The country will not forgive Remainers destroying the Brexit deal

Increasingly, the public is looking more and more askance at the protesters occupying central London. They claim sanctimoniously to be acting as our saviours, to be taking extreme action to defend us from disaster, to be behaving so aggressively because the emergency is so extreme. But the public is beginning to recognize they are hypocrites, crippling businesses and paralyzing national life to indulge their obsession. Britain has had enough of the uncooperative crusties of Extension Rebellion – and the whole extravagant Remainer tantrum.

The Remainer rump concentrated at Westminster has fetishized the supposed threat of WTO Brexit as a potential extinction event, in exactly the same way that the climate loons clambering onto the roofs of tube trains have weaponized natural climate change. In both cases the objective is to terrify the public into subjection to their minority political agenda. The public, however, is unimpressed.

The hypocrisy of the Remain camp is breathtaking, beginning with the Leader of the Opposition. During the past 48 hours we have heard Jeremy Corbyn expressing grave concern about the prospect, under the Johnson Brexit deal, of a border down the Irish Sea. Qué? Did Corbyn not devote much of his political life, before he became Labour leader – before the Anglo-Irish Agreement or the Good Friday Agreement were even thought of – to campaigning, sometimes in unsavoury company, to put a border down the Irish Sea?

So, why is he upset now that a first tangible step in that direction has been taken? Because it is a pose he must adopt, for opportunist political reasons, just part of the whole nexus of lies and deceit that is the culture of Westminster. The Surrender Act was the latest, most arrogant legislative expression of many MPs’ contempt for the nation. It may, however, have also been one of their last self-indulgences, as the public mood hardens against them.

This week has been a tipping point, not just in the Brexit saga but also in the growing public resolve to remove from power the anti-democratic oligarchy that has, at first covertly but now brazenly, tried to annul the electoral verdict delivered by 17.4 million voters. We should pause to consider, very deeply, the significance of that now commonplace reality. Daily we hear angry Brexiteers repeating the mantra of “17.4 million voters”, but has this constant repetition obscured the enormity of what is being denounced?

Britain is a democracy. That system of government, to any thoughtful person, is not sacrosanct. It has many flaws, chief among them its tendency, deplored by political philosophers from Plato in the fourth century BC to Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in the 1950s, to degenerate into dictatorship. We are getting some flavour of that in Britain today. Yet those flaws in the system are not the point.

The point is that parliamentary democracy has for generations been the consensual political settlement governing the United Kingdom. Its crucial characteristic is the consent by those who have been defeated in electoral contests, from parish council elections to national referenda, to the assumption of power by those who have gained the majority. Individual parliamentary elections might occasionally be disputed in court, but the outcome of any public vote has invariably been respected.

That was the case until 24 June 2016 when the results of the EU referendum showed that the population had defied the instructions of the entitled oligarchy. Disoriented by this unprecedented rebuff, the oligarchs at first pretended to conform to the electoral conventions. “The referendum result must be respected,” was the hypocritical cry of those who intended, by the most extreme resorts, to frustrate it.

Still alarmed by the unfamiliar terrain in which they found themselves, Remainers hastened to appease public opinion by going through the motions of honouring the referendum result. In March 2017, Article 50 was voted through by 495 MPs. At the general election in June that year, parliamentary candidates who have since become household names for their fanatical opposition to Brexit gave their constituency associations gushing pledges to deliver on the referendum result.

Since then, as Remainers became more and more emboldened under the encouragement of a partisan Commons Speaker who facilitated their abuses of parliamentary convention and the wider constitution, we have witnessed a mass coalescing of the elites to defeat the popular will. The power grab by the Blair-confected Supreme Court was yet another demonstration that the Remain establishment was willing to shred the delicate gossamer of our unwritten constitution in pursuit of its obsessive drive to keep Britain inside the European Union.

Have we really grasped the full enormity of what has been happening? In a country where every general election result has been accepted by the defeated parties, for the first time, a public vote has been rejected by the establishment. What makes that revolutionary development more egregious is the fact that the EU referendum was the largest democratic exercise in our history. To reject that is to repudiate the whole consensus on which our governmental system is based.

Yet that is what the Remain faction has done. The insincere claim that we must be saved from “crashing out” via a WTO Brexit – as ludicrous as the contrived Irish border issue cooked up by Brussels and Leo Varadkar, the ultimate logic of which is to give Northern Irish terrorists a veto on Brexit – has now been abandoned in favour of the anti-democratic objective: “Stop Brexit”. It is a measure of the extent to which politicians have become divorced both from reality and principle that the party most aggressively proclaiming its aim to “Stop Brexit” calls itself “Liberal Democrat”.

The hypocrisy of the ultra-Remainers is now transparent. Having shouted from the rooftops their determination to prevent No Deal, they are now proposing to vote down the last and only deal on offer. It does not even represent Brexit in any meaningful or recognizable shape, yet still they will not have it. These are Brussels anthem-and-flag loyalists. But now they are being found out.

When the imaginary apocalypse of No Deal hovered menacingly over the heads of the impressionable it was possible for Remainers to impose upon them. But now it is no longer a question of No Deal and an agreement has been accepted by both the EU and the UK government, the national mood is unmistakably one of relief. For businesses, now beginning to be seriously damaged by uncertainty, it is a godsend.

If, on Saturday, a country that can at last see release from the pit of the Brexit impasse almost within reach witnesses a few hundred arrogant MPs either rejecting the solution or, worse still, extending the ordeal even further, while simultaneously insulting the electorate’s intelligence and an existing democratic decision by trying to impose a second referendum, its anger will surely terminate the careers of its persecutors.

Remain has run out of road. Even in Brussels it has diminishing numbers of friends. If the Remainer coterie tries to inflict further damage on the country it will be engineering its own demise. Extension Rebellion is as discredited and counterproductive as its climate alarmist equivalent.