Brexit: The British government starts to recognise reality

[Celerity]

https://fedtrust.co.uk/brexit-the-british-government-starts-to-recognise-reality/#more-4404

Michael Gove’s acknowledgement that trade between the UK and the EU after 1st January 2021 will be far from frictionless is a watershed in the Brexit process. The claim that Brexit would not significantly impinge upon British trade with the European Union was central to the 2016 Leave campaign. So central indeed that government ministers spent the three years thereafter repeating this dishonest assurance in the face of ever-mounting evidence to the contrary.

With its 80-seat majority safely secured, the British government has concluded that now it is safe to begin the process of gradually accepting the negative consequences of Brexit, so vigorously denied hitherto. Naturally, this acceptance of reality remains only grudging and partial. Michael Gove spoke as if the imminence of border formalities were an uncontroversial prospect long accepted by all parties. He also seemed wholly unembarrassed by the short length of time available for preparation until the end of December and the five years at least it will take for the government’s new frontier trading regime to be in place. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the government has begun its painful journey towards at least partial European realism by announcing the imposition of extensive paperwork and similar formalities. It was a repeated trope of the Leave campaign that bureaucracy and “red tape” disfigured and delegitimised whatever may have been the original and commendable goals of the EU’s founders .

The enduring denial that Brexit would involve customs and other checks at the border(s) of the EU was not merely a political and rhetorical convenience. The equivocation about the objective implications of Brexit for cross-border trade reflected a continuing disagreement among Leave voters and later within government itself about different models for quitting the EU. Campaigners for a Leave vote knew that there is not and never has been a majority within the British electorate for any specific form of Brexit. Any serious discussion during the referendum campaign of realistic alternatives to current British EU membership would have risked splintering the Leave coalition. Post-2016 government ministers have been forced to realise that any concrete form of Brexit, be it “hard” or “soft,” brought with it highly unpalatable consequences which they have been reluctant to discuss honestly with the electorate. Until now.

It seems from the recent rhetoric of Michael Gove and other ministers that the British government has now intellectually resolved the Brexit conundrum by tilting decisively towards a “hard” Brexit. All the ‘inverted pyramid of piffle’ about “having our cake and eating it,” about “exact same benefits” and about the UK’s “having the upper hand” in negotiations with the EU has melted abruptly in the first heat of this new phase of negotiations. The warnings of “Project Fear” have now become the acceptable discourse of ministerial pronouncements .

Hard truths

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