MPs can’t see the catastrophe on the Brexit horizon
It is a rule of human psychology that those who are most vocally opinionated on a subject often find it hardest to understand that they haven’t a clue what they are talking about, We saw this from both sides in last year’s lamentable referendum debate, and there has been little sign of any improvement since.
Nothing brought this home more clearly than the recent questioning by the Commons Brexit committee of Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK’s former ambassador to the EU, who resigned last December with a warning to his colleagues that they should beware of “ill-informed and muddled thinking”.
The contrast between Sir Ivan and the MPs shuffling papers in front of him was devastating. From his years in Brussels, he understands how the EU actually works, and he spoke with an authority so far almost entirely lacking in our public debate. He diplomatically tried to convey that, thanks to Theresa May’s decision to leave the single market and go for a “one-off trade deal”, she is facing a horrendous task. On leaving an immensely complex regulatory system, we become what the EU calls “a third country”. We are thus automatically excluding ourselves from the arrangements which currently allow our £230 billion a year of exports to flow unimpeded into the rest of the EU.
Our export trade, as he put it, will thus fall into “a legal void”, confronting us with all sorts of customs procedures and other “non-tariff barriers” which could bring that trade to a halt. If the MPs had been clued-up enough to get the implications of what he was saying, they might have realised how fiendishly difficult it will be to negotiate, in the time, a deal which could allow us to replicate even part of that access our chemicals and pharmaceutical industries, our airlines, farmers exporting Welsh lambs and countless other sectors enjoy now.
Instead of trying not to sound too alarmist, it might have been better if Sir Ivan had come fully into the open, by spelling out just where all this “illinformed and muddled thinking” is threatening to lead us (almost all of which, of course, could have been avoided if Mrs May had listened to people who know what they are talking about and decided to keep us in the European Economic Area). Less than two weeks away from her triggering Article 50, our politicians may be in for a very rude awakening. It could be a catastrophe beyond imagining. Money to burn: The Green Buildings Council wants Britain’s 26 million homes to be made ‘zero carbon’ by 2050 – which could cost up to £25,000 per home