The ongoing six year search for the lost Brexit benefit has been widened by the newly appointed minister for Brexit opportunities, Jacob Rees-Mogg. The MP for Somerset North is now appealing to readers of the Rupert Murdoch owned Sun newspaper to tell him what the benefits might be. We have scraped the barrel so hard that we have now gone through the bottom and we are now well and truly down the rabbit hole.
Having exhausted every conceivable possibility using the finest minds in Whitehall and the Vote Leave campaign - including Dominic Cummings - Rees-Mogg is now asking Sun readers to let him know “of ANY [in capitals] old EU regulations that should be abolished.”
Translation: “Almost 6 years after the Brexit vote I still have no idea what it was about” - Jacob Rees Mogg: I want Sun readers to write to me and tell me of ANY petty old EU regulation that should be abolished https://t.co/nrNViVF4KI
— Gavin Esler (@gavinesler) February 10, 2022
Before Brexit, he explained, 'many' of his constituents would write to him to complain about regulations that burdened them daily, including farmers and electricians, on so many issues. You would think he would have had a list of quickly scrapable EU laws. For reasons we do not yet understand he has decided to ignore those constituents and launch a new appeal. Perhaps he deleted the emails and threw away the letters, who knows?
JRM said, “I had to tell them that even as an MP I could not help to solve their problems, as these rules were set by the EU, not the British Parliament."
Now that he does have the power to solve their problems he turns to people who buy what is probably the country’s silliest newspaper - bar The Star - what they think; think perhaps being a bit of a stretch.. What they will suggest is anyone’s guess, but it’s safe to say none of it will be realistic, practical or possible.
It all feeds into the notion that the Vote Leave government really doesn’t have any idea what it wants to do with Brexit as pressure grows on them to cast aside great swathes of EU law and replace it with …nothing.
Anyone who manned street stalls for remain between 2017 and 2019, who spoke to leave voters and asked more or less the same question, will be able to tell the minister for Brexit opportunities that the answer will be a big fat zero. From Sun readers it may be even less than that.
There have been umpteen reviews of EU law since 2012. Oliver Letwin headed the first one and found nothing, at least nothing of consequence. The last was by Ian Duncan Smith’s TIGRR which reported last June. It was noticeable that even IDS didn’t advocate scrapping a lot of EU law, most of his report was about regulating things differently in future.
This, by the way, is Allister Heath in The Telegraph the other day:
"..the establishment drumbeat that Brexit has been a failure will grow ever louder, there will be hundreds of academic papers seeking to 'prove' this 'lack of success', and by the late 2020s a Labour government will feel sufficiently emboldened to sign back up to myriad European initiatives. The Tories must diverge so much that this becomes impossible."
He proposes diverging so far from EU rules that it it's “impossible” for the U.K. ever to rejoin. He is an associate editor at The Telegraph. Think about that. He is a complete fool.
He’s not a lone voice either. Hannan has said as much, too. There is a head of steam building up to start slashing away at retained EU law. The problem is the one identified way back in 2016, either you diverge a lot and damage your own economy even more than it has been up to now, or you diverge a little and Brexiteers like Heath and Hannan will launch attacks on you and leave voters will think there was no purpose in Brexit. It’s a quandary isn’t it?
Finding some Goldilocks point is the thing what will prove impossible.
So far, when it’s come to the crunch, Johnson has backed away. In October 2019 and in December 2020, despite all the threats he folded and made big concessions, the biggest of course on the NI protocol and on fish. I don't expect any different in future. And if Johnson isn't prepared to do it, who is?
What we are about to see is the final battle. The one that Cummings put off in 2015 when he rejected having a plan because getting everyone to agree to it would be "insuperable."
We will soon see just how insuperable it will be.
