Tuesday 17 May 2022 02:13 AM GLOVER: Why a cosy Liberal/ Labour stitch-up is the surest way to see us led on ... trends now
Many people who voted for Britain to leave the EU will assume that Boris Johnson irrevocably secured a deal after years of chaos and confusion.
Brexiteers are strengthened in this belief because, apart from the Scottish-Nationalists, very few politicians openly mourn the European Union or say that they want to re-join it as soon as possible. The squabbles about Brexit are surely over.
Beware of such complacency! There are, in fact, many MPs and several organisations yearning for this country to be re-admitted by Brussels, and stealthily working towards that end.
And why should we be surprised? Eurosceptics campaigned for decades to leave the EU, and were depicted as loonies or extremists by mainstream politicians. Europhiles are doing the same thing from the other direction. The difference is that they are moving more swiftly.
Ploy
One body which gazes longingly across the Channel is called Best for Britain. It was founded in 2017 to stop the UK leaving the EU, despite a majority having voted to do so the previous year. Not outstandingly democratic, then.
After we finally quit the European Union, despite Best for Britain’s attempts to overturn the result of the Referendum, the organisation re-branded itself. It now champions ‘internationalist values’ without explicitly advocating EU membership. But that, of course, is the Holy Grail.
Members of its board and its executives are the same people who used to plot to stick with Brussels. It continues to attract Europhile former British ambassadors and proBrussels politicians from all parties to its councils.
STEPHEN GLOVER: Some Lib Dem MPs, such as Layla Moran (pictured), are, admittedly, keen on the idea
Best of Britain’s latest ploy concerns a survey of 10,000 voters, conducted on its behalf by a company called Focaldata. It supposedly shows that a formal arrangement between Labour and the Liberal Democrats would lead to both parties winning enough seats together for Sir Keir Starmer to become Prime Minister.
According to an analysis of the polling, an electoral pact between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens — in which these parties would agree to stand down candidates to maximise the chances of beating the Tories — would result in a small overall majority.
The suggestion is that under such arrangements, Labour would win 322 seats, the Lib Dems 13 and the Greens 1, giving them a combined total of 336, which would take them over the 325 threshold for a simple majority.
However, if there were no such alliance, and candidates from these three parties stood against one another, they would fall short of an overall majority, according to the analysis. In that case, they would require the support of the Scottish Nationalist Party to form a government.
The import is that a threeway alliance between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens would see off the Tories without necessitating any reliance on the SNP. Voters who backed the alliance would be told that the SNP could be side-lined as an electoral force at Westminster.
Balderdash
The upshot, so Best for Britain implies, is that the SNP would be in no position to insist on a second independence referendum in Scotland. Unionists could plump for the alliance with an untroubled heart.
It is, of course, all balderdash — and dangerous balderdash at that. In the first place, the chances of
