ON FRIDAY PM MAY let it be known that if she did not think that her EU deal would be agreed by parliament she would not move it, and in its place a number of indicative motions would be allowed, so that parliament could decide what it wanted.
With that she raised the white flag and opened the floodgates to her own removal, and for the House of Commons, the number one enemy of Brexit, to mount an anti-Brexit coup, which began with the mass demonstration through London last Saturday.
PM May who started her premiership by declaring that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, has opened the floodgates for the House of Commons to try to do what its majority wanted to do from day one – stab Brexit in the back to stay in the EU.
In vain the ERG group appealed to her to change her position and that if she agreed to resign afterwards they would support her deal, as would others, and it would be passed. May, however, has now some new and powerful allies.
Labour’s Tom Watson, addressing the large pro-remain march on Saturday demanded a second referendum saying: ‘I can only vote for a deal if you let the people vote on it too. Prime Minister, you’ve lost control of this process, you’re plunging the country into chaos, let the people take control.’
SNP leader Sturgeon added that now was the ‘moment of maximum opportunity’ to avoid a no deal Brexit.
Chancellor Philip Hammond protested too much on Sky’s Sophy Ridge news show on Sunday. He said: ‘This is not about the prime minister… changing prime ministers wouldn’t help, changing the party of government wouldn’t help.’
He denied reports he was hoping to parachute in May’s de facto deputy, David Lidington, as caretaker, adding: ‘To be talking about changing the players on the board, frankly, is self indulgent at this time.’
Hammond said he understood MPs were ‘very frustrated’, but stressed that ‘one way or another parliament is going to have an opportunity this week to decide what it’s in favour of’.
The Sunday Times reports that Lidington, who voted Remain, is being lined up to replace May, while The Mail on Sunday said the Brexiteer Environment Secretary Michael Gove was the ‘consensus choice’.
Former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said the EU’s decision to dismiss May’s request to delay Brexit until 30th June and insist on its own timetable instead was ‘as close to being humiliated as any prime minister I’ve ever seen in Britain’.
The prominent Brexiteer also told The Andrew Marr Show that the disloyalty some cabinet ministers were showing to her was ‘appalling’. They should be ‘censured, sacked’, or at the very least ‘they should be apologising and they should shut up’, he added.
However, it is all too late for that. The leadership row comes ahead of a week where the PM is expected to lose all control over the Brexit process.
Chancellor Hammond, however, urged a certain amount of caution saying that he would remove the revoking of Article 50 and remove supporting a no-deal Brexit from the list of indicative resolutions, as ‘both of those would have very serious and negative consequences for our country’.
He was plainly worried that the first provocative motion might well anger the 17.4 million workers who voted to leave while the millions who have said they want ‘no deal’ might seize hold of the second.
Hammond favoured a second referendum. He said: ‘It is a coherent proposition and deserves to be considered, along with the other proposals.’
The millions of workers who voted for Brexit and their supporters must now mobilise rapidly. They must demand that the trade unions that support Brexit, the RMT and Aslef mobilise a workers’ march for Brexit, and a mass lobby of the House of Commons all next week.
When parliament carries through its coup against the result of the referendum of 2016, it will have lost its right to rule. Its coup against Brexit must be resisted and defeated. In fact if parliament shuts down Brexit the working class must react in Cromwellian fashion and rise up to close down parliament and replace it with a workers soviet.
The UK must leave the EU on March 29th!