Listening to the Withdrawal Agreement debate yesterday a couple of contributions by Brexiteers stood out for me. The first was from Owen Paterson, the former DEFRA Secretary and Eurosceptic who is almost totally blinded by hatred for anything and everything in continental Europe and in particular Brussels. One or two MPs had already mentioned many leave voting constituents were miffed by people saying they didn't know what they were voting for.
If these leavers are now unhappy I am very surprised, since this is exactly what leaving the EU was always going to look like - difficult, confusing, divisive, chaotic, all-consuming, protracted, uncertain and frustrating. In fact things are unfolding exactly as remainers said they would.
Paterson seemed to argue that the voters gave Brexiteers carte blanche to deliver whatever sort of Brexit he and the Tory party think is right. He suggested voters gave the instruction to leave and left everything else up to the government. This is a bizarre argument for me. It really means membership of the EU is worse than any other status - bar none, a bit like North Korea or even worse than that.
These are the exact words he used when speaking in the House (HERE) at 4:07 pm:
"We then had the referendum, and the people decided overwhelmingly to leave—17.4 million people in the biggest vote in British history and the biggest majority on any one subject. Everyone then said, “What does leave mean?” and the Conservative party helpfully interpreted leave to mean leaving the single market, the customs union and the remit of the European Court of Justice. Sadly, however, what we have come up with here does not deliver that. The withdrawal agreement is a betrayal of what the people voted for".
So, the Conservative party 'helpfully interpreted' the leave vote to mean a hard Brexit. This is how it works. You ask someone to vote in a vague, airy-fairy way and afterwards you give them more details about what it was they voted for and expect everyone to agree with you. This is the very reason why parliament voted the deal down so decisively yesterday. We've now learned it wasn't just leave voters who didn't know what they voted for, Paterson didn't either.
Crispin Blunt (speaking at 5:37), in trying to convince the House that all would be well if we exit without a deal in March, used an anonymous letter from a civil servant in the pages of The Telegraph as evidence everything is tickety-boo. Blunt 're-assured' the nation that everything is under control:
"I am obliged to the anonymous civil servant who concluded his piece in The Telegraph on 28 December as follows:
“An enormous effort by thousands of hardworking civil servants has been made to ensure that if we leave the EU without a deal, ‘crashing out’ over a ‘cliff-edge’ is simply not going to be an option, and it is purely a political decision not to make this clear to the public and nervous backbench MPs. But if the Government was frank with Parliament and the country what justification would be left for its disastrous Withdrawal Agreement? What would Remainers do without a Project Fear? They would need to think up convincing positive arguments for staying in the EU, something that has so far proved beyond them.”
So this is how to convince people. Write anonymously to The Telegraph and if your letter is published it becomes like a peer reviewed paper in the scientific journal Nature or an entry in Encyclopaedia Brittanica. I, for example, am just putting the finished touches to one which will prove beyond doubt that the world is flat. No doubt President Trump is also working on several that will show conclusively he didn't have any help from Putin in winning the 2016 election.
Perhaps Mr Blunt wrote the letter himself? We should be told I think. But even if (a) the letter was genuine and (b) the civil servant knew what the score was across the entire civil service Blunt doesn't tell us what private industry would do. Is he just as confident that car production and farming will continue as it is now?
He didn't say, and nobody asked him.
