Eyre Lines

We are gearing up for another general election. Is it just me, or is the idea that we should have ANOTHER general election (making two in all) in order to try to pack the House of Commons so the government can force through a bad Brexit because “the people have spoken” and we therefore can’t possibly have a vote on the deal which is on the table somewhere between ironic and insane?

Let me spell it out. We decided to leave the EU in the referendum, and thus “have to obey the will of the people”, so we can’t have another vote now we know a lot more about how the process would work and how we will be affected. But despite the Fixed Term Parliaments Act stipulating that the next election should have been in 2020, we had an election in 2017 and are now having another in 2019, and the only real issue at either of those is Brexit – certainly, this year’s election will be the Brexit election.

We can’t have another vote, so we have to have another vote.

Let’s face it, if the government had agreed to put to whole thing to a second referendum having got as far as the May deal, they would have got that past parliament back in the spring, and we could have had our second referendum in good order and then gone ahead or not on the basis of that vote.

There is, of course, only one possible answer – the hard line Brexiteers think that if a second referendum was held, the country would decide overwhelmingly not to leave. So much for Brexit being “the will of the people”. Far better, they think, to force us to a vote where other issues muddy the waters, such as the abysmal poll ratings of Jeremy Corbyn (which I put down largely to a campaign of vitriol launched by the Tories and by the vast majority of the media starting the day after he was elected) and the fact that in a Westminster election, the Liberal Democrats have never managed to get into triple figures of MPs (and more usually have been down in the teens and twenties).

Of course, in the European Elections the Liberal Democrats polled more than Labour and more than twice as many votes as the Conservatives – but that was an election which was far more clearly about Brexit. OK, it must be admitted that the Brexit party got nearly as many votes as Labour and LibDem put together, but totting up their votes and those of the Conservatives, the other parties, who were at the least in favour of a second referendum, polled significantly more….

The trouble is, it isn’t going to be clear to a lot of people that Brexit really is the only issue on the table. It certainly isn’t about whether Jeremy Corbyn would be a good leader – there is no chance that he could come out of this with an overall majority, given that Scotland will vote overwhelmingly SNP and Wales will probably knock off a few Labour seats in favour of Plaid Cymru, and that previously safe Labour seats in the north may even elect Brexit party MPs… For those scared of him, the worst that might be seen is that Labour would be the largest party, but be forming a minority government and seeking SNP and LibDem votes on specific issues. We won’t be seeing the socialist republic of Britain on the back of this election.

It isn’t going to be about the wonderful spending promises of either the Labour or the Conservative parties either. If we do actually exit the EU, neither of them will have the money to follow up on those, due to the expected reduction in GDP (which funds taxes, and so the government) of around 10-20% – though Labour might actually try to, given the cheapness of international borrowing at the moment. We’d pretty soon be seeing “we can’t afford to do these things” and a new period of austerity which might even eclipse that of the Cameron government.

No, our slogan for this election should be “Let’s get Brexit done with” – let’s elect ABC candidates (anything but conservative), have a new referendum and yes, OK, if we still vote to leave, we can do that; I’d support putting extra options on any new referendum such as “Norway deal” to clarify further what the people actually DO want, but I’m pretty confident that the “will of the people” is to stop this madness.

And we should remember that this is not about “the will of the people -v- parliament”. Parliament has wonderfully represented the lack of any single will of the people; it’s represented the hardline “get out at all costs” merchants, the “let’s try to keep decent trading arrangements but nothing else” viewpoint, the “let’s have a Norway style deal and get out of the political side but keep all the other advantages” body of opinion and the “Brexit is a stupid idea” camp. The thing is, none of those have had an absolute majority, so there has been deadlock while May and then Johnson try to finagle us into “get out at all costs” – and parliament has said “no” to that.