This afternoon, on the Roberto Perrone show on BBC Three Counties Radio, our Honorary President Godfrey Bloom spoke about the recent parliamentary story covering the Conservative Party’s ‘Brexit Mutineers’.
If you would like to listen to this interview, please click on the audio link below:
The thing is Godfrey Bloom is incorrect on two points. In reality:
(i). Parliament didn’t bind itself to any outcome when it passed the 2015 Act.
(ii). The Cameron government did promise to implement what the public would decide in the referendum, but then Cameron resigned and an entirely new government was formed by Theresa May.
The upshot of those facts is that the referendum result was not binding on either Parliament or the government. Parliament retained its legislative competence in this area completely, while the government that promised to honour the referendum result was quickly dissolved and replaced with a new one.
Not only that, but we have also had a general election this year, so we have both a completely new parliament and a second May government. The pre-election promises to bring about Brexit are not binding, as party political promises are not in any sense contractual and normally have little or no constitutional weight.
I do think Brexit will happen. The question is, and always has been, whether it will be a Real Brexit involving withdrawal from not just the EU but also the Single Market and Customs Union, thus restoring sovereignty.
As for Anna Soubry, she wants us to use language that “brings our country together”, which sounds authoritarian to me. But this woman is not some sinister authoritarian, she just doesn’t comprehend what a real political culture looks like. She’s the consensual, dialectical type at home in the vapid managerial climate that EU membership has spored at Westminster. Her notion of adversarialism – of actual political debate, in other words – is overgrown children exchanging juvenilia and arguing over petty minutiae within pre-agreed parameters. She wants to bring the country together because she does not understand the weight of the issues at stake or the fundamental drift of things.
I don’t want to bring the country together. It wouldn’t be desirable, as it would involve compromising with people who are basically the neo-liberal capitalist flip side of orthodox Marxists, seeing Man as a homo economicus, and who would sell-out Britain for access to cheap green wine, Polish nannies and villas in Tuscany. Those people can’t be compromised with, and ideally, they should consider leaving the country to live somewhere more in keeping with their cosmopolitan ethos: thus allowing us bigoted provincials and country bumpkins to maintain the true cosmopolitanism they value so dearly.
There will be no Brexit.