Wednesday 21 September 2016

A special kind of deceit


Labour leadership candidate, Owen Smith, is either too stupid or too dishonest to be leader. Why? Because of his assertion that there should be another referendum on Brexit because people were misled by leave campaign 'promises' about what would happen if a leave vote was achieved, such as an extra £350m being available for the NHS.

It's a ludicrous assertion. The leave campaign highlighted what it believed could be done with savings it said would be achieved by leaving the EU. It was not a promise. It was not part of a manifesto of policies for implementation by Vote Leave after the referendum vote. Vote Leave is not the government and it wasn't standing for election.

The Elliott/Cummings cabal was simply setting out what it claimed might be possible (however ridiculous) for the government of the day to do with money it believed could be saved by leaving the EU.

Had the remain side won, the result could not be subsequently challenged on the basis that the remain campaign 'promised' there was no plan for an EU army, or that the UK would not pay any additional budgetary contributions to Brussels. As a mere campaign there was nothing they or Vote Leave could say that would bind the government to particular actions.

The referendum result is being attacked by any means possible by people who refuse to accept the will of the majority of voters. The reality is Owen Smith knows his assertion is a cynical and calculated piece of deceit. His sheer disdain for a democratically-determined decision and fatuous attempts to apply interpretation to the result in order to undermine it, because he didn't get his own way, is petulance on steroids.

In that Smith is no better than Tory peer, Baroness Wheatcroft, another sworn opponent of democracy, who believes voters should know their place, shut up, and leave decision making to vested interests and party machines. Voters should remind these people who are the masters and who are supposed to be the servants.