Brexit Crisis Looms

There are two roads open to Brexit. One is the hard model favoured by the hard right of the Tory Party. It is driven by ideology and is willing to pay any price in terms of economic damage and loss of freedoms for what it sees as some Utopian national independence. In an interdependent world this is surely a fantasy, but in the Brexit drama it is an understandable way forward. It may be reckless or economically suicidal, but everybody knows what it is.

Next comes a sensible and practical Brexit. This disconnects GB from the political structures of the EU, but leaves the economic ties largely intact. Likewise the free movement of capital, goods and people carries on with perhaps minor modifications. In other words the lives of politicians change and grow narrower in connection with all things European, but the people and business carry on as usual. This is easy to understand and there is a majority for it both in the country and both Houses of parliament. There will be cost and compromise, but all within reason and within reach of the reasonable.

Unfortunately the disagreements in the Cabinet are so fundamental that there is no consensus on what is required or how to get it. This is the third road, as yet unmade. There is even confusion about the nature of the Brexit negotiations. They are, in the first stage, a complex unpicking of a tightly woven legal structure, where there are obligations which are contractually binding and which must be met and others from which withdrawal is feasible. But the government does not see it that way. Rather it sees a contest like a pub quiz. So it does not want ‘to reveal its hand’.

This means neither the government itself, the country at large, the EU, nor anybody anywhere can fix on what GB actually wants. This is where we are now. In the words of the EU’s lead negotiator, there is a ‘disturbing deadlock’. Maybe this is the crisis before the breakthrough. Or maybe the muddled thinking of our government has driven it into a thicket of its own false hopes.

But believe me, if that is where we are, we cannot hang about there for long. Because it is a thicket in which terrible national misfortune clings.