Quote Originally Posted by Ganpati's Goonerz--AFC's Aboriginal Fertility Cult View Post
The bottom line is that had the ERG voted with the whip, we'd be out of the EU now.

During the 2016 vote, none of the leave campaigns advocated no deal. Farrage openly discussed being in the SM (Norway) and the CU (Switz), both of which would have made us rule takers, and as such, just as much a "colony."

So 52% voted for a from of Brexit which would have involved some form of vassalage. May's govt put this to Parl 3 times. The only reason it didn't pass was because the ERG voted against said Govt.

There is no way that a no deal Brexit could be described as evolutionary change by historical British standards. It would be completely revolutionary. You'd have to go back to 1649 to find such a break with the existing order.

So please explain simply what deal you'd have tried to get 2016-19 with the EU that would be both "evolutionary" and avoid making us, to some extent, "a colony of the EU", to the extent that as opposed to pooling sovereignty, we would take rules over which we had no say.

And that's before we mention the Irish border.

There's no such thing as an "evolutionary" no deal Brexit. And that, coupled with the Irish border, has been the crux of the problem.
If this logic held up for a second, Leave voters would be angry with the ERG, wouldn't they? But they're not. Instead, they're angry with the Remainer establishment that deliberately scuppered Canada-style deals offered by the EU in order to facilitate Chequers and the WA, which were only ever Remain by any other name. This is a matter of public record, by the way. Number 10 and the Cabinet Offic repeatedly undermined the DExEU's negotiations in order to pursue their appalling WA. This was a Remain stitch-up from day one.

The Irish border has always been a non-issue that the EU has been able to exploit mercilessly because May was stupid enough to make it one of her 'red lines'. Had she not done so, the fact of the matter is that ultimately the EU would have been faced with the need to either establish a border itself against the wishes of the RoI and the UK (not possible) or reach an accommodation. But for May's idiocy, an accommodation would have had to be found.