Friday 23 March 2018

Passport Cakeism

I can understand, after a fashion, why those who fought so hard and so long to regain the right which the UK never lost to determine the colour of its own passports at the thought of the shiny new blue ones being manufactured by foreigners.  After all, if you really believe that those EU types have been preventing us from making them blue, it's easy to see why you wouldn't want those same people to get the contract for the new ones.  But at another level, the furore exposes, yet again, the essential cakeism at the heart of Brexit.

In effect, what they really seem to want is the right for UK companies to continue to have unfettered access to the EU27 market, whilst preventing countries from those EU27 countries from winning contracts here.  Protectionism at home, but free trade everywhere else is not a combination which anyone else is going to allow, as even Trump is being forced to discover.  The Brexiteers are going to have to face that simple reality eventually as well.

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