A half-volley sweetly dispatched to the boundary?
Any Rusters who buy or subscribe to the Daily Torygraph may well have been there before me, but there was an excellent article in yesterday’s (Saturday 19th January) edition by Juliet Samuel on the subject of the current Brexit log-jam in Parliament.
Sadly, I cannot provide here a link to the piece – as I would have wished – because of the Telegraph’s restrictive pay-wall that prevents this. My stance on the subject is that, since I buy the Telegraph (amongst other papers) every day, I don’t see why I should then pay extra just in order to read its offerings online.
As James Bond once nearly said “Once is enough”.
Regular readers will be only too aware that I voted Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum because I repeat the fact practically every time I contribute to this organ. I did so for two reasons:
Firstly, I had never before voted in an election for any party or candidate in my life and felt that I ought to do so at least once, just so that I could say that I had been through the experience.
For me, it was a bit like (say) undertaking a sky dive – the thought of doing one doesn’t frighten me (I’d do one in aid of charity or similar just for the hell of it) but the honest truth is that the idea of jumping out of an aircraft has never particularly appealed to me and I certainly wouldn’t ever bother start doing it for personal pleasure, as thousands do every weekend up and down the country.
It’s a bit like fishing. That has never remotely interested me either.
Secondly, of course, I voted Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum because Nicola Sturgeon (the SNP leader) had promised in advance that – if the UK voted to leave – she would go for another Scottish Independence Referendum, something that I was and remain heartily in favour of … simply because it would be a wonderfully simple way of ridding the UK of the dragging anchor of the Scottish nation which holds us back from regaining our former glory and position in the world.
But back to my topic of the day.
In her opinion piece yesterday Juliet Samuel brilliantly skewered the fundamental hypocrisy of MPs over Brexit.
She pointed out that – for example – Ben Bradshaw has spent plenty of time since the 2016 EU Referendum demanding that the Commons should have the right to vote upon the triggering of Article 50, which (he said) the Government was proposing to deny them.
Then the Government granted said right, Bradshaw duly voted to trigger Article 50. The Government has since also granted the Commons the right to vote on Brexit matters several more times. There is even talk now of “Parliament taking control of the entire Brexit proves”.
And what is Bradshaw’s latest position? He now wants to “give the decision back to the people” via a Second Referendum.
Ms Samuel mentions the fact that several MPs are saying that Mrs May’s Deal is deficient because of the absence of “legally binding guarantees” and then points out the irony that, of course, the essence of an MP’s job is to create legislation (including legal guarantees), not import them from elsewhere.
The theme of her piece is that – on the Remoaner side of the argument – the very people who are now thumping the Commons table proclaiming the rights of MPs to determine the course of international dealings and decide what laws the Government can and cannot pass are the very self-same people who simultaneously appear to be perfectly happy to let the EU bureaucracy continue to impose more and more laws upon the UK that we will just have to accept and in any event can do little or nothing much to fend off or veto.
I just thought it was a rather well-argued essay.