In a triple-header of revelations today, ‘The Slog’ assembles the evidence to condemn the Prime Minister as an anti-democratic, unconstitutional and enthusiastic supporter of ‘Superstate’ hegemony and coordinated European defence. We trace her suspicious rise to power, the defence agreements signed during 2018 that nobody knew about, and how the media have been cowed into censoring the real nature of the October 31st Article 50 extension agreement.
Part 1: Quick, quick, slow
Things were odd from the outset of the Brexit saga. What ought to have happened turned out, again and again, to be replaced by something abnormal.
David Cameron handed a hospital pass to the British People in early 2016 when he announced that there would be a Referendum on whether to Remain in the EU or Leave it. He did so because he felt certain that Remain would win, and thus once and for all shut up the 60-90 influential Leavers in his Party….while arresting any chance that there might be a mass desertion by that ginger group to UKIP.
During the referendum, I was told by two sources (one in Washington, the other in Brussels) that the UK “would not be allowed to leave the EU”. The reason given to me was geopolitical defence considerations. I assumed they were referring to ballot rigging. When Leave unexpectedly won, I regarded the source information as almost certainly wrong.
With two weeks to go to the Referendum, opinion polls had begun to show Leave opening up an 8% gap. At that moment, Jo Cox was murdered, and the attacker tried and banged up with minimal publicity. Remainers milked the event, and the lead shrank to 3%. Here’s the poll of polls from the time:
Having lost the vote, Cameron nevertheless vowed to keep his word by staying on to see through the Brexit process. Within four days he was gone. No Cabinet coup against him was mentioned: he was merely (and suddenly) an UnPrime Minister.
Two viable candidates for the Conservative leadership then emerged. Andrea Leadsom – a confirmed Leaver – was known to have a clear lead among the activist vote. Theresa May was one of the longest-serving Home Secretaries in British history. She had shown herself in that role to be extremely happy to invent a new “crime” bafflingly called ‘non-violent extremism’. What she seemed hopeless at was blocking Jihadists from getting into Britain, and being located once they’d arrived. This enabled MI6 to continue declaring high-level emergencies, but not at catching those responsible for major incidents like the Manchester atrocity. Security agencies, after all, need dangerous enemies: without them, they’re out of a job….or at the very least, their budgets get cut.
Just before Mrs May became Home Secrtary, the Ministry of Defence in London produced a Top Secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order in Britain as follows: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The last of these was described in the paper as the biggest threat. The leaker of this document was none other than Julian Assange.
This was the somewhat censorious and slightly hysterical culture our current Prime Minister found at the Home Office in 2010. During her term there, among other things, Mrs May presided over a phone-hacking plot in the British media that somehow managed to let every perpetrator but one (Cameron’s previous press secretary at Number Ten) get away. But it left the MSM media set in fear and disarray.
Andrea Leadsom pulled out of the race to become the next Conservative leader, saying it was in the “best interests of the country at such a time of instability”. Standing next to her when she made this unexplained departure from the contest was Steve Baker – a dedicated and heartfelt Leaver closely aligned with her campaign, and now still a determined Leaver with strong suspicions about Whitehall perfidy in relation to Brexit.
May having avoided the Leave-dominated Tory activist vote, 1922 Chairman Graham Brady bestowed the diadem upon her head.
In the weeks that followed, a number of decisions were taken, and people put in place. Leaver Boris Johnson became foreign secretary, but was immediately embroiled in (and thus distracted by) the Skripal poisoning farce and subsequent Russophobia that ensued. David Davis (also a Leaver) was given the task of negotiating Brexit, but within weeks it became obvious to his team that a parallel “negotiation” was taking place, headed by another May appointee from Whitehall, Oliver Robbins….a notorious EU federalist who had chaired the main pressure group for a United States of Europe while at Cambridge. Davis was also regularly thwarted in his attempts to build a properly accommodated team by the rabidly Remain Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond.
With the exception of Liam Fox, the rest of the Cabinet were Remainers of one ferocity or another.
Our unelected Prime Minister Theresa May triggered Article 50 shortly before 12:30pm on March 29 2017…..more than seven months after her Coronation. No credible explanation has ever been offered as a reason for such a delay. We can be certain, however, that it gave the European Commission in Brussels some much needed breathing space in which to liaise geopolitically, and sort out its stonewalling strategy.
Despite this built-in advantage for a Remain Executive, it was rapidly made clear to May that both the 1922 Committee and the European Reform Group within the Conservative Party would be monitoring progress carefully. By April 2017, she was already having her ear bent by eurosceptics about foot-dragging at Hammond’s Treasury and obstructionism from Whitehall. There is clear and repeated anecdotal evidence that – in the light of a huge fall-off in support for UKIP and a Labour Party at war with itself – May was “advised” that, with an increased majority following a snap General Election, she could safely ignore the Tory Leaver minority. Almost immediately she called that election….with flagrant disregard for the recently passed Law making stricter Five-Year Terms the general rule.
A compliant media went along with the spin that a new influx of Tory candidates would produce more euro-sceptic believers (this was nonsense) and also give her a stronger negotiating position with Brussels….an odd claim, given that Britain held (in terms of the trade deficit and its contributions to the EU budget) all the high face-cards. Bizarrely, UKIP campaigned only minimally, the idea being that most of its voters would support the Tories rather than solidly-Remain Labour.
All of these assumptions proved to be wrong, and a brilliant campaign of ‘Corbyn Sanctification’ from Momentum (spearheaded by a ground-smart social media strategy) resulted in the Tories losing their majority, and becoming dependent on a triumphant DUP for support. In the months following the DUP deal, the UK side became notably more strident about Ulster being treated as an integral part of the United Kingdom – which it has been since 1923 – but with an open border as per the Good Friday Anglo-Irish Peace Agreement. A complete unwillingness by Brussels to accept alternatives or time limits led to stalemate. But notably (despite her dependence on DUP support) Theresa May showed no desire to walk away and leave the EU without a deal. Observers were puzzled as to why this was, given a No Deal scenario would hit the EU far harder than it would Britain.
What most of those observers didn’t know (along with 95% of the public) was that, away from the Brexit spotlight, the Prime Minister was signing several European military unification measures that were in and of themselves certain to neuter any Brexit outcome.
REVEALED: HOW MAY SAID “BREXIT MEANS BREXIT”, BUT THEN SECRETLY SIGNED AWAY OUR MILITARY SOVEREIGNTY
Date: April 15, 2019Author: John Ward21 Comments
Theresa May is always happy to be photographed with our armed forces. But throughout 2018, she signed five separate EU military union directives to reliquish British control over them…..and kept Parliament in the dark about her neocon treachery. Secrecy has always been her preference. Her unconstitutional power-grab continues to march on, largely undetected by The People – and unreported by the mainstream British media.
Part 2: Theresa’s Euroarmy quickstep
It’s hard to believe that Theresa May is anything other than fully-signed up to the US Alt State’s neocon foreign policy. She will have developed contacts in it via MI6 while at the Home Office, and it’s clear she works well with them. Donald Trump is, on the whole, not part of that Alt State: he has criticised her Withdrawal Agreement as “a great deal for the EU”. As part and parcel of her bent towards NATO, energy geopolitics and keeping the Saudis happy, it is equally clear that she has zero respect for the British Constitution, flouting it at every turn.
On April 14th 2018 (a year ago yesterday) May ordered the RAF to take part in a completely unjustified bombing of Syria, neatly using the excuse of Parliament being away on Easter recess as the reason for not having it debated in the House. As the raid had been planned some 18 days previously, her excuse was and remains spurious: she involved the UK in an unprovoked attack on Syrian leader Assad – despite the complete lack of evidence of any genuine chemical weapons attack at all, let alone Basshar Assad’s involvement in it – and as such ignored a long-established constitutional precedent that, under such circumstances, Parliament must give its approval.
Her acquiescence in the secret formation of an EU army in concert with NATO represents another case in point. EU leaders have lied about their goal of creating such a standing army for years. In 2003 Tony Blair wrote in The Times, “There is no such concept as a European army”….and even during the 2016 referendum, both MSM and Remainers lied about it. The Guardian said, ‘Claims from the leave side about moves to unify Europe’s armed forces are nothing more than fantasy.’ Lord Ashdown said the idea of an EU army was ‘nonsense’ and ‘for the birds’. Nick Clegg insisted, “the idea we’re going to have a European air force, a European army is simply not true.”
It is inconceivable that Mrs May (and her close ally Michael Fallon) didn’t know this during the election: but both voted to remain. Once the referendum was over, Defence Secretary Fallon and others ministers rubber-stamped EU proposals for closer military integration. The EU Security and Defence Implementation Plan, the European Defence Action Plan vastly increased the powers and remit of the European Defence Agency and the European Defence Fund. Every last step towards tying the UK in militarily (taken by the six EU Councils since we voted to leave) binds us into EU military plans, Brexit or no Brexit.
This was done because, in October 2016, May instructed the Cabinet Office, Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence to lock us into the emerging European Defence Union. In June 2017, she attended the European Council where she approved the European Defence Fund, the European Defence Industrial Development Programme, and PESCO. But in her statement to Parliament the following week, she omitted all references to it. This too was unconstitutional.
Her utter dishonesty continued. Early in 2018, Alastair Brockbank, the Cabinet Office Europe Unit’s Defence Adviser, signed an agreement binding Britain into the Framework Partnership Agreement with the EU’s defence policy, structures and rulebook. But May’s government insisted we would not be part of it. Belatedly, the Government slid through a ‘Technical Note’ confirming that “The UK welcomes the agreement that future arrangements on CSFP [Common Security and Foreign Policy] and CSDP [Common Security and Defence Policy] could become effective during the Implementation Period.” Just one half of one page of the 600+pps Withdrawal Agreement quietly promises that the UK will, after Brexit, continue to contribute to “the European Defence Agency, the European Union Institute for Security Studies, and the European Union Satellite Centre, as well as to the costs of Common Security and Defence Policy operations”. The Commission’s own stats show that, during the period 2021-28, this will cost us €31.3 billion.
The United Kingdom will not have any vote or say (under Article 156 of the WA) in the policies pursued with that money. The EU could invade Hungary, and we’d have to stump up for it. Further, complying with EU directives on defence leaves us still under the control of the European Court of Justice. The madness continues into the Political Declaration, Article 80 of which calls for ‘a broad, comprehensive and balanced security partnership’. Article 104 confirms the ‘United Kingdom collaboration in relevant current and future projects of the European Defence Agency’.
The “big sticking point” in the Brexit negotiations has been the lack of time-limit on an Irish border backstop. None of the aforementioned signed agreements have any time limits on them. Yet as late as 27th November last year, Lord Hague claimed that May’s deal ensures “we are not expected to be a part of” more EU centralisation, including in the military context.
The former head of the Secret Intelligence Service Sir Richard Dearlove, Sir Rocco Forte, Martin Howe QC, Lord Lawson, Sir Paul Marshall, Major General Julian Thompson and Lord Trimble signed a declaration saying, “The ‘deal’ surrenders British national security by subordinating UK defence forces to Military EU control and compromising UK Intelligence capabilities.”
To lie to Parliament from the Despatch Box about “taking back control and honouring the 2016 decision of the British People” is also, of course, a clearcut contempt of Parliament and, in normal times, would result in the resignation of the perpetrator. But these are far from normal times, and the Constitution is being ignored on an almost weekly basis.
That is true of areas around Brexit that go well beyond military matters.
Olly Robbins is a trusted ally of Theresa May, and she directly connived in his Whitehall conspiracy to overshadow, obstruct and than displace David Davis as OIC Brexit bargaining. Steve Baker has given unvarnished and damning evidence to the Cash Brexit Committee alleging clear cases of civil servants wilfully ignoring action requests given by elected officials. Frustrated and humiliated, David Davis resigned in July 2018, telling the PM in his resignation letter that ‘the current trend of policy and tactics makes it less and less likely that the UK will leave the customs union and single market.’ How right he was. May claimed that she would now take over negotiations personally; this too was a lie. Working directly with his German counterpart and without any elected chaperone, Robbins put together a capitulation that was translated first into German, and then French, before being approved by Merkel and Macron….and only then presented to May.
For any senior Whitehall official to conduct foreign affairs in this manner is a crime beyond breaking the Constitution: it represents a coup d’état against the sovereign power of Parliament and its Executive. And Therasa May is very clearly implicated in it.
Since that moment, not one single word of the Diktat has been changed. Barnier lied about it having been “exhaustively negotiated”, and Theresa May was directly complicit in that lie.
Having bullied her Cabinet into accepting a Brino (Brexit in Name Only) Withdrawal Agreement, Mrs May then tried various threats, false “there is no alternative” claims and not a little bribery to push it through the Commons. MPs have rejected it three times. When told by Speaker Bercow that this was unconstitutional, May ignored the comment and told Parliament she would ask for an extension to March 29th as the leaving date. When Tory MPs Bill Cash and John Redwood told her in the House that only a full-on repeal of the Article 50 Act could render that legal, she ignored them too, took advice, and did it with a Legal Instrument. The advice has been kept secret from the House…..along with all of her sly defence commitments.
All those things too are unconstitutional. She should’ve been removed by Parliamentary vote. Instead, she is being protected by Tory MPs who are, equally unconstitutionally, trying to undermine and reverse a Brexit decision taken after a binding referendum. (And equally, the plan of Yvette Cooper and Hillary Benn to make No Deal illegal are every bit as reprehensible).
The new departure date of April 12th came and went. Mrs May flew to Brussels and grovelled for more time. Now she has an extension to October 31st 2019.
In the light of this, the British MSM have stuck firmly to the line that no onerous conditions are to be inflicted upon Britain during the extension period.
As the final instalment will demonstrate later today, this too is a complete lie.
You can read Part 1 of this series here
The truth about Theresa May’s “flexible” extension
Date: April 15, 2019Author: John Ward28 Comments
It cannot have escaped anyone’s attention that Theresa May always looks more at home among the Brussels neocons than she does when facing the House of Commons. Perhaps, being a parson’s daughter, she is more at home telling the truth to eurocrats than lying to MPs. In this third and final part of today’s three-parter, we look at the Devil in the detail of the Prime Minister’s less than flexible flextension agreement with the EU.
Part 3: Dirty Dancing with the Dictators
Having coined the term ‘Brextension’, I was somewhat miffed to discover the British MSM had decided that ‘flextension’ – a risible bit of Orwellian Newspeak that emanated from Donald Tusk’s office – was a better description of the new October 31st phoney war. The more I delved into the details of the October 31st extension, the angrier I got. Far from being (to quote the BBC) “a soft extension with no onerous clauses in it of the kind demanded by President Macron”, it is in reality about as flexible as a prehistoric tree.
The degree of British media self-censorship in relation to the Brextension Diktat simperingly accepted by Theresa May on April 11th has been so consistent in its synthetic acceptance of Brussels spin, it cannot be put down to journalistic incompetence or simple idleness. The restraints to which Theresa May has signed up are so numerous – so ever present on almost every page – they couldn’t possibly be missed by even the most drunken tabloid hack.
One is left suspecting (as always these days) the threat of D-Notices all round unless the media behaved. And so, naturally, they did.
Take, for example, Article 50(3) of the European Council Decision (EDC) of last week: (my emphases)
“…the United Kingdom shall facilitate the achievement of the Union’s tasks and shall refrain from any measure which could jeopardise the attainment of the Union’s objectives, in particular when participating in the decision-making processes of the Union.”
This is a truly astonishing codicil which can only be interpreted in one way: either you vote for everything we want, or you are out. There literally is no other understanding of it beyond, “your vote is either for us or worthless”. From the Treaty of Rome all the way through to Lisbon, this is illegal under the EU Constitution.
The supposedly laissez-faire extension continues in the same vein:
“This extension excludes any re-opening of the Withdrawal Agreement. Any unilateral commitment, statement or other act by the United Kingdom should be compatible with the letter and the spirit of the Withdrawal Agreement, and must not hamper its implementation. Such an extension cannot be used to start negotiations on the future relationship.”
The demands of this insistence are beyond funny. “We give Britain all the time it needs to agree completely with us on everything they don’t agree with us about”.
Allegedly, May’s Brextension has been dubbed ‘flextension’ because it allows us to leave earlier if an agreement is reached. Not true: the only circumstance in which we can Brexit early is if the UK ratifies the Withdrawal Agreement. “Tell us how wrong you have been and sign our diktat, and you are free to leave”.
But next up is a real doozey: I wonder what percentage of the British electorate grasp this: there is no exit on WTO terms allowed for in the extension period. In a way, this is really a recognition of what Cooper the teenage Vandal has already achieved in her rushed-through banning Law. But the Prime Minister has now confirmed in a signed deal with the EU that we will not leave without a deal. This will make it ten times more difficult to repeal the Cooper Act. We are now effectively committed to a deal in some form or other until November 1st 2019.
It’s not hard to see the game plan here, because it is classic EU practice: “we will keep on extending until you say yes”. And unless our Political Class allows The People to have a general election (no chance of that one, then) there is nothing The People can do to defend the Sovereign Decision of The People. Um…..
That, folks, is my definition of trussed up in a concrete slab and dropped into the Hudson River….with the proviso, “Good luck – and please feel free to wriggle as much as you like”.
And here’s one final killer punch on the nose for the Cabinet, Parliament, Constitution and People: the agreement was signed on May’s behalf before a single one of them had been allowed to comment on it. The Chief Executive of Britain’s sovereign body signed this Treaty of Compiègne without the approval of any other constitutional officers. Tinfoil Theresa obviously sees herself as a monarch with Divine Right to absolute, prerogative powers. Not even La Thatcher would’ve pulled a stunt like that.
Arise, Queen Theresa I.
Not only did Theresa May – yet again – disguise the real nature of the prison we have come to call Flextension when reporting to Parliament, so keen were the Commons troughers to buzz off in search of the Easter skive, very few of them even bothered to read beyond the sanitised press brief issued by Donald Tooooosk.
I am delighted to recognise that others with sharper eyes pointed me at the full version, and that I have drawn heavily from their conclusions – because I agree with all of them, based on the content therein.
This is the situation that we Brits – allegedly the cradle of modern freedoms – must now come to recognise, but not accept:
• Our Prime Minister is batting for the other side, cares not a fig for our laws, and suffers delusions of religious grandeur. She must be taken down.
• Far from working hard to take The People’s part, Corbyn Labour is negotiating with her clique in order to dilute not just Brexit, but even Brino. It has failed to recognise the federalist EU for what it is – a neoliberal rich capitalist’s club. It has fallen victim to the siren calls of pc fanatics and narcissist minorities….and as such, it no longer speaks for the majority of citizens.
• The great majority of the Conservative Party is very happy to go along with May’s nightmare vision of a neoliberal economy and neocon foreign policy, because it is largely peopled by self-serving nonentities of little foresight who are incapable of independent, contrarian thought.
• The choice for those who value self determination, devolution and Citizens’ control over their destiny remains the same: role over and accept remote control from distant unacountables, or get rid of a Remainer Parliament.
In her unctuous wisdom, Yvetter Cooper has removed the option of WTO No Deal. And her arch enemies the Tory Party have no stomach for an election.
I do not and never will approve of violent demonstrations. But in the current swamp, it must be very hard for ordinary people to summon up a viable alternative.
So well done, Westminster, Fleet Street and Downing street: you fucked us over again.
We have arrived unhappily at the Place Called Here for all kinds of long, medium and short term reasons: lack of good history and civics teaching in schools, pernicious or gullible ideology, 40 years of Brussels lies about federal, fiscal, and military ambitions, weakness among those who followed Thatcher on the subject of EU superpower megalomania, American neocon hegemony, the growing engorgement of military intelligence aspirations, robotic Labour blindness on the nature of free-speech democracy, the irresponsible sociopathy of David Cameron, and the recruitment of Theresa May by the corporacratic globalists.
It took me four months to finally twig what my initial two sources from Spring 2016 had been on about: the slow and steady assurance of the Fat Controllers that public apathy, short memories and wide-eyed trust would allow for even the biggest plebiscite in British history to be reformulated, then diluted and finally poured down the sink….without the slightest chance of any form of telling revolution in British politics taking place.
The point of this unique one day triple-header at The Slog is not to make wild conspiracy theory accusations. Rather, it is to use strange events, unprecedented actions and above all bald facts to reiterate two simple points:
1. Nigel Farage can call his new toy ‘The Brexit Party’, but the issue at stake here is infinitely bigger than that, and extends far beyond the British Isles: the issue at stake is a citizen’s Personal Destiny Control (PDC) versus unaccountable Super-state lust for power
2. Disgust, abstention and shouting at the telly are no longer fit for purpose. The sole weapon left in our armoury is The Vote. The sole will necessary is preparedness to use it intelligently to take away the powers of the élites one by one. If we do get euro-elections, then we must do just that
With grateful thanks to ‘The Slog’ – John Ward for an excellent insightful piece
LIVING STONES 