Heroes: The Return of the Never Ending Story 

 

‘They started this mess 

I know, I seen them do it now 

They better confess’ 

 
‘…..Or will we see the party [Tory] splinter into two factions leading to the creation of a new party, or defections to UKIP or the Liberal Democrats?’ 

I wrote the above in March 2016 in the very first article entitled ‘Brexit: The Never Ending Story’. How little has changed. 

Rishi Sunak is the latest leader trying to herd an increasingly anarchic Tory party. Over the weekend former cabinet ministers openly criticised policy under his leadership and dozens of backbench MPs plotted a new rebellion over Brexit. 

Although the party lost heavily in the recent council elections, there were signs that Sunak was steadying the ship, especially on a personal basis where he was running neck-and-neck with Starmer. However, his decision to drop the planned EU law guillotine which would have seen >4000 EU laws shredded has sent the loony right into a tantrum.. 
 

‘Rishi Sunak is the latest leader trying to herd an increasingly anarchic Tory party’

 
Speaking at the inaugural conference of the pro-Boris Johnson Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) in Bournemouth on Saturday, former home secretary Priti Patel said some senior figures at Westminster had ‘done a better job at damaging our party‘ over the past year than Labour. She also criticised MPs for removing Johnson, saying they had overseen the ‘ousting of our most electorally successful prime minister since Margaret Thatcher’. 

Patel appears to have learnt nothing from the short-lived Truss debacle, as she backed a tax-cutting agenda, despite the perilous state of public finances and stubbornly high inflation. ‘The public will not vote Conservative because they want high taxes, high spending and high borrowing. They vote Conservative because they expect us to keep taxes down.’ 

Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary and one of Johnson’s biggest backers, predictably said nothing of merit: ‘We no longer have that inspirational leader and those visionary policies. What happened to levelling up? It’s been all but dumped … a U-turn on the promised bonfire of EU regulation, which in itself demonstrates a paucity of ambition.’ 

Despite this she clearly isn’t a fan of Rishi; ‘The solution to most problems in politics are usually quite simple – you need the right leader, you need the right vision and you need to make people feel inspired … I don’t think we’re there at the moment.’ 
 

‘you need the right leader, you need the right vision and you need to make people feel inspired … I don’t think we’re there at the moment’

 
As ever all roads lead back to Brexit, Sunak’s about face over the retained EU law bill, is made all the worse as it was a centrepiece of his campaign for the Tory leadership last year, complete with a video  of him shredding laws to strains of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. 

Eurosceptic Tory MPs, such as former minister David Jones, now deputy chair of the European Research Group (ERG),  are demanding that he reverses his U-turn: ‘This is a very important issue to a lot of Conservative backbenchers. A promise was made at the time of the last general election that we would deliver the benefits of Brexit, which included getting rid of a whole tranche of EU laws. Now a lot of those same members are extremely concerned that this promise seems to have been abandoned.’ 

Another senior ERG figure said the rebellion would be far bigger than that over Sunak’s deal on post-Brexit Northern Ireland trade, the Windsor framework – which saw 22 of his own MPs vote against him – because scrapping EU laws made sense to millions of voters as a demonstration of Brexit in action. 

Cleary, that the party is once again split over Brexit.  

Charles Walker, the Tory MP for Broxbourne, and former vice-chair of the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs, said: ‘After the conduct of the Conservative party last year, Rishi Sunak is a far better leader than it deserves.’ 

Deriding critics on the right who preferred Johnson or Truss, he added: ‘The last thing the Conservative party wants is a tribute act to chaos.’ 

Tory MP and defence select committee chair Tobias Ellwood said the new burst of activity on the right looked like a deliberate attempt to skewer Sunak. ‘After finally seeing our government enter a welcome period of stability, reflected in the national polling, it is difficult to interpret this sudden surge in right-wing activism as other than a deliberate attempt to knock the prime minister off course,’ he said. 

Like so many aspects of Brexit, the shredding exercise had become almost completely detached from the original promise of the project. 

Business groups, which might have been expected to welcome less red tape, had instead been urging the government to remove the sunset clause, warning it was creating uncertainty and instability. 
 

‘the shredding exercise had become almost completely detached from the original promise of the project’

 
One of the less talked about parts of the bill was the discretionary powers it gave ministers to make changes to the law without any parliamentary oversight or consultation with the businesses, organisations and people whose lives could be affected by them. The verdict of one eminent King’s Counsel is it would violate key constitutional principles in the UK, including the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, separation of powers and the rule of law, by ‘transferring parliament’s essential role, law-making, into the hands of ministers’. 

This saga is just the latest is the series of lies that were used by ‘Leave’. It was, we were told, going to turbocharge the economy. It would free up money to spend on an underfunded NHS. It would boost wages in low-paid jobs by reducing immigration levels. And it would reinvigorate our parliamentary democracy by returning sovereignty to Westminster. 

Taking the last point first, rather than restoring parliamentary sovereignty it was driving this key constitutional principle into the ground. The claim that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week for the NHS that has been ruled a ‘clear misuse of official statistics‘ by the UK Statistics Authority, and the suggestion that staying in the EU would mean Britain would be set to share a border with Syria and Iraq. It continued under Boris Johnson’s premiership, with his false statement that the Northern Ireland protocol he had negotiated would involve no customs checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Lies, and more lies.  
 

‘rather than restoring parliamentary sovereignty it was driving this key constitutional principle into the ground’

 
Brexit was just an ideology shared by a bunch of right-wingers dreaming of a return to Victoriana.  

Getting Brexit done may have given a Johnson an 80-seat majority in 2019, but that is now history.  As the local election results show, people are suffering from high inflation, rising interest rates and stagnating wages: some of that is due to global factors, but the UK’s new status as a growth laggard is the main outcome of Brexit. Meanwhile, NHS waiting lists are at record highs and patients are being treated in dilapidated buildings. 

Brexit was populism in action, but rather than being a magic fix for all our woes, it has made us poorer, absorbed huge amounts of diplomatic capital in attempts to resolve the issues it created in Northern Ireland, and cheapened our politics by normalising the spread of misinformation. 
 

‘We still have the lowest post-Covid growth rate of any G7 country’

 
Yes, the economy is growing but only just. We still have the lowest post-Covid growth rate of any G7 country. Another interest rate increase seems sure to follow after last week’s hike, meaning more pain for homeowners, and further depressing spending in other sectors of the economy. 

As the impact of the cost of living crisis spreads, polls suggesting that Tory voters are as enthusiastic as Labour voters about an imagined society in which most wealth is held in the middle rather than by an elite. 

Voters are concerned by the police’s behaviour in arresting anyone and everyone during the coronation. There is a realisation that our traditional right to protest is under threat. Defending civil liberty is becoming a popular cause. 

The local election results predict the death knell of populism. Ukip was eliminated and the Reform party picked up just two seats. Despite predictions that the result show Labour not winning a majority, the progressive opposition parties collected 60% of the vote, compared with the Tories’ 29%.  
 

‘There is a realisation that our traditional right to protest is under threat’

 
Voters are getting wise to the Tory’s tricks, and being fed a diet of culture wars, shrinking the state and tax cuts, looks increasingly out of date when compared to the multiple crises they have caused. The government consistently does nothing about what actually matters to people, such as the cost of living, public sector strikes, and a crumbling health services. 

The economy is shot because we have no industrial strategy to further our embrace of new technologies. For example, no one has chosen to locate an electrical vehicle or battery factory in the UK.  

Young voters realised that leaving the EU would turn Britain into a smaller, more insular place, closing off possibilities and prospects in their own lives, which is why C.75% of them (aged 18-24) voted ‘remain’ in the 2016.  

Seven years late a report by a cross-party committee of the House of Lords, ‘The Future UK-EU Relationship’ found that ‘post-Brexit barriers to mobility between the UK and the EU, in both directions, have had an especially significant impact on young people.‘ 

For emerging musicians seeking to tour in Europe, new regulations and visa restrictions that penalise inexperience have created an ‘unmitigated disaster‘. For other types of performers and artists, it is a similarly dismal story. Temporary professional employment in the EU used to be a way to broaden experience and contacts in the early phase of working life, are now far more difficult to access.  
 

‘C.75% of them (aged 18-24) voted ‘remain’ in the 2016′

 
School trips, in either direction, have become more complicated due to Brexit. The UK Border Force’s refusal to accept ID cards in place of passports and visas has contributed to a decline in the number of visiting European school groups. In 2022, the number of pupils travelling on group trips to the UK was 83% lower than in pre-pandemic 2019. At universities, the ending of the Erasmus programme has led to an accompanying decline in incoming EU students.  

These limitations are explained away as collateral damage therefore nothing is done to improve anything, as a result young people have disproportionately disadvantaged by Brexit. The government doesn’t care as most don’t vote Tory! 

The popular misconception is that revisiting Brexit will lead to electoral disaster, which explains why  Labour want to ‘make Brexit work‘ and the Lib Dems rarely mention it. 

The electorate by and large accepted the referendum result, and gave the government the chance to show it could work. However, all the evidence shows that Brexit is damaging our lives and livelihoods. 
 

‘all the evidence shows that Brexit is damaging our lives and livelihoods’

 
In reality, Brexit was a decision made by one generation, in response to a campaign led by a now discredited PM, Boris Johnson. The younger generations who, as we have seen, are the most negatively impacted by leaving the EU have every right to fight to have the decision revisited.  

Whist the progressive partes  did well in the local elections, both could perhaps prosper by highlighting the failings of Brexit and proposing that where necessary, new arrangements are negotiated and put in place.’ The Tories will accuse them of wanting to take us back in – but they will say that whatever Labour says. 

Despite the Tories’ best efforts to hide from reality, the current cost of living crisis has an awful lot to do with Brexit. Sunak, is being sold as a technocratic problem-solver; a numbers man who understands the economy, but he was the man who made the case that Brexit would deliver a high-growth, dynamic economy. 

As a country we need to learn from our mistakes, which is something the Tories clearly cannot do. Correcting the disaster that is Brexit will neither be easy or quick, but the sooner we start the sooner we finish. Like Brexit, sad old Brexiters need to be consigned to history. 
 
 

‘If I could start again 

A million miles away 

I would keep myself 

I would find a way’ 

 
Another bonus from Philip, as we have the first of a two-parter this week – and one thing’s for sure, he’s not going to have to scratch around for copy.

Someone recently looked at DIY and said ‘why have you still got a Brexit column, it’s yesterday’s news’; well, I think Philip’s prose neatly answers that as the factions for and against dig further in, and the debate becomes ever more acrmonious.

Is there any real belief that the one that Boris ‘got done’ will be the one we end up with?

So what was he thinking?

Part 1 sees us revisit the never ending story, which seems to have plenty of life left in it.

Unsurprisingly, Sunak’s U-turn on the bonfire of the EU laws has sent the loony right into a terrible tantrum. All sorts of mutiny is reported.

In reality, this is a party not fit to govern a country. Until they can finally leave Brexit behind they will continue to be not fit for purpose.

It is very difficult to find any positives in Brexit, even the Eurosceptics aren’t happy with it. I never understand their claim that “it hasn’t been done properly”, we have left what else is there? The real problem was that it was done at all.

As a lawyer friend told me after the referendum; “Brexit was voted for by old people who cared more about themselves than their children and grandchildren.”

Despite popular opinion saying that revisiting Brexit at the next election is a mistake for the opposition party’s I see it as an opportunity. Whatever they do the Tories and their media acolytes will shout you want to rejoin the EU, so they may as well try and right the wrongs it has caused.

We have also seen the first pro-Boris Johnson Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) conference in Bournemouth. The usual idiots were wheeled out to make thinly disguised comments that Johnson is the leader we need. Do they mean the convicted liar?

It brings to mind a new TV programme, “I’m a leader, get me back in #10” . I had visions of Nadine Dorries and Patel doing a bushtucker trial; they both make me feel sick so it would be good to see them suffer instead. All that was missing was Ant or Dec laughing like hyenas.

Musically, we start with the Wipers and “Return of the Rat”, to finish we have Nine Inch Nails and “Hurt”. Enjoy!

 

@coldwarsteve
 

 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

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