Simon Jenkins, the Guardian columnist, has openly called for a U-turn on Brexit. This follows the devastating news that the EU plans to impose a 50% tariff on steel imports, affecting nearly 80% of UK steel exports and threatening the entire industry in this country. Jenkins says rightly that the UK steel industry "will be butchered" thanks to Brexit. “The public is clearly ready to see Brexit reversed," he declares, adding that there is an “urgent need” for “some coalition of politicians to take the lead and state baldly that Brexit was an error.” I think we can all echo that. His op-ed is compelling and well-argued.
Mr Jenkins says that when he meets politicians who championed Brexit nowadays, he asks them one simple question: Do you still think you were right? He says a "few fools mutter, 'Yes, on balance' and 'In the long term, perhaps.' The honest ones shrug and look uncomfortable."
What he doesn't say is that he was one of the fools.
Although he claims to have voted to remain, within two weeks of the disastrous vote to leave the EU, he was writing in the same newspaper: Ignore the prophets of doom. Brexit will be good for Britain
There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, eh? But, in July 2016, he said this:
"Now, with blood barely dry on their lips, project fear has mutated into project stupid-idiots. I find it staggering that the remain minority can accuse the Brexit majority of not knowing truth from lies – unlike in all elections? – and could not have meant its vote. It should therefore be asked to vote a second time, and show due respect to its elders and betters."
"Brexit is starting to deliver," he claimed, even as politicians on both sides were still reeling from the enormity of what had happened and fumbling for a consensus that would deliver on the wild promises made during the campaign. A consensus that has never been found, I should say. No, Brexit was not 'delivering' then, it's delivering now in South Wales and Scunthorpe and Sheffield and in a thousand other places, and it will go on 'delivering' as long as we allow it to. The so-called prophets of doom were right, as almost two-thirds of the country now realise.
Jenkins seems to have recognised he was wrong and nine years after the event, suggests that "there cannot be a single industry that would oppose [a return to the EU]. The need is for leadership. This should not be a partisan matter, except insofar as it might isolate Farage’s Reform party – and perhaps be his undoing. It should become a consensus. Of course, it will not be easy. But it will be right."
I can't blame Jenkins for voting to leave because he didn't, but he was basically indifferent to the outcome which is almost as bad: "During the referendum I was persuaded neither by Project Fear nor by Brexit’s projected sunny uplands." He genuinely believed it wouldn't make that much difference.
Today, he calls for the whole ghastly mess to be reversed.
The papers seem to think Starmer and Reeves are all set to blame Brexit and Farage for the expected tax rises next month, rises that will break Labour's pre-election pledge not to increase the burden on working people. This is a good strategy - but it has one fatal flaw. Won't voters say: if that is true, why don't you rejoin?
It's like driving into a wall and blaming the last person who used the car for leaving the steering wheel in the wrong position. It's a silly argument. Starmer should blame Brexit, but pre-empt the question by saying Britain will indeed begin the path to rejoining the EU. It would force Farage to spend the next four years defending the indefensible.
BTW, the 'fools' who still think Brexit was a good idea often claim it wasn't 'done properly' and think Farage is the only man able to do the job, reveal what was perhaps the biggest lie of all. That leaving the EU would be simple and easy. If Vote Leave had said it would be fantastically complex, with just a vanishingly small chance of success and that only one man in the UK was capable of pulling it off, would the result have been the same?
I don't think it would.
Nathan Gill
Farage is desperately trying to distance himself from Nathan Gill, his former colleague and the Welsh leader of Reform UK, who is awaiting sentencing for accepting bribes to make statements in the European Parliament echoing Kremlin propaganda. Gill pleaded guilty after police discovered messages on his mobile phone.
His efforts to show Gill as some low-level nobody have not been successful.
The Byline Times are reporting on what looks like numerous occasions when the two were together with the wife of Oleh Voloshyn, the pro-Russian Ukrainian man who gave him the money (we still don’t know how much). They have pictures of Farage in Gill’s office with Nadia Borodin on the very day Gill gave an interview outside the media wall of the EU Parliament to Borodin, who appears to have been working for Channel 112, a Ukrainian TV outlet associated with the pro-Russian politician and businessman Viktor Medvedchuk.
Borodin was the wife of the man who bribed Gill!
There are pictures of Farage in Gill's office in Strasbourg holding up a T-shirt with the message: Leave and Let Die#Brexit, that were retweeted by Oleh Voroshin himself.
I am still puzzled why it was necessary to offer Gill money to persuade him to do something that Brexit Party leader Farage had (apparently) already done for nothing. What would make more sense (to me) is if Farage had also taken money in the years earlier to repeat Kremlin narratives in the European Parliament, and it was (a) cheaper and (b) less obvious in 2018 to get Gill involved.
I should say there is no evidence that Farage has taken money to say things helpful to Putin, but I don’t know what’s worse: pushing the messages of an adversary for nothing or doing it for money.
