One of the more obvious aspects of Brexit that doesn't get much comment these days is how unbalanced the whole affair has been in terms of the consensus view of each side. The very least that we remainers can claim is that we - the 48% - held one single objective, to stay in the EU, while leavers seem to have a different one for every voter. That has been clear since 2015 when Dominic Cummings wrote his infamous blog post about how "insuperable" it would be to try and get a consensus about what Brexit might look like. It's this notion that prevented the Vote Leave campaign from presenting a plan around which everyone could coalesce.
That much was clear for several years during May's tenure and all the cabinet disagreements that we know of. But seven years on and amazingly, there is still no consensus among Brexiteers even after Britain under Johnson signed two binding treaties with the EU. We've had the Withdrawal Agreement, the TCA, and now a third, signed by Sunak earlier this year, the Windsor Framework.
In the Tory ranks, the range is still quite extreme. Tobias Ellwood MP favours a return to the single market and the customs union while others are up in arms about talk of the UK and EU moving towards an agreement on joining Horizon, the EU's £80 billion science research programme. Witness this from David Campbell Bannerman:
Does the nation whose people discovered gravity, invented Penicillin, TVs, World Wide Web, Telephones, Electric Motors & Steam Engines really need handouts from EU (with no top world unis) to develop future science programmes? Embrace Pioneer not Horizon https://t.co/0UYhcFTczh
— David C Bannerman (@DCBMEP) July 7, 2023
This weekend, the former UKIP EP candidate and Tory DEFRA secretary George Eustice has admitted we need more EU workers to address the chronic labour shortages, especially in agriculture and the food industry:
Eustice is said the be "highly critical of the Home Office" and the skills-based immigration system which he says is "failing the country on many levels."
“The flaws in our current so-called skills-based immigration system are becoming clearer by the day because we have got a policy that does not correspond to the needs of our economy.
“We are allowing in people who are deemed skilled such as lawyers, insolvency practitioners, museum officers, even disc jockeys, when we have no shortages whatsoever in those sectors. But we are not allowing people to come here to work in sectors like the food industry, even though there are acute labour shortages in these sectors, and that is contributing to inflation."
His solution is that the UK starts a series of "bilateral negotiations with EU member states, starting with countries like Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic states, and widen it to the whole of the EU eventually, to establish a reciprocal youth-mobility visa scheme.”
The government has effectively nationalised the supply of migrant labour and just this week a review commissioned by ministers has warned that an “overly bureaucratic and slow administration of visa applications during periods of stress and conflict have had a substantial impact” on the labour supply.
Well, there's a surprise, eh?
Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, had a rather tetchy meeting with Tory MPs on the European Scrutiny Committee recently when it became clear the controversial REUL revocation Bill was being drastically watered down. They can't even agree on what Britain's post-Brexit regulatory regime should look like. There is a huge split between those who want anything with a hint of the EU expunged totally from the UK statute book and what you might call pragmatists if you can use that word about anyone who supports Brexit.
I seem to recall one of the main planks of Brexiteer arguments was that Brussels has to design regulations that were acceptable to 28 widely different member states and this was an impossible task. Far better, they argued, that Britain should design rules to suit Britain and British industry.
Yet, it is now blindingly obvious that we can't do that.
Britain's FPTP system and the absence of any cross-party industrial policy means the landscape for industry in this country was constantly changing, with an earthquake practically guaranteed every few years. But at least we had the EU to bring in mostly sensible regulations, ones that had been fully consulted on and given a lot of thought and that worked across an entire continent.
Now we haven't even got the stability of belonging to a large regional trade group. God help us.
