January 16, 2019January 16, 2019 Joe Quinn

Still Confused About Brexit? It’s Actually Pretty Simple…

Politics

SBrexit blather is back in the news again. To listen to politicians and media talking heads, you’d think it’s all rather complicated and ‘beyond the ken of mere mortals’. In reality, however, ‘Brexit’ is quite simple: for the last two and a half years, the British establishment is trying to make Brexit go away.

Don’t believe me? Explain why, then, that of the 650 UK Members of Parliament, about 70% come from constituencies where the majority of people voted for Brexit while among all Members of Parliament, about 70% have made it clear that they favor remaining in the EU.

In addition, the Conservative government which approved the referendum in 2015 was lead by David Cameron, who has always been against leaving the EU. His successor, Theresa May, who negotiated the pseudo-Brexit deal that would effectively keep the UK in the EU, and which was voted down yesterday by a massive majority in Parliament, is also against Brexit.

So the obvious reason why the last 2.5 years of British politics has been an utter farce, and why the British people find themselves in this current mess, is that while a majority of British citizens voted to leave the EU,a large majority of their MPs on both sides of the aisle (and the British ‘establishment’ itself) do not want to leave the EU and are determined to make sure it never happens. To claim otherwise would be to suggest that British politicians were as clueless about the nature of the UK’s relationship with the EU as British public. But that’s not the full story.

The decision that Brexit would not happen was taken immediately after the ‘yes’ vote in the referendum in 2016, and that fact was evident to anyone with eyes to see. The politiking of the last 2.5 years had little to do with Brexit and everything to do with internal UK political power games, i.e. British political party mandarins and individual politicians feathering their own nests with an eye on their future positions within the British political system, which they are sure will remain an integral part of the EU. The Conservative strategy so far has been to hold on to power by attempting to convince their voter base (who want Brexit) that Theresa May’s ‘deal’ is actually Brexit, when it clearly isn’t at all. The EU has been on exactly the same page as Theresa May all along.

At the same time, the main opposition Labour party has correctly seen ‘Brexit’ as their best chance to force both a no-confidence vote in May’s government and another snap general election to take power themselves. The no-confidence vote happened this evening and, as expected, the Conservatives survived given their slim majority in Parliament and the support of Northern Ireland’s ‘more British than the Queen’ Democratic Unionist Party (which has its own agenda to prevent the breakup of the United Kingdom and the reunification of Ireland. Basically, when Conservative politicians are asked if they have confidence in themselves, they’ll always answer ‘yes’.

It should be remembered that the only motivation for then Conservative Party leader David Cameron to ‘green light’ the Brexit referendum was these same internal political power considerations. At the time, the Conservative party was concerned that the ‘far-right’ UKIP party – which had been leading a decades-long campaign for the UK to leave the EU – would steal most of the country’s traditional Conservative voters (the majority of whom wanted to leave the EU) and effectively replace the Conservative party. That is why Cameron, even though he was an ardent ‘Remainer’, assented to the referendum. At the time, the bi-partisan British political establishment was convinced that – when it came down to it – the majority of voters would vote to remain in the EU. When a majority voted for Brexit, they were more than a little shocked.

But an important question that has been mostly overlooked throughout the Brexit face is, what, exactly, galvanized so many British people to vote to leave the EU definitively?

The British – or, more specifically, the English,who make up more than 80% of the UK population – have always seen themselves as a ‘people apart’ when it comes to Europe. Their tendency towards jingoism and their historical supremacist attitude toward the ‘other’, coupled with their position as a relatively large island off-shore the European continent, makes them constitutionally leery of being ‘swallowed up’ by the EU. But something happened in recent years to push them over the line of wanting to leave the EU.

By the time the Brexit vote was held in 2016, the US/Western-led ‘war on terror’ was in its 15th year. This is a war that the vast majority of people in Western nations understand as a war on ‘Muslim terror’, for obvious reasons (the 9/11 attacks were carried out – or certainly made to look like they were carried out – by Muslims). During those 15 years, multiple major ‘Muslim terror attacks’ on European and US soil served to confirm to many people in Western nations that radical Muslims were indeed intent on attacking and killing as many ‘Westerners’ as possible. This perception was dramatically strengthened after 2013/2014 when ‘ISIS’ appeared on the public radar with high definition videos of ‘infidels’ (including Westerners) being beheaded, crucified, burned alive, drowned in cages or thrown off buildings.

The Western press, ever dutiful to its job of spooking the public, enthusiastically reported on ISIS’ horrific exploits. But by the end of 2015, the same press was ALSO widely reporting that ISIS was smuggling its members among refugees arriving in Europe, and that it was precisely due to the UK’s membership of the EU that so many refugees were arriving in the UK. As if to prove the truth of this claim, 2015 saw more horrific ‘Muslim terror attacks’ in France, the UK and the USA, with many more high-profile ‘terror plots’ foiled in many countries. In addition, almost daily reports streamed in describing ISIS’ ongoing rampage across Syria and Iraq and their plan to establish a ‘caliphate’ that would stretch into Western Europe.

So it was in this climate that a traditionally EU-averse British people were asked if they wanted to leave the EU, with the clear implication that leaving would give them back control over their borders, thereby reducing the number of terror attacks, or so they believed (and still do). That the Brexit ‘yes’ vote was all about immigration was echoed by Cameron when he claimed that “he could have avoided Brexit had European leaders let him control migration.” Theresa May and other members of her party have since publicly acknowledged that immigration was the central issue that lead to the vote to leave the EU. As I have noted, however, the cause for such sudden concern over immigration was terrorism, and terrorism which, a lot of evidence suggests, the British state had a hand in.

But why is the British establishment united in its rejection of the people’s vote to leave the EU? Clear economic reasons are one factor, but even more important for the British establishment is the access to and control over other European nations (they call it ‘security cooperation’) which membership of the EU provides. Consider the recent revelations about the UK govt/military propaganda/influence outfit, ‘Integrity Initiative’ (II), which operates ramified networks of ‘influencers’ within many EU government and media centers.

Equipped with a complete lack of actual integrity, this subversive, anti-democratic influence operation is but a current expression of a long-standing practice. Clearly founded upon historical military-intelligence relations with other NATO members, Integrity Initiative is, among other things, producing ‘eyes only’ reports for German eliteswarning them of the dangers of ‘joining the dark side’ by developing warmer relations with Moscow. Thanks to the tranches of documents written in their own words, we need not speculate on the value of remaining within the EU for the British establishment:

“The US needs to rebuild its understanding of Russia and how to deal with it,”while“the UK needs reminding how to play its key role of encouraging/enabling US leadership in Europe/NATO.”

Ideologically-aligned with the US ‘deep state’, British career diplomats and ‘securocrats’ have for many decades (some would say centuries) sought to control as much of the world as possible. For such pathological types, this domination and control is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. In short, outside of the EU, this UK-US means of control over the direction of Europe and its people dries up.

So where does ‘Brexit’ go from here? Clearly both of the main UK parties are in big trouble. Neither of them want Brexit of any significant kind, but both want power. Today the Conservatives saw off a no-confidence vote in their government, so their grip on power is secure for now. Negotiations between Theresa May and her cabinet and the main opposition parties is underway. The common goal is to find a way to make Brexit go away. The only solution I can see to this political impasse that can achieve that goal while fending off the Labour party and ensuring that the Conservatives serve out their term until the next general election in 2022, is – as I have been saying for two years now – a new referendum that will have to be rigged to reflect a ‘Remain’ vote. (If you think ‘they would never’, think again.) The majority that is for Brexit would have to accept that they have, apparently, been defeated, and the Conservative government would focus on bullshitting the English Brexiteers that they tried their hardest but, alas, ‘democracy is democracy’.

Will the English people accept it? Perhaps one of the only examples of honesty from a British politician in recent years was provided today by former Brexit secretary David Davis, who said that there will be” quite visible anger” among the public if the UK has not left the EU or begun a transition process to withdraw by April. “It will be really serious indeed,” he said. That’s quite possible, and while a ‘yellow vest’ type uprising in the UK may not be appealing to the British establishment or the people, it may be the only option to further expose the real problem in so-called Western democracies today: an almost complete disconnect between the people and their increasingly corrupt leaders.