Saturday, 21 July 2018
The Brexit Taliban are dead men walking
The most idiotic thing about the Brexit ultras is that their game is not going to work. For sure they can crash us out of the EU but they won't be in power long enough to bring about their Singapore on Thames nonsense.
The first thing that happens after crashing out is the EU cooks up a string of emergency time limited agreements just to avoid hassle on its own borders and to avoid actual civil emergencies. It will then simply wait til the UK is begging for any kind of deal.
That then is going to come with a raft of terms and conditions worse than anything we could be negotiating right now with ECJ supervision over a whole raft of EU law. The point being that no deal cannot stay no deal.
Having smacked the aerospace, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing sectors hard, there will be no safe Tory seats in the country. The middle classes will be fuming along with a seriously disgruntled working class who find their hours cut.
The narrative as it stands is that if the Tories don't deliver a hard Brexit then the headbangers will defect to Ukip, but this is assuming Ukip is even organised enough to field candidates. They'll just assume someone else will do it for them.
It's true that headbangers will be pissed off if May delivers a softer Brexit, but a lot of remainers will vote to prop up the Tories just to keep Corbyn out. That won't apply if we have a no deal Brexit. The Tories will be finished.
At that point the threat of Corbyn will be somewhat moot in that he will likely not enjoy an outright majority and will have to form a government with the Lib Dems. Moreover we will be too piss broke to do anything Corbyn wants to do.
It will take a Tory party split for them to ever be considered electable again - but by the time they take power again we will have signed up in full to some or other EU agreement, and they won't get to piss around with tariffs. By then the free trade fad will be over.
All the ultras are really doing is smashing the country against the rocks for no gain, destroying the Conservative party and handing power to a dysfunctional coalition for a decade or more that will be more socialist than anything we've seen since 1948.
If the plan was to bring about a global free trading Britain then they've chosen a pretty foolish strategy that will more than likely have the opposite effect. Britain will become more insular and more protectionist and we will see cackhanded attempts to nationalise things.
Politically I think we've crossed the event horizon, and they are going to have to learn first hand why free trade delusions are obsolete - and that will be a costly lesson we will all pay for - but afterwards the cause of free market liberalism will be dead in the water.
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