Despite this being published on April 1, it appears not to be an April Fool's Joke from the Telegraph.
Even as a Brexiteer, I’m starting to think the time has come to cut our losses and embrace the security of the Brussels fold
SHERELLE JACOBS
1st April 2024 • 7:00pm
To call it a farce does not even come close. The Brexit saga has tipped into the realms of national tragedy. For some reason, it is taboo for Leavers such as myself to admit that the project has been a calamity. When it comes to “The B Word”, British politics has become gripped by a kind of “violence of silence” – with politicians and voters alike reluctant to confront the fallout from the country’s mangled, halfway situation. But after a trip to the Devon fishing town of Brixham, I am more compelled than ever to be blunt.
On the one hand, Brixham represents our country at its best. It exudes an understated dynamism and a keen sense of national identity. In the morning, trawlermen watch their catch being auctioned at Brixham’s world-leading, state-of-the-art fish market. In the evening they pour into the Sprat and Mackerel where the landlord has been known to pour pints in his slippers and Wi-Fi is banned. (“We Talk to Each Other” read the signs.) In the restaurants visitors feast on the hake, gurnard and cuttlefish prolific in Channel waters (as opposed to mass-imported cod that has, in some twist of insanity, become our national dish).
Sadly, Brixham also captures everything that is wrong with this country. Tory Brexiteers promised that leaving the EU would allow Britain to “take back control” of its waters, and enable our fishermen to feast on a “sea of opportunity”. Instead, the fishermen of Brixham told me they are at the mercy on a daily basis “to whatever side of the bed French customs get up on” and are “drowning in red tape”. They are in despair, as Defra – with a zeal reminiscent of Brussels bureaucrats – slaps questionable quotas on fish, from cuttlefish to pollack. As one skipper, Tom, who voted Leave, told me: “To be honest it ain’t much better, because we’ve still got the same people in government who were there before, who have still got the EU ideology.”
It is not just the fishing industry that is reeling from the botched Brexit. In recent weeks, Britain’s trade talks with Canada have gone over the cliff, and the wine industry has warned that the new Brexit alcohol duty regime is “unworkable”. Tory efforts to introduce border checks for goods of animal and plant origin are becoming a fiasco.
As Brexit trade chaos worsens, the deregulatory dreams of Tory Leavers fade. In January 2023, we were once again promised a bonfire of red tape. Within a few months, the pledge to scrap 4,000 EU laws had been completely watered down.
The question is why Brexit has spectacularly failed. Of course, the conventional Remainer wisdom is that it was doomed from the start. But this neglects the elephant in the room: as it turns out, Britain is terrified of freedom.
Much of this fear is harboured by the elites. Whitehall is terrified of allowing our fishing industry to thrive, lest trawlers decimate the ecosystem. Defra officials – working within a bureaucracy that incentivises error avoidance over public service – are afraid to use their common sense on fishing quotas.
Britain is equally terrified of free trade, lest it plunges us into a libertarian dystopia awash with cancerous meat and alcoholism. Canadian negotiators have walked away because the UK Government, beholden to this country’s protectionist farming lobby, refuses to allow Canadian farmers to sell hormone-treated beef here. Some 10kg of steroid-implanted cow has about as much extra oestrogen as a boiled egg. It is the chlorinated chicken hysteria all over again. The new Brexit alcohol duty regime that links rates to specific alcohol strength outdoes Brussels in its convoluted paternalism.
Most striking of all is that we are petrified of seizing on the biggest opportunity presented by Brexit and becoming an AI superpower. Parliament is growing sceptical that Britain can pursue a lighter regulatory approach to AI without degenerating into an America-style “Wild Wild West”. Hollywood fears that AI will exterminate humanity are starting to intermingle toxically with our Christian-socialist suspicion of “tax dodging” big tech egos. When it comes to leading the world on AI healthcare, privacy concerns are turning policymakers and voters queasy about leveraging our trump card – which is the NHS’s possession of the world’s single biggest and most detailed collection of health records
At some point we need to be honest with ourselves. If, as a nation, we are unwilling to maximally benefit from Brexit by leveraging our freedom, then we should decisively minimise our losses and re-enter the security of the EU fold. If we’re not going to improve on the EU fishing quota system, then we might as well go back in, so that fishermen can at least smoothly export their fish across the Continent. If we don’t actually want to strike free trade deals, then we should rejoin the EU protectionist racket, and let Brussels use its market heft to prop up our unproductive sectors. If we are unwilling to become a world leader in AI innovation, then we should throw our lot in with the EU as it aims to become the global leader in AI regulation.
If the ruling class is out of its depth using tax breaks and moonshot projects to seduce multinationals into building the super processors needed to train large AI models on UK soil, then we had better fall in with the EU’s vaguely forming plan to build one giant pooled data bank, for machine learning firms to feast on.
Similarly, if we are not going to fight for freedom on the global stage by forging a new model for liberty in the 21st century, then we should at least do our bit for Western security by reclaiming our disproportionate sway over EU foreign policy – not least given its shifting stance towards Russia.
What we categorically should not do is go on pretending that the country can afford to live with a halfway Brexit. The soft-Remainer view that Keir Starmer might be able to negotiate a superior, closer deal with the EU, while remaining outside the single market, is deluded. Having outwitted British negotiators into signing an agreement almost entirely on Brussels’ terms, the EU has little incentive to reopen talks.
Equally, the view that the symbolic or theoretical regaining of British liberty makes it all worthwhile is based on a flawed idea of freedom. True liberty is not simply a principle of non interference, or “freedom from”. It is also the “freedom to” – the liberty to act, to build, to progress. Without the latter dimension, Brexit “freedom” is meaningless. And in this high stakes era, as we teeter on the brink of both an AI revolution and a geopolitical dark age, it is dangerous.
Comentários