Monday 28 June 2021

Brexit and the five year plans

The similarities between Brexit and communism are becoming clearer by the week. And like communists, flat-earthers and creationists, Brexiteers keep coming up against the old problem of a lack of supporting evidence to show things are getting better, or as we might call it, reality. Everything is either going to be alright at some unspecified time in the future or it's all gone pear shaped because it wasn't implemented properly.  We shall be seeing and hearing a lot of this for the next few years.

Meanwhile, we all wait and suffer.

I say this because of several things.  First of all, Lord Frost has given an interview to Anand Menon at UK in a Changing Europe (UKCE) - a think tank - where he was asked what would allow us "in specific terms" in five or ten years time to judge if Brexit had been a success.

More "openness in the country, different patterns of trade, cheaper products, wider ranges of products and some of the levelling up" all sounds quite modest and rather nebulous to me. I'm not even sure what "openness" means and "levelling up" is a slogan cum soundbite. These are the best 'specifics' he could come up with - and at the second time of asking.

Now cast your mind back five years - to July 2016 - when another recently ennobled Brexiteer, Daniel Hannan, gave an interview to Die Welt, which someone (Simon Gosden) posted part of on Twitter yesterday:

Remember, this is five years ago. You can read the DW report on it HERE.

This comes in the week The Grocer, hardly a sensationalising red-top, declares that "food shortages are now inevitable" due to a crisis in the labour market and UK supermarkets write a joint letter to the government calling on the prime minister to "personally intervene to allow access to European labour by introducing temporary worker visas for HGV drivers and adding them to a 'shortage occupation list'."

The Scottish government has prepared an official response to the 5-year anniversary which says:

"Reduced investment, together with changes in productivity and migration, are likely to create a further drag on the growth of the Scottish economy compared to continued membership of the EU. Scottish Government modelling indicates that in the long run, the basic Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiated by the UK Government with the EU could mean Scottish GDP is £9 billion lower (6.1%) by 2030 compared with EU membership."

The UK government refuses to publish an economic assessment and instead we get Lord Frost "hoping" we will see some modest improvement in another 5-10 years time. Who to believe, eh?

It's been obvious for a long time what sort of Brexiteer Richard North is.  Yesterday morning he launched an attack on Nick Cohen for lumping all leavers together and he is clearly in the 'it would have been alright if they had done it my way' camp and he criticises what has been done so far (as he usually does) for being a "limited and ineffectual vision of Brexit."

There could be (and possibly will be if we don't continue to fight it) years of this constant re-writing of history and attempts to try different types of Brexit to finally show and prove once and for all that there is no version of it that is better than we had before 2021.

Frost and North are both men who I think know that Britain is never going to be an unregulated Singapore on Thames. We need regulations and probably as much as we had before Brexit. There will be no bonfire. The important thing as far as they're concerned is that they are NOT EU regulations. They might be word for word the same or achieve broadly the same result as long as they're not from Brussels.

This will simply mean less trade with Europe and nothing else. I think probably every other country in the world would be able to see there is a mutual advantage in agreeing common standards and regulations with your neighbours to create a single market for trade. What could the downside be?  Occasionally, you might have to accept something you don't entirely agree with - but so is your neighbour.

It would have been far better if in the past, governments of both colours had sold the idea of working together with our neighbours and consulted MPs more, convinced newspaper proprietors, editors and journalists that generally the EU is a good idea and if we get involved we are more likely to get our ideas approved for the benefit of all of us.  Instead, EU rules were created almost furtively and this created suspicion which gave Johnson an opportunity for a laugh and the whole Eurosceptic movement grew out of it. And Brexit is where we have ended up.

Now returning to Lord Frost. One of the other things he said in the UKCE interview is that it's important in a democracy to be able to change government where 'everything changes overnight' - every policy and every minister. 

This is part of the British problem.  We spend most of the time re-organising things like the NHS based on ideology. The Tories privatised the railway and Labour want to renationalise them. It would be far better to have an agreed cross-party policy for this kind of thing as they seem to do in Germany and France and avoid the constant upheaval. 

Proportional representation would be far better, To avoid sharp turns to the left or right resulting in the zig zag pattern of life in Britain which takes up so much national effort, and keeping us on a more even course towards greater prosperity.

So, I am not convinced that one of the main advantages of Brexit is as Frost thinks it is.

Sitting in the Lords of course he won't feel any of the impacts of Brexit.  Ain't that the problem?  Reorganisations are fine for everybody else, but not if you are in the middle of it.

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