Love Farage, or hate him, this is a good speech. His final speech to the EU parliament. The man who started it all.
Three and half years it’s been since the referendum. Three and a half years! When we all thought it would be a fairly quick procedure.
I thought back to my own views about Brexit. I thought I’d been a “squishy Remainer”, not too soft, not too firm, just a bit kind of “Remainery”. That’s been the way I remembered myself being at the outset, less firm that my own family of more staunch Remainers. (Mind you, none of us is British, so all is moot).
But when I went back to early posts on this blog about Brexit, this morning, after watching the actual Brexit, live on TV, (07:00 HKT) I find that I was actually a “squishy Leaver”! [so squishy I didn’t even recall clearly...]. I think I was squishy because I hadn’t looked into it in any detail, assuming, I think, like most people, that it would again be a majority to remain like the last time there’d been a referendum on Europe.
Whatever.... I became a hard Brexiteer over time. Just as all folks tended to become more entrenched in their views. While my family remained Remainers. Many have noted that most Remainers accepted the referendum outcome, even if they weren’t happy with it. It was only the extreme rump — What Rod Liddle calls the Provisional Remainers, after the IRA group, or “provos” — who caused all the trouble, and divisions in the following three years.
I became a hard Brexiteer mainly for two reasons:
a. The referendum. I was powerfully persuaded that we ought to accept the “will of the people”. The issue had only gone to referendum because parliament had been unable to agree on a stance. When you can’t agree in parliament, you can, in rare cases, go to the people to resolve the issue for you. This was done in the referendum. And it was done clearly. The fact that the majority was not larger ought not be surprising: as Rod Liddle says here, [or PDF] the whole weight of government and media opinion was against Leave.
I became a hard Brexiteer mainly for two reasons:
a. The referendum. I was powerfully persuaded that we ought to accept the “will of the people”. The issue had only gone to referendum because parliament had been unable to agree on a stance. When you can’t agree in parliament, you can, in rare cases, go to the people to resolve the issue for you. This was done in the referendum. And it was done clearly. The fact that the majority was not larger ought not be surprising: as Rod Liddle says here, [or PDF] the whole weight of government and media opinion was against Leave.
... the Remain movement used every possible recourse to thwart Brexit. This included, but was not confined to, the House of Lords, the law courts and the undermining of parliamentary protocol. They had on their side the judiciary, the BBC, our academics, the City of London and the CBI, the International Monetary Fund and of course the European Union.And still, and still, the public decided to leave by a clear majority.
As the fights in parliament and outside grew stronger to try to thwart the decision of the people, I -- clearly like many others -- became angry. How dare they!
b. The attitude of the EU to Brexit. There’s a YouTube video of the background machinations of the main folks in charge of Brexit on the EU side, "Brexit behind closed doors". It’s their dismissive and arrogant attitude that got up my nose.
Those are the two main things that made me move further to Brexit, hard version.
There were other things: scaremongering, for example. The extreme Remainers (Rod’s “provos”) told us of disasters that awaited. I looked into some of them. And it was clear that they were exaggerated, unrealistic concerns. I did my own analysis on the “Yellowhammer” document.
And if they respond that the bad the it’s “haven’t happened, yet”, we respond that many of the predictions were supposed to be for disaster immediately after the 2016 referendum. Not one has come true. Not one.
Rod again:
Not a single one of those egregious Project Fear predictions has come true, not one. Inward investment stock in the UK was more in 2018 than in France and Germany combined, at almost £1.5 trillion ($1.95 million) — no. 1 in Europe. The UK’s economic growth is predicted to outperform the entire eurozone, with Germany — only recently sidestepping an official recession — heading towards stagnation. Unemployment is the lowest it has been for 45 years and the unemployment rate just a little more than half of that for the eurozone as a whole. Wages are at last rising. The pound is comparatively buoyant.
