by John Brian Shannon

I have a question:

Why did almost one-million people protest in London on Saturday?

Apparently, almost one-million people turned-up to protest Boris Johnson’s Brexit 2.0 deal which was scheduled to be passed later in the day in the UK House of Commons.

But because it’s unwise to anger one-million protesters milling about on London’s streets… the vote was postponed until Monday, October 20th. Smart thinking!

Can you imagine the security nightmare and the damage to shops, double-decker buses, personal vehicles, and (possibly) to life and limb had the vote gone ahead and be approved with one-million hostile protesters waiting just outside the House of Commons?

A million revellers could cause a lot of damage — and played across the world’s TV screens, the entire scene would’ve made the UK look like a country that hadn’t yet come of age and still didn’t understand how democracy works.

I noticed some UK news outlets were trying to play-down the number of protesters, with some saying “thousands” or “tens of thousands”. But why do that? We all know that 16-million people voted against leaving the EU in 2016, and it’s probably safe to assume that 1/16th of them are still unhappy about the outcome of the EU referendum.

That’s how democracy works: Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose.

But the time to expend all your effort to get the result you want, kids, is in the run-up to a vote, not after the fact.

And let’s face it, in a country of 66-million people you could raise one-million protesters against Vegemite-on-toast if you were as well-financed as that particular Remainer cohort.

I can hear the shouts rising to a crescendo: “Taxi Drivers Against Vegemite!” and chants of, “Vegemite, OK!… Toast, OK!… But No Vegemite On Toast!… HEY! HEY!”

I have a message for yesterday’s anti-Brexit protestors:

Are you aware that on June 23, 2016 Britons voted to leave the EU (the 1st ‘People’s Vote’ on Brexit) and that British MP’s voted 498-114 to leave the EU on February 1, 2017, and that on June 8, 2018 Theresa May won a General Election a.k.a. the 2nd ‘People’s Vote’ (as a General Election is the purest form of a ‘People’s Vote’) an election in which all parties campaigned on a promise to deliver Brexit?

And, are you aware that the EU’s own Jean-Claude Juncker, the EC’s Donald Tusk, the EU’s Chief Brexit Negotiator Michel Barnier, and every single head of government in the EU27 have agreed that the new Brexit deal proposed by PM Boris Johnson (Brexit 2.0) is the best way forward for the EU27?

If you think you’re working for the European Union when you’re protesting against Brexit 2.0, you’re not. EU leaders have accepted this deal. And they wouldn’t have accepted it… if it didn’t work for their EU27.

If you think you’re working for the UK, you’re not. A majority of Britons still want Brexit to happen according to recent polls.

If you think you’re working for democracy, you’re not. How can you be working for democracy when you’re seeking to overturn the democratic choice of The People?

You need to stop and think; Why are you trying to overthrow something that a majority of Britons voted for, what the UK government itself proposed to the EU, and what the EU/EC accepted as the best way forward?

So, who or what are you working for?

My guess is that 1/3rd of you are professional (paid) protestors who travel all over Europe protesting anything that pays your travel expenses (How do I know that? Because I see the same faces protesting in Paris, Berlin, London, and Dublin, and not just on the topic of Brexit!) another 1/3rd of you are associated with a UK political party that once voted for Brexit but since it now looks like it might actually happen they don’t want any part of it, and the last 1/3rd of you are simply poor losers since the 2016 referendum.

To the first-third I say: Enjoy!
To the middle-third I say: Support democracy instead!
To the final-third I say: Grow Up!

By the way, I strongly support your right to peaceful democratic protest. That’s not the issue here. Brexiteers are trying to understand you!

If I’m wrong and it’s simply a generational thing, then, please consider this line of thought:

The older generations built the country you now live in.

They did it with blood (wars) sweat (labour) and tears (several recessions) and they did it (mostly) without cars, air conditioning, computers, the internet, TV’s, the Chunnel, scheduled airline service, or hundreds of other things that we all take for granted these days.

Since the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht when the UK illegally joined the EU in 1993 (according to the UK constitution it is illegal to hand any amount of UK sovereignty over to any foreign power) Britons weren’t given a vote on EU membership.

And the first time that they did get a vote on EU membership, they voted to leave — mind you, that opportunity took 23-years to arrive! Which is hardly democratic.

If you study demographics or are equipped to do a Google search, you can see yourself that approximately 500,000 Britons die every year (mostly from old age) so you can extrapolate for yourself how many older people have died since the UK joined the EU. (500,000 per year x 23 years = 11,500,000 UK deaths since joining the EU)

Therefore, eleven million Britons died waiting for the chance to vote on whether they wanted to join the EU, or not. But nobody asked.

Surely most of them would’ve voted against EU membership as it contravened the UK constitution, nor did they want to be ruled from a continent that caused two world wars, and later, the Cold War (a consequence of WWII) which was also costly for UK taxpayers in blood and treasure.

In fact, all they ever wanted to do was to recover from war, from postwar poverty, and rebuild their broken lives and broken country.

Everything you see in the UK was built by them. Every road you drive on, every bridge you drive over, every airport you fly out of to Spain or Malta for your annual holidaymaking, and every major building in the country. And so much more.

So, who are you, who’ve yet to accomplish anything like that, to try to take away from what’s left of them and their families, the opportunity to have a real vote for or against membership in a foreign political bloc?

And while I agree that it was a fine thing for the UK to join the EEC in 1973 (the EEC was a trading union, not a political union like the EU) it’s even better from a democratic perspective that Britons were able to vote on EEC membership within 3-years of joining.

Nothing wrong with trying it out for a couple of years so that Britons could see if it was a good or bad thing for them! In 1975, UK citizens voted enthusiastically to join the EEC and it did a world of good for both the UK and continental Europe.

In any event, Britons voted to leave the EU in 2016, the UK Parliament voted to leave the EU in 2017, and the UK held a General Election where all parties ran on a platform to deliver Brexit (and a pro-Brexit party did win on June 8, 2018) and EU and EC leaders have approved Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit 2.0 deal, and now a relatively small number of British MP’s suddenly have ‘cold feet’ after campaigning for Brexit in 2016, 2017 and in 2018.

So, again, who are you… to try to overthrow the will of the UK people as expressed in 2016, the will of Parliament which voted for the European Union bill in 2017, the will of the present UK government which won an election in 2018 based on their promise to deliver Brexit, the will of the EU leaders and negotiators, and the will of the leaders of the EU27 countries?

Who are you? And why do you hate democracy?

Please tell us in the comments below — we’re genuinely interested to know.

As always, abusive comments won’t be published.