Brexit: in search of opportunities
“Only Boris can save Brexit?
Bollocks. Only Boris can f***
Brexit up now.” So one arch-Eurosceptic Tory raged to me the other day, said Tom Newton Dunn in the London Evening Standard – and there are plenty of others in the party who feel much the same way. They believe that, two years after the UK formally departed from the EU, the Government is still failing to take full advantage of the country’s new freedoms. There have been too few trade deals, not enough divergence from EU standards, not enough scrapping of Brussels red tape. It was these arch-Eurosceptics that put Johnson into No. 10, and they have the power to bring him down. Hence the PM’s desperate efforts to placate them with last week’s mini reshuffle, in which he appointed Jacob Rees-Mogg to the new role of Minister for Brexit Opportunities.
Finding these new opportunities is proving tricky, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, which may be why one of ReesMogg’s first acts in his new role was to appeal to readers of The Sun to write in to him with suggestions of “ANY petty old EU regulation that should be abolished”. Alas, it’s a doomed quest. The downsides of Brexit grow more glaring by the day: the Public Accounts Committee reported last week on the “clear increase in costs, paperwork and border delays”; in a business survey, more than half of importers and exporters complained about the additional paperwork and higher transport costs. The upsides of Brexit, meanwhile, all tend to prove illusory or trivial on closer inspection.
There are some benefits to Brexit, said John Rentoul in The Independent. Our rapid approval of Covid vaccines, for instance, probably wouldn’t have happened if we had remained inside the bloc, even if there were no legal obstacles preventing EU members from going it alone. And you shouldn’t dismiss the desire of the “vast majority of people in this country” for domestic control of immigration policy. In emerging areas such as artificial intelligence and gene editing, the UK may be able to take advantage of its greater independence, said the FT. But the reality is that any such benefits will be incremental and take time to accrue, as Rees-Mogg himself once acknowledged: in 2018 he said it would take 50 years to feel the benefits of Brexit. They won’t be delivered by trying to whip up some instant bonfire of EU regulations. “Charting a course after Brexit to benefit the UK is possible, but requires sensible discussion and painstaking mastery of detail.” There’s little evidence of either in Johnson’s latest campaign.