‘Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward. / All in the valley of Death, / Rode the six hundred.” Why does Tennyson’s great poem come to mind as the local garage waits for a spare part to be delivered from Turin to fix a problem with my Fiat?
In pre-Brexit days, thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s great achievement in integrating the British economy into the European single market, spare parts for cars, dishwashers – you name it – could be delivered almost overnight thanks to the sophistication of the EU supply chain.
No more! There is supply-chain chaos all over the land, although our prime minister recently gave the game away about the hole in his absurd championing of Brexit by admitting that Northern Ireland, as a member of the UK and the European single market, enjoys the best of both worlds.
In the case of my Fiat, Proietti Brothers of Islington have had to wait three weeks: a relatively small, personal anecdote of the frustrations of Brexit. So why did a famous verse I learned at school come to mind? I’ll tell you why: because the worst government of most people’s lifetimes is ploughing on, pretending that it can make a success of a manifest disaster. And the Labour opposition refuses to challenge it on the biggest self-inflicted crisis of our time, tamely ruling out the obvious need to rejoin the single market and restore freedom of movement to businesses and citizens.
Now, although the economy is in a bad way, and affected by the consequences of Brexit at almost every turn – a dramatic rise in import prices is a direct consequence of Brexit, and explains why our inflation rate is stubbornly higher than that of our European neighbours – I do not for one moment wish to overdo the valley of death analogy. Nevertheless, it came to mind because there is something ineffably stubborn and crass about the refusal of our two major parties to recognise the scale of the disaster and conduct – or, in Labour’s case, advocate – an about-turn.
I referred in a recent column to a Federal Trust study by Prof Andrew Blick of King’s College London: 59% of respondents to a poll say Brexit has made Great Britain worse off; and 55% say Brexit was “a mistake”.
What should certainly make Keir Starmer sit up and take notice is that 46% of the so-called red-wall voters with whom he is so obsessed say Brexit was a mistake. But the study finds that although the Labour lead was 26% when voters were surveyed, it would have been 28% if Labour had had the courage to say Brexit was a mistake.
In such circumstances, although red-wall Brexit supporters would still be lingering, Blick’s findings suggest that Labour would still win all 42 red-wall seats!
Which brings me to a fine new book by the economist Russell Jones. Entitled The Tyranny of Nostalgia – Half a Century of British Economic Decline, it explains, among many other things, how “the end of the period under study saw the fabric of the UK’s economic and social infrastructure stretched dangerously thin”. Moreover, “Britain’s once proud and dominant manufacturing sector was permitted, and at times even encouraged, to wither away.”
This began with the shortsighted monetarist and high-exchange-rate experiment of the first Thatcher government, in 1979-83. In evidence to a parliamentary select committee, the then chair of ICI, John Harvey Jones, said: “Twenty per cent of our customer base in the United Kingdom disappeared.” Faced with the results of its culpable neglect of manufacturing, the Thatcher government looked to Europe, the single market and Japanese inward investment to recoup.
All this has been thwarted by Brexit, so why don’t our major parties own up to the disaster?
Jones has an especially good analysis of the Brexit referendum and its aftermath. He notes: “The problem for both policymakers and businesses in July 2016 was that although leave had won, there was limited understanding of what exiting the EU meant in practice.”
Well, the understanding is less limited now. The only sympathy I have with most Brexiters is that, as Jones implies, they simply had no idea of what they were in for. Plainly, now, most people do, and rightly don’t like it.
At which point I should like to remind people that the Eurosceptics spent decades working their way towards a referendum; furthermore, when one Nigel Farage thought on the night that he had lost, he vowed to fight on. Remainers such as Starmer are being weak in bowing to the view that this country has to stick to the results of a “democratic” referendum that was conducted on false pretences and has proved to be a colossal mistake.
They are not leading us into the valley of death. But they are most certainly making us poorer.
