Prime Minister Boris Johnson has insisted his “oven-ready” deal with the European Union is “great” and “able to deliver all the advantages of leaving the EU” — if the public gives him a working majority in the December snap election.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, Johnson warned in a Telegraph article, would “hold back business, and they would hold back investment – and worst of all, they would hold back Brexit”.
The 70-year-old socialist, he said, was offering the country a “nightmare programme in which he would seek to renegotiate the deal in some unspecified way, and would then put that deal to the people in ANOTHER toxic and tedious referendum” — prolonging uncertainty for businesses and investors.
“With a new parliament and a sensible majority government, we can get [my] deal through a new Parliament in days,” Johnson insisted.
That deal, he said, was not just “oven ready”, but “a great deal”, one “able to deliver all the advantages of leaving the EU: making our own laws, controlling our own borders, taking back our money, and exercising all kinds of new freedoms”.
This is not quite true, however, insofar as the treaty the prime minister has negotiated with the EU does not finalise the future relationship between Britain and the EU — it merely allows for Brexit to take place in the legal sense and enter a so-called “transition” or “implementation” period lasting until at least the end of December 2020 in which negotiations will continue.
During the “transition”, Britain would remain an EU member-state in all but name, in the sense that it would be subject to EU law, EU judges, and EU migration rules throughout.
Britain would have to hand over the estimated £39 billion “divorce bill” the EU has demanded and lose its representation in the EU Commission, Council, and Parliament, however.
Nevertheless, Johnson pressed the case that “a vote for any other minor party is effectively a vote for Corbyn, and his catastrophic political and economic programme” — a thinly-veiled attack on Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which opposes his deal — and that voters would be best served by his “sensible and moderate One Nation Conservative government, that has already achieved record employment, and [has] the most ambitious environmental programme of any country on earth”.
“Let’s go with this government, get Brexit done, and unleash the potential of Britain in 2020, not consign it to a year of two referendums,” he concluded — the second of those referendums being another on Scotland’s position within the United Kingdom, which Jeremy Corbyn has signalled he could support as part of what Johnson described as a “shady deal” with the left-wing Scottish National Party (SNP).
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