ABHI Brexit Update: A Significant Juncture
It has been a funny old week, and I am wondering if there is an omen in the fact that tomorrow’s England France game has been called off. We tried to make sense of some of it at our fantastic Brexit event on Wednesday. We employed some serious brain power on it too. I am not sure how far we got. From the Chair I fluctuated between the depths of despair as Melissa Barnett and I speculated (yes, I know) on the permutations and combinations that exist in La La land, and some cautious optimism listening to the massively cerebral Mark Dayan from our friends at the Nuffield Trust. There was certainly no shortage of endeavour from our friends in the Office for Life Sciences, whose library of resources to prepare us for a no deal exit grows ever more exhaustive. Even if it is supposed to be illegal for us to leave without a deal, I think, at least, that the amount of planning going into the consequences of doing so offers a degree of reassurance. But, of course, we will not know how prepared we are for sure until we reach Doomsday. So, as I said, I am not sure how far we got.
I was pretty sure that yesterday we had finally gone to the dogs. Driving to fulfil some of my NHS commitments at the wonderful Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham, I was tuned in to the Today programme. At what I presume was close to peak audience time, there was a full ten minute news item about a spat between two footballer’s wives. (Being a footballer’s wife is, apparently, an actual thing, and a lucrative one by all accounts.) One of them had turned detective to work out which one of the others was “leaking” private stuff to The Sun. It involved some jiggery pokery on Instagram that even my daughter could not explain to me, but was sufficiently impressive for the newspaper, if you can bring yourself to recognise it as such, to describe the would be sleuth as Wagatha Christie. Quite funny if you like that kind of thing, but ten minutes on the Today programme? By teatime, mind, I was beginning to think higher forces might be at play. One of the protagonists was Coleen Rooney, who from what I can tell, all things considered, is a pretty genuine and sincere Scouser. And it might just be that something of a miracle happened on Merseyside.
Merseyside may be stretching it a bit. The, what might yet prove to be pivotal, meeting between Boris and the Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, took place on the Wirral. People who live on the Wirral regard the River Mersey as some sort of a moat between themselves and Liverpool. If you ask them where they come from, they tend to say Cheshire, or else Deeside. The River Dee is another moat which keeps them away from Wales. It is well worth a visit, the Wirral, an interesting and picturesque place. It is home to Port Sunlight, a model village and, depending on your point of view, either a fine example of post Victorian philanthropy, or the iron hand of capitalism inside a velvet glove. The Lever brothers certainly had nanny state tendencies, openly telling their workers that as they would only spend their wages on enjoying themselves, the company would hang on to some of it to provide housing and “healthy recreation.” Like I said, it depends on your point of view, but it is certainly a way from the gig economy we have created for ourselves.
Anyway, the Wirral was the venue for a meeting between the two leaders in whose hands a solution to the most intractable Brexit issue lies. That they both left making positive noises about a possible route to a deal by the end of the month, caught most commentators by surprise. To be fair the mood music for much of the week was hardly encouraging. Angela Merkel and Donald Tusk had both suggested that a deal was highly unlikely, as, indeed, had Varadkar himself in the Dáil. Ministers here seemed to be focusing on how best they could frustrate the spirit of the Benn Bill, and the officials at Wednesday’s event certainly held the line that we will be leaving on 31st come what may. Brexit Secretary, Steve Barclay, is in Brussels today meeting the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, and will have travelled with a renewed sense of purpose and optimism. How much optimism is unclear, it is still difficult to see how arrangements for the Irish border that suit both sides can suddenly appear. To avoid a hard border Northern Ireland has to remain in the customs union or else you treat the province differently to the rest of the UK. And neither option can gain consensus. Some will also be cynical about Johnson’s motives. Was it merely a case of not wanting to spoil an afternoon by the water, whilst enjoying some unseasonably favourable weather in the North West? We will see, but time is short, so much so that Parliament will sit on 19th October, the first time MPs will have missed Saturday Kitchen since they agreed to the Falklands War.
What none of this will change is the fact that we are heading for a general election. There must have been something in the air yesterday, because Jeremy Corbyn appears to have finally arrived at a position. Labour will support an election once no deal on 31st October is avoided, and will stand for a second referendum on a deal versus remain. Then again, the wind could change direction tomorrow. The Lib Dems are clearly for remaining, but it is not clear what line the Tories will take. It will of course depend on whether or not a deal can be landed in three weeks time. If it can, the equation then is rather more simple, vote for us and we will deliver this. If they are forced to request an extension then it will likely produce yet more divisions in a fractured Party. Do they stand for no deal, or do they say trust us, we can really do it this time.
We appear, finally, to be reaching a significant juncture, maybe as a result of Fantasy Thursday yesterday. The sobering thought though, is that this is not the end of it, whatever happens. We have not yet even reached the end of the beginning. It took India 60 years to sort out a similar situation. Similar, except it was just us and them. Enjoy your weekend.
