It's a far cry from the unbounded optimism she showed in April 2018 when addressing a Question Time audience where she said:
“You don’t get all the benefits outside the single market it’s true, but there will be new benefits to be reaped by these new opportunities. There are going to be a lot of Remainers in particular who are absolutely dumbfounded in March 2019, when the UK does leave the European Union and it doesn’t fall off a cliff.
“It’s not going to be perfect right away, but I think it’s going to be okay.”
I think it's going to be OK. Mmmm. A lot of Brexiteers also thought it would be OK too. But now they're united in recognising that it isn't. Strange that. She was warned endlessly by real experts that it would be a disaster economically but chose to dismiss the warnings as scaremongering.
It appears to be a strange reversal that she is the 'absolutely dumbfounded' one while remainers see only what they expected would happen and are not surprised by any of it. We may not have fallen off a cliff the following day but the damage has been significant, otherwise, how did the country get broken?
The problem she identifies is short-termism, where necessary long-term investment is substituted for spending huge amounts of cash to get positive headlines that solve an immediate crisis. I have some sympathy with this, but unfortunately, this was true when we were a member of the EU, and leaving it has not improved our strategic decision-making at all but has simply hooked up a drag anchor on trade and reduced GDP and tax revenues.
Before Brexit we had the money but made the wrong decisions, now we don't have the money to make any decisions - except for making painful choices about what to cut next. And we haven't seen the last of them either.
She says Sunak must explain why, 13 years on, schools are unsafe, nothing gets built, and the country’s major institutions all seem to teeter on the brink of collapse. Because, Andrews says: "that’s what happens when short-term political decisions pile up: lots of money is spent, nothing much happens."
But Brexit, which she supported enthusiastically, was a very long-term decision made without any evidence to support it by people like her who just 'thought it would be OK.'
Since 2016 the government, largely made up of Brexiteers or converts to the cause like May and Truss, has spent virtually every waking minute making short-term decisions. I am talking here about the Withdrawal Agreement and the EU-UK Trade deal in particular which were conducted against self-imposed deadlines, and the FTAs with Australia and New Zealand. The NI protocol is still causing real tensions.
Decisions about implementing the EU trade deal are repeatedly put off, and EU laws are scrapped only to be replaced by virtually identical UK ones. Plans to create a UK standards regime with a UKCA mark have been abandoned altogether.
The immigration policy changes on a daily basis to take account of labour shortages with government ministers engaging in what often to an outsider looks like a crazy plate-spinning act. The latest cabinet row is over Sunak's efforts to secure an early free trade deal with India. Home Secretary Suella Braverman is said to have 'challenged' the PM over suggestions that to get an agreement Britain will need to issue thousands of additional visas every year for Indian students and workers.
What are these if not short-term decisions made to manage today's problems, problems created by Brexit and designed to avoid its worst impacts?
It would be nice, just for once if they admitted they were wrong in 2016. For that, we must wait, but it's coming, it's coming.
