Remainers are too reasonable. One emollient speech from our beleaguered prime minister making concessions to reality that have been obviously necessary ever since the 2016 referendum is depicted as a breakthrough. A “cliff edge” has been averted, trills a leading business lobby group. This overture deserves a fair hearing: prepare for a new partnership with Europe, opines a leading pro-EU newspaper, its bite suddenly muzzled. And more of the same.
Mrs May may have moved, but she remains firmly lashed to the Big Lies that underpin Brexit, propagated by the obsessed right of her party. There is no “opportunity”, as they endlessly repeat, in leaving the EU: the trade deals that allegedly will more than compensate for what Britain is losing do not exist. Brexit is a monumental, self-inflicted wound, delivered by the attempt to build an imagined Thatcherite utopia and “global Britain” that are undeliverable fantasies. Mrs May’s concessions to realism have yet to recognise this.
For the EU is not the cause of all our ills – from training to infrastructure – as the deluded and vainglorious foreign secretary argued in his 4,000-word paean to Brexit a week ago. Brussels is not strangling Britain with a mountain of red tape, immigration-provoked poverty and emasculating the NHS. Britain’s failings are all minted at home by the very philosophy the Brexiters champion. To rupture our relationship with our largest trading partner and the continent that shares our values based on such epic lies can lead nowhere but bitter division. Britain’s long-run vitality, and the integrity of public argument, requires that truth be spoken to rightwing power, however awesome, bullying and fearsome it is.
So, yes, Mrs May did argue for a stand-still transition of about two years after article 50 expires, so 60-mile queues on the Kent motorway system and potential shortages of key parts, foodstuffs and medicines may be temporarily avoided. And, yes, Britain will continue to make its budgetary contributions and accept the entire EU framework, even though it will no longer be represented in the European commission, the European council and the European parliament. The EU’s magnificent four freedoms will continue. EU citizens living in Britain will have their rights entrenched by treaty. Britain will have lost control and gained zero.
Nor will it gain anything down the line. Britain will lose and have less control; this is why the pound fell and Moody’s downgraded Britain’s credit rating. The deep relationship with the EU that Mrs May urges to be “creatively” constructed – a continuation of the cake-and-eat-it approach Britain has sought and partly achieved as an EU member – cannot be done outside it. The fantastical proposition is kept alive to try to stop her party openly splitting. The truth that will painfully emerge in the months ahead is that Brexit can only happen on terms the Brexit right want, with years of lost trade, diminished opportunity and fading influence. There is no creative middle way.
Europe cannot agree any form of privileged British access to its markets – even if we agree to follow every EU rule although no longer shaping them – while simultaneously allowing Britain to strike trade deals with the Anglo-American and Bric economies, the only ones that can begin to compensate for what we are losing. Britain would become a funnel for those economies to access the EU on the same privileged terms and for Europe to funnel goods and services back. It would mark the end of the single market and customs union, make a mockery of the EU’s global trade relationships and render it purposeless. It cannot happen. Britain has to choose: Europe or the rest of the world.
On this choice, there is a brute reality. The obstacle in international trade is not tariffs – it is the non-tariff barriers to trade, especially in services, where Britain is strong. The Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Americans and even the Australians and New Zealanders are very good at keeping unwanted foreign providers of goods and services out of their economies with a string of laws, regulations and protocols that dwarf anything the EU has in place.
Free-trade agreements (FTAs) that Brexiters think are so easy rarely extend to non-tariff barriers, especially in services, which is why economists of all persuasions (except Professor Patrick Minford) forecast zero growth in Britain’s trade in services with the rest of the world – even with FTAs; and very little growth in goods. But trade in both with the EU will plummet. The consensus, fairly represented by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, is that we will end up with roughly £100bn less trade in services and £100bn less in goods, a decade-long economic depressant.
But we will have control over our borders, retort the Brexiters. Will we? India has made it clear that there is no trade deal, even excluding non-tariff barriers, without a vast extension in immigrant visas. So will other putative trade partners. Britain will have swapped the chance of partially controlling its borders with agreement with the EU for no control whatsoever. Immigrant inflows will balloon, even as trade shrinks. Only Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and their know-nothing Thatcherite followers could engineer such a debacle.
But we must all, it’s said, get behind Brexit to respect the will of the 52%. No, we don’t. First, the 52% had no idea they were voting for stagnation, little or no let-up in immigration, less control, and decline. Second, democracy is about debate, deliberation and ongoing accountability and voting, not genuflecting for all time before one snapshot of opinion on one day in June 2016 whatever happens subsequently. That’s why democracies govern themselves with parliaments, capable of reversing mistakes and throwing out those that make them.
On one issue the Brexiters are right. Britain now has to choose what country it wants to be. One only loyal to the union flag, attempting to intensify the Thatcherite programme that has so weakened not just the economy and public services but the cohesion of the country? Or one that wants to build a 21st-century economy and society, actively deploying government, with loyalties to both the British and EU flags, around values that, as Mrs May acknowledged in Florence, we share with Europe?
Unlike Mr Johnson, I like the EU flag and what it stands for: it makes the union flag, when flown alongside it, stand for more generosity, nobility and openness than it can alone. I don’t want our flag co-opted so that any criticism of an act of economic and political vandalism is depicted as unpatriotic. I want, like many millions of others, to claim both flags as representing who I am. There is no middle way. The honest choice, even if it splits the Tories, is to leave the EU or stay. We can and must stay.