Brexiteers are not very pleased with Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexiting progress. Dominic Raab, Brexit Secretary, has already suggested a final deal might be delayed beyond the October deadline. Brexiteers are livid with Chancellor Philip Hammond, a sincere Remainer, who has discredited No Deal options with damaging financial forecasts and a lack of preparations. This week, MP Andrea Jenkins highlighted the ongoing UK’s post-Brexit entanglement in European defence institutions and policy, whereby UK would be obliged to align with EU rules, essentially still acting as a rule taker.
People are flocking to join the Conservative Party, even former Labour councillors and Ukippers have applied for membership, but not everyone is delighted or accepted. Troublemaking Tory Remainers fear these rookies will bring the party into disrepute or influence the election of a future Leader of the Party who might be a genuine Brexiteer. According to Conservative Party rules, MPs select the two finalists and members choose between the two. Rebelling against the Party rejecting UKIP donor Arron Banks into the Party, Daniel Kawczynski, MP, has complained to Sir Graham Brady of the powerful 1922 Committee, saying the Conservative party has always been a broad church of political viewpoints, why exclude Arron Banks when we accommodate Jacob Rees-Mogg and Kenneth Clark at opposing ends of the Tory spectrum.
Out of the blue, French President Emanuel Macron commands EU leaders to make a Brexit deal with UK, and Michel Barnier, the chief negotiator, offers some kind of special partnership. Why, when we know France does not buy into the Chequers Plan and Barnier has basically rubbished all of Theresa’s May’s government’s ideas? This feels like a PR stunt to make them appear amenable and allies with UK against a backdrop of populist discord about immigration in Italy and Poland. The government agreed to give the people Brexit; most people do not want the best deal available at the last minute, they want to properly leave the EU without tethers, WTO or No Deal, but definitely no single market. Businessmen such as Sir James Dyson, the chairman of Bristol Docks and CEO of Aston Martin have no worries about Brexiting with No Deal.
The Chequers Plan devised by Theresa May before the summer recess has not been accepted. It does not provide the independence people voted for. Peter F. Allgeier, former US Ambassador to the WTO and a former Deputy US Trade Representative, wrote in Conservative Home that the Chequers Proposal places UK in a straitjacket as far as trade policy and EU regulations are concerned. In Kenya this week, Theresa May avoided responding to the question “would Britain be more prosperous post-Brexit?” An anonymous Brexiteer volunteered the appropriate answer: “I believe in the British people, who are a very hard working and industrious, British people always create opportunity and prosperity, it is thanks to them that Britain will always prosper.”
The Chuck Chequers mantra initiated by Jacob Rees-Mogg and promoted by Boris Johnson and Priti Patel is morphing, by popular demand, into the chuck-the-PM mantra.