How Are The Tories Going To Get Brexit Done?

Brexit is a big deal for the country, but it is an especially big deal for the Conservatives whose idea the whole thing was.   So it isn't surprising its the first item on their manifesto.  And their slogan is clear.  They will get it done.  This begs the question of what they want to get out of it and how they are going to achieve it. 


The first question is answered, to my mind rather flippantly, with a rather skimpy list of objectives.

Take back control of our laws.
Take back control of our money.
Control our own trade policy.
Introduce an Australian-style points-based immigration system.
Raise standards in areas like workers’ rights, animal welfare, agriculture and the environment.
Ensure we are in full control of our fishing waters.

Membership of the EU does involve some ceding of control of our laws to a European wide body, so simply leaving is enough to meet both the first and second.  So we don't need much more detail there.  The third one is again easy enough to grasp and to achieve.  But there are a lot of ways we could frame our approach to a trade policy.  We are going to want to hear rather a lot more about this.

An Australian style points based immigration system is clear enough.  But the Australian one is designed to ensure Australia gets the immigrants it needs, which is not how Brexit was sold.  We certainly want some details here.

I am not sure what raising standards in workers' rights etc is doing in this part of the manifesto as there is nothing about membership of the EU that would have stopped that happening anyway.  But they all sound like good things anyway so I am interested in the details.

Fishing sits a little uneasily in that list.  This is a business that generates less than a billion pounds in total, making it small fry in comparison to the 2 trillion pounds the rest of the economy turns over.  It does however have an emotional resonance out of all proportion to its size for many of us, me included.  I come from the coast and fishing is in the family.  I regard it is a hard, dangerous and badly paid job that my education has specifically enabled me to avoid.  Focusing on bloody fishing instead of science and technology is the height of folly in my book. 

So how do the plans to achieve these objectives stack up?

The next two paragraphs start laying out the plan.

We will negotiate a trade agreement next year – one that will strengthen our Union – and we will not extend the implementation period beyond December 2020. 

Presumably this trade agreement will be with the European Union, and the Union that will be strengthened will the the United Kingdom.  Future historians might appreciate as to which union was the good one and which was the bad one.  And the plan is to get everything done in less than 12 months, an extraordinarily ambitious timescale.  Ambition is to applauded in a plan for the future, so this is good.  But I would like more detail on how this is to be done.  Especially as the next paragraph takes a detour to outline more legislative targets unrelated to Brexit.  They also find time to point out that a vote for Jeremy Corbyn is a vote for chaos.  I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much. 

I turn the page to carry on finding out about the plans for Brexit, but find that we are already onto the next section.

So on the biggest issue facing the country, the Conservatives have a list of objectives and a single sentence on how those objectives are to be met.

I am only reading this document at all because I am treating it as the outline of a serious political project.  I have to wonder whether the Conservatives are giving it the same level of respect.