The electorate is going to the polls today in a state of blissful ignorance over the catastrophe that is about to hit the country. That is because Theresa May has run a dishonest but successful campaign. She called an election to give herself a mandate for her version of Brexit. She has contrived to get through it while avoiding the substance of the subject entirely. Labour hasn’t challenged her because it too wants to avoid the topic. This has been the Brexit election where Brexit was scarcely discussed.
She has told the electorate nothing new about how she intends to do it, about how Britons will be poorer and more highly taxed if she keeps to her plan to leave both the single market and the customs union, or the devastation that will follow if she walks away from the table without a deal. Instead she has stuck firmly to fantasy and empty phrases. Brexit means Brexit. Best deal for Britain. Strong and stable. It has been the lobotomisation of democracy.
Her failure to be truthful about what’s imminent means that if she wins, as everyone expects, she won’t have a mandate at all. A brave and big leader would have tried to win the voters’ backing for the difficulties ahead. She has avoided that. Her victory will be based on evasion and soothing visions.
Her decision to interpret this as licence for a hard Brexit is as outrageous as if the Remainers had won a narrow victory and immediately decided to join the euro, the Schengen travel area and an EU army, declaring that no discussion was needed because this was the people’s will.
One horrified and knowledgeable insider says that the truth is that in the next 15 months we are about to dismantle an economy that has taken us 40 years to build and which will take us the next 50 years to recover.
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“An agile, imaginative leader could have avoided all of this
May is getting away with this because the impact of our imminent departure is only just beginning to be felt. For a year we have been in a phoney Brexit. Consumers stayed confident. Six months ago we were the fastest-growing economy in the G7. We’ve been like the cartoon character Wile E Coyote, who charges off a cliff but stays suspended until he looks down and suddenly realises that there’s nothing under his feet. We too are about to fall. Charles Grant, of the Centre for European Reform, says the painful trade-offs can’t be avoided.
Figures from the G7 last week show we are tying with Italy for the slowest growth. The economy is at a standstill, hit by the soaring inflation caused by the collapse in the pound. Higher costs have not been balanced out by a rise in exports. The volume of exports has barely risen at all.
Yesterday the OECD, the leading global economic think tank, added to the gloom. The eurozone is finally forging ahead of us — we are forecast to grow at half the global average this year and to collapse to 1 per cent next year. The Treasury’s figures, not revised in a year, think an agreed Brexit will make us £36 billion a year poorer by 2032. A no-deal exit would cost £45 billion, more than the entire schools budget for England.
This is not what Brexit voters thought they were choosing. They were voting to be richer and prouder and more in control. That’s what they were promised in last year’s set of deceptions by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage. They have no idea of how damaging Brexit is going to be in practice and they don’t know how remarkably unprepared the government is for it.
In 11 days we will enter the most complex negotiations the country has ever faced. We will not only have to rethink every aspect of our trade with the EU and create more than 30 agencies to replicate the oversight the EU now carries out for us. The Financial Times has calculated that we will need to renegotiate more than 750 agreements that the EU has with more than 160 countries, covering fishing, flying to America, trade, agriculture, parts for our nuclear power stations and far more. Every deal will require large amounts of attention and knowledge — all just so we don’t lose our current rights, not to improve on them. What’s worse is that we will be at a massive disadvantage because we will be trying to play multidimensional chess with almost the entire world simultaneously. They by contrast will be able to concentrate on their deal with us. It’s not hard to see who’s likely to have the stronger hand.
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Our government is in no way prepared for this. It is frantically recruiting and training trade negotiators, a role it hasn’t had to fill for years because the EU has done all the work. Virtually none of the recruits have the experience that countries such as Canada say is critical for success. Worse, the National Audit Office reported last month that Britain has still not recruited one third of the thousand negotiators we are looking for.
If May had been a more agile and imaginative leader much of this could have been avoided. Nick Clegg says that the minute Brexit was voted for, senior EU and German officials were preparing to offer the British some concessions on freedom of movement in return for a softer Brexit. That might have been an EU-wide brake on immigration if any one country’s flows became too high. But the call never came. May and her people viewed the EU as opponents, so they didn’t even try to come to an agreement.
That our future is now entrusted to this rigid, proud leader terrifies me. Unless she can adapt, in a year’s time a lot more people will be scared. May has been fiddling but under her government the Brexit fires are starting to burn.