This week in Brexitland, July 22, 2022
The Tory leadership contestants go extra Brexity during the run in to the last two
In the final stretch to see who the Conservative parliamentary party would pick as the two MPs to go to the membership, everyone reached for the subject every Tory loves the most these days. No, not low taxes - they got that out of the way quickly to get to the real prize. Of course I’m talking about Brexit. In a bid to make the final two, each of the candidates set out their own Brexit “agendas”. They made for particularly depressing reading.
Sunak is playing the “EU red tape is holding us back” card and I can’t blame him. It’s wonderfully reliable. Just say you’re going to slash a bunch of EU derived laws and the Brexity faithful cheer in delight. The fact that you aren’t actually going to cut very many laws that were derived from an EU Directive doesn’t matter - no one seems to ever expect actual results from this sort of thing. Which makes it a free hit, something you can promise that people like but which you never have to actually deliver on. As Rishi himself put it this week:
“If I am elected, by the time of the next election, I will have scrapped or reformed all of the EU law, red tape and bureaucracy that is still on our statute book and slowing economic growth.”
Notice the language used there? He is only going scrap stuff that is “slowing economic growth”. Given there is almost nothing there that fits that category, he can do pretty much nothing and still fulfil his pledge. Isn’t Brexit wonderful?
Mordaunt, predictably, went down the exact same route, only (also predictably) in a manner that was even less nuanced than Rishi’s approach. Penny told the nation that “We’ve waited too long to cut EU red tape!” and after some waffling of a particularly Mordaunt-esque quality (I’ll give her this, she does have her own style. Problem is, it’s terrible), she surprised us all with some actual examples of EU red tape she’d like to slash. This is a rare treat, as usually Brexiters like to run a mile from having to talk about specifics in this area.
Only problem with this being, there is a reason Brexiters avoid getting into specifics, namely that the specifics tend to either be really lame (your hoover might be 2% more powerful!) or outright dangerous. Mordaunt had two “Brexit benefits” to explain that she would have delivered had the parliamentary party placed her in the final two.
“For example, we can rebuild our natural ecosystems faster and more effectively. We’ll achieve this by repealing EU rules which force water companies to solve water quality problems by building expensive, high-carbon water treatment plants, when striking deals with local farmers to reduce pollution risks or slow water runoff upstream could be both a greener and far more economically efficient and productive solution instead.”
This sounds a lot like Mordaunt-speak for “We’re going to lower your water quality by finding some cheaper, libertarian way of doing things that will be at best half-arsed and at worst lead Britain to having the worst water quality in the western world”. But perhaps I’m just being cynical because of the Turkey remark and her lame explanation of it. Oh, and the “trade deals with American states” guff. Oh, and almost everything else she’s ever said.
Then she talked about Open Banking, saying we should "extend” it, which sort of gives the game away that this is yet another “Brexit dividend'“ that we could have done while in the EU, ie not a dividend of Brexit at all.
And….that’s it. I will give her half a point for trying, though. I mean, actually naming some of the EU red tape you’re going to “slash” is always a brave move, particularly when it seems to be promising to make our water undrinkable. Of course, it didn’t work for her in the end.
Then we come to Liz Truss, our probable next prime minister. Who, strangely, hasn’t laid out her cards on Brexit to the same extent as the other two this past week. Well, she hasn’t written an article about her Brexityness for the Daily Express, which is weird for this contest. Despite being a Remainer and an ex-Lib Dem, Truss didn’t have to say very much about Brexit this week because she is already implicitly trusted on this subject by Tory Brexiters. All religions like a zealous convert, and the church of Brexit is certainly no exception. No one doubts St Liz’s conviction here, so much so that she didn’t even need to go on and on about cutting EU red tape or making our water undrinkable.
2. A record number of people now think Brexit was a bad idea
A YouGov poll published this week put support for Brexit at a post-referendum low. 53% of Britons now think Brexit was a bad idea, versus 35% who think it was wrong to have left the European Union. Leaving 12% in the “don’t know” camp, which seems kind of odd that anyone could still be undecided about Brexit, but I would hesitate to guess this is probably good news for Remainers - a lot of that 12% might be Leavers who don’t like what they see but can’t bring themselves to give up on the project just yet and are willing to wait and see if it eventually comes good.
The poll was particularly bad news for the Tories on Brexit as well. 61% think Brexit is being handled badly by the government, with only 25% saying it’s being done well. Even more stark, only 5% think it’s being handled “very well”, versus 38% who thinks it’s being handled “very badly”. For people under 24, the numbers are: 64% think it was wrong to leave, with only 10% think it was the right move. In fact, every age group up until 65 thinks it was a bad idea - however, for over 65s, the numbers are 59% right move, 37% wrong.
The final thing I’ll pull from this poll is the degree to which the Tories have become the party of Brexit. The numbers for Lib Dem and Labour voters on this are stark, with 83% of those saying they’ll vote Labour at the next general election thinking Brexit was a bad idea and 84% of Lib Dems saying the same thing - up against 75% of Tory voters saying they think Brexit was the right thing to have done. What this means is that as Brexit gets more and more unpopular over the coming years, the Conservatives’ voting base will continue to shrink accordingly. I had thought when the trade deal was agreed that Labour would get more blame for it than they have, they having voted for the deal, than is now the case. But no, people associate Brexit and in particular, the Brexit with which we ended up, with the Tories almost exclusively. The polling suggests that long-term, this could be disastrous for them.
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