Monday 15 May 2023

Inside the madhouse

Sometimes, living in this country post-2016 has seemed like being in an asylum after the inmates have taken charge. Goodness knows what it's like inside the Tory party. Badenoch’s announcement on Thursday has pushed a few of them over the edge and they are now plotting to get rid of Sunak, according to reports in inews and on social media. They are absolutely steaming mad about the U-turn on the REUL Bill, which itself is a piece of total insanity.

I honestly thought we had reached peak stupidity with the bendy banana stories until I saw a couple more articles in The Telegraph (where else?) yesterday.

The first is by Tony Diver and Will Hazel with the title (I promise you this is true): Brexit pledge to bring back pounds and ounces stalls. Yes, they literally thought imperial measures were coming back. It could easily have been a satirical piece from Private Eye. They say:

“The return of imperial measurements to Britain is under threat after ministers scaled back plans to abolish European Union rules by the end of the year.

"Despite a pledge from Boris Johnson at the last election to restore the 'ancient liberty' of using pounds and ounces, an official consultation has found that businesses and voters largely prefer the metric system.”

The 'threat' they're talking about is not to bring feet and inches back as you might think, but NOT to do it. There is a belated recognition that nobody (not businesses and not voters) wants imperial measurements back but The Telegraph is furious enough to carry a headline about the plans to do it being 'under threat.'

Well, who knew?

It ends:

"Brexiteer sources pointed to the fact that Ms Badenoch’s list of rules to be scrapped does not include an EU regulation requiring bags of nuts to be printed with the message 'contains nuts'.

"One said: 'The only thing that’s nuts is that seven years after the referendum, ministers are claiming civil servants haven't had to scrap regulations as asinine as this'."

Who the source was we don’t know, but really is this why we’ve had seven years of turmoil, five prime ministers, upset all the neighbours, lost trade and jobs and driven millions of EU citizens half crazy with worry? Because a packet of nuts has “contains nuts” printed on it? Really?  Is that all they were worried about?

What do we look like from the outside?

The second article came from Sir Bill Cash, who hasn’t been right in the head for years. He has now totally lost it over the ditching of these so-called retained EU laws, the vast majority of which UK governments of both colours voted FOR when we were EU members!

He has penned an article himself (Kemi Badenoch’s proposals would betray Brexit – but there is still time to fix them) where he writes:

“There is still adequate time for a proper full review of all the EU legislation we inherited, especially if the present sunset provisions are extended for a few months. It is now clear that a significant proportion of the mere 600 EU laws in the schedule in the bill for revocation are not and never were of any legal or political national UK interest. They include fishing matters between the EU and the Cook Islands or Vietnam.”

The fact that virtually all the EU laws repealed so far and shown on the government’s dashboard for months and months "were not of any legal or political national UK interest" has been obvious for months. They were not even low-hanging fruit, they were from last year's ‘June drop’ and lying shrivelled and rotten on the ground. None of them adds up to a hill of beans.

Poor old Bill Cash has only just twigged what's happening and he’s hopping mad about it.

John Redwood has also noticed:

We have reached a tipping point in Brexit. The old question that we used to ask on our street stalls about which EU laws needed to be scrapped (and nobody could answer) has now become all too real, urgent even for Sunak and the government. After seven years people inside his own party want to know. 

Times columnist Iain Martin, the Brexiteer who went into a cold sweat at the thought of being asked the question since he had no idea himself, wrote in 2021 that "there were and are nerdy Brexiteers who can produce lists of Brussels red tape that needs to be slashed to improve competitiveness."

Where are these 'nerdy Brexiteers' now?  Where are these 'lists' (plural) that he talks of?  The fact is they all assumed there were such laws and a whole mountain of them but now they have the chance to dump them nobody can produce anything meaningful. They have been operating in their very own echo-chamber for years, shouting to those of us outside that we were just remoaners. 

The fact is none of them ever bothered to look in detail to find (a) laws that were forced on us; (b) have created a drag on the British economy; (c) are unpopular with the voters and (d) could quickly be ditched without a similar if not identical replacement.

Presumably, one of these nerds that Martin listened to was Jacob Rees-Mogg who has blamed ‘snowflakey, work-shy’ civil servants for the problem and claims that he "could’ve ‘drawn them [a list of EU laws] up himself over a weekend."

And yet in almost seven years, including a period when he was the supremo looking at Brexit 'opportunities' he never did, preferring to spend his weekends doing something else, that's how much Brexit meant to him. 

I bet the truth is he often came up with ideas but civil servants explained why they were daft or impossible.

Anyway, all this has brought matters to a head and Sunak is now in a perilous position. He either has to come up with some real substantial EU laws to scrap by the end of the year which could inflict more damage on our weakened economy or face a leadership challenge - probably from Johnson supporters who are already on manoeuvres. 

According to The inews: Rishi Sunak facing revolt of 30 Tory MPs over Brexit ‘sell-out’ on bonfire of EU laws with someone on Twitter even suggesting "at least 54 MPs are poised to send 'letters' of no confidence' to the 1922 Committee":

I suspect this is just mischief-making but for a PM who has been in office less than eight months, it's a bit worrying.

A senior Conservative MP, talking about Badenoch who was once touted as a leadership contender, told the Sunday Telegraph: “She’s totally untested. This is the problem that we’ve got - we’ve got people in Cabinet because they’re all wannabes. They’ve delivered the square root of zero."

At least somebody recognises the problem. Thirteen years, Brexit and things are far worse now. Nothing can save the Tory party from oblivion. 

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