Kiss of Death: Tony Blair Gives Anti-Brexit Rebel MPs, Second Referendum Stamp of Approval

Iraq war architect and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has egged on supporters of a second referendum, including rebels that have walked away from his own party in protest against Jeremy Corbyn’s lukewarm approach to Brexit.

Speaking Sunday, the controversial former Prime Minister turned multi-millionaire speaker and sometimes ‘peace envoy’ again shared his view that Brexit should be opposed and praised the “courageous” members of the new Independent Group for taking a stand against the democratic will of the British people.

The Independent Group formed last week after 11 centrist, globalist members of Parliament from both Labour and the Conservatives walked away from their parties in protest against Brexit and started campaigning openly to force the British people to go to the polls again — possibly in the hope they would reverse their historic 2016 decision to leave the European Union.

While Mr Blair insisted he would be sticking with Labour rather than moving to the new party, he said of their decision while speaking on the BBC Andrew Marr Show: “I’ve got a great deal of sympathy with what they’re doing and what they’re saying… I think they’re courageous in having done it.”

Noting the divisions in the highest levels of British politics over Brexit, he said: “You are going to have a situation in which the two main parties break up.”

Although a second referendum is Blair’s ambition, he admitted during the interview that British politics wasn’t yet ready to accept that, and would have to be nudged towards it. In his own words of another referendum to override the first — “we get to that at a later stage.”

In comments that left BBC interviewer Andrew Marr remarking that Mr Blair sounded like a spokesman for the Tory European Research Group (ERG) for his language, he said of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, which he opposes: “…so the risk for Britain is that we leave, not knowing what the future with Europe is, paying the money up front, become supplicants to Europe, have no negotiating leverage, and then of course it is too late to do something about it.”

It is likely it was the use of the term ‘supplicant’ which triggered the questioning from Marr. Top Brexiteers including Lord Lawson and David Davis have frequently used the word, and the term has been in such frequent use among right-wing critics of both Theresa May’s plan and the European Union, the Prime Minister was forced in 2016 to insist the UK would not become a supplicant to the European Union.

On bringing a second referendum, Blair said that once Britain’s parliament was faced with a choice, probably this month and realises that “a hard Brexit is painful, and a soft Brexit is pointless”, then another vote would suddenly be on the cards.

Blair has been a persistent voice speaking against Brexit since the run-up to 2016 vote, when he campaigned for Britain to vote to stay. Breitbart London reported in 2018 when he made his position perfectly clear, vowing: “I am 100 percent opposed to Brexit… Up to the very end I am going to do everything I can to stop it.”