Golf club rules.

Imagine the scenario.  You are resigning from your golf club.  You want to do other things, spend your money in different ways.  So your letter goes in: “Thanks for all the fun, but I’m moving on. So I’m sorry, I’m resigning.  Hope to see you all again soon.”   

Imagine your surprise when you get a letter back saying: “Thanks for the resignation letter.  Attached is the time table by which we will operate your departure, including what payments you need to make.  And by the way, if you don’t keep to this, and a few other terms and conditions you will also see attached, you can’t leave until we say you can leave.”   

Laughable?  Of course it is.   

And yet that is exactly what Mrs May, and it was Mrs May, not her cabinet, signed up to in 2017 when the European Union insisted on “phasing” the Brexit negotiations and tackling three subjects of interest to the EU first, before the EU would be willing to discuss its long term post-Brexit trading relationship with the UK.   

She should have laughed and said “on your bike”.   

This of course is now one of an increasing number of charges to be laid at Mrs Mays door, and her door alone.   

The latest one being uncovered in the advice of the Attorney General for England and Wales is the scandal over proposing the EU, through its judicial arm, can stop us leaving till we have jumped through all of its hoops.  Mrs May tried to deny this would happen because it is not our intention to get there.  Then why have the so called back stop unless it is there to be used?   

That a UK prime minister could even have thought that was an idea worth testing, never mind inserting it in an international agreement, shows how much Mrs May has gone native in the EU.  It is now abundantly clear who’s side she is on.  And it’s not the UKs, no matter if you voted Leave or Remain.

As Martin Howe, QC, notes in his Withdrawal Agreement: the Northern Irish “Backstop” and the constitution of the United Kingdom paper out today, “The UK should unhesitatingly reject the draft Withdrawal Agreement and make clear that any deal with the EU which seeks to violate the fundamental constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom and overturn the Belfast Agreement will not be accepted. Therefore a different approach from the December 2017 approach must be adopted. That approach should be based on behind-the-frontier enforcement of border controls, and not on the dead-end and insoluble problems of “alignment” of rules.”.