David Davis addressed conference yesterday (full speech is HERE) and told delegates to keep their eye on the prize. He said the "prizes for success are enormous. But so are the consequences of failure". In saying this he has once again confirmed that Brexit is a gamble, a roll of the dice with the nation's future at stake. What responsible government would campaign for and enter into a negotiation where the outcome was so uncertain?
Neither do I believe the prizes are what he claims. We might win a plastic duck in a few years if we're lucky but there is a high risk of going over the edge of a cliff in 2019. Who would take that bet on?
He says the negotiations are the "most complex you could imagine" where one "oversight" could cost the taxpayer billions. I cannot recall any Brexiteer saying anything remotely like this during the campaign. Brexit was sold to us as a rock solid certainty but now it looks more like a 100:1 shot, based on the recommendation of a dodgy tipster. In fact Buzzfeed looked at the number of times we were told it would all be easy HERE.
And Davis now says Whitehall is making preparations for a no-deal exit. Boris Johnson accidentally revealed the truth in the House of Commons in July this year (HERE) when he said the opposite: “There is no plan for no deal, because we’re going to get a great deal and I would, just for the sake of example and illustration, I would remind the honourable lady that there was a time when Britain was not in what we then called the Common Market.”
Davis repeated the mantra that leaving the European Union "allows us to be more international, not less". I am not sure anybody knows what this actually means since the Germans export five times what we do to China for example. Switzerland exports far more to India than we do as well and they have a bigger language barrier. Aren't they international?
