THE most ludicrous piece of political spin coming from the European Parliament elections this week is the suggestion that an emphatic and ground-breaking victory for the new Brexit Party was somehow really a vote for Remain.
The Brexit Party was only founded six weeks before the ballot, yet it still managed to cruise to a famous win, garnering more votes than the Labour Party and Conservatives combined.
Nigel Farage with the brexit Party's new MEPs who include Ann Widdecombe, a former Tory MP.
Remarkably, the Brexit Party not only topped the poll in the UK but it is also now the biggest political party in the entire European Parliament.
Yet desperate Remainers have, bizarrely, attempted to argue that this incredible vote to leave the EU is somehow proof that most Britons want in fact to stay.
Meanwhile, Tony Blair’s old spin doctor, Alastair ‘Dodgy Dossier’ Campbell, was also arguing that because the Brexit Party was streets ahead in the poll this was evidence that Remain really won.
These people are utterly deluded.
They make the risible claim that if you add up all the votes for the Remain parties – the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Change UK– you get around 40 per cent, a bigger vote share than the Brexit Party on its own.
I am sorry but this is laughable nonsense. It is a bit like arguing that Manchester City should be stripped of the Premier League title and the trophy handed jointly to Watford and Crystal Palace because, between them, they ended up with more points than City at the end of the season.
Nice try, guys, but I am afraid it doesn’t work like that.
But if you want to play that silly game try adding up all the votes for explicitly Brexit parties – the Brexit Party, the Conservatives, Ukip and the DUP – and you get around 45 per cent of the vote.
And I am erring on the side of caution with that calculation by excluding the Labour Party’s vote, whose official position is to leave the EU and which has many staunch Leavers among its supporters, particularly in the northern strongholds.
And it is worth noting that this tsunami of Euroscepticism is no longer a purely British phenomenon – there have been huge increases in support for anti-Brussels parties right across the continent, most notably in France and Italy.
The results last weekend are not a one-off protest either. In fact British people have voted five times in the last five years against the EU.
In 2014 Ukip topped the poll in the European Parliament elections, the first time a party outside of Labour and the Conservatives had topped a nationwide poll for over 100 years.
In 2015 David Cameron led the Conservatives to an unexpected poll victory on the backs of Leave supporters who backed him because he promised a referendum on membership of the EU.
In 2016 we had the referendum victory for Leave with 17.4 million people backing Brexit in the biggest exercise in participatory democracy this nation has ever witnessed.
Then in 2017 more than 84 per cent of voters backed explicitly Leave parties who promised to deliver Brexit in their manifestos – promises that have been broken to their cost.
And last weekend we witnessed another huge victory for Leave. How many times do we have to keep voting before they take heed of what we say?
I’ve said this before, but it is worth repeating – Remainer fanatics are playing a very dangerous game. Democracy will only survive if the losers of a democratic vote accept the result.
If you force people to keep on voting until you get a result acceptable to the Establishment, you will destroy democracy and all public trust in our political institutions.
That is why a second referendum would be a corrosive and divisive
disaster.
Remainers finally need to accept that they lost. Once safely out of the EU we can start to build a fair and prosperous society as a newly independent country.
If the referendum result continues to be denied, and especially if Article 50 is revoked by a Remainer Parliament, the next general election will see the Brexit Party soar to even greater heights. Bill Carmichael. Yorks Post.
Ask too how many Brexiteers in the Lib Dems and Labour still voted for their 'normal' party.
