Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
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Jo Johnson hits out at direction of government negotiations, calls for second referendum The British government was thrown into a fresh round of turbulence on Friday as Jo Johnson, the brother of Boris Johnson and the country’s Transport Minister, resigned unexpectedly and lashed out at the direction of government negotiations on Brexit, describing it as the country’s worst instance of statecraft since the 1956 Suez crisis. In marked contrast to his brother, who remains firm that leaving the EU without a deal would be no bad thing, and resigned because he believed the deal being negotiated was too soft, Mr. Jo Johnson called for a second referendum. The choice being presented to the British people was no choice at all, he said in an online article, announcing his resignation. The deal being negotiated with Europe by the government — dubbed the “Chequers Deal” — would leave Britain economically weakened with no say in EU rules it would have to adhere to for years, while a “no deal” scenario would inflict damage on the country. “To present the nation with a choice between two deeply unattractive outcomes, vassalage and chaos, is a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis,” he wrote, adding that from the work of his own Department he was aware that a no-deal scenario could threaten the country’s access to fresh food and medicine. Mr. Johnson is the MP for Orpington, a town in the south eastern county of Kent that threatened to become a “lorry park” in the event of a no-deal Brexit. An affront While the majority of his constituents voted to leave the EU, he rejected the idea that a vote on “what an idealised Brexit might offer” versus what was being delivered in reality, matched up to what many had voted for, describing the current state of things as an affront to democracy.
