Boris Johnson is in Ireland today, having been in Wales yesterday offering feeble reassurances, particularly to the farming community, that all will be well in the event the EU 'force' us to leave without a deal. It didn't appear to work too well. He repeated his determination to deliver Brexit by October 31 and said it would be the EU's fault if the UK ended up leaving without a deal. 'It is their call,' he said. 'It is up to them if they want us to do this.'
This sounds more like an ultimatum - give me what I want or the kid dies. The 'kid' being the entire British economy.
Johnson is building another great Brexit paradox. On the one hand, he is using the threat of leaving without a deal to get the EU to renegotiate, so the impact of it would be very severe, especially on them, while telling everyone here that there's really nothing to worry about.
At one of his last hustings just a few days ago, he reassured us that a no deal Brexit would be fine. Planes will still fly and we'll have drinking water and Mars bars. Yesterday it was the turn of Wales to be reassured. Sheep farmers were told the government will support them to find new markets and so on. It's quite a balancing act and a £100 million mailshot is planned to dispel any fears in the public mind while putting the responsibility on Brussels for the 'disaster'. This apparently rosy future will actually all be the 'fault' of the EU. Strange, eh?
But this is all of a piece in the long saga isn't it? We were going to be better off by leaving the world's biggest, richest and closest trading block. Giving up the slickest and easiest trading arrangements the world has ever known with our nearest neighbours in order to pursue the possibility of inferior trade deals in years to come, with other nations thousands of miles away. Taking back control from the EU and then accusing them of 'bullying' us. None of it makes any sense to me.
Even the government's basic position is irrational. If EU membership is so awful why have we spent the best part of three years trying to achieve something that looks incredibly close to EU membership? Frictionless trade in goods, close co-operation on matters of security, data transfers, transport, science, education, etc, etc.
And of course, when things appear irrational on the surface there is always another explanation.
Brexit is really the continuation of the internal Tory party war over Europe by other means. In this case a mult-billion trade dispute with our friends and partners, not just in Europe but around the world, with the livelihood of millions of people at stake. I sometimes wonder if those at the centre of it all (Farage, Cash, IDS and so on) ever stop to think it might all have gone a bit too far?
There is another argument raging now about whether or not anybody voted to leave without a deal, sparked off by Dominic Raab in a recent interview where he asserted:
"We made clear – those on the campaign – that we should strive for a good deal, but if that wasn’t available, that we should go on and make a success of Brexit, and so that was discussed"
Making a success of Brexit by relying on basic WTO terms for the vast majority (not just the 50% + with the EU) of our external trade for years and years sounds like an oxymoron to me. It just isn't possible. Channel 4's fact checker could not find a single example of Raab saying anything of the sort, in fact he even dismissed the idea of the EU NOT giving us a favourable deal.
However, Andrew Lillico, a former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member, comes to Raab's defence with an article in The Telegraph (HERE no £) where he argues that nobody foresaw the Withdrawal Agreement. He is picking on a narrow legal definition:
"It simply is not true that no-one anticipated “no deal” during the referendum. Quite the reverse, no-one anticipated what we now call a “deal” — ie a Withdrawal Agreement — and if we had anticipated it we’d have opposed it. What was anticipated and debated was whether there would be a trade deal — and there was extensive discussion of the possibility that there wouldn’t."
"It simply is not true that no-one anticipated “no deal” during the referendum. Quite the reverse, no-one anticipated what we now call a “deal” — ie a Withdrawal Agreement — and if we had anticipated it we’d have opposed it. What was anticipated and debated was whether there would be a trade deal — and there was extensive discussion of the possibility that there wouldn’t."
Unfortunately for Lillico, there are two problems for him. Firstly, the Withdrawal Agreement is an essential pre-requisite to a trade deal - the settling of the divorce matters - that we did not oppose, we agreed to it and secondly, as Channel 4's research found, Raab never suggested we would leave without a trade deal anyway.
And as we know, Liam Fox said a UK-EU trade deal would be the 'easiest in human history' while Lord Lilley said it shouldn't take more than 'ten minutes'.
Nobody said it would even be hard to get one. They certainly didn't say it would take a long time and involve a lot of trade offs. And they NEVER said we would have to leave without one. It is the rewriting of history again.
