Brexiteers’ fury won’t go away over summer
If Theresa May thinks anger at her Chequers proposal will evaporate over the summer, she is wrong. The grassroots Tories are furious – and rightly so. Mrs May’s own constituency chairman says she must not give any more ground to the EU. Many Conservative members feel she has already surrendered too much. Mrs May has offered Brussels, among other things, a vast sum of money, extensive regulatory harmony, a veto on many forms of deregulation, a continued role for European courts and to stay in the single market for goods. This doesn’t reflect the spirit of the referendum and it obviously breaches Mrs May’s own red lines. It is baffling that she does not admit it.
And even these concessions won’t be enough: key elements of her proposal have already been rejected by Michel Barnier, and many member states will prove no more amendable. Brussels’s ideal outcome would be a Britain perpetually tied to the customs union and single market, barely any freer than before, yet with no formal way of influencing the rules. We would be unable to reform our economy and unable to trade freely globally. Going by past behaviour, Mrs May will presumably conclude that she can only sell her dreadful plan if she makes even more concessions to Brussels. If that happens, more ministers will resign – and the Tory party itself might implode.
Mrs May is wasting time trying to persuade individual members of the EU27 of the benefits of her approach: there’s no point trying to sell people a car that they know full well has no engine. She would do better to rethink her proposal completely. Alternatives exist. The Department for Exiting the EU, when it was run by David Davis, came up with a roadmap for Brexit – indeed, it’s a tragedy that instead of listening to Leave supporters who had been thinking about this project for years, No 10 subcontracted work out to Remainer civil servants. Ask someone who doesn’t want to do something how to do it and, inevitably, their solution will be flawed.
If the Tories don’t get this right, it will be a disaster for the country, which is most important, but also an electoral catastrophe for them. They are throwing away the votes of those who backed them in 2017 – in some cases, for the very first time.