Resignation shows Brexit is pointless
DAVID Davies has resigned from the Cabinet, not on principle, but because his vision of the UK out of the EU could not be delivered. It could not be delivered because it was based on wishful thinking and false assumptions – rooted in ignorance, delusion and deceit.
The horrendous consequences of leaving European structures, for our aerospace, auto, pharmaceutical, and high tech manufacturing industries, for our universities, scientific research, and health services – vital for us, especially locally and in the North West, have meant the cabinet has had to come up with a softish Brexit. Even Gove and Fox signed up. They accepted that cutting ourselves off from the EU would cause us so much harm that even a Brexit Government that pledged exit from the EU court, the single market and customs Union, must fudge its red lines. If that is necessary, then it follows that their arguments for leaving the EU were false.
If we need to have single market access and a customs arrangement, even at the price of abiding by the rules and accepting a role for the ECJ, then the referendum arguments that ‘we are better off out’, ‘we have to be free to make our own rules’ are only slogans, not truths.
It appears that far from being ’shackled’, our economy, and our people, are actually liberated by those rules and agreements.
Some Brextremists are furious at the fudge, still yearning for a glorious ‘independence day’.
They proclaim that we will be rule takers, not rule makers, a ‘vassal state’. But hang on, wasn’t their big argument that we were being bullied, dictated to by Brussels, we had to ‘take back control’?
The truth is that we always were ‘rule makers’ – we had a big vote in the council, and our meps sat in the parliament. Major rule changes required our agreement.
And all those hundreds of laws the EU supposedly makes … now it appears they are chiefly about standardising a myriad of regulations about products, rather than each country having its own divergent rules and hundreds of institutions to administer them. Bureaucracy to effectively simplify bureaucracy.
A huge bureaucracy we now have to expensively build from scratch.
The logic is clear, if soft Brexit is better than no deal, and it is, then no Brexit gives us far more power, and control than soft fudge Brexit.
If our MPs haven’t the guts or wisdom to say so, give the people a vote on all the options, now the truth is clear. have clout in the world.
And all the problems, perceived and real, are not caused by the EU but our own wallowing in a false nostalgia and exceptionalism. Poor government, poor management and poor understanding of the real world.
The EU is the crutch that has sustained the UK for the last 40 years, and a cheap crutch for how much it has carried us, pull it away and all we will have left is, tea, and, being current, football.