We shouldn’t forget why we voted Leave
Two news stories caught my eye this week. The EU is planning to spend €12 million on doing up a building in Paris – the “House of Europe” – which it’s going to rent for €6 million a year, as part of the goal of Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament, “to bring Europeans closer to the EU”. The second is from our Brussels correspondent, James Crisp, who reported that the EU officials’ end-ofyear staff party is planning to serve 700 bottles of wine and 26 different side dishes, costing up to €55,000.
Nothing has changed there, then, I thought. The EU is continuing to waste taxpayers’ money on selfaggrandisement and selfcongratulation. The trouble is, the EU simply doesn’t get it. In the out-of-touch, unaccountable, wasteful world of the Eurocrat, this is just another day in the office where there’s always the spare change for a bit of pomp. Despite a million other causes that the money could’ve gone towards as the continent battles all sorts of malaise. Despite being about to lose its second largest contributor because of failing to reform.
It is important to keep this in mind as we enter the first full round of talks on Monday. Extraordinary as his intervention was, Sir Amyas Morse, the head of the National Audit Office, cannot be alone in fearing that the Government is risking the success of Brexit by failing to show “active and energetic” leadership. I will add, though, that it isn’t just the Government – I remain utterly unimpressed by our entire political class in its failure to provide the calm, clear and positive approach needed to take us through these negotiations.
The process of Brexit is going to be complicated. I don’t know many people who think otherwise. The EU itself is an incredibly complex bureaucratic institution and it will take serious politicking and solid negotiating to disentangle ourselves from the decades of regulations, which our own policymakers gleefully incorporated into our rule books while adding a few of their own for good measure. So yes, the task at hand is enormous and complex. But it is a nonsense to believe that it would be any less challenging to remain in an inward-looking, outdated, cosy trading block which is burying its head in the sand and refusing to reform in the face of a changing world.
Scrutiny is crucial, and if we fail to hold our own executive to account during the Brexit process, we will have let down millions of people who voted to leave the EU because of its flagrant disregard for its citizens. We cannot afford to flounder and we must get it right. But for goodness’ sake, let’s also have a little bit of perspective and avoid the temptation to compare Brexit with appeasement of Nazi Germany as Lord Adonis did last week.
Let’s also have a little bit of optimism. The number of tourists visiting the UK in the first quarter of the year rose by 21.1 per cent thanks to a weaker pound, and they spent a record £4.4billion. It doesn’t seem like German businesses have much of an appetite to punish us for deciding to leave the EU either; Aldi has announced 4,000 new jobs as part of its UK expansion and stays on course to increase its number of UK stores from 700 to 1,000 by 2022. The world seems to know we are open for business and appears a lot less perturbed at Brexit than some of our own citizens. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;
at telegraph.co.uk/opinion
You’ve probably forgotten that Theresa May had quite a good G20 summit. For a fleeting moment back then, there were news reports of the enthusiasm expressed by the United States, Japan, China and India over the possibility of new trade agreements with the UK after Brexit. The reason that glimmer of optimism seems to have occurred about a century ago is because the Government buried it almost immediately with a bizarrely inept, totally unnecessary fiasco of a headline initiative: the “invitation” to opposition parties to offer their ideas and cooperation on our departure from the EU and, indeed, on any other matter of government policy they could think of.
You know what happened next. The hilarity took days to die down: so weak and bankrupt was the May government that it had to ask for help from the opponents it had just finished denouncing, blah, blah. Who couldn’t have seen that coming? What in heaven’s name were they thinking? And why does that incident seem so characteristic of what is beginning to look like a chronic inability to manage