As Brexit delusion deepen s, we need to get real about ‘no deal’
THE British government’s four-day-old Brexit policy lies in tatters. Theresa May is clinging to office by a thread – and it’s long past time the Irish government started seriously planning for a no-deal Brexit.
The Tory party is now in open revolt – not only unable to articulate a coherent Brexit policy to the EU, but incapable of even agreeing that policy among its own members. It took Mrs May two years to cobble together her Brexit policy and just 48 hours for her own cabinet members to torpedo it.
The bitterness and resentment that has now been unleashed among her parliamentary party was perhaps best illustrated yesterday by a backbench MP, Marcus Fysh, who publicly claimed: “Number 10 is trying to stitch up the country.”
This widely held belief among Brexiteers, that an unaccountable civil servant, Oliver Robbins, froze out Brexit secretary David Davis and drafted the UK’s Brexit plan on his own, has caused a simmering anger to boil over and explode.
The humiliation was certainly too much for Mr Davis, who was apparently too shell-shocked by the callousness of his treatment to resign on the spot on Friday and instead waited until Sunday night to issue his explosive resignation letter.
Ditherer and dilettante Boris Johnson, who infamously described Mrs May’s plan as a “turd” he would be forced to polish, before meekly endorsing it on Friday evening, was clearly left blindsided by Mr Davis’s resignation. He was nowhere to be seen yesterday morning, cancelling his engagements as foreign secretary, before Number 10 issued a terse confirmation of his belated resignation in the afternoon.
The turd, at that point, had clearly grown too large and too unwieldy for even s***-stirrer extraordinaire Mr Johnson to safely handle.
Faeces seems to be a recurring theme where the Brexit plans of the British government are concerned, with another blunt Tory MP, Simon Hart, describing the latest developments as a “s*** show”. And who could argue with that analysis?
The ultimate irony, of course, is that all of this internecine warfare among Tories is over a proposed Brexit deal that would never be acceptable to the EU.
Mrs May’s much vaunted Chequers’ compromise, a lofty sounding ‘facilitated customs arrangement’ in which the UK would be aligned with EU regulations on goods and agricultural products but could jettison rules related to services and freedom of movement, is essentially a repackaged version of a previous idea, ‘a new customs partnership’, which has already been dismissed by EU negotiators as “magical thinking”. The grand plan, over which the Tory party has now split, still entails the cherrypicking of those parts of the EU’s four freedoms which are most advantageous to itself. It would never f ly.
Despite that, arch Brexiteers still believe the “magical thinking” proposed by Mrs May is a betrayal of their Brexit dream and an unacceptable dilution of what their party promised voters.
For these zealots, it doesn’t matter that what they promised is manifestly unobtainable, they still loathe Mrs May for failing to achieve the impossible. And that hostility will only fester and grow more poisonous as the Brexit deadline approaches and their Brexit delusion remains as illusory as ever.
The Tory party today is reminiscent of some kind of death cult which has promised its members eternal salvation – the only catch is they must commit mass hara-kiri in order to obtain it.
How can anyone who values rationality, objective facts and logic ever hope to negotiate with these ideologues? And why would anyone treat any policy proposal that emanates from their negotiation team with anything other than cynicism and suspicion?
That is the question that must now be levelled at the Irish government, which has tried its best up to now to hide the extent of its concerns about the calamity happening across the water. But there comes a time when reality must be accepted in this country too and that reality is that Mrs May, almost certainly fatally wounded and devoid of any authority, will be unable to reach a Brexit deal.
Y ET, despite the writing being on the wall for some considerable time, as deadline after deadline to come up with a credible plan for the Irish Border was missed, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has only conceded that “largely desktop planning” for a no-deal outcome has been contemplated at this late stage.
Personally, I have no idea what “desktop planning” is – presumably it entails at least one report with a couple of spread sheets and pie charts thrown in for good measure – but it doesn’t sound particularly comprehensive, or reassuring for people who live near the Border.
Compare our “desktop planning” to what has been happening in the Netherlands, where concern at the omnishambles in the UK resulted in a hard Brexit action plan.
That plan, rolled out back in February, envisions between 750 and 930 additional custom officers being hired to police Dutch ports with that recruitment drive having started already. Unlike us, the Dutch aren’t hanging around sending good vibes and words of encouragement to Mrs May. They’re planning for the aftermath of her failure. Explaining why they had started preparing for a hard Brexit so early, Dutch Brexit rapporteur Pieter Omtzigt said “a trading nation like the Netherlands just cannot afford for customs not to work, it would be a disaster”.
Well, we are rapidly hurtling towards our own disaster here and need more than mere “desktop planning” in order to try to avert the worst of the consequences.
It is truly unfortunate that the British people opted to make one of the most seismic political decisions in generations at a time when the most incompetent government in its history was in power, but we are where we are. And where we are now is between a rock and a hard Brexit.
It’s time to start planning for the latter, before we become collateral damage.
Faeces seems to be a recurring theme where the Brexit plans of the British government are concerned