Brexit

Theresa May has made it to the summer. In the aftermath of the election, Downing Street’s immediate aim was to get the Prime Minister to the parliamentary recess. On Thursday they succeeded. They think that the next six weeks will give the government a much-needed chance to regroup and catch its breath. Like a cricket team playing for the close, they hope conditions will be more favourable when proceedings resume. But is there any reason to think that things will be different in September? The summer break can do many things but it can’t conjure up another 20 Tory MPs or put time on the Brexit clock. Tory optimists claim things will be better once everyone has had a lie down.

We went to the first night of the Proms last week. Thinking it was all over, we left the auditorium just before Igor Levit came back on for a delayed encore in which he played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (transcribed by Liszt) as an anti-Brexit gesture. We loved Levit’s earlier rendering of a Beethoven piano concerto, but were spared his political views, so it was a perfect evening. Two nights later, Daniel Barenboim took advantage of the Proms conductor’s podium to make an unscheduled speech in which he deplored ‘isolation tendencies’. All good Brexiteers deplore isolation tendencies, which is one of the reasons we don’t like a European Union with a tariff wall, but of course Brexit was the great conductor’s target.

This post was first published on Slipped Disc On the first night of the BBC Proms, the German-based pianist Igor Levit played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in Liszt’s solo-piano reduction as a token of his opposition to Britain leaving the EU. His was a reasoned and reasonable gesture by an artist who has strong views and wished to express them in music alone. Not so Daniel Barenboim who, before his Prom last night, announced that ‘Elgar makes the best case against Brexit … because he was a pan-European composer' and then, from the podium, after a performance of Elgar's Second Symphony, added 'isolationist tendencies and nationalism in its very narrow sense is something that is very dangerous'. This was out of order.

Does Labour want to leave the Single Market? Maybes aye, maybes naw, as we used to say in North Britain. Corbyn isn't saying. It might be one of the biggest questions of public policy of this decade, but the man who now has at least a non-trivial chance of being PM one day isn't saying where he stands on it. This matters. Of course, we think we know what he intends on the single market. We think he is hostile to it and regards it as a wicked capitalist plot. We think he also inclines towards leaving because he wants to keep inside the remaining chunk of the old Labour working-class vote that is persuaded by the Ukip argument that the single market means free movement which means immigrants.   But we don't know because Corbyn isn't saying.

You’d think a government wouldn’t launch its flagship bill that takes Britain out of European Union legislation without first being clear what taking Britain out of the EU would actually look like. Apparently not: the once Great Repeal Bill - now just plain old European Union (Withdrawal) Bill for less triumphant times - was published today, and no-one is clear on Brexit at all.

Last week it was Vince Cable trying to tell us that Brexit was depriving Wimbledon spectators of their strawberries – swiftly denied by the All England Club. This week it is the turn of pizza chain Franco Manca to try to scare us of the consequences of Brexit. Announcing the company’s results, chairman David Page said, in comments prominently reported in the pro-EU Financial Times: “The long-term Brexit impact is unknown. It is, however, already affecting the availability of skilled European restaurant staff”. In other words: your pizza is under threat from your silly vote to leave the EU. Brexit hasn’t appeared to hit the company’s bottom line, however. Revenue of the chain’s parent company was up 41 per cent to £41.2 million.

The Brexit divorce bill isn’t on the table yet but it’s already provoking plenty of debate - and quite a bit of anger. Figures bandied about have ranged from the tens of billions upwards, with some speculation the final demand could be as much as 100bn euros. Ministers have done their best to avoid being drawn on a figure which wouldn't be acceptable, with David Davis coming closest by saying Britain will not pay 100bn. Now, Boris Johnson has waded in. The Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons that: "I think that the sums that I have seen ... seem to me to be extortionate and I think go whistle is an entirely appropriate expression." What seems clear from Boris’s remarks is that there is no chance of the government agreeing to a 12-figure bill (i.e.

I voted Remain last year for two reasons. First, however irritating I found some aspects of the EU, I could not vote for the chaos I believed would follow a Leave victory. From the accession of Theresa May to the night of the general election, that looked like an excess of pessimism; now it looks like wise foresight. The second prong was an analysis of my own and my neighbours’ economic circumstances: in what sense was EU membership actually making us worse off? In my own case, not at all; local shops, hospitality outlets and tourist attractions, likewise. Subsidised hill farmers and fatter farming cats on the flatlands? Not really, even though broader frustration with Brussels made many of them vocal Brexiteers.