Graun left with same old finger-wagging

J Freedland in the Graun has mixed feelings as the year winds down. Issues are revealingly connected in a new petit bourgeois (journo faction) worldview 

in electing Biden and rejecting Donald Trump, Americans are moving to undo the great error they made in 2016. I envy that – because we are still stuck with ours.... even an agreed exit will ravage our economy more deeply than the pandemic, which itself has shaken us to the core. [a paper from an LSE person says] Covid-19 reduces future UK GDP by 2.1%, in present value terms, but Brexit shrinks it by nearly twice as much: 3.7%. And that’s if we get a deal (the figure rises to 5.7% without one).

So it was still all a mistake. Perhaps we should still shut up and get on with it? Freedland will not let any dogs lie;

Johnson’s win was on the promise of an “oven-ready” deal that simply needed a thumbs-up from the voters. And yet here we are, almost a year later, with no agreement. The Brexit that won ratification last December was sold on a false prospectus, bogusly claiming a degree of resolution that was not there.  [And] in the depth of a winter wave of the virus, with most of the country in various degrees of lockdown and with businesses ailing and overwhelmed – is the very worst time to be forcing a radical overhaul of supply chains and trading arrangements with our nearest neighbours.

Good old Operation Fear rides again:

supplies of crucial medicines, including any new vaccine against the coronavirus, could be disrupted by Brexit,...The country’s food supply is “imperilled” too, according to Bloomberg

 What should Labour do?

Abstention [on no deal or a thin deal] has obvious drawbacks. It looks like the very Brexit fence-sitting that cost Labour so dear a year ago...yet to vote with Boris Johnson is to dip Labour’s fingers in the Brexit blood...

That leaves only moral politics:

First, Brexit was always a terrible idea, but it’s lunacy now, and he [Starmer] need not carry its taint. Second, he is the leader of the opposition – and if anything cries out to be opposed, it is this.

Let's oppose illness and sin while we are there.

One puzzling bit too, another dilemma for Labour:

And let’s not forget: the most immediate elections are in Scotland, where a Boris-backing Brexit vote will not exactly boost Labour’s chances.

 A Boris-backing Brexit vote --in Scotland?

In the real world, it is almost the opposite case. Corona has altered things so much that a specific effect of Brexit will be hard to assess. Economic modelling must be even more flimsy because no-one knows what will happen with the virus and rhe economic reset that will follow. Certainly, the virus has permitted substantial State spending of an unprecedented kind -- so much of it is being fed through cronies, of course. Staying in the EU seems irrelavant except that we would have to obey their spending limits and follow thier economic reset.

 

The Graun still cannot miss a chance to say they were right, they still have the moral high ground, so they can still lecture us, and they would do something different -- principled and symbolic opoosition. That's the most important kind of politics!