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Greg Evans
Feb 08, 2019
It's been another big week in the land of Brexit as European Council president Donald Tusk caused controversy for his 'hell' comment.
The situation prompted a lot of fury and uproar from Brexiteers but some felt that he was justified to say what he said.
Another person who agreed that he had every right to say comments along those lines is The Times columnist Hugo Rifkind.
Appearing on BBC Question Time on Thursday night Rifkind defended Tusk and used an interesting analogy to describe Brexiteers.
Speaking in Motherwell, Scotland, Rifkind said:
Senior British Conservative politicians, in recent months, have likened the EU to the Soviet Union and more recently Nazi Germany so I think Donald Tusk is fairly restrained.
His views of how Brexiteers have been behaving, I was thinking about this, it's kinda like when you are on a train and there is a child who is screaming and there is a parent there who doesn't really care and is going 'look, this is everybody's problem.'
That kinda seems to be the Brexiteer approach to bringing about Brexit is to decide that it is for everyone to deal with, everyone in the EU. We've all got to come together and solve this problem.
They are quite justified to say 'no, this is Britain's problem. This is a thing that Britain has inflicted on the block. It's a problem for Britain to solve.'
The Brexiteer approach from the outset has been to call for this thing, to campaign for this thing and then expect for all the problems that it raises to be identified and solved by other people.
Then when you have a government that tries to solve them they go 'well, not like that' but still never acknowledging ownership of the fact the problem exists, never accepting responsibility for the problem that exists.
I'm not surprised that Donald Tusk is astonished at there behaviour because so am I.
Rifkind's comment was greeted with a round of applause by the audience and has also garnered praise on Twitter.
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