The party has put up this uplifting video of Saturday’s march. For those of us who were there it’s great to remember that time when you were in the same place as 700,000 like-minded people. For those who weren’t, and who either have always felt nervous or are starting to feel nervous about Brexit, it’s encouraging to see so many people out there winning the argument.
We marched because we demand better than what this Tory Government is offering us. We demand better than the utter mess they are making out of Brexit and we demand a final say on the deal. https://t.co/Mp2XkNrVFV pic.twitter.com/5hlKNdiCSw
— Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) October 22, 2018
Since the march, we’ve seen Dominic Raab go on Marr and effectively say that the extremist wing of his party are more important than peace in Northern Ireland. I mean, how on earth can any minister abdicate his responsibility to the country quite so brazenly?
Then yesterday, Theresa May said we were 95% there as far as a deal was concerned. Well, your brain is only 3% or so of your bodyweight, your heart is less than half a percent and your eyes don’t weigh very much at all – but if you are missing all three, you’re pretty stuffed. What we do know about this deal so far is that it sells out our service based economy, it will kick a lot of stuff into the long grass, so we are effectively flying blind, and there is no agreement on the Northern Irish border which is pretty fundamental to the future of the UK.
The Brexiteers are telling us that we must stick to the “will of the people.” They are no longer offering us any optimistic vision of how wonderful post Brexit Britain will be. Some of them even acknowledge we will be poorer. Surely that shouldn’t be their choice to make.
They are clearly too scared to trust the people to mark their homework because they know there will be a lot of red pen and a Fail grade.
The People’s Vote campaign is now concentrating on changing MPs’ minds. Our next post gives you three things you can do to help that along.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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7 Comments
I could not make sense of what PM May was saying in parliament. She seems to be setting out more conditions (red lines?), amongst which some appear to breach the legal framework for the Single Market.
This would be impossible to accept without treaty change. Opening up treaties is fraught with complications, both practical and political, and not something that could ever happen at the behest of a departing member.
It beggars belief that so many UK politicians, at the highest level, and UK commentators are still so ignorant of EU processes.
What is it about the obsession with quoting 95%?
Until recently we were also by the Chris Grayling, the Secretary of State for Transport, that Crossrail was 95% completed and was set to open in early December this year.
There is now no new opening date, just an admission that the project is at least nine months behind schedule.
amateur project managers.
The first 90% of most projects takes 10% of the time, the remaining 10% takes 90%. So if they are right, and it’s 95% finished, we could expect the remaining 5% to take something in the region of 18 years. I remember predicting the failure of that NHS computer system, too. So we should be out of the EU on TM’s estimates by 2040, including a 20% contingency allowance.
I’m pleased the party has “put up” this uplifting video. Sadly I cannot make it work from this site and I can’t even find it on the party’s own website which is as usual visually impressive but otherwise fairly useless…to me anyway.
Keep up the pressure on here, Caron. And I’m pleased you continue to say 700,000 people were there. I have been on a few London demos in my time and observed many more and I think including the people stood watching and the late-comers (all supportive) there were nearer a million there. Not as many as the “million” on the Iraq march but I think we all knew that there were rather more out that day (up to 2 million) which the authorities downplayed as hard as they could. (Meanwhile the official party press releases continue to say only “over half a million” – I just shake my head in wonder…)
Congratulations to the LibDems on this success.
If everybody has been saying (ever since Tim Farron started our Second Referendum campaign two years ago) that we’re too insignificant, too small, to do anything substantial, this is a pretty emphatic refutation of that condescending frame from the big bullies: Labour ad Tories.
700.000 demonstrators (or 1 million according to a very seasoned demonstrator) is a reminder that very many Britons feel existentially insecure with any Brexit.
Turning so many lives topsy turvy for a whim of Farage, or Boris’s leadership ambition, should be a capital crime in any law book.
My deepest sympathy to all my British friends in these wrenchingly uncertain, frightening times.
Bernard
Further support for our call for a “People’s Vote”
https://theconversation.com/brexit-has-already-hurt-eu-and-non-eu-exports-by-up-to-13-new-research-105334
This academic work has been modelling flows of goods and services between the UK and 28 other countries. Normally, devaluation increases exports because they become more competitively priced relative to other countries’ competing products. This work suggests that the £ devaluation as a result of Brexit has not increased the volume of UK exports.
Uncertainty kills economies and even after Brexit day the uncertainty will continue nay it will increase. Brexit needs to be stopped because if it isn’t we face at least a further decade of austerity and we can kiss goodbye to essential services and triple lock. To those that think they have nothing to lose because they feel they have nothing or will be protected because they have retired, think again the old and the weak suffer worst under economic dislocation.