Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 3

The moral maze of the British constitution

BBC Radio’s Moral Maze, on which I am a regular panellist, started its new run last night with a discussion about the moral duty of MPs. With the Brexit crisis setting government against parliament and parliament against the people, we asked whether the principal duty of MPs was to their constituents or to their conscience, and whether sovereignty lay with parliament or the people. Is the British constitution currently working as it should, or are MPs trying to subvert it – and is it ever going to be the same again?

My fellow panellists were Giles Fraser, Anne McElvoy and Mona Siddiqui, and our four witnesses were Labour MP Emma Reynolds, former Conservative Cabinet minister Lord Lilley, constitutional lawyer Jack Simson Caird and law professor Richard Ekins. You can listen to the show here.

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Even James Bulger’s killers deserve humane treatment

A film about the murder in 1993 of the toddler James Bulger has been nominated for an Oscar despite protests from his mother, Denise Fergus.

James was almost three when he was abducted by two ten-year-olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, at a Merseyside shopping centre. They tortured and murdered him and left his body on a railway line, where it was mutilated by a train.

Meanwhile, the actress Tina Malone is facing contempt of court proceedings over a social media post allegedly showing recent images of Venables. There is a global ban on publishing anything that identifies him or Thompson, who have both been living under new identities since they were released in 2001.

Both controversies illustrate the particular hold this killing exerts on the public imagination more than a quarter of a century on.

Justice is served neither by dismissing the need to treat even the worst criminals within the rules of civilised behaviour, nor by scorning the profound desire for just deserts. Punishment for terrible crimes should uphold our humanity, not diminish it.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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Any compromise would subvert the will of the people

Much has been made of a possible compromise on the Irish backstop. Even if the EU were to agree to this, however, Mrs May’s proposed deal remains a stinker.

The Withdrawal Agreement would trap the UK with no exit unless the EU agreed. It would subordinate Britain’s defence and security structure to EU control and endanger British security ties with its main allies. It would continue to subordinate the country to rulings by the European Court of Justice.

Above all, the UK would remain hostage to the EU during the negotiations that really matter about their future relationship.

Leaving with no deal is said to be unthinkable. Why? There would be problems, but these have been vastly exaggerated. In any event, it’s only by leaving with no deal that the EU – which needs a deal – would have any incentive to negotiate on the UK’s terms.

In any event, the people voted in the referendum to leave the EU. MPs ran for election on a manifesto promise to honour that decision. They themselves passed the EU Withdrawal Act last year which committed the UK to leave on March 29 regardless of whether or not there was a deal.

To read my whole Times piece (£), please click here.

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The obvious, ahem, solution to the Irish border problem

By all accounts, the penny has finally dropped in the brain of the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

It has apparently now dawned on him that, in order to stuff the British over Brexit, the EU has played him for a sucker. It seems he has now finally grasped that if the UK leaves the EU with no deal, it is Ireland that will be stuffed. Big time.

This is apparently causing panic not just in Dublin but in Brussels. Paul Goodman writes a good summary here. Earlier this week, Margaritis Schinas, the EU Commission’s chief spokesman, said that in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ireland would have a “hard border” with Northern Ireland.

This merely restated what the EU had been saying for the past two years. Nevertheless, the consternation this seemed to cause in Dublin prompted the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, to blurt out that his team had studied “how controls can be made paperless or decentralised, which will be useful in all circumstances”.

This of course was pretty well what Britain’s former Brexit Secretary, David Davis, had been promoting, along with numerous other Brexiteers who have been pointing out until blue in the face that the physical encumbrances of a hard border can mostly be obviated by technology and good will. So what therefore has this monumental and reputedly insoluble problem actually been about?

You may well ask. It’s now obvious that, as Brexiteers have also been saying throughout, the only people who want to create a hard border that would disrupt trade between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic are the EU – who invented the Irish border impasse solely as a bludgeon to force the UK to abandon Brexit in one way or another.

But now Britain looks as if it might indeed depart with no deal, there’s panic in Brussels as well as Dublin – because of course, contrary to Project Fear scaremongering, it is Brussels and Dublin who have so much to lose if Brexit really does happen.

You’d need to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Given Ireland’s dependency on the UK, Brexit, with or without a deal, has the potential to devastate the Irish economy. There is, however, an obvious solution to the problem which I first canvassed here in July 2017.

This is for Ireland also to leave the EU.

This is said to be unthinkable, but for Ireland it is in fact (if they can think about this rationally) a no-brainer. The case for Irexit was argued in June 2017 in a Policy Exchange pamphlet by Ray Bassett, a former Irish diplomat and part of the Irish Government Talks Team during the Good Friday Agreement negotiations.

Although obviously this was written before all the developments during the Brexit negotiations, his basic point remains persuasive. In summary, it’s that although Ireland’s economic success has had much to do with its EU membership, this attachment is shallow. Far more important – and despite the obvious historical tensions – are its immensely close economic, cultural and political ties to the UK. If these were damaged, Ireland would be devastated. Bassett wrote:

“There is no other EU member more intertwined economically, historically, geographically and culturally with the United Kingdom… For Ireland, there is really no upside to Brexit.. there is a very strong case for an alternative course. Namely, opting to remain with the United Kingdom in a customs and free trade area, while negotiating as favourable as possible trade and investment terms with the remaining 26 member states.

… Despite the globalisation of the Irish economy, the United Kingdom is still by far Ireland’s main trading partner, accounting for nearly 30 per cent of the country’s merchandised imports… The President of the Irish Farmers Association, Joe Healy speaking on RTE (Irish National Radio) on 19 January 2017 said: ‘The UK is an important trading partner for us. 40 per cent of agri-food products go to the UK. That’s worth about €5billion alone. We export 90 per cent of our beef, with half going to the UK. Our dairy products that are exported to the UK have a value of slightly less than €1 billion.’ He added that it was ‘almost impossible’ to find markets where farmers would get the same returns as they currently do from the UK market. In 2016, 55 per cent of Ireland’s exports from the construction and timber sector went to the UK, as well as around half the country’s exports of clean energy technology. The bulk of Ireland’s exported small electrical goods go to the UK. Also, many of the Irish SMEs [small or medium-sized enterprises], which export to the UK, lack the linguistic skills and international business experience to diversify into new markets on mainland Europe.

… When Brexit finally takes place, Ireland will find itself on the extreme western fringe of the European Union. The centre of gravity of the Union will have shifted further eastwards. The Republic of Ireland will represent four fifths of an off-shore island, which is positioned behind a larger off-shore island that is no longer a member of the European Union. Ireland will suffer from a major physical dislocation from the main centres of power and influence in the EU.”

And finally:

“Ireland can have no sympathy with the current sentiment inside the EU Institutions that Britain needs to be “punished” for its decision to leave and that, under no account can the British be “rewarded” for Brexit… Any retaliatory action against the British is likely to disproportionally affect Ireland. It is clearly in its interest to vigorously fight that type of warped thinking… If it cannot influence the overall EU position, there is a strong argument for Ireland to declare that it is departing from Team EU… it would be a brave Government in Dublin who would ask the electorate to re-instate a border in Ireland and erect barriers with our nearest neighbour Britain where most Irish people have family links.” (my emphasis)

Oh dear.

It’s not too late to make amends, Mr Varadkar. All it needs is to think the unthinkable. That means acknowledging reality and thinking logically. Ireland went into the EU on the UK’s coat-tails. Brexit means it must now come out too.

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The dirty little secret of the “diversity” agenda

If there’s one concept in Western progressive circles that is deemed essential for a decent society, it’s “social inclusion.” The promotion of diversity is assumed to be morally unchallengeable.

That’s also the prevalent attitude among Jews in both America and Britain.

Many if not most support liberal immigration policies and equate antisemitism with “Islamophobia.” The belief is that those who are against immigration and diversity will be against the Jews too.

In fact, the opposite is the case.

The default narrative on the left is venomous hostility to Israel. This is the “new antisemitism,” singling out Israel for demonization based on lies and distortions afforded to no other country, people or cause, and which has legitimized antisemitic tropes straight out of the Nazi or medieval Christian playbooks.

In Britain, this has all but consumed the Labour Party under its far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn. In the United States, it is making steady and unchecked headway in the Democratic Party.

But what has not been acknowledged is that this is being fueled by the embrace of diversity.

In Western Europe, mass immigration and the increasing Islamization of countries such as France, Germany or Sweden are the principal cause of a horrifying increase in violent attacks on Jews. This is rarely acknowledged.

In Britain, antisemitic attacks have reached record levels. They are perpetrated by significantly disproportionate numbers of Muslims relative to their proportion of the population.

This is rarely acknowledged – although the Muslim activist Mehdi Hassan did blurt out in 2013 that the British Muslim community’s “dirty little secret” was its “routine and commonplace” antisemitism.

In America, the promotion of “diversity” is producing similar results. Three of the four co-founders of the Women’s March – Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour – are devoted admirers of the vicious anti-white racist and antisemite Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam.

In November 2016, when Perez posted a picture of herself holding hands with Farrakhan, Sarsour commented: “God bless him.”

Sarsour has asserted that there is “nothing creepier than Zionism,” hailed the Palestinian tactic of getting children to throw rocks at Israel Defense Forces’ soldiers as the “definition of courage” and claimed that “some folks … always choose their allegiance to Israel over their commitment to democracy and free speech.”

Mallory has called Farrakhan the “Greatest of All Time.” A year ago, she attended a Farrakhan speech in which he denounced Jews as “children of the devil” and mentioned her in complimentary terms.

Tablet magazine has reported the claim that Mallory turned on Vanessa Wruble, a Jewish co-founder of the Women’s March, with remarks such as “your people hold all the wealth.”

There’s worse in Congress. Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib, elected last year as a representative for Michigan with the support of Muslim Brotherhood Islamist groups, danced at her victory party draped in the Palestinian flag.

In April 2017, she shared a platform with Palestinian terrorist Rasmeh Odeh, convicted for the murder of two Israelis in a 1969 terror attack, saying she was “honored” to be on the same stage.

On her first day in office, Tlaib posted a “correction” to the world map in her congressional office by marking Israel as “Palestine.” Her swearing-in ceremony and a subsequent private celebratory dinner were attended by Abbas Hamideh, executive director and co-founder of the Palestinian activist group al Awdah.

Hamideh has repeatedly stated that Israel does not have a right to exist, equated Zionism with Nazism and ISIS, and voiced support for the Iran-backed genocidal terror organization Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who he says is “the most honorable Arab-Muslim leader of our lifetime.”

Meanwhile, Ilhan Omar, the new representative for Minnesota who was also backed by Brotherhood groups, has opposed moves to stop BDS, called Israel an “apartheid regime” and expressed antisemitic views.

In 2012, during one of Israel’s wars with Hamas in Gaza, Omar tweeted: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

The claim that the Jews hypnotize the world is of course one of the signature tropes of paranoid antisemitism. Omar initially blamed the subsequent outrage on “Islamophobia.”

This week, however, after even The New York Times called her out for this, she issued a lame apology saying she had used the word not realizing it was “ugly” and “offensive” to Jews. This won’t do. The key point is that she thinks of Israel in this paranoid and potentially murderous way as uniquely and conspiratorially evil.

If any Republican was revealed ever to have appeared on a platform with, say, David Duke or parroted neo-Nazi rhetoric there would be an eruption of outrage and their career would instantly be terminated. Yet in response to this anti-Jewish bigotry, the Democrats and their supporters are not just turning a blind eye but actually embracing it.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has called the Women’s March leaders “the suffragists of our time”; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has praised them as “courageous”; the American Civil Liberties Union’s magazine has extolled Sarsour as a “leader in the truest form of the word.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, once again displayed his dismayingly shallow grasp of antisemitism when, after referring to Omar evoking an “old antisemitic trope,” he tweeted: “And hats off to Rep Omar for her honest apology & commitment to a more just world.” This about someone who continues to call Israel “evil.”

Most astoundingly of all, Pelosi has now appointed Omar to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Thus the Democratic Party has now actively embraced and implicitly legitimized vicious antisemitism and an agenda aimed at the destruction of Israel that any decent leader should exclude from civilized discourse.

The reason for this moral collapse is the shift in political gravity that has taken place on the left in which positions previously shunned as marginal and unacceptable have now become mainstream.

Support for “Palestine” has transformed what has never ceased to be a genocidal agenda into a presumed liberation movement and the signature progressive cause.

Black power, once seen rightly as a hateful, anti-white, violent revolutionary movement is now an accepted narrative in America’s black community. This would undoubtedly have horrified its great and visionary leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Contrary to the poisonous travesty published a few days ago by The New York Times that vilified Israel and wickedly suggested that King would today be its foe, he actually said: “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews. You are talking antisemitism.”

Tragically, the mainstreaming of black power has now also mainstreamed black antisemitism, just as the championing of “Palestine” has mainstreamed hatred of Jews.

This shift that has taken place to an anti-white, anti-West, anti-Jew agenda is denied largely because it is so closely associated with “diversity” – that is, black people and Muslims.

The sheer terror of being tarred as racist or Islamophobic causes such circles not only to deny this is happening, but to hurl accusations of racism or Islamophobia at any who point it out.

Black power demagogues like Farrakhan whip up black-on-white race hate wherever they can. Preying on America’s guilt over its terrible history of slavery and anti-black bigotry, this anti-white racism threatens to unstitch America’s social fabric.

In 2014, the Investor’s Business Daily described how the “radical Muslim Brotherhood has built the framework for a political party in America that seeks to turn Muslims into an Islamist voting bloc.”

Social inclusion has meant embracing not just the unconscionable but a dagger at the throat of Jews, America and the West.

Jewish News Syndicate

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Banana republic coup in the mother of parliaments

The no-holds barred attempt to stop Brexit in its tracks by Remainer MPs who form a majority in the House of Commons is now taking the form (as I have previously warned) of a prospective coup by parliament against the people.

MPs threw out Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the EU by an uprecedentedly massive majority. A as a result, legislation passed by parliament last year means that the UK will leave the EU on March 29 with no deal.

Remainer MPs are determined to stop this by any means possible. They are aiming to enable MPs to seize control of the legislation timetable from the government in order to block no-deal.

Accordingly, Labour Remainer Yvette Cooper has tabled a motion to delay the date of the UK’s departure by extending the period laid down under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, which currently expires on March 29.

This is said to to have more force than other MPs’ motions, which are merely advisory, because it paves the way for legislation to be originated by MPs. It is thought to command the support of enough Conservatives along with Labour to render Mrs May powerless to stop Brexit from being pushed into the long grass.

The first thing to say about this is that the date of departure is not only enshrined in UK law but in a European treaty. It cannot be altered unless all 28 EU nations agree.

Last December (in an amazing coincidence of timing) the European Court of Justice ruled on this very issue. The UK could revoke its intention to leave under Article 50 only if this decision was made “in an unequivocal and unconditional manner” — that is, not as a negotiating tactic to secure improved terms in a withdrawal agreement — and so long as it was taken “in accordance with [the UK’s] constitutional requirements”.

Neither condition would seem to be met by the MPs’ manoeuvres. In a deeply disingenuous Guardian article, Yvette Cooper wrote:

“The bill doesn’t stop Brexit or decide what kind of Brexit we should have or what kind of deal would work. Nor does it affect the result of the referendum. It doesn’t revoke article 50, it just avoids us crashing out with no deal in place at the end of March. The government and parliament still need to resolve the best way forward, but the bill means if needed there can be a bit more time”.

Cooper’s stated objective is to stop the UK leaving on March 29. She talks about “extending Article 50” which is lazy gobbledegook. Her move necessitates revoking Article 50, since its terms lay down in treaty law a departure date of March 29.

Furthermore, her move is intended to give more time to… to do what, exactly? From what she has written, this is as clear as mud. More time to… well, er, “debate”, and then…well, just come up with something, anything that’s an alternative to no-deal. That is hardly an “unequivocal and unconditional” decision. It is at best a move to secure alternative terms of withdrawal – and at worst, to stop Brexit altogether.

As for being “in accordance with [the UK’s] constitutional requirements”, the very opposite would seem to be the case.

In a paper written for Policy Exchange Sir Stephen Laws QC, a former First Parliamentary Counsel and thus an expert on Commons procedure, argues forcefully that there is no constitutionally proper means for MPs to change the law governing what happens next over Brexit against the wishes of the government. (His paper was specifically a response to an amendment proposed by the arch-Remainer Dominic Grieve QC, but its main point would seem to apply to other similarly motivated Brexit wrecking motions including the one planned by Cooper).

Laws argues that the draft amendment to overturn the rule that gives precedence in parliament to government business is based on a misreading of constitutional procedure.

The key point is that the government’s approval is needed for any major expenditure. If the UK doesn’t leave the EU on March 29, this will entail continued expenditure arising from the UK’s financial obligations as a member state.

“A Bill that contains provisions that give rise to expenditure cannot pass unless those provisions have been authorised by a resolution of the House, and the motion for such a resolution can only be moved if it has been recommended by the Crown. That means that the Government has to have approved it.

“…The electoral system itself, so far as it is a means of holding the Government accountable to the public, depends crucially on the ability of the public to hold the Government responsible for how it has used the principal lever of government – the use of public money. Removing that responsibility would undermine the whole UK constitutional system.”

If the Commons Speaker were to allow this outrage, writes Laws, the Queen herself might be required to intervene to uphold the constitution. For all precedents are absolutely clear that any motion to remove that government responsibility would itself require the recommendation of the Crown.

“It is a sacred duty of all UK politicians not to involve the Monarch in politics. They have a constitutional responsibility to resolve difficulties between themselves in accordance with the rules, and so as not to call on the ultimate referee. However, might not a Government in that situation think that this was precisely the last resort for which the Royal Assent process is retained?

“How should the Monarch react to such advice? The answer is not straightforward, and the prospect of it needing to be considered in a real-life political crisis is unthinkably awful…Nobody involved in all this could possibly think that the creation of the sort of nightmare constitutional crisis I have described would be worthwhile. So, if there is a plan that would run even the slightest risk of precipitating it, it should be abandoned.”

Alas, fanatical Remainer MPs are only too likely to precipitate such a crisis. That’s why the leading back-bench Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg is now urging that, if parliament intends to subvert and undermine the constitution, then parliament itself must be stopped.

“If the House of Commons undermines our basic constitutional conventions, then the executive is entitled to use other vestigial constitutional means to stop it, by which I basically mean prorogation”.

Prorogation means bringing about the end of the parliamentary session — which would mean that all those laws which had not made their way through parliament would automatically fall.

These are desperate scenarios – but then, the current situation is desperate and unprecedented. Quite simply, and despite all their protestations to the contrary, Remainer MPs (along with some purported Brexiteers whose backbone is even weaker than their intellect) are setting parliament against the democratically expressed will of the people.

The British people voted in 2016 for one thing only: to exit the EU. Since every possible alternative to no-deal being proposed by Remainer MPs is aimed at keeping the UK tied to the EU at least to some extent, their real purpose is to reverse that referendum result.

Last year, MPs passed an act of parliament enabling the government to trigger Article 50. They themselves thus committed the UK to leave the EU on March 29 this year regardless of whether or not a deal on the terms of departure had been struck.

The manoeuvres of Grieve, Cooper and all the other Remainer MPs who will stop at nothing to prevent the UK from leaving with no deal are therefore all intended to stop Brexit itself without admitting it.

Moreover, in producing such division and chaos they are actively weakening the UK against the EU, which has absolutely zero incentive to be reasonable while it is led to believe Brexit may never actually happen.

Every MP who votes for these wrecking amendments will therefore be complicit in cynically abusing parliamentary procedure, undermining the British constitution and spitting in the eye of the public. They are also traitors to the British national interest.

They will have forfeited thereby the moral right to be members of parliament at all – and judging from the escalating fury being voiced by the public at this trashing of democracy, they will be booted out of office at the first opportunity.

Where all this leaves the historic cradle of political liberty doesn’t bear thinking about.

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Sorry, we baby boomers are not all dead yet

“Intergenerational inequalities” is the claim that the baby boomers have accrued to themselves countless benefits, such as housing, pensions or free higher education, which they have wilfully denied to the younger generation. Elderly people are thus accused of “stealing” the future from the young.

This claim has been given rocket fuel by Brexit. Young Remainers accuse the older generation, who disproportionately voted to leave the EU, of saddling them against their will with a future which they believe will be infinitely worse than now. How dare they!

Well, as a baby boomer Brexiteer I can only apologise for the fact that I am still alive. Worse still, I actually voted for Brexit in the first Europe referendum in 1975 when I was only 24. Clearly, I was as good as dead then.

The idea that older people might support Brexit as a way of improving their children’s lives — and that they might even be correct — is of course deemed beneath consideration.

There are many election issues on which elderly people may vote to affect the lives of those who live on after them. So maybe the electoral system should be progressively weighted so that the vote of an older person is worth, ooh, let’s say, one half or a quarter or a third of a younger person’s vote?

And why stop there? As King Lear’s daughters might have said after deciding how many retainers their now all-too dispensable aged father should keep in his retinue, why give older people any vote at all?

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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Our crazy world: Women’s March antisemitism, Brexit end-game

Our crazy world: please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the antisemitism infesting the US “Women’s March”, the Brexit crisis in Britain which has reached its nail-biting end game, and more.

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There’s only one way now to rescue British faith in democracy: leave the EU with no deal

They said if the UK left the EU with no deal, Britons would starve to death and run out of medicines and that planes would no longer fly.

But when ComRes pollsters asked “Would you support/oppose leaving EU with no deal if EU refuses to make any more concessions?” no fewer than 38 per cent replied that they would support it while 36 per cent said they would oppose it. A similar result was produced by an ICM poll last week in which 28 per cent said they’d prefer no-deal, 24 per cent a referendum, 11 per cent a general election and only eight per cent the Withdrawal Agreement.

They said that given the purportedly dire prospect of no-deal, the public would now reject Brexit and so should be given the chance to vote accordingly in a second referendum.

But a YouGov poll of Conservative party members earlier this month found that in a second referendum with three questions on the ballot paper, 57 per cent would vote to leave with no deal, 23 per cent would choose Theresa May’s deal and 15 per cent would choose to remain in the EU.

They said no-deal would be a disaster for Britain’s economy, that lorries would back up for miles at Dover in permanent gridlock and that huge numbers of jobs would be lost.

But when a panellist on BBC Question Time in working-class Derby last Thursday said the only option now for Theresa May was to walk away from the EU negotiations and embrace “no-deal”, there was an instant roar of approval with applause, cheers and whistling.

When another panellist pointed out the obvious fact that MPs had in effect voted for no deal last year when they passed an act of parliament giving the prime minister authority to trigger Article 50 before they knew what she was going to do, he didn’t even get to finish his sentence before the audience burst into fervent and enthusiastic applause.

I experienced a similar response (although less vociferous) when I said the same thing on the previous week’s show – and that was even in in solidly Remainer London.

Yes, these are just snapshots. And yes, other polls find majorities for Remain. But given the blood-curdling, apocalyptic warnings of what is said to be in store for Britain in the event of no-deal, it is beyond remarkable that around one third of the total polled would still vote for no-deal.

This tells both Conservative and Labour Remainers – as well as Mrs May, with her wretched Brexit-in-name-only-Remain-by-stealth compromises – that they are not so much playing with political fire as throwing oil-soaked torches onto the pyre for democracy they are themselves building.

It’s now clear that a white-hot fury is escalating among the British public – including among some principled Remainers – at the unprecedented coup being mounted against democracy by Remainer MPs determined to poke the British public in the eye by reversing the decision it took in the 2016 referendum and stopping Brexit in its tracks.

Today’s Sunday Times reports a conspiracy hatched between Britain’s Robespierre, fanatical arch-Remainer Dominic Grieve QC and a House of Commons official, no less – one of those officials whose sacred duty it is to ensure the rules of parliamentary conduct are observed – to subvert those parliamentary rules in order to seize power from the government and give it to MPs in order to overturn the people’s vote to leave the EU by ruling out no-deal.

“Leaked emails obtained by this newspaper show that Dominic Grieve, the former attorney-general, has been in secret communications with Colin Lee, the clerk of bills, with the explicit intention of suspending Britain’s departure from the European Union. Lee drew up three versions of the plan for Grieve — each of which would overturn centuries of parliamentary precedent — and then swore him to secrecy. MPs will tomorrow unveil their plan to hijack the agenda of the Commons to suspend article 50, the mechanism by which the UK is leaving the EU.”

There are, the paper reports, two plots afoot.

“Two different groups of rebels will then table amendments, to be debated on January 29, that will seek to allow back-bench MPs to seize control of Commons business and force through their own legislation — a device seen by May’s team as a constitutional ‘coup’. One group, led by Nick Boles and Yvette Cooper, will attempt to outlaw a no-deal Brexit. But a group of more than 20 plotters led by Grieve want to go further by suspending article 50. Their plan would need the support of 300 MPs — not even a majority — as long as they came from five different parties. Only 10 Tories would have to approve, making it all but impossible for May’s team to thwart the plot.”

This coup against democracy is to be mounted by MPs determined to rule out the very outcome that they themselves voted to trigger by an act of parliament they passed last year –  thus also repudiating the very manifesto pledge to honour the referendum vote to leave the EU on which they they offered themselves for election to parliament in 2017.

Among comments currently bouncing around the web are “deselect Grieve”, arrest and prosecute him and others in these plots (as well as the jaw-droppingly partisan Commons Speaker), try them for treason, prorogue parliament and other such reactions. Despite the overheated nature of many of these responses, they suggest a level of outrage among the public over the attempt to stop Brexit which is unprecedented.

The anger this is producing is so great and so profound it could sweep away the Conservative party as a political force for ever, and also sweep away with it public faith in the entire democratic process – the process which these politicians are now setting out to destroy.

There is only one way to avert this catastrophic breakdown of government by consent in Britain, and that’s to allow to proceed what the British people voted for and parliament voted to implement – that in the absence of a deal that suits its interests, Britain will leave the EU on March 29 with no deal.

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Exhibition of cowardice in Golders Green

Here’s a little thought experiment for you to try.

Suppose a synagogue wanted to hold an exhibition commemorating, say, co-existence between Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain.

Suppose a group of Jews who objected to anything showing Muslims in a good light intimidated the organisers of the exhibition into dropping it, threatening them with violence if it went ahead.

There would be a huge outcry by the wider Jewish community at such behaviour. It would almost certainly make the national papers which would be delighted to show Jewish “extremists” in such a bad light.

Yet when the reverse happens the reaction is… silence.

When Golders Green Hippodrome was turned into a mosque in 2017, the Jewish community voiced initial concerns. These were largely dissipated when it emerged that the mosque, called the Markaz or Centre for Islamic Enlightening, was run by a Shia sect that follows Grand Ayatollah Sadiq Hussaini Shirazi.

The Shirazi are opposed to the Iranian theocratic regime on the grounds that there should be separation between mosque and state. As a result of this conflict, writes the counter-extremist researcher David Toube on the Quilliam website, the followers of the Shirazi school have been persecuted and its leaders arrested.

The Markaz has gone to some lengths to display neighbourliness and friendship towards the Jewish community. Its Jewish supporters say its leaders have a strong history of interfaith co-existence, have generally steered away from politics and have denounced jihadi groups.

On the other hand, its Jewish critics say that some members of the ultra-conservative Shirazi sect have in the past expressed hostility towards Britain, while at its previous premises the mosque’s community centre hosted speakers who have claimed that Isis was created by Israeli intelligence and that the Jews control global financial markets.

Nevertheless, the Markaz planned to host a travelling exhibition created by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. This highlights the Albanian Muslims who defied their Nazi occupiers during the Holocaust to offer protection not just to their Jewish neighbours but also to Jews who had arrived in Albania and faced deportation to the camps.

The exhibition was to be brought to the Markaz by Rabbi Natan Levy, head of operations for the Faiths Forum and a noted interfaith activist.

But then the Iranian regime and its apologists got to to work. Roshan Salih, editor of the British Muslim news site 5 Pillars, urged a boycott of the Markaz for collaborating with “Zionists” because Yad Vashem was an Israeli institution. “No to any kind of normalisation with Israel,” he declared.

Iran’s Press TV denounced the exhibition as “outrageous” and as an “‘interfaith’ event with Zionists”. It complained that the mosque’s “interfaith” activities with pro-Israel groups were normalising Zionism within the British Muslim community and thus weakening the Palestinian cause.

The big guns arrived when Iran’s Mehr news agency described the event as cooperation with a “Zionist institution” and termed the Markaz a “Shirazi cult”. At that point, the reaction ratcheted up from nuisance to danger. As the JC reported, the Markaz leaders were frightened by this backlash from Iran, fearing the regime could take revenge against members’ relatives who live there.

In other words, this event was cancelled as a result of Islamist intimidation in London.

But from the mainstream media, there wasn’t a peep of protest.

There was no criticism of Islamists, of course, through the usual hang-ups about being called Islamophobic or getting killed (whichever holds the greater terror).

No outrage at the world’s most lethal, antisemitic and openly genocidal regime being able to dictate events in the heavily Jewish district of Golders Green.

From those newspapers which were so quick to denounce Jewish opponents of the Markaz as “Islamophobic” extremists, no outcry at these egregious expressions of the Muslim antisemitism which is epidemic in the Islamic world.

As for the Markaz itself, having extended a hand of friendship to the Jewish community it caved under pressure. While understandable, this is an all-too familiar story. Whether through fear, indifference or tacit support for Islamic extremism, the Muslim world continues to allow its most radical and murderous wing to dominate and define it.

At the same time, the wider community’s lack of interest in what happened at the Markaz means that once again Britain has left Muslim victims of Islamist terror hanging out to dry.

Once again, the Islamic jihad has been met by silent, spineless acquiescence from all sides.

This is how it wins.

Jewish Chronicle

Update: A mosque in Redbridge has reportedly volunteered to host the exhibition at an undisclosed location, while its cancellation in Golders Green was also criticised by Fiyaz Mughal of Faith Matters.

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