The following article by Labour MP, Kate Hoey and active supporter of the LEAVE MEANS LEAVE CAMPAIGN, was published in the Daily Express last week. This is one of the most honest and common sense articles on Brexit we have seen in a long time.
by Kate Hoey
WITH hindsight it is clear that the senior echelons of the civil service never accepted the result of the referendum. They were following Cameron and Osborne’s lead in refusing to prepare for a Leave result.
So all the promises made about the result being final and that it would be honoured were made by politicians who never believed that the British public could possibly ignore their dire warnings. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum those, like myself who had campaigned hard to leave, undoubtedly took our eyes off the ball.
We were exhilarated, filled with positive feelings about our country’s future outside the EU and so proud of those wonderful men and women across the country who despite the entire establishment urging a Remain vote went out and voted for an independent future for the UK.
We were even more proud of the millions who came along to the huge rallies and told us, some with tears in their eyes, that for the first time they believed that it was worth voting. I too believed that the promises made by politicians and enacted in the referendum legislation would be respected.
Yet two years later that same establishment backed by much of the broadcast media is bombarding us with messages of fear. Every day another “celebrity” pops up to support a “people’s vote” – shorthand for another referendum. Their aim is to demoralise and frighten, hoping that more and more people will just accept a watering down of the 2016 result.
The EU Commission assumed we would change our minds. There has never been a referendum result it didn’t like that it hasn’t overturned. The Danes, the French, the Irish, the Dutch and the Greeks all voted against the EU and then were forced to vote again or were ignored because apparently the voters were “misinformed”.
A friend told me last week of how a week before the referendum his uncle, a labourer who rarely voted in ordinary elections, said to him: “If we vote Leave, just watch. They will make us vote again until we give them the result they want.”
Having told him that would be unthinkable in this country he realises now he was being naïve. The fact that elements within the Cabinet seem to be aiding and abetting the EU by being so feeble in standing up for our country is a betrayal of the British people.
The EU will never accept when democratic electorates reject the push for further integration. The EU is a market project, not a democratic project. Mistrust of national majorities is at the heart of the EU.
Tony Benn described the EU as a coup d’état by a political class who did not believe in popular sovereignty. The EU is dominated by politicians who do not trust their own people. This is extremely dangerous.
Mistrust of national electorates is embedded in the political cultures of some European countries but it goes directly against the way the British constitution has evolved. Nye Bevan, another Labour EU sceptic, praised the tremendous power of the UK system, which gives to a party winning a majority in the House of Commons almost unlimited power.
UK socialists traditionally understood that there were few institutional limits on a Labour government with a majority. The EU is a major limit. The commission’s behaviour towards the Greeks and now the Italians is a warning. From their perspective national demo cracies cannot – indeed must not – have control over their own economic futures.
It could not have been put more clearly than by the German finance minister when he said after the Greek elections: “We can’t possibly allow an election to change anything.”
Brexit is fundamentally a constitutional decision, not a policy one. It opens up a new range of policy options but there is no single set of policies inherent in Brexit. This is why it doesn’t make any sense when people talk about a “Tory Brexit”. It would be like talking about a “Tory first-past-thepost,” a “Tory voting age”.
The latest stunt by Remainers is to quote polls supposedly showing that Labour Leave areas are changing their minds. But these are the same polls which told us Remain would win. The vote that mattered was on June 23, 2016. We have had the people’s vote and it delivered to the British establishment the biggest shock since Churchill was thrown out of Downing Street in 1945.
Just think if, after Labour had won that election, the Bank of England issued a warning that a Labour government would be ruinous to the public finances, big business threatened to leave the UK and then Churchill said that he would not resign as prime minister until there was a second vote because he felt the Labour campaign had been misleading?
It would amount to little less than an anti-democratic coup, which is exactly what is being staged by these People’s Vote campaigners now. So what should Leavers do?
As Callaghan said: “We do not need to throw our hand in, beset by a false and unworthy despair. We need to believe in ourselves again.”
We can no longer trust the Government to deliver the result of the referendum. It is time for all those who voted Leave to speak out and make their voice heard.
That is why I support the reinvigorated Leave Means Leave campaign. We have to show we will not allow politicians to betray the will of the people.
The British Democrats say that putting a committed ‘Remainer’ (Theresa May) in charge of the Brexit negotiations is like putting an arsonist in charge of a fire engine!
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shame Kate Hoey is still in a party that is full and lead by a rabidly anti British clique of hard left loonies that thankfully makes them unelectable
Kate talks about ‘the will of the people’ but the overwhelming majority of her constituents voted to Remain in the EU. If she decides to stand in the next election she will almost certainly be deselected by her local Party.
most people in Her constituency were not even born here that great 3rd World Toilet London I avoid the place like the plague