Boris Johnson’s claim that £30bn from the divorce bill will be ours to spend after no-deal Brexit is shameful
Editorial: Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel, the prime minister himself and absolutely everybody else knows that no deal will not free up a single penny for the UK economy. It will cost it untold fortunes
Politics and public discourse have very little safeguard against politicians who wish to strip them of their basic dignity. For several years now, the world has frankly had no idea how to respond to a US president who customarily makes remarks that were recently thought not merely unsayable but unthinkable. Rival politicians who are people of colour should “go back to where they came from”. A critical TV host has been “bleeding pretty hard from a facelift”.
The rest of us have no choice but to engage with these debasing words and we are lessened as a result.
Sadly, the world stage now has another such person on it, and he is our prime minister. Reporting on the G7 summit in Biarritz, one German journalist described Angela Merkel looking upon Boris Johnson, “just as one looks upon a rare beetle”. Johnson, like so many of his ilk, has reached the age of 55 without ever coming to understand that the world at large is nothing like a British public school.
His now trademark over-talking and over-gesticulating in the face of others is alpha male behaviour only in the eyes of the vanishingly small percentage of the population that comes from the same bizarre, stunted species. To the rest of us, it engenders only toe-curling embarrassment. An international humiliation.
And we must also have to lower ourselves to engage with the latest public threats – made to the European Union, but for the benefit of the UK domestic audience – that are so stupid as to be beneath our basic dignity.
On Friday we had Donald Tusk and Mr Johnson brandishing each other “Mr No Deal”. If there is no deal, the idea it will be the European Union’s fault, as opposed to Mr Johnson’s who led the Leave campaign and is now ramping up preparations for it, is laughable.
MrJohnson’s intellectual justification for this is that he has demanded the EU do something it has said it will not do – remove the backstop – and so if it does not do so, it will be the EU’s fault and not his own.
This logic will be familiar with anyone who has had to mediate arguments between toddlers. Give me X or I’ll do Y, and if you don’t it’ll be your fault. Johnson, tragically, is in his mid fifties.
Hit latest gambit has been to tell Mr Tusk and the European Union that, in the event of no deal, the UK will not have to pay at least £30bn of its £39bn “divorce” settlement. This, much to the annoyance of some Remainers, is technically true. Most of the £39bn covers payments into the EU budget during the transition period until the end of 2020 that is part of the withdrawal agreement. Indeed, £6bn of it has already been paid as a result of the delay to the UK’s exit. If there is no withdrawal agreement, there is no transition period, and there will be no need to pay this money.
But the claim that it will, therefore, be at Johnson’s disposal to “spend on UK priorities” is embarrassing. Economists are often wrong in foresight. They are not wrong in hindsight. All major investment banks calculate the cost of Brexit to the UK economy over the last three years at somewhere around £90bn, and this is before it has even happened.
The government has also already earmarked, and spent, billions of pounds preparing for no deal. That money, combined with the economic shock that will accompany no deal, obliterates that £30bn in an instant. Again, this is not contested analysis. All Brexiteers, even no-deal Brexiteers, concede there will be “bumps in the road”.
Most of all, however, the economic case for Brexit, gossamer-thin though it is, is based on free trade. No Brexiteer can possibly bang the drum for free trade and diminish the fundamental importance of striking a free trade deal with the European Union. The costs of souring relations with the EU will be a lot higher than £30bn.
Johnson is also yet to wave a bat in the direction of no deal’s fundamental question. Even if the withdrawal agreement is rejected, the EU could not have made clearer that the withdrawal agreement will, nevertheless, still form the basis for any future trade negotiations.
Mr Tusk, Ms Merkel, Mr Johnson and absolutely everybody else knows that no deal will not free up a single penny for the UK economy. It will cost it untold fortunes.
It is now more than three years since the referendum. There are, we are firmly led to believe, mere weeks until the UK leaves the EU. Its negotiating position is yet to evolve from that of Sheriff Bart in the satirical western Blazing Saddles, who points his gun at himself and threatens to shoot himself if his demands aren’t met. It may be that the EU now believes we are serious. But serious is not the word. We are, quite literally, a joke.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments