May selling UK a pup when Brexit bulldog is needed

After promising to take Britain out of Europe on Brexit Day, it seems Prime Minister Theresa May will now delay.

Eleven days to B-Day — but not really. After publicly promising more than a hundred times to take Britain out of Europe on Brexit Day, it seems Prime Minister Theresa May will now delay. As a joint Australian-British citizen, I am angry. The Times’ excoriating “View on Theresa May” last week asked, after not one but two “meaningful vote” losses on the floor of parliament, what if anything she has to offer? What indeed? Her own Brexit Secretary voted against her.

One of the parliamentary votes, to ban the option of a “no deal”' permanently, to take it off the table forever, is a tragedy. As anyone in business will tell you, to negotiate a good deal you need something with which to bargain. As it happens, this vote to ban a “no deal” forever and ever is not legally binding, even though it is politically binding. Furthermore, each parliamentarian who voted for the permanent ban will be judged by their electorates come the next election. Many of these electorates voted to leave. Sadly we now know that parliament thinks that a bad deal is better than no deal.

Donald Trump offered May his ideas on how to negotiate, the art of the deal, but he said she hadn’t listened. “I’m surprised at how badly it’s all gone from standpoint of the negotiation,” he said.

Putting Theresa May in to negotiate with a brilliant Anglophobe like Michel Barnier and hardened Brussels technocrat Jean-Claude Juncker was putting a golden retriever in with a couple of dobermans.

She kept bringing the deal back, but the British people have been sold a pup. What was needed was a bulldog, one who would have ramped up the hard Brexit option far earlier and so showed Britain was prepared to leave come hell or high water.

There are so few column inches written about how much pain Europe would be in under a hard Brexit or No Deal scenario. Europe is under huge pressure at present, from Germany minus Merkel to Italy’s financial pressures to French riots.

Not only does Britain have the wrong leader, worse is that her key advisers have been biased from the start.

The very idea of leaving Europe is an anathema to people like Ollie Robbins, who masterminded the drafting of May’s deal with Brussels as her chief negotiator. That became clear when his biased conversation in a Brussels pub was overheard by an ITV reporter and he promptly left the front line.

More shocking is that this bias extends to almost all Sir Humphreys despite the democratic people’s vote to leave Europe. These people have been working relentlessly to Remain, both publicly and, more effectively, behind the scenes.

If you don’t believe me, read the explosive article written by an anonymous senior bureaucrat in the civil service, also in The Times last week.

He estimates that 90 per cent of civil servants support Remain, delivering an entire culture of negativity towards Brexit.

“I have lost count of the number of insulting and derogatory terms that are used in my own department and elsewhere to refer to the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit: ‘racist’, ‘stupid’, ‘uneducated’. I have witnessed first-hand civil servants doing everything within their power, subtly and under the surface, to frustrate Brexit and talk it down at every opportunity.”

The writer says he lives in fear that his colleagues will discover he is a Brexiteer, refuse to talk to him again and that he might even lose his job.

Adding insult to injury, recent reports have confirmed suspicions that former prime minister Tony Blair has been personally advising French President Emmanuel Macron, the man who wants to lock in the Orwellian European Project, on how to stop Britain leaving Europe. What is treason if not this?

Now why is all this so important?

First, because democracy needs a fair go and a new referendum is not democracy.

Second, because opportunity for Australia lies with Britain sitting outside the European Customs Union. If not, there can never be a free trade agreement with Britain. Worse for Britain is the vassal-state scenario, where she remains in the Customs Union as a non-voting member, unable to contribute to any reform within that union.

What happens this week? May will ask Europe for a delay in Brexit to June 30. She will then bring a third meaningful vote to parliament, hoping somehow to polish the Irish Backstop; perhaps she might even convince her Attorney-General Geoffrey Cox to change his mind that her amended Backstop can still lock Britain into Europe in perpetuity.

If this new plan fails, she will ask for a much longer delay, perhaps two years, one which would have all those civil servants patting themselves on the back. The PM is banking on this option being so unpalatable for Brexiteers that they will finally vote for her deal.

Over the weekend in The Telegraph she called for her MPs to be patriots, arguing: “If parliament can find a way to back the Brexit deal before European Council, the UK will leave the EU this spring, without having to take part in European elections. If it cannot, we will not leave the EU for many months, if ever.” What should happen next? The British parliament votes for a short delay to the Brexit withdrawal date, short enough to avoid the mire of having Britain participate in European parliamentary elections in May. Once agreed, that precious time should be used by both sides to prepare for Britain to exit under WTO rules and a new productive trade relationship with Europe.

Yes, it will be painful. Yes, there will be real people hurt, jobs lost. But the sky will not fall. The world will go on, efficiency restored, new deals with Europe cut, deals with the rest of the world struck.

Unless Brussels has designs on locking in Britain to the Customs Union forever like the British civil servants, it is the right decision — to leave Europe as dictated by the referendum.

Ticky Fullerton presents Ticky at 4.30pm and 10pm Monday to Friday on Your Money.