We are getting to the point where some Brexiteers can vaguely see reality coming although they are still looking through rather foggy binoculars. Paul Goodman over at Conservative Home (HERE) is now writing that the party will probably accept almost anything provided we leave the EU next March. The EU can insist on whatever they wish during the transition and the transition can be as long as needed. Just get us out is the message and we can negotiate a cleaner break later.
On the other hand we will be in an EU ante room, as Peter Lilley described it, and able to quickly negotiate our way back in. This must be their worry. Here's Goodman's position from his article:
"And there is always the human instinct to believe that everything will be all right on the night. We will get a fully-fledged trade deal before next March – or something very close to one, anyway. The backstop will never kick in. We will leave the Common External Tariff. Ireland and the EU will back down on full regulatory alignment".
He still talks of getting a "fully-fledged" free trade deal sorted out by March next year and somehow in the details will be a solution to the Irish border problem. This is still fantasy on several counts. There is not the slightest chance of getting a trade deal signed by March 2019 and, without some miraculous technological solution, even with a FTA, there will be a hard border in Ireland. The only way of avoiding it is to remain in the customs union and the single market or commit ourselves to tariff and regulatory alignment so close to what we have now as to be indistinguishable from the EEA/CU - but with no influence, or very little, over the rules we will be following.
As for the idea that the backstop will "never kick-in" or that the EU will "back down" on regulatory alignment, this is a bit of wishful thinking. The idea that "everything will be alright on the night" is typical Brexiteer thinking as a substitute for a workable plane.
If we remain close to the EU and bound by its rules, people will question what has been achieved for all the argument, division, rancour, effort, money and loss of trade, jobs and influence.
He thinks Conservative MPs who supported leave are at the point where they admit Brexit is not going well (this is quite an admission for Conservative Home) and can see the prize slipping away. To prevent it slipping entirely from their grasp they, or a majority, will probably swallow anything.
The comments below are surprisingly quiescent and not the fury that would have followed a similar article last year. One contributor makes what I think is the most valid point:
"The lesson of this piece is that as an intellectual or policy-making experiment, Brexit and the Brexiteers are an unmitigated disaster. They have been agitating for this outcome for decades, and they nearly destroyed Major’s government in the process. They were the godparents of the Blair government. And yet when we got to the referendum, there was no policy, just a lie on a bus and dishonest posters about 75 million Turks pitching up at Dover. Since the referendum even the leaders of the fiasco have proven unable to cobble together a policy. People unable to articulate what their own will is look pretty silly when they stagger from debacle to debacle fulminating about 'the will of the British people' ".
There are replies blaming it on Cameron who should apparently have had a plan for leaving the EU. Perhaps he should have had, but this in no way absolves the Brexiteers of being unable to agree one since the referendum. But they simply never thought it through and they just kept reinforcing their own views that it would all be very easy. It isn't an it will only get harder.
