Guido Fawkes' blog is like Paul Dacre's Daily Mail on steroids, so far to the right it's almost out of shot. It is insanely pro-Brexit as are most of the people who follow and comment on the posts. So, I was fascinated to see a sense of panic in an item posted this week about House speaker, John Bercow (HERE) having the power to stop Brexit. Paul Staines, the Wizard-of-Oz figure behind the site, advises Brexiteer MPs not to be complacent although I'm not clear what he's actually suggesting they do about it.
According to the post, Bercow could:
- Allow a Contempt Motion
- Widen the scope of Brexit legislation to include more amendments
- Use a humble address to force more damaging no-deal plans to be released
- Stretch the meaning of a humble address to force a second referendum
- Force the government not to leave without a deal
Bercow is supposed to step down next year and is loathed by many Conservative MPs. He in turn loathes many of his erstwhile colleagues and probably wouldn't mind in the least throwing a large spanner into the Brexit works.
However, continuing my theme over the last few weeks, the entire Guido Fawkes post is predicated on the mistaken belief that leaving without a deal, the default option according to Staines, will actually be allowed to proceed all the way to March 29th when we simply topple over the notional cliff edge. This is simply not going to happen.
If, like Staines himself, you constantly read other self-reinforcing views from the ultra Brexiteers who say no deal is not something to fear, you eventually begin to believe there is nothing to fear. But there is.
At the end of January with 60-70 days to go, and well before we get anywhere near a decision to leave without a deal, business, industry, the banks and financial services as well as transport and freight forwarding companies, HMRC and a host of others will make their voices heard loudly and publicly for the first time. The fear which Brexiteers deny exists will become palpable. What ministers have been told in private will be in banner headlines splashed across front pages the length and breadth of the country.
Neither the private or the public sector is prepared for a no deal outcome. The nation would be entering a commercial and legal void, the results of which may be even more far reaching than anyone could possibly imagine.
And if the unthinkable actually came to pass, we have to ask ourselves what would happen then?
To succeed we would have to be prepared to carry on without a deal for a long period, months and perhaps even years. If within a week or two, we are forced to beg the EU to re-open talks our position would have been massively weakened. We would have played our strongest let's-walk-away-from-the-talks card only to see it fail.
But if we tough it out, the car industry would grind to a halt and probably perish within weeks. Supermarkets would quickly run out of some foodstuffs, we wouldn't starve but the extent to which we rely on European imports, of all kinds, would become clear. Under these circumstances who could survive the longest? The 440 million people and 23 million companies inside the EU27 would be far more resilient with more choices for alternative product sources and markets. EU governments do not even have to engage in the same sort of root and branch changes to VAT, customs declaration systems and so on. Whereas we are almost starting from scratch.
The EU is not going to blink before we do. No matter how long it takes. If anything they would benefit as more firms choose to relocate into the single market.
Sooner or later, we would be forced back to the negotiating table and all the same issues such as the divorce bill, the Irish border backstop and the role of the ECJ will still be waiting. We would only have succeeded in even more massive self-harm and achieved nothing.
The government will no doubt have thought all of this through. And we will not leave without a deal.
