Monday 2 August 2021

Cummings admits Brexit needs 'fixing'

Dominic Cummings seems to be suffering some sort of mental breakdown brought on by the growing realisation that Brexit has indeed gone wrong and is set to become a disaster. He regularly takes to Twitter and engages with all and sundry, swashbuckling like Douglas Fairbanks Jr in a cheap B movie. Last week it was David Gauke, this week he is claiming an advantage of Brexit is that democratically elected MPs are now responsible for “fixing it.”

This is his tweet:

It’s not really clear to me what “it” means in this context. He calls it a "broken system" but I'm not sure even what this refers to. Is it democracy itself? Is it the the nation’s problems or is it Brexit specifically? Or is it all three? Either way it’s amazing. 

You could say we can’t begin to fix the nation’s urgent problems, the inequality, poor productivity and failing infrastructure, until we’ve fixed Brexit. In that way Brexit has hindered rather than helped, which is what I think historians will conclude one day.

I seem to remember, a long time ago writing a post about Johnson being the first to declare Brexit was a mistake because of his lack of conviction about it. I was wrong, it looks like Cummings is the first.

You don’t need to 'fix' things that are working as you intended so I think we can safely assume the former senior adviser is at least starting to have his doubts, and not in private any more.

The pushback was immediate and visceral:

Others suggested MPs were always responsible for fixing things but they seemed to misunderstand Cummings’ basic point. I think he means MPs have somehow been constrained by the European Union and have been unable to improve the average citizen’s lot, a problem confined to Britain alone apparently.

He was challenged that this isn't what was on the side of the bus but he says this is what he meant by 'take back control' :

Others pointed out that it is only necessary to “fix” Brexit because of - well, Brexit. It’s like knocking your own house down in order to show that you can fix it. You might even be able to do it but at the end you will be living in the same house having spent years and a great deal of effort and money to get back to where you were.

And worse than that, the demolition takes place when the property is at imminent risk of flooding, a problem you can’t begin to address until the house has been rebuilt.

Personally, I am not convinced our MPs are even capable of fixing anything anyway. Every other European country seems to have legislators who don’t think the EU restrains them from raising living standards. This is a unique position taken by Brexiteers like Cummings (assuming he is one, and that’s not a given).  To raise living standards you need to begin with a government that has that as an objective and we haven't had that for years.

One might even suggest MPs who actively support Brexit are the sort of people who should be kept away from any important decision making.

Finally, when people ask him what he actually did in Downing Street you get technological word salad answers like this

Which someone described as Grade A bullshit.

He justifies a lot of his actions during the pandemic by suggesting the urgency outweighed everything else, including placing billions of pounds of PPE on single bidder contracts and even breaking the law:

In this he reveals himself to be not the revolutionary thinker he thinks he is but absolutely typical of the problems that have beset Britain for decades in higher management and that is, faced with an urgent problem, the first thing they do is panic.  Everything is done at high speed with little thought, decisions are made which later prove to be wrong and have to be expensively corrected later. Too often the urgent gets priority over the important.

The vaccine rollout is a great example. We set off at high speed and mocked the EU for being slow. They set about cranking up production capacity and several countries including Spain and Belgium, have now overtaken us with the rest not far behind and have exported millions of doses to other countries outside Europe. They shared vaccines fairly across member states, didn't have to break the law to do it, have lower numbers of deaths from covid-19 and haven't got warehouses full of unusable PPE kit.

See the difference?


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