Being a
fair-minded soul, I’ll accept that the MP for the 18th Century didn’t
actually say,
as he has been accused of doing, that we would have to wait 50 years for the
benefits of Brexit to be realised. What
he did say was that it will take 50 years for the full economic consequences to
be clear, which is not quite the same thing.
Either way, though, it’s a refreshingly honest statement from a
Brexiteer, most of whom have been claiming all along that the economic benefits
would be more or less immediate.
In strictly
economic terms, Brexit, no matter how it’s dressed up, is the first instance in
history of a country deliberately seeking to weaken trade ties with one group
of countries, and there is an economic cost to doing that. That cost might or might not be offset in due
course by strengthened trade ties with other countries; for the true believers
it’s an article of faith that it will, whereas the rest of us can only hope. But those new deals will take many years to negotiate
and agree, during which period the EU itself will also be negotiating stronger
ties with the same countries – and they have rather more bargaining power at
their disposal. Any deals which the UK
cuts need to be significantly better and/or operational for a very long time if
they are to stand any chance of leaving the UK better off than it would
otherwise be. 50 years sounds to me like
a not unreasonable period over which to judge whether the gamble – for that’s
what it is – will have been successful or not, and Rees-Mogg is making a fair
point in saying so.
What he didn’t
say, however, is that, for people who think like he does, it simply doesn’t
matter how long it takes to arrive at a judgement, or whether the overall economic
outcome at the end of that 50 years is favourable or not, because they start
from a position of seeing Brexit as a good thing in itself for entirely
non-economic reasons. Those are partly
about clinging to an outdated notion of absolute sovereignty and independence,
partly about hankering after an idealised past where Britannia ruled the waves,
and partly about Anglo-British nationalist exceptionalism which insists that ‘we’
are not like ‘them’ and are very special.
It’s about a world view, not economics.
The other thing
he didn’t talk about was who in society would suffer the economic consequences
as the economy adjusts over the next 50 years, because in any adjustment on such
a scale there will inevitably be winners and losers. There is, in short, a price to be paid, and
the question is about who gets to pay it.
We can be certain that Rees-Mogg, and people like him, will not be among
the losers. Arguing that the price of
taking this huge gamble is worth paying is easy enough if you’re not the one
paying it, but the big dishonesty from the outset has been the failure of those
taking that view to spell out that there is a price and to be clear about who
will pay it. Had they done that, they
would have had to campaign for Brexit solely on the basis of the ideological
rationale; that they did not do so underlines that they never thought that they
would be able to persuade enough people to support their world view.
Even now, some of
them are still arguing that there will be a Brexit dividend, despite the government’s
own advisers having well and truly rubbished
such an idea. Their simplistic claim
that if we’re no longer paying £x to Brussels (and we can argue about the value
of x, but the precise sum is irrelevant here) we will be able to spend that £x
on other things is easy to latch on to.
What’s missing of course is the unstated assumption that ‘nothing else
changes’; and if that assumption were true, then of course there’d be a
dividend. But that’s a bit like assuming
that if I stop spending money on food, I can spend it on other things, which
simply assumes that the food keeps coming.
The point is that Brexit changes a whole host of other things; the
assumption that it doesn’t is patently and obviously wrong and is being exposed
as erroneous on a daily basis.
That leaves the
Brexiteers in a desperate situation.
They ‘won’ the referendum but can see that victory slipping away from
them as their lies and half-truths become increasingly clear, and as people
come to realise who is going to be paying the cost of the Brexiteers’
dream. Their only hope is to get on with
it, to exit quickly before the process can be stopped or reversed, and deal
with the consequences later. Whether the
Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition are complicit or merely useful idiots is open to
debate, but ultimately irrelevant. At
the moment, the Brexit ideologues are winning the battle without ever needing
to win the argument.
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