Putting on the
strongest and stablest face she can muster, whilst at the same time looking
sufficiently serious and determined, the Prime Minister has told us we’re now
entering the end game of the Brexit talks with the rest of the EU. The detail of what she is about to agree with
Brussels seems not to have been fully shared with the rest of the Cabinet so
far, let alone the rest of us, but one ex-member
of the Cabinet has already declared that what she is going to propose amounts
to ‘total surrender’. I assume that he
means surrender to ‘Brussels’ rather than the truth, which is that it is, at
last, a surrender to reality. The
situation today is, in effect, no different to that which existed when Article
50 was triggered – the promise of the ‘exact same benefits’ without the
obligations of membership is simply not on the table and could never have been.
If a deal is done
at all, it will inevitably mean tying the UK into the EU’s rules for longer and
more completely than the Prime Minister has admitted to date, despite her
continuing denials. Finding a way out of
the situation into which her own red lines have painted her will be neither quick
nor easy, even if she manages to get her ministers and parliament to sign up to
it. If this is indeed the end game, it
is such only for the Prime Minister herself.
In relation to Brexit, the words of one of her own predecessors come to
mind – it’s not so much the beginning of the end as the end of the beginning. If Brexit itself isn’t halted, then it is
going to remain more of a process than an event, probably taking at least a
decade before it finally happens. And
that’s a truth which neither the government nor the main opposition party is
yet willing to face.
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