Around the world, jaws are dropping at the UK’s convulsions over leaving the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing.... This resembles not so much a divorce as an amputation without anesthetic using blunt knives and a broken saw, with the surgeons throwing punches across the operating table.
This week, the deal struck between Prime Minister Theresa May and the EU over the Brexit terms was thrown out by an enormous majority in the House of Commons.
Although this was the largest prime ministerial defeat in British history, Mrs. May survived a motion of no-confidence the following evening.
This was largely because of two factors: the infighting among Tories about who should replace her, and the fear of precipitating a general election which might bring the far-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to power.
At the core of May’s spectacularly inept EU negotiating strategy lay a fundamental conceptual error. Britannia is bitterly split down the middle between Brexiteers and Remainers, who want to stay in the EU. May wanted to deliver a Brexit deal which would bring both sides together by giving each a little of what it wanted.
But on the issue of sovereign British independence, there can be no compromise. The UK is either out of the EU or it is in. May’s deal would have left the UK under the thumb of the EU over which, as a non-EU member, it would no longer have any influence at all. It was Brexit in name only ‐ or Remain by stealth.
The lesson here for the wider world is that negotiating with the non-negotiable always leads to surrender. Under pressure from the West, Israel has tried to bridge an unbridgeable gulf with rejectionist Arabs. As a result, it has been unable to extricate itself from a perpetual state of war and terrorist attack.
May has survived; but Brexit itself now faces its moment of greatest peril. For a majority of MPs are Remainers, and many if not most are determined to stop Brexit in its tracks.
WESTMINSTER IS currently heaving with plots aimed at reversing the 2016 referendum result ‐ while purporting to honor it.
So MPs are coming up with demands to delay the legal date for the UK’s departure, demands for a second referendum, demands for "compromise" departure terms that are, in effect, forms of Remain.
This is all to break what is widely reported as the parliamentary "deadlock" over the issue. But there’s no deadlock. The legally binding default position is that if no deal with the EU is struck, Britannia will leave on March 29 without a deal.
This is enshrined in an act of parliament passed last year. So the way forward is in fact very clear. The problem is that MPs who passed this act of parliament now want to dump it. They claim that leaving with no deal is out of the question because it would plunge Britannia into chaos and ruin.
Yet instead of helping bring that about, Remainer MPs are spitting in the eye of democracy by seeking to reverse the referendum result, thus setting parliament against the people. Why?
At the core of much Remain thinking lies a profound indifference toward or even contempt for the very idea of a sovereign nation. For people who take pride in their cosmopolitanism and who regard national ties as a form of bigoted atavism, democracy can be endlessly reinvented in their own image.
Such Remainers thus grossly underrated the depth of feeling behind the vote for Brexit because they grossly underrate Britannia itself.