Confected outrage about 'no deal' is just another remainer tactic | thearticle

Dominic Grieve, who recently ignored a vote of no confidence passed against him by his constituency association, says that it would be “extraordinary” for Boris Johnson not to stand down if

his government loses a vote of no confidence. Mr Grieve argues that in such circumstances – largely brought about by himself – a National Unity Government should be created, possibly headed

by Ken Clarke. In standard logic, if an argument generates an absurdity then something has gone wrong. We suggest that Mr Grieve reacquaints himself with this axiomatic constraint. If “. . .

therefore Ken Clarke will be our Unity Prime Minister” is the conclusion of your argument, then it’s time to check your premises. Mr Grieve proposes to enter into an absurd redefinition of

the relationship between the governed and those who govern. Without consent; without legitimacy; and without consultation. What is “extraordinary” is that Grieve thinks it would be

extraordinary were Johnson to refuse to step down in the middle of an attempted coup. When everything that happens is extraordinary, by what measure would such a refusal stand out as

particularly egregious? Of course, by extraordinary he might actually mean unprecedented. But Mr Grieve’s relationship with precedent is an on-again-off-again affair, a bit like Ross and

Rachel in Friends. And there is no space for precedent in this hypothetical case, as the Fixed Term Parliaments Act has not been tested. “Precedent” is properly defined as a connecting

principle that relates the present to the past; not the present to some Fantasy Cabinet version of Dungeons and Dragons. The Army Council of the Remain Insurgency is running out of options.

As Dominic Cummings has implied, Mr Grieve has spent too much time poring over his Beginners Guide to the UK Constitution and not enough time watching the calendar. The Insurgency leaders

will soon be running on outrage alone, as they watch the clock tick down. They have found themselves in a mating trap, and are on the verge of upending the board. They have had a good run.

The attempted confiscation of the 2016 result has been creative: a series of distractions energised by linguistic activism. They have managed to keep the “Brexit discussion” alive and within

parameters very much of their choosing. They noticed, far earlier than the Leavers, that whoever controls the language of any debate shapes the outcome of that debate. The 2016 result was

clear. They therefore moved the post-Referendum analysis into the theatre of maximum ambiguity: the economic consequences of the decision to leave. The actual character of the EU itself is

Mrs Rochester in all this, locked safely away in the attic, never to be mentioned. They have done this with Establishment connivance, and our acquiescence. Instead of a discussion of what

leaving means, properly conducted by an analysis of the thing we are leaving, we have had a debate about what people thought they were voting for, which has been conducted exclusively in the

vague language of economics. Nobody voted to be poorer, we were told, to which the proper response, never adequately made, should have been: how do you know and why does it matter anyway?

Brexit was always primarily a moral idea, not an economic one. Remainers have managed to obscure this. They are like people who insist that the Mona Lisa be described solely in terms of

pixels of paint on a canvas, rather than via an imaginative engagement with its whole. Thus the Customs Union, a defining structure of the EU Project, is presented as a benign economic

partnership rather than what it actually is: systematic microaggressions against the idea of national sovereignty, expressed via a protection racket. Mrs May’s own Withdrawal Treaty is

suffused with mechanisms of continued membership obscured by clauses themselves written in the language of economics. And so, in the final act, we see the attempt to remain in the EU take

the form of confected outrage at the possibility of “no-deal”. Here the distortion takes the form of a conflation between “deal” and “treaty”. There are in place a number of arrangements

already, intended to facilitate our withdrawal should a codified agreement not be reached. Why do these not themselves add up to a “deal”? Because for the Insurgency only a treaty will ever

do, preferably one we enter into as supplicant. The only problem with May’s treaty, for the Remain fanatics, is that as a straitjacket it is insufficiently tight. If the Boles/Letwin/Grieve

axis of grievance succeeds in its aim of dissolving the executive in the legislature and thus has the opportunity to create legislation blocking our departure, it will be required to move

from ambiguity to specificity. But motions in the Commons are the stuff of the kindergarten; actual legislation is big boy stuff. The connection between thought and language is intimate. To

use the latter to shape the former carries a risk: that in deceiving others you are deceiving yourself. Hence the outrage Mr Grieve feels at the government using tactics he himself revels

in. But in the end, truth has a habit of intruding. The slow-motion coup d’état of the Establishment is founded upon absurdities and contradictions at least as formidable as, and not

exhausted by, the nonsense idea of a National Unity Government designed to overturn a referendum result. Grieve has been instrumental in shifting our political physics away from the

Newtonian in the direction of quantum theory. He now feels he is within his rights to decide what is and what is not “extraordinary”. He must not be indulged in his impertinence. We have a

new PM who, whatever his glorious flaws, is a man who understands the bewildering potential of language. He knows that the Remain Establishment has set the linguistic agenda and that this is

why we are where we are. One of those flaws is vanity; he will be entirely keen to see Brexit through in October just to, as Corporal Jones said, “stick it up ‘em”.