Tories must pull together
The upbeat message is that Britain is doing surprisingly well after all the forecasts of doom, and has a lot to offer in the future
William Hague
It is putting it a bit too politely to say that in the wake of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnsons article last Saturday, the approach of senior ministers to the Brexit negotiations appears to lack co-ordination. More bluntly, it is now 15 months since the referendum, and high time that all members of the British Government were able to express themselves on this subject in the same way as each other, putting forward the same points, as part of an agreed plan.
Hopefully, that happy circumstance will follow the speech that Prime Minister Theresa May is due to deliver on the subject in Florence. If not, there will be no point in Conservatives discussing who is going to be the foreign secretary, chancellor or prime minister in the coming years, because Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn will be the prime minister, sitting in Number 10, Downing Street, with John McDonnell and Diane Abbott, completely ruining the United Kingdom. Look how the Cameron and May administrations have diminished the basic decencies of civilised government. Their perverse response to the great squeeze has been an 18 billion pounds cut in income tax, mainly for the better off, and a 9 billion cut in corporation tax . The 4 billion pounds minimum wage rise is dwarfed by 14 billion pounds in benefit cuts.
A million public service jobs have been axed, with more to go. Public service now forms the lowest proportion of the workforce for 70 years just 16.9 per cent. Wherever you look, you see this great disinvestment in the public realm. Spending on social housing fell to a record low last year. Next year, for the first time ever, the NHS will suffer a real cut per capita. A spokesman for Stansted airport last week protested that the lack of Border Force staff is already causing unacceptable passport queues at airports, even before Brexit begins. Children and young people needing urgent mental health treatment are now kept waiting for 490 days. These are just figures that have emerged in the past week. As I discovered while researching my book, Dismembered: How the Attack on the State Harms Us All, these sorts of figures tumble out every day truly it has been a decade of destruction.
The great recession has been exacerbated by a lack of public and private investment, and by ideologically driven tax and spending cuts. The next decade threatens worse, depending on what can be salvaged from Brexit. The pandemonium within the Tory party would be raucous entertainment if the Brexit negotiations werent so deadly serious. Enjoy the spectacle of the Tory press dividing between Brexit factions some for Boris, some for Gove, the Mail on Sunday peeling away from Brexit altogether. A country already limping from economic damage is at the mercy of this crew of fanatics fighting over what Brexit means, their inadequate leader only telling us it means Brexit. Will she say anything useful in Florence this week? Her draft speech says that city taught us what it means to be European, but her party never learned the lesson, poisoning Britains mind with a nasty brand of nationalism.
Johnsons fearless blueprint for a brighter future ( as described by the Telegraph ) pledges a bonfire of regulations and lavish tax cuts: staying in the single market and customs union or contributing any money would be a great betrayal. Anyone revolted by his cynical isolationism, bogus statistics or the absurdity of his glorious future is branded unpatriotic. How this stinks of the 1930s, that other dark depression decade. But yet again he tops this weeks Survation poll as most popular to lead the Tories: Rees-Mogg, in second place, plans no fewer than nine speeches at the Tory conference. This dangerous pair of scoundrels rise by use of raw nationalism: they need to be defied by all in their party with any shred of historical knowledge about where it leads. After the Brexit decline, watch them ramp up the xenophobia.
Having attended some 40 Tory conferences over the past few decades, I think I know what the mood of the activists will be when they gather in Manchester in two weeks time which is an urge to bang some very powerful heads together with some very considerable force. They will want ministers to show that the period of negotiating publicly with each other is over, and that the time for negotiating in earnest with the European Union has begun.
On what basis can differences over the nature of Brexit the transition, the bill, the immigration controls be settled? I suggest the answer is what we might call upbeat realism: Positive and enthusiastic about the future of the UK, but realistic about the formidable difficulty of leaving the EU without damage.
It would be easy to think that millions of Britons are wallowing in gloom and depression, but in fact British people have been busily doing what they did before the referendum, with the same strengths and weaknesses. Their productivity is flat, and therefore so are wages, but Britain still attracts investment and it creates jobs faster than anyone else in the West.
If you explain to European audiences that last weeks employment figures show nearly 400,000 new jobs were created in the UK since the referendum last year and unemployment is at the lowest in 42 years, they look a bit dumbfounded. Add to that the fact that business investment has held up over the last year and they are further surprised. Yes, the pound has fallen and inflation gone up in consequence, but in the past few days, sterling has recovered a good deal of its losses, as the Bank of England seems to be meandering towards a sensible policy of raising interest rates after all.
An open-hearted and generous approach
The upbeat message, therefore, is that Britain is doing surprisingly well after all the forecasts of doom, and has a lot to offer in the future. Post Brexit, Britain is likely still to have a more open economy, with more predictable taxes, than most of its neighbours provided it does not accidentally let in a Marxist government. Britain can be a prosperous place, in or out of the EU. But then the realism has to come in as well, including on the part of passionate advocates of leaving the EU.
The writer is a former UK
foreign secretary
