Mrs May said 109 times at the Despatch Box in the House of Commons that the United Kingdom would leave the European Union on the 29th March 2019, in accordance with the provisions of Article 50 in the Treaty of Lisbon. But the EU has brushed its own Article 50 aside at Mrs May’s request. Britain did not leave the EU on 29th March because Mrs May’s misnamed Withdrawal Agreement with Angela Merkel has not yet got through the House of Commons.
The true name for Mrs May’s Withdrawal Agreement is the Withdrawal (of Democracy) Agreement. It sets up a Joint Committee in Whitehall (Articles 164 to 169) to rule the relationship between the EU and the UK throughout the transition period (Articles 7&131), which it will extend to 31st December 2099 (Article 132). Clause 2 of Article 166 says that its decisions will “be binding” on the EU & UK, in other words this Joint Committee will overrule the British government.
As the Court of Justice of the EU will resolve all disputes between the EU and UK sides of this Joint Committee (Articles 168 & 174), this committee will be the means whereby the EU will impose Direct Rule on the UK. Direct Rule by the EU will make Parliament in Westminster redundant, and the proceedings of the Joint Committee will be “confidential”, in other words, secret (clause 10 of Annex VIII).
The actual existence of this Joint Committee may also be secret, and it has never been mentioned by the BBC so far. Ignorance in Britain of the contents of the Withdrawal Agreement is understandably almost universal, as few people, and least of all MPs, have the patience to read through its 585 pages of dense teutonic verbiage. So ironically MPs who voted against Mrs May’s misnamed Withdrawal (EU) Bill are mistakenly accused of voting to stop Britain escaping from the EU.
Mrs May and the rest of the Remain MPs in the Commons, at least three-fourths of the total number there, will do anything to avoid No Deal (with the EU). No Deal is the WTO Deal, the terms of trade of the World Trade Organisation, by which those countries outside the EU, the majority in the world, trade with the EU. Those terms of trade are the General Agreements on Terms of Trade, known as GATT, which have been reached in the eight rounds of international GATT negotiations since the late 1940’s. The WTO oversees the operation of GATT, and all the major trading states in the world belong to the WTO. The EU itself belongs to the WTO, and so is subject to the World Trade Court of the WTO in Geneva. Since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 the EU’s share of world trade has fallen by half.
If Britain leaves the EU without Parliament agreeing to the EU deal (Mrs May’s misnamed Withdrawal Agreement) and opts for the WTO deal instead, then Britain will regain its independence. It will become self-governing like other countries outside the EU that trade with the EU under WTO rules. Once out of the EU, British voters will be able to vote their sovereign government in a sovereign Parliament out of office as they could before 1973. Whereas British voters can never vote the EU Commission out of office now.
Because the Leave victory on the 23rd June 2016 showed the British people to be unreliable subjects of the EU, the EU will withdraw democracy from the UK. And that is what Mrs May’s Withdrawal Agreement is for. The Joint Committee junta in it will abolish democracy. That is why Mrs May doesn’t care about the electoral consequences of her alliance with Jeremy Corbyn to get her (Anti)Withdrawal Agreement through the Commons. Because once her egregious Agreement gets through Parliament, the Tory & Labour and other parties will not matter anymore, and neither will elections or the electorate. They will all be trumped by the Joint Committee, and the EU has now given Mrs May until next Halloween to get her Agreement through Parliament.
The Withdrawal (of democracy) Agreement is Whitehall’s response to the 23rd June 2016. The EU has always been the bureaucrats’ idea of Heaven, and Whitehall bureaucrats feel far more loyalty to their opposite numbers in the EU than to the British electorate, who they regard as ignorant yokels. The Referendum victory for Leave showed that the Commons could soon have a majority of Leave MPs. So the EU had to act fast.
Mrs May’s mission from Angela Merkel is to force her Agreement through Parliament as the EU’s Final Solution to the British Problem. And in that mission to withdraw democracy she has the support of those MPs in the Commons who campaigned for Remain before the 23rd June 2016. Remain MPs would much rather be ruled by EU bureaucrats, than by the dangerously unpredictable and swinish multitude of British voters.
Remain MPs regard the vote for British Home Rule on the 23rd June 2016 as a racist & xenophobic Hate Crime. Consequently Remain MPs are wary of the ballot box itself, and see universal suffrage as a dangerous indulgence of populism. Populism gives a voice to the vulgar, plebeian concerns of the common herd, and those concerns can speak through the ballot box, as they did on the 23rd June 2016.
Whitehall and Westminster both agree that the 2016 Referendum revolt showed that British voters are dangerously patriotic. Better therefore that democracy is withdrawn altogether through the covert imposition of direct EU rule through a secret junta. The Joint Committee in Mrs May’s Withdrawal (of Democracy) Bill is just the junta to do that, it is a masterpiece of bureaucratic cunning.
OK Ralph, some facts. You reject the WA, fair enough. But advocate no deal. This will not get through Parliament and no amount of shouting for it will get you it. Plus, nobody actually advocated for that during the referendum, so it would be implementing a path that nobody voted for. Where do you go from here, in the real world?
Korea, you say that nobody campaigned in the Referendum for No Deal. No Deal is the deal offered as the terms of trade of the World Trade Organisation, which the EU is signed up to as a WTO member, and world trade is carried on under those WTO rules.
Gerard Batten, an MEP for UKIP of many years standing, co-authored a book published in 2014 called “The Road To Freedom : How Britain Can Escape from the EU”. In this book Gerard correctly discerned that Article 50 was introduced into the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon as a trap to catch EU member states escaping from the EU.
Gerard Batten said that the British government should ignore Article 50 absolutely and declare Britain’s unconditional independence unilaterally. It is Britain’s right to do so, as national self-determination is a fundamental right in international law.
After Britain had declared unconditional independence, Gerard advocated Britain trading with the EU like all the other nations outside the EU do now.
You say that nobody advocated No Deal, the WTO deal, but Gerard Batten did, among many others. You are mistaken as to a matter of fact.
Was this plan stated on Leave referendum campaign publications distributes to the general public? i.e. ‘This is our plan to leave the EU’
It still doesn’t adjust the parliamentary arithmetic though. There is no appetite for no deal in the HoC. These are the options at present, WA, general election, referendum or revoke. Unless you can enlighten me of one that I’ve missed that is also possible in the current situation?
Was our handing over our armed services to the EU, vehemently denied at the time, on the ballot paper? Was the Global Compact on Migration signed up to by May and the EU on the ballot paper? Were the promises made that the Government would implement, straight away, the wishes of the people adhered to?
The people voted to leave. We were told to that the purpose of Art. 50 was to reach a deal to ease the separation for both sides, lies as we find out from the resulting surrender document which is purely to keep us tied to the EU. It was understood, on trust, that if a satisfactory mutual deal could not be reached, then we would just leave on WTO rules and this was written into law.
The same “numbers” you refer to in the HoC voted this law into existence by a large majority, and also voted against the WA three times with majorities ranging from large to massive. These same “numbers” are also only in the HoC because they overwhelmingly stood on a mandate in a GE, to honour the wishes of the people.
To now try to write anything into or out of the binary referendum question is nonsense. The only democratic and honourable course is to leave now on WTO rules, although it is clear that many reputations are beyond salvage.
Reply to comment by
Korea MacLean on May 7, 2019 at 2:45 pm : –
Korea, you say that the Withdrawal Agreement says that the Joint Committee can extend the Transition Period only by up to one or two years. That is what Article 126 says, but Article 132 amends that.
Article 132 of the Withdrawal Agreement attracted attention from the start when the WA was first published online. Because its phrase “31st December 20XX” will allow the Joint Committee to extend the Transition Period until the end of this century.
Anybody can look the WA up online and find Article 132 and read the phrase “31st December 20XX”. It will be no surprise when “20XX” becomes 2099.
I think I’ve found the problem. I’m referring to the final WA published 25th Novemebr 2018. The document you are referring to seems to be outdated. Is it the draft?
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/759019/25_November_Agreement_on_the_withdrawal_of_the_United_Kingdom_of_Great_Britain_and_Northern_Ireland_from_the_European_Union_and_the_European_Atomic_Energy_Community.pdf
I am referring to the Withdrawal Agreement published by the European Union available online now. If it is out of date then that is rather curious. It may be that the EU has two or more versions of the Withdrawal Agreement to call upon, and the EU Court of Justice can choose the version that it prefers. The EUCJ can do that as it is the supreme interpreter of EU law. I am confident that the EU Court of Justice will prefer the version of the Withdrawal Agreement that locks the UK into the transition period until 31st December 2099.
Regardless of whether Article 132 says that the Joint Committee can extend the transition period until 31st December 2099, the Joint Committee will be able to do so in any case. Clause 2 of Article 166 says that the decisions of the Joint Committee will be “binding on the EU & the UK”. So the Joint Committee will be a junta that subjects Britain to dictatorial rule.
The EU side of the Joint Committee can propose anything it likes, including an extension of the transition period to 31st December 2099. If the UK side of the Joint Committee disputes that, then the Court of Justice of the European Union will decide between them.
The Joint Committee can decide to do anything it wants, such as placing Britain under martial law, or increasing the compensation to be paid by Britain to the EU for Brexit from the proposed £39 billion a year to £390 billion a year, and so on. And it will be an EU Court that decides whether to support such decisions of the Joint Committee.
The draft Withdrawal Agreement went online on 15th November last year. Article 132 in it with its “31st December 20XX” phrase quickly became notorious. The Telegraph soon had a half page interview with Floella Braverman the MP for Fareham in which she denounced Article 132.
But after that the EU Council of Ministers endorsed the Draft Withdrawal Agreement on 25th November anyway.
I assumed that meant that Article 132 was accepted by the European Union. But Korea MacLean has discovered a different version of the Withdrawal Agreement on the British government’s website, dated 25th November.
In this version Article 126 has been renamed as Article 132 and the original Article 132 has gone, who knows where? Whether the original “20XX” version of Article 132 has been deleted from the Withdrawal Agreement altogether, or just moved to a different place in its 585 pages, could take a lot of time wading through the WA’s tedious, trying and tiresome river of verbal excrement to discover.
But my thanks to Korea MacLean for pointing out a version of the Withdrawal Agreement that I had missed.
Article 132 refers to an extention of the transition period. Nowhere does it mention 2099. I noticed some other inaccuracies as well. I wonder what else isn’t entirely true?
Article 132 says that the Joint Committee can extend the transition period to “31st December 20XX”. So the EU side of the Joint Committee can propose the extension of the transition period until 31st December 2099. If the UK side disputes that proposal then the EU Court of Justice will have the last word in settling the dispute (Articles 168 & 174).
What other inaccuracies did you notice Korea? I would really like to know.
ARTICLE 132 Extension of the transition period
1. Notwithstanding Article 126, the Joint Committee may, before 1 July 2020, adopt a single decision extending the transition period for up to one or two years.*
That’s a hell of a lot of extensions that get you to 2099. Which you revised to 20xx in your reply.
Korea, here is clause 1 of Article 132 of the Withdrawal Agreement, I’ve copied and pasted it just now. (The asterisk footnote is at the end of the other clauses in the Article.)
How can you say that I revised 2099 to 20XX ? ( It will happen the other way round before July 2020.)
Article 132.
1. Notwithstanding Article 126, the Joint Committee may, before 1 July 2020, adopt a single decision extending the transition period up to [31 December 20XX].*
* In case of extension, the Union will notify other parties to international agreements thereof.
Are you referring to the original document as I copied and pasted directly from it and it seems to be different from yours? Mine says ‘extending the transition period for up to one or two years.*’ . You claim it says ‘extending the transition period up to [31 December 20XX].*’ . I’ve checked from downloads from both UK gov and EU. Your article states 2099 multiple times, in your reply you state 20xx. That is not consistent.
I have forwarded this article on to my own MP (with whom I have been in dialogue since last November on this issue). I have been telling her that this ‘Deal’ not a Deal but a Treaty and that Britain will be annihilated by the EU who have long wished for us to be squeezed out of existence!
My covering comment to her is as follows:-
“I am sending you the attached article that, I believe, accurately encapsulates the exact principles behind the Withdrawal Treaty that was given to Mrs May (by the EU) to enact. If the Treaty is passed though the HOC it will mean the complete and utter capitulation of any semblance of British democracy. The death of British Democracy will be laid wholly and completely at the door of the Parliamentarians who will have enabled it.
Mrs May is, even now, scheming to acquire Labour Party support to carry out this iniquity. Never in my lifetime do I remember a PM who has worked so tirelessly to deliver this county into the hands of a foreign power. The infamy will live long in the annals of history and the Conservative Party will have been annihilated in the process.”
Top marks for having forwarded this document to your MP Frederica and I note you have previously taken this subject up before with apparently no discernible reaction.
You may be wondering why this is and in fact the government are continuing to doggedly pursue such a base outcome and in fact I don`t suppose you are the only one who has made their views known.
I believe I had the answer, cat let out of the bag by a female Conservative pontificating on the Local Election Results on BBC News Service this afternoon.
I`m quoting what I thought she said as follows.
When we set out on the Brexit path we said we wanted to continue a close friendly relationship with Europe (don`t think she said the EU) and this withdrawal agreement is the method of continuing that, when it is all completed (i.e. the WA passed to honour our word to parliament and the people – doesn`t matter that it`s In Name Only) then once it is complete we can get back to operating as friends just as we have done before.
Such sweet people -they`ll sell you and your Sovereignty down the river without turning a hair – (Pigs!-Trotters!-Trough!!!!!).
They are all at it, it`s a parliamentary conspiracy and they all hang together in a policy of omerta – well I hope they do all hang together on the same day and the same gibbet- its treason
I’ve been ranting and raving for quite a while that the only explanation for recent political events is that democracy isn’t part of the planned political future. Now the reality is staring us in the face and this article highlights exactly what is happening, frightening stuff, let’s just hope it isn’t too late.
Just been watching Adam Boulton on Sky talking to a chap about what the results of the local elections mean so far and he points out loud and clear that the population is frustrated that the Cons are not getting on with Brexit , but also Labour failing to support the Cons also, he thinks there will be more impetus to getting an agreement done between the two parties.
He failed to mention that will be an agreement to get this WA through parliament and of course there was no mention of this agreement`s toxicity in any terms, never mind this single absolute exposure of direct rule from Brussels by JOINT COMMITTEE.
As you say Flyer – frightening
So how do we get this out to the public at large !!!!!
Posters and flyers. I am working on it,
At last thanks to Ralph Prothero`s exposition I have a concrete easy reading one point answer why the WA must be rejected.
I cannot believe the mass of MPs are unaware of this trap and can only conclude they are silent parties to a major horrible conspiracy against the British people.
Just as I have always refused to believe that the majority of German people were unaware of what was being committed in death camps under their control and in their name.
Would I be correct in believing the Greek arrangement is the pattern for our stitch up (enslavement).
Incidentally if the Labour party are aware of this situation, why are they continuing to negotiate with frau May? makes them part of the conspiracy don`t it??
This article MUST be distributed widely (formally) and responses sought, at least if MSM refuses it must be made viral on the internet.
Mrs May is a liar, if we take notice of the number of times that she said ‘We leave the EU on 29th March 2019’.
The tag of Liar is however pointless. ….. Nobody with sense listens to this stupid woman now. She is a grade one drip !
She is able to bank her salary, and she will get a good pension as an ex PM, so the Tory Party are even bigger drips !
Mrs May’s mendaciously named Withdrawal Agreement enables the EU to seize total power over Britain in a coup d’etat through its so-called Joint Committee. The words in Article 166/2 that the Joint Committee’s “decisions will be binding” on the United Kingdom could not be plainer. Then the transition period in which those decisions will be binding on the UK will be extended until the 31st December 2099.
Once the misnamed Withdrawal Agreement gets through Parliament any results of any elections in the UK will not matter, along with the electorate, or any political parties. The Joint Committee, overseen by the EU Court of Justice, will be a junta ruling Britain until 31st December 2099. That is why Mrs May is laughing.
Can you show.me where you get this date from? I can’t find it in the WA.
Article 132 says that before the 1st July 2020 the Joint Committee can extend the transition period until “31st December 20XX”. Obviously “20XX” can become 2099.
That decision will be taken by a secret committee (clause 10 of Annex VIII) that overrules the British government (clause 2 of Article 166).
Where do you get this secret stuff from? It’s called a Joint Committee, co-chaired by both the UK and the EU. Seems sensible in the circumstances seeing as it is a transition for the UK leaving the EU and they need to have agreement. I think the word you’re looking for is confidential, which you could have used as that is the term used in the WA. You seem to have embellished the language for your own agenda.
Korea McLean on May 6, 2019 at 8:12 pm.
“Where do you get this secret stuff from? It’s called a Joint Committee, co-chaired by both the UK and the EU. Seems sensible in the circumstances seeing as it is a transition for the UK leaving the EU and they need to have agreement. I think the word you’re looking for is confidential, which you could have used as that is the term used in the WA. You seem to have embellished the language for your own agenda.”
Korea, as you say the word that clause 10 of Annex VIII in the Withdrawal Agreement uses is “confidential”. “Confidential” means “private”, referring to something not to be made public, surely you will agree on that. So the proceedings of the Joint Committee are not to be made public. The location, the members, the decisions of the Joint Committee could all be kept private and confidential under the words of Annex VIII. In other words the proceedings of the Joint Committee are to be kept secret from the public.
You say that I have embellished the language of Annex VIII for my own agenda, on the contrary, I have brought out its true meaning. You say that I have an agenda or purpose in writing these articles about the Withdrawal Agreement. My only purpose is to reveal what the Withdrawal Agreement is hiding in its 585 pages of dense, tiring and tiresome verbiage.
The bureaucrats in Brussels and Whitehall deliberately use boredom as a political weapon. They allowed the text of the Withdrawal Agreement to go online, confident that few if any politicians or journalists in Britain could ever read through it even if they tried to. That confidence has been justified.
Ralph Prothero’s explanation and summary of traitor Theresa’s “agreement” should be compulsory reading for every voter. It is a disgrace how obvious it is that MPs have not read it.
“…the 2016 Referendum revolt showed that British voters are dangerously patriotic.”
Then why did they allow “Patriotism” to on the ballot paper?
What exactly, did they expect?