There is an explosive story on the BBC website this morning claiming, with impeccable sourcing, that David Davis is being hamstrung in the negotiations by red lines set by Mrs May (HERE). It paints Davis and Johnson as quite liberal on immigration while May comes across as hard line. The cabinet is said to be split over leaving Euratom. This is what happens when a small group of advisors set policy without a proper debate and that group is pandering to an extreme view. More worrying is the obvious fact that the government does not have a settled view of what Brexit means - beyond meaning Brexit that is.
It has all the hallmarks of Davis getting his excuses in first. He is a man with tremendous ego, even by cabinet minister standards, and will not want to be remembered for a disastrous outcome so this sort of leaking matters. One can imagine more of it as time goes on. DEXEU has lost two ministers and several other senior staff in the past few months (HERE) which indicates to me that some people would rather jump than be tainted for years afterwards by association.
I begin to wonder if there isn't a growing realisation that Brexit is massively more complex than the Brexiteers, and perhaps anyone else ever realised when the referendum was called and the campaign was underway. Davis himself has compared Brexit to the moon landings.
We learned a few days ago that DEXEU is still assessing how many bilateral agreements the EU has signed with third countries or other organisations. This is just to find out the number, said to be over 700, not to renegotiate them.
There is definitely no clarity about the 35 or so existing free trade agreements the EU has at the moment with 53 countries. Can we continue with these, so called grandfathering, or do we start from zero? This is important but no one appears to know.
The civil service has been hollowed out over the past seven years and is about 30% smaller than it was. It needs to develop a whole new immigration policy and register the three million EU citizens in the UK at the moment in the next couple of years. A civil servant of twenty five years standing says developing and implementing a new registration process is utterly impossible in the time available and I believe him.
It looks as if the government is being overwhelmed. Apart from a new immigration policy, we also need a new agricultural policy and a new fishing policy. A Norwegian expert (see Nick Clegg HERE) has apparently said managing cod stocks in the North sea is not rocket science, it's far more complicated than that. Any of these policies would stretch any government but we are attempting all three at once and at the same time renegotiating our relationship with the EU, our trade with 53 other countries, developing a new customs regime and perhaps 700 or so international treaties.
This also has to be set alongside recreating dozens of new agencies for medicine safety, air and maritime safety and other mundane technical stuff that allows modern life to go on smoothly and which we are only vaguely aware, if we know anything about it at all.
To continue Davis' analogy about the moon landings, it is as if we have set ourselves a challenge that took the richest and most powerful nation on earth seven years to accomplish, but we have given ourselves two years, with three months off for an election, and set aside no money to do it. More than that we haven't designed or tested the rocket engines yet!
And the larger backdrop to all of this is a slowing down of the economy, due largely to Brexit, at the end of what has been described as the longest period of falling real incomes since the 1970s (HERE). Brexiteers promised all sorts of prosperity if we left the EU. They have created a rod for their own back. Voters expect things to get better when almost certainly they will get worse. Every aspect of life in this country is going to be impacted by Brexit in one way or another. Change is always unsettling. There will be winners and also vociferous losers.
Industry is said to be preparing for a bare knuckle fight (HERE) to retain membership of the single market and the customs union.
One begins to believe that several things might happen over the next twelve months. Someone will emerge who will finally tell the truth about the complexity and cost of it all. People will begin to realise that either they have been lied to or the government was and is totally incompetent. I think the only real question is if we learn all this before it's too late or not. The nation is in a mess, a mess that gets worse by the week. At the epicenter is the Conservative party. A hard core section plotted and agitated for Brexit for years. But they never gave it any deep thought or bothered to understand the EU, what it was for or what an alternative might look like.
They are a demolition crew when we needed architects and builders. The wrecking ball is just starting to swing. It is not yet too late.
