M’lords are told we are about to pay €80billion to fall over a cliff
Worried about the Brexit negotiations? Don’t be. David Davis says it’s all going to plan. Leaving the EU without a deal, the Brexit Secretary told a House of Lords committee yesterday, was “improbable”. At the very least, he said confidently, we should expect to secure “a basic deal”.
Well, that was a relief. But what, wondered their Lordships, might “a basic deal” consist of ?
Mr Davis looked philosophical. “I think of it,” he said, “as a deal without the bits we really want.”
A deal... without the bits we really want. Hmm. I’m not sure that sounded quite as reassuring as Mr Davis meant it to. It’s a bit like telling your wife that you’re going out to buy a new car, and then coming home with nothing but a pair of driving gloves and an air freshener. She’s unlikely to be terribly impressed. Particularly when you tell her the gloves cost €80billion.
Ultimately, Mr Davis appeared to concede yesterday, Britain could end up paying the EU a sizeable sum. “The withdrawal agreement,” he told the Lords, “will probably favour the [European] Union in terms of things like money.” The Brexit Secretary seemed in a breezy mood – that is until he was asked why the Government still refused to publish the secret studies it carried out on the likely economic impact of Brexit.
Would he agree, asked Baroness Suttie, a Lib Dem peer, that no deal would be especially damaging to Northern Ireland? Mr Davis said nothing for a strikingly long time. “That detailed analysis,” he said at last, “I don’t really want to enter into here.”
Readers in Northern Ireland may find Mr Davis’s hesitancy concerning, but I shouldn’t worry. As I’ve said before, the Government is only keeping it secret because it’s so dazzling that, if the Europeans read it, they’d fly into a jealous rage and plot to scupper everything. Mr Davis was simply taking care not to give the game away.
One man who doesn’t share the Brexit Secretary’s optimism is Alistair Darling, now Lord Darling. “We don’t seem to know where we’re going,” he lamented. “It’s like walking through a snowstorm: you could go over a cliff, or down a crevasse… I just ask myself time and time again: why are we doing this to ourselves?”
Honestly. Maybe they should at least let Lord Darling see the analysis. Once he realises that after Brexit everyone is going to be travelling to work in a gold-plated helicopter, he’ll be fine.