For many of us Brexiteers, Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan is not good enough. Whilst many of us expected the withdrawal process and separating Britain from EU institutions to be difficult and that there may have had to be compromises with the EU and transitional arrangements, Mrs May’s plan is shockingly bad. It is neither the full Brexit that the majority voted for and is not the cleaving back to the EU that the Remainers want. It is the policy equivalent of the old joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
What Mrs May is putting on the table gives too much to the EU and has potential to cause trouble in the future. It doesn’t satisfy Brexiteers and gives concessions to the EU that it didn’t need to give bearing in mind Britain’s relatively strong financial position among the EU nations . The United Kingdom is the second or third (depending how it is measured) nation with regards Gross Domestic Product after Germany. The main casualty from a UK withdrawal from the EU would be Germany and France who would then have to shell out much more from their economies to prop up the European Union than they would have had to do had Britain remained in the EU.
Many of us completely understand that exiting the EU would involve a bit of horsetrading and deal making and this would need to have been undertaken by skilled and knowledgable negotiators on the UK side led by a Prime Minister who could give those negotiators the backing they required. Unfortunately Theresa May has not been the leader that Britain needed at this time. Her time in the office of Prime Minister has been a mirror image of her time at the Home Office, which was one of incompetence, appeasement of vested interests and personal arse covering. I had hoped that Theresa May could have put her own Remain sympathies to one side and got behind the Brexit that the majority voted for, but I and others have been disappointed on that front.
The question now is can Theresa May survive as Prime Minister? She has been incredibly divisive in the Tory party and has made some awful mistakes, such as calling an election when she really did not need to and her handling of the Brexit issue, something that has not inspired confidence. She has nailed her colours to the mast on her handling of Brexit and this is looking like it is an incredibly bad decision that could go badly for all of us.
Because Mrs May has approached and dealt with Brexit in the manner that she has done she has made a lot of enemies in her own party as well as in the wider country. The Cabinet meeting which was supposed as I saw it put a united front of shared responsibility on the Chequers Brexit Plan was a disaster. The Cabinet meeting was followed by a slew of ministerial resignations which severely weakens Mrs May’s position and her authority. It’s normal for contentious issues to cause a few ministerial casualties when ministers resign on matters of principle, but what we’ve seen today is unusual. Four ministers have resigned today and that is on top of others who have resigned their positions earlier on this year, this is not a good situation for any Prime Minister to have to face but when the Prime Minister appears to lack so much support in her party and in the country, it is verging on disastrous.
It appears that Mrs May’s situation can only get worse, not better especially after the news that various Tory MP’s, including Brexit enthusiast Jacob Rees-Mogg have submitted letters to the chair of the Tory backbench 1922 Committee stating that they have no confidence in the Prime Minister. If the required number of letters of no confidence in Mrs May are received by the Committee then things will get politically interesting very quickly. Mrs May could see the writing on the wall with regards to how she is viewed by her party, especially the Brexiteer part, do the right thing and step down and trigger a leadership election. In this scenario Brexiteers hope that a Brexiteer leader will be voted in who will carry out the will of the electorate in a much more muscular manner than Mrs May has done so far. That in my opinion would be the better option.
I’d rather see someone like Mr Rees-Mogg or even, despite reservations, Boris Johnson as Prime Minister than another Remain leaning figure similar to Mrs May. What worries me is if she decides to bluff it out, try to get her Brexit plan through Parliament, fails at that and fails at any subsequent vote of no confidence in the House of Commons. If that happens and we have an early election (something much more difficult to do under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act of 2011 than it was previously) then we have the problem of May’s Tories being so unpopular over the issue of Europe that the rabid socialists of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn get elected into government. May’s Tories although they are divided, incompetent and all too willing to virtue signal and get onto politically correct bandwagons over issues of transgenderism, would be much more preferable and much less damaging than a Corbyn led government. Corbyn would ramp up the appeasement of dangerous imported ideologies like Islam, promote open borders, would be economically incompetent and damaging and would probably make Britain’s existing problems one thousand times worse. It would be much better to replace Mrs May with a new Tory leader than risk protest votes, dodgy communal votes and the apathy party put Jeremy Corbyn into Number Ten.
Try as I might I really cannot see Theresa May being able to continue in her position as she has lost so much support in her party and her country. I find myself at this point echoing the words of Oliver Cromwell when he addressed the Rump Parliament in 1653 “you have been sat to long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, i say, and let us have done with you. In the name of god, go!.” Theresa May’s position is now untenable, it is time she went and was replaced with someone that both the Tory Party and the British people can have confidence in.
