The other day, I watched a Daily Mail Columnist, (I didn't catch her name) talking with Polly Toynbee on The Daily Politics. She dismissed the idea that voters didn't know what they were voting for in the referendum on Brexit. Yet in the same week we had an example of prominent leavers disagreeing with each other on what Brexit should be. This is nearly two years after we actually voted.
First we had this article HERE in The Telegraph by John Longworth and John Mills saying it's vital that we leave the customs union. The heading is: "Don't let the Brexit wreckers take us back to medieval times: freedom from any Customs Union is vital". Today, in the very same newspaper we have Christopher Booker (HERE) telling us: Don’t my fellow Brexiteers see that the EU’s customs union gives us everything we want?
Remember these people all voted to leave the EU and urged others to vote the same way! Yet we are told the voters "knew what they were voting for". Did they? Even the people doing the urging didn't know what they were voting for. They all knew what they were voting against. It was the status quo, what we are actually going to end up with is anybody's guess at the moment.
In the letters column of the Telegraph (HERE) a Mr Andrew Gray in Edinburgh claims the EU is "weaponising" the Irish border in order to scupper the talks, while another writer thinks the EU is only after money and will give in if we threaten to leave without paying the £40 billion divorce bill. This kind of thinking would lead to catastrophe but is being fed daily by people like Daniel Hannan who writes (HERE) this week: "The EU believes it can push Britain around over Northern Ireland. They don't know Britain".
He argues that staying in the customs union "while leaving the EU would be the worst of all worlds, far worse than where we are now". He was the one who said before the vote, "absolutely no one is talking about leaving the single market". Now he wants to leave everything, or most things - although even he says we would have to agree "the minimal courtesies that we have even with unfriendly states – on aviation, exchange of information and the like". Unfortunately, doesn't say why the EU would agree to this if we walk away. It is Hannan's fantasy.
He tries to argue that the EU is being awkward and "behaving so belligerently". He asks "why is it proposing more restrictive terms for Britain than for any other neighbour?"
Jean Claude Piris, the former EU Trade Commissioner was forced to respond to Hannan via Twitter, he said (HERE):
"No discrimination. U.K. will be treated like any other third country. Ireland issue is a consequence of the will of the British Government, not only to leave EU, but also to leave CU and SM. It was known before the referendum that such a will would lead to a difficult dilemma"
Hannan is stirring up a lot of anti-EU sentiment which will not help when we are forced to climb down later - as we most certainly will.
If we were ever truly thinking of walking away without a deal on withdrawal or future trade we should have been planning for it from August 2016. It wouldn't have prevented a serious economic disaster but it would have mitigated the worst of it. Business would have fled, the pound would have taken a real battering and unemployment would have shot upwards. This is probably what stopped the government starting to plan for it in the first place.
But having done nothing and now with less than a year to go, the option of walking away, insofar that it was ever thinkable, is now completely out of the question. Yet people like Hannan still seem to believe we can do it.
Even he must realise that as the clock ticks down with nothing actually agreed (nothing being agreed until everything is agreed) the EU grows more and more powerful in the Article 50 process. The letter in The Telegraph suggesting the EU only wants the money we have agreed to pay is laughable.
The Commission spends about 1% of European GDP, of which we contribute about 15%. If anybody thinks the EU is going to make huge concessions in exchange for 0.15% of its GDP they really need to get a reality check. Brussels also knows that no British government is going to crash the economy for the sake of £40 billion or so spread over forty years. Only a lunatic would give it a second thought. If we weren't prepared to do it in 2016 we certainly won't do it now or at any time. We will accept whatever the EU demand.
We are going to become more of a supplicant with every passing day. Not only will the EU "push us around" but everybody else will.
This is the reality of taking back control.
