“In less than three weeks, Britain leaves the EU. Those vast marches, the crowded public meetings, the indefatigable Remain campaigners, the great speeches, the parliamentary wheeler-dealing and principled resignations were all for nothing. The “get Brexit done” Tories, exploiting the least electable Labour leader ever, won the election and were handed an 80-seat majority. The die is cast.”
These are the words of Guardianista remainer Will Hutton on our forthcoming Independence Day and the tears just seem to get even more salty!
Hutton could be seen as very much a socially democratic Blairite and his Oxford University biography (surprise, surprise) reads as follows:
Will is a political economist, author and columnist with a career that spans investment banking, BBC radio and TV, newspapers, consultancy, leading think tanks and heading up government commissions.
After six years in the City, he launched his career in journalism as economics editor for the BBC’s Newsnight and later for The Guardian. He went on to become editor of The Observer in 1996, for which he still writes a regular column. From 2000 until 2008 he was CEO of The Work Foundation, stepping down to work as its part time non-executive vice chair. He co-founded the Big Innovation Centre in 2011, which has become one of Britain’s leading innovation think-tanks, soon before joining Hertford College. He has made numerous TV documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4.
As you can see below he continues in The Guardian with the same old dross about the impending economic doom we face but even more significantly the seeds being grown for the UK to REJOIN the failing EU!
For the political class, the issue has become toxic. Boris Johnson wants Brexit expunged from the lexicon so that the new normal is for Britain to be wholly outside the EU. Labour, flattened by its epic defeat, is agreed that to be pro-EU is political death. Remain Britain – half the population – has no champion.
It is a first order political miscalculation. The Conservative party created Brexit. It must own it. Labour, after 2015, made two monumental miscalls: first, not sufficiently opposing austerity and later voting for article 50. There must be no repeat now. Brexit must be opposed in every dimension. This is a Conservative project. The Tories must be its sole sponsor and live with the consequences. I think it will break them.
But from 2021, Conservative refusal to accept the economic reality that Britain can only protect its dense European supply networks by agreeing to continue to implement EU regulations in every sector will mean frozen new investment and escalating closures. Especially in its crucial auto, aerospace, drugs, chemical, food and drink industries. Expect the Japanese carmakers to pull out first, as will Airbus – more will follow.
Given all that, Johnson and Sajid Javid’s attempt to launch a “decade of renewal”, in particular by trying to revive failing towns in the Midlands and the north, is once again incontinent babbling. Meanwhile, the dynamic liberal populations of our growing innovative cities will look back on EU membership, with its commitment to openness and bringing a continent together, with fondness and mounting regret. In Northern Ireland and Scotland, there will be determined attempts to do something about it – campaigning bitterly to split from Tory England. The EU, extraordinarily, is about to become very popular.
England, too, will move in that direction, but more jerkily. There can be no renewal without reconfiguring our capitalism so that it has a more European stakeholder character, accompanied by active state and city government. Johnson is condemned not to use Brexit to complete the Thatcher revolution as his Tory right want, but paradoxically to Europeanise the British economy to try to bring prosperity to the party’s new electoral base beyond the south. He will find that if he is to halt the exodus of inward investment – a crucial prop to the towns he wants to help – he is going to have to find some face-saving way of aligning with EU regulations.
Here the EU, if it shows some deftness, can construct a series of custom-made British arrangements. There will have to be standing bilateral councils on defence, cybersecurity, terrorism and climate change where the need is unanswerable on both sides. Similarly, if the UK wants to retain a semblance of its manufacturing industry, alongside trying to grow service industries as disparate as advertising and insurance broking, it will have to follow shared European single-market rules to allow market access. It will be a variable geometry Europe – with the UK as an uneasy outlier.
It will also be unstable and unsatisfactory and calls to drop the half-out/half-in relationship will emerge, followed by calls to rejoin fully, not least to keep Britain together. Britain, chastened by its exile and more European in its economic and social model, will find EU membership the second time round much easier. All this is inevitable: the only question is whether it will take five or 15 years, depending on how quickly the Labour party – or a successor – can capture and successfully exploit the new political currents.
So at 11pm on 31 January, dismiss Johnson’s extravagant claims for what lies ahead and the faux celebrations. Light a candle in a window, at your door, in your garden; find friends to do it together. We stand for a European Britain. We will be back.
Light a candle in the window with friends, how pathetic these metropolitan luvvie types really are. We will be back he says like a pathetic Terminator wannabe! Well, Will, we won’t be back because when we are free and sovereign and we show that leaving the EU was the right move then all of you will be forced to eat humble pie. Knowing the egos of your average Guardian writer they will continue to make excuses I am sure but this is why we must celebrate the 31st with all our gusto and reclaim our nations destiny!
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Lead Correspondent | David Clews is the Lead Correspondent for UNN, with over 20 years of political/campaigning experience and a wealth of social media and communication skills David gets to the heart of what is really important to the real people of the UK.
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