A video clip of the Exiting the EU Select Committee's first public meeting on 16 November 2016 has emerged. Gove and Raab are just MPs sitting on the committee and displaying their usual ignorance and arrogance about Brexit. Gove, isn't in the clip itself but I took a look at the whole thing and as one of the leaders of the Leave campaign who fronted a lot of TV appearances and public meetings with that breezy don't-worry-it's-all-very-easy approach, it is particularly damaging.
He is now Cabinet Office Minister and responsible for getting Brexit done. In 2016 he was spectacularly naive - as most journalists like him were and many still are. I assume Gove himself now has an inkling about it.
The committee were hearing evidence from Sir Simon Fraser and he comes under pressure from Raab for suggesting that we might need more civil servants after Brexit, not less as Raab thought. I don't know what he thinks now about the 50,000 form fillers the private sector needs to completer the additional 215 million (at least) annual declarations.
The clip is in the tweet below:
This is staggering. In 2016, Dominic Raab was "jarred" and "bemused" by the idea that leaving the customs union could increase the burden of bureaucracy, despite @SimonFraser00's clear explanations. (h/t @RocketRacer69) (1/2) pic.twitter.com/bDmg81h79y— Property Spotter (@PropertySpot) July 26, 2018
Raab if you remember is the man who as SoS for Exiting the EU (and now Foreign Secretary) was surprised to learn how much we relied on the Dover - Calais crossing.
He is a Brexiteer who has been on a journey and unfortunately has not yet reached the end since he is still intent on forging ahead with the madness of Brexit despite daily revelations of the damage it will do. Raab can't now admit it will be a disaster.
But Gove was even worse in my opinion.
He begins by suggesting the academics and Fraser, a former mandarin, in giving evidence are making it all far more complicated than it actually is - although looking back from where we are now, they were being too optimistic - and he even offered the thought that they were doing so out of some sort of special interest for their own clan.
He talks of Occam's razor - about simplifying complex things in the way that a historian or indeed a journalist might do about things past. In my experience, complex things are usually complex and trying to offer simplistic solutions doesn't help. Gove seems to think it does.
Here is Gove's session. It's about ten minutes long but well worth watching for Gove's sheer stupidity.
He displays the arrogance for which he has become famous but also an absolute ignorance of Brexit and all of its implications. A tweet from Sir Simon Fraser in 2018 says it all:
I recall @DominicRaab with @michaelgove pressing me to agree in the first ever meeting of the @CommonsEUexit Select Cttee that #Brexit could be successfully done in 6 months. I note that almost 2 years on he is Minister in charge of stockpiling essential goods.— Simon Fraser (@SimonFraser00) July 25, 2018
This was in 2018 but with just five months to go and business screaming for details about how trade is to be managed after December this year, Gove is now the man in the eye of the storm.
At one point he says the UK and the EU at the moment have tariff free access to each other's markets and why don't we "just carry on?" He went on to suggest people were "seeking to over complicate it". Fraser explains gently that the EU would be negotiating in their interests and might not see it that way.
I couldn't find the part where Gove or Raab say it could all be done in six months but they both come very close to it.
