Bernard Ingham: At last, beef on the bones for great Brexit carve-up

The short answer is that it must – and will – because the people have willed the end and real politicians know that, for all the Remoaners’ bluster, they are in deep trouble if they deliver anything else.

This destination has never been in doubt since the referendum. An independent, sovereign nation with control over its borders – and service with a smile for all who want to do business with the UK.

What has been in doubt since the people spoke on June 23 is how we shall get there. Theresa May has now provided a critical signpost. We shall sever all Brussels’ authority over us by a Bill repealing the 1972 European Communities Act that set us on an unhappy and sometimes disastrous 44-year odyssey.

This will convert European law into UK law and it will be up to our sovereign Parliament to decide what, if anything, of European law we wish to retain. We shall be making our own future.

Inevitably, all this takes time. Major legislation always does. Mrs May has now bought the Government more time to get its ducks in a row before triggering our departure in the New Year by invoking the celebrated Clause 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and then including what is dubbed as “the Great Repeal Bill” in the Queen’s Speech for the 2017-18 session.

By 2019 – well before the next election – we should be out on our own in the brave new globalised world, even if some loose ends in our former association with the EU still need tying up.

And so Mrs May emerged from her 60th birthday celebrations making two important points.

The first is that she is not going to be rushed, even if her deliberate approach creates something of a vacuum that latterly has been filled by Europhiles saying she hasn’t a clue about her post-Brexit policy. We have got to get used to our new Prime Minister taking her time over policy.

The second is that she is a real politician. She fed her Tory critics red meat at the very start of the party conference and in the process 
challenged every MP in the land to decide between sovereignty and the subservience to Brussels that a majority of the electorate – 17 million voters – have rejected.

It may be argued that she is entering into an enormous gamble since she has an inadequate majority in Parliament and that possibly a majority of MPs of all parties, if not necessarily her own, voted to remain in the EU.

The clever lady is no doubt banking on the common sense of most MPs not to tamper with the voters’ verdict. If, however, they do, she will become overnight a Heroine of the People, and will live to fight another day for them in a new Parliament that she must surely command if the current state of the Labour Party prevails.

Of course, there is many a slip between cup and lip – that is the fascination of politics – but we now know not only where we are going but broadly how we are going to get there.

Mrs May, as she will surely make clear today, is fundamentally a reforming Prime Minister bent on spreading wealth and opportunity across the nation and to all those who are prepared to work to better themselves. She wants a more equal society better treated by 
capitalism.

I never thought I would live to see a Tory Prime Minister espouse workers on company boards as distinct from worker-shareholders. Yet that is what she has done and will no doubt reiterate it in her speech to the Tory Party conference today.

This raises the question as to whether there is any centre ground left for the other parties. Moderate Labour MPs are seeing Mrs May take up their pet ideas – though not grammar schools – for increasing the opportunities for ordinary working people.

This, coupled with the hard, totalitarian nature of the Marxist Corbynistas, means that at least for the moment we are heading for a one-party state in England. Scotland already is one with policies not dissimilar to Jeremy Corbyn’s and consequently escalating debt.

Who in the Labour Party is going to rescue our democracy and improve its governance by recovering its appeal to the mass of the people? We need Labour to come up smelling of political Bisto soon.