OPINION:
2020 will be a better year for the U.K. now that the decision to leave the EU is unequivocal. A gloomy future was predicted for post-Brexit Britain but sterling has surged, and a boom is predicted, helped by the forthcoming U.S. trade deal.
It will have taken an excruciating three-and-a-half years to get to Exit Day, so Remainers cannot complain they haven’t had the time to overturn Brexit.
Despite using every trick to delay, appeal, protest, undermine, insult, de-legitimize and reverse the largest ballot in British history, U.K. citizens still voted overwhelmingly for a government that was committed to carrying Brexit through.
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Add impeachment to that list and it also describes the Democratic Party’s strategy to deny Americans their constitutional right to be governed by the candidate who was voted in.
Democracies have always faced threats from hostile powers, but since 2016 the greatest pressure on the U.K. and American systems has come from electoral sore losers.
How ironic that a party named the Democratic Party has spent all this time trying to overturn the result of a democratic election. They have been behaving almost like the slave-owning party they once were, fighting a president to keep control of their plantations.
Once they took back control of the lower house in 2018, it was only ever going to end in impeachment. For them to back off, they need to be defeated in the same way that Remainers have been in the U.K.
Some of their candidates seem even more left-wing than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labor Party just lost big time. If the Democrats lose both sides of Congress as decisively in 2020, their in-house blame-game will start, and a second-term president could be on a home run.
Like Margaret Thatcher, President Trump is a conviction politician attracting voters in huge numbers. They also dared to challenge the establishment.
“Draining the swamp” to remove mosquitos, also disturbs the alligators and snakes. In Margaret Thatcher’s case, this was the EU and its acolytes within her own party.
Her efforts to keep the U.K. independent had become a direct threat to Brussels expansionist plans, so she had to go. The Conservatives replaced her with John Major, “the grey man” as he became known.
Previously, as the U.K.’s finance minister, he had talked Margaret Thatcher into allowing Britain to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), which she had been refusing to do for good reason.
As prime minister, in February 1992, Mr. Major then signed the Maastricht Treaty that created the more centralized and powerful EU. Seven months later, ERM caused the “Black Wednesday” sterling collapse.
A currency speculator called George Soros made a billion pounds that day by “breaking the Bank of England,” but those events also reawakened the euro-skeptic movement and set a young trader called Nigel Farage on his way.
John Major, and the Tory “grandees” who felled Margaret Thatcher, later played major roles in the Remain campaign, until Boris Johnson’s victory finally ended their influence.
At least Mr. Trump has the support of his own party, which is why he will survive the Democrats’ latest attempt to oust him.
Boris Johnson is the first U.K. leader since Margaret Thatcher who hasn’t thought pleasing the EU is a U.K. government’s top priority and it has won him the first comparable majority.
Now he is hoping his net-zero greenhouse gas policies will find similar favor.
Promoting anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has been a vote winner for politicians and a cash cow for its proponents, but the theory has never been properly scrutinized as that debate was shut down long ago.
Its advocates claim to have the consensus of opinion with them, as if science is a popularity contest, but there remain some inconvenient truths that cannot be hidden by a hockey stick graph or a young girl’s scorn.
And then there is the question of selectivity. Even if you believe CO2 is a problem, China produces around 29 percent of global levels and that is set to grow. This is double what the United States produces, though it gets away with it.
The U.K. produces just 1 percent and yet it sees no inconsistency in using Chinese money to reduce that further.
Mr. Johnson and other world leaders should question the effectiveness, or the hopelessness, of smaller nations committing to expensive and risky reduction targets, while China plans to open new coal-fired power stations.
Mr. Trump is once again the exception, and global warming could prove to be a key election battle point in 2020 as the Democrats have little else left to challenge him on.
Maybe this will lead to the full facts, costs and motivations behind the man-made climate change assertion being openly discussed. No one should object to having more light shed on such an important issue — not even the Paris Agreement Remainers.
• Andrew Davies is a U.K.-based video producer and scriptwriter.
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