One of the apparently unintended outcomes of the vote to leave the EU will surely be the slow destruction of the UK. That it will be the Conservative and Unionist Party that helps bring it about is surely the greatest irony of them all.
The increasingly slippery Nicola Sturgeon, despite a long-awaited dip in her popularity, leads a party, the SNP, that will never rest until it has brought about separation from the UK. Given that Scotland voted Remain in the referendum, the unfolding mess that Brexit will bring about will not be lost on Sturgeon and the rest of her party. We know that, like most politicians, Sturgeon is a ruthless opportunist, it is hard to blame her for exploiting the increasing divisions Brexit will bring. Scotland is not alone.
The island of Ireland faces an even more complex Brexit. For example, will there be a “hard” border between the north and the south? It is no good just assuming there won’t be because, like most aspects of our departure from the EU we just don’t know. I suspect there will definitely be some form of managed border, not least to address the concerns many Brexiteers had with immigration to the UK, and if there is one can only imagine very difficult questions being asked about the agreement that has kept the peace in and brought stability to Northern Ireland. Economists believe Ireland could be even worse affected by Brexit than we are.
Clearly, the Brexiteers had no clue of the implications of leaving the EU, nor their depth and breadth, and those who campaigned, no matter half-heartedly (like Theresa May), to remain have found themselves with no plan either. This is deeply concerning for all manner of reasons.
Even before Brexit has even been triggered, sterling has collapsed and shows no signs of reviving. The likelihood is that the pound has a long way to go before it finds its level. So even now we face dramatically higher fuel and food prices and increases in cost to everything we import. This will have an effect in the here and now because many people, especially the worse off, will suffer a decrease in living standards. We also know that but for the intervention of the bank of England in printing hundreds of billions of extra pounds, hundreds of thousands of job losses have been prevented for the time being. But let us be clear about this: we knew it was coming.
Whilst the referendum campaign was generally unedifying, essentially a combination of Project Fear versus Project Hate was how some saw it, no one can say that they weren’t warned what happen in the event of either outcome. If we had remained, it would have been life as before, no change, but we didn’t remain, so now we face up to an immense period of change. I’d like to be very clear that I am not one of those who believe we should reverse the referendum vote. I would be lying if I was to say that I am no longer angry about the decision to Brexit. Not so much angry at the people who voted to leave the EU, although I cannot help but feel a degree of antipathy towards some older voters who by voting Leave have voted to deny their children the same opportunities their generation enjoyed, but very angry at the lies of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Gisela Stuart and the rest of the Leave team which may have affected the outcome.
Since being appointed prime minister, Theresa May, the silent remainer, has adopted the ugly, populist language of the Farages and Johnsons of this world, shouting “Brexit means Brexit” at every opportunity, making her the heroine of the right wing media. At the same time, every word she has spoken has seen the pound tumble still further. We must accept, in my view, that the vote to leave the EU must not only be respected and accepted by opponents, it must also be implemented. But it must be implemented in order to cause the least possible damage to the country.
One important reason given by many “outers” was that they wanted “sovereignty” to be returned, whereby decisions would be made by our parliament and not by the EU parliament and by unelected bureaucrats. Putting aside the fact that none of the Brexiters seem to be able to tell us which EU laws they can’t wait to get rid of, the logical consequence of returning sovereignty will be to enable our own MPs to hold the government to account over the terms of Brexit. So far as I am aware, no one voted to remove power from Brussels to hand it all to a prime minister whose party manifesto in 2015 including a promise to remain in the single market but now says immigration comes first. It is the British way that a PM is chosen by the largest party, but there is a compelling argument that says whilst May has a clear mandate to take us out of the EU, she has no mandate on what Brexit should look like.
It could be that May will be voting for the future of England and Wales if Scotland and, God forbid, Ireland go their own way, so a good deal for everyone on these islands is essential. I do not envy May her job in the forthcoming negotiations but she has made her bed and now she has to lie in it.
We know there will be a considerable financial hit as Brexit slowly sinks in but we all knew that was coming. I am not yet convinced that May is a substantial enough politician to lead this country to a better, or more likely less worse, place, so to entrust in her the task of not just saving the economy from collapse and preserving the union is a gamble to say the least. But it the gamble, the huge step in the dark, we have chosen.
Project Fear lost the referendum for all manner of reasons, but I am afraid that the fears were more than scare stories. That is the task before Mrs May. The question is whether she is up to it? The evidence so far is not reassuring.
