Priti Patel has an article in The Daily Express that I think sums up the Brexiteer's dilemma: We MUST make Brexit work or Labour will surely drag us back into the EU. She minimises the problem, if Brexit doesn't work the Tories will also be forced to take us back into the EU. And since it's increasingly hard to see how Brexit can ever be made to 'work' in any meaningful way, then ipso facto, we are going back into the EU. The only imponderable is when. Brexit was supposed to have been ‘done’ in 2019 but we all know it wasn’t and things have gone downhill ever since.
The Tories naturally can’t admit it. To do so would be electoral suicide. Hence all the confused messaging, that Brexit has either failed (N Farage), has been successful (R Tice), or not successful enough and more needs to be done (P Patel, et al). Take your pick.
Patel blames the establishment, and remainers:
"We all know that for more than three years Parliament tore itself apart as the establishment and remain backers unable to get over the fact they lost."
This might hold up for a period but every year that goes by with no progress to show makes it a harder argument to sustain. Recently, a poll at the end of May suggested just 9% think Brexit has gone well, hardly a ringing endorsement is it?
She says the Windsor Framework has "kept Northern Ireland under the thumb of the EU and compromised the internal market of the UK while the Government has not moved fast enough to scrap EU laws and replace them with sensible regulations that empower businesses."
It's hard to see that changing anytime soon and as for 'empowering business' with 'sensible regulations' this might be OK if UK businesses actually wanted to diverge from the regulations that govern our single largest export market and from which we source most of our imported food and intermediate parts. They don't, which means it either won't get done or if it does, the changes will only damage our economy even more. It's crazy.
She says on new trade deals, the Government should have made "more progress opening up trade with more markets" and she cites India and the USA. Unfortunately for her, a three-year project by the Resolution Foundation, and the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, suggests that policy has "run out of road." In other words, there aren't going to be any more new significant trade deals, beyond what has been achieved already and they have been somewhere between very little and microscopic.
The report says any idea of the UK gaining any more benefits has reached the end of the road because deals with the USA and China which account for almost a quarter of the global economy are unlikely to happen for years, if ever. One with India doesn’t seem very likely shortly either.
All this is backed up by a new poll by Public First for UK in a Changing Europe, which shows the public is growing ever more sceptical about the 'benefits' of Brexit. This is a huge piece of work (537 pages) and digs deep into the attitudes, not just of what each side thinks about Brexit, but what they think others think about it, too.
On page 147, they ask: If you knew what you knew today, how would you have chosen to vote in the 2016 EU referendum, if at all?
The result, of 4005 respondents, is that 54% would vote to remain while just 31% would now vote to leave. Excluding those who wouldn't vote or don't know how they would vote, this is 63% to 36% now in favour of staying in. Quite a turn round.
Only 72% of leave voters would now choose to leave, while 91% of remainers would still choose to stay. This reinforces what YouGov have been finding for years.
And on page 438: Do you agree or disagree with the following?: I regret voting for Brexit
This shows 15% of leave voters either strongly agree (6%) or agree (9%) that they regret voting for Brexit while another 3% are not sure now. The figure for remain voters regretting their decision is 7% with 3% strongly agreeing (where have they been?).
Over three-quarters (76%) of people think the economy has got worse over the last year with just 9% believing it's got much or somewhat better. And nearly six in ten of that 76%, believe it was due to the impact of Brexit. These are hard figures for Brexiteers to argue with.
The interesting thing is that for each of the 133 questions, the poll breaks the answers down by 60 categories, age group, educational attainment, region, income and so on. I'll take a deeper dive and see what else might be of interest.
