Another article from today’s Times that’s bang on the money IMO
We’re all paying the price for May’s little lie
Jenni RussellApril 3 2019, 5:00pm,
PM couldn’t have known that ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ would haunt her two years later
You may not know it, but Theresa May — the indecisive, secretive, blinkered, tribal prime minister taking us to the edge of disaster — is a hidden genius. Hold on to that thought.
Here we are, days from crashing out with no deal. Suddenly there’s a chance of averting destruction, as MPs try to block it, and the prime minister abandons hardline Brexiteers in the hope that Jeremy Corbyn will help get a deal through. It’s only a chance, though. Europe’s leaders are still deeply sceptical that we can agree among ourselves within a week, and if we fail, they may refuse us extra time to inflict confusion on them.
You might suppose that Britain, with the exception of a few extremists raging about betrayal, would be hugely relieved at he chance of avoiding no-deal at the thirteenth hour. How could we not be? This week the cabinet secretary’s private briefing to government on no-deal was leaked. It is shocking.
Sir Mark Sedwill predicts devastation for the economy and “significant disruption”. Food prices would rise 10 per cent, fresh produce by more. Our recession would be worse than in 2008.
We would be much more vulnerable to terrorism and crime; losing information-sharing with EU forces would “enormously increase” the pressure on our security services. No-deal in Northern Ireland, with all the tension over imposing border controls, would leave it so unstable that Whitehall would have to reintroduce direct rule from London, an arrangement with a bitter history.
This is an official record of the civil service’s bleak assessment of what threatens us within a fortnight, not hysterical shroud-waving. It reinforces all the warnings we already have, from the EU’s quietly factual briefings last summer to the increasingly agitated pleas from businesses, councils and hospitals for government to grasp how disastrous crashing out would be.
Yet warnings like these are shrugged off by much of the electorate as invented, exaggerated or short-term, because many now think no-deal is just fine. A YouGov poll shows that if there’s no agreement next week, no-deal is the most popular outcome. People would rather crash out than remain, at 44 to 42 per cent. Even if an extension is granted, 40 per cent want no-deal and only 36 per cent to stay in.
This is dumbfounding. This is a country sanguine about declaring sanctions on itself, putting itself out of work, making crime easier, forcing its own lives to become meaner and harder. Only a third of voters believe the warnings about disruption; 45 per cent think them mostly nonsense.
Why have we ended up here? No-deal was never on offer in the referendum. Brexiteers told us how simple, smooth and profitable Brexit would be, from Liam Fox asserting that an agreement with the EU would be the easiest in human history, to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove promising “no sudden changes that would disrupt the economy”. Nigel Farage suggested joining the EEA, while Vote Leave’s Daniel Hannan said no one was threatening our place in the single market and Owen Paterson that “only a madman” would leave it. Nobody proposed a chaotic, bitter Brexit and yet it is now the most popular option.
This remarkable and dangerous transformation of public opinion is principally Theresa May’s achievement. She unintentionally turned a slogan with some short-term usefulness into one of the most convincing, concise and memorable political messages of recent years. She turns out to be one of the most brilliant, if destructive, marketeers in politics. “No deal is better than a bad deal”, a centrepiece of her Lancaster House speech in January 2017, was only ever meant by her to be a convenient figleaf, simultaneously keeping her Brexiteers loyal and convincing the EU that Britain had other options than to agree to compromise.
It failed on both counts. Where it has spectacularly worked, in May’s endless repetition of it and its gleeful adoption by the right-wing press, is that it has sunk deeply into voters’ consciousness, convincing those confronted with Brexit’s unavoidable tradeoffs and difficulties that we needn’t deal with all these tiresome Europeans and their realities. Because no deal is better than a bad one, right?
The tragedy of this convenient strategic lie and its effective brainwashing is twofold. It threatens public backing for the compromise that May is frantically seeking now, bewildering all those voters who believed her. And it was never in any way true. No-deal, in the sense of freedom and independence, is a mirage. It does not exist.
If we left without a deal the very first thing we would have to do, even if ports were not being paralysed by checks, hospitals running out of radiation medicine and fresh food disappearing from shops, would be to open talks with the EU on new trade rules. Except now we would be supplicants, not members, pitching our 60-million market against one ten times the size. We’d be facing their understandable contempt and fury at our reneging on our existing agreements and obligations to them. And their first preconditions for talks would be as now: money, Ireland, citizens’ rights.
Theresa May never dared explain the reality; that no-deal would mean, in practice, the UK’s immediate surrender to the EU’s emergency terms. Now that she is desperately trying to avert the disaster she herself always understood, the prospects of getting MPs and the public to back it are threatened by the success of her own calculating lie.
