The country is stuck between May’s bad deal and a no-deal Brexit – a Final Say is our only route out

The only way politicians can cover themselves is to say to Leave voters: you said you didn’t like our relationship with Europe in 2016; we’ve negotiated a new one; which do you prefer?

Femi Oluwole
Friday 15 February 2019 11:22 GMT
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There are only three possible outcomes to this Brexit mess: we leave the EU with the deal that’s been negotiated but both leavers and remainers hate it; we leave the EU with no deal at all but that’s crazy; or we don’t leave the EU but that would need a new referendum. With parliament about to decide what comes next, how do we move forward when the three paths in front of us are blocked?

In 2016, most of the pro-Brexit politicians and journalists reassured us that by voting to leave there would be a good deal at the other side. So to pretend “we” voted for no deal is just dishonest. On top of that, the Good Friday Agreement which underpins peace in Northern Ireland is based on close ties between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Several of those ties would be broken if there’s a no-deal Brexit. And we can talk about the economic insanity of a no-deal Brexit until the hormone-treated cows come home but parliament already voted against it for many reasons including national security.

What about the deal? When we at Our Future Our Choice speak to Brexit voters they tell us they wanted more control. Well, because the UK has 73 out of the 750 members of the European parliament, in addition to our vote share in the EU Council, we have three times as much voting power as the average EU country. Now if you compare that with a Brexit deal which means we follow the rules of the EU but no longer have any say, you can see why Brexit voters hate the deal.

Mathematically, if neither of the Brexit options have more than 48 per cent support then logic says staying in the EU is the most popular option. Only two things unite the country right now: nobody likes the deal that May has brought back, and nobody wants Brexit to keep dominating UK politics. So far we’ve only negotiated an exit deal, not a trade deal. So under both Brexit scenarios we’re spending the next four years or more negotiating that. Instead of dealing with the problems that pushed people to vote for Brexit, like the crises around the NHS, housing and poverty, it will be just more Brexit.

A referendum where we get to actually look at the Brexit deal they’ve negotiated, and vote to reject Brexit as a whole is the only way to avoid that, and so we can actually get to work fixing the real concerns of Brexit and Remain voters alike.

But parliament needs to be reminded who it is working for. That’s why young people have been speaking out against this mess. Our generation voted overwhelmingly against Brexit. We are more connected to the outside world than any previous generation.

We tweet at American presidents, play FIFA against people in France, we date Italians and have summer jobs in Spain. We completely refuse to lose the right to freely live, work and love in 31 of the cheapest countries for us to get to. Somehow people didn’t realise that when they were screaming to end free movement they were pushing to narrow the career options of an entire generation of Brits.

Therefore on 27 February, hundreds of young people, led by Our Future, Our Choice will be filling the halls of Westminster, in our Parliament Takeover, speaking to MPs telling them that a Final Say is the only way out for the country and for them. If MPs vote for a deal that angers both Remain and Leave voters, they’re out of a job. If they allow no deal to happen, when the economic and security consequences of that start to be felt, again, they’re out of a job. They only way they can cover themselves is to say: you said you didn’t like our relationship with Europe in 2016; we’ve negotiated a new one; which do you prefer?

Femi Oluwole is co-founder and chief spokesperson for Our Future, Our Choice, a pro-EU advocacy group for young people​

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