Jacob Rees-Mogg, the star backbencher who has become the de facto leader of the Brexit-supporting wing of the Tory Party in the House of Commons, has warned that Remainer MPs seeking to impose their will on Britain’s EU negotiations are not asserting Parliamentary sovereignty, but plotting to keep the country in a state of “vassalage”.
The Somerset MP’s intervention comes as Theresa May has made a series of concessions to EU loyalists on the EU Withdrawal Bill, allowing Parliament to intervene in the Brexit negotiations in a move heralded as a “significant climbdown” by Labour’s Chuka Umunna, who works for the anti-Brexit ‘Best for Britain’ group bankrolled by billionaire globalist George Soros.
Rees-Mogg dismissed the idea that negotiations could be “managed by resolutions of the Lords or the Commons” in full public view, as the parliamentarians who make up the so-called ‘Remain Resistance’ suggest, and warned that their “real aim” is to either “do a pre-packaged deal with the European Union or to try to stop the Article 50 process” altogether.
He also cautioned that, while the legal situation is unclear, it is just possible that Article 50 — the section of the Lisbon Treaty activated by Theresa May some months following the Brexit referendum, in order to set in train what was supposed to be a two-year departure — could be reversed.
“Legal opinion differs so it is possible that an instruction from the Commons to the Government to stop it unilaterally could keep us in the European Union,” he warned.
“It is also possible to extend our membership with the unanimous agreement of the other 27 member-states.”
The changes to the EU Withdrawal Bill which Theresa May has accepted were crafted by the Viscount Hailsham, in the House of Lords, and former attorney-general Dominic Grieve, in the House of Commons.
The Prime Minister has sought to reassure Brexit supporters that the concessions do not amount to handing the Remainer-dominated Parliament an effective veto over the Brexit deal — or Brexit itself. But Rees-Mogg warns colleagues that Hailsham and Grieve, Tory ‘centrists’ with legal backgrounds, are wily customers, with “a deep attachment to the European Union”.
“[The wording of the changes] will not be accidental and will have a bigger purpose,” he advises.
Tellingly, former Prime Minister, Iraq War architect, and arch-Remainer Tony Blair has been bullish following the recent parliamentary struggle, estimating that the establishment’s chances of sabotaging Brexit have now risen from 25 percent to “about 40 percent”.
Apologists for the continued efforts to derail Brexit — despite the Leave vote in 2016 and an electoral landslide for parties which stood on a platform of delivering a clean Brexit from the EU, its Single Market, and Customs Union in the 2017 snap election — have attempted to justify Parliament’s actions by saying it is merely reasserting Parliamentary sovereignty, as Brexit campaigners desired.
Rees-Mogg dismissed these claims firmly, saying that the Soros-led Best for Britain campaign had “been exposed as a group that wants to stop Brexit and has provided slides showing people how it thinks it could be done”. He added that its aim “is not parliamentary sovereignty or oversight but continued vassalage within the European Union”.
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