Mrs May says she is taking her stand on the issue of Northern Ireland and the integrity of the United Kingdom. If so, good; but it cannot be the whole truth. After all, she surrendered on the Irish border issue in negotiations last December until, at the very last minute, the DUP forced her to row back. I think the irreducible core of her position is something which she does not fully disclose: that she is determined to keep Britain in the customs union, though perhaps only approximately and certainly by another name. This cannot work, surely, because to the EU it is ‘cherry-picking’ and to the Brexiteers it is BRINO, but there must be a reason why she revives it each time it is stamped on. It would be very interesting to know if she has given some private undertakings to the British motor industry.
If you think about it, it is obvious that The People’s Vote march last Saturday in London could not have been attended by 750,000 people, as its organisers allege. That is the equivalent of every man, woman and child in Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge (to take three Remain-voting cities). Sky News reported that the organisers claimed more than 500,000 (itself a preposterous figure), and by Monday this had swollen in most reports by 250,000. Only the Sunday Telegraph mentioned that such estimates are dubious. It was a big march, certainly (and mostly an amiable one), but visibly much smaller than the march against the Iraq war in 2003 (two million claimed by the organisers, probably more like 300,000) and the Countryside Alliance’s Liberty and Livelihood March of 2002 (organisers and police roughly agreed on 400,000). Of course, I do not know how many were there on Saturday (I would guess about 150,000), but nor does anyone. And that is the point.
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