The Architects Of Brexit Know The Game Is Up

Michael Gove is not my favourite person.  He's obviously untrustworthy.  He has nothing on his CV that commands any respect.  And he is the man that brought Dominic Cummings into parliament.  He does however have one unusual trait for a Europhobe in that he is thoughtful.  In a movement that is all about instant gratification he at least is thinking ahead.  So it is fascinating to hear his reply to a question about other countries leaving the EU.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/brexit-news-latest-michael-gove-warns-of-longterm-damage-to-democracy-if-uk-stays-in-eu-a4249576.html

So far from imagining that Britain is to be a trailblazer for a general exit from the EU he sees it continuing to exist and to develop.  This is not exactly an unusual forecast, and it is pretty much the assumption of everyone around the world.
 

But it is worth reflecting on just how often Brexiters claim that the whole edifice is on the point of collapse.   (I know they often claim it is turning into an empire/fascist dictatorship/soviet union etc as well - but bear with me.)  As a non-believer it takes a bit of thinking to get into that mindset, but it is actually quite important that they think this.  If the EU is stable and popular, why exactly should we be leaving it?  The positive vision of a global Britain leaving the shackles of a clapped out European prison to trade freely around the world is a bit hard to sustain if you don't think it is going to do better outside the EU than in.  And in if Britain is going to be better off outside, surely other countries will want to join us.

Britain leaving is a huge blow to the EU.  It is hard to imagine a bigger shock to it.  It might cope with losing another small country or even a couple of them.  But Britain is big and matters.  If another big one goes - Italy for example - it is pretty much game over.  But there is no indication that this is in fact likely and Gove is obviously not expecting it to happen.

So that means the future will be one where Britain's relationship with the EU is going to be a continual matter for debate.  There are a whole host of formal programmes, organisations and arrangements where we have to come to a decision on what we do.  For example, are we going to join the European Medicines Agency?  As it happens the British have had a great deal of input into that particular one.  The cheapest and easiest approach would be to simply sign up for it as Norway has done.  But this means effectively participating in an EU institution.

There's a political issue there of course.  The closer we align ourselves the more pointless Brexit appears and the easier it is to rejoin.  But if it makes sense to do so from a practical point of view, then we can only avoid it by doing things our own way.  I can't think of any ways in which the UK could come up with a better, or even a more British, way of regulating drugs.

And the same applies in a whole series of arenas.  Basically the formal decision to leave is the easy bit.   If we seriously want to be anything other than a shadow member of the EU in all but name we have a huge amount of work to do.  And who is going to do this work?  I have already drawn attention to the fact that leavers are in a minority in the workforce.  The people who are going to be sitting on committees and making arrangements will for the most part have no particular axe to grind with the EU.  And for the most part, the existing EU structures work well enough.

Basically if the EU doesn't collapse, we need to have some kind of relationship with it.  Most of our exisiting arrangements are fine as they stand and the people at the sharp end don't have an issue with them.  So we are going to have Brexit in name only.  And sooner or later we are simply going to rejoin.   Brexit will have been a collosal waste of time and money.   A lot of both.

I think the leadership of the leave movement have long since realised this.  Boris Johnson is more or less begging the Labour Party to pick up the job of actually leaving.  Gove's Euroskepticism is at least sincere, insofar as you can make any judgement of the true feelings of such a devious operator.  Farage having won the argument to leave has not deigned to give us any detail on how leaving is going to work.  Nobody anywhere on the phobe side of the debate is looking at how Britain is actually going to interact with our nearest neighbours in a few weeks time.  As they are are all keen on World War II analogies, they are rather like the generals of theVermacht in 1942.   They have failed to cut off the oil supplies of the Soviet Union.  It hasn't collapsed.  The Red Army is still intact.  They might appear to be winning but now face inevitable defeat and there is nothing they can do about it.  The troops on the ground are going to find out soon.