Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has branded British politicians “cowards” for failing to push their voters into a re-run of the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.
Speaking at the Climate Change Leadership summit in Porto, Portugal, the 70-year-old Democrat took aim at the (in)famous “Breaking Point” poster unveiled by Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage at the height of the campaign, showing a huge column of illegal migrants pouring through the continent’s borders in late 2015.
“One of the most powerful posters in the ‘Brexit’ campaign was one that showed an endless line of refugees saying, ‘The EU failed’,” Gore told his hosts — although, in fact, the legend read “The EU has failed us all”.
“I do not want to get into the issue, but as a politician I will say that I think politicians of the United Kingdom are cowards for not allowing a second referendum,” he declared, suggesting that many migrants — many of whom turned out to be violent criminals or even radical Islamic terrorists — are fleeing climate change.
The multi-millionaire did not press the issue, of Brexit, however, explaining: “I have enough problems in my country, with the crazy Trump.”
Brussels and its supporters have form on subverting referendums which do not go in their favour, pushing through re-runs of Denmark’s referendum on the Maastricht Treaty which transformed the European Community into the European Union in 1992, and Ireland’s referendum on the Nice Treaty increased the bloc’s powers over its member-states in 2001.
Referendums rejecting the proposed European Constitution in the Netherlands and France were worked around by repackaging it as the so-called Reform Treaty, or Lisbon Treaty, amending the previous Maastricht Treaty and Treaty of Rome — and not putting it to the public in either country this time.
Lisbon was subject to a referendum in Ireland, where the constitution required a public vote to authorise any transfer of sovereignty to outside forces, and was rejected by the Irish people — but, as with Nice, they were simply made to vote again.
Most recently, a Dutch referendum rejecting the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and a Greek referendum against punishing bailout measures agreed by a previous agreement were simply ignored.
The former Bill Clinton running mate’s intervention will buoy the spirits for EU loyalists in the British parliament who are, in fact, pushing for the people to be made to vote again on the EU as he desires.
Both the left-wing Labour opposition and the “Independent Group” of centrist-globalists who have broken away from Labour and the governing Conservative Party have thrown their weight behind a second referendum — despite having stood on election manifestos promising to deliver Brexit in 2017 — along with the Liberal Democrats.