Enough is enough

Brexit has become such a dominant element of my professional life over the last six years that I thought I had become inured to the craziness as politicians bend over backwards to fulfil “the will of the people” following a non-legally binding referendum that threatens to crash the economy. But the events of the past few days have tried my patience like never before. We are increasingly in a 1984-style Orwellian world in which politicians operate in a world of doublespeak. Take today’s parliamentary votes in which MPs passed two motions, one of which called for redefining the nature of the Northern Irish backstop designed to avoid a hard Irish border whilst the other made it clear that parliament is not in favour of leaving the EU without a deal.

MPs fell over themselves to suggest that somehow we had moved forward. How? By accepting two contradictory motions, one of which suggests the UK is prepared to go to the wire on the backstop proposal and the other which says the complete opposite?  Such is the predicament facing the Conservatives that Theresa May is prepared to ride roughshod over the national interest in a desperate attempt to keep her party together. And everyone can see it. Obviously the EU has no interest in renegotiating the deal – the need for an Irish border exists to ensure that if the UK does indeed crash out of the EU and falls back on WTO rules, they can be enforced. Moreover the EU has made it clear that the UK can remain within the customs union if it is prepared to accept the terms. But this is not enough for a group of MPs who, in the words of Boris Johnson, want to have their cake and eat it.

If Orwell had not written 1984, someone else would have had to invent Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the first chapter of which is entitled Ignorance is Strength.

Ignorance abounds: Following the warnings by Airbus CEO Tom Enders that the company may be forced to reconsider its position in the UK in the event of a hard Brexit, we were treated to this spectacular rebuttal from Conservative MP Mark Francois who remarked that his father “was a D Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German and neither will his son." Yes, you did read that right: an elected member of the British parliament, born in 1965 and whose military experience came no closer than serving in the Territorial Army, refers to a war that ended twenty years before he was born to attack the business interests of a multinational company. Is this really where we are? Has Brexit at all costs simply become a cause celebre for nationalists to realise their fantasy of a pre-EU Britain that never really existed? In the words of comedian Chris Addison, “it’s a peculiar anomaly that Brexiters can clearly recall World War 2 yet have no apparent memory of The Troubles in  Northern Ireland.” Shame on you, Mark Gino Francois.

The extent to which the Conservative Party has tied itself in knots over the EU question was laid bare by a recent BBC programme Inside Europe, the first episode of which followed the trail which has led us to our current predicament. It illustrated the extent to which the British Conservatives have failed to engage with the EU. But perhaps more damningly, it highlighted the ham-fisted efforts of former PM David Cameron, who was elected on a promise “to stop banging on about Europe”, to deal with the EU and how he failed to stand up to the right-wing of his party at pretty much every turn. We were reminded of how the UK vetoed the EU’s efforts in December 2011 to rewrite treaties which would place limits on fiscal deficits and debt, and impose automatic penalties for countries which breach them, as it attempted to place a firebreak in the way of the raging Greek debt crisis.

As it happens, the EU did not cover itself in glory. The measures were badly designed and focused on imposing fiscal discipline at a time when it was least needed. In the preceding the 17 years Germany had only complied with the debt brake rules twice and France not at all. But the EU was still not willing to grant the UK any concessions which would exempt the UK financial services industry from any treaty changes, thus prompting Cameron’s veto. I wrote at the time that it “could set the UK on a collision course with other EU members. It is to be hoped that such an outcome does not arise.” I had no idea it would lead us down the path towards  the 2016 showdown but it is no surprise that the EU was not overly keen to help Cameron when he attempted to wring concessions which would  allow him to claim some progress ahead of his self-imposed (and foolish) decision to call a referendum on membership.

One of the issues that struck me most forcibly was that many Conservative politicians were fixated on the need for a referendum as early as 2012 in a bid to lance the boil of Euroscepticism. Whilst the Westminster bubble may have focused on the fact that UKIP was drawing support away from the Conservatives, the issue of the EU simply was not as uppermost in the minds of voters as the programme led us to suppose. I thus could not help feeling that there was a certain amount of history being rewritten.

Every time British MPs engage in a bout of navel-gazing such as we have seen tonight, we call enough is enough. Yet still it goes on. But Brexit is simply a problem for the Conservative Party that cannot agree on what form it should take. If I were an EU negotiator, I would tell the UK government that they have a choice – accept the deal as it is or leave without one. They have no interest in giving in to the Conservative hard-liners who have demonstrated unwillingness to compromise. It is now up to British politicians to face them down, and stand up for what they were elected for: The interests of the people who put them there – all of them, and not just the 52%.