Tory europhile Dominic Grieve has called for a “polite rebellion” if Theresa May presses on with Brexit, suggesting a national unity government should deliver a second EU referendum.
The former Attorney-General, who serves as the ad hoc leader of a group of EU loyalist rebels which has already voted against the Government to defeat aspects of the legislation to deliver Brexit in Parliament, declared that “the time has come for a polite rebellion by pragmatic Conservatives” in a Sunday Telegraph article.
The Beaconsfield MP said he hoped that the Prime Minister would “come to see the benefit” of holding a so-called ‘People’s Vote’– or ‘Losers’ Vote’, according to Brexit supporters — on Brexit, but warned that “if she insists on pressing on, I for one cannot allow short-term party considerations to override the national interest”.
Unlike many EU loyalists, who claim that the purpose of a ‘People’s Vote’ would be merely to give the public a say on the final terms of Britain’s exit from the European Union, Grieve cheerfully admits that he “would of course argue that we need to change our national position”.
“We should choose to return to our union with twenty-seven like-minded European partners, whose values we share from centuries of interconnection and whose futures are intimately bound up with our own,” he adds, for the avoidance of doubt.
The idea of a cross-party ‘national unity’ government to thwart the public’s 2016 vote to Leave the European Union has previously been floated by fellow Tory europhile Anna Soubry, who in July 2018 told the BBC: “I personally would abandon the Labour frontbench and I would reach beyond it, and I would encompass Plaid Cymru, the SNP and other sensible, pragmatic people who believe in putting this country’s interests first and foremost.”
Soubry’s statement raised eyebrows, as the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru are, in fact, left-wing separatist parties which wish to break Scotland and Wales off from the United Kingdom as nominally independent EU member-states, and can therefore hardly be said to “believe in putting [the] country’s interests first”.
Her constituency of Broxtowe voted Leave in the 2016 referendum, and she is now complaining that local party members wish to deselect her for another candidate.
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