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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Twisting on 17: the hardline Leavers’ great gamble
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Twisting on 17: the hardline Leavers’ great gamble
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The day after the referendum, the Remainers simply re-defined the question not as Leave/Remain, but demanded Soft Brexit - Brexit In Name Only. This was not an acceptance of the referendum result - it was an indulgence to the voters granted by a political class who could not accept that they had lost and simply intended to make losing look as close as possible to winning.
The last two years have simply proven what Leavers said all along. There is no middle ground with the EU. No matter what has been proposed, either in Camerons re-negotiation or in Brexit talks, they are not interested in a middle ground. They are interested in building an empire. There is no Soft Brexit. The Remainers have no plan - everything they suggested has been rejected by the EU. They spend their time whining at the ERG but they are defending an imaginary deal. So now the Remainers real game is coming to the fore - if we can't have Brexit In Name Only, we just won't allow Brexit at all.
The Leavers have always been consistent about what they want from the exit discussions. It is May, trying to placate the Remainers, who has tied herself up in knots trying to cherry pick parts of the existing arrangements (preferably all of them, as long as nobody notices). THAT is why the negotiations have been a failure. The NI backstop was never even raised before November 2017 - if the UK Government had immediately asked for a CETA+ deal it would have been done by now. It was the evidence of the UK Governments weakness that opened the door for Barnier and Varadkar to try their luck. May's appeasement has allowed their position to become entrenched and it is probable that as a result there will be no deal.
The problem is not that Leavers won't compromise. We had a referendum because EU membership was a binary question and 45 years of history proved that fudging it did not satisfy the voters. The outcome of a referendum cannot be that the losers dictate terms to the winners. Judging from this post at least, the elite establishment have learned nothing from the events of the past three years.