Brexit – I was sick of it when it was all happening. It’s off the news now, but when Covid settles down it will just come back again.
To deliver Brexit we need to find a consensus in the party.
I’m well aware of different views across my own party and across Parliament on pretty well all Brexit issues.
There is no question in my mind that a ‘Brexit’ would deal a significant blow to the E.U.’s strength and resilience at exactly the moment when the West is under attack from multiple directions.
What happened with Brexit was people taking back control.
I’m proud to say like many of my colleagues in the Conservative Party I am fully behind Theresa May’s Brexit plans.
My position was that if the country could unite around a soft Brexit that would be the least worst way through. But it is now very clear that the country is not going to unite around a soft Brexit. There is nobody really advocating a soft Brexit.
Sovereignty is not just at the national level; that’s the mistake of Brexit that other people make.
The people should make the final decision on Brexit when they see the government’s Brexit deal.
Italy is working to make sure the Brexit shock is an opportunity for a European reawakening.
Including myself, it is now clear that there is a significant group of Conservative MPs who think that a People’s Vote – a vote on the final form Brexit will take, is absolutely indispensable for the future wellbeing of our country.
From the immediate abandonment of the promise of an extra £350m for the NHS, the history of Brexit is already littered with discarded and unfulfillable promises.
Nothing of substance is being achieved or even proposed, while the country remains trapped in the Kafka-esque misery that Brexit has become.
Jeremy Corbyn’s policy on Brexit has failed to unite his own Labour MPs and has been rightly castigated for lacking any clear course.
If you look at it ideologically, I would say Brexit is not something that probably is good for the world.
How we Brexit must preserve the opportunities that come from leaving the E.U., such as the benefits of an independent trade policy.
The only thing that I know for sure is that the people who invest in the U.K., those investors, believe strongly that the ramifications of a hard Brexit are very bad, and they believe that a recession will take place in the U.K., and that would clearly be negative for banks of the U.K.
We don’t know what is going to happen with Brexit, it’s not going to be good for the North anyway whatever happens. It’s not going to be good for Ireland whatever happens. And the problem is we don’t know what is going to happen so we can’t really prepare so everything is speculation.
Brexit is the most complex and difficult political decision our country has had to take in mine and many other lifetimes.
For me, the most ironic aspect of the Brexit debate has been right-wing Brexiteers speaking loftily about parliamentary sovereignty, when they have never backed MPs having a fuller involvement in how our country is run.
Brexit is the best thing to happen for Russia, for America, for Germany, and for democracy.
On the night of Brexit, while some people were celebrating and others were having wakes, I stayed in and played Beethoven, his quartets mainly, into the small hours of the morning.
One of the strengths of the U.K. is its ability to attract very highly talented people from all over the places, but also their ability to send English people outside. So they’re very brain circulation-oriented, and I do hope, even with Brexit, they will keep this asset they have.
A no deal Brexit would be a complete failure by the government to negotiate for Britain.
Many Conservatives believe that our conference needs to show the Conservatives retain a reputation for competence, a strong commitment to market economics and how that benefits everyone, and how Brexit is not going to drag us to a point where a Corbyn-led government becomes a reality.
The final Brexit deal must ensure there is no diminution in Britain’s national security or ability to tackle cross-border crime.
Brexit has certainly exposed an ugly underbelly of our democracy. It is clear to me that we must ensure that the many Leave voting communities must never be left behind again.
The key to stopping the hard-right nationalist forces poised to pounce on Brexit isn’t going to be finessing a reprieve for the status quo. It’s about actively creating consent for meaningful change, and expanding democratic participation beyond a second referendum.
The day after Brexit I had a moment when someone said, ‘Don’t you want to go back to your own country?’ I wasn’t 100 per cent sure if he was thinking he was being kind? I was like, ‘Um… this is my home, thank you.’
The ‘Reader’s Digest’ used to run a feature called ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.’ The new wisdom – post-Trump and Brexit – is that it doesn’t.
Having spent six years as Europe Minister, I am in no doubt about the technical challenge Brexit presents lawmakers.
Brexit and Trump had upended the fundamental establishment viewpoint that politics was aspirational, that good politics promised progress, generational betterment and ever-expanding world reach.
I’m obsessed with Brexit.
I am attached to a strict approach to Brexit: I respect the British vote, but the worst thing would be a sort of weak E.U. vis-a-vis the British.
We have seen at first hand that upholding the Good Friday Agreement while also avoiding a hard border in Ireland is the key to unblocking the Brexit logjam.
I believe that Brexit, whether it’s a bad deal or no deal, is a big deal – too big for anyone to ignore – but it’s not a done deal.
I suspect my own journey to Brexit has closely followed that of Britain’s. I had doubts, then I decided we should stay in, then I had very serious doubts as our island began to sink under a tide of regulations and our government lost control of the immigration system.
One might have thought that Brexit would be a wake-up call for the American media. Yet, just as in the U.K. referendum, ‘Russia’ became the buzzword in the U.S. election that the political and media establishments thought would scare people into voting for the status quo.
I think one of the laughable things about poor old Brexit is that they’re so cross – they’re furious with everyone. But this isn’t a cross country; this is a generous and optimistic country.
Although the most amount of attention went to what happened in the United States and in Brexit, Cambridge Analytica and its predecessor, SCL Group, worked in countries around the world, particularly in the developing world, to manipulate elections for their clients. So it was global.
Left to their own devices, the Tories will squash the life out of what Brexit really represents in terms of the chance to shake up political life and overturn a complacent status quo. We cannot let that happen.
London thrives because it is one of the most open cities in the world, but Brexit is shutting the door on talented people coming to live and work here – the people we need when we get sick, the ones we see on the Tube, our friends and neighbours. Even worse, it has made London a less tolerant place.
Is it just me, or did 2019 feel like an endless fight? Tension over Brexit and climate-change protests trickled down into our everyday lives, putting pressure on every relationship.
Westminster is gripped by a fanatical race towards a cliff-edge Brexit and nobody is stopping to think about the impact it would have on the everyday lives of the people we serve as politicians.
Part of the Brexit debate was about control, having a say over our laws and money and letting politicians stand up for what the people voted for, not signing away our sovereignty.
The Brexit vote, the presidential elections in the U.S., a number of the other regional political movements – that’s not a flash in the pan.
There’s a way that we can deliver a Brexit that works for our country, and the really interesting thing is the amount of Tory MPs working with Labour MPs, forming that consensus.
The Government cannot just be consumed by Brexit. There is so much more to do.
As the Bank of England has noted, Brexit is a unique experiment in the reimposition of protectionist barriers to trade.
The pursuit of an extreme Brexit cannot come at the cost of peace in Northern Ireland.
The day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, I woke up determined to make a success of Brexit. I was surprised by how quickly I went to acceptance of the result, without passing through any of the prior stages of grief.
Boris Johnson tried to prorogue parliament to get his disaster of a Brexit through, bringing hundreds of thousands out onto the streets for the ‘Stop The Coup’ protests, and seeing his cynical strategy overturned by the Supreme Court in the process.
Brexit is a cliff, not a gradient. The mistake we are in danger of making is to believe that some Brexits are better than others when the fundamental problem is Brexit itself.
I accept of course we’re in deep trouble and deep difficulty. But if we, under a new leader, reinvent ourselves properly as a Brexit party, we will be faced with the inevitability at some point of a general election in order to deliver Brexit because this Parliament is stopping the delivery of Brexit.
