UK may choose not to disembowel itself with a rusty hacksaw after all

THERE will be no Brexit. From time to time I have alluded to that prediction which I made shortly after the 2016 referendum. And I mention it again in passing, only because in relation to Ireland at least, it has now effectively come to pass that there will be no Brexit — it has been agreed by all parties that everything will be more or less the same as it was before anyone ever heard of Brexit, which means that no matter what they call this “full alignment with those rules of the internal market and the customs union” and so forth, I think it is fair to say that in Ireland, there will be no Brexit.

Interestingly, within moments of the initial announcement that Northern Ireland was to be given this unique dispensation, all across the United Kingdom they were putting in their own special requests — “we’ll have a piece of that too, mate”, was the cry.

Since the middle of 2016 we have been hearing the most distinguished commentators talking about the myriad permutations of Brexit, but for a long time there was no mention of even the possibility that one of these permutations, might be the No Brexit Brexit envisioned in these pages.

But now any article on this subject will present the No Brexit Brexit as a 50-50 proposition at least, having come down there all the way from the initial odds which were astronomical. Indeed there wasn’t even a valid price back then, it was considered so unlikely it was more like one of those “hilarious” specials from Paddy Power on, say, Bertie Ahern to become the next pope.

And the 50-50 deal that it has become, was narrowing again last week with the defeat of Theresa May’s government in the House of Commons where a majority decided to give a meaningful parliamentary vote to any final Brexit deal.

As a rule the Brexiteers are strangely opposed to such voting, indeed you’d almost think that their vision of “taking back control” was one whereby the “control” belonged only to various offshore tycoons and other vaguely aristocratic weirdos whose eagerness for a hard Brexit is matched only by their personal immunity from the downsides of any deal.

So it was another defeat for them, a week after the hard Brexit, the soft Brexit, and any other kind of Brexit were ditched in Ireland. Within days of the Brexiteers first becoming aware of the existence of a place called Eire, within days of its entering the atmosphere of planet Earth, Brexit on its first flight had disintegrated. It had crashed and burned like the botch job that it is, that it has always been.

This idea of the No Brexit Brexit, this hunch that things would eventually proceed more or less as they always had done, was originally dismissed by our old friends the distinguished commentators — though in truth to dismiss something you have to briefly consider it in the first place.

Which did worry me at times, maybe just for a moment, just the normal doubts you might have, when everyone in the known universe is saying one thing, and you are saying something else. That moment passed of course, because I would keep returning to first principles, that fundamental intuition remained the same — I could not persuade myself to believe that ultimately, the United Kingdom would choose, figuratively speaking, to disembowel itself with a rusty hacksaw for a dream that came out of the head of Nigel Farage.

And still I don’t believe they will do that, even as they are selecting that proverbial hacksaw, Made in England, and hoping for the best. I believe they will find a way not to do this, or they will do it in such a way that they might as well not be doing it. And it may not be pretty, but it will still be a lot prettier than the hacksaw scenario, and it might even work.

I felt it was there from the start in Theresa May’s line “Brexit means Brexit”, which of course means nothing. I felt that anyone who really wanted Brexit, or any part of it, would have found a form of words commensurate with that crazy ambition.

Imagine, if you will, that the people who run Britain — whoever they are — really wanted this Brexit. Naturally they would never have considered the difficulties it might cause in Ireland, because they don’t care about us, they probably don’t even know how much we depend on them. But in their own land, you’d think they might at least be having their pictures taken wearing high-vis jackets looking at an architect’s drawing for one of those new customs posts at Dover. Just to look busy.

When people are spurred on by a cause, they tend to get much better at what they’re doing. They are focussed, they have their wits about them. Instead Theresa May has become a kind of a case study of a person traumatised and rendered incapable by some horrible series of events, by this plague of nationalism which has elevated some of the worst people in England to positions of influence.

Indeed she seems more at ease, personally, not with the braying morons of her own party, but with the members of the Eurocrat ruling class with whom she was enjoying that perfectly grown-up lunch in Brussels the other week, until she was called out of it by the DUP.

In truth she is probably less comfortable with the nationalist inanities of Brexit than is Jeremy Corbyn, who has always been against the EU.

And these are not just impressions, we’re not just taking this from the body-language experts. The words spoken by May herself at Lancaster House last January were also telling us that instead of membership of the single market, Britain will seek “the greatest possible access to it through a new, comprehensive, bold, and ambitious free trade agreement”…

No membership then, just “the greatest possible access”. Which suggested to me that the new free trade agreement would be so comprehensive, bold, and ambitions, it would end up looking very much like the old agreement.

The distinguished commentators are seeing this now, as big as a basketball, but we must wonder why they didn’t see it originally, when it was just as big — instead they tended to stay within the parameters of the hard Brexit or the notso-hard Brexit, wondering if the Bad Deal might be better than the No Deal, as if to stray outside those lines might make them look less than entirely serious — and looking serious, after all, is a large part of what they do.

Indeed perhaps the greatest damage that Brexit has done to the UK so far, is that it has destroyed its reputation as a country run by serious people, the sort who wouldn’t be foolish enough to run some bulls**t referendum in the first place. But if they did, and it went horribly wrong, they could find a way around it. Like they do in old Eire. They can’t go there again. But in their own massively dysfunctional way they are somehow staggering towards their destination: there will be no Brexit.

‘Within days of arriving on planet Earth, Brexit had disintegrated’