Hutton dreams of 2029

 I missed this first time around on one of the Sundays we have endured lately: This is W Hutton in the Observer:

The dream is over. On New Year’s Day, the curtain comes down on Britain’s long engagement with Europe’s noblest and greatest effort at collaboration and liberty. Our freedoms are to be slashed and an immense bureaucracy imposed on us. Next Friday Britons will lose the freedom to live, work, and trade in goods and services as they choose throughout the EU. Once natural [!] rights are to be torched.

Bloody hell! We are not rejoining are we? Hutton thinks actually we are -- in 9 years time (see below) 

Our goods exporters, previously able to treat Europe as their home market, will have their goods painstakingly checked and controlled at EU borders, and VAT and excise duties paid immediately. More than 200m customs declarations will have to be filled in as lorries wait in new vast holding pens disfiguring our land....To sell into the EU a business will have to ensure it complies with that country’s laws. Services, our banks, insurance companies and investment house – great economic strengths – will have to go cap in hand asking permission to trade where once they were welcomed

Compliance with laws is entirely new, of course. Of course, British exporters were welcomed! We did so well compared to EU exporters. I love the idea that we only trade now if we are granted permission. It gets fanciful and worse... 

We will need visas to stay in the EU beyond three months. Fifteen thousand British students a year will lose the right to study with no fees in European universities under the Erasmus programme. Britain is out of the European Investment Bank, which lent billions to the depressed parts of the UK; also out of Euratom, Europol and Eurojust. We are out of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, crucial in the fight against climate change and fundamental to the economics of wind farms and new nuclear power stations alike. We are to lose all automatic [NB] access to EU databases....the capacity of the British government to turn British regulations into EU regulations and, via the EU’s heft, then global regulations, as it has done so cleverly, for example, over specialist chemicals and mobile phone networks, has disappeared. No British company will be able to follow Vodafone to global pre-eminence. Inward investment, which boomed under EU membership, and which has already fallen by four fifths since the referendum, will remain depressed.

our horizons shrink, along with our influence. Cooperation with the EU over defence, foreign policy and external security is to cease at the request of the UK government. Thus, not only is Britain outside the forum where European states construct their alliances, thereby disabling itself from the great European game of balance of power politics it has played so well, it has chosen to make itself a Little Sir Echo in a world of mighty superpowers 

Poor old Hutton still dreams of Empire as so many of them do. Of course, there has to be some balance:

[The deal] goes significantly beyond World Trade Organization terms. Even the EU concedes that this is unprecedented, if very much in its interests...The UK will win some new autonomies. It will be able to approve the use of hi-tech products – from drones to new medicines – faster, which, if used cleverly, will benefit those fast-growing industries. There will be a baby trade deal with the US. But, in the biggest irony of all, if this is to benefit British capitalism it will require a makeover – to become more high investment and stakeholder-oriented, working closely with government. It will have to look… more European.

I see no problems if it adopts those aspects of European policy, but not all the rest of it that comes as a package, of course -- that is the whole point..

Meanwhile, Hutton clearly intends to dream the next 9 years away (why 9? why not 4?)

And when the incoming Labour government of 2029, led by one of the MPs who saw the future and voted against the treaty this week [ah -- Starmer will have to be overthrown first], holds its promised referendum on EU membership [complete with joining the Euro?] , the elderly Europhobe voters will this time be outvoted.

The old P Toynbee policy --wait for the elderly to die. Why wait? Deny us the vote now. And those likely to die before 2029? And anyone suspected of Europhobe irrationalism?