William Hague:
Sealing a Brexit deal may be tantalisingly close, but leadership squabbles only play into opposition hands
It is putting it a bit too politely to say, in the wake of Boris Johnson’s article in this newspaper on Saturday, that the approach of senior ministers to the Brexit negotiations appears to lack co-ordination. More bluntly, it is now 15 months since the referendum, and high time that all members of the Government were able to express themselves on this subject in the same way as each other, putting forward the same points, as part of an agreed plan.
Hopefully, that happy circumstance will follow the speech the Prime Minister is due to give on the subject in Florence on Friday. If not, there will be no point in Conservatives discussing who is going to be the foreign secretary, chancellor or prime minister in the coming years, because Jeremy Corbyn will be prime minister, sitting in Number 10 with John Mcdonnell and Diane Abbott, completely ruining this country.
Having attended some 40 Tory conferences over the past few decades, I think I know what the mood of the activists will be when they gather in Manchester in two weeks’ time – which is an urge to bang some very powerful heads together with some very considerable force. They will want ministers to show that the period of negotiating publicly with each other is over, and that the time for negotiating in earnest with the EU has begun.
Of course, history reminds us that it can be surprising just how long a government can carry on with tensions at the top – Blair and Brown maintained a permanent and bitter conflict for years on end. But a minority administration facing the biggest challenge since 1945 is in a much more perilous position, and it will come to grief without a determined effort to stick together from all of its members.
On what basis, then, can differences over the nature of Brexit – the transition, the bill, the immigration controls – be settled? I suggest the answer is what we might call “upbeat realism”: positive and enthusiastic about the future of the UK, but realistic about the formidable difficulty of leaving the EU without damage.
The instinct of Boris that the world needs to hear the upbeat message about Britain is correct, because far too many people abroad are now assuming that we are in some rather pitiable and paralysed state. It would be easy to think that millions of us are sitting wallowing in gloom and depression, but in fact British people have been busily doing what they did before the referendum, with the same strengths and weaknesses.
Our productivity is flat, and therefore so are wages, but we still attract investment and we create jobs faster than anyone else in the West. If you explain to European audiences that last week’s employment figures show nearly 400,000 new jobs in the UK since the referendum last year and unemployment at the lowest for 42 years, they look a bit dumbfounded. Add in that business investment has held up over the last year and they are further surprised.
Yes, the pound has fallen and inflation gone up in consequence, but in the past few days sterling has recovered a good deal of its losses, as the Bank of England seems to be meandering towards a sensible policy of raising interest rates after all.
The upbeat message, therefore, is that we are doing surprisingly well after all the forecasts of doom, and have a lot to offer in the future. Post Brexit, Britain is likely still to have a more open economy, with more predictable taxes, than most of our neighbours – provided we don’t accidentally let in a Marxist government. We can be a prosperous place, in or out of the EU.
But then the realism has to come in as well, including on the part of passionate advocates of leaving the EU. Leaving is a really difficult and complicated process, which, speaking bluntly again, it would be quite easy to screw up.
Many businesses have built up their supply chains, their offices, their markets, over many years on the assumption we were staying in. It is complete common sense that they need time to adapt and, as the CBI and others have pointed out, face only one upheaval rather than two. Having a big change in customs, tariffs and regulations to enter a transition phase and then another one perhaps two years later is a nightmare if you are importing or exporting.
The lesson of this is that it is very much worth going for a simple deal with the EU, with a couple of years when we stay in the single market and customs union, and then have enough time to settle a good free trade deal. Doesn’t that involve still paying into the EU? Yes, but doing so would partly end the argument over money. Wouldn’t we be unable to restrict immigration in that time? Yes, but it turns out that net migration from EU countries has already fallen to about zero in recent months.
Last week, the best speech given on all of this in Parliament was by my old colleague Sir Edward Leigh MP. He, a long time Leave supporter, called for “an open-hearted and generous” approach to the exit negotiations, and told the Government to “stick to the essentials, be confident,” with two years to implement the exit after March 2019. He had it right, both in the spirit and the policy he was calling for.
The other wise words I heard last week were spoken by the head of a very large foreign pension fund, pondering whether to keep on investing here over the next three years. He said: “I’m not worried about the UK in the short term. And I’m not worried about it in the long term. But I am definitely worried about the period in the middle while you’re actually leaving the EU.”
That man, and so many others like him at home and abroad, is basically positive about Britain. For longstanding Leave supporters in the Government, it’s worth being realistic and paying the price to get a smooth exit to reassure those people about the medium term, just as Sir Edward was advocating. In return, the long-time Remainers should be upbeat about the future.
If the Prime Minister can capture that combination in her speech this week, it will be a message around which her colleagues could unite. And it’s about time they did.