One of the positives about the lurch to the right that happened around Brexit has been that there is a renewed confidence in asserting unpopular truths and promoting values that are rather better than narrow minded nationalism. For the first time in years people have been prepared to stand up and articulate the value of migration. That has helped to shift public opinion.
Similar shifts are also taking place in other areas of thought. For years the intellectually dominant view has been that we must weaken the state and take it out of as much decision making as possible. The consequences of weakening building regulations and removing effective inspection and enforcement were clear to all at Grenfell Tower. The manufacturers and the builders were allowed to hire their own regulators and in practice there was no official body with the power to insist on safe materials being used. The advantages of cutting edge private sector management have also not exactly been in evidence from Carillion or Northern Rail. We appear to have hit peak stupidity at the time of the referendum and a conscious fight to recognise the value of sharing risks and responsibilities and getting government to do some long-term planning is underway.
The far right has been trying for a long time to sell us fantasies of simple cure all solutions. Brexit being one of them. Those wild acts of blind faith are starting to run into problems with reality. It is increasingly looking like there is no practical means of creating wonderful new trade deals and the only way to avoid seriously damaging the UK economy is to shadow EU rules and regulations for a very long time. Any alternative approach leaves us with a hard border around Northern Ireland and major problems for employers like the UK motor parts manufacturers who sell across the EU.
It is just possible that the government could recognise this reality and stumble towards a solution that is rather better for the country than anything that has been on offer for many months. I continue to believe that there are no gains and many losses for the UK in being out of the EU single market, EU international collaborations and EU standards. That doesn’t mean that everything about the EU has been a universal positive. Shadowing all the rules and regulations so that we can continue to trade but being outside some of the more clumsy and unhelpful EU systems might just prove to be a tolerable solution.
The two big gains in such an arrangement are agricultural support policies and regional policy. It isn’t hard to design a better way of helping farmers that the Common Agricultural Policy. At the moment we are subsidising some of the richest people in the country simply for owning land. What they do to that land is not effectively influenced by those subsidies. The consequence is massive mile long fields where one single crop is sprayed with pesticides and grown on soil soaked in nitrogen. Small scale farmers using more long term sustainable methods have to compete on price with giant factory farms subsidised by the taxpayer. It would be fantastic to see that equation turned around and the subsidies only paid out for responsible land management, re-forestation of upland, and sustainable use of the soil.
Similarly, it is pretty easy to come up with a better set of regional policies than the EU’s European Social Fund or structural schemes like ERDF. At the moment the vast majority of EU regional spend goes on short term projects that appear for three years and then disappear leaving a very limited legacy of change. The UK regions badly need to use that money for long term investment. Creating a half way decent and functioning railway system in the North and the Midlands would be a good start. As would stronger investment in science, technology, environmental industries and turning research into successful regional business enterprises.
There are, however, one or two slight difficulties with the idea that we might accidentally end up with a half way sensible Brexit. The main one being that there is desperately little evidence that we have either a government or an opposition capable of grasping it. Neither seems to have a genuine plan. Both lurch from the position that was politically convenient last week to the one that is politically convenient the next.
The government still feels politically obliged to pretend that it can sign wonderful new trade deals as soon as it exits the EU. It does not seem to have noticed that Donald Trump is busy putting tariffs on UK products and that he is not exactly gentle and kind when it comes to trade deals. Any good that could possibly be done to UK agriculture by a change in subsidy policy will be utterly destroyed by being forced to import US agricultural products. There is no way of signing an international trade deal without creating a supra-national court of arbitration that can over-ride the sovereignty of the UK Parliament and force us to open every NHS contract to bids from US health firms. If you want an end to UK sovereignty and the NHS there is no more effective route that to sign a free trade deal with the US. Yet May has such a divided cabinet that she has decided to guarantee to them that she’ll give up sensible transition arrangements and stop shadowing EU rules by 2021 in order to chase the fantasy of those damaging new trade deals.
The opposition also feels politically obliged - to pretend that it can magic up a jobs first Brexit. For months it has been arguing that in order to do this we need to be out of the EU so we can subsidise the commanding heights of a widely nationalised UK economy. The reality that there is no trade deal available anywhere in the world that would allow blatant export subsidies seems to have escaped them. So has the risk to jobs of getting out of the EU single market. Now, late in the day and reluctantly, the Labour leadership are trying to find some way of accommodating the massive pressure from its new young membership that wants to stay in the EU. It would be wonderful if this led Labour to adopt the policy of shadowing all the vital bits of the EU and doing our own thing on regional policy and on agriculture that I’ve tried to outline here. Don’t hold your breath. Corbyn doesn’t have that vision. He still thinks he can create socialism in one country in a world of increasing globalism.
The leaders of the two major political parties are therefore not thinking clearly about the challenge. In a global world there is no avoiding collaboration across borders. In a world of distrust of politicians there is a real credibility problem for remote international bureaucracies. The central intellectual challenge of our age is to find a way of having effective international decision-making bodies whilst also empowering local decision making and local democracy at every possible opportunity. Running away from the EU is just avoiding facing up to that challenge.
The Green Party articulated what needs to be done remarkably well during the Brexit campaign when it argued that “Another Europe is Possible.” It has also been massively right to argue that the only way to hold inept and short sighted politicians to account over Brexit is to insist that the final deal is put to the British public. Let us hope that the force of economic, social and environmental reality brings UK politicians steadily closer to a sensible way forward. Or better still let’s rely on the force of a final public choice about whether we really do want to leave to do that even more successfully.