Boris is stating that the law banning 'No Deal' has wrecked his Brexit negotiating strategy. He insists that he has to be able to walk away from the table if they don't give him what he wants. But it is not a table he can walk away from. This is not a transaction to buy a house, with another, better house down the road, it is a divorce. Anyone who has ever been through a divorce knows damn well that you can't simply say "Well I'm walking away from the table". Given the complicated private life of Boris, you'd think this would have occurred to him by now. I wonder what his lawyer would have said to him if he'd said "If she doesn't give me the etchings, the Ferrari and the Mansion in Berkshire, tell her it's no deal". Surely Boris knows that in all divorces, the lawyer is the only person who wins. I wonder if Boris has thought whether the Dominic Cummings strategy of alienating many of your friends and supporters will help the Conservatives in the long run.
The current impasse in Parliament about whether we should leave Parliament without a deal fascinates me. The Tory Party has virtually imploded over the matter, but what fascinates me more than anything is that everyone, leavers, remainers and those on the fence know damn well that the concept of ''No Deal' is an illusion and a lie. You may ask how I can make such a preposterous claim? Well think about some of the arguments that the ERG and hard leavers are putting about. How about the one about tariffs damaging trade? They say "German car makers won't let that happen". Or the need for us to get visa's to go to France or Spain "They won't want to lose the tourist income". Or the ending of information sharing between European and UK police authorities to deal with terrorism and crime "Of course that will continue". Whatever you may or may not think of the EU, even the most hardline leave supporters recognise that these will need to continue. They can only continue if some sort of deal is done. Maybe this will take the form of a thousand small deals, but at some point all of these issues will be tied up and resolved. What will happen in the meantime? Well clearly it would be suicidal to cease co-operation on terrorism and nuclear safety etc, so a temporary deal will have to be bodged together in a hurry. As to the German car makers and the arrangements for cancer drugs, these will presumably be given a reasonable amount of priority. Given that the Conservative Party have virtually abolished the Royal Navy, whether or not a deal on fishing rights in UK waters is put together may be a bit irrelevant. Even if we banned French fishermen, we don't have the ships to stop them. Will we need a visa to visit France? Who knows, common sense says that some sort of deal will be done. Will UK companies still be able to sell products in UK markets, will UK pensioners be booted out of their homes in Spain and France? Will UK bands be able to tour in Europe without red tape making tax arrangements making it impractical?
There will be thousands of smaller issues, things which affect small groups of people. Most of these, people won't realise until they actually try and do something which is affected. I fully expect that all of these things will eventually be resolved. The bank of England say that this will result in a 5% reduction in GDP. This means that we will be worse off if we have not negotiated a proper deal. But whatever happens, there will have to be all manner of temporary deals in place.
What this means is that the term 'No Deal' is technically incorrect. What the phrase should be is whether we go for a managed of a chaotic exit from the EU. Why don't we use these terms? Presumably because Boris and the ERG realise that arguing for chaos does not sound good. The thing I cannot get my head around is why the ERG and the hard Brexiteers are in such a rush. We've been in the EU for decades. No one is banged up in jail because we are members, no one is starving to death because we are members and no one is constrained from going about their daily business because we are members. Surely the aim of Brexiteers should be to prove that the UK is better off out of the EU and the best way to do that is to have as seamless an exit as possible.
If Brexiteers believe that the best way forward for the UK is a free trade deal with the USA and us trading with the EU on WTO/GATT24 rules, then they should be able to find qualified, respected economists who can put the case together. Has this been done? There should be a detailed study that analyses the different sectors of the economy and lays out the pro's and cons for each.
For many Brexiteers, it is not about the economy. For them, it is about sovereignty and independence. They believe that the EU has meant that we are no longer a self governing nation. They object to us being subjected to Europe wide legislation. I've asked many for specific examples of where EU law has resulted in injustice. The usually cited cases are vague notions that the European Court of Human rights has meant that rapists, murderers and serial killers roam the streets and have tellies in their jail cells. This is nonsense. The UK Parliament makes our laws and our judiciary set the sentences. The human rights laws in Brussels that are so objected to were largely drafted along the lines of UK law. Whether we leave or stay, we will still have these laws and the UK will not suddenly adopt the US ways of executing people or locking them up for ever for nicking three bags of sweeties from Smiths. When the UK has lost cases in the EU court of human rights, it has been because the law has been incorrectly applied. The judges who sit on the ECHR panel are the best qualified judges in Europe and they apply the law as it is written. If you think that UK judges will apply the law in a different way, then you probably don't understand the way the law works. Of course we could tear up all human rights laws. The upside of that might well be that rapists and serial killers lose the tellies in their cells, but the downside is that any government that has to take no account of human rights can behave in a very dangerous manner. I personally would rather see us be protected by laws that ensure a government can't victimise me. Of course, as a blogger that disagrees with the Government, I am probably more exposed than many. I don't expect a knock on the door at 3am any time soon, but having travelled around the USSR, Eastern Europe and China in the 1980's and 1990's I know exactly what being in a police state feels like and it really isn't pleasant.
Anyone looking at the state of the UK government at the moment surely would surely find it hard to make a case that we are doing a good job of running our own affairs. We are currently leaving the EU on 31st October and we still don't know what the Prime Minister wants a deal to look like. His chief adviser, Dominic Cummings is not elected and not even a member of the Conservative Party. He has sacked 21 long standing MP's many of whom have dedicated their lives to the Conservative Party. He has forced the Prime Ministers brother to conclude that he can't stand as an MP. He's forced the Conservatives chief whip in the Lords to resign. He's lost the Conservative Party their majority. His whole strategy is based on forcing a snap election that he believes Boris will romp on a wave of Brexit fervour. He's calculated that the UK electorate fear a Jeremy Corbyn government. That would be an interesting theory if Theresa May hadn't tried the theory out and lost her majority. There is a theory that Boris will do a deal with the Brexit Party. This hoovered up the UKIP vote, but that was less than 2% of the electorate in 2017. Any seat that elected a Labour MP in 2017 is just as likely to do so today. I don't see Corbyn getting a majority, but I do see the Lib Dems taking swathes of Tory seats. The loss of Ruth Davidson in Scotland as Tory Leader is likely to lead to a loss of seats there. My prediction is for a hung parliament with a coalition of 2-3 parties required to form a government. I suspect that the next PM may be neither Corbyn nor Boris. I had supposed that the remain element of the Tories may join some sort of government of National Unity, but Boris has purged them.
The main argument of Brexiteers that it is the will of the people to leave the UK is perhaps as illusory as every other claim. We are constantly reminded that 17.4 million people voted for Leave. The population of the UK was over 63 million in 2011, when the last census was taken. That means that 27.6% of the population voted for Brexit. Now some were too young, some did not qualify to vote because they were not UK nationals and some couldn't make their mind up. Since the referendum 2016, millions of young people who couldn't vote have come onto the electoral register. When we talk about democratic rights, what about them? They will have to live with the fallout for this for far longer than the strongly leave supporting older generation. When the UK joined the EEC in the 1970's the UK was known as the 'sick man of Europe'. The country was regularly in the grip of 'balance of payments crises' We made regular trips to the EMF to get bailouts to keep the country afloat. Our percentage of world trade was falling year by year. Whatever you may think of the EU, since the EEC became the EU, Thatcher signed the Single European act and Major signed the Maastricht treaty, the UK has done rather well. The right wing press was crowing about the Bank of England downgrading the damage that a 'No Deal' Brexit would do. It will only knock five percent off our GDP rather than the previous estimate of eight percent. As I mentioned, I don't accept the definition of 'No Deal'. I prefer the term chaotic exit. If you delve deeper, you will find that the Bank of England have simply said that is the most likely scenario, not the worst case. The bank, by nature is a very deeply conservative (small c) organisation. What does this mean? No government in history has ever previously proposed a policy which it's own central bank says will damage the economy so severely.
As I stated at the start of this blog, Boris doesn't seem to realise that he's negotiating a divorce. The only person I know who tried a 'No Deal' divorce was the ex husband of a work colleague. He announced that if his soon to be ex wife did not accept his demands (to come back and accept his boorish behaviour), he'd kill himself. He ended up alienating all of his friends, upsetting his children and being sectioned as he was at risk to himself. I saw him a few years later. He was very sheepish and spent half an hour boring me about how sorry he was that he'd acted like an arse. I wonder if, in a few years, when the dust has settled and Boris is back on HIGNFY we will see a similar act of contrition?
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