Thursday 30 September 2021

Going from bad to worse

As the army is readied to help deliver fuel to filling stations amid video footage of fights breaking out on forecourts and key workers unable to get fuel to travel to work, it is becoming clearer by the day that Brexit was a thoroughly bad idea. This is just the latest evidence that Brexit is not going to plan - assuming there ever was one, which I doubt.

Brexit had a vision alright but no plan to achieve it and we can see now just how much of a fantasy the vision was. Far from catapulting Britain to a leading role on the world stage Brexit was always going to do the exact opposite. We can’t even influence things on our own continent with our close neighbours let alone in the rest of the world.

A good example of this fantasy has resurfaced in an article written by Daniel (now Lord) Hannan two days before the vote in 2016 for the web site Reaction Life. Hannan pretended that the date was 2025 and that we had left the EU six years before and suddenly become world leaders in any number of fields, bestriding the globe with new found "self-belief"  and presumably barking orders at all the lesser countries - that is those who aren’t British.

Instead they are laughing at us with German TV apparently describing the UK as “crisis island.”  

This is how the visionary Hannan saw 2025:

"It’s 24 June, 2025, and Britain is marking its annual Independence Day celebration. As the fireworks stream through the summer sky, still not quite dark, we wonder why it took us so long to leave. The years that followed the 2016 referendum didn’t just reinvigorate our economy, our democracy and our liberty. They improved relations with our neighbours."

And:

"Older industries, too, have revived as energy prices have fallen back to global levels: steel, cement, paper, plastics and ceramics producers have become competitive again."

What was he on?  Do read it, you will be encouraged that Brexit is just a passing thing.

Hannan famously said that “absolutely nobody is threatening our place in the single market,” - nobody that is except him. 

In the Reaction article he said, “from 2019, Britain could begin to disapply[EU] regulations where the cost of compliance outweighed any benefits" and he thought we would be opting out of all sorts of EU laws while apparently remaining in the single market, although he didn't explain how that would work.

He also said that we and the EU would adopt ‘global’ standards without asking himself who wrote those global standards. More often than not they are drafted in Brussels and taken up globally due to the so-called ‘Brussels effect.’  He is right but for the wrong reasons, we will be following EU rules - the ones we have opted out of.

And this is even more puzzling:

"several other European countries have opted to copy Britain’s deal with the EU, based as it is upon a common market rather than a common government. Some of these countries were drawn from EFTA (Norway, Switzerland and Iceland are all bringing their arrangements into line with ours). Some came from further afield (Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine). Some followed us out of the EU (Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands).

"The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures."

He seems to think a common market can exist without common rules enforced by a common body. Amazing.

Another leading Brexiteer, Allister Heath over at The Telegraph, seems to have woken up to the unfolding disaster. He has stopped writing a stream of tub-thumping pieces about how Britain had nothing to fear from a no-deal Brexit for example and started describing a nation that has become a laughing stock.

His piece yesterday was titled, The Brexit-hating global elite is watching Britain's chaos with glee and sub-titled, "Furious voters won't stand by if the Tory Government's incompetence turns us into a worldwide laughing stock."

He bemoans the incompetence of the government as if Johnson's own "manically disorganised" way of working was a surprise to him. Those who mouthed slogans about taking back control never spared a minute to think about who that control might be given to.

Heath writes:

"Most toxic of all for the Government, the Tory base, who are patriotic and proud of being British above all else, are increasingly worried that the rest of the world is mocking us. They look at the disgraceful queues at our petrol stations, and wonder why we appear to be the only country to have imploded in such an embarrassing way."

"It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that so many Tory voters are upset. They are right that the Government’s incompetence is humiliating Britain. One of the many advantages of Brexit – for despite Johnson’s errors, the case for it remains overwhelming – is the wonderful accountability it enables. The chaos can no longer be blamed on Brussels’ policies, or European judges or anybody else. The buck stops at No 10."

In other words, one of the 'advantages' of Brexit is that we can demonstrate to the world how ridiculously incompetent we are. And I'm not just talking about politicians - who voted them in?

I don’t think Hannan or Heath are bad men, no more than Johnson or Gove or any of the others who advocated Brexit and were at the forefront of the campaign even before 2016. I don’t accuse them either of being in the pay of a foreign power. No, what they are guilty of is far worse. They were and are stupid half-witted idiots who set themselves up as experts when they actually knew nothing about this country, the people who live in it or how businesses and the economy actually work.

The charge is stupidity, ignorance and the reckless endangerment of a nation. 

Finally, I want to end with a couple of things. This morning the Chief Secretary of The Treasury, Simon Clarke, MP for Middlesbrough was on the Today programme at about 7:50 and was asked by Justin Webb how he was going to ensure "this country functions" in the run up to Christmas. This will be the first anniversary of Brexit remember.

A functioning country.  Think about that.  This is post Brexit Britain we are talking about.

And YouGov released a poll yesterday (6,000 people so pretty accurate) which makes sobering reading for Brexiteers:


There has been big drop since June in the number of people who think Brexit is going well (-7%) but an even bigger increase in the number who think its going badly.  We are now at 53% v 18% and the impact of Brexit has barely been felt.

Hang in there.  It's just a matter of time now.


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