Common market, common sense
After 6 long years it is sometimes difficult to remember what was said and promised during the referendum campaign. But basically behind the lies about the money for the NHS, cutting red tape and freeing the fishing industry to prosper again, was a simple argument.
We’d be mad to leave the Single Market but we can be like Norway. Have all the benefits of membership, none of the bothersome meetings or European idealism and we could cut our own trade deals. The best of both worlds.
The day after the vote this was immediately forgotten, as the ultras took over the Tory party and held the nation hostage.
The deal we got was the one they wanted not what people voted for. So it is nice to see a Tory, Tobias Ellwood, point out that applying to rejoin the Single Market would cut red tape, reduce food prices and be a massive economic boost. The common sense solution we were all promised in the first place.
So that won’t be happening then.
The ultras are either blind, stupid or, far more probably ,deep into fantasy land. Where just one more push to distance the UK even further from anything to do with the EU is all that is needed to reach the sunlit uplands.
Already Mr Ellwood has been accused of trying to reverse the “freedoms” gained. What freedoms these are it is impossible to say but the damage caused to win them has been huge, from appalling economic growth figures, to queues at airports- they are all around us.
As in Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, the UK is being driven to the point of despair by the small minority who can never admit a mistake, nor back down, nor see the world as it is.
The book should be required reading for all MPs. There is always someone willing to risk everything, for one last push to try to win an impossible fight.
The consequences are always awful, if you let them take control.
Mr Ellwood is proposing a sensible, grown up, reasonable and practical way out. He’ll be lucky not to become an “enemy of the people”.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.