The prime minister finally came to flood hit South Yorkshire yesterday. When the flooding first happened he was in Matlock and said it wasn't a national emergency. After Corbyn claimed the response would have been different if Surrey had been hit, Johnson chaired a COBRA meeting as if the stockbroker belt was under three feet of water. Yesterday he was heckled by residents in Stainforth still struggling to cope with what for them was an absolutely devastating event with the token help of 100 soldiers.
They were discovering for themselves that Johnson, like any good sociopath, doesn't do empathy - as we will all find out soon enough if he gets a majority. He has offered them £500 for each household and £2500 for each business affected by floodwater. This is probably about what he would spend on a decent bottle of wine and a good night out.
I hope workers in Sunderland and the West Midlands are taking notice along with farmers, fishermen and businesses in Northern Ireland - in fact pretty well anybody likely to be impacted by a hard Brexit whether it's the no deal variety or one slightly down the hardness scale. They will get no sympathy from the PM simply because he hasn't got any and precious little practical help.
Now, I want to point you towards a couple of polls. The first is by YouGov HERE. They were surveying people about support for Johnson's deal and of the 683 (out of 1689 - 39%) who supported it, a majority (56%) did so to "Get Brexit Done". None of the other eleven (11) choices even got to 10% although the fact that it was better than no deal was the reason chosen by 7%. You can forget the bright future outside the EU or even the notion there is the slightest benefit to Brexit - just 2% thought it was a 'good' deal - people just want the whole fiasco to go away.
It is also a demonstration of the power there is in a slogan. Get Brexit Done is very similar to Take Back Control. A 3-word slogan that probably came from a focus group and was road tested in other focus groups has now become the slogan du jour, chosen by over half of those supporting the deal and just as much a lie as taking back control. There are some people who really can be fooled all of the time.
Disappointed? Then let's consider this survey by Deltapoll where it seems a large majority (68%) would prefer to wait and take more time to get their preferred outcome. Bizzarely this split 71% for leavers and 65% for remainers. In other words there was and is no great pressure to "Get Brexit Done" even among leavers who were happier than remainers to take more time to get it right.
What conclusion can we draw from these polls which seem to contradict each other?
Firstly, that poll results are influenced by the question as always but more than this I would lay money on the fact that nobody in either YouGov's or Deltapoll's samples had the foggiest notion of what Johnson's deal means for them, their livelihoods, the economy, the future of The United Kingdom and it's place in the world. The figures are therefore totally meaningless.
Over at the pro-Brexit website Briefings for Brexit, a Paul Sheard, described as a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, writes about why he supports Brexit. He says the EU hasn't covered itself in glory over Brexit and he blames them for much of the problems:
"I am more critical of the way the EU has handled the whole Brexit process, which has tended to be narrow, bureaucratic and lacking in imagination and flexibility, both in the run-up to, and in the aftermath of, the June 2016 referendum. Rather than high-level political decisions setting the guardrails for the technocratic work needed to give effect to them, all too often the bureaucratic tail has seemed to wag the political dog."
It's not clear to me where Mr Sheard has been for the last three years and I can only assume he has been living somewhere deep in what's left of the Amazon rain forests. The EU's negotiating mandate was set by the leaders of the EU27 not by the Commission and they didn't ask for Brexit, it was our decision.
For the last two and a half years the EU has watched while all of the arguments raged on our side about what Brexit actually means - and it still isn't resolved. Sheard is an economist and he goes on:
"To the extent that Brexit does cause substantial disruptions to the amount and pattern of UK-EU trade, they are likely to be mainly short-term in nature. In the long term, after all Brexit-related adjustments to the pattern of consumption, production, investment, asset prices, and policy variables have taken place, the UK economy will be at full employment again. The question then is, what will the impact be on the UK’s potential growth rate relative to the counter-factual of Brexit never having happened? One argument is that UK potential growth will be lower because of the impact of the loss of two-way seamless trade and investment access to a huge market on its doorstep.
"However, this outcome assumes that the EU, contrary to its own economic interests but perhaps reflecting political self-survival instincts, continues to play hard-ball with the UK; but to the extent that it does, presumably the UK will have incentives to move in the direction of becoming “Singapore on the Thames” and gear its international economic policies to the more rapidly growing areas of the world, notably the US, India and China, and, unencumbered by membership of the EU, will be nimble enough to be able to do so. The long-run impact of Brexit on UK potential growth is uncertain, but reasonable arguments can be made that it has either sign."
He has the same mindset as the average Brexiteer. He concedes implicitly that loss of two-way seamless trade will damage us but only if the EU acts 'contrary to its own economic interests'. Of course he knows what they are better than the EU27 themselves.
Never mind, keep threatening an erosion of employment, social and environmental rights and the EU will be forced to give us what we once had as a member - that is unrestricted access to the single market without having to pay the cost of maintaining it or being encumbered by it's rules.
It is not a matter of the EU being inflexible as Sheard thinks. They are only trying to preserve the single market by enforcing the rules that we helped to set when we were a member.
Only after Brexit they will work against us.
