Tuesday 31 January 2023

Third anniversary of Brexit passes with warnings for Brexiteers

I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for Brexiteers. On the third anniversary of leaving the EU the IMF publish a forecast suggesting the UK economy is continuing its nosedive and will shrink and perform worse than ALL other advanced economies, including Russia, a country that has plunged itself into a terrible war with its neighbour.  Next, a poll claims that every UK constituency but 4 now thinks Brexit has been a mistake. Not much to smile about is there?

BBC Newsnight carried a report to mark the date with businessmen describing Brexit as a 'disaster' (even one who voted to leave) and leave voters now simply offering airy-fairy assurance that things might get better in 15-20 years. Inspiring it wasn't.

Elsewhere, Daniel Hannan is wearing his rose-tinted spectacles again or he's forgotten to take his sedatives and someone has let him loose with a keyboard. His latest effort for The Telegraph is well past parody: The evidence is undeniable. There really is a Remainer plan to rejoin the EU by stealth. The clue perhaps came in 2018 when a million people marched secretly through London in a bid to reverse Brexit by demanding a second referendum. Stealth? What did he think we were doing?

There is no stealth to it, we are doing it all perfectly openly, and we’ll win eventually, of that I haven’t the slightest doubt despite Starmer saying until he’s blue in the face that he will NOT take us back either into the SM, CU or the EU.  He will.

What Hannan is worried about is the UK NOT diverging from EU rules. He is the founder of the Institute for Free Trade and an adviser to the Board of Trade but appears not to understand trade at all. We joined the EU and helped create the largest free trade area in the world, by converging our regulatory standards.

To take his logic, every country in the world should (for example) achieve an acceptable level of personal data privacy by adopting different GDPR rules that either every other country has to recognise as equivalent or block the transfer of data across national borders. 

But what is the point of 164 WTO members having a hotch-potch of 164 different data protection regimes with each country having to check each of the other 163’s is equivalent, and to constantly monitor that they have not changed so they’re no longer equivalent?  It is a massive and permanent bureaucratic burden compared with agreeing on a common international standard.

Hannan might like to believe everyone will accept our standard but why should they?

Remainers are trying to give Brexit a bad name, he claims. They “have systematically and cynically conflated that [transitional] cost with the vastly greater cost of a lockdown which, in most cases, they themselves demanded.”

The head of the OBR, Richard Hughes has already said Brexit is going to cost twice as much as Covid and the IMF study out today seems to confirm it. How come every other advanced industrial nation is doing better than we are?  Brexit obviously must be the answer or a large part of it.

Hannan says: "For their scheme to have even the slightest chance of success, they need to convince the country that Brexit has been an economic disaster."  Brexit is doing that perfectly well on its own. We don't need to convince anybody.

And he literally thinks stability in Northern Ireland is the EU’s problem. On the Northern Ireland Protocol, he tells us:

"Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of our current debate is that the people labelled moderate and grown-up are those arguing for some of the most outlandish ideas ever entertained in Parliament: that the UK should have an internal border; that parts of our country should be governed by foreigners; that it is wholly up to us to solve the EU’s proclaimed problems."

So, we have now reached the point where the most committed Brexiteers can't agree. Conservatives like Hannan blame remainers, while Rebecca Jane who claims to be or have been a deputy leader of UKIP,  blames the Conservatives:  

She calls for the return of UKIP to “get the job done.” God help us all.

In the unlikely event that was to happen, after a few years when UKIP has had a go and failed, up will pop Richard Tice of The Reform Party and say only he can deliver the one true Brexit, something which has become like an advanced Rubik's cube, so complex, contradictory, esoteric, rare, sickly and fragile that only a diminishing band of elite believers can understand what it is and how to deliver it. 

But you can see what excuses the Brexiteers are going to use when we rejoin, regardless of how long that takes. No matter how long we are out of the EU, they will always maintain it wasn’t long enough. Brexit will never have had the time.

Finally, the polling I mentioned earlier is from Unherd. 

It shows just 3 constituencies still think Brexit was the right thing to do. These are all on the east coast either in Lincolnshire or north Norfolk.  Tom Newton Dunn, who used to work for The Sun, tweeted:

James Johnson, a Conservative pollster, responded to a tweet from former cabinet minister David Gauke (a remainer) who expressed surprise that Clacton was one of the constituencies that now think Brexit is wrong - Clacton was staunchly in favour in 2016:

Gavin (Lord) Barwell, May's chief of staff echoed Johnson in thinking voters don't want to rejoin:

There is caution among pollsters and politicians but I genuinely think they’re behind the curve. Perhaps the poll doesn’t equate to rejoining, but what else does it mean?

If a majority of people think we’re headed in the wrong direction and even leave voters now believe they were duped, what is the answer? To just carry on knowing that it’s a bad thing, done badly by bad men? The British people may not be the brightest but they are not that stupid.

If you suddenly realise you’re going in the wrong direction on the M1 and you’ve gone past your intended destination in Northampton, what do you do, carry on to London? It’s ridiculous.

We know how to resolve the problem, and it’s completely obvious. 

The polling is clear and I fully expect the trend to continue. When we reach 70% or 80% thinking it’s a mistake, the politicians will be forced to listen. It's just a matter of time.

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