Tories’ Brexit unity fades as Heseltine slams May’s speech
Michael Heseltine at Downing Street in 2017 as he was sacked from his advisory roles for rebelling against the government in a Brexit vote in the House of Lords.
Lord Heseltine was always going to criticise Theresa May. That doesn’t mean he’s not right, though; he is.
Tory hopes of uniting the party behind Theresa May’s latest vision for Brexit faded as former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine dismissed her latest speech as just more “phrases, generalisations and platitudes” which had done nothing to make a deal more likely.
While most Conservative MPs and peers gave the prime minister a period of grace after Friday’s address, Heseltine said all May had done was offer more detail on a set of demands that the European Union had made clear all along it would never agree to.
Talking to the Observer, he said: “The speech just moves us further down the cherry-picking road. It set out the cherries that Britain wants to pick but that approach completely ignores the fact that the EU has said, ‘sorry there is no cherry picking’.”
He added: “Why is it that after 18 months since the referendum we have not got any closer with these issues? The answer is simple: because no one has got any answer about how to do it.”
Source: Tories’ Brexit unity fades as Heseltine slams May’s speech | Politics | The Guardian
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Then again, how about a gloomy prediction. As we have seen from Tory responses to May’s recent speech, regardless of whether she really made any progress, all the various Tory factions, including Rees-Mogg, Johnson and Gove, expressed their support. So did their propaganda arm, the Mail, Express, Sun etc. They will carry on with this regardless until the very end,deal or no deal. Anything the Tories eventually manage to agree with the EU will be presented as a great patriotic victory over the treacherous Europeans. The disunity that we find so obvious will disappear ,again regardless of the actual result of negociations. The Tory Party exists to take, and hold, power. The rest is merely a detail.
What we have, then, is a stalemate. We don’t want to give any more ground, the E.U. doesn’t want to give any ground at all. Where does that leave us? We have our “red lines,” the E.U. is intransigent. What is to be done, if the two sides don’t do what Mrs. May said and try to come to some accord? I was listening to a very interesting programme, today, on Radio 4; on it, E.U. citizens were saying that Michel Barnier’s negotiating timetable was unhelpful and would cause problems for them. It’s not all our guys, as useless as they are. I am increasingly of the feeling that what that German M.E.P. said is true and that Michel Barnier doesn’t want a deal; possibly to try to force us to stay, because they’ll be in trouble without us. I’m sorry but the more that I learn about the E.U. the further and faster I want us to run from it. We seem to be a wilful child who needs to be brought into line. We value our independence too much and that must be beaten out of us. We won’t play the game. President De Gaulle saw it whic his why he didn’t want us in the club in the first place. We have been at odds with Europe since the project began and I don’t see that changing. £ike Theresa May said, we didn’t vote for a distant relationship with our neighbours so, why does the E.U. appear to be promoting just that, or else disrespecting our democracy? Were the E.U. less intransigent, the referendum result, in my opinion, would have been vastly different. I’m not fan of hers but I can’t lay all of the blame at Our Terry’s door, because the other side is being just as, if not more, uncooperative. What to do, then? It’s a game of poker. Who will blink first?
I don’t think the aged Tarzan has anymore status than sturgeon Blair Clegg or the myriad of anti democratic politicians determined to ignore the electorate.
I just wish the Tory Party would speed up its civil war and break asunder.