As a result of the sabotage of Brexit by U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May and other Remainers in the country’s parliament, a new, grassroots political movement called the Brexit Party has emerged. Brexit champion Nigel Farage, the former UKIP leader, and others officially launched the party today.
The U.K. was due to officially leave the European Union on March 29, but May and her Remainer (i.e., Remoaner or Remainiac) colleagues have extended that date several times, thus betraying the will of the people. The actual departure date, if ever, and under what circumstances, are very much up in the air.
Conservative in Name Only May repeatedly promised the British electorate that Brexit means Brexit, that the U.K. would officially escape the Brussels-based EU on March 29, and that no deal is better than a bad deal. She has lived up to none of those commitments. The deal that she negotiated, which Farage calls a surrender document and a binding treaty, would actually keep the U.K. trapped in the EU as a non-voting member, i.e. Brexit in Name Only (BRINO), nonetheless subject to all its regulations and laws.
Absent an parliamentary-approved agreement, a no-deal status would have enabled the U.K. to enter into trade arrangements with individual countries like the U.S. and many others under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. It could do so without being bogged down by the EU rule book and its heavy-handed bureaucracy.
In his Brexit Party address, Farage an MEP (member of the European Parliament) insisted that his nation’s dominant two-party structure is “unfit for purpose.” He added that the pro-EU parliament has become out of touch with the country, which voted by referendum on June 23, 2016, to exit the EU.
As evidenced by the Brexit betrayal, the U.K. political system is broken, he declared simply.
The U.K. was never meant to participate in the May 23 European parliamentary elections if the March 29 date had held up, especially on the basis of a clean or no-deal WTO Brexit.
The Brexit Party will now field a slate of candidates in May; Farage underscored that the is just the initial stage in bringing about “a democratic revolution in British politics.”
He also did a humorous callback to when vowed t hat if he ever returned to active politics, it would be on the basis of “no more Mr. Nice Guy.” The joke is that many of his aggressive foes never considered him that nice in the UKIP days.
Farage also revealed that the placed a bet that amounted about $1300 on his party winning the May election over the Conservatives and Labor. As leader of UKIP in 2014, Farage’s party stunned the London-centric media and political establishment when it won the EU elections, an unprecedented achievement for a third-party in the U.K.
An ally of President Trump, Farage concluded by saying that the Brexit Party would provide the British people “a decent, respectable, competent political vehicle that they can believe in and they can vote for.”
The fledgling Brexit Party has apparently received the equivalent of about one million U.S. dollars in small donations in the past two weeks.
[Featured image credit: Euro Realist Newsletter, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 license]
