We Have Witnessed Peak Brexit

Several Labour MPs - to their collective shame - voted last night to give a second reading to the new and supposedly very wonderful Brexit deal secured on behalf of alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. They might not have been so keen on backing Bozo The Clown if they had known the potential consequences.

Fortunately, some of those MPs were not as keen on the ridiculously short timescale being proposed for debating the bill brought before Parliament. And it was that timescale on which Bozo and his fellow spivs and chancers were depending. The swiftness of the hand would deceive the eye. And scrutiny. And opposition.

We know, from the analysis done on Theresa May’s proposed deal, that the effect of Bozo Brexit would be bad for the economy. Just how bad was not told; the best estimate was that the hit would be around three times that of the 2008 recession. It is becoming abundantly clear that the Government knows it will be bad. So they won’t tell us.

Jonathan Portes of King’s College London has been observing the deceit, and is not happy at the Treasury’s conduct. “Disgraceful. A cross-Whitehall team spent months developing a trade model *precisely* in order to model the impact of different Brexit deals, and now [the] Chancellor is refusing to use it because he doesn't like the answers”.

He added this response to Prof Tim Bale: “The model exists and it would be relatively easy to calibrate it to Johnson deal (making various assumptions). And it's easy to work out what results would be roughly. Have they done this internally? We don't know”. Colour me cynical, because I am cynical: yes, they have done this internally. Hence the concealment.

That thought was only magnified after Jacob Rees Mogg claimed there was no impact assessment on the deal because economists give “the answer you want”: “Apart from anything else, the contempt this shows for the work done by government economists - who definitely did *not* give their bosses ‘the answer they wanted’ when asked to evaluate the May deal - shows [Jacob Rees Mogg] is unfit for public office”.

But now the potential for that assessment to be leaked is magnified, and leaked it will be, after Bozo and his chief polecat Dominic Cummings had their cunning plan kiboshed once again. As David Allen Green mused, “There is nothing Johnson and Cummings can now do, if European Council agree …There will be an Article 50 extension to 31 January … By automatic operation of the Benn Act, a statute of the UK's own sovereign parliament”.

And all the time, the support for Brexit, despite the press cheerleaders backing it so shamelessly, is slipping: Joe Twyman of Deltapoll has just told “Latest EU Referendum Voting Intention from Deltapoll (comparison with 5-7 Sept): Leave 45 (-2) … Remain 55 (+2) … Sample: 2,017 Fieldwork: 18-21 Oct 2019”. So why maintain the pretence?

Ah well. Asa Bennett of the Telegraph has let that one slip. “‘We Eurosceptics have fought for years to live in a free country’, writes [Steve Baker] and his ERG deputy Mark Francois for [the Tel]. ‘Woe betide any MP who tries to stop that’”. But we do live in a free country.

Thus the Brexit motivation: a false premise, a phoney ideological stunt, a chimera, a house of cards built on cheap slogans. For which We The People will pay dearly.

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