Irish debacle ? Nah.


Mrs May needs to deliver a Hard  Brexit for the likes of Gove and Johnson and their non-doms paymasters and a Soft Brexit for the majority of people who voted Brexit for all sorts of reasons, or did not vote Brexit at all; these latter two together are without the shadow of any doubt the very vast majority. Only a few fanatics want a Hard Brexit or a No Deal. Vociferous as they are, most of the rest of us doubt they have the interest of the country, let alone the majority of its citizens at heart however much they tell us deregulation and turning the UK into market-first-people-last-US is the way to go. 

As the British reasons for leaving the EU are as many as the targeted campaigns led by people as different as Hannan, Banks, Farage, and anti-Tory or anti-establishment media campaigns, there is no way she can deliver anything that will please a majority of people. Rock, Hard Place and she knows it. And that’s before we take the DUP into account, or the usual suspect newspapers now turning on May to try and get silver spoon spoken Rees-Mogg in her place as she fails to deliver the Hard-Brexit-Stuff-the-EU they so cherish. 

Politics has become such a daily detailed saga that she has to play a different game to any other Prime Minister before her. Neither Thatcher nor Blair had the hourly scrutiny of a social media obsessed with finding news where there are none yet. Had Blair had the EU scrutiny she has, we would not have had so many immigrants when Eastern Europe got in and the EU put in place rules to avoid the problems we now face, too many immigrants too quickly. But Blair and Mervyn King thought it would benefit the economy of the UK, which it did at the time. EU countries looked on in envy at the UK’s GDP. They now look at the UK happy to not be where we are. 

So let’s wonder why we got a leak that there was an agreement on Northern Ireland before the end of the meeting with the EU, ie before the deal was signed and dual announcement in Brussels was made, when the Prime Minister knew full well that the DUP would block it? 

The Conservatives have backed themselves in a place where their biggest fear is not just Corbyn, though he is the poster boy, but McDonnell. The main reason Labour are going up in the polls is not only because there are more voters looking at the Left, but because there are more people realising they were sold something that cannot be bought: being out of the EU with most of the benefits of being in the EU. And it was Conservatives and Ukip that sold them that. Ukip has all but disappeared, so Conservatives’ fault it is. They’re not so much pro-Labour as anti-Tory who clearly promised what cannot be delivered. When nobody can agree what ‘most of the benefits’ are, it therefore cannot be delivered. When priorities and reasons for leaving were so wide and different, delivering cannot be achieved without alienating a big swathe of the population. 

What the British Prime Minister has done all along is putting the likes of Johnson and Davies in places where they can prove how good, or bad, they are. They wanted this Brexit, now they can do the work to deliver it. She, as is her job, will be the mouthpiece that delivers what they give her. She will deliver the will of the people, so long as it is given to her in a package that is achievable. She knows, as any politician does, that she will be blamed for whatever goes wrong. 

To my mind, she is paving the way to prove to the British people that leaving the EU now, when the UK had a deal from Cameron that would have let this country move forward within the EU without being a full part of a federal state, especially on Monetary Union and Financial bail outs on the Eurozone – big bone of contention that many believed he had not really achieved – is not in the interest of the UK. She will go down in flames come what may, but contrary to what ‘Tory Haters’ keep saying, I believe she is playing political chess by doing her best with the worst cards ever dealt a British Prime Minister in modern history. 

We all know now, despite what Hannan, Johnson or Farage told us pre-referendum that the UK cannot have the same access to the Single Market (ie tariff free) without Freedom of Movement. “They need us more than we need them” is proving that the British politicians and businessmen, who assumed they understood how the Continentals tick, got it wrong. They are not a nation of shopkeepers, the Union has become more important to them than the markets, however important the British market and markets in general are to the Union. 

What I believe we are seeing, is a Prime Minister incapable of delivering a deal, not because she is incapable, but because what is being asked of her is not achievable if it is to be in the interest of the country. It is not even in the interest of the Conservative Party as I do not believe that the majority of Conservative voters (a majority of whom are not Conservative Party members) agree with the minority of Hard Line Conservatives that want to take the UK out of the EU at any cost. 

What the Prime Minister is doing is ousting the Hard Liners so the population can see for themselves what they said then and what they say now. Let us see the reality of Brexit unfold.  

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