Brexit is not the EU's top priority
As time has gone on, external threats such as the perceived threat of Russian aggression; the economic problems posed by China and the very fact that Donald Trump occupies the White House are much higher up the EU’s agenda than Brexit, which is increasingly a sideshow. Brexit is a British problem and requires the government to come up with a clear plan for what it wants. But it has not done so two full years after the referendum which, lest it be forgotten, was legally only advisory. The government was not required to implement the decision.
Twelve months ago, I wrote “As for where we will be in a year’s time, I suspect not much further forward. If the EU plays hardball on the Brexit bill and the UK refuses to back down, the clock will be running down without any tangible sign of progress on the trade deal which the UK so badly wants.” To a greater or lesser degree, that is exactly what has happened. The UK has been forced to concede ground on some of its key issues, notably the role of the ECJ, and the government is beginning to realise that delivering a Brexit that works is much harder than many of its proponents believed.
The lack of domestic political coherency is making things much worse
There are still those who blame Remainers for hindering progress, but the less cerebrally challenged Brexit supporters realise that the government’s headlong rush to deliver has placed it into a box from which it cannot easily escape. Political journalists have had a field day reporting on the parliamentary machinations as pro- and anti-Brexit supporters slug it out. But the fact that the UK still does not have a coherent Brexit plan speaks volumes for the degree of disorganisation at the heart of government.
One of the more depressing aspects of this week was that rebel MPs, who threatened to mount a challenge to the government’s lunatic policy, chickened out of the fight when the chips were down. Their proposal was that parliament should have the power to take over Brexit negotiations in the event of a ‘no-deal’ with Brussels. In the end, they were bought off with a compromise in which the Speaker of the House of Commons would decide whether any motion put forward by the Government on Brexit was amendable. This was enough to buy off chief rebel, former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who stated “Having finally obtained, and I have to say with a little bit more difficulty than I would have wished, the obvious acknowledgement of the sovereignty of this place [parliament] over the executive in black and white language I am prepared to accept the Government’s difficulty and support it.” He then proceeded to issue his original proposal (that parliament could take over negotiations), only to then vote against his own amendment.
If that does not sum up the bizarre nature of political proceedings, I don’t know what does. Former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Nick MacPherson, summed it up perfectly in a tweet when he pointed out that “Europhile Tories always compromise to preserve party unity. Their opponents don't.”
And business is losing patience
For all that the electorate appears to have lost interest in the minutiae of Brexit, big business has not. Only yesterday, Airbus announced that it was considering whether it would continue investing in its UK operations. COO Tom Williams said in a radio interview, “over the next weeks we need to get clarity. We are already beginning to press the button on our crisis actions ... We have got to be able to protect our employees, our customers and our shareholders and we can’t do that in the current situation … we need to have clarity. We can’t continue with the current vacuum.” This matters because according to a report produced last year by Oxford Economics, Airbus contributed £7.8bn to the UK economy in 2015 which is “larger than the economy of Newcastle upon Tyne” (the principal city of NE England).
Business is no longer prepared to take the government on trust, and with the March 2019 exit deadline just nine months away, time is increasingly pressing. A number of other businesses have also spoken out to warn of the dangers of a hard Brexit and as one commentator suggested recently, the true costs of Brexit will only become evident too late to stop it. It is not as if it is not already hurting. According to the latest estimate by John Springford at the Centre for European Reform “the UK economy is 2.1 per cent smaller as a result of the vote to leave the EU. The knock-on hit to the public finances is now £23 billion per annum – or £440 million a week.” Recall that the UK was meant to save £350 million per week by leaving the EU!
It is simply astonishing that a traditionally pro-business Conservative government can take a project like Brexit and totally ignore all the evidence placed before it. By leaving the single market and placing barriers in the way of EU migration, the government will reverse the liberalisation of the UK economy overseen by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s – a process that was copied by many other countries. Part of the problem with the Brexit concept is that it was sold as a vision of making Britain great again (sounds familiar). But many voters are guilty of seeing old Britain through rose-tinted spectacles: Ironically, the age group most in favour of Brexit were those who lived through the strikes and the power cuts of the pre-Thatcher 1970s.
I have long argued that whilst Thatcher was no fan of the EU, she recognised the potential of the Single Market in a way that the generation of politicians who succeeded her clearly do not. In that sense, the current generation of Conservative politicians who revere the legacy of Thatcher and talk about the benefits of free markets clearly do not understand what the 1980s revolution was about. Quite how they hope to enhance living standards whilst simultaneously putting obstacles in the way of the free movement of goods and labour demonstrates the economic illiteracy of their argument.
My late father never had much time for politicians, believing them to be more interested in looking after their own interests than those of the people they were meant to serve. Whilst my dad and I did not always see eye-to-eye on matters of politics, we were united in our assessment of the current generation of politicians.
As time has gone on, external threats such as the perceived threat of Russian aggression; the economic problems posed by China and the very fact that Donald Trump occupies the White House are much higher up the EU’s agenda than Brexit, which is increasingly a sideshow. Brexit is a British problem and requires the government to come up with a clear plan for what it wants. But it has not done so two full years after the referendum which, lest it be forgotten, was legally only advisory. The government was not required to implement the decision.
Twelve months ago, I wrote “As for where we will be in a year’s time, I suspect not much further forward. If the EU plays hardball on the Brexit bill and the UK refuses to back down, the clock will be running down without any tangible sign of progress on the trade deal which the UK so badly wants.” To a greater or lesser degree, that is exactly what has happened. The UK has been forced to concede ground on some of its key issues, notably the role of the ECJ, and the government is beginning to realise that delivering a Brexit that works is much harder than many of its proponents believed.
The lack of domestic political coherency is making things much worse
There are still those who blame Remainers for hindering progress, but the less cerebrally challenged Brexit supporters realise that the government’s headlong rush to deliver has placed it into a box from which it cannot easily escape. Political journalists have had a field day reporting on the parliamentary machinations as pro- and anti-Brexit supporters slug it out. But the fact that the UK still does not have a coherent Brexit plan speaks volumes for the degree of disorganisation at the heart of government.
One of the more depressing aspects of this week was that rebel MPs, who threatened to mount a challenge to the government’s lunatic policy, chickened out of the fight when the chips were down. Their proposal was that parliament should have the power to take over Brexit negotiations in the event of a ‘no-deal’ with Brussels. In the end, they were bought off with a compromise in which the Speaker of the House of Commons would decide whether any motion put forward by the Government on Brexit was amendable. This was enough to buy off chief rebel, former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who stated “Having finally obtained, and I have to say with a little bit more difficulty than I would have wished, the obvious acknowledgement of the sovereignty of this place [parliament] over the executive in black and white language I am prepared to accept the Government’s difficulty and support it.” He then proceeded to issue his original proposal (that parliament could take over negotiations), only to then vote against his own amendment.
If that does not sum up the bizarre nature of political proceedings, I don’t know what does. Former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Nick MacPherson, summed it up perfectly in a tweet when he pointed out that “Europhile Tories always compromise to preserve party unity. Their opponents don't.”
And business is losing patience
For all that the electorate appears to have lost interest in the minutiae of Brexit, big business has not. Only yesterday, Airbus announced that it was considering whether it would continue investing in its UK operations. COO Tom Williams said in a radio interview, “over the next weeks we need to get clarity. We are already beginning to press the button on our crisis actions ... We have got to be able to protect our employees, our customers and our shareholders and we can’t do that in the current situation … we need to have clarity. We can’t continue with the current vacuum.” This matters because according to a report produced last year by Oxford Economics, Airbus contributed £7.8bn to the UK economy in 2015 which is “larger than the economy of Newcastle upon Tyne” (the principal city of NE England).
Business is no longer prepared to take the government on trust, and with the March 2019 exit deadline just nine months away, time is increasingly pressing. A number of other businesses have also spoken out to warn of the dangers of a hard Brexit and as one commentator suggested recently, the true costs of Brexit will only become evident too late to stop it. It is not as if it is not already hurting. According to the latest estimate by John Springford at the Centre for European Reform “the UK economy is 2.1 per cent smaller as a result of the vote to leave the EU. The knock-on hit to the public finances is now £23 billion per annum – or £440 million a week.” Recall that the UK was meant to save £350 million per week by leaving the EU!
It is simply astonishing that a traditionally pro-business Conservative government can take a project like Brexit and totally ignore all the evidence placed before it. By leaving the single market and placing barriers in the way of EU migration, the government will reverse the liberalisation of the UK economy overseen by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s – a process that was copied by many other countries. Part of the problem with the Brexit concept is that it was sold as a vision of making Britain great again (sounds familiar). But many voters are guilty of seeing old Britain through rose-tinted spectacles: Ironically, the age group most in favour of Brexit were those who lived through the strikes and the power cuts of the pre-Thatcher 1970s.
I have long argued that whilst Thatcher was no fan of the EU, she recognised the potential of the Single Market in a way that the generation of politicians who succeeded her clearly do not. In that sense, the current generation of Conservative politicians who revere the legacy of Thatcher and talk about the benefits of free markets clearly do not understand what the 1980s revolution was about. Quite how they hope to enhance living standards whilst simultaneously putting obstacles in the way of the free movement of goods and labour demonstrates the economic illiteracy of their argument.
My late father never had much time for politicians, believing them to be more interested in looking after their own interests than those of the people they were meant to serve. Whilst my dad and I did not always see eye-to-eye on matters of politics, we were united in our assessment of the current generation of politicians.
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