What the commentators said
The public voted for Brexit, but they didn’t vote for hard Brexit. That’s the cry of the Remainers. But speaking as a Remain voter myself, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, I regret to say it’s a deeply disingenuous argument. EU leaders have made it quite clear that if Britain insists on any opt-out from the policy of free movement, we will be denied membership of the single market. So to make out that we can square this circle, under some form of soft Brexit, is dishonest. As for the idea that May should spell out what she hopes to obtain in Brexit negotiations, said John Rentoul in The Independent, that’s just ridiculous. Revealing all her cards before talks even begin would set her up to fail.
The Government won a mandate for change in June, said Janan Ganesh in the FT, but it wasn’t a mandate for painful change. Voters didn’t believe the warnings that Brexit would lead to a drop in their standard of living. They’re in for a nasty shock. The tumble in the value of the pound, and last week’s Marmite battle, are early indicators of the price to be paid for Brexit, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Admittedly, there are “some upsides to a plunging pound”: it will make our exports more competitive, and help reduce our balance-of-payments deficit. But it will also push up the costs of imports, fuelling a “spike in inflation” and higher household bills.
We’re in for a nasty “squeeze”, agreed Sean O’grady in The Independent. But the pain is worth it if you believe, as I do, that this necessary, and inevitable, period of adjustment will let us “rejoin the world economy with a competitive offering, rather than relying on a large but essentially closed-off, stagnant and protectionist single market in the EU”. We endured the same sort of industrial “cold shower” when we joined the EU in 1973 and our cosseted industries suddenly had to compete with Europe’s best. It took a while for UK growth to return, but it did, “because, in those days, the EU was good for the economy; it is not so now”.