Prime Minister Theresa May, after making so many concessions to the EU, has revealed a “steely determination” to face down Brexit supporters, warning the country to accept her ultra-soft Brexit or risk “no Brexit at all”.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday — which backed a Remain vote in the 2016 referendum, unlike its weekday counterpart — the Prime Minister says her “message to the country this weekend is simple: we need to keep our eyes on the prize. If we don’t, we risk ending up with no Brexit at all.”
The “prize” she refers to is her Brexit vision, which she claims “restores our national sovereignty, so that it is our Government that decides who comes into our country, our Parliaments that make our laws and our courts that enforce them.”
But critics say her deal merely rebadges impositions such as the Free Movement regime, the overriding superiority of EU law, and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice — as a “labour mobility package”, a “common rulebook”, and a system under which the EU court does not hand down decision to Britain directly, but the British courts enforce their case law on its behalf.
Backbench star Jacob Rees-Mogg, who leads the Brexit-supporting European Research Group (ERG) in Parliament, has said he now fears the Prime Minister “is a Remainer who has Remained a Remainer”, and does not believe that her plan will or even can deliver a real Brexit, because she does not believe in it.
“Was soft Brexit planned all along?” he asked aloud on social media.
Steve Baker MP, who resigned from the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) shortly after Secretary of State David Davis when the plan was unveiled, certainly suggests so.
The Wycombe MP revealed that DExEU, set up in the wake of the Leave vote in June 2016, had been working on a white paper entirely different to the one the Prime Minister had sprung on ministers at Chequers, and that Brexiteers appeared to have been victims of “a year’s worth of cloak and dagger to land us into the Chequers position,” with the Cabinet-level department having served as a kind of “Potemkin structure” to give the impression that the Prime Minister was working on a real Brexit, while her EU unit at the Cabinet Office was undermining them behind the scenes.
“An establishment elite who never accepted the fundamental right of the public to choose democratically their institutions are working towards overturning them,” he complained.
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