Brexit

Theresa May is taking a break from defending her Brexit deal in Parliament – giving the chance to her Attorney General to have a go instead. But Geoffrey Cox's sales pitch to MPs on the Brexit backstop isn't going entirely to plan. Cox confirmed to Parliament that there is 'no unilateral right' for Britain – or the EU – to 'terminate' the arrangement. In response, a Tory MP yelled out: 'So it's a trap!'   Mr S thinks it is fair to say that, with only eight days until the big Parliamentary vote, MPs could do with a bit more persuading...

I can see that there is a moral case for a General Election, as demanded by Jeremy Corbyn. An election which Corbyn would win, by some margin, I suspect. The government is inept, hopelessly divided, derided and May will not get the majority she needs to push her Brexit deal through the Commons. There is a strong practical as well as moral case for an election then. I get all that. What I do not get is why this TV debate should be between May and Corbyn. If Corbyn had a clear line on Brexit then maybe. But he does not, he has been, on the issue, evasive to the point of obscurantism and even now I do not know what he wants to happen. In the Brexit debate he is a total irrelevancy.

No-go-day was meant to be yesterday, I say in The Sun. This was the moment when the Department for Exiting the EU wanted the principal purpose of government to become getting the country ready for leaving the EU regardless of whether there was a deal or not. Number 10 argued that a vaguer deadline of late November / early December was better. They thought that this would give more time to tell whether full on ‘no deal’ prep was necessary or not. But now, Number 10 is indicating that it wants to hold off until after the meaningful vote on the 11th of December. This is not a good idea, though. Those inside the machine estimate that it would take four months of intense preparations to get this country into a place where it could make no deal manageable.

The Prime Minister might have been a bit too clever when attacking Corbyn’s and Labour’s opposition to her Brexit deal. Some four hours in to her 14 hour flight to the G20 leading nations’ summit in Argentina, she told journalists: “What they are doing is advocating rejecting the deal we negotiated with the European Union without having any proper alternative to it. “They say they don’t want ‘no-deal’ but by appearing to reject a temporary backstop they are effectively advocating no-deal, because without a backstop there is no deal”. So she is accusing Labour of ushering in the kind of economic no-deal calamity – a devastating recession that would see the income of the U.K.

While some may doubt Donald Trump’s claim to be a friend of Britain’s, his intervention in the Brexit debate this week has been timely and depressingly accurate. The deal that Theresa May has brought back from Brussels, and which she will put before the Commons on 11 December, is indeed a good deal for the European Union. Brussels retains control over the British economy but no longer has to deal with the British in its various voting procedures. Britain agrees not to become more competitive through regulatory reform, and its chances of striking trade deals are slim. So Trump was merely saying, in his usual offhand manner, what other world leaders have been thinking. His thoughts are echo-ed in Australia, which had been looking forward to doing a trade deal with the UK.

When Gary Lineker isn’t talking about football there is another subject that he likes to bang on about: Brexit. Lineker has backed the 'People’s Vote' campaign and is calling for a second referendum. As the Chancellor Philip Hammond unveiled his Brexit forecasts this morning, Lineker was spurred into action on Twitter: The only problem? That is the message the Treasury was selling 2.5 years ago. Back in May 2016, the chancellor’s predecessor George Osborne warned that Brexit would tip Britain into a year-long recession and cause a ‘profound’ economic shock. We were also told by David Cameron that a vote to Leave would be the ‘self-destruct option’. Of course in the end that never happened.