THE OBSERVER: The government has to give up on playing games and start to make deals with the EU
Brexit isn’t working. We were sold a false prospectus. Businesses, especially small and medium-size ones, are reeling. They are absorbing unwanted costs; paying hidden tariffs; suffering hitherto avoidable checks on exports; moving factories, depots and offices to within the EU; shedding workers and haemorrhaging orders. Children’s school trips to and from Europe have collapsed. It takes months to get a visa. British science remains outside the EU’s Horizon programme, the biggest international science programme in the world. So it goes on.
As importantly, centuries of British statecraft, aimed at building alliances in Europe with whatever constellation of countries best suited our interests, has been shattered. Britain’s leaders, from Pitt and Palmerston to Churchill, all understood the vital need to engage with Europe. Now, Ireland’s taoiseach, Micheál Martin, or France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, are vastly strengthened, securely knowing they have the entire EU behind them. Whether attempting to solve the cross-Channel migrant crisis or trying to join Horizon, bellicose jingoism is not only crass – it has no hope of achieving the results we want. Britain is suddenly diminished even if our Brexit leaders have yet to realise how little Britain has become.
These realities can’t be disguised for much longer. The Brexit minister, David Frost, felt the need at last week’s one-day Margaret Thatcher conference on trade to argue that success, clearly elusive, would need Britain to overcome “the forces of entropy, of laziness, of vested interest”, his blather signifying desperation and beleaguerment. The “vested interests” are no more than businesses bewildered by rising costs and diminished opportunity. The Spectator’s editor, Fraser Nelson, who had earlier chaired a debate between Vince Cable and veteran Brexiter Daniel Hannan, admitted in a Telegraph column entitled “Was I right to support Brexit?” that he found himself challenging Hannan more than Cable. Where were the sunlit uplands we were promised? From Global Britain to unleashed freedom to “liberalise, innovate and grow” the Brexit project was sinking. Even Keir Starmer at last felt emboldened at the CBI conference to begin to exploit such fertile ground; Labour had a plan to make Brexit work, which the government evidently hadn’t, he argued. » | Will Hutton, Observer columnist | Sunday, Novermber 28, 2021
Brexit was a silly idea from the very start. The Brexit referendum should never have been held. The referendum asked the electorate to vote on something they knew little or nothing about. Therefore, when many people voted for Brexit, they voted based on emotion rather than fact. They couldn’t vote on facts, because they had been given few to contemplate. Any ‘facts’ they were given were “alternative facts”!
No voter with any understanding of economics or geopolitics would ever have voted to come out of the world’s greatest single market: the Single Market.
The electorate shouldn’t be blamed for this blunder. Why? Because they were lied to by Brexit zealots – the people at the top who wanted to make a Brexit killing. They wanted to line their own pockets; the rest be damned.
Britain’s place is in Europe. Even Margaret Thatcher saw that; and she was no real fan of the European Union. But, in fairness to her, she worked tirelessly to bring about the Single Market. She was no federalist; but she was all for making it easy for business and commerce, all for tearing down impediments to free trade. She knew it would bring the UK prosperity. And it did.
Current Tories have done the very opposite: They have destroyed what Margaret Thatcher worked so hard to create. It is far easier to destroy than it is to create and build. That is a well-known fact of life.
The bottom line is this: The electorate were lied to. The result for the United Kingdom is simple to understand. Brexit will impoverish the nation. In fact, more than this, it might even break up the nation. The unintended consequences of stupidity! – © Mark
