The incoherence can be seen in some recent comments from leading Brexiteers.
In the pages of The Telegraph Penny Mordaunt, Minister of State at the Department for International Trade, extols the benefits of leaving the EU in a piece headlined: The benefits of Brexit are huge, and Britain isn’t sitting still She says "our deals with individual US states will open up procurement, tackle regulation and seek to mutually recognise professional qualifications."
This is a 'deal', wait for it, with Indiana which is not really a deal but a non-binding 'memorandum of understanding (MOU).It explains that on public procurement Indiana favours its own businesses first, followed by companies in the states bordering Indiana (Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois). Britain comes in equal third place with everybody else. What Indiana (pop:6 million) can do to 'tackle regulation' isn't immediately obvious, to me anyway.
Still it's something I suppose, but not enough for Daniel Hannan.
Lord Hannan, who needs no introduction, writing in the same newspaper, has his own take on things: The Tories have almost wholly given up on conservative principles. What a tragic waste. Hannan is deeply disappointed with what Brexit has delivered and says, "Outside the EU, Britain could have become freer and more competitive. We had a Conservative Government with an 80-seat majority, for Heaven’s sake. We could have scrapped Brussels regulations, flattened and simplified taxes, embraced global markets, slimmed the civil service, decentralised powers and broken cartels. We could, in short, have made this the most attractive place in the world to do business."
He adds that it is nearly a year after the end of the covid restrictions in Britain, and "it is now depressingly clear that there is no plan to make use of our opportunities. After all their talk of buccaneering Britain, our leaders have shied away from almost every difficult economic decision. What a waste. What a tragic, needless waste."
What can you say?
I seem to remember Michael Heseltine, when he was defence secretary under Margaret Thatcher, suggesting that government was nothing more than a very large management job - the kind you need in any successful business.
If so, and I agree with him, we seem to have elected a lot of men and women with no management experience whatsoever. The board of directors of UK PLC has instead been taken over by the sales department, an event guaranteed to end in disaster. I speak as someone who has spent his working life among salesmen. This is where the incoherence comes from.
There is no calm analysis, no serious assessments, no introspection and certainly no reading or understanding of any details. No listening to customers needs, no incremental improvements, no plan, no monitoring, no realism, nothing beyond the hope that someone in engineering and manufacturing will find a way to fix it.
Salesmen are either relentless optimists with their heads in the clouds or manic depressives believing everything is a disaster. And I am not necessarily talking about different people here. These are traits that you can often find sitting perfectly easily side by side in many individual salesmen.
Johnson is the CEO and, like Donald Trump, a natural salesman. He is always selling but doesn’t really understand his product (GB). In fact he has only the vaguest notion what it does and no idea at all how it does it. He constantly over promises and always disappoints. He has gathered around him many dim bulbs like Mordaunt, Patel, Dorries and so on, to minimise the risk of being outshone on the intellect front himself. I must say they could not have been easy to find.
Putting that sort of person at the top, means there is nobody to rein him in.
Hence, Government has become little more than a machine for issuing grand plans written in the expansive style of a Johnson column, with the outcomes always vague and several years down the road. This is typified by the ‘levelling up’ agenda, which means different things to different people, none of them attainable but all sufficiently far into the future to make accountability little more than a distant hope.
However, one of the aims of Brexit was the so-called 'bonfire of EU regulations', an aspiration set all those years ago and now coming up for delivery and therefore perhaps some accountability is becoming due, especially since the ones who made the original claims are now in charge.
There is little sign of smoke yet as the minister responsible, Mr Rees-Mogg, is metaphorically on his knees trying to light the bonfire on a dark, wet night using some damp matches. He has resorted to asking random newspaper readers for ideas. The Express claim their Brexiteer readers have given the government 2,000 ideas to "obliterate EU rules" and "reap the benefits of Brexit and get rid of hated EU red tape."
Thankfully we only get the top nine.
Fracking is No 1 - something the EU have never stopped any member doing - and lifting the 1400 watt limit on vacuum cleaner power was No 2.
On this latter point we have a Dyson DC40 which is 700 watt - half the EU limit. It is remarkably powerful and takes a bit of moving when running over carpets because of the sheer amount of suction. If we had a model with twice the power we would probably need to nail the carpet down and make sure the dog was outside before switching it on. Who needs it?
Another rule to go is the one about the size of vans that require an operator's licence, a topic which is never far from the thoughts of the regulars down at The Wheatsheaf, I'm sure. Personally, I can't remember seeing that in 2016 but there was a lot going on. I must have missed it.
Hannan is right for once, a real rarity. Brexit is indeed a tragic, needless (and very expensive) waste.
