Thompson, a staff writer in the magazine, cogently argues Britain has in recent years made fundamental policy mistakes that have resulted in our present parlous condition. He argues, and I think he is probably right, that if you remove London, Britain is one of the poorest nations in Europe. Having spent 30 years traveling the length and breadth of this country's ripped backside rather than the tourist spots I am afraid this is painfully true.
Compared to France, Germany, and most other West European countries we do indeed look poverty-stricken.
The first mistake was by Mrs. Thatcher who prioritised financial services over manufacturing, he claims. I think he slightly overdoes it here because I am pretty sure Thatcher believed the single market would do for manufacturing what the big bang did for The City. And in some ways it did help.
Next, he accuses politicians (Tory ones anyway) of choosing “austerity over investment” which they did from 2010 onwards, and British voters of choosing “a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one” in the 2016 referendum.
The predictable results he identifies are falling wages and stunningly low productivity growth.
He ends with this:
“Enemies of progress can criticize the legacy of industrialization, productivity, and globalization. But the U.K. shows us what can happen when a rich country seems to reject all three. Rather than transforming into some post-economic Eden of good vibes, it becomes bitter, flailing, and nonsensical.”
The second and much longer one is by a former adviser to Mrs. Thatcher, Ferdinand Mount in Prospect magazine: Why did it all go to pieces? The sub-title is The Tories won’t recover until they face up to the disaster of Brexit. Mount’s piece is a critique of the current Brexit madness which has infected the Tory party, threatening to tear it apart.
He singles out Johnson for being in hock to the ultras and for not really believing in the project that he will now always be remembered for.
He marks the Jeremy Warner article in The Telegraph recently (Project fear was right all along) as the turning point when the conspiracy of silence over Brexit ended; when it became possible to suggest it is a disaster and not be howled down.
"Right up to this moment, the slightest hint that Brexit had any downside was strengstens verboten in the pages of the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sun, or indeed round the cabinet table in Number 10. Columnists who might have thought of uttering this heresy were shunted aside to less controversial subjects, such as transgender rights or the offside rule."
Open season on Brexit has now been officially declared.
Mount says the main reason for signing up for the Trade and Cooperation Agreement was the ease with which we could get out of it, never a great starting point for a new relationship and certainly not one that Gove called a new “special relationship between sovereign equals”.
As he points out we have already started to try and "weasel out" of the level playing field conditions by virtue of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which aims to remove all unwanted EU law from the statute book by the end of 2023, replacing it where necessary with fresh UK law. This he says "prompted despair from business groups, trade unions, environmentalists, and lawyers. Parliament will be clogged with the bits and pieces for years to come, and further long-term damage to the British economy is inevitable."
"The whole interminable farce has been, largely if not wholly, of Johnson’s own making. It is the ripest example of bad governance in Britain since the war," says Mount.
“Policy under the past three short-term prime ministers has been a desperate search to demonstrate the concrete benefits brought by leaving the EU. Poignantly, even in her blink-and-you-missed-it resignation speech, Truss was still mourning the failure of her vision of a Britain that ‘would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit’.”
However, despite all that what he doesn’t do is call for Britain to rejoin. Instead, he calls for “some sort of high-powered inquiry, containing politicians and experts of all sorts—including the more rational Leavers like Daniel Hannan and Larry Elliott—and chaired by someone like William Hague, can, by going through the issues sector by sector, provide the authoritative cover for the new prime minister [Sunak] to impose realistic solutions.”
I am far from convinced Hannan or Elliot are rational leavers (an oxymoron in my opinion) and if 60% of the population now think Brexit has been a mistake, which they do according to the polls, the obvious solution is just to reverse it, not launch an effort to find yet another untried option however attractive it might appear.
Mount, like many other reasonable remainers (I think that is what he is), seems to believe irrationally that there is some perfectly calibrated point on a smooth vernier scale which (a) exists (b) can be found and agreed by all parties in the UK and (c) is acceptable to the EU27. It also presupposes that the future for both the UK and EU is static and unchanging.
One only has to think about this for a second to see how hopeless it is. Not one of the conditions is true.
EU membership is like a marriage. It may not be perfect but perfect enough for both parties to stick together through thick and thin, better or worse. And you are either married or you aren’t - there isn’t some legal halfway house.
In is in and out is out. And if 'out' doesn't work, the answer must be 'in'.
Finally, can I just show this tweet by Robert Kimble, a Brexiteer who deserves a prize as a contortionist for thinking this one up. When we have reached such a bizarre position you know that for Brexit it is all downhill from now on:
The Australians, Americans, Indians, Canadians, Japanese, South Koreans, Germans, French and Italians aren't investing in opening up new operations in the UK or boosting existing facilities here because they believe the UK is failing. It's because they know we'll be successful 👍
— Robert Kimbell (@Rob_Kimbell) October 28, 2022
