Brexitwatch: A Book of Secrets - have I met an emissary from the future?

 A funny thing happened to me the other day as I was walking across a blasted heath not far from where I live in North London.

I saw a woman standing by a fire. I was going to write ‘old woman’ and then I realised she was no older than me, and was possibly a good deal younger, as most people are. As I approached she held out a book, quite a weighty tome, and said: ‘I am Sybil. I have come from the future with this book of secrets. Take it.’

Sadly, living in modern Britain has bred suspicion and cynicism in me, and I quickened my pace and brushed past her. After a few moments, I heard her shout: ‘Then I’ll burn the book.’ I looked back and saw her throw it on the flames. Then I went hurrying on my way.

A few hours later something made me go back. There was no sign of the woman. The fire had gone out, but among the ashes were the remains of the book. I saw that it was a volume in the New Oxford History of England entitled Brexit 2015- but the end date of the period it covered was lost, as was the author’s name and date of publication.

Gingerly I retrieved what was left of the volume, and found the opening sentences:

‘We can now see that the Brexit referendum of 2016 was the real fault line in English history. The previous year, David Cameron, a friendly, plausible prime minister, had won a surprise victory in the General Election. Unfortunately Cameron was also shallow, weak and careless, and rarely failed to put the interests of the Conservative Party before the interests of the country.’

I am now trying to piece together other passages, which I will post in this blog.

Brexitwatch: this wasn't meant to happen! Part 1

When Prime Minister David Cameron gave in to the Conservative Brexit fanatics and promised to hold a referendum on EU membership if he won the General Election of 2015, he also let them do a lot of other things - e.g. gerrymander the electorate by systematically excluding millions of people who could have been expected to vote Remain.

He never bothered to think about crucial questions - such as what would happen if there was a very small majority, and/or a small turn out? What if some countries in the UK voted for Remain and others for Leave? Should the Leave campaign have to come up with a credible programme for quitting the EU or should they be allowed to be all things to all Brexiters and promise a whole pile of often contradictory things that could never be delivered?

You see none of this mattered, because Cameron knew the Tories were not going to win the election. At best, they'd be back in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and the Libdems would save him from holding the referendum.

Unfortunately, Cameron misjudged the ferocity with which his party would stab their former coalition partners in the back, and so, curses!, he won a majority. That wasn't meant to happen. 

So now he was stuck with the referendum, but still he didn't need to worry about the crazy, negligent basis on which it was being set up, because Remain was going to win. Leave was going to lose, and all but the most fanatical of the Brexiters could be put back in their box for a few more years.

To be continued

Brexitwatch: the speech he never made

It is almost three years since the Brexit referendum. The man who called it, then Prime Minister David Cameron, promised that whatever the result, he would stay on as PM, but he broke that promise, resigning within hours. Just imagine if he had kept it. How much heartache and division, how many job losses he could have spared us from, and how much money he could have saved us.

All he needed to do was make this speech:

'Good morning. I am surprised and disappointed at the result of the referendum, but I promised that whatever the result I would stay on as your prime minister, and I will keep that promise.

I congratulate the Leave Campaign on their victory. Those who campaigned for the UK to leave the EU must clearly have had a credible plan for how this could be achieved without damaging our country, because without such a plan, no responsible politician could have advocated such a course of action.

So I am convening all those MPs who campaigned for Leave into a grand committee to come to an agreement on what they suggest as the way forward. Their plan will then be put to parliament as a whole.

In the meantime, there are many other tasks that our country requires its prime minister to perform in many other fields of policy, and I am now going back into 10 Downing Street to carry on with that work. Thank you.'

Would that really have been so hard?

Brexitwatch: history as it should have been

The morning after the referendum in 2016, prime minister David Cameron stood in front of 10 Downing Street and made the following speech:

'I am surprised and disappointed at the result of the referendum, but I promised that whatever the result, I would stay on as your prime minister, and that promise I will keep.

I do not have a plan for leaving the EU, but I know the people who advocated leaving must have, because if they hadn't, they wouldn't have advocated leaving.

I have formed a special cabinet committee comprising those cabinet members who campaigned for the UK to leave. It will be their task to come up with a plan as to how this should best be achieved.

That plan will be put to the cabinet, and once the cabinet has approved it, it will be put to parliament.

In the meantime, the government has a lot to do on many fronts, and I am going back into number 10 to get on with that work.'

Brexitwatch: the government should have....done nothing

Oh, the perils of failing to follow my advice. There would have been no referendum. Today we would still be happily in the EU not looking over the abyss of an economic collapse, we would not have had a spike in xenophobia and hate crime, and David Cameron would still have been prime minister with a workable majority.

If only he had taken note of what I wrote on 3 April 2015:

FRIDAY, 3 APRIL 2015

UK election: the next government should.....do nothing

One of the more bizarre criticisms of the UK’s coalition government was that in its latter stages, it entered a ‘zombie’ phase. In other words, for once, MPs were failing to carry out their supposed duty of rushing through poorly drafted new laws which they have not read properly, and which have disastrous unforeseen consequences.

It is the kind of mentality that saw Labour inventing 3,600 crimes in 11 years, and we wonder why the prisons are overflowing. Or that had the Tory-dominated coalition mounting yet another complete reorganisation of the NHS – something David Cameron had specifically promised not to do.

What we seem to get more and more is government by vanity project. After all, how is a politician meant to get into the history books by making sure the health service or public transport ran efficiently? No, they want to be the man or woman who shook up the NHS, or built HS2.

How many times have you heard governments promising to ‘cut red tape’? But power is so delightful, and the temptation to boss other people around just too great to resist. Back in the nineteenth century when a colleague demanded that Prime Minister Lord Palmerston should pass a new piece of legislation, he replied: ‘There are too many laws already.’

Somebody once said the trouble with elections is that whoever you vote for, the government always gets in. Whichever government wins this time, expect a flood of new laws and regulations.

More on this from Simon Jenkins -

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/02/government-ministers-public-servants-change-reform

Brexitwatch: Don't endorse David Cameron

Who is more to blame for Brexit? Theresa May or David Cameron? It is certainly true that May's pursuit of the most extreme and destructive form of Brexit in order to keep the Tory Party together is irresponsible and disgraceful, but surely Mr Cameron is even more culpable.

Crime 1. To try to keep the Tory Party together, he was prepared to risk the future of his country. And he created a referendum loaded heavily in favour of the Leave faction. But at least he promised that whatever the outcome, he would stay in power to deal with it.

Crime 2. Instead, within hours, he had announced his resignation, leaving others to clear up the mess he had made.

Now Alzheimer's Research UK have made Mr Cameron their president. I consider it an insult to the people of the UK to endorse him in this way, and have written to protest:

Ms Hilary Evans,

Chief Executive,

Alzheimer’s Research UK,

3, Granta Park,

Riverside,

Cambridge CB21 6AD.

Dear Ms Evans,

I was horrified to discover that you have appointed David Cameron as your president.

When he was Prime Minister, Mr Cameron devised a thoroughly irresponsible referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. He did this as a shabby manoeuvre to keep his party together without concerning himself with the effect it would have on his country.

The referendum caused deep divisions within our country, racism, xenophobia, violence and threats of violence against many people, and an outcome that is likely to make people poorer, especially those who are already poor, and to cause public services, such as the NHS and social care tor the elderly, to face completely inadequate funding.

Before the vote, Mr Cameron had promised to stay on as Prime Minister whatever the result. Instead, within hours, he resigned, abandoning his country to its fate, and leaving others to try to clean up the mess he had created.

This conduct falls below the standard you should expect in someone holding the office of your president, and I trust you will sever your links with Mr Cameron without delay.

Yours sincerely,

John Withington

Brexitwatch: What is Theresa May up to?

During the EU referendum campaign, British Prime Minister Theresa May claimed to be supporting Remain, though her participation was so discreet as to be almost invisible. And yet just three months later, she is supporting the most extreme and damaging form of so-called ‘hard’ Brexit – rejecting the European single market that buys almost half of the UK’s exports.

Why? There are a number of possible explanations:

1. Ms May is a liar. She was always a supporter of hard Brexit and was just pretending to support Remain because she was afraid that backing Leave would damage her ambition to be Prime Minister.

2. Ms May genuinely supported Remain but has been won over to hard Brexit by arguments advanced by the Brexiters since the referendum. As no credible arguments for hard (or any other sort of) Brexit have been put forward, this seems unlikely.

3. Mrs May, like Boris Johnson, is not much interested in arguments about EU membership. She just wants to be Prime Minister, and will say or do whatever she thinks necessary.

4. Mrs May was afraid the Brexiters might ruin her first Tory Party Conference as PM, so she adopted David Cameron’s approach – cowardice and capitulation. In fact, she still believes in Remain, or at least staying in the single market, and at some convenient point in the future, thinks she will somehow pull the Tories back to this position. Good luck with that one. Look how it worked for Cameron.

5. Mrs May is engaged in a softening up exercise, conjuring up the most disastrous picture of Brexit imaginable, so that when she comes up with something that damages the country a bit less, Remainers will be pathetically grateful and go along with it, instead of continuing to argue that the referendum was (as indeed is the case) advisory and not binding, unfair, won on the basis of a pack of lies, indecisive etc

6. Like Boris Johnson, Mrs May believes Britain can have its cake and eat it, remaining in the single market while ripping up the rest of our agreements with the EU on freedom of movement, EU law etc. This is hard to believe as virtually every important person in the EU has made it clear this is a non-starter, and in spite of (presumably) months of looking, the Brexiters have not found anyone of substance who says the opposite, 

7. Mrs May, like the Brexiters, has not the faintest idea what to do. I am far from sure, but I think this is probably the most likely explanation.

Brexitwatch: So farewell then, David Cameron

According to Enoch Powell, 'all political careers end in failure'. But few can have burned up quite so spectacularly as that of David Cameron.

He spent months telling us it would be a disaster if we left the EU, and yet because of his foolishly constructed referendum, which imposed no minimum threshold for Brexit, on the say-so of not much more than a third of the electorate, we are now consigned to suffer the damage he predicted.

As for his flagship policy - elimination of the budget deficit - he abandoned that completely. Originally he promised to balance the books by 2015, then by 2020, and much pain and austerity was inflicted on the British people to achieve this objective. Now there is no plan for getting rid of the deficit, just as there is no plan for what to do when we leave Europe.

In Peer Gynt, as the hero's life nears its end, he is confronted by a button-moulder who proposes melting him down to see if anything of value remains. When David Cameron's time at No 10 is melted down, what will we find? He legalised same-sex marriage. And that is about it.

We British often get sentimental about prime ministers who are coming to the end of their careers, however unpopular they may have been. But David Cameron's great failing was that he put the interests of the Conservative Party before the interests of his country. And for that history will judge him harshly, and rightly so.

He leaves office a leading contender, against some formidable competition, for the title of Britain's worst-ever prime minister.

Brexitwatch: Write to your MP

If you are not prepared to stand by and watch Britain dragged out of the EU on the basis of a Brexit campaign founded on a pack of lies which won the support of less than 38 per cent of the electorate, you need to write to your MP. This is what I have sent to mine.

'As a representative, and not a delegate, clearly your responsibility now is to exercise your judgement as to the best way of avoiding further serious harm to us, your constituents, and to the country as a whole. In the absence of any plan of any sort from the Leave campaign, this can only be achieved by a clear statement from Parliament that it rejects the result of a fatally flawed referendum, and affirms that the UK will remain in the EU.

We are already suffering serious economic damage from the referendum result - job losses, cancelled investment, value of people's savings and pensions slashed by the falling pound, and miscellaneous other effects, e.g. the loss of £7bn+ from the taxpayers' holding in RBS, not to mention racist violence against minorities in our country:-

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-eu-referendum-racial-racism-abuse-hate-crime-reported-latest-leave-immigration-a7104191.html

This cannot be allowed to continue. Parliament must act.

The EU referendum result lacks legitimacy for the following reasons:-

1. The Leave campaign deceived people into voting for it by lying. It broke at least four promises in the first 24 hours after the result 

http://disasterhistorian.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/brexitwatch-lies-and-broken-promises-so.html

And large numbers of pro-Leave voters now wish they had voted Remain.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-eu-referendum-bregret-leave-petition-second-remain-latest-will-we-leave-a7105116.html

2. Even Nigel Farage has admitted that a 52-48 margin of victory would not be sufficiently decisive and would require a second referendum

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nigel-farage-wants-second-referendum-7985017

If we had been voting to have a one day strike instead of to leave Europe, the proposition would have been rejected as having insufficient support:

'The government has long emphasised that, it does not consider a majority vote valid if it is less than 40% of the eligible electorate, when it is union members voting for a temporary public sector strike. Given that an EU exit is far more important and permanent, how will MPs justify treating the 37.4% of the vote to leave as sufficient, especially when the majority is so small and significantly composed of old people who won’t be affected by the outcome?'
Professor John Veit-Wilson
Newcastle upon Tyne

The Brexiters plainly have no plan, but I am sure that you do. I look forward to hearing what it is.'

Brexitwatch: Letter to David Cameron

I sent this letter to David Cameron via the No 10 Downing Street website - https://email.number10.gov.uk/

The site allows you 1,000 characters. If we want to keep Europe in the EU, it is important that as many people as possible write to him. Feel free to adapt/improve/be inspired by/ignore what is written below, but do write:

Mr Cameron, you have so far always put the interests of the Conservative Party before those of your country. If you do not want to be remembered as the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had, that needs to change now. In order to stop the dreadful damage that is already happening to our economy, you need to put a motion before Parliament, saying that the UK will be remaining a member of the EU. MPs are representatives, not delegates. They are not bound by a referendum result that was won by systematic lying from the Leave campaign. If we had been seeking approval to hold a one-day strike, the government would have refused on the grounds that the approval of less than 40% of the electorate was insufficient. And yet you consider it is enough to take us out of the EU, and inflict all manner of unnecessary horrors on us! Even Nigel Farage has admitted that a 52-48 margin is too narrow to be considered decisive. At the v least, we deserve a 2nd referendum - this time a fair one.

Brexitwatch: the blog that foresaw the future.

So I was proved right, though I would have preferred to be proved wrong. 

This is what I posted on 10 June 2015

WEDNESDAY, 10 JUNE 2015

David Cameron and Europe - at last the truth

Like me you probably thought you were seeing things a couple of days ago when David Cameron suddenly seemed to develop a backbone as he declared that anti-European ministers would have to, er . . . follow government policy or resign. Indeed we were seeing things, and normal service was resumed within a couple of hours as Dave caved in to the anti-European fanatics.

I did warn that if the Tories won the General Election in 2015, Britain would leave Europe. It is not what Cameron wants. He and George Osborne understand it would be a disaster, even if the rest of their party do not, but having the courage to say so is, of course, quite another matter.

It’s clear that Cameron’s plan is to follow Harold Wilson’s recipe from 1975. Lace your speeches with plenty of anti-European rhetoric and agree to a referendum to placate the extremists in your party. Carry on a ‘renegotiation’ with your European partners. Gain a couple of cosmetic changes that you sell as major concessions. Win the referendum to stay in Europe by a comfortable majority.

I covered the 1975 referendum, and here is why Cameron will fail:-

1. Harold Wilson was one of the sharpest political operators Britain has ever seen. Cameron is simply not in his class.

2. The newspapers in Wilson’s time covered Europe reasonably fairly. Now the papers with the biggest circulations spew out an unremitting stream of anti-European bile.

Brexit looms. Will the last businessman to leave the country please turn out the lights.

Gaza - normal lack of service resumed

After Israel carpet-bombed Gaza last year, destroying 17,000 Palestinian homes, international donors promised $3.5 billion to rebuild it. While the Palestinians waited, their babies died of hypothermia in the plywood huts they had been reduced to living in.

A year on, the number of houses that have been rebuilt is.....0. Israel constantly obstructs the importation of the materials that are needed, in spite of vague promises that its blockade would be lifted.

Most of the help donors promised has not been delivered, but then if you know that anything you do rebuild will soon be destroyed again by the Israelis, you might start asking what is the point?

Power cuts last up to 16 hours a day. Unemployment is 43 per cent. As for the relief effort, the Palestinians say: 'People come to talk to us every month. They talk, and they leave, and nothing ever changes.'

There are now signs that ISIS is feeding on the despair, and could be making Gaza its next target. With their blind support for Israel, Western leaders like David Cameron are laying out the welcome mat.

As for Israel, it calls its periodic attacks on Gaza 'mowing the lawn', and another one is expected soon. As one Israeli newspaper put it: 'Israel is heading to the next violent eruption with the Palestinians as though it is some sort of natural disaster that can't be avoided.'

See also my posts of July 22 and 28, 2014.

David Cameron and Europe - at last the truth

Like me you probably thought you were seeing things a couple of days ago when David Cameron suddenly seemed to develop a backbone as he declared that anti-European ministers would have to, er . . . follow government policy or resign. Indeed we were seeing things, and normal service was resumed within a couple of hours as Dave caved in to the anti-European fanatics.

I did warn that if the Tories won the General Election in 2015, Britain would leave Europe. It is not what Cameron wants. He and George Osborne understand it would be a disaster, even if the rest of their party do not, but having the courage to say so is, of course, quite another matter.

It’s clear that Cameron’s plan is to follow Harold Wilson’s recipe from 1975. Lace your speeches with plenty of anti-European rhetoric and agree to a referendum to placate the extremists in your party. Carry on a ‘renegotiation’ with your European partners. Gain a couple of cosmetic changes that you sell as major concessions. Win the referendum to stay in Europe by a comfortable majority.

I covered the 1975 referendum, and here is why Cameron will fail:-

1. Harold Wilson was one of the sharpest political operators Britain has ever seen. Cameron is simply not in his class.

2. The newspapers in Wilson’s time covered Europe reasonably fairly. Now the papers with the biggest circulations spew out an unremitting stream of anti-European bile.

Brexit looms. Will the last businessman to leave the country please turn out the lights.

Lockerbie - let's have the right inquiry

I worry more and more about the BBC’s supposed flagship 10 o’ clock Television News. Last week it consumed more than half the programme in an extraordinarily repetitive, virtually information-free report on the hunt for Raoul Moat.

Last night it devoted seven minutes to American outrage over the release eleven months ago of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. You will remember that al-Megrahi was freed from his Scottish prison on compassionate grounds, after being diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

Two BBC reporters told us how cross the Americans were that al-Megrahi had had the temerity to not die, that the new UK government now considered the release a “mistake”, how the Americans were accusing their favourite villain, BP, of having engineered the release etc, etc. Neither reporter seemed aware that there are very serious doubts about al-Megrahi’s guilt, shared by the families of some of the UK victims. (These doubts appear not to be much thought about in America where questioning the guilt of Arabs is not really part of the culture.)

Jim Swire, whose daughter was killed in the attack, has condemned the US’s “mass hysteria” and its cynical attempt to use al-Megrahi as another means of taking “revenge” on BP. The Scottish government are standing firm and have coolly pointed out that the prisoner was released under due process of Scots law, after taking into account the testimony of independent medical experts.

The Americans want an inquiry into al-Megrahi’s release, but Scottish MSP Christine Grahame has a better idea. Why doesn’t the US stop blocking a full independent inquiry into who really bombed Flight 103? Then we might finally get the truth. The new British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is in Washington next week. He has promised to be less subservient to the Americans than Labour were. The next few days may reveal whether he will keep his word.
(See also my blogs of 27 July, 16 and 22 Aug, and 19 Sept, 2009)

Iraq - a deafening silence

Iraq has mainly been noticeable for its absence in the UK election campaign. In the leaders’ second debate last week, supposedly concentrating on international affairs, there was one innocuous question about the Pope that let everyone agree twice, but none concerning Britain’s biggest foreign policy disaster in at least half a century, though Nick Clegg made it clear that, unlike Gordon Brown’s Labour party and David Cameron’s Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats had always opposed the war.

From Iraq itself the very next day came a reminder of the continuing murderous chaos that the US-UK invasion has unleashed. A wave of bombings killed at least 58 people, most of them blown up near Shia mosques during Friday prayers.

The authorities blamed al-Qaeda. Yes, that is the same al-Qaeda that had been a nonentity in the country before the invasion. They also said they expected more attacks.

More than six weeks after Iraq’s own elections, there are still no officially certified results. Last year more than 4,640 Iraqi civilians met violent deaths. (See also my blogs of July 30, Sept 29, Dec 14, 2009 and Jan 28, 2010.)