Project fear is becoming project reality. Each day brings new evidence of the dire consequences of Brexit. Sometimes it takes the form of a big company announcing that it’s moving operations from the UK to the continent, taking hundreds or thousands of jobs with it. It could be JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or Samsung, depending on the day of the week. [...]
Ah, but surely all that lot are just whingeing remainers. Except the arch-leavers themselves have either become strangely quiet or else now implicitly admit that Brexit is a disaster unfolding in slow motion. Dominic Cummings, the anarchic genius behind the Vote Leave campaign, caused a stir when he confessed that Brexit was a task as difficult as defeating the Nazis – those outraged by Adonis’s comparison should take note – and caused a bigger stir when he admitted that voting leave may turn out to have been an “error”. Less noticed was David Davis’s dismissal of talk of a possible Brexit domino effect. “I don’t think anyone is likely to follow us down this route,” he said. [...]
The difficulties are legion, but the most important is the one raised by my colleague John Harris. He rightly wrote that simply to ignore the referendum result of June 2016 would be to inflame the very rage at an unlistening establishment that drove the leave vote in the first place. It would fuel a resurgent Faragism even worse than the original. [...]
The complication is that that moment may not arrive, and the terms of the future deal may not be clear, until after March 2019 – by which time the article 50 clock will have run out and the UK will have left the EU. From that point on, any referendum would not be about staying in but rejoining, which could be a very different proposition.
No comments:
Post a Comment