Government By Opposition

There is something very odd about this Tory government. Thatcher would not even recognise it as a government. Because governments act and do and fix. But this government just talks. It talks in airy fairy terms about aspirations and hopes, whether about Brexit or tuition fees or whatever, as if accepting that it is not in power, but outlining the kind of things it might like to do if it were. So whether it is Boris about, well Boris, May about tuition fees or national security and the EU, or the latest appearance by David Davis in Vienna about keeping all the lovely regulations in place, or ones just like them, which Brexiteers though they had voted to get rid of, we are left with a peculiar sense that we are being governed by people who do not realise that they are in charge and responsible for all of it.

If tuition fees are the highest in the world or nearly so, it is because the government of which May was a cabinet member put them up there and setting up an inquiry to find a formula using smoke and mirrors to pretend this is not the case will fool nobody. If there is anxiety about maintenance of European security cooperation, it is because the government of which May was a cabinet member called a referendum before it had worked out what leaving the EU would entail and without one single clear idea of how the UK could prosper better outside it. Or how a mass of critical pan-EU agencies, of which we are leaders and innovators, would work without us, or more to the point, how we would work without them.

If we are going to keep all the regulations as Davis asserts then why are we leaving? Why is his negotiating team constantly proposing things which it knows in advance will be rejected and which are thrown out within minutes of their being proposed. Why is the ministry of which he is the Secretary of State unable to explain to positively anybody anywhere what on earth it is, specifically, the UK wants? Apart for the silly of being out with all the goodies of being in. Because that is a very big No No, which would never get by 27 heads of government, the European parliament or, in the case of any new trade terms, ratification by each of the parliaments in the member states.

The answer of course is simple. The cabinet is split into two separate pieces like a well seasoned log beneath a nice sharp axe. Each piece wants the opposite of the other. This cannot work. Neither can it go so on. Sooner or later a nice sharp axe, wielded by the people through the ballot box, will sunder them all.