European elections won’t help Brexit - Bernard Ingham

I shall understand if next to nobody goes to the poll, though, bearing in mind the effort to get universal suffrage, a boycott would be a betrayal of our ancestors.

But let us be realistic. Nothing that happens tomorrow will change a thing.

The Tories and Labour will get hammered and, judging from the polls, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party will have a field day.

This may give tremendous satisfaction to Farage who will be able to resume baiting the Europhiles on the Strasbourg stage.

But it will not get us out of Europe.

The very idea that any UK contingent in the European Assembly, to give it its Sunday name, will give us our independence is risible.

Only the UK Parliament can do that and in one way or another the Government has been trying repeatedly to get it to do so.

It has failed in the face of protests over the delay which have filled the Press, monopolised the ether and sometimes brought central London to a standstill.

We are bored stiff with it.

We are also between Conservative Prime Ministers because the notoriously brutal Tories are removing Theresa May in their panic about the next election, having in one way or other done their best to prevent our EU departure on March 29.

They are panicking even though we are currently only mid-term in this Parliament.

The next election is not due until 2022.

Tomorrow’s will consequently be a protest vote pure and simple with the principal beneficiary – the Brexit Party – effectively standing on a suicidal platform.

Logically, since it wants Britain to have done with the EU, it wants to do away with itself.

What is there left for Brexiteers when we have Brexited? Will Farage then seek to lead us to the promised land with a resuscitated Monster Raving Loony Party whose absence from tomorrow’s election is regretted by those who see it as haven of sanity in our unhinged politics?

As of now, we haven’t a clue what else he stands for apart from Brexit and democracy.

I am with him all the way in promoting democracy, but to what end?

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tries to give the impression he is the greatest democrat of them all but there is not much democracy for workers in the Venezuelan paradise which he blindly extols.

Incidentally, the poverty of our political class is underlined when Labour’s deputy leader is none other 
than the slim-line Tom Watson.

There is now only one way forward for Britain.

It is to get out of the EU now, even if it is too late to avoid tomorrow’s election.

Until we do, government will be paralysed for months – and certainly until the Tories elect a new leader before the July recess.

In short, today’s focus – and that for the foreseeable future – should be on Westminster.

Have the blighters, whether Brexiteers or Remainers, not the wit to see that this undistinguished episode in our history needs to be ended?

The country cannot afford their self-indulgence any longer. The route is clear: Brexit without an entirely unnecessary Irish backstop – and, if the EU bureaucrats don’t like that, then they can whistle for £39bn.

The Treasury’s Chief Secretary, Liz Truss, has just had the guts to see a no deal Brexit as better than losing it.

Does this lift her in the May succession stakes?

It ought because the voters are fed up with all the talk whether fanatical, mealy-mouthed or, like Sir Vince Cable, leader of the Liberal Democrats, just plain daft.

He seems to think all Brexiteers are thick and Northerners.

Plankish though I may be, I take that as a compliment.

If Mrs May again fails in her final dogged attempt to honour the 2016 referendum, then the battle for her succession must be won by a decisive action man or woman.

We simply cannot go on like this.

That completely rules out Remainers who would just seek to cement us into the failing EU.

Let’s face it: Nigel Farage may be pointing the way but he cannot deliver us the independence and sovereignty we seek.

Only the Tories can or will.

Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish and other nationalists, Change UK and the Greens can’t and wouldn’t.

It is high time loopy Tories ended Nigel Farage’s benefit match.