Forecasts? Oh, those forecasts! After telling us all for ages that they didn’t exist, or weren’t quite ready, or that the dog had eaten them, the Government was obliged grudgingly to admit that HM Treasury’s region-by-region economic forecasts of the impact of Brexit on the economy, were actually a thing and weren’t actually all that encouraging.
The Treasury had reached the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that losing unrestricted access to our largest export markets and paying £40bn for the privilege might not be very good for the economy. The best-case scenario for Wales (if we stay in the single market and customs union) is the economy shrinking by 2% over the next 15 years. A full-fat, breakfast-means-breakfast, chips-with-everything Brexit will set Wales back a whopping 8%.
Ministers went into Brexit damage limitation mode. Don’t panic! Said Brexit minister Steve Baker. These forecasts are just the same sort of crap we in the Government base all our economic policy on. They’re always wrong! Brexit will be just fine.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is now on serious leadership manoeuvres, drawled a question to the Minister to the effect that a chap down the boozer had told him the forecasts weren’t just wrong, they were bent. Was the Treasury deliberately fiddling the figures, talking the British economy down and trying to sabotage Brexit?
Yup, said the Minister. That chap is spot on.
The Minister was later forced into a grovelling apology, after accepting that the chap might have said something a bit different. In an effectively led government, a minister who called another Government department a pack of fraudsters would be swimming with the fishes. That Steve Baker is still in place shows the extent to which Theresa May has dropped the reins, lost the stirrups and is now holding on for dear life to a clump of mane as about seventy of the Tory Party’s top nutters furiously spank the country towards a precipice.
Coming to prominence as a spanker is Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies, who on Tuesday put his weighty paddle in on the Conservative Home website, in defence of Mogg. The economic forecasts were no more trustworthy than Tony Blair’s dodgy dossier. A small but vocal minority are trying to sabotage Brexit, led by ‘so-called experts’ (i.e. experts) telling the country how to think.
RT railed against the civil service mentality that is trying to keep the UK in the customs union and single market, when “no sensible nation would voluntarily enter into such an arrangement” (Norway, that’s you on the naughty step). “The rallying cry of the Vote Leave campaign was to “Take Back Control” – of our money, of our trade, and of our borders. It is our duty to deliver all three, undiluted.”
Anyone who believes there is such a thing as ‘undiluted control’ of our own money is deluded. Brussels never had control of our money. The strength of our money is the product of the strength of our economy, and of how international markets perceive our currency as a store of value. Puzzlingly, the referendum result value did not exactly send the value of Sterling soaring up.
Capital and money are the truly international forces that many Brexit voters were kicking off against in the first place. You can of course, if you want, try to control the coming and going of money in the same way you try to control the coming and going of people. Capital controls, like the barbed wire Brexiters want to see around our borders, are rarely the sign of a happy population or a strong economy.
May is not long for this world. The miasma of incompetence that has hung around her administration since last June gets thicker and more putrid by the week. It is a measure of how far the Tory party is drifting from election-winning Cameron centrism that people are now discussing, in all seriousness, the prospect of Boris, Jacob Rees-Mogg and their spotty state school swot hanger-on Gove mounting a successful putsch.
The only thing preventing May’s departure is the near-universal acknowledgement that we are deep into frying pans and fires territory here. However incompetent and divisive the PM may be, it is hard to identify a more competent alternative who stands any chance of uniting the Party.
Gove and Rees-Mogg have the virtue of clear, classical liberal free market views and the ability to articulate them, and Boris believes whatever it is expedient for him to believe.
Their vision is not without its appeal. But those who advocate a freewheelin’ low-regulation, low tax, Singapore-style economy should explain to the country how it is we hope to get there, and how an economic model which has been hugely successful for a couple of authoritarian far eastern city states can translate to a nation as large and diverse as the UK.
Politically, the hard Brexit dream is undeliverable. The Conservatives seem to have forgotten that they didn’t exactly win last June’s election, and are kidding themselves if they think that the Boris-Mogg-Gove model could be pushed through Parliament. They also refuse to be frank with voters about the costs, as identified by HM Treasury or otherwise, of making Brexit happen.
“The poorest parts of the UK”, RT reminded us “are looking to us to come good on our promises. In Wales, Cornwall, and Grimsby the vote to leave was driven by a visceral desire to disrupt the status quo – not preserve it.”
RT is absolutely right about this, but disrupting the status quo has never happened without a price. The voters who were conned into thinking their lives might improve by lashing out against international markets and immigration are the ones who will be worst hit by the kind of Brexit RT wants.
Add Comment