Boris Johnson’s Brexit administration has got off to a terrible start.
To appreciate just how bad things are, here’s a thought experiment: imagine if you had been told that the price of Brexit was the wholesale reordering of the UK economy on eco-socialistic grounds, as outlined in my book Watermelons.
- Your countryside would be trashed by a massively expensive, economically unviable white elephant project — HS2 — whose only functions were a) to cover the government’s embarrassment at having squandered so much already and b) to enrich crony capitalist engineering companies and project managers and c) pacify the leftist Civil Service
- You’d have to strip out your gas cooker and your gas boiler and replace them with new, much more expensive electric versions
- You’d end up with a Chancellor who suddenly revealed himself to be as bad as, if not worse than, Philip Hammond — only one who is entirely unsackable, because he pushes all the appropriate racial/religious minority buttons.
- You had a Prime Minister so bedazzled by greenery that he actually chose to share a platform with Deep Green, Malthusian purveyor of outrageous alarmist propaganda Sir David Attenborough and spew all manner of scientifically illiterate guff about the beneficial trace gas CO2 sitting menacingly over the planet like some malign tea cosy
- You were expected to give up your petrol or diesel-powered car
- Your coastline was defaced with yet more whale-bothering, utter-tosser-enriching, stupidly expensive bird-choppers
- Your country was entered into a green experiment far more radical and transformative (and insane) than anything anywhere within the European Union — including, even, Germany’s economically ruinous Energiewende
- The minister administering this scheme, instead of being your usual Commie deadbeat apparatchik, was so able and forceful you’d almost imagine him to be a Conservative — if it weren’t for his extremely dodgy eco-socialist Weltanschauung
- None of this had been costed, not remotely. But we’re talking trillions of your money
- The difference any of this will make to climate change is precisely zilch, not least because the growth of China’s fossil fuel economy is now entirely outstripping any reductions the West suicidally and unilaterally makes for green virtue-signalling purposes
- To rub salt into the wound, your new Prime Minister made a speech singing the praises of free markets – as if to taunt you with what might have been if only you had elected an actual Conservative government. [See Matt Ridley’s tweet below]
The fantasy:
The massively disappointing reality (NB – this is not what remotely what Smith, Ricardo or Cobden had in mind…)
Would you still have voted for Brexit under those circumstances?
I’m not sure that I would — not least because everything I have just outlined above is actually worse for Britain than almost anything we experienced during those long decades under the yoke of the EU.
Many readers will no doubt say: “I told you so! Boris was always a squishy centrist.”
Well, maybe, but first, I would still maintain that he was the only hope of breaking that three-year post-referendum deadlock which nearly saw Brexit being cancelled; and second, I had rather hoped — especially under the guidance of an advisor like Dominic Cummings — that his pragmatism would come to the fore and he would have realised that the ONLY way of delivering on his promises for a revitalised post-Brexit Britain, for the working classes especially, was to ditch the green crap.
That bullet-pointed horror show I’ve just outlined above: it’s like a fantasy wish-list come true for all the things that people who voted Remain would have liked to happen to Britain but would never have dared hope could happen.
It’s like being the sole member of an even-worse EU with knobs on, over whose politicians you have no more democratic control than you did over the EU’s because they’re there for the next four years at least with a massive majority.
It’s also like a checklist of pretty much all the things that Brexit voters — and working-class voters especially — loathe with a vengeance.
Big government nicking their transport and their independence?
Some poncy green pillock from Whitehall dictating how they can heat their home on the basis of some bollocks they’ve heard from some Remoaner gimp on the detested BBC?
Restrictions on their holiday travel?
Massively higher energy bills?
Much, higher taxes?
More eco-brainwashing for their kids at school?
Every minister in government smirking and preening like they’ve just cured cancer when what they’ve actually done is emulated the economics of Enron and snatched defeat from the jaws of Brexit victory?
I often used to write of David Cameron that there was only one thing you could ever be sure of: that everything he did would prove to be the most massive disappointment.
But Boris appears determined to outstrip that disappointingness on almost every conceivable level.
None of us voted for the Brexit he is delivering because what he is delivering isn’t really Brexit.