European Parliament, Brussels, BELGIUM: Delingpole here. I’m on a mission inside the belly of the beast to find out how our European Union friends are taking the latest news on Brexit.
Short answer: they’re in denial.
Brexit is almost certainly going to happen; the chances that parliament will be able to derail it are growing slimmer; and No Deal – unless Prime Minister Theresa May can cobble something together in the form of a new Withdrawal Agreement negotiated with Brussels – is how Britain will leave the EU on March 29.
But here, in the European Parliament, is what chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier had to say:
“This Withdrawal Agreement will not be renegotiated.”
And here is EU president Jean Claude-Juncker (talking about that contentious back stop, which is the main sticking point in negotiations):
“No safety net can be safe if it can be removed at any time.”
In other words nothing has really changed. The EU wasn’t interested in negotiating back when. It still isn’t in negotiating now.
No one who watched the BBC documentary I analysed in my last post would be remotely surprised by this.
The European Union is a force which only moves in one direction. It does not do negotiation.
The EU is not a club which retains its members by keeping them happy and rewarding them with all manner of perks. It’s run much more like a prison, in which the benefits of staying in consist largely of incentives like: “Well if you don’t try to escape, we won’t shoot you…”
Something has to give, though, if Britain is not to “crash out” – as the Euro weenie propaganda would have it – with No Deal.
It’s a question of which side blinks first.
My bet – or rather my hope – is that it won’t be Theresa May.
Yes she’s useless but the one quality she does have is bovine stubbornness. And I think, in this, she has the full support of the British people (who right now are being very poorly represented by their parliament).
As Nigel Farage told the EU parliament when he was finally allowed to get a word in:
“Unelected bureaucrats have been talking down to and humiliating the leader of our nation and the British public don’t like it.”
Yep. She may be a crap prime minister. But she’s our crap prime minister and we have just about enough of these jumped up Brussels technocrats telling us what we can and can’t do.