Second Brexit Referendum Could Be a 'Suicide' for Tories - UK Politician

Boris Johnson has warned that the Conservative Party will be ruined if it does not deliver Brexit. But even if whoever replaces Theresa May as British Prime Minister is a firm Brexiteer, will hard-line rhetoric be enough to seal the UK’s departure from the bloc, when a parliamentary consensus on the issue is still required?

Sputnik has discussed the issue with Robin Tilbrook, Chairman of the English Democrats.

Sputnik: Do you agree with Boris Johnson’s claim that the Conservatives must deliver Brexit to avoid the destruction of the party?

Robin Tilbrook: I do agree with him; I think they’ve basically got a choice between choosing him or the Conservative MPs deciding to suicide their party. 

Even the other people who are genuinely committed to Brexit, they are people who are in some cases very compromised, like Michael Gove, who I don’t think would stand any chance of rallying people because the main thing we know about him is that he’s the sort of person who is a backstabber, and he and Mr Fox who have sort of clung on to office right through Theresa May’s time, have no kind of credibility after that, at all.

Many of the others are out and out remainers, and even those that are pro leave, like Steve Baker, aren’t sufficiently well known, and the Tories have got themselves to a point where they are in real crisis.

They’ve really got to do something spectacular to stand a chance of recovering any of their support, but from my point of view; that’s a win-win. We’ll either wind up with Boris Johnson as a committed Brexiteer, or the Tory Party goes into oblivion and that’s going to be the first and key step of getting rid of getting rid of the two party system in this country, which has become an absolute millstone around our necks, and we need to get rid of it.

One of the things that eventually precipitated even the spineless 1922 Committee of the Conservative Party, to actually get rid of Theresa May, was that she was actually starting to talk about having a second referendum; and if the Conservatives support a second referendum, they can say goodbye forever to the eighty percent of their support that voted leave, and they are finished, so that would be a decision to suicide the Conservative Party, and if they decide that; well good riddance I’d say.

Sputnik: What will Theresa May’s legacy of Prime Minister be?

Robin Tilbrook: I think it’s obvious already. Her legacy as Prime Minister is that of utter failure, and a rather contemptable failure at that, as a Conservative politician with the Conservative badge on, they are supposed to be patriotic, and there she was basically trying to betray us to the EU, to get us into a state that some of their people were saying was making us a colony.

That’s just not what you would expect somebody who owes their position to pretending to be a patriot, to actually try and achieve, so I think again, good riddance to her, she’s been nothing but trouble and a disaster for the country and also for the Conservative Party.

Sputnik: Could you explain the English Democrat’s court case regarding the government’s failure to deliver Brexit?

Robin Tilbrook: Basically we’ve got a case that we’re bringing for the English Democrats, to get a declaration from the high court that we are already out of the EU, legally speaking, and the case is actually quite simple in one way, because it’s basically that we served our notice under Article Fifty, it expired on the 29th of March, and therefore we are out.

The only way that it can be argued that we are not out on the 29th of March, is if there is a legal justification for the normal consequence of the expiry of a notice not to apply, and the government is in great difficulty over this.

They first of all tried out make out that they got a royal prerogative to extend it, but that argument doesn’t work at all, thanks to the Gina Miller case, and the next thing they’ve tried to make out is that the EU and international law overrides our domestic law; that’s a very weak argument, and the third thing they’ve tried to make out is that they passed a regulation, that’s a bit more complicated, but that’s also a very weak argument, because the regulation has to be specific to the act that it’s in, and that act isn’t about when we actually leave the EU.

The result is that quite a lot of lawyers who’ve looked at our case, in fact all except for two that were paid to say otherwise, have said that we’ve got a very strong case, and one example of a lawyer who’s looked at it and said that we’ve got a very strong case, is a retired court of appeal judge; Sir Richard Aikens, who said our case is strongly arguable.

Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of Robin Tilbrook and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.