No. 30 - 'Holding our Nerve'?

Dear James, 

For once, Mr Corbyn was right. ‘Hold our nerve? You tell that to the car workers at Nissan in Sunderland!’ It is quite clear that Mrs May is attempting to take us all for a very long ride indeed. Having massively lost the vote for her original deal, she did a hand break turn and is now pretending that the EU will surrender to her demands to rewrite the driving manual at the 11th hour. The ERG gorilla in the back seat is beating its chest with one last, reverberating squeak! 

But she drives recklessly on. She is time wasting. Running down the clock. Why should it take so long to discover once and for all that the Withdrawal Agreement will not be opened and the best she can hope for is a few tweaks to the Protocol? But she tells us that she knows that the EU will crumble. What arrogance! What blindness to reality. It may keep her Brexiteers on side for a few more weeks but it does nothing to solve the interests of the United Kingdom as a whole. What it adds up to is that she is attempting to hold us all to ransom and I for one will never forgive her or her party. 

But it is not just the PM. This ‘Mother of Parliaments’ is complicit in this existential crisis. ‘Mother’ has clearly lost her marbles. The conceit that adversarial politics of the British type is superior to any other kind of democracy is being exposed for what it is – a hotchpotch of jeering MPs, blank faced front benchers, a bewildered opposition and a leader who, against all the procedures and traditions of our ‘unwritten constitution’, suffered, two weeks ago, the biggest parliamentary rebuff in history and yet refused to resign! The world watches this bedlam in consternation. What a way to run a country, they will be saying. So much for democracy! 

And I am afraid James, that you too are collaborating in this farce. Your party has plunged us into this crisis because it was too fearful to stand up against a minority of nationalist zealots and over powerful tabloid press barons. Very soon you are going to have to decide. The ‘party within a party’, the ERG gorillas steering from the back seats, will either have to be confronted or allowed to take over the steering wheel. If the latter occurs then you will become the party of the far right -  sullen, angry and vindictive. So much for the sunlit uplands!

James, Mrs May asks us to hold our nerve but it is your nerve that is being tested. Before it can be tested though, you’ve got to find it!. Will you continue to be lobby fodder for the government. Or will you soon make a principled stand in the interests of the nation? 

The road is running out. The public, business and those Nissan workers in Sunderland, have had enough. The only way to address the issue is to stop the car, request an extension to Article 50 and then put the deal back to the people. 

Please don’t let us down James. 

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent