Please see my wire from earlier this week as Brexit diarist for The New York Sun, ‘Brexit: Once More into the Blamed Breach’:
Given the political roller-coaster ride the cause of British independence has endured for most of 2019, these several weeks of politicking before Thursday’s general election have been anticlimactic. Like most electoral campaigns, parties vie to outdo one another with promises of bounty. Conservative or Labour — with minor parties joining in — merely prepare the final bill to future taxpayers. The one difference, of course, is the fate of Brexit.Prime Minister Johnson criss-crosses the country to the mantra “Get Brexit Done.” His leading challenger, Labourite Jeremy Corbyn, vows to renegotiate Mr. Johnson’s agreement with the European Union and then, remarkably, campaign in a second referendum to remain. Other party heads are pledged either to such a referendum “do-over” or cancelling the Article 50 exit outright. With only a handful of seats at stake for them, they have little to lose; they gamble that more outrageous platforms will stand out.
The one outlier is Nigel Farage and his Brexit Party. Kudos to Mr. Farage for making during the 1990s the UK Independence Party the pre-eminent voice for British sovereignty. That culminated in a Conservative premier, David Cameron, calling for a referendum in 2016 to placate Eurosceptic Tories. When Mr. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, failed to deliver the referendum decision to leave the EU earlier this year, Mr. Farage formed the Brexit Party.
After the party’s singular success in the European parliamentary elections in the spring and amid anti-Brexit mayhem in Parliament — principally to the charge that Mr. Johnson’s deal is little better than Mrs. May’s agreement — Mr. Farage vowed to take his party to the polls for a “clean break Brexit.”
At first, the Brexit Party aimed to field candidates in all 650 constituencies. When fears mounted that, by challenging Conservative incumbents, Mr. Farage risked giving Remainers control of the House of Commons, he reversed himself and conceded Tory safe seats.
Yet even this strategy came under fire this weekend, when a number of leading Brexit MEPs criticized this concession as a continuing risk, by weakening Conservative challengers to Labour seats. They argued this reversed a previous commitment of contesting only constituencies where Tories were demonstrably weaker than Brexit Party candidates. Instead these Brexit MEPs urged electors to forsake Mr. Farage, marshal the independence movement behind one party, and vote Conservative.
The reasons are two-fold.
Remarks are welcome on DMI’s Facebook page.
My thanks to editor Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.
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