04/12/2016
The big mistake we have all been making has been to focus too much on the mechanisms for leaving the EU, with not enough given to what we want out of Brexit. Thus, it is perfectly fair to observe that, in the referendum, we voted for a departure, not a destination.
Even now, the public discourse is largely avoiding the question of where Brexit is taking us, with the end result more likely to be a consequence of our mode of leaving rather than the result a deliberative policy. Rather than defining a direction of travel, therefore, the Government seems to be devoting more effort to containing the effects of different leaving options.
Raising the issue from outside the bubble, though, is not going to be easy - although Pete
has made a start. The bubble-dwellers are so behind the curve that they haven't even begun to think seriously about an end game. And neither are they temperamentally or intellectually equipped to do so.
In any event, for the next week we are going to be distracted by the Supreme Court hearing, which is going to trigger interminable comment on Article 50 and related matters, with no resolution in sight until mid-January. That will shunt discussion on an end game further down the line.
Despite most journalists having a basic education and at least average intelligence, they nevertheless seem to be making an incredible meal over the term "interim", or "transitional". We assume most of them know what these words mean, although they seem to have difficulty in translating them into practical effect.
Thus we have the likes of Simon Watkins in the
Mail on Sunday whingeing about the aims of Brexit being "diluted". One by one, he writes, "the much-vaunted aims of Brexit are being diluted. The core objectives were surely leaving the single market, scrapping our payments to the EU and controlling immigration".
But those objectives were not part of the referendum which, as we all know, was confined to the question of whether we should leave the EU. There was no plebiscite on the Single Market, and many of us did not consider (and still do not consider) that EU payments were a core issue.
As to immigration, despite the recent surge on movement from EU Member States, it is still the case that more immigrants come from outside the EU â where we have the means of control but choose not to use them.
Where immigration from the EU is concerned, a post-Brexit UK that stays in the EEA (via Efta) would have the unilateral right to restrict movements, under Article 112 of the EEA Agreement. It is only the absolute determination of the politico-media nexus to remain ignorant on this issue which allows the likes of Watkins to make the point he does.
But what he and so many of the others ignore is that concessions which might be unacceptable if they were part of the final settlement may be tolerable â and even welcomed â if they were part of an interim settlement which paved the way to a stable long-term solution.
The degree to which we would be prepared to accept concessions would doubtless depend on the nature and attractiveness of the end game. But it is not unreasonable to posit that the more attractive it is, the more we are prepared to concede in order to attain it.
Ironically, within
Flexcit we have long held that an option which keeps us in the EEA and thus the Single Market for the short-term is the best we can hope for. Our longer-term aim is the abolition of the EEA as we know it, with the reconstitution of the Single Market under different management, with the headquarters moved out of Brussels to Geneva.
Doubts about the practicality of this come mainly from people who have not read (or understood) Flexcit and, amongst that sub-group, there are many who dispute that the idea is at all practicable, couched in terms of the EU never permitting it.
Yet, entirely of its own volition, Brussels has ceded legislative authority over vehicle construction and safety, and on vegetable and fruit marketing standards, and is now a law-taker in these spheres. It has not made new laws here for many years.
Add to this the WTO TBT and SPS agreements, and the Vienna and Dresden agreements on standards, and we see that much more of the Single Market
acquis has been ceded to regional and global organisations â to say nothing of the global nature of financial services legislation.
Totally under the horizon, we have also seen the emergence of a systematic process for standard-setting, via UNECE's WP.6, which has the support of the EU and the participation of all EU Member States. For a post-Brexit UK, this would be the obvious â and effective â forum for cooperation on standards setting, keeping the UK full in the loop on developing the Single Market.
Such matters, though, are totally above the "pay grade" of the average journalist, most of whom are still wittering about the "loss of influence" and "fax law" if we take the EEA option. The idea that Norway could actually have
more influence, rather than less influence outside the EU, is totally beyond their grasp.
Eventually, we suppose, some of them will catch up â but the process is painfully slow. Issues we were writing about three years ago have still to be settled by the legacy media and many of the politicians, who seem stuck in their own laborious version of Groundhog day. At least, in the film, the loop came to an end. There is no certainty that it will do so in real life.
Perversely, we see in
The Times Matthew Parris complaining that: "The British disease is now rank ineptitude", writing that, "whatever the trade or profession it seems to be considered bad form to root out the stupid and the incompetent". Significantly, though, he does not include journalism in his list of failing trades.
Then we get the likes of Nigel Jones in the
Telegraph telling us that the Leave majority in the Conservative party should set aside their differences with Ukip, and working with Ukip's new leader Paul Nuttall to mount a grassroots campaign to press the Government in the direction of the EU's exit door, with a view to achieving a "clean break".
Clearly, Jones has not noticed that there is not a fag paper between the position of the Tory Right and Nuttall's Ukip, which now has Gerard Batten for its Brexit spokesman calling to ditch Article 50 and repeal the European Communities Act â exactly the stance taken by John Redwood.
As we begin to see in Nuttall another of those
Walter-Mitty figures with
extremely ambiguous CVs, one would have thought the best option for the Conservatives would be to put as much distance between them and Ukip as they possibly could.
Little did we think for all those many years when we have been dreaming of leaving the EU that, when the great event finally came, the driving force would be the incompetence of the major players â from ministers who don't know the basics, to MPs locked in their private miasmas of ignorance, and a legacy media which inhabits a different planet.
One can only hope that, deep within the bowels of government, there are people who do know what they are doing. But if there are such people, they are keeping themselves extremely well-hidden.
