A pro-European politician from the Conservative Party has obtained an Irish passport and says he may let his UK passport lapse if Britain becomes hostile to the EU, declaring that because of Brexit he is “ashamed to be British in many ways.”
Charles Tannock, a Conservative Member of the European Parliament, has confirmed that he took advantage of the fact that his grandmother was born in Dublin because he wanted to remain a citizen of an EU member nation.
An MEP for London since 1999, Tannock, (left, with David Cameron), is one of thousands of British citizens who have been applying for an Irish passport since the UK voted to leave the EU last year.
Tannock told the Irish Times that he was a “pretty angry pro-European Tory” who was strongly opposed to Brexit and had sought out an EU passport. He accused his own party of being mired in “arrogance and hubris… the petty nationalism, the triumphalism”.
He said his interest in his Irish heritage “has been awakened by Brexit because, to be honest, I am quite ashamed to be British in many ways”.
In April the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFA) in Dublin revealed there had been a 68% rise in Irish passport applications from the UK in the first quarter of 2017. Some 51,000 applications were received from the UK between January and March 2017, compared with 30,000 for all of last year.
If the surge continues, the DFA expects the number of applications to pass 1m by the end of this year.
Race for Irish passports
Tannock said that being a Remainer Tory was hard “but I am not leaving the party yet.”
“If someone like me were to leave the Tory party, it would just become Tory-kip – a Conservative UKIP and I think you need some moderates to try and redress the imbalances which have crept into the Conservative party,” he said. He helf that as a British MEP he should continue to use his UK passport but he was “ seriously considering” whether he would renew it after the UK leaves the EU in March in 2019 if the UK heads in a “hostile direction” towards Europe.
“I wanted to feel fully European and be reassured I would remain an EU citizen” Tannock said. “I was not getting [Irish citizenship] to use it now. It is more a statement of my EU and Irish heritage and loyalty. I believe that you can be loyal to more than one country, you can love different things in different ways. I love being European, I love being Irish, I love being British and I don’t see any incompatibility between them. Having an Irish passport made me feel a lot better psychologically to be honest.”
“A Pack of Lies”
Tannock told the Irish Times that he “deeply regrets” the Brexit referendum result, whjch came after a what he called a dishonest campaign led by UKIP and prominent members of his own party such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox (left) and his fellow MEP Daniel Hannan..”It was done on a slim majority on a broad franchise. And there were a pack of lies and false promises made. I don’t feel morally bound by the outcome but I accept that legally that was the result,” he said.
“The government feels bound by it, there is no going back on Brexit but where I can be absolutely clear, there is nothing in the referendum which says we have to have the hardest Brexit. I have been campaigning ever since day one for the softest Brexit to stay as close as possible.”
“If my model were adopted – to stay in the single market and the customs union – there would be no Border problem in Ireland. Instead they have decided that Brexit means Brexit, there has to be a total divorce and Europe has to become something quite alien. They have this ludicrous idea, led by someone like (International Trade Secretary) Liam Fox that somehow the EU has stopped Britain trading with the world. I have always said that if that was so, Germany would have left the club decades ago.”
by Bob Graham
The post Brexit: Tory Politician Grabs Irish Passport appeared first on Felix Magazine.
Brexit: Tory Politician Grabs Irish Passport posted first on http://www.felixmagazine.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment