Month: September 2017

By MARCUS STEAD

THE ONGOING sulk-a-thon by a small but vocal minority of Remain supporters who refuse to accept the result of a referendum that took place 15 months ago shows no sign of abating.

Last Saturday, ‘The People’s March for Europe’ consisting of between 10,000-15,000 Remoaners took a route through central London before a rally in Parliament Square.

Organisers claimed that as the march progressed, numbers swelled to 50,000, though police have not verified these figures, and it does strike me as rather odd that passers-by would abandon their shopping or sightseeing to follow a march that ended with speeches by such nonentities as Lib Dem leader ‘Sir’ Vince Cable (who could easily be mistaken for the late comedy actor Ken Campbell) and his almost-entirely forgotten colleague ‘Sir’ Ed Davey.

Going by the pictures, the marchers appeared to consist of the usual suspects – ageing university lecturer types in corduroy jackets and white beards, and the middle class, brainwashed, precious students who attend their lectures. Both these demographics are all too often guilty of a ‘we know what’s best for you’ attitude.

More significantly, later that day, the Last Night of the Proms took place at the Royal Albert Hall. An organisation named ‘EU Flags Proms Team’ spent £4,000 to hand out twice as many EU flags as it did at the same event last year.

A spokesman for the group told The Telegraph: “During the Age of Enlightenment Mozart, Handel and Bach all lived and worked for part of their lives in London.

“Presumably under the Brexit dark ages, they would not be welcome. What an appalling backward step for our country.”

This is a grossly stupid statement and stinks of the sort of cheap opportunism we have become all too accustomed to from the Remoaners. Of course talented musicians from EU countries will be welcome in London post-Brexit. Equally, we will continue to welcome musicians from non-EU countries to the Proms such as Switzerland and Norway.

These anti-Brexit campaigners know full well that the EU and Europe are not the same thing, but it suits their agenda nicely to parody those who wish to leave the EU to be anti-foreigner. One of their main demagogues, James O’Brien, uses his daily three-hour radio show on LBC to routinely and relentlessly smear Leave supporters as racists and xenophobes rather than rational people with legitimate concerns about the lack of democratic accountability in the EU, immigration controls and a wish to form trade deals with growing markets around the world.

The ‘EU Flags Proms Team’ was at least partly successful in turning the Royal Albert Hall into a sea of blue and yellow, on the night of the year when two months of niche Prom concerts barely noticed by the vast majority of the population concludes with half an hour of patriotic singing on prime time BBC One.

There’s no scientific way of telling what the demographic make-up of the Royal Albert Hall was on Saturday evening, but there were a few clues. Firstly, and most obviously, the only non-white faces I spotted all night were those of the performers. The audience, both seated and standing, was overwhelmingly white. Remember, the Royal Albert Hall is located in the heart of what is probably the most racially-diverse city in the world.

Secondly, that hideous high-pitched laugh of the theatre-going intellectual could clearly be heard when the conductor made twee jokes. I can’t prove that there weren’t many bricklayers, bin men, cleaners or market traders in the audience, but it’s a fairly safe bet that most of those present were from the metropolitan professional classes, with a heavy bias towards the public sector, especially the universities sector.

A short walk away at Hyde Park, where the concert was simulcast on big screens, there were few, if any EU flags to be seen among the assembled thousands who had gathered on a chilly September evening to participate in a  patriotic sing-song free of charge.

Shortly before the traditional fare of ‘Rule Brittania’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ came a rendition of ‘Surbaya Johnny’ from Kurt Weill’s unsuccessful, short-lived play ‘Happy End’.

The lyrics to ‘Surabaya Johnny’ were written by the Marxist poet, playwright and theatre director Bertolt Brecht. One of his works was the poem, ‘Die Lösung‘ (The Uprising) about the uprising of 1953 in East Germany. It was written in mid-1953, but it criticised of the government and wasn’t published until 1959 in the West German newspaper, ‘Die Welt‘. It goes:

 

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

 

I’ve heard it said that Marxist training never goes to waste, and the sentiments of Brecht’s poem certainly appeared to mirror the attitude of quite a few Labour MPs.

In the months after the referendum, David Lammy would frequently go off on Twitter rants saying that ‘we’ (by which he meant ‘Parliament’) can block this ‘madness’ (by which he meant the democratically-expressed will of 17.4 million people, a larger number than had voted for any government in any of our lifetimes).

A similar attitude appeared to exist among the EU flag wavers in the Royal Albert Hall with their, ‘never mind democracy, we know what’s best for you’ attitude. While watching the concert, my mind was cast back exactly 363 days to one of the strangest experiences I have had in two decades of political campaigning.

Stephen Doughty, the Labour MP for Cardiff South and Penarth

My local MP, Stephen Doughty (Labour), invited me to a discussion titled, ‘Brexit Implications for Cardiff South and Penarth’. For those of you who do not know the constituency, it is the seat of former Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, and consists former dockland areas housing some of the oldest black and Muslim communities in the UK, pockets of both working and middle class districts, and the town of Penarth, which is broadly considered to be rather well-off and affluent.

I had no idea what format the meeting would take. It was held in a Greek Cypriot community facility in the old docklands, right in the heart of the poorest part of the constituency. Yet of the 12 people present, I was the only one not from Penarth, there were no non-white people present, and I’m fairly certain I was the only one not to be a card-carrying Labour member.

What became abundantly clear early on was that this meeting was going to be 11 against one. Despite there being only two per cent in the referendum vote, and despite the meeting taking place in possibly the most ethnically-diverse community in the UK, I was the only Brexit supporter present. I suspect Doughty was careful with whom he invited to the meeting.

Doughty opened proceedings by saying that the purpose of this meeting was to gauge local opinion so that he could be guided as to how to act in the vote on triggering Article 50, which was still some months away.

The meeting began with about half an hour of general points, after which we were split into two groups for smaller-scale discussions. The ‘other’ group was chaired by Doughty himself, while the group I was a part of was chaired by his researcher, Tom Hoyles.

The overall tone of the entire meeting was, frankly, dreadful. I am not saying that everyone who hails from Penarth is a snob with an unjustified sense of superiority, but there’s certainly a strong element who are. Most of those present fitted into that category. They were generally older, and had strong connections to the universities sector, either as lecturers, researchers or fellow travellers in some way.

I can recall a few specific remarks. One woman talked about how it was ‘vital’ that the UK stayed in the Single Market. I calmly asked her to tell us what the Single Market actually was. She could not do so.

I helped her out by stating that the ‘Single Market’ actually has no specific legal meaning. It really means “single regulatory regime”. Membership of the Single Market doesn’t mean the right to buy and sell in the EU (pretty much the entire world can do that); it means accepting EU jurisdiction over your domestic technical standards.

She responded by looking down her nose at me and asking, “And how do you know?” (For what it’s worth, I have a 2:1 degree in Politics and Communication Studies from the University of Liverpool, I am a professional journalist and, aged 33, I have two decades of political campaigning behind me).

This was followed by people expressing concerns that their son Tarquin won’t get his research grant into the impact of climate change on soil in West Rutland (or something like that). I responded by pointing out that the UK is a net contributor to the EU, no matter which set of figures you choose to believe, so the UK government could continue to fund all these projects and still have money left over.

Whether funding all these grants is a worthwhile use of public money is another question, and I think fear of a democratically-elected UK government concluding that the money could be used for more worthwhile purposes was what really motivated their concerns.

They then moved on to how Tarquin might struggle to go travelling in his ‘gap yah’ due to visa restrictions.

I reminded them that in reality, visa requirements to many European countries were lifted decades before the UK joined the EEC in 1973. Visa restrictions for travel to France, Sweden Belgium and the Netherlands were lifted in 1947, for Italy, 1948, and Austria followed suit in 1955.

Today, UK passport holders can travel to a vast array of countries both inside and outside the EU without a visa, from Argentina to Singapore to South Africa. It is utterly absurd to say that British people will require a visa to visit European countries beyond 2019, though I completely respect the rights of European nations to put restrictions on middle class British youngsters on ‘gap yahs’ from treating their countries like playgrounds and helping themselves to jobs that should really be the preserve of the country’s own young people.

They then tried playing the ‘it was only an advisory referendum’ card. I responded by reminding them that a few weeks before the referendum, the government sent a lengthy booklet to every household in the country that included the statement, “This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.”

I also made it clear that the 17.4 million people who voted ‘Leave’ were not giving their MPs some friendly advice, they were giving them a firm instruction. Failure to follow this instruction would undermine democracy itself and would risk serious civil unrest. These 17.4 million people were not going to crawl away quietly, nor were the millions of Remain supporters who graciously accepted the result.

Then they tried playing the ‘people didn’t know what they were voting for’ card, but quoting that ‘£300 million per week for the NHS’ figure that the official Leave campaign quoted. The obvious response to that was that the Leave campaign was not a government, or even a political party, they were merely making the point that the money was theoretically available (the true figure is closer to £220 million, but the basic point still stands).

Furthermore, I do  not really believe that the ‘£300 million’ quote really changed many minds. I also pointed out the Remain campaign’s absurd ‘Project Fear’, spearheaded by George Osborne, Mark Carney, and their big hero, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-smirking ‘cool dude’, President Barack Obama, who made that menacing ‘back of the queue’ threat to what is supposedly the USA’s biggest ally.

Which brought us on to their next argument that post-Brexit, ‘no-one will trade with us and no-one will be our friend’. Obama’s threat was brought up again. I calmly pointed out that whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump won the upcoming election, Barack Obama would not be in the White House either when Article 50 was triggered, or when Brexit negotiations took place.

I am not a fan of Donald Trump and would not have voted for him, but, unlike his predecessor, President Trump respects the democratic will of the British people and is ready and willing to enter into trade talks.

On top of that, I reminded our friends from Penarth that the EU sells more to us than we sell to them, and it would be absurd to pretend that it wouldn’t be in their interests to trade with us on favourable terms.

One woman remarked that Parliament had ‘far more important things to do’ than to ‘waste time’ on Brexit. To me, that just showed the contempt she had for the clearly-expressed concerns of her fellow voters, especially those who feel that the EU, and globalism, isn’t working for them. Not that I expect she invites any such people to her dinner parties, so this meeting was a chance for her to hear, from me, views she is seldom exposed to in real life.

Throughout the meeting, I was patronised in various ways. They spouted the clichés about how I was ‘destroying my own future’ and I was repeatedly addressed as ‘young man’.

What did not get discussed much were the real reasons people voted for Brexit – a desire for a return to proper Parliamentary democracy, the ability to elect and remove those who make decisions that affect our lives, the supremacy of UK courts over foreign ones, a desire for sensible controls on immigration, the ability to form trade deals with the wider world, with countries with growing economies and expanding populations, and the ability to have a genuinely independent foreign policy, free from the clutches of Mr Juncker’s proposed EU army and unnecessary hostility towards Russia and Iran.

In summary, I believe that those present were mainly members of the higher education sector who wanted to protect their own interests, even at the expense of democracy, along with a few easily-manipulated types who had bought in to ‘Project Fear’.

I would give myself an eight out of ten for the way I handled that meeting. It concluded with me making a few remarks about the importance of avoiding extreme language and personal insults, as there had been an utterly poisonous atmosphere in the country for some months, and I was also aware that Doughty was close to the murdered MP, Jo Cox. But I do not believe for one second that Doughty was remotely interested in our opinions.

Doughty is one of those types who followed the ‘classic’ route into politics for a modern-day career politician. He did the politicians’ degree of ‘Philosophy, Politics and Economics’ at Oxford, after which he became an advisor to Labour MP Douglas Alexander.

He tried to get the Labour nomination for the safe seat of Pontypridd in 2010, but lost out to Owen Smith, and had to wait until 2012 for his chance to become an MP, when Alun Michael stood down as member for Cardiff South and Penarth. Mr Michael had known Doughty ‘since he was a baby’, and worked behind the scenes to help his nomination. At 32, Doughty was an MP.

Doughty has all the personal characteristics of a young, career politician. I’ve mixed in these circles on occasion, and, regardless of party, young men like this have certain traits in common. With very little life or ‘real world’ experience, they nearly always have older, male mentors, and have a false sincerity about them that leads to little old ladies saying, “Isn’t he a nice young man?”

By scratching the surface, we soon see that Doughty is not as ‘nice’ as he first seems. His voting record on unwise use of military force is particularly shoddy, in that he supported action to aid the militant Islamist Al-Nusra Front against President Assad’s regime in Syria, and has voted against investigations into the Iraq War of 2003.

Doughty was at his most dirty and underhand, when, in January 2016, he made his intentions to resign from Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench team known to the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, who in turn arranged for him to resign live on air on the Daily Politics programme, rather than by the usual means of sending a letter to the party leader.

Prior to the House of Commons vote on triggering Article 50 in March this year, I tweeted Doughty to say that I would consider standing against him at the next election if he betrayed the expressed will of the people by voting against it. Doughty replied by accusing me of ‘threatening’ him, clearly not understanding how ‘democracy’ works. The election came far sooner than anyone anticipated at the time, and I ended up supporting the Conservative candidate, Bill Rees, who I thought had the best chance of defeating Doughty in a fairly safe Labour seat.

In the run-up to the election, I asked Doughty on THREE separate occasions on Twitter whether he would take the Corbyn whip and be loyal to his leader if Labour won enough seats to form the next government. After the third occasion, Doughty blocked me.

We have only had one further interaction in the months since. On 9 July, a debate was taking place on the Facebook page of the Cardiff Coal Exchange, a spectacular, beautiful building that had been allowed fall into a dangerous, derelict state over the last ten years, before being spectacularly revived into a hotel and conference centre by the Liverpool entrepreneur Lawrence Kenwright, beginning in late 2016. The building has now been restored to its former glory and is being run in a commercially sustainable way.

Doughty was opposed to the redevelopment for unfathomable reasons. He seemed to want to put bureaucratic obstacles in Mr Kenwright’s way. I have included screenshots from the interaction that followed. It looks to me as though Doughty was throwing one of his characteristic hissy fits.

Of course, Doughty is far from the only Labour MP who thinks he has the right to override the expressed will of the people because ‘he knows best’. Earlier this week, Doughty, his friend Chris Bryant and David Lammy were among many Labour MPs who feigned concern for workers’ rights as a pretext for trying to block the European Union Withdrawal Bill, while knowing full well that the so-called ‘Henry VIII Powers’ will only be used for very specific purposes, which I outlined on this website last week. Doughty and co’s real agenda was to at best frustrate and at worst block the Brexit process, something they know full well.

How long will it be before voters in Labour heartlands wake up and smell the coffee? With a handful of notable exceptions, the vast majority of Labour MPs think the decision taken to leave the EU by millions of working class people is something to be patronised, ignored, watered down and preferably reversed in the long term.

The sentiments expressed in Brecht’s poem were probably intended as an early attempt at satire, but they seem to reflect the mentality of most Labour MPs, who think their own opinions are superior to those of their constituents. When will voters in the Labour heartlands realise that the party to which they give their unwavering loyalty treats them with utter contempt?

By MARCUS STEAD

WAS LABOUR ever really the party of ordinary working people? I am not sure. But if those days ever existed at all, future historians will pinpoint the absolute latest date at which they ended as 5 September 2017.

For that was the date when the Labour leadership announced that it will order all its MPs to vote against the European Union Withdrawal Bill when it comes before the House of Commons next Monday (11 September 2017).

The bill will repeal the 1972 European Communities Act, which took the United Kingdom into the EEC (the precursor to the European Union), and meant that European law took precedence over laws passed in the UK Parliament. It will also end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

Crucially, all existing EU legislation will be copied across into domestic UK law to ensure a smooth transition on the day after Brexit. This matters because there are believed to be 12,000 EU regulations in force, while Parliament has passed 7,900 statutory instruments implementing EU legislation and 186 acts which incorporate a degree of EU influence.

The total body of European law, dating back to 1958, is known as the Acquis Communautaire. It binds all member states and in 2010 was estimated to consist of about 80,000 items, covering everything from workers’ rights to environment and trade. As well as regulations, this includes EU treaties, directions and European Court of Justice rulings.

The EU creates new diktats all the time, and the UK will continue to abide by them until it formally leaves.

So what’s the problem? On the surface, it appears that the Labour Party dislikes what are colloquially known as ‘Henry VIII’ powers, after the Statute of Proclamations in 1539. What this means in the current context is that Ministers will be able to make changes to the statute book without going through the usual Parliamentary scrutiny process.

This sounds very nasty and undemocratic, but these powers are an absolute necessity and are nothing to be concerned about, provided they are limited and defined. For example, in many instances, there will be the need to amend a bill to take out a reference to an EU body serving as a regulator and replace it with a reference to a UK regulator. It would be a hideous waste of Parliamentary time to have to put each and every reference before the House, and would clog up Parliamentary business completely, something Labour knows full well.

Ministers have already taken steps to reassure critics that such measures will be time limited and will not be used to make policy changes. The government estimates that between 800 and 1,000 measures known as ‘statutory instruments’ will be required to make sure the process functions properly.

What does Labour dislike about this? To quote the statement released on Tuesday: “Labour fully respects the democratic decision to leave the European Union, voted to trigger Article 50 and backs a jobs-first Brexit with full tariff-free access to the European single market.

“But as democrats we cannot vote for a bill that unamended would let government ministers grab powers from Parliament to slash people’s rights at work and reduce protection for consumers and the environment.”

“Parliament has already voted to leave the European Union. But the Government’s EU (Withdrawal) Bill would allow Conservative ministers to set vital terms on a whim, including of Britain’s exit payment, without democratic scrutiny.

“Nobody voted in last year’s referendum to give this Conservative Government sweeping powers to change laws by the back door. The slogan of the Leave campaign was about people taking back control and restoring powers to Parliament.

“This power-grab bill would do the opposite. It would allow the Government to seize control from the Parliament that the British people have just elected.” 

It’s hard to take a statement seriously that includes meaningless jargon like ‘jobs-first Brexit’ in its opening sentence. The second sentence fares little better. Labour knows full well that the government would be committing political suicide if it dared to ‘slash’ people’s rights at work without going through the normal Parliamentary process. Labour also knows that the main purpose of the Henry VIII powers is to replace references to EU bodies in legislation with UK ones.

What is astonishing is that the Labour Party, and indeed pro-EU Conservative MPs like Kenneth Clarke and Anna Soubry had very little to say when governments implemented thousands of EU directives without Parliamentary scrutiny. The timing of their sudden conversion to absolute belief in Parliamentary democracy is convenient to say the very least. It’s also worth remembering that the Shadow Brexit Secretary, ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer was quite keen on extra-parliamentary law-making when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.

Sir Keir has already said that ‘no deal’ is the worst possible deal. That means we can reach one of two conclusions about him:

Either he is too stupid to understand that his comments incentivise the EU to offer the UK a very bad deal on the grounds that the UK is desperate to accept any deal. As an experienced barrister and a former Director of Public Prosecutions, we can probably rule that out.

The alternative conclusion is that Sir Keir is on the side of the EU bullies of Barnier, Juncker and Verhofstadt, and that real agenda is to frustrate and water down Brexit to the greatest extent possible, with a view to keeping the UK in the EU in all but name, with a view to re-joining on the pretext of a future economic downturn.

Labour’s stance proves once and for all, beyond doubt, that it does not truly respect the expressed wishes of the electorate. 161 of the 262 Labour MPs currently in Parliament represent constituencies that voted Leave at last year’s referendum. The referendum was not advisory, as some of the more slippery Remain supporters claim. It was an instruction. Every household in the country was sent a booklet prior to the referendum that included the statement, “This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.”

I have no idea what more evidence voters in the Labour heartlands need that the people they routinely elect treat them with utter contempt. Jeremy Corbyn looks and behaves like an ageing, slightly eccentric university professor, and that is now the class of person the Labour Party represents – the university lecturers, middle class idealistic students and the Islington dinner party circuit. It does not listen to, or address the concerns of, the working class communities in the grimmer parts of the country, and has not been a ‘grass roots’ workers movement for a very long time indeed.

For example, Owen Smith’s constituency of Pontypridd backed Leave 53.7% in the referendum, yet Smith had the nerve to vote against the triggering of Article 50 in February. In the general election four months later, Smith was returned to Parliament with 55.4% of the vote, and an increased majority of 6,549.

The people of Pontypridd often have an attitude of, “I’m Labour, always have been, always will be, and my father before me.” A dangerous local groupthink sets in. They do not stop and think about what the Labour Party has actually done to deserve their unquestioning loyalty. In this instance, they had two good reasons not to vote for Smith: Firstly, he made a careerist attempt to replace Corbyn as Labour leader in the autumn of 2016 and sought to take the party in a Blairite direction. Secondly, he disobeyed the instruction his constituents gave him when he voted against the triggering of Article 50 in February 2017.

What more proof do the people of Pontypridd need that their MP, and their party, treats them and their concerns with utter contempt? Pontypridd is a powerful example because of the brazen nature of Smith’s antipathy, but a similar pattern emerges across the Labour heartlands in the South Wales Valleys and Northern England.

The European Union Withdrawal Bill will, in all likelihood, get through Parliament with the help of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Labour’s comments will amount to nothing more than hot air. There will, of course, be some decent Labour MPs, such as the excellent Kate Hoey, who will defy the whip and vote with the government. They deserve our admiration and respect for putting their constituents before their party.

Surely the time has now come for voters in Labour heartlands to finally acknowledge their loyalty towards the party is not reciprocated, and that they have been taken for granted once too often.

By MARCUS STEAD

IF YOU have a roof that needs repairing, should you hire qualified professionals or let the cowboys do the work? All sensible beings know it is far better to pay a bit more and get suitably-trained people in rather than risk shoddy workmanship or even danger from the cheaper option.

We face a similar dilemma with our approach to the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. The result was a clear, but not overwhelming victory for ‘Leave’ (52% to 48%), and a degree of magnanimity towards our opponents who voted ‘Remain’ is desirable. But the make-up of the House of Commons, and the leadership of the main political parties are dominated by ‘Remain’ supporters.

In other words, we have put the task of guiding the country out of the EU into the hands of politicians who, at best, don’t really believe Brexit is in the UK’s best interests, and at worst, will try to sabotage the process to suit their ‘I told you so’ agenda. In turn, this may lead to a ‘half in, half out’ Brexit, or, quite possibly, a poor deal that does so much damage to the economy that within a few years the UK will be begging to re-join the EU on whatever terms it can get (which will almost certainly mean adopting the euro).

I have never, for a single second, doubted that my ‘Leave’ vote last year was the correct one. I am absolute in my belief that the UK will be freer and more prosperous outside the EU than in it, but the UK’s departure from the EU needs to be handled correctly, by people who actually believe in Brexit. Let us put the current crop of political leaders under the microscope:

Theresa May became Prime Minister because nobody else wanted the job. She had a long and utterly unremarkable track record as Home Secretary, where she failed to meet the key 2010 manifesto pledges of bringing annual net immigration figures down to the tens of thousands (which is itself impossible for as long as the UK is in the EU) and the repeal of the Human Rights Act (a piece of legislation nowhere near as nice as its title suggests). Her handling of the fallout from the Jimmy Savile scandal was also nothing short of appalling.

There is little sign she disagreed with much of the New Labour project, and even less sign that she has ‘conservative’ instincts. There is personal warmth between her and the New Labour ultra-feminist Harriet Harman, and May once said at the dispatch box of the Commons that she ‘loved’ the foul-mouthed rock musician, ‘Sir’ Bob Geldof.

Mrs May kept her cards close to her chest during the referendum campaign. She was a ‘Remain’ supporter, but wasn’t very vocal about it, which was clearly a calculation on her part that by being relatively quiet, she would be in pole position for the leadership.

Most of the people in key Cabinet positions were ‘Remain’ supporters – Chancellor Philip Hammond, Home Secretary Amber Rudd, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, Education Secretary Justine Greening, and Conservative Party Chairman Sir Patrick McLoughlin, to name but a few.

Even Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s support for ‘Leave’ should be treated with suspicion. He waited until the last possible moment to declare his hand before the referendum, and indeed had a newspaper opinion piece drafted, though never published, in which he outlined his support for ‘Remain’. A few years ago, I wrote an article about Johnson’s long CV as an unprincipled opportunist. He had no track record whatsoever as a eurosceptic campaigner prior to the weeks before the referendum.

Liam Fox, with his trade portfolio, has for years been described as a ‘eurosceptic’ in the press, but it was only in the run-up to the referendum that he stated he wanted to see the UK leave the EU. Before then, he appeared to be one of those ghastly hybrid characters who says they dislike the EU but would like the UK to remain in a reformed EU (anyone with any understanding of how the EU operates knows that this is a far-fetched pipe dream).

The only major Cabinet figure with a solid background in euroscepticism and who appears to be on top of his brief is Brexit Secretary David Davis, though even he was once pro-EU and served as Europe Minister for a period in the John Major government of the 1990s. Yes, I do believe his long-ago conversion to euroscepticism is genuine, and yes, I do believe he is a political heavyweight. He also comes across as sincere and affable, and is on good terms with MPs from other parties. But he cannot undertake this arduous task alone, and I have concerns about the mandarins and support network that surrounds him.

A few weeks ago, James Chapman, the former political journalist who became a civil servant, had a very public breakdown on Twitter in which he declared his hatred of Brexit. It subsequently became clear that Chapman is mentally unwell and we should wish him a return to health. But what is of wider concern is that Chapman spent a year working alongside David Davis in the Brexit Department. How many other people with similar views still hold significant positions of influence within the civil service?

On the Labour side, Jeremy Corbyn had a long, proud track record of euroscepticism stretching back decades. Corbyn’s support base is with the Labour membership, but inside Parliament, his own back benches are dominated by younger, careerist Blairites and Brownites who despise him.

In the run-up to the referendum, Corbyn feared his position as leader was insecure, and as an appeasement to his back benchers, he came out as a ‘Remain’ supporter, but he never looked very convincing. The telling point came when the alleged ‘comedian’ Adam Hills asked Corbyn on TV what his level of enthusiasm for staying in the EU was out of ten and he replied, “Seven and seven-and-a-half.” It was hardly a ringing endorsement.

Throughout the campaign, Corbyn’s support for ‘Remain’ seemed half-hearted at best. Most of the time, he sounded like a hostage reading out his captor’s demands. The leadership challenge came regardless last autumn in the shape of Owen Smith, a chancer with a bit of causal misogyny and thuggery thrown in. Corbyn won, thanks almost entirely to his support with the modern-day Labour grassroots of middle class students and Islington intellectuals, but he would have been better off sticking to his eurosceptic principles during the campaign. The leadership challenge was always going to come. If he’d stuck to his guns, he would have developed a strong bond with the traditional Labour heartlands in the north of England and in the South Wales Valleys, which in turn would have strengthened his hand in the inevitable leadership contest.

Corbyn’s political mentor was that fine anti-EU campaigner Tony Benn. If Benn was still around, I find it inconceivable that Corbyn would have done his damaging u-turn to appease the New Labour disciples who continued to despise him in any case. The vast majority of Labour MPs are both pro-EU and anti-Corbyn. Even now, after a general election campaign in which he exceeded expectations, Corbyn struggles to get enough support from his own backbenches to form a Shadow Cabinet.

The likes of David Lammy, the slippery and calculating Stephen Doughty (in whose constituency I live), and around 200 others, will have to put up with Corbyn’s leadership for as long as he is seen to be doing well. But they have numerous ways of tripping him up, and are biding their time for the opportunity to remove him and replace him by a clean-shaven, sharp suited type in the mould of Blair who will block or reverse Brexit.

Even with Corbyn at the helm, the party’s policy appears to have changed towards committing the UK to membership of the Single Market, and more importantly the Customs Union, which effectively means being a member of the EU in all but name. I will address the difference between the Single Market (which I am open-minded about) and the Customs Union (which I am strongly against) in an upcoming article on this website.

The sarcastically-named Liberal Democrats and their leader, ‘Sir’ Vince Cable (himself a leader as a result of a coronation rather than a contest), barely even try to disguise the contempt they hold for Brexit. With 12 seats, they are a rump of the party they were just two years ago, but it is clear they will use what little power they have to try and stop Brexit from happening.

Actually, I have some sympathy with old-school patriotic liberals in the tradition of David Lloyd George and Jo Grimond. In the years that followed the merger between the Liberals and the SDP, it gradually became clear that the so-called ‘Liberal Democrats’ were saturated by the political children of the dreadful Roy Jenkins.

Our entire political establishment is dominated by those who support the EU project and hate the result of last year’s referendum. True eurosceptics are few and far between in Parliament, and even they are mostly pushed to the margins of their respective parties. The civil service appears to mirror Parliament with its lack of Brexit enthusiasts and its lacklustre preparation for negotiations so far.

A significant minority of backbench Conservative MPs make the right noises on Brexit, but not many of them are in Mrs May’s inner circle. The Labour Party has reliable Brexit supporters in the form of Kate Hoey, Frank Field and a small number of others, but they do not hold much influence with Corbyn, and in any case are massively outnumbered by admirers of Blair, Brown and either of the Miliband brothers, a group of apparent rivals who all strongly support continued membership of the EU. Actually, their much gossiped-about rivalries were always more to do with personality clashes and political ambitions rather than significant disagreements on policy.

All this does not bode well for a period in British political history that requires strong leadership and absolute commitment to the task in hand.