According to UKIP founder Alan Sked, leaving the EU without a deal seems like a likely outcome at the moment.
Sputnik: Could a no-deal Brexit still be on the cards?
Alan Sked: It’s perfectly possible that we could leave without a deal, but the fact that Boris Johnson is doing this seems to me to indicate that he’s putting pressure on the EU, telling them that they mustn’t mess about, and by law that he can’t extend the transition period’s deadline and therefore have to come to some sort of a deal before next December.
How seriously the EU will take it, I don’t know, but it’s telling that both the backbenchers and the Tory Party that he’s serious about Brexit, and a hard Brexit and also telling the EU that they won’t be able to buy him off with some sort of deal which ties the UK into the European Court of Justice and other European regulations forever. He will go for a hard Brexit, and if they don’t play ball and negotiate seriously, then it will be no deal.
Sputnik: Is Boris Johnson a true Brexiteer?
Alan Sked: I think he is a true Brexiteer; everything he has said so far seems to indicate that and this latest move seems to confirm that he is interested in a serious Brexit deal and not just being fobbed off with something that looks like Brexit by the EU.
Sputnik: Can the Labour Party recover from their general election defeat?
Alan Sked: Perhaps they don’t have a future. They’ve already been wiped out in Scotland, which ten years or so ago was a Labour stronghold and now they’ve only got one MP there, whereas they used to have nearly all Scottish MPs 10 or 15 years ago.
It looks as if that process of disillusionment with Labour is now spreading down from Scotland into the north of England. That was a huge blow to them in this election that they lost all of these traditional Labour seats that had never voted Conservative at all before and now they are voting for Boris. If he can further consolidate these areas, then Labour has no future at all, because the Tory Party under Boris has taken seats in Wales on a larger number than ever before, the Labour Party has been wiped out in Scotland, and if it is then wiped out in northern England - then it will end up being the party for middle class, bourgeoisie liberals in London and a few other cities.
Labour seems to have lost its grip on the working class and for a socialist party, that seems to indicate that it has no future.
