The wicked flee where no man pursueth

The Prime Minister’s latest Brexit proposal is already well on the way to Brexit In Name Only and, by the time Brussels has finished demanding even more concessions and the government has finished rolling over, the UK is likely to be in the limbo I have consistently described as the worst of all possible worlds.

Let us be clear: BRINO is not only worse than Brexit it is worse than Remain. The future envisaged by the Chequers proposals appears to be a UK permanently held hostage in the EU’s anteroom. We shall be obliged to accept all rules on goods etc. without any say in drawing them up. In practice, we shall have to implement the ECJ’s decisions on those rules. We shall lack the flexibility to foster innovation in new industries such as biotechnology, where we have a comparative advantage. We shall not be able to negotiate any goods trade deals with third parties that depart from EU rules; hence it seems unlikely that we shall be able to agree a deal with the USA, our largest single market. We shall be obliged to accept a permanent deficit with the EU in goods trade.

For the privilege of this absurdly disadvantageous arrangement, we shall pay the EU £37 billion pounds. By the end of the negotiations, I don’t doubt we shall also be paying annual fees too, so the point of making a divorce settlement payment at all escapes me utterly.

Meanwhile, Brussels will ensure that we cannot participate in any of the ongoing EU projects such as Galileo, though, in a magnanimous gesture, they will allow us to continue paying for them in our settlement bill.

Any sensible government would have held off triggering article 50 until it was sure that preparations for ‘no deal’ could be completed in two years. This government has allowed itself to be backed into a corner by assuming goodwill on the part of the EU, even when it was evident that none was forthcoming. Failure to plan for ‘no deal’ fatally undermined the UK negotiating position. The nearer the deadline approached without any plan for ‘no deal’, the more obvious it became in Brussels that the UK would take any (bad) deal rather than ‘no deal’.

The arrangement now proposed is so bad that one is tempted to suspect it was never the intention to allow Brexit actually to take place. If you had set out to secure the worst possible deal you could scarcely have done a better job.

I now suspect a second referendum was refused not because the establishment expected a different answer but because it feared the same answer. A confirmation of the public’s desire for Brexit would have made it that much harder to deliver the non-Brexit-dressed-up-as-Brexit which we now see is intended.

Naive ingenu that I am, I actually trusted the official government statement that the government would implement what the electorate decided. I should have known better. It was, after all, a promise made by politicians.

Truly, the wicked flee where no man pursueth. The pass defending UK democracy has been yielded without a struggle.