Brexit: situations vacant
By Pete North - August 28, 2023
For reasons that escape me, Brexit is trending on the social network formerly known as Twitter today. I haven’t looked in on it for a while but I’m not in the least bit surprised to see it’s the usual mewling from the same narrow band of bad faith actors with FBPE hashtags. Their entire output is one long protracted whinge. Though you do have to admire the pig-headed refusal to acknowledge the passage of time.
To be fair, there’s quite a bit to whinge about. The Tories couldn’t have made a bigger mess of the TCA if they were trying. The fact we haven’t implemented border checks yet means the EU has unimpeded access to our market while UK exporters face the full brunt of third country controls.
The Tories believe that to implement checks bow would be an inflationary measure. And they’re right. But abandoning border controls leaves us wide open to counterfeiting, fraud and biosecurity threats. The Tories can’t seem to manage a border of any kind. Eventually we’re going to have to bite the bullet – and that will mean a jump in imported food prices.
Remainers and the Labour party believe the fix is to renegotiate the TCA and hammer out a new SPS deal. I don’t see this happening at all. If it’s even offered it will come with many unpalatable strings attached. The EU is still pretty firm on its “no cherry-picking” stance. But more importantly, with economic nationalism on the rise, it’s highly likely that food lobbyists within the EU would lobby against resumed competition from the UK.
I think the real question is why we’ve done so little to stimulate and renew our own food and agriculture sector. There’s no good reason why we should be importing food from Morocco or southern Spain. We should be building SMRs in east Anglia so we can run our own greenhouses – with hot water and electricity that’s too cheap to meter.
We should be investing heavily in agricultural robotics research and looking to do the job without involving the EU’s corrupt haulage industry and resorting to modern slavery. This is what people wanted form Brexit. A renewed focus on British industry and British jobs.
Remainers think the ultimate fix is to simply rejoin the EU, regardless of the fact the EU has many of the same labour shortages, and agitation for the return of internal border checks. The single market is contingent on low wage exploitation and the labour pool has dried up last time I checked.
The fault here is not with Brexit, rather it is the inability of our politics to bring itself to task on any problem of importance. And even if we could get these ideas for industrial policy into the overton window, any ambitious plan is stillborn by way of Britain’s creaking bureaucracy. Anything we attempt ends up four times over budget with most of it spent on regulatory compliance exercises – much of it of EU origin.
The only area where the political class shows any kind of ambition is Net Zero. Making our energy more expensive and less reliable is the one thing that gets them animated. You can always count on them to put their own self-serving agendas first.
Ultimately, our political class is not interested in the opportunities it affords the to rethink and reshape Britain. The path of least resistance, they think, is to try and patch up the TCA and pretend none of it ever happened. It’s the plan that requires the least amount of thinking on their part.
What we’re dealing with is a political class that isn’t terribly interested in the business of governing. They have power but don’t have the first clue what to do with it and they’re more than happy to have civil servants do their thinking for them. There is no ambition to transform Britain. Their relationship with the real Britain is akin to my relationship with upper Amazonian tribespeople.
Essentially, Britain is on autopilot and its politicians are parasitic free-riders, only the the auto-pilot software was written for Britain as an EU member, and the longer we coast without entering new coordinates, the more likely we will crash and burn. Only that won’t happen because it’s beyond their abilities.
On present form we’re already heading for rolling blackouts. Witless political meddling with the National Grid without a coherent strategy has left us vulnerable to major price shocks and the worse it gets the more unlikely it is that British industry can ever recover. We certainly do need “adults in the room” but those purporting to be those adults are the very worst of the venal sociopaths who did this to us in the first place.
The real faultline of Brexit is that we left in order to be self-governing, but there is no one willing or able to even attempt it. Our politics is broken and our so-called democracy is barely worthy of the name. We can only limp from bad to worse because the public isn’t given a meaningful choice. All we can do is drift into failed state territory.