James O'Brien's Monologue With One Year Until Brexit Is A Must-Watch
29 March 2018, 12:47
There is one year until Britain leaves the EU and this is James O'Brien's epic monologue on where we are right now.
Brexit Day is scheduled for 29th March 2019, when we will leave the European Union.
James has spent 21 months waiting to be proved wrong on Brexit, but says that each day, it just becomes clearer and clearer that Britain has made a mistake.
And as he sets out our position with a year left, he admitted he is still baffled by how people still don't see what a disaster Brexit will be.
Speaking live from the Stephen Lawrence Centre, he said: "'Get on with it' is the new catchphrase. No one can tell me what 'it' is.
"This clash between reality and fantasy culminated last time I spoke to Lord Kerr, who wrote an Article50 and said that we now have one year if we wanted to, we could just stop Article 50 and revert to normal. I don't think that's going to happen.
"He wrote Article 50, told me that it was something that could be revoked and then I got bombarded with Brexiters telling me Lord Kerr didn't know what he was talking about. And that seemed to me to sum up Brexit.
"You've got Liam Fox telling the Managing Director of a car panel manufacturing company that he knows more about car panel manufacturing than the Managing Director of a car panel manufacturing company does.
"You had David Davis on October 10th 2016 saying there will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside. He now says of course, just over a year later, that the negotiation will be tough, complex and at times confrontational. 'Nobody has ever pretended this will be easy. I have always said this negotiation will be tough.'
"Gove said in April 2016, 'The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards. We can choose the path we want.'
"John Redwood, 'Getting out of the European Union can be quick and easy. The UK holds most of the cards.'
"I don't understand why we remain so entrenched. And I don't know how we can build bridges now.
"I will work, like anybody else who loves their country, to make the damage as little as possible, but until the people responsible for doing the damage admit what they've done, it's really really hard. It's really hard to actually say, 'OK we're hurting ourselves but everyone's got to pull together to minimise that hurt.'
"Because you still have this hope that a penny will drop on a massive scale, people will realise that if Michael Gove and David Davis and Liam Fox and John Redwood and all the rest of them are saying the polar opposite of what they were saying two years ago, the polar opposite, demonstrably contradicting themselves, I don't get psychologically why people's minds don't change."
