Author Archives: Alan

‘a frenzied race hate attack triggered by the Brexit vote’

Do we need a special inquiry into the BBC’s handling of Brexit?  It has consistently attacked every aspect of the process, promoting every utterance from Brussels as if they were the only viable and sensible options whilst ridiculing and denouncing everything that comes from the British side.  Not only that but a more sinister aspect of BBC reporting is apparent whereby it has been demonising and dehumanising Leave voters and politicians associated with the Leave side [just look  how it has been treating Boris in the last couple of days…with lies and smears] claiming they are racists and linking them to the Far Right and Nazis…and to murders.

The BBC fabricated an astonishing claim that the death of a Polish man in Harlow was the result of a racist attack that was inspired by Brexit.  This was a complete lie and even in the immediate aftermath of the death there was no evidence that this was in any way motivated by race.  That didn’t stop the BBC concocting a massive lie that was intended to bolster its narrative that Brexit had made Britain a ‘more racist and nastier place’…..or rather that white, British people are savage racists at heart…all of them.

Even more outrageous, and all the more ironic considering the BBC has been recently telling us how politicians are facing ever more abuse and attacks, they set Nigel Farage up as the man to blame for the death broadcasting a claim that he ‘had blood on his hands’….

‘But I mean, Nigel Farage, I mean, thank you for that, because you are part of this death, and you’ve got blood on your hands, thanks to you, thanks for all your decision, wherever you are, er . . . yeah, it’s your call.’

Nigel Farage says he may well refuse to pay the licence fee…hmmm…hardly a suitably hardline response to the BBC putting his life on the line…..Farage and his family having had death threats since Brexit…the BBC isn’t interested in those though…..they do like to keep up the ‘amusing’ abuse though…this report from the US was illustrated with a picture of Nigel Farage on the frontpage leader even though he had absolutely nothing to do with the story….just another attempt in the BBC drive to portray Farage as a machiavellian schemer who won the Brexit vote by tricking and manipulating us….Nigel – the robot that could tell you how to vote.   The BBC desperate to make us think the vote was ‘stolen’….they pull the same tricks with Trump’s win.

It turns out that the Polish man who died was in fact extremely drunk and it was he, not the youth who punched him, who made racist comments and became aggressive first.  The death was not murder but judged as manslaughter.  This was not a hate crime [on the part of the youth] but just one of those late night fracas that have tragic ends.

The BBC’s narrative has been sickeningly racist, anti-white, anti-British and has been deliberately shaped to malign Brexit as driven by the Far Right and paint all Leave voters as racist little englanders who want to chase immigrants out of the country.  Just watch the Newsnight video below in which Brexit is held to blame for making Britain a much more ugly and nastier place…apparently…..

News Watch has been following this in great detail…

BBC’s Harlow ‘Brexit race hate’ claims debunked

News-watch formally submitted detailed complaints to the BBC’s Complaints Unit. With total predictability, they were dismissed.

Meanwhile, the deluge of anti-Brexit BBC reporting has continued, including the angle that race-hate was involved in the vote. And how did the BBC report Friday’s sentencing hearing? With a headline that this was not a race hate murder connected to Brexit? That Daniel Sandford had been wrong to afford such prominence to that possibility? That the (English) killer had been provoked by racist chants by a drunken Polish man 25 years his senior? And that the Farage blood-on-hands quote had now been shown to be preposterous?

Of course not. Tucked away in the BBC’s regional website Essex pages is a short 280-word report that makes no mention of last year’s intemperate sensationalism by the corporation, and notes only towards the end the key point that the racism involved did not emanate from the killer.

Brendan O’Neil in Spiked also comments and notes that the reporting was part of a concerted effort to undermine Brexit…

A killing in Harlow: the shame of Remainers

We must confront the elite’s lies about the killing of Arek Jozwik.

It’s the great shame of Remainers. Yes, there was ‘rampant hatred’ in Britain in the weeks after the Brexit vote. But it wasn’t in places like Harlow. It didn’t come from ordinary Brexiteers. It was in political circles and media circles, where the contempt for Brexit speedily morphed into contempt for the lower orders that voted for it. Into denunciations of entire towns and classes. Into bile about the ‘low-information voters’ who had wrecked the elite’s pristine Britain. Into a fact-lite conviction that the rabble were in the grip of violent hatred. It wasn’t evidence but prejudice that made them turn on Harlow and by extension the rest of working-class Britain. The demonisation of Harlow was the truly hateful thing back then, and it was also the pinnacle of ‘post-truth’: that is, it was based on a lie. In raging against the alleged hatred of the Harlow hordes and others, elite Remainers revealed their own hatreds, their classist fear of democracy, their low political outlook that meant they were even willing to exploit the death of a migrant to attack the lives and beliefs of the less well-off.

RIP, Mr Jozwik. Britons are deeply sorry you were killed in our country where you made your home, and that our political and media elite used your death to propagate untruths.

Marr had his usual talking shop with the usual suspects.  We were told this was to be a programme investigating identity politics and how this has led to so much conflict around the world….ie the enforced ‘joy’ of multiculturalism  and diversity that has brought nothing but trouble…and curry and corner shops ‘open all hours’.  Except that wasn’t what we got.  What we got was just some luvvies sat around making grandiose, pretentious, arty farty claims about their work and how important it all was.  Oh there was a bit about immigration…..a self-described immigrant, a theatre director, who has produced a play about Enoch Powell, informed us that the ‘prejudiced’ Enoch was totally wrong and that his ‘rivers of blood ‘ speech has caused all the problems we now have [not that we have any problems of course]…

‘What Shadows’ is a play that tells the story of Enoch Powell’s famous ‘rivers of blood’ speech from 1968, and its impact on the country decades later. The play’s director Roxana Silbert says the play shows how prejudice can be found across the political spectrum.

This was pretty much accepted as documented fact by Marr depsite it obviously being a prejudiced and very partial take on Powell…and a wrong one at that.

Marr did venture a surprising claim, in carefully guarded language…that perhaps Enoch was right….if we look at how Muslims are in conflict with our society.

Hope he’s got his tin hat on…if only for the brick bats from his own side.

How soon they forget, when it is convenient to do so.  The BBC has been running one if its surveys that whatever the answer they get they know they can run a sensationalist and alarmist story….usually along the lines of the Far Right must be reined in!!!!

Apparently MPs are getting more abuse than ever…twitter is aflame with it….MPs are shocked and scared…and as the BBC informed us this morning on the Today show…they are ever more vigilant and aware of the dangers ‘since the death of Jo Cox’.

Really?  They weren’t aware of the dangers since the attempted murder of Stephen Timms by a Muslim in 2010?

The last serious assault on a parliamentarian was the 2010 stabbing of Labour MP Stephen Timms.

Timms, MP for East Ham, was stabbed twice in the stomach at his constituency surgery in east London on 14 May 2010. The surgeon who operated on him described the injuries he suffered as “potentially life-threatening” because of the possible loss of blood and infection had he not been treated. He spent five days in hospital with abdominal injuries.

His attacker was a 21-year-old radicalised student, Roshonara Choudhry, who told police she wanted to kill the former government minister for supporting the Iraq war. She was pulled off the MP by his assistant and held by a security guard.

Odd how the BBC forgets that one.  Or indeed the many, many murders by the BBC’s favourite terrorist group [pre-the golden age of Islamic terror] The IRA…and let’s not forget that the man, and his side-kick, who is leading the Labour Party is a man who vocally supported the IRA’s use of murder to further their political aims…something the BBC tried to gloss over during the last election….

1979 – Airey Neave

During the Troubles, Irish republicans frequently targeted ministers. In March 1979 Airey Neave, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, died in hospital after his car was blown up as he drove out from the underground car park beneath parliament’s New Palace Yard. The Irish National Liberation Army claimed responsibility for the bomb.

A former army officer who had successfully escaped from Colditz during the second world war, Neave had been an outspoken opponent of republican violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

1981 – Robert Bradford

Ulster Unionist MP the Rev Robert Bradford was assassinated by IRA gunmen in November 1981 while attending a political surgery at a community centre in south Belfast. A caretaker was also killed in the attack.

1983 – Edgar Graham

Another UUP politician, the Northern Ireland assembly member was killed in December 1983. A law lecturer at Queen’s University in Belfast, he was chatting to a colleague on campus when IRA gunmen walked up to him and shot him repeatedly in the head.

1984 – Sir Anthony Berry

The IRA Brighton hotel bombing targeted then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet during the Conservative party conference. Thatcher escaped without injury but five people in the Grand Hotel were killed, including a Conservative MP, Sir Anthony Berry, who was deputy chief whip. His wife was injured but survived. Norman Tebbit’s wife Margaret was among those injured in the blast and was left permanently disabled.

1990 – Ian Gow

Ian Gow, another Conservative MP and former army officer who was opposed to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, was killed outside his East Sussex home in July 1990 when the IRA placed a Semtex car bomb under his Austin Montego. The IRA claimed responsibility for the murder, stating that the MP for Eastbourne had been targeted because he was a “close personal associate” of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

The BBC have finally found a narrative to explain a terrorist bomb on the Tube planted, allegedly, by refugees…

Two men who have links to a foster home in Surrey are still being questioned by police after Friday’s Tube attack.

On Saturday an 18-year-old man, thought to be an Iraqi orphan, was arrested in Dover port, and a 21-year-old was detained in Hounslow.

Douglas Murray must have a crystal ball…or long held experience of how the likes of the BBC try to cover up, explain away and excuse Muslim terrorism informs his insights…

Unlike events some weeks ago at, say, Charlottesville (which is on another continent), blame for events in London on Friday will not be allowed to spill out anywhere. Probably not even onto the culprits themselves. They will be described as ‘boys’ or ‘young men’ or ‘kids’. We will hear about how they were ‘pushed’ to their actions in some way. If their country of origin was one we were militarily engaged in (Iraq) this will be deemed a contributing factor. If their country of origin is a country we have not been militarily engaged in (Syria) this will be deemed a contributing factor.

This site also predicted the tired old ruse by the BBC to justify or excuse mass murder….

Now that the Telegraph has identified the bomber and others will do so as well, the BBC will be forced to acknowledge this also…no doubt it will be a quick line half way down a page and rapidly forgotten in further reports….rest assured they will be digging hard to find a back story for the bomber that they can try and exploit to make it seem like he is a victim and it is Britain’s fault that he was turned into a potential mass murderer.

The self-obsessed luvvies spent their time at the Emmys attacking their pet hate Trump.

Alec Baldwin sneered that Trump hadn’t won an Emmy for all his time on television…

Yeah…but…he did win the Presidency……so suck on that for the next three years or more smart Alec….

A complete non-story makes headline news on the BBC frontpage and the BBC continues to throw muck at Boris in the hope that some sticks never mind the truth…the BBC’s fake news in this case emblematic of how it has reported on Brexit in total….almost complete lies and misinformation designed to portray Brexit as negatively as possible….

Brexit: Boris Johnson accused of ‘misusing’ statistics

This so-called report gets nowhere near the truth in its supposed ‘analysis’ and in fact gives you, the audience, the job of deciding what’s true and what’s not as the BBC can’t bring themselves to admit Boris is right….

This is an extraordinary row.

A senior cabinet minister and the most senior civil servant responsible for official statistics, engaged in a public slanging match on a Sunday afternoon.

At lunchtime, Sir David’s letter, accusing the foreign secretary of “a clear misuse of official statistics.”

Mr Johnson’s formal written reply to Sir David accusing him of “a complete misrepresentation of what I said” and asking him “to withdraw it.”

Sir David is yet to respond again.

Who will people trust the most? The civil servant or the politician?

That is your call.

Hmmm..our call?  Well it needn’t be ‘our call’ if the BBC was doing its job properly and actually ‘analysing’ the facts…as the Spectator points out….

Why is the UK’s supposedly independent statistics watchdog joining the Boris-bashing?

Perhaps Sir David didn’t have time today to also purchase a Telegraph subscription and therefore was unable to read what the Foreign Secretary actually wrote. Because, unlike the ordinary everyday abuse of statistics by politicians (on which the Statistics Authority is normally silent) every word from Boris (this time) was accurate. Here’s what he had to say:-

‘Once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week. It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS, provided we use that cash injection to modernise and make the most of new technology.’

How on earth does this ‘confuse gross and net’ as Sir David claims? We all know the deal with the EU: we pay in, then a chunk of the is returned to the UK via a rebate and EU spending. So our net contribution is about £200 million a week.

But as Boris argued in the campaign debates, the gross figure matters…..it’s fairly clear that it’s not quibbling about the net amount: it’s about ‘control’. About what happens to the gross, before it’s converted into net.

Doubtless Sir David doesn’t like this argument, but in trying to say that it’s illegitimate – or somehow an “clear misuse” of statistics – he is over-reaching and calling the neutrality of his office into doubt.

So when the Foreign Secretary uses the gross figure in legitimate correct context, why then does Sir David upgrade his condemnation from ‘potentially misleading’ to ‘clear misuse of official statistics?’ He’ll have written his letter for consumption for the press.

Odd how the BBC’s indepth and rigorous ‘analysis’ can’t recognise the real problem…a civil servant over-reaching his office and seeming to be taking a partisan interest in the issue.

Much more fun to attack Boris and undermine Brexit.  No?

The BBC clearly learns nothing from Rochdale and Rotherham etc etc etc as it refuses to publish the nationality and status of the alleged Tube bucket bomber…the Mail published it a day ago, the Telegraph headlines it today….

Parsons Green attack: ‘Iraqi’ refugee suspected of trying to bomb Tube ‘was spoken to by police several times’

Of signifcant importance to most people…..a Muslim refugee given refuge in a western country, and shown great kindness by his foster family who took him in, repays all that by trying to  carry out a mass murder on a train.  It might be appropriate for people to know this in order that they can assess what the impact of further such immigration might be and if it is really sensible to import potential trouble into the UK.  Why did an Iraqi come here to seek asylum?  Iraq is not a country in mass disorder.  He could have gone to a safe place in Iraq but chose to make his way here….initially no doubt as he was told he would be given everything on a plate that he might not get  in Iraq before then radicalising and setting off bombs on a train.

The BBC does not want you to think like that, it does not want immigration and terrorsim, or the crime wave across Europe, to be linked to immigration…and yet it is…we should be told.

Now that the Telegraph has identified the bomber and others will do so as well, the BBC will be forced to acknowledge this also…no doubt it will be a quick line half way down a page and rapidly forgotten in further reports….rest assured they will be digging hard to find a back story for the bomber that they can try and exploit to make it seem like he is a victim and it is Britain’s fault that he was turned into a potential mass murderer.

At present this is the nearest the BBC come to making the link...

The BBC’s home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani, who was at the scene, said a large number of officers have been working inside the property and a forensics tent is in place in the back garden.The house belongs to an elderly couple known for fostering hundreds of children, including refugees.

However no suggestion that the alleged bomber was a refugee himself….

A second man has been arrested as part of the investigation into the attack.

The 21-year-old was arrested in Hounslow, west London, on Saturday night on suspicion of a terror offence and is in custody in south London.

An 18-year-old man is also being held on suspicion of a terror offence over the Parsons Green explosion.

Remarkably there is no mention also of the claim that the alleged bomber had been arrested previously by the police as both the Mail and Telegraph claim…the BBC instead report Amber Rudd dodging responsibility for a possible cock-up that allowed the attack to happen…naturally the BBC don’t speculate about that…they prefer to say it is all bunkum so that they can attack Trump….

She added that US President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the terrorist behind the attack was “in the sights of Scotland Yard” was “pure speculation”.

Remarkable thing isn’t it?  Boris, foreign secretary and cheer-leader in chief for Brexit isn’t allowed to comment on progress and what Brexit should look like but all the Remainers in cabinet are able to not only comment but actually try to hijack the process and make up policy whilst May was on holiday?  What’s more remarkable is that the BBC’s finest political stooges for Remain don’t notice the hypocrisy.

Amber Rudd appears on Marr and the BBC headline with Brexit: Boris Johnson ‘back-seat driving’ over Brexit, says Rudd.…never mind that it was Marr who put those words in her mouth.  What the BBC doesn’t tell you is that Rudd is an ardent Remainer and anti-Boris fanatic who is hoping to be Party leader….so many reasons for her to put the boot in to Boris…but the BBC doesn’t notice as it happily quotes her bashing Boris about his article.

Oh hold on….that article that Rudd is castigating Boris for…she hasn’t actually read it…..’Asked if she had read his article, Ms Rudd said: “Unfortunately not. I had rather a lot to do on Friday. There was a bomb that nearly went off in Parsons Green.’

What is also remarkable of course is that she and the BBC didn’t hyperventilate so much and sensationalise about a real intervention when Phillip Hammond actually tried to change Brexit policy whilst May was on holiday.  Do you remember all the fuss and excitement from the BBC and the likes of Rudd when he did that?  No…because he was doing what they wanted….backseat, or was it frontseat, driving Brexit in the directon they wanted…ie no Brexit….Rudd in fact jumped into the frontseat with him…as Sky reported….

Theresa May departed for her annual hiking holiday in the Swiss and Italian Alps on Monday – but if you thought that might lead to a pause in politics, think again.

The BBC also gives us this on Boris’ article….

Meanwhile the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority has written to Mr Johnson, questioning his decision in the 4,000 word article in Saturday’s Telegraph to refer again to a disputed figure used by Leave campaigners during the referendum about the UK’s EU budget contributions.

“I am surprised and disappointed that you have chosen to repeat the figure of £350m per week in connection with the amount that might be available for extra public spending when we leave the European Union,” Sir David Norgrove said.

“It is a clear misuse of official statistics,” he added.

Trouble is it is more that Sir David Norgrove is abusing his position and misusing offcial statistics when he criticises Boris because Boris is in fact right as we’ve noted in a previous post.  Boris says we will ‘take back control of £350 million’….and that figure is correct if the rebate is included. The point is is that the rebate is still the EU’s to give or take back…it can revoke that privilege and indeed, as we noted, seems intent on doing so….thus ‘taking back control of £350 million’ should rightly include the rebate figure.  Perhaps Sir David Norgrove should sit down and actually read and understand what is being said instead of involving himself in the politics.  Perhaps the BBC should also sit back and take a more critical look at what he says…but then as he is voicing the Remain narrative why would they do that?

Note Norgrove also that Boris doesn’t take into account the fact that payments that come back to the UK to pay for projects here will probably still have to be paid for….that proves the point that Norgrove doesn’t understand Boris’ point…it’s about who decides what that money is spent on not the actual amount.  Perhaps someone in such an obviously important and influential position should be more careful about their interference in politics.

Not only should Brexiteers get more proactive promoting Brexit and Britain’s glorious future but maybe should also be more active and critical in judging how the BBC is reporting Brexit…the BBC clearly cannot be trusted one inch to bring us an honest and accurate picture of events.

For instance here’s their analysis….

In his article, Mr Johnson had said the UK should not be giving the EU any money to gain access to the single market after Brexit and said he would like to see a lot of the money recovered from Brussels going to the NHS, repeating the disputed referendum claim that exit could provide an extra £350m for the health service.

Except he did not say anything like that…he said some of the money could go towards the NHS, he did not say all of that £350 million could go on the NHS.  The BBC report it in this way so that they set Boris up for later interviews in which they will claim he did say that and he will have to spend his time denying what is a BBC lie rather than giving the good news about Brexit.  It is a deliberate misinterpretation of his comments that the BBC knows is wrong…he does not think there is £350 million extra to spend as the BBC says he says…his point is that we should decide how to spend it not Brussels.  The BBC, and it seems Norgrove, deliberately or otherwise, misreport that.

EU should ‘undermine national homogeneity’ says UN migration chief

The EU should “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states, the UN’s special representative for migration has said.

Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural.

It should have been long apparent that the EU’s freedom of movement dictat is not about economics but about politics, culture and crucially identity.  The policy drive to move populations around Europe is intended to break people’s links with their own country, their nation, their identity and their loyalty.  The EU wants to create an EU superstate and to do that it needs EU citizens loyal to it…and its unelected government.  Thus politically, culturally and ethnically European nation states are ‘cleansed’…not by removing people but by moving in massive numbers of people who will not be loyal to their new state and nationality and who, as they see the homeland they left also destroyed by cultural and political invasion, they then look to the EU for governance, laws and protection.

The BBC of course is on-board but has its own reasons…very similar but it adds into the mix ‘race’…the BBC, along with Blair’s Labour Party wanted to ‘brown’ hideously white Britain and ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’….hence the BBC’s extremist drive to force open Britain’s borders to allow in as many non-white, non-Christian people as possible without regard to the consequences.

Tim Black in Spiked thinks this is the aim of the EU’s, and the Left’s, freedom of movement…

The newly christened EU citizens were never treated by the EU oligarchy as ends in themselves, as autonomous individuals with lives freely to lead. They were treated, rather, as means, tools, instruments. And not just economically. They were treated as cultural instruments, too, as vehicles of social and attitudinal change, a means to challenge and morph the make-up of national societies, to challenge and morph the attitudes and values of largely indigenous, provincial working-class populaces, to dilute and stigmatise their sense of nationhood and, ultimately, their sense of national sovereignty. And, at the same time, the migrant was therefore a means to usher in the brave EU world, consisting of a transnational entity run by an oligarchic pool of national elites who had stumbled on a way to govern apart from the older national democratic structures.

Blair himself was central to the EU’s use of immigration as a means to re-engineer society, turning it away from the nation state and towards the transnational EU. Between 1997 and 2010, New Labour oversaw the quadrupling of net migration from 48,000 people in 1997 to 198,000 by 2009. As Labour speechwriter Andrew Neather infamously put it in 2009, ‘mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’. So spectacular was New Labour’s achievement that UN migration chief Peter Sutherland went so far as to pay tribute to the UK’s immigration policy, on the grounds that it undermined the ‘homogeneity… of the people who inhabit [the UK]’.

The BBC continues to peddle the idea of a ‘soft Brexit’ as the best and only possible option, a ‘hard Brexit’ as a cliff edge disaster, in the hope that voters will shrug their shoulders and make no protest as Remain politicians try to neuter Brexit, failing that it ‘suggests’ a second referendum, the ground having being laid by the BBC’s torrent of pro-EU and anti-Brexit propaganda, or failing that it works towards forcing another general election that brings in a government that refuses to complete Brexit…hence its continued attempts to suggest May is weak and on borrowed time when there are absolutely no grounds for thinking so.

Of course a soft Brexit is no Brexit at all.  The use of such terms is a delibrate attempt to influence how people think about Brexit…Brexit, or ‘Hard Brexit’, that was democratically voted for, is bad,  ‘Soft Brexit’, ie continued membership of the EU, is good but was not voted for, it was rejected but the BBC wants you to change your mind.

From the Telegraph:

The biggest problem with Soft Brexit is that it’s not attainable

In the first of two extracts from their new book, Liam Halligan and Gerard Lyons say the commonly held belief that Britain would be better off inside the single market and customs union is misconceived

There has been much talk of “Hard Brexit” versus “Soft Brexit”. Such labels are ubiquitous during these Article 50 negotiations – used freely by the broadcast media – yet they are partisan and deeply misleading. Hard Brexit makes leaving the European Union sound extreme and damaging, suggesting isola­tion and a bleak economic future. Soft Brexit, conversely, conveys a comfortable, ongoing relationship with the EU, with Britain still “part of the club”.

Leaving the single market and the customs union isn’t Hard Brexit – even if the name is deliberately coined to sound painful. It is simply Brexit. Staying inside the EU’s two main legal constructs, meanwhile, isn’t a harmonious Soft Brexit. It amounts, instead, to a deliberate and cynical failure to implement the 2016 referendum result.

A political narrative has developed that Britain would clearly be far better off staying inside the single market and customs union. As such, anyone wanting to actually implement Brexit, by leaving both, is seen to be obsessed only with sovereignty and immigration – and prepared for the economy to suffer, as long as they get their way.

Remaining a member of the single market and/or the customs union, in contrast, is presented as an enlightened “Soft Brexit” compromise, a balance between the Leave side’s “hard” ide­ology and Remain campaigners’ common sense. These are the terms of the UK’s Brexit debate, as viewed by much of our political and media class as we enter the autumn of 2017 and these EU negotiations heat up. Yet they are wrong on every level.

Soft-headed

Many Parliamentarians say they “respect the referendum result” but want “Soft Brexit”. Attempting to negotiate such an outcome, though, would seriously damage the UK, the EU and the vital ongoing relationship between them.

While Soft Brexit is often presented as liberal and progressive, the single market promotes the interests of producers over consumers while entrenching the advantages of large corporations – which are far better able than smaller rivals to handle the complex regulation. Freedom of movement rules provide big firms with a ready stream of cheap, easily exploitable labour, while suppressing the wages of the UK’s most financially insecure workers. The single market also facilitates large-scale corporate tax avoidance.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Soft Brexit is that it is unobtainable. Back in December 2016, the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier said: “The single market and its four freedoms are indivisible – cherry-picking is not an option.” Yet this is precisely what the Soft Brexiteers are attempting, breaching EU rules by seeking single market membership along with a special dispensation from freedom of movement that no other country has.

That’s why “Soft Brexit” will actually end up being “Messy Brexit”. Pushing for this outcome puts the UK in direct and absolute conflict with the EU’s core principles – which, if seriously breached, could tear the bloc apart, as others demand the same deal. The most likely Soft Brexit outcome would be a diplomatic stand-off, along with chronic uncertainty for citizens, investors and businesses, risking serious economic and political damage.

The UK will, of course, continue to trade and collaborate with the EU ex­tensively after Brexit. Complaints that we are “cutting ourselves off” or “pulling up the drawbridge” are infantile and absurd. With a hung parliament, though, and the Conservatives vulnerable in the Commons and the Lords, the Soft Brexiteers sense this is their moment.

Far from “respecting the referendum result”, they are promoting an unobtainable outcome and sowing parliamentary chaos. Their aim is nothing less than to reverse the June 2016 referendum and, in doing so, topple the Government.