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Brexiteers, calm down. Brexit has not been betrayed 7 June 2023, 4:15pm please log in to view this image Kemi Badenoch (Credit: Getty images) Text settings Comments Share Being a Brexiteer these days is like being Kenneth Williams playing Julius Caesar in Carry On Cleo. Far too often we find ourselves crashing around the place bellowing: ‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.’ Last month Nigel Farage made waves by declaring that Brexit had ‘failed’ thanks to wilful Tory treachery. Prior to that, the Windsor Framework was interpreted as a conspiracy between Brussels and Rishi Sunak to bury Brexit. Let’s stop being so jumpy whenever Rejoiner fanatics seize on opinion polls showing a degree of Brexit regret The latest betrayal is said to be the decision by Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch to curtail the scope of the Retained EU Law Bill. Now she plans for it to remove 600 Brussels edicts from the statue book rather than the clean sweep of 4,000 originally envisaged. Nobody can accuse Badenoch of making policy decisions based on what will work best for her in a future Tory leadership contest. Unlike her great rival Suella Braverman, she is quite content to rub up Tory right-wingers the wrong way if she considers their thinking deficient. Yesterday at a Commons committee she mocked the desire of various Brexiteer ultras for a symbolic ‘bonfire’ of all past EU law other than anything that had been specifically proven to be essential to good governance. Declaring herself ‘a Conservative, not an arsonist’, she defended her more incremental approach under which Brussels laws will only be abolished once the consequences of removing them have been carefully assessed. On top of the 600 laws going under the current Bill, the government has pointed out that another 1,000 have already been scrapped and a further 500 will disappear under a separate Bill on financial services. ‘I don’t think a bonfire of regulations is what we wanted. What we wanted was the reform and removal of things we did not need,’ added Badenoch. To purist Brexiteer Tories such as David Jones and Richard Drax this was a huge provocation, with the latter admitting ‘it is in my DNA…to smell a stitch-up’. I think that is true of most people I campaigned with to get the UK out of the EU, and no wonder given the frankly bizarre attempt by the British establishment to prevent the referendum result being implemented. But the establishment failed, Brexit happened and we Brexiteers are going to seem increasingly deranged to the average punter unless we stop crying wolf about conspiracies around every corner. The UK only freed itself from EU rules and regulations at the very start of 2021. Since then we have done some useful stuff on trade deals, started to make tax regime changes that would not have been possible previously, got our Covid vaccines ready ahead of the game and played a starring role in getting vital armaments to Ukraine before the Russian tanks rolled in. Our economy has done about as well as Germany’s, which is to say not very well at all. Immigration-wise, we are no longer a major net importer of people from the EU but have become a gargantuan importer of people from the rest of the world thanks to deliberate Conservative policy choices. Brexit hasn’t failed at all. On the contrary, it has widened the range of things it is possible for governments to do and made them more democratically accountable for their deeds and misdeeds. More often than not the Tories have disappointed us on this basis but the real test will come when the country is run by a set of politicians who all wish we had never left the EU. This could well be Labour and Keir Starmer either on their own or in conjunction with smaller anti-Brexit parties such as the Liberal Democrats. If Brexit is to prove durable then it must survive such a regime and I think this is the prospect that is making Brexiteers so jumpy. But again, the logical advice must be to calm down. Nobody has yet set out a remotely credible route map under which a Starmer regime can take the UK back into the EU or even deep into its orbit. Obviously his current pledges about not bringing back free movement and not rejoining the customs union or the single market must be taken with giant pinches of salt given all his previous broken promises on Brexit. But even so, just thinking briefly about the reserves of political capital that would have to be expended to get a Rejoin project off the ground underlines how unrealistic the idea is. To rejoin the EU, a governing party would need to put an enormous and extended effort into negotiating a re-entry deal with Brussels. That would have to cover key issues such as the duty to join the euro, the restoration (or not) of the UK rebate, free movement or no free movement and opt-outs from other integration processes. This would take many months during which the governing party would be lambasted for betraying its promise to make the best of Brexit and for any other negative events that cropped up while its eye was off the ball. Any resulting Rejoin proposition would be highly unsatisfactory across multiple fronts, especially as Brussels would not wish to be seen to reward the UK for having inflicted the trauma and humiliation of Brexit upon it. Brussels would also seek to protect itself against the potential impact of the UK public voting to leave again some years down the line. Other free trade deals signed by the UK during its sojourn outside the EU would be put into jeopardy too. And then the government would have to fight a referendum on taking the country back into the EU with its tail between its legs. This simply isn’t serious politics. Added to this, any more limited enhanced cooperation deals a Starmer administration entered into with Brussels on individual policy areas could easily, in the absence of application of the Treaty of Rome, be overturned by a future Tory or Eurosceptic government. So let’s stop being so jumpy whenever Rejoiner fanatics seize on opinion polls showing a degree of Brexit regret. Or when they seek to blame Brexit for shortages on supermarket shelves or catastrophise the passport queues that occasionally afflict them during their cosmopolitan wanderings. The best response by far is laughter and mockery. They are now the eccentrics, nostalgists and dispossessed and it would be silly to imbue them with imagined powers of omnipotence. Kemi Badenoch is right to be thorough in plotting significant post-Brexit legal changes. We have a generation in which to make a success of things. SUBSCRIBE Try a month freePatrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn is a former MEP and political editor of the Daily Express
please log in to view this image ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret Sunak with his choppers. Cleverly with his Logan Roy style private jets. Johnson with his lawyers. They think the public purse is there to serve them. Rarely are they motivated by genuinely serving the public . please log in to view this image
why is the cop standing doing nothing while the rest struggle is he part of the hurty feelings squad have they all left their batons at the cop shop at least one turns up to sort **** out
To be fair I’ve seen people 40 years older put forward less coherent opinions on migration on this website.
Just a reminder that Michelle Mone is still living in luxury after fleecing the country for millions.
I see government fraud has quadrupled to 21 billion since Johnson came into office! These ****s need jail time and it to be spent on the nonce wing. No wonder Roland Rat Sunak doesn't want any messages to see the light of day.
As had been apparent from national data, today's downward revision to Q1 growth confirms that the Eurozone experienced a technical recession over winter by the smallest of margins (-0.1% q/q in Q4 and Q1). Very weak domestic demand was partially offset by net trade. please log in to view this image Quote Tweet please log in to view this image D
