Peter Lilley is still battling hard to convince us that dropping out of the EU and adopting WTO terms is actually the second best option after a free trade deal. He had a piece in The Times yesterday HERE (it's behind a paywall but if you don't subscribe read it HERE). Needless to say it has received a barrage of criticism about it's use of "facts" which are no such thing. David Henig, UK Director at ECIPE, leading thinking on future UK trade policy, does a detailed take down on Twitter HERE.
I won't repeat the arguments against his article because I'm not an expert although I can see a lot of what he says is wrong, but I do want to focus on two or three points. Lilley, now Lord Lilley, is a long time Eurosceptic and mad keen Brexiteer, a clever fool in the mould of Michael Gove.
First of all, his piece loses all pretence at credibility in the very opening sentence:
"For two years I have advised businesses to prepare for Brexit assuming that there will be no UK/EU trade agreement."
To remind everyone, he actually and famously said that it would take "ten minutes" (HERE) to negotiate a trade deal. It's not clear when he stopped telling everyone it would take ten minutes and started saying there won't be an agreement at all, ever. To remind you, this is very first shameless sentence.
His article twice mentions "hostile non cooperation" on the part of the EU as "envisaged by remainers ". Remainers don't envisage any such thing. We envisage the EU treating us as a third country, in fact the same as every other third country. He says this would be illegal under the EU constitution but what he describes as hostile is actually the EU treating us exactly in line with its own rules and in the way that we have apparently democratically voted FOR!
And it's very odd, not to say ridiculous, to rely on WTO rules to support the contention that the EU can't discriminate under those rules (which it won't anyway) but at the same time propose waiving trucks from the EU through Dover after Brexit without applying any border checks - totally against the same WTO rules, unless you do the same for every other WTO member (which would destroy farming and manufacturing overnight).
But if you want proof of the Brexiteers belief in UK exceptionalism, the last sentence sums it all up:
Finally, freed from the constraints of EU membership and Article 50 we could negotiate our new relationship with the EU as equals.
He literally thinks we are equal to all the 27 other members put together! Who do we think we are?
In August 2017 he wrote in The Telegraph that we didn't need or want a transition period (HERE) saying, "Remainers rely on a "transitional" deal like drunks use a lamppost – more for support than illumination. It is time they spelt out what problem it would solve, how and why the EU would agree to it".
We asked for it because we needed it desperately, because it will all take far more time, because it's all far more complicated than Lilley said and because we haven't prepared, because nobody knows what to prepare for. And that's the truth.
Let us also not forget Lilley was the man responsible for the fiasco that was the Child Support Agency.
