Some sort of clean break Brexit is looking far more likely than it was when Theresa May was Prime Minister. What happened?
Today Nigel Farage made a speech to the Brexit Party (the event is ongoing and his speech starts about 17 minutes into that live stream).
Back in March of this year all seemed lost. We had a Labour and Conservative party, both of whom were happy not to take us out of the European Union. […] The talk was that not only were we not leaving the European Union but we were to face a second referendum. […] That is why I founded the Brexit Party. […] We managed to turn all of that anger that was out there in this country into optimism and hope. We made people begin to realise that actually Brexit was going to happen. […] It was our rise and success that got rid of the worst and most duplicitous prime minister in British history. I think we pretty much guaranteed that her successor would be a leading brexiteer. Indeed if we hadn’t fought those elections I suspect Mrs May would still be there.
Farage claims that at this point Boris is mostly aping Brexit Party lines. But he does not mind. He is pleased that Boris has brought some energy and optimism to the job, and that he is saying we will leave on the 31st October, “do or die.” But Nigel is skeptical, since we heard similar things from Theresa May early on, and Boris looks like he might be satisfied with the withdrawal agreement minus the backstop. Boris and the Conservative party can not be trusted, Nigel says.
It is clear that Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party are the ones keeping Boris honest. Will it be enough, or will they also be the ones bringing about the downfall of the Conservative Party should he fail? Says Nigel:
The withdrawal agreement is not Brexit. The withdrawal agreement is a betrayal of what 17.4m people voted for, and if you go with the withdrawal agreement we will fight you in every single seat up and down the length and breadth of the United Kingdom.
He talks about another possibility: that Boris proceeds with leaving with no deal. Nigel thinks no deal is the best deal. He calls it a clean break Brexit, leaving the UK independent and sovereign.
If Boris Johnson was to summon up the courage to lead this country into a clean break Brexit on 31st October, and if the only means of achieving that was calling a general election … then we would put country before party … we would be prepared to help him, perhaps in the form of a non-aggression pact at the election.
He goes on to suggest that the only way the Conservative party could win a general election is with the help and support of the Brexit Party. “We will not get a genuine Brexit without the Brexit Party being involved.”
It seems that Mr. Farage is not concerned with the parliamentary future of The Brexit Party, only with the success of Brexit. If a “No Deal” BRExit on 31st October 2019 makes the BXP an irrelevance, then Mr. Farage seems happy with that (his activists, maybe not so much). That is one of the advantages of the BXP being a one-man crusade supported by millions rather than a bottom-up accumulation as with most parties.
It also seems to acknowledge the reality that no collaboration with the Tories is possible without undermining the end goal, so unilateral acknowledgement that the BRExit party will not fight in seats where the MP’s are pro-Leave (whether Tory or Labour) might be the best way of dealing with an election between now October 31st.
Equally, having a vast army of BXP parliamentary candidates ready to go (even if all they do is dilute the Tory vote and deny the Tories a parliamentary majority) may well be sufficient to keep Boris honest and to reduce the level of parliamentary treason.
So fair play to Mr. Farage. If he pulls this off he definitely deserves a knighthood, for the simple justification that he has battled for the peeps on this matter since before most politicians cared about BRExit (even Maggie was rather late to the party).
“Boris and the Conservative party can not be trusted, Nigel says.”
“… may well be sufficient to keep Boris honest and to reduce the level of parliamentary treason.”
There seems to be a theme there — an expectation that the useless tossers in Parliament (Conservatives & Labour) cannot be trusted. And there is undoubtedly good reason for that distrust!
It all leads back to the question — What happens on the Day After Brexit?
Nigel seems quite happy for The Brexit Party to go away. Boris is a well-known weathervane and probably will not care much which direction the ship heads in as long as he is sitting in the captain’s chair.
Brexit is the beginning, not the end. Yet no-one is talking about what comes next — apart from Boris’s quixotic bluster about opening up the US market to British pork pies. The situation may be vaguely reminiscent of the Russian Revolution, where a popular movement to remove the Czar and get out of the War was subsequently promptly co-opted by the Bolsheviks — because they were the only organized group with a plan.
It is long past time for good people with a plan to step forward!