Still oceans apart on Brexit
IS that Canada calling? Each day on the countdown clock to Brexit it feels as if we are closing the Atlantic gap.
Call it continental drift, call it complacency, call it a crisis and you’d be more accurate, because it doesn’t look as if we are leaving Europe on good terms.
We are adrift, everyone asleep at the helm, steaming towards a Canada-style deal with the EU, narrowly focused on a free trade agreement on the movement of goods, and little else.
After Salzburg it does not look as if the EU 27 are going to blink. What did Donald Tusk, the EU council president, say as he called for UK proposals to be reworked? “More hope but there is surely less and less time.” Ouch.
The only people incredulous that EU leaders did not roll over to accommodate the Chequers plan must be the Downing Street strategists who devised the idea in the first place.
In retrospect, the incompetence was baked in. Theresa May’s self-imposed red lines laid down, first at the Tory conference after she became leader and then in her Lancaster House speech early in 2017, boxed her in.
Instead of including, or even attempting to include, the opposition and the devolved governments in forming a consensus on what lay ahead, May devised a strategy to keep the rabid right-wing of her own party at bay.
On migration, an end to free movement, on sovereignty, ending the jurisdiction of the EU court of justice, it all pointed to this endgame.
Instead of cautiously triggering Article 50 when the UK was ready we had “Brexit means Brexit”, a phrase so banal the public just want it and everything to do with it to go away.
May now lives in faint hope of a fudge that will get Chequers through the special November meeting of the EU leaders. The EU specialises in fudge.
That is assuming the Chequers deal survives the Tory conference. “Dead as a dodo,” says middle of the road Tory Mike Penning, though I reckon she will survive (How much worse can it be for her than last year?).
Then May just has to get the mess through parliament which, like the Irish border, is an unsolvable Brexit puzzle.
It requires Tory MPs to fall into line for fear defeat could lead to a general election or a second referendum.
She will need Labour MPs to save her and risk forever being decried as Brexit betrayers by the SNP and Lib Dems.
The hard Brexiteers are poised. Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary and rival to Boris Johnson for the Tory crown, outlined his dream of a no-deal Brexit to Cabinet last week.
He would turn the UK into a low tax, low regulation, offshore haven for global companies that stalk the planet looking for a cheap deal and cheap labour, with workers rights and environmental safeguards abandoned.
The opposition offer few solutions or vision to avoid that sticky end.
Delay, says Sturgeon. Fair enough, but will that result in a better deal?
Being vague on Brexit suited the eurosceptic Corbyn during the 2017 election, the one he lost against the worst Conservative campaign ever.
He’s backed the customs union
MOST Orcadians would regard Storm Ali as a mild breeze. So little sympathy at home for island MP Alistair Carmichael, pictured left, who took off from London City airport on Tuesday afternoon heading for Edinburgh and into the teeth of the gale.
Having overflown Edinburgh, his flight touched down a few hours later – at Stansted Airport.
That’s a grand total of 32 miles travelled, and not even air miles at that.
through gritted teeth. Everyone will be stunned if the Labour conference decides anything about calls for a second referendum except to “keep all options on the table”.
Any PM would go down with the ship before granting one anyway.
The collapse of the Government and ensuing Brexit catastrophe might suit the left. Chaos is a vital ingredient of revolution and any blow to the British state is seen in quarters of Scottish nationalism as an advance.
But the damage of Brexit will take years to overcome and the least well off will suffer most. Who welcomes that?
Every way you look at Brexit there is no easy way out, even if we don’t drift off to Canada.