On June 23, 2016, Britons voted to leave the European Union in a historic referendum. However, more than three years later, it is still unclear whether the country will go through with Brexit. Last night, Tory rebels and opposition MPs defeated the Government in their first attempt to pass legislation designed to thwart no deal.
The Commons voted 328 to 301 to take control of today’s proceedings, meaning they can bring forward a bill seeking to delay Britain’s departure from the EU.
In response, Boris Johnson said he would try to pass a motion for an early general election.
However, in order to do so he will need a two-thirds majority and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has already made clear his party would not vote for the motion unless and until the anti-no deal bill passes first.
The veteran left-winger said: “Get the bill through first in order to take no deal off the table.”
As uncertainty continues, a newly-resurfaced report by Dominic Cummings sheds some light on Mr Johnson’s strategy but most importantly reveals the level of awareness of his Government.
In a post on his political blog, the Prime Minister’s key advisor argued that the cold reality of the referendum was no clear story, and no inevitability.
He wrote in 2017: “It was ‘men going at it blind’.
“The result was an emergent property of many individual actions playing out amid a combination of three big forces.
“Many of these actions were profoundly nonlinear and interdependent and the result that we actually witnessed was very close.”
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Listing the three big forces that prevented Remain from winning, Mr Cummings said: “For example, if Michael Gove had stayed out of the campaign then Vote Leave would almost certainly have either collapsed or been forced into fighting the campaign on a losing message like ‘Go Global’, a firm favourite for many years among a subset of MPs and Farage’s inner circle (Leave.EU adopted this as its first slogan) and a total loser with the public.
“Therefore another counterfactual: why did Cameron and Osborne not try very hard to get a clear commitment from Gove that all he would do is issue a statement but would carry on with his day job and would not campaign?
“I hope he would have refused but it was worth a shot and they didn’t try very hard.
“Without Boris, Farage would have been a much more prominent face on TV during the crucial final weeks, probably the most prominent face.
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“We had to use Boris as leverage with the BBC to keep Farage off.
“It is extremely plausible that this would have lost us over 600,000 vital middle class votes.
“Without Victoria Woodcock, an absolutely phenomenal manager and by far the single most important person in the management of Vote Leave, we would not have been able to build anything like the structure we did and this could easily have cost us the winning margin of votes.”
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