Back to 'soft' Brexit?

 In response to the question of what Remainers actually want, S Jenkins might come closest to spelling it out in the Gruan today

The evidence is all around us: life outside the single market is an utter disaster

 [Pointing to events since leaving the single market]  All [sorts of workers, mostly low-paid ones  in agriculture and farming] have benefited in the past from the open market in European labour. All must now lobby Whitehall for permits, visas, waivers and, if not, compensation. Hundred-page documents must accompany every food convoy to and from Dover and Belfast, where hours of tailbacks quietly rot produce.

 [Whitehall] officials are now peering into food containers and poring over job advertisements, exerting the full force of their regulatory zeal. Jobs must be categorised by specialism, shortage, pay and length of stay. Vast Whitehall charts must be mapping labour flows. The Home Office aversion to foreigners has bred a “hostile environment” culture...private care homes were forced to sack 50,000 unvaccinated staff. To pretend to compensate, the government then offered care homes extra visas. It turned out they could be only for one year – despite the essence of care being continuity. As for getting a visa, it is said to take a minimum of 16 weeks. 

 Leaving the EU had some arguments for it. Leaving the single market had none. “Soft” Brexit within that market would have been far been easier to negotiate. Leaving it has meant wrecked supply chains and terminated scientific collaboration. It has undermined recruitment patterns and destabilised Northern Ireland. It has crippled the fish industry and impeded billions of pounds of UK trade. Its consequences have wavered between nuisance and disaster.

Brexit has seen a consummation of the very thing Tories are supposed to hate – bureaucracy... Brexit is estimated to have required a civil service army of 50,000 new officials, more than the entire central bureaucracy of the EU in Brussels. 

 Britain’s position as an island has to be one that trades openly with the mainland....

No, this is not revoking Brexit or rejoining the EU. It is just embracing sanity.

 

As ever, some good points here. There was an underestimate of consequences,especially when the EC played hardball with the restrictive practices. There may indeed be some independent enthusiasm for bureaucracy in Britain. But these are thin gruel. All the consequences are easily seen as the reponsibilities of EC punishments. There has been a compounding influence of covid admitted here. There is a good reason behind some of the policies in squeezing out the low pay/immigrant labour regime of the past. There is no possibility of having 'free trade' without political control by Brussels as well know, so it is still all a pipe dream, and always was -- can Jenkins have forgotten the KitKat option pursued by T May's civil servants? As always, only the insane oppose this common-sense.