A first glimmer of hope in the Brexit tunnel

Since the morning of 23 June 2016, when the British electorate demonstrated to the world that a referendum is a poor way of reaching good sense in politics, I’ve never felt so encouraged about Brexit as today.

A fine day in Winter. A good moment for a glint of hope on Brexit

Much can still go wrong. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove remain senior ministers in the British government. They were leading figures in an anti-EU campaign that took political mendacity to levels not often achieved in pre-Trump democratic nations. Leaving the EU would free £350m a week for the NHS, they claimed; the reality is that leaving the EU will cost huge sums and the NHS crisis worsens by the day.

Instead of being driven from power as such dishonesty deserves, they continue to exert great authority at the highest level of government. It would be unwise to write them off. They will counterattack and it would be sensible to expect them to be highly effective.

Nevertheless, we can still enjoy, at least for now, an outline agreement between the UK and the EU in which Theresa May in effect conceded that we might not actually leave. In order not to create a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, she accepted the principle that the whole of the UK might remain aligned on regulatory standards with the EU, at least for some aspects of trade.

That means that she has opened the door to the possibility of our staying in the EU Single Market in effect, if not in name. If we can hold off the wild men of Brexit, such as Gove and Johnson, and make sure this happens, we shall at least have limited the damage that Brexit could do to our economy. That’s both in maintaining easy reciprocal access with our major trading partners in Europe, but also in fending a threatened dependency on an arrangement with the US. Such dependency, it has already made clear, would mean our abandoning standards that matter to us.

We would, if all this happens, have limited the worst of the damage to us. We will have maintained values and standards that protect our way of life. What we will have given up is merely the right to have any say in defining those standards: we will no longer have a vote in the deliberations that decide the regulations we adopt.

In other words, we shall have cut off our noses to spite our faces, but at lest we won’t have completely shot our foot off.

For that small mercy, on this fine winter’s days, let’s at least be thankful.