Theresa May might have said this
I will deliver Brexit. I will be faithful to the mandate given to us by the British people. I will heed their anxieties about immigration and I will act so that we have more control about who comes in and out of our country. But, friends, I must tell you candidly that I will not act in a way which will jeopardise the open, dynamic economy upon which our great trading economy relies.
And that means I will also fight to retain our membership of Europe’s single market, the world’s largest borderless marketplace created by our party’s greatest heroine, Margaret Thatcher. Yes, that will require compromise with the other EU member states — it may even mean we will need to pay some money to Europe in return — but in my considered judgment that is the best way to balance our goal of taking back control and our duty to bequeath future generations with a strong and prosperous economy.
writes Nick Clegg in the Standard
Why doesn’t she? It is as if there is a bomb under her party that will go off at the first merest hint of backsliding on Brexit. And maybe there is.
So we have gone from a leave campaign that promised ‘of course we can still co-operate when it is in our interests’ – and what does that mean if not remaning in the EU or at least the softest of soft Brexits – to a headlong dash for hard Brexit and sod the national interest.
And we have gone from a narrow narrow referendum result to the most extreme position of the leave camp.
I know you’ll hate to be reminded of him, but in this instance I think George Osborne is right: the country voted for Brexit; it did not vote for hard Brexit. If you weren’t aware of the impact of your words in Birmingham at the time — or the absurd, if short-lived, proposal to force all companies to “confess” how many foreigners they employ — I suspect the shadow they have cast will be more apparent to you now. Your government is looking dangerously rudderless when it comes to implementing Brexit, and sly and shifty in its attempts to evade any meaningful parliamentary scrutiny.
Do read the whole letter here, but it strikes me that there is an even bigger problem than the government’s invisible, probably non-existent plans for Brexit. What are the plans for the control that is going to be “taken back”?
Remember that one strand of the leave campaign promised that we could have a more buccaneering open capitalist UK, one a more socialist UK, and yet another a more isolated and insular UK. Each was effectively targeted at the correct voters – all the Facebook advertising I saw here in Sheffield took the “Labour Leave” line.
Now the claims are true, we could take any one of those three paths post-Brexit. (Frankly we could take them while staying in the EU, possibly not so far, but further than the voters would generally tolerate.) But I hope we are all ready for the righteous fury that will erupt when one is taken and the other two, necessarily, are not.
Unite the nation? Your best chance, Theresa, is to do what is right for the economy.
* Joe Otten was the candidate for Sheffield Heeley in June 2017 and Doncaster North in December 2019 and is a councillor in Sheffield.
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6 Comments
There is a general tendency of many people to talk in absolutes, as the UK government Minister was doing on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday. Democracy is not an absolute, it is a work in progress.
The Reform Act 1832 disappointed most people at the time. Allowing more people to vote was progress, but there also needed to be rules affecting bribery, intimidation and a secret ballot. Enfranchising women was a major step forward, but it came in two stages for the election of MPs, 1918 and 1929.
Reducing the voting age to 18 was progress, but many people aged 16 or 17 are in work, can get married, can join the armed forces, etcetera.
There needs to be effectively enforced legislation to provide rights to minorities to prevent oppression by majorities. Loopholes will be sought, for instance what is the effect of the Freedom of Information Act on a referendum?
The current government has recognised the case for British Citizens to be allowed to vote, even if they live abroad, and they will presumably need to demonstrate that they are still alive, but they may be disadvantaged by the UK leaving the EU, so that some of them, perhaps many of them, will want to exercise their right to return to live in the UK, affecting he statistics for net immigration.
Prime Minister David Cameron personally signed an agreement allowing voting at age 16 in the referendum of 18 September 2014, but some of the people thus enfranchised were not allowed to vote in the referendum of 23 June 2016 and their equivalents were not allowed to vote either. He is personally responsible for this affront to democracy. resignation without apology is insufficient. If he wants a peerage this should be taken into account.
Large numbers of people who have been making their lives in the UK for decades are allowed or disallowed to vote depending on whether they are from Malta or Cyprus but not if they are from the Republic of Ireland, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy etcetera and resented their exclusion.
Democracy is a work in progress. It is not confined to voting at the UK level.
As I understand it no country is a ‘member of the single market’.
I think a country can be a member of a customs union however, which all EU countries and some others are currently.
Any experts?
There is indeed a bomb under the Tory party in relation to Europe and Theresa May(hem) is not defusing it, merely re-setting the timer.
The question is: will she be brave enough to stand up for the interests of the country rather than her own party? History tells us that Tories rarely do so.
I want to be a Lib Dem supporter but I’m presently not. There’s been so much outrage against the government I think the Lib Dems should have some solid answers which I’m currently not seeing.
Nick Clegg talks about “more control about who comes in and out of our country”, but what does this mean? The voters won’t be happy with simply entry exit checks. Does it mean cutting benefits? Would Lib Dems support that? I don’t know.
I wouldn’t usually ask for such detail, but considering the outrage against the Tories I think the Lib Dems should have a detailed alternative, besides staying in the EU.
“Theresa May might have said this… Why doesn’t she?”
Er, she HAS said pretty much exactly what Nick Clegg says she ought to have said. From her conference speech, 4th October :-
“But let me be clear about the agreement we seek… I want it to involve free trade, in goods and services. I want it to give British companies the maximum freedom to trade with and operate within the Single Market – and let European businesses do the same here. But let’s state one thing loud and clear: we are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration all over again…”
I think May has been crystal clear on what she wants – free trade and control over immigration – and I suspect this approach is the one most people want her to take. Clearly she’s unlikely to get it all, and some kind of compromise with the EU will have to be sought instead, as Clegg suggests. But who is currently the biggest barrier to such a compromise? It is the EU themselves, as typified by Donald Tusk with his “hard Brexit or no Brexit” outburst of last week.
Anybody who wants a soft Brexit are wasting their time attacking May, since she seems to want a fairly soft Brexit herself. They should be trying to persuade the EU instead.
Stuart
Anybody who wants a soft Brexit are wasting their time attacking May, since she seems to want a fairly soft Brexit herself. They should be trying to persuade the EU instead.
As Donald Tusk has put it, this is like wanting to have your cake and eat it, wanting the benefits of being in the EU but not the costs.
People want Britain to be free of the EU, well ok, but that also means the EU is free to treat Britain as it likes. Freedom goes two ways, as so-called “libertarians” never understand: it is not just about being free from legal obligations, it is also about what others are willing to let you do when you rely on them to be able to do it.
One might say the only truly free person is a peasant who has enough land to grow his own food and so is reliant on no-one else. But what he can do on his own is limited and requires back-breaking labour, that is why in modern society we give up some freedoms and take on specialist occupations and so are reliant on others, because working together that way means we can achieve more, and so gain more freedoms in return.
So it is with nations. Britain is not a self-reliant nation, indeed it is an extraordinarily non-self-reliant nation. So, other nations do have control over us because we rely in them, and leaving the EU won’t stop that. If the EU thinks it can do without free trade with us, why should it offer it?