LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th January, 2020) The passage of the withdrawal bill does not guarantee a clean Brexit as "remainers" will try to sabotage it by forcing the United Kingdom to rejoin the European Union, a senior member with the UK Independence Party told Sputnik on Monday.
The bill overcame resistance from pro-EU elements in both chambers of the British parliament to gain the royal assent last week. This was made possible by the ruling Conservative party's landslide victory in December's election.
"They will do their damnedest to sabotage it. They've moved from 'remain' to 'rejoin.' So they want to be called re-joiners. You'd think after the December election they'd be begging for forgiveness. But instead they want to re-join the EU," Freddy Vachha, a UKIP national campaign manager, said.
The UK is set to formally exit the EU on Friday, triggering an 11-month transition period in which the two will try to negotiate an amicable trade deal. EU officials have cast doubt on whether such a pact is possible within months, despite otherwise optimistic sounds from Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
But Vachha argued that no transitional period would suffice if enough people in the civil service, including many in both chambers of parliament, were determined to "make Brexit fail."
He went on to criticize the recent behavior of the unelected upper chamber, which he claimed had come to represent a train of political thought out of step with the needs of modern UK politics.
The House of Lords passed five amendments to Boris Johnson's Brexit proposal, including the so-called "Dubs" amendment intended to aid child refugees in reuniting with their families, only for them to be rejected by the House of Commons.
In what was then believed to have the potential to turn into a back and forth clash between the Lords and the Commons, Vacha suggested that the Lords had ultimately capitulated out of fear of a backlash from pro-Brexit lawmakers, who now have a majority of eighty seats � their largest since 1987.
