Apparently not all Brexiters are geriatric "Heartbeat" fans or are knuckle draggers living on Welsh Council Estates. (How things have changed; when in the 30's unemployed Welsh miners, Chapel to a man, patiently queued up every day to read the newspapers in their local Library. Good to see what a good dose of Margaret Thatcher and Richard Dawkins can do for community morale)
They simply seem to have problems, in thinking things through.
Anne Main, Tory MP and Brexit backer, said: "Nobody on the official Leave campaign raised the prospect of sending people away and deporting people. "This has been raised by the home secretary and it is a catastrophic error of judgment for someone who wishes to lead this country to even suggest those people who are here legally, working with families and settled, should be even part of the negotiations."
Labour MP and Brexit campaigner Gisela Stuart - who tabled the Commons question - said the UK should not "retrospectively change the rights of its citizens" , and that anything other than a guarantee was "a failure of this government to protect its people".
She said EU nationals "are not bargaining chips" - an argument that has separately been made by Tory leadership contender Andrea Leadsom.
Immigration minister James Brokenshire defended the government's position, saying there would be "no immediate change" affecting EU citizens, but that whether to offer an absolute guarantee would be a decision for the next prime minister.
Passing the buck in time honored fashion IOW.
This was all in response to an earlier BBC interview with Phil Hammond
In a BBC interview, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond - who is backing Mrs May to be the next leader and prime minister - said he thought it "most unlikely" that EU nationals already living in the UK would be told they could not stay, and called for informal talks before the UK officially triggers its departure from the EU.
But he said to fully guarantee EU citizens' rights to remain in the UK, without commitments from other countries towards Britons abroad, now risked "selling our people out too cheap".
"You can't say anything until we have had the negotiation because clearly this has to be a bilateral agreement.
Now obviously Hammond was laying it on a bit thick, for the benefit of softies such as Main and Stuart who never seemed to have realised what they, potentially, were voting for.
There is an inexorable logic to this.
Just as there's an inexorable logic to the American Criminal Justice System in seeking to be scrupulously fair, consigning individuals to Death Row for 10 or 20 years to contemplate their possible fate before finally being executed
Just as there's an inexorable logic in any Final Solution to the Jewish problem in having to gas each last child for as Himmler ** patiently explained, when they grow into adults they'd only come seeking revenge for the murder of their parents
So there's and inexorable logic in the possibily, if the EU want to play hardball, of the UK, and indeed the EU having to deport people, whole families perhaps against their will in the full gaze of the media. And all because the UK decided it wanted to leave.
A pariah - the UK ? No way!
And yet only three weeks ago anyone daring to suggest such a thing - the possibility of EU nationals being deported from the UK, would have been accused of scaremongering*.
Whether this is likely to happen is anybody's guess. However what's truly scary is that soft lummocks such as Main and Stuart in voting for out, not only won for themselves the unexpected bonus of wrecking the UK economy but the possibily of people being used as bargaining chips. When they never ever thought any of this could ever happen. Boo, Hoo, Hoo.
michael adams
- A Straightforward Question for Outers
** I'll see Timmy's Stalin, and raise him a Himmler
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