Even Boris would blush at latest hard Brexit baloney
IN A premiership measured by closing the Downing Street door each night without disaster having struck, Theresa May has had a good week.
With 80 Tory MPs vowing not to back her Chequers plan to negotiate with the EU, with Brexiteers one minute braying about bringing her down and the next oleaginous Jacob Rees-Mogg taking an oath of personal loyalty (ha!), you’d think the persistent, dull headache of being Prime Minister might finally overwhelm May.
Not a bit of it. The people holding their heads in their hands this week are the Boris Johnsons and assorted Tory hard nuts of Brexit as their so-called alternative plans were published.
In 2016, the Leave campaign made a good fist of lifting the SNP’s referendum playbook for the Brexit vote, making an emotive appeal on the opportunity Brexit would bring the NHS.
Remember how in Scotland the Yes campaign argued, convincingly for some, that the only way to save the NHS was to break up Britain? It was nonsense but the NHYes campaign cut through and Salmond, for one, was convinced that given another few weeks, it would have turned the tide. The No side were convinced too.
The emotive leverage of the NHS is the reason Leave used the same tactic, promising millions more a week for the health service if people voted for Brexit.
The demand to “take that lie off your bus,” revealed not just the anger but the fear Remain felt about the power of the message.
But sloganeering on the NHS was easy and gave leading Leave campaigners good practice at making fantasy claims.
You’d think the Brexiteers would know better than to also copy the SNP’s mistakes. This week they doubled down on them. Publishing the White Paper on independence, full of a million holes and one big one on the currency, fatally undermined the Yes campaign.
But goaded into revealing what their alternative to the Chequers plan is, Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group published a series of papers on what a hard Brexit would look like.
On Monday, they confidently predicted that within 15 years of crashing out of the EU without a deal, the UK would be a trillion pounds better off.
The paper drew from a report by Economists For Free Trade, a pro-Brexit pressure group who claimed the UK would prosper under a “World Trade Deal”, which doesn’t actually exist and would do nothing to prevent the doomsday disruption to supply chains and border checks that come from being outside the EU’s single market.
On Wednesday they tackled the Irish border problem, again proferring solutions which do not exist.
It was laughable but if you think making it up as they go along is a pattern for the Brexiteers, there are some parts of their agenda so outlandish that you could not make them up, so whacky that not even Johnson could endorse them.
These include plans for Brexit Britain to build its own Star Wars style missile defence system and to send an expeditionary force to the Falklands.
In fact, the penguins on the Falklands benefit from EU funding so Brexit does indeed pose a threat that might require an environmental expeditionary force of some kind to protect them.
As for a space shield, that’s as daft as proposing we spend £100million for the UK to have its own separate GPS satellite replicating the EU’s Galileo sat-nav system. Wait a minute, that is the Government’s idea.
The prospects for May still look terrible. She might only have months to go in Downing Street but I’m willing to take a small bet she’ll be signing Christmas cards as PM.
But worse still for Britain would be if she is bullied by the Tory Brexit nutters into a position where no deal is possible. Then their fantasy Brexit becomes the country’s nightmare.