Published On: Thu, Feb 14th, 2019

Boycotting the European elections: there can be no business as usual after Fake Brexit

There has been a lot of talk in corporate-media in the last few days about a delay to Britain leaving the EU. Basically it would mean the postponement of the repealing of the European Communities Act 1972 (ECA), which is due to take place on 29th March. This must be the case, because Britain’s leaving is inextricably linked to the repeal of the ECA: when EU legislation doesn’t apply, Britain is out of the EU (it’s a tad more complicated than that, but not by much). There may well be a lot of frantic activity, right now, regarding the international treaty related to this matter (Article 50), but in the end, the domestic is everything. As has been pointed out at FBEL before, the Article 50 deal is for justifying the domestic legislation which will continue to tie Britain to the EU. All the talk of delay has been for applying psychological pressure on the public to accept the Article 50 deal. The Article 50 deal, or the Withdrawal Agreement, is crucial to the contrivances of the British Government and the EU to deny Brexit.

The crucial fact about Brexit is that the so-called leaving day, 29th March, can’t be delayed. The biggest enemy for those who would like that is the clock ticking down, and a lack of time to legislate against it – or so the consensus seems to own it. However, there might yet be an option for Government, which is sinking in a patch of quicksand that it never anticipated and is wildly casting around for a vine to extract itself with, to act to postpone, in full or in part, the repeal of the ECA.

In July 2018, the Government published a white paper regarding a plan for Brexit; the following is paragraph 60:

On exit day (29 March 2019) the EU (Withdrawal) Act 2018 will repeal the ECA [European Communities Act]. It will be necessary, however, to ensure that EU law continues to apply in the UK during the implementation period. This will be achieved by way of transitional provision, in which the Bill will amend the EU (Withdrawal) Act 2018 so that the effect of the ECA is saved for the time-limited implementation period. Exit day, as defined in the EU (Withdrawal) Act 2018, will remain 29 March 2019. This approach will provide legal certainty to businesses and individuals during the implementation period by ensuring that there is continuity in the effect that EU law has in the UK during this time. The Bill will make provision to end this saving of the effect of the ECA on 31 December 2020.

At the time, the corporate-media reported this in the following ways:

SKY, with the headline, Law keeping UK under EU jurisdiction will continue to apply after Brexit, and the sub-headline, “Ministers planned to repeal the European Communities Act, but will now ‘save’ some ‘parts’ of it during the transition period.”

The Daily Express, with headline, Brexit plan sets out how UK will keep EU laws – and warns Brussels about losing £39bn bill, and the sub-headline, “EUROPEAN Union law will continue to take effect across the United Kingdom during its Brexit transitional period out from March 2019 as the Government plans its exit from the bloc – which warns Brussels of the risk of missing out on the £39bn payout if there is no future partnership agreement.”

Until the author starts looking in detail at the legislation (a task that wasn’t going to start until post-Brexit, for reasons explained elsewhere [see article linked to above, in fact]), he won’t know if the “Saving of the ECA” is something that has now been provided for by an amendment, or is due to come – providing it is possible – with and in the passing of the Withdrawal Bill.

It could be that the much-hollered-for delay is already on the books – the corporate-media certainly wanted to give that impression, although a writer at the FT was certain that an amendment would be needed (readers should search for ‘Saving’ the repeal of EU law really means ignoring Brexit day; the link, here, goes to an intervening request to make a subscription).

The point of all this boils down to a little piece of important information: when the Government tries to keep Britain in the EU by its domestic legislation after it has failed to ratify the international treaty impetus for doing so (i.e. there is a no-deal Brexit), then it will find itself in a very tricky situation indeed. So, having Parliament approve the Article 50 deal is key. All the talk of delay is for psychological pressure upon the public so that it can overlook Parliament’s legislating a bad deal – and, ironically, it is only a no-deal Brexit that could scupper a delay. It isn’t a question of “a deal or delay” – as the matter is being explained to the public. A deal means a delay.

On the back of this, there needs to be some scrutiny applied to the so-called Brexit leadership who, lately, have been letting it be known that they are getting ready for European elections in 2019. Their rationalisation goes like this: the Government will get an extension to the Article 50 negotiating period in order to ratify the deal in Parliament, but this extension will mean a postponement of the Brexit leaving day beyond March 29th, requiring Britain to take part in the elections for the European Parliament in May 2019.

Breitbart put it like this:

While the United Kingdom should not be holding EU elections in 2019, as it would have already departed the European Union before the polling date, if Brexit is delayed even by a couple of months the country could be forced to go to the polls again to select its representatives for the next EU parliament.

In fact the reality could well turn out to be that a requirement for Britain to take part in the elections would come about because of a deal before March 29th – and the author strongly suspects that this is something that leading proponents of Brexit have already figured out.

The reader is asked to notice the phrase from the Breitbart extract, “the country could be forced to go to the polls”, and recognise it for mischief-making (or bad writing). While, in the circumstance whereby there would be an election, the British Government may be under some liability that it had signed up to with the EU, but the country would definitely not be forced to go to the polls. In fact, the country would be quite free to treat the European election as a non-event, and boycott it.

Indeed, if Brexit is not resolved by a no-deal separation from the EU, then a boycott of the European elections would be high on the agenda for the Leave-voting public who want to punish the British Government (the easiest protest a person can make is to cancel their TV licence – and we should expect to see millions of cancellations in the first weeks of April if the Leave-voting public intend to be serious).

Another reason not to partake in the European election is so as to avoid “contract-forming” activity. This is when one partakes in a service, and the act of doing so makes one liable to pay for it. A contract may not be understood to exist prior to the rendering of the service, but comes about when the user actively partakes of the service (this is not the same as keeping unsolicited goods or services that one passively receives). In the context of Brexit, the Leave-voter should not be involving himself in the assembly of a European Parliament, and therefore claiming representation in the EU, in other words, partaking in a service. It is hoped that the reader gets the point without the need for any more elaboration.

To sum the issue up: there cannot be business as usual if Britain does not leave the EU on 29th March – meaning a no-deal exit.

However, who do we find encouraging participation in the European poll other than Nigel Farage, who said of the new Brexit Party, that is now associated with him, that it was “founded with my full support and with the intention of fighting the European elections on May 23 if Brexit has not been delivered by then.” Please note, the Brexit Party appears to have been specifically formed to lead Leave-voters into participating in the European election. Indeed, on 11th February, Farage was boasting on Twitter that 35,000 people had registered as supporters of the Brexit Party within 48hours of its recognition by the Electoral Commission.

Quite astounding. If you had recently discovered, when Government had not obeyed a clear instruction that had come about by the pooling of your sovereignty in a referendum vote, that such activity for expressing a political will was entirely pointless, then why on earth would you run, lickety-split, to fruitlessly invest into a new pool of sovereignty at the call of a character who didn’t help you make Government obedient in the first instance? There is no one realm or class of people that has a monopoly on stupidity in Britain.

The fact that the BBC’s Newsnight promoted the Brexit Party on the same night that the Electoral Commission had made it a State-sanctioned political party may well have something to do with the rush to register interest with (and donate to) the Brexit Party. A debate was held involving Steven Woolfe, the former UKIP man, now expressing an interest in joining the Brexit Party (“will reportedly join up”, says the Express). Woolfe, of course, was involved in a major disruption of UKIP in 2016 when he somehow, inexplicably, failed to get his leadership application papers in time – which caused an almighty civil war – and then supposedly got into a fist fight with an individual who remains one of the few UKIP MEP not to quit the party (and thus overtly supports Batten’s catastrophic leadership). Woolfe, after his UKIP options quickly ran out, made overtures to the Conservative party. It is, dear reader, highly unlikely that the entire incident was not engineered to damage UKIP.

Anyway, Woolfe was pitted against an individual called Owen Jones – someone who the author has no interest in, and knows nothing about, but understands to be some kind of social media personality/“journalist” – or, a famous “leftist”. Owen Jones did of course come to the attention of FBEL when he played a part in the Anna Soubry incident, written about in the article to be found by following the link here.

When that Newsnight material is surveyed as a whole, with Owen Jones lapsing into accusations of racism of the sort that were levelled at pre-“Robinson” UKIP, with Woolfe, a mixed-race gentleman, robustly reproving the allegation, the programme looked like button-pressing to inspire a certain section of the audience to flock to the Brexit Party. The reader should note with interest that Jones raised a talking point whereby the Brexit Party was called a “vehicle for the Establishment” (Jones, of course, could not possibly be the same sort of thing). It appears that the British Government is held in such low esteem that its mouthpieces, on flagship BBC news programmes, are accusing each other of being “of the Establishment” in order to meet the expectations of the support-base they have accrued.

Those who have flocked to the Brexit Party, and those who are thinking of it, might want to reconsider and ask, has it been cobbled together for those people who could not bring themselves to vote for UKIP in the upcoming European election? Of the prospect of this, with regards to UKIP, Gerard Batten had the following to say:

UKIP, the authentic party of Brexit, is ready to contest it. The Tories will be wiped off the European electoral map should they fail to deliver full and unencumbered exit from the European Union on the 29th of March.

People who are ready to vote UKIP in the European election may want to ask, why does Batten give a monkey’s nut about the European political map? And people who are still staking any hope in UKIP for broader success really need to come to terms with the fact that the associations that Batten has made with internet shills and agent provocateurs was to entirely divest the party of its electoral potential. It was killed off deliberately. That being said, and as Jacob Rees-Mogg lately pointed out, UKIP may well use the actor who plays the part of “Tommy Robinson” as bait to entice a few thousand, who cannot shake off the delusion that “Robinson” is the anointed one, to partake in the European election.

Rees-Mogg’s “Robinson” intervention came as part of an interview or a piece at ConservativeHome. Via The Sun, he said:

“I’d be very concerned if there were a delay in our departure date, that that would be the way for Tommy Robinson to win the European elections.

“Say we had a delay, and Tommy Robinson is now linked one way or another to Ukip – if we go beyond July, then there would be European elections, and you would see that in an election people don’t really care about that it would be a free hit to vote for an extremist.

“It is an opportunity to protest, and I think the protest would be huge if the date had been delayed.”

Some would excuse this as a warning to Government not to delay Brexit, but in all reality, the Government must know that support for “Robinson” is astroturfed. In that case, it is clearly a suggestion as to how people should treat the election, with the prospect of “Robinson” being elected acting as a greater motivator for those, out of horror, who would vote to deny him, than for those who would elevate him. Of course, the more effective way to protest – because Rees-Mogg quite clearly understands the potential for registering discontent – would be to refuse to participate: to boycott. And yet, Rees-Mogg clearly enjoins people to vote in the European election, telling them that it’s ok because they don’t really care about it.

There are plenty of MPs and politicians that look as harmless as Rees-Mogg, and purport to possess a principle by which you can feel safe in making them a spokesman for you – and yet they are in fact dangerously deceptive. This is the nature of the beast – because it is allowed to flourish. “Bait and switch” is the term for what Britons must contend with when being persuaded to abdicate personal power into the hands of a representative who, having received it, does something contrary to the conditions by which it was relinquished. Even now, most Britons don’t understand or appreciate the existence of persistent Government-by-deception that wants to gather up consent to rule through parties enough, all across the ostensibly manufactured spectrum, for everyone to vote for. It is the great scam of all time, is British politics: everyone votes, and in doing so legitimises a party that got less than half of the ballot. Not one time, but many times. Over again. And the general progression of Government always continues in a certain direction, no matter who “wins”.

The “country’s” participation in the European election should certainly be one of the first victims of a Fake Brexit, and the withholding of votes in a British general election (with votes withheld for all but independents at locals) should follow as soon as the opportunity allows. After that, with their real power demonstrated to them in the shape of an illegitimate assembly in Westminster, it may dawn on more people that the system of British politics is not fit for purpose at any time, in or out of the EU – it is, after all, only supposed to present the illusion of the rightful sovereign republic (the Commonwealth). Maybe, in the end, the benefit of the EU has been in our gaining an understanding of how government should be properly constituted (so that it safe from conmen and criminals selling us down the river), and the extraction of Britain from the EU provide the starting point for all the real work to come. There’s much more at stake for Parliament than a reaction against its denying no-deal Brexit.

 

Further reading:

With Brexit causing mass loss of confidence in Government, damage limitation begins (with the outright solution never mentioned) (link)

Delegitimising Parliament: why “we the people” must stop voting (link)

Feature image by ITV News.

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