Crisis and emotional necessities

 P Toynbee makes some good points about Tory incompetence but still loses it and ends with a silly rant. Shame. There is a case to be made about how the UK Government failed to anticipate the difficulties, including the ones the EC would create in their continued weaponisation of the Irish border and the ratification of the TCA, well explained in Briefings for Britain last week. They are a bunch of botchers and improvisers

David Frost and Michael Gove seem never to have known that each boatload of seafood needs 71 pages of customs forms; nor did they understand the fatal fish “depuration” rules that left stock rotting on the dock.

Political optics were all that mattered to these brilliant negotiators, so they thought they could abandon the services and the banking sector, despite services making up 80% of our economy and financial services 10% of tax receipts. So City firms have moved £1.3tn of assets to the EU already, and within one month Amsterdam has overtaken the City as Europe’s largest sharetrading centre.

They might be forgiven for never knowing the EC would play such a determinedly obstructive game? But they should have prepared. Other Toynbee arguments are less convincing:

Seetru, a Bristol industrial valve-maker I’ve followed throughout Brexit.[why?] ...[sent]...Half its exports were to the EU: as UK exports to Germany fell by a shattering 56%, its managing director, Andrew Varga, finds his products “stuck for eight weeks in German customs, swamped by bureaucracy, massively clogged”. Fearing the loss of his just-in-time customers, he’s flying his products to Germany at “10 times the cost”.

He calls “doctrinaire and ideological” the creation of a UK kite mark, forcing him to re-register 30,000 products under two systems. “That,” he sighs, “is what they call sovereignty.” Brexit never “took back control” or escaped “Brussels bureaucracy” but instead blocked the borders with impenetrable thickets of red tape.

So "Brussels bureaucracy" blocked the borders really? Then there is this:

“Au revoir to au pairs”, mourns the Telegraph, with no visas for student family helpers because they earn under £20,480. The British Cactus Society mourns the loss of its industry to customs barriers. Students mourn the needless loss of Erasmus, its inferior Turing replacement abandoning cultural swaps for teachers.

Deep irrationality and ignorance prevails:

The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph barely cover the EU trade fiascos, says Dr Andrew Jones, part of an Exeter University team monitoring Brexit media stories since the referendum...Prof Katharine Tyler, of the same Exeter team – and currently re-interviewing voters from Lincolnshire, the south west and Newcastle – finds no shifting views in either leavers or remainers. Nor does she expect real-world effects to have much impact given Brexit’s strong connection to national and personal identity. Bad trade news bounces off sovereignty-seekers, for whom any economic price was always worth paying.

And the point of this?

The remain ship sailed long ago, but the boat to Norway may eventually dock here...The only answer is Norway-shaped: putting all the UK into the single market and the customs union restores frictionless trade, with no Irish borders.

Alas, for Toynbee

Britain is still emotionally [!] miles away from recognising that necessity.