It’s Brexit or bust for Theresa May
When you went to the polling station on June 23 2016 and you looked down at your ballot paper, did you put your cross next to “ambitious managed divergence”? Me neither. I ticked “Leave the European Union”. Some picked Remain, in equally good faith, but there was no option called “ambitious managed divergence”.
Mysteriously, this seems to be the Brexit position the Cabinet arrived at after its mini-break at Chequers. Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. Cry God for Harry, England and ambitious managed divergence!
And what is AMD when it’s at home? You may well ask, Marjorie. George Orwell pointed out in his great essay “Politics and the English Language” that whenever politicians stop choosing words to make themselves clear and start using ugly phrases “tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”, you can be sure that they are being less than honest. That looks to be the case here. Perhaps the Prime Minister will enlighten us in her Brexit speech on Friday, but don’t hold your breath. Mrs May’s strategy, paralysed passivity aside, seems to be to tell the children as little as possible and hope we won’t notice as what we voted for drains away like sand through a sieve.
“One day we will be sitting here not talking about Brexit,” Boris Johnson told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday. “It’s going to be fantastic.” I do hope so. To be honest, I am so fed up with the whole thing that I cannot bear the daily drip-drip of defeatism.
Talking of drips, which of these two do you most want to slap: Keir Starmer or Anna Soubry? With his pinkcheeked air of pained superiority, Labour’s Sir Keir reliably incites me to armchair violence. Brexit rebel Soubry is even more annoying as she puts her own conscience before the views of the Tories who elected her. Soubry’s horse is so high she needs breathing apparatus every time she gets on it. Who would believe that this alleged Conservative, now making life incredibly difficult for her own government and threatening to found a pro-european party, is the same Soubry who said in 2011: “I believe the EU has become a huge, overly costly, bureaucratic organisation fundamentally lacking in both democracy and accountability to the many millions of people who pay for it through their taxes and who are bound to live by its rules.”
Couldn’t agree more, Anna. That is why your constituents voted overwhelmingly to leave, and it’s why we want to hurry up and get on with the Brexit you’re so busy (and undemocratically) trying to thwart.
I feel about Brexit exactly as the Jewish Princess, Joan Rivers, said she felt about giving birth: “Wake me up when the hairdresser arrives.” I want the grunting and the pushing part to be over so we can start enjoying our new freedom and become the great global trading nation we were before we got shackled to Brussels, which took a staggering seven years to sign a deal with Canada. And that was nearly kiboshed when Belgian’s French-speaking region of Wallonia demanded stronger safeguards. It was a total embarrassment.
Right up there with Jeremy Corbyn deciding he wants us to remain in a customs union with the EU and the repellent betrayal of Labour’s working-class voters which that entails.
If we are in a customs union, we can’t help our own steelworkers in Port Talbot. In fact, if we offer any state support to rescue British jobs, the EU will fine us. We can’t reduce the cost of children’s shoes because Brussels slaps a 17per cent tariff on footwear from non-eu countries to protect its own manufacturers. A customs union might be convenient for certain businesses, but it sure as hell doesn’t help the ordinary people who voted instinctively for Brexit in their millions. The leader of the Labour party, as the marvellous, principled Frank Field points out, is ready to rat on his own supporters for his own political advantage.
Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury weighs in on Brexit in a new book, Reimagining Britain. Calling for a “generous” border policy, the Remain-supporting Justin Welby laments the threats to “our togetherness”: the housing shortage, the crisis in the NHS, education inequalities. “Welcoming strangers to our country and integrating them into our culture is important. We must never crush the new diversity,” warns the Archbishop. “We must be generous and allow ourselves to change with the newcomers and create a deeper, richer way of life.”
Oh dear, those dreadful racist Brexit voters and their uncharitable attitude! Do you think the Archbishop is aware of the threat to “our togetherness” posed by uncontrolled immigration? Those overcrowded schools and hospitals? That puzzling housing shortage? So generous is our border policy, the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics reveal that 578,000 new migrants settled here in the year to September 2017 alone. Try creating a “deeper, richer way of life” with that overwhelming influx when your public services are already under immense strain. Unsurprisingly, the people at the sharp end, those living in communities where a pregnant woman in labour can’t find a bed in a maternity unit, take a rather different view from the one afforded by the ivory towers of Lambeth Palace.
Come to think of it, all the Brexit resisters – a complacent, selfinterested political class, powerful vested interests devoid of national loyalty, pious, patronising people who don’t suffer any adverse consequences from EU membership – are the reason why 17.4million of us voted to get out in the first place. Do they think they will wear us down, the We-know betters, with their sly stratagems, their pessimism, their awful persistence?
I admit it. There is a temptation to say, oh, what’s the point? If it’s really this difficult, why bother? We don’t have a Maggie Thatcher with the oomph and the drive to bulldoze us through Barnier. More’s the pity. But we can’t give up now. In the past, when any member country has dared to vote against a treaty, the EU has always told it to go away and vote again. Until it comes up with the right answer. Do we happen to know of any arsey, small country with the guts and the history to call time on that arrogance? I think we do. Deep down, we still know that country.
On Friday, Theresa May has a last chance to spell out our Brexit plan like she means it. I hope she finds the words, and that they don’t include “ambitious managed divergence”. “Read my lips, Juncker: we’re leaving.”