Isn’t life so much easier after Brexit?!
THE last four or five years of UK politics have surely shown us how lucky we are to have politicians in power that we can rely on and trust.
Who really doubted we would get a deal with the EU that gave us everything we wanted when Michael Gove and co had assured us we would “hold all the cards in the negotiations,” and Liam Fox said it would be “the easiest deal in human history”? And they were right, weren’t they? After all, what reason was there to believe honourable folk like them would ever lie to us? There are those naysayers, of course, who say the deal is wafer thin compared to what we were promised, but they would, wouldn’t they? When prominent Leave campaigner Daniel Hannan said “no one is talking about leaving the single market” and “only a madman would leave the single market”, it had obviously slipped his mind that we couldn’t achieve our basic objectives if we remained in the single market – an honest mistake, surely? And when Boris Johnson said there would be a border down the Irish sea “over his dead body” he obviously meant a physical one, with floating border posts and things, not the theoretical one he had already agreed to months before. Obviously.
Everyone agrees the deal is a triumph for our negotiators, and it did take us only four and a half years to reach (don’t let anyone tell you most people thought we would be out the day after the referendum).
Granted, the fishermen aren’t that happy, but I don’t remember anyone suggesting they would get back all their fishing rights to UK waters. Alright, we will get back only 25% of the EU’s share (after five years), but that’s a lot better than the 18% the EU initially proposed, and our demand of 80% was a bit ambitious, after all. True, the fishing industry is now losing money hand over fist due to red tape, with ships confined to harbour, fish destroyed and firms going bust. But at least, as Jacob Rees-Mogg has assured us, the fish are “better and happier” because they are “now British fish” after Brexit. There are of course a few moaning Minnies complaining about loss of things like European health insurance and pet passports, restrictions on how long you can stay in the EU without a visa, the threat of mobile roaming charges being reintroduced, etc etc, but who wants to travel abroad anyway? And what true British student really wants to study in Europe? We needn’t worry about any negative effects on our manufacturing industry because we mostly depend upon our service industries anyway. Granted, there is very little help in the deal for these industries to compensate for the loss of guaranteed access they had within the single market – much less than we had been pushing for – but you can’t expect everything you want, can you? And who’s fussed about things like data protection, recognition of professional qualifications, access to security databases, product conformity standards, etc etc, when, as Iain Duncan Smith says, we can now go out and “dominate the world again”
– a new British Empire! But the best thing about Brexit is that it weeded out all those inefficient Remainers from the government, leaving a cadre of competence and efficiency in the cabinet that can really get to grips with Covid-19, as we have all seen.
Bravo Boris and co, I say!