Friday , March 29 2024

If reports are correct, the Brexit deal must be rejected

From this site’s inception, it has been the mission of the Daily Globe to secure a Global Britain. Our first article was entitled The Globe Needs the United Kingdom. Our motto is “British Values with a Global Perspective.” We are also home to the Commonwealth, Realms and CANZUK campaign (“CRCC”) which shares our outlook on a Global Britain as coequal members of a free community of nations. Since 2015 we have campaigned for Brexit and offered numerous articles on the subject. We believe fundamentally in the greatest Britain was and can become as a nation that engages with the world – a nation that brought the world parliamentary democracy, the English language, a global free market economy, and that ended the slave trade and defeated tin pots tyrants from Philip II to Napoleon to Louis XIV to the Kaiser and Hitler and Communism. We believe that the United Kingdom of Great Britain has a great future with exciting proposals such as CANZUK and greater Commonwealth integration. We see Brexit as a chance to strengthen the bonds with old friends and build new bridges with nations not in the Commonwealth. With the EU’s economy rapidly falling behind in comparison to the Commonwealth and the rest of the world too, we see Brexit as an opportunity to create a truly modern, dynamic and global economy that delivers prosperity and opportunity to citizens of the UK, the Commonwealth, the Anglosphere, and beyond.

The Daily Globe is also fundamentally a Unionist site. We have been blessed to share over 100 articles by the brilliant Scottish unionist author Effie Deans and will continue to do so. We have shared a book by John Hartigan where he launched the #BelieveinBritain campaign. We have re-published the book Belfast Child about a boy growing up in Belfast to a Protestant family with a lost Catholic mother. The Daily Globe is committed to a better United Kingdom and has published scores of articles regarding strictly domestic issues. We know that the precious union must be preserved and that a successful nation prospering outside the EU is the best way to defeat the nationalists by presenting a preferable and better option for all.

If the reports are true, then what has been agreed by the British government would not achieve the Brexit we and so many others have been fighting for. You can read the rumoured detail here and here. Basically, the deal can be summarised as: UK as a whole remains in the Customs Union until the UK is allowed to escape by the good graces of the EU (won’t happen) or it wins an arbitration allowing the Customs Union jurisdiction over the UK to end. This clause is seen as a UK “win” but is in fact a humiliation because almost all international treaties allow a unilateral exit clause – Article 50 for instance does. Further concerning is that we do not know when the Customs Union’s (EU) imperial rule over the UK will end. Finally, even after EU rule of the UK ends, Northern Ireland would be bound to certain parts of the Single Market – and there is a possibility if Chequers is agreed to in the subsequent trade negotiations that the UK will be in the Single Market for goods and agri-food products anyway.

It is possible that the media reports are false and that the deal is better than we thought. We should, of course, give the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt as we would anyone. But recent signs are not encouraging – her Chequers proposal is a capitulation that makes UK independent trade policy largely impossible. The EU has made a fool out of her by making her appear so weak on numerous occasions (including mocking her on social media) yet she continues to bow to them. Her style of governance, of over-reliance on Rasputin-like advisers of Olly Robbins and Gavin Barwell (replacing her previous Rasputin-like advisers of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill that helped design the Conservatives 2017 election near-calamity) makes this site believe she is largely unfit to be head of government. All we ask is that she keep to her word of leaving the Single Market, Customs Union, and end the jurisdiction of the ECJ. Her Lancaster House speech will do quite nicely.

If the Prime Minister’s EU deal is as reported then ministers have a responsibility to vote it down. If it passes through cabinet, then those who voted against must resign and fight for Brexit in the House of Commons. The House of Commons then must vote it down. Boris is right when he said yesterday that the deal, as reported, would be the first time in nearly 1,000 years Parliament will not have a say over the laws that govern this country. No Parliament that believes in democracy, whether in respecting the vote to Leave or the right for people to vote for representatives to make laws for their people, could vote for that.

Finally, some people fear that they must support this deal or Brexit will not happen. That is not the case. It is enshrined in law that the UK will be leaving the EU on 29 March 2019. The idea of a second referendum is preposterous for several reasons but chief among them: 1. What would be the question on the ballot paper? No-Deal Brexit or the EU? May’s deal and the EU? and 2. What EU would the people be voting to be a part of? Will it be the arrangement of Britain having its own currency, not being in Schengen and a rebate, or will it be having the Euro, Schengen, no rebate and an EU army? My money is on the latter option.

WTO Brexit was not the ideal situation but it is far preferable to capitation to a foreign power, which now wishes to be an Empire.  If the UK leaves the EU without the Northern Ireland border issue solved, the two can trade with each other through a system of globally standard fair tariffs. The UK does not have to impose any kind of physical border in Northern Ireland (there is already is an international border) and neither does the EU. If a physical border is created, it will be solely the choice of the EU, as no such edifice existed when the UK-ROI border was a mere UK-ROI affair: It is the EU’s own protectionist laws which would require such a ‘Customs Wall’. The EU and UK can implement the “95%” that had already been agreed without the border issue upon Brexit day. From there the UK can face the world and implement exciting new changes like work towards CANZUK, join the TPP and work on a brand new space programme with Commonwealth nations. It can fashion its own tax structure, build its own immigration system and take back control of its territorial waters to invigorate British fishing.

There is an inspiring scene in The Darkest Hour with Gary Oldham, towards the end of the film. The first is when Churchill is seen doubting his determination to refuse to ask for peace with Hitler. He is seen leaving his chauffeured car and takes a ride on the Underground to gauge public opinion. He asks the immortal question: “You, the British People, what is your mood? The response is robust: We will not be bullied into accepting something which is “better than nothing”. I am sure the mood of the British People remains equally robust and determined.

What terrifying punishments is the EU threatening to impose on us that has made May collapse? What has caused the self-avowed follower of the inspirational Joseph Chamberlain to follow the example of the spineless Neville Chamberlain? Are we expected to betray our values, history, freedoms, family across the waters, and Common Law for a paultry thirty pieces of silver? And if that is the case, then the people of Britain must consider: Is this the nation we choose to live in? A nation where economic ease and corporate convenience trumps all else? Can we truly wear poppies and lay wreaths at the Cenotaph on Sunday and then surrender all they fought for, all they gave their all for, without the least struggle or cognitive dissonance?

The great American statesman Ben Franklin said “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” If the British government is so petrified of minor economic tariffs most of the world already trades on then it deserves to be vassals. But the people do not deserve to be vassals. The British people voted for freedom and to face the world. The Globe and CRCC hope that the people’s representatives in Parliament vote down submission.

Signed,

Ted Yarbrough

Editor and Co-Founder of the Daily Globe.

Isaac Anderson

Founder of the Commonwealth, Realms and CANZUK Campaign and Daily Globe contributor.

 

About Ted Yarbrough

Ted is the co-founder and editor of the Daily Globe. He is a long-time blogger on British politics and has written a thesis on Thatcherism.

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2 comments

    • Ted Yarbrough

      Thank you John! & Thank you for your writings as well – which are excellent. They are very popular, especially on Facebook.