Dominic Raab gave an update to parliament yesterday on the Brexit negotiations. It was a sweaty and rather shifty performance by the new Brexit Secretary and he looked anything other than comfortable. He was more like a spiv trying to offload a dodgy motor. He put a brave, if rather red and shiny face on the fact that very little progress had been made. He spoke a bit too quickly to be convincing, looked as though he didn't actually believe a word he was saying and would have preferred to be somewhere else. The Independent say he was given short shrift (HERE) and that was true - from both leavers and remainers!
I think we could have looked back on almost any of the previous statements by David Davis, his predecessor, and copied and pasted the words into Raab's update yesterday. It was another groundhog day.
There was a lot of talk of working towards the best deal, of making "technical" progress, of continuing to negotiate on the Chequers agreement, of resisting EU "pushback" and so on. He talked about avoiding "new trade barriers" and seemed unaware that there wouldn't be any "new" barriers, the old barriers, the ones we helped to devise, would serve the EU just as well. This was in answer to a question from John Redwood who was also under the impression, as he has been for years, that the EU might be erecting "new" barriers.
Whenever difficult questions came up (whatever serious problems were raised) he said it was "not what we wanted" and that it was a negotiation, as if Barnier was just teasing and was going to give us everything we were asking for - eventually. He said no deal wasn't the "preferred option" and Andrea Leadsom kept smiling inanely alongside him, looking for all the world like she was at a WI meeting listening to a discussion about cakes. He also kept referring back to the technical papers as if they contained the answer to every possible question that anyone could raise.
In fact when somebody warned of the impact on the car industry of no deal, they were advised by Raab to "show more mettle" (HERE).
It occurred to me that if we put Brexit in the context of a commercial negotiation, as the government frequently does, we should not forget they take nearly £150 billion of goods and services from us every year. They are our biggest customer, but we are not their biggest supplier. Getting "tough" in the negotiations is not going to end well.
Philip Hollobone asked if we would keep the £39 billion if we left without a deal. Raab gave a fudged reply that didn't say one thing or another although he must know we will still be on the hook for every penny.
Owen Paterson asked about the Irish border and wanted to know specifically what it was that was causing the difficulty in reaching an agreement. He didn't get an answer and it almost seemed as if Raab, the Brexit Secretary, had no idea what the actual problem was. This is the major sticking point in the negotiations and yet the man in charge couldn't tell The House, Owen Paterson or us what the problem at the heart of it was. Shocking or what?
Overall, the impression you got watching the debate, was that most Leave supporting MPs still didn't actually understand what it was they had campaigned for or how it would impact the country (for better or worse) under any possible scenario. They had no time for any of the problems raised about the breakup of the UK, the loss of thousands of jobs, the hit to the economy or anything that smacked in any way of an adverse impact. It was all ideology on their part and very flimsy stuff at that.
If this was our sovereign parliament, God help us all.
