EU Referendum


Brexit: Treasury Committee


14/07/2016




Back from London, but at the end of a nineteen-hour, action-packed day, it's too late report. Pete makes a start on his blog. I'll pick up the threads when I've had some sleep. I'll also have a go at this.

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And, with the benefit of a little sleep, it is possible to drop in a few observations, which I'll do throughout the day. A propos the appointment of Mr Alexander (aka Boris) Johnson as Foreign Secretary, one must recall the description of a former boss, Max Hastings, who called him a "charlatan and sexual adventurer". To this one must add the barely adequate descriptor of "serial liar".

To have such a man appointed to one of the great offices of state is surely a joke – a sick joke. To have him appointed as Foreign Secretary is an insult to the post, the nation and the rest of the world.

Therein lie some clues as to the thinking of newly-appointed Prime Minister, Theresa May. Described as a "belief-free zone" by those who know her (even more so than the departed Cameron), she has no commitment whatsoever to Brexit. She acknowledges that the result of the referendum must be honoured but thinks it is mistaken and that the process will lead to disaster.

With that expectation, she is quite prepared to give high-profile "leavers" their head and allow them to make a complete mess of the process. Placing Johnson at the head of the team, with David Davis as "Mr Brexit", goes a long way to achieving that. It is a team designed spectacularly to fail.

This is not so much malice as indifference. We are being sent a message: "You wanted, you've got it. Now suck it up and live with the consequences". In the hands of Johnson, aided and abetted by Davis, a failed Brexit would be sweet revenge for the "remains". It is calculated to be a message the nation will never forget, and thus not want to repeat after we go crawling back to mother Europe, to have our face washed and our legs slapped.

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I'm slowly going through the video of yesterday's select committee hearing. I found the blog comments, the tweets and the DMs extremely helpful and also have Pete's futher thoughts to work from.

As I listen to the narrative unfold - and also today hearing Philip Hammond say that we will leave the Single Market, but will negotiate access to it - it strikes me that there is scarcely anyone in the House of Commons who actually understands how the system works, and what it means to be out of it.

Go back to last May (and I don't mean the Prime Minister), and we have Junker telling us that the UK will be treated as a "third country" if we leave the EU. That was treated as a threat, but it was actually a statement of fact, describing the UK's technical status if we leave without a formal trade deal.

And if people think I'm exaggerating about the M1 becoming a lorry park as part of an extended "Operation Stack", all they need to do is go to Southampton Docks and see how "third country" imports are dealt with. The point is there, that Southampton has a fully-resourced and long-established system for dealing with such imports. 

Currently, "short sea shipping" - mainly from the UK - through French ports, accounts for about 114 million tonnes a year, the equivalent of 15,000 truck-loads a day (a crude average figure) - a road train 200 miles long. Through the Channel tunnel alone, the daily average is 4,000 trucks.

There are simply no facilities at Calais or any of the northern French ports, for dealing with that amount of material, if they have to be treated as "third country" goods - each load opened up, inspected with some goods detained for testing. Purely on a practical basis, none of the ports could cope, so it should take very little imagination to realise how quickly queues could build up.

Our problem, however, is trying to overcome the profound ignorance of people who do not have the slightest idea of what is involved. They can't take in what you tell them because they have no conceptual framework which will enable them to process the information they are given.

Thus, I think, I'm going to have to proceed very carefully with my report and analyses. There is an enormous amount of information to process, and it'll take me a while to put it together.