Sunday 7 February 2016

Leave.EU: The Suicide Option


The date seems somewhat arbitrary. I can't say what their working is. But what they are saying here is that their "vision" is being "free of membership fees". That means they have elected for total separation from the single market and ending of all cooperation and joint ventures with the EU within a tight deadline. That means they have also elected to end free movement.

That means they have landed us with massive administration costs of maintaining strict border controls, it's now difficult for business to get staff, and trade is conducted on the basis of a mystery trade agreement we are supposed to guess at.

Since they believe this is how it is going to be, they can no longer claim that trade continues unaffected, there will presumably be regulatory divergence and we are locked into the most risky Brexit process there is. The one that all of business hates the very idea of. Their vision is a Britain that has no cooperative ties with our closest neighbours at all, and presumably we would be directing all trade through non-EU customs channels.

There are many more things we can infer from this notion that we are to be "free of membership fees", but mainly Leave.EU wants the most disruptive model you could possibly imagine, and all somehow be settled in just three years.

They then invite us to share their vision. If that's Leave.EU's vision, then folks will probably conclude that we are better off in. What they are telling us here is that they want full separation as fast as possible under the most hostile terms.

This now prevents them from saying Brexit is risk free, and they can no longer make the case that our participation in academic programmes is safe. We'll be renegotiating every strand of cooperation from scratch. You might conclude that they haven't really thought about it. Would you vote for a campaign that suggested ending a forty year relationship on those terms? I wouldn't.

So how do they expect to win a referendum? Simple. They can't. They'll be taken to pieces and they'll look completely stupid as they contradict themselves time after time. And word will get round that they don't have the goods. On the basis of this, half of the opposition's scaremongering will be absolutely right. In all senses, Leave.EU are massive losers. I think we're done here, don't you?

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