This video is extraordinary to watch again now. In 2019, @JMPSimor explained to @mrjamesob the constitutional paradox at the heart of Brexit: the referendum was advisory, so the courts would not quash the result, even though the legal challenge argued it had been tainted by proven unlawful campaigning. She told @LBC that, had the referendum been legally binding, the result could have been set aside. So Britain was left with this absurd position: The referendum was not legally binding enough to be invalidated but it was treated politically as binding enough to take us out of the European Union. And that was not the only unresolved constitutional issue. My own 2018 judicial review, Webster v Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, challenged the missing Article 50(1) decision, the lawful decision to withdraw that had to precede notification. Parliament expressly authorised notification under Article 50(2), but never expressly enacted that antecedent decision. The courts refused permission in both cases. Now we are being told by the Prime Minister @andyburnham that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum. This changes the context again. It does not automatically undo Brexit. But it makes one thing impossible to avoid: Britain needs a statutory public inquiry into the referendum, the intelligence, and the Article 50 decision-making process. We need documents. Witnesses under oath. The Cabinet record. The intelligence assessments. The legal trail. Because ten years on, the question is no longer simply whether Brexit was right or wrong. It is whether the British public and Parliament were ever told the full truth about how it happened.

🚨 In March 2022, just weeks after Putin invaded Ukraine, Britain’s former defence attache in Moscow wrote an extraordinary letter. Air Commodore Carl Scott said that while serving in Moscow from 2011–2016, Britain repeatedly reported the direction Putin was taking: massive rearmament, militarisation of society, propaganda, repression and preparation for conflict. 👀 The warnings were there. 🔥 And this is the line that should still haunt British politics: “Our withdrawal from the EU… greatly emboldened those in Moscow.” Scott also condemned Britain’s willingness to accommodate Russian wealth, describing London as a safe haven for “corrupt, and corrupting, wealth”. Brexit fractured one of Putin’s principal strategic adversaries, weakened Britain’s influence in Europe and, according to a man who had watched the Kremlin at close quarters, emboldened Moscow. ✅ We were warned about Putin. ✔️ We were warned about Russian money. ☑️ And we were warned about what weakening European unity would mean. The question Britain still hasn’t properly confronted is: why did we refuse to listen?