Time for grown -up decisions
A GREAT deal of effort is now being made by the Conservative Party to insist that the ‘grown-ups’ are back in charge and the nation can once again breathe easy that there will be no more random policy lurches or scandals to throw us all into chaos.
This narrative does its best to ignore the truth that most of these grown-ups have been there throughout the last 12 years of government and all that has been wrought in its name. Sure, a few of the mouldiest apples have been removed from the barrel, but you’d certainly want to give any of the remainder a wash before biting into them, given the company they’ve been keeping.
For farmers, the outlook is as confusing as ever ... back into the UK Cabinet comes Michael Gove, who was perceived as a chap with some well-thought-out ideas for agriculture back in the day, but who has now been handed the very urban brief of ‘levelling up’, and isn’t likely to see much of the countryside anytime soon.
Instead, into Defra goes Therese Coffey, and as Richard Wright noted in this week’s Euro Notebook, while she brings no obvious agri-credentials, other than representing a mildly rural constituency, she has a maverick reputation, reinforced by her brief turn as the UK’s first Health Secretary happy to be photographed in public with a cigar in one hand and a full glass in the other.
Crucially, however, she was a staunch supporter of the UK remaining in the EU. To survive in the Tory party since voting ‘remain’ in 2016, she has had to do a fair bit of back-pedalling, and is unlikely to ever endorse a ‘rejoin’ campaign – but she may yet become one of the growing band of folk who acknowledge that the UK’s current pickle has a lot to do with the ‘hard’ Brexit that followed the Leave vote.
That idea’s been politically ‘verboten’ up til now, but as Prime Ministers and Chancellors come and go, unable to smash the square Brexit peg into the round hole of economic reality, or produce anything resembling the prosperity promised by Vote Leave, the realisation is dawning that the Good Ship Britannia might benefit from at least slipping back into
Europe’s massive economic slipstream, if not actually scrambling tearfully aboard.
Imagine the return of ample workers for our fields, polytunnels, meat plants and packing houses. Imagine free and fast movement of high standard goods across our borders, to both the east and the west. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
None of those benefits require EU membership
– just the renegotiation of the dogmatic and to this day unworkable ‘hard’ Brexit agreement that was demanded by the political imperatives of last decade.
So long as they shake their heads and won’t even open their mouths to discuss the subject of a new deal with Europe, the supposed grown-ups of Westminster will continue to look more like toddlers refusing a forkful of broccoli ...