Are we locked in a delusional bubble over Brexit?
Ihave observed before that the most dangerous hidden price we have paid for our 44 years becoming ever more enmeshed in the European Union system of government has been the way our political class seemed to switch off en masse from ever really trying to understand it. And in the past year or two, as we prepare to leave, that ignorance has come back to haunt us in spades.
Not a day goes by without politicians and commentators making some elementary technical error, showing how little they grasp what we are up against: as when Philip Hammond is reported as arguing that we should leave the EU but remain in its customs union, without realising that a country cannot belong to the customs union without being an EU member.
Most frightening of all has been Theresa May (a “belief-free zone”, as one of her former Cabinet colleagues privately calls her) being talked into believing that we could simply walk out of the talks without a deal. She clearly has no idea of what a catastrophe this would land us in – as in discovering that our aircraft no longer have any legal right to fly outside UK air space.
Alarm bells first began to ring during last year’s referendum, when the official Leave campaign deliberately turned its back on proposing any exit plan. Exactly a year later, it seems that we are this week entering the talks still no further forward.
Ever more voices are now being raised to say that the only conceivably workable way for us to leave would be the “Norway option”, joining the European Free Trade Area and remaining in the European Economic Area. But the grounds given for rejecting this have revealed yet again the astonishing ignorance of what this might have brought us.
We would have escaped the entire “political” EU, no longer having to obey three-quarters of its laws, but with the freedom to continue trading much as we do now; to make trade deals with the outside world; to exercise selective control over immigration from the EU; and to escape the rulings of the European Court of Justice.
None of this has ever been properly explained or discussed. It has merely been loftily rubbished by those who never tried to understand it or how difficult any alternative would be. But now, a whole wasted year after the referendum, it is probably too late for Mrs May and her colleagues to re-enter the real world.
Locked in their delusional bubble, they will not realise why they are leading us into disaster until they come up against the awful reality that they never even tried to understand.
‘We cannot belong to the customs union without being an EU member’