Monday 27 December 2021

Anxiety creeps in to spoil the Brexit fantasy

As 2021 draws to a close after a year of Brexit, I think I am detecting a certain anxiety creeping in to those of an anti-EU persuasion. It's not panic - yet - more of a nagging doubt, a bit of uneasiness or disquiet, that sort of thing. I think this is most pronounced among the Brexit coalition who believed we were somehow shackled by EU regulations that could quickly and easily be thrown off as if releasing the handbrake on a heavy vehicle parked on a steep incline. A quick flick of the ratchet and off we would go.

I noticed this a few weeks ago and rather more recently Andrew Neil in The Mail asks "why aren't Boris Johnson and his Brexiteers making the most of our freedom?"  Neil is Chairman of The Spectator where Kate Andrews is the American born economics editor. She was also an associate director at the shadowy right wing think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and a Brexit supporter. Her latest piece for the magazine asks if Boris has "made you better off." I suspect the answer for most Spectator readers is no, although it might not have made them very much worse off - yet. 

You would have thought as economics editor she would know that Brexit is unlikely to make the majority feel better off next year - or indeed in the years after that as well.

Andrews writes:

"Johnson’s plan is to ride out the turbulence, the Downing Street scandals, and then draw voters’ attention to the economy. It’s the old Ronald Reagan question: ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ Johnson is banking on the answer being a resounding yes."

Others are not so sure. "I don’t know how we’re going to answer that question when it inevitably comes up," one Tory minister tells Andrews.  I think he's right. There are no economic miracles coming along to save the Tory party from its own folly.  The sceptical minister says:

"Unless we’re entirely trusting now that the state can solve all our problems — which it’s comprehensively, blatantly failed to do in the past — we’ve got very little to offer."

Andrews talks about inflation and rightly says unless you get a 5 per cent pay increases next year you’re bound to be worse off. And she adds, “It’s not only inflation causing households financial strain. Johnson’s National Insurance tax rise will hit workers in April, taking the tax burden to its highest level in living memory.”

Another Tory MP tells her, “Everyone is rightly focused on scandal right now, but the big fear is that when it all dies down, we will find we have unknowingly strayed into an economic no man’s land. The public isn’t ready for what we find there, and [the government] has no plan to navigate us out.”

And it isn’t as if Johnson’s enjoying being on the crest of some sort of polling wave. The Tories are well behind. In Scotland it looks like they may end up with no MPs at all. A huge 25,000 respondent poll by Focaldata for The Sunday Times is, I assume, designed to make Tory MPs think about replacing Johnson. 

Labour are predicted to win a "stunning 26 seat majority". Johnson himself would lose his Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat where he has the smallest majority of any sitting prime minister since 1924, at just 5,034 votes.

In practice Labour don’t need to do anything like as well since the SNP would almost certainly support Starmer. 

Andrew’s says, “More than five years after the Brexit vote, the Prime Minister has a difficult question to answer: what was it all for?”

What a question that is. What was it all for indeed?  She partly answers her own rhetorical question:

"We have not seen much in the way of new free trade deals and the government has been more focused on industry bailouts than it has been on creating a business-friendly environment. If Johnson doesn’t deliver on his promise of higher wages, voters will move on to the next question: what are the Conservatives for? There is not yet an economic answer to that. Next year, it will be the Tories’ mission to find one."

She is one of those who think the EU has provided a ‘business unfriendly’ environment despite masses of data showing all the major EU economies are more productive and export far more than Britain.

Whatever the Tories do, after Brexit, it will not provide the economic answer to the question what is the Tory party for? I am afraid voters will be forced to conclude it is to make us all poorer.

David Campbell Bannerman, the former Tory MEP, and Deputy Leader of UKIP from 2006 until 2010, is still adamant all will be well next year. In response to the dire polling numbers he tweeted:

Like the Communist party, a fuller Brexit delivery will always be a year away. Don’t hold your breath.


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