Mr
Sunak yesterday. So no change there. Will the people-who-like-to-say-no DUP
refuse to come back into power-sharing now they’re no longer Northern Ireland’s
biggest party? Who knows?
The point is Mr Sunak has made an effort to stand up to both
groups, and assert that the EU is not our enemy, and that if this country is
going to limit the damage from the Brexit disaster, we will need a constructive
relationship with Europe.
This, of course, will raise many difficult questions for
him. Yesterday, he was waxing lyrical about the advantages to Northern Ireland
of being inside the EU Single Market. But Brexiters like him are denying those
advantages to the rest of the UK, even though they promised we would stay in
the Single Market when they were conning people into voting for Brexit. Every
day more people see through the Brexit lies, so for how long can this
doublethink survive?
But perhaps for the first time since 2016 we have a
Conservative prime minister prepared to stand up, to some degree, for the UK. No Brexit is as
good as being in the EU, but the Conservatives have so far chosen a
particularly bad version. If Mr Sunak is prepared to defy the fanatics in his
party and lead us away from the foolish delusions that have dominated the
Tories, he deserves credit for that.
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the
end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
