Whether one person or party “leads” in the rhetorical competition that has been raging for the last 10 years in the UK is of virtually no consequence for the overall good of the country as a whole. We are in metaphorical competition to prove who has the biggest hat while the Titanic sinks beneath our feet. The currently proposed solutions to this sinking are similarly built around demonstrating how the size of our respective hats will somehow address the fact that the ship is sinking. Seemingly ignoring the disconnection between hat size and bouyancy.
The current generation of politicians are blessed and cursed by Brexit. They are blessed because they will always be remembered historically as the group that managed the country through a self imposed disaster similar to a war. Cursed because they wont be able to do anything beyond managing this particular issue. It is all that is relevant for them. May knows this and has, partly at least, accepted it. Corbyn knows it but doesn’t want to accept it.
Similar in the way in which Churchill is remembered for his wartime role, both for what he did but also what he stood for, the current group of politicians will also be remembered for their roles during this crisis.
History has been kind to Churchill, who stood on the right side of one particularly significant issue but on the wrong side of many other issues. Brexit is similar insofar as it is not something that will be negotiated over two and a half years. It wont be negotiated over ten years. The impact of effectively changing our form of government will play out over the next two decades. The negotiations taking place now will shape the course of these two decades of change but the unpleasant reality is that we dont know where it will go or whether it will be good or bad. We know that now it is messing up a lot of things that were designed when we were part of the EU, but that is understood; when you change a system itself rather than a component of a system, the impact of that change will filter through the components of the system in ways which it is very, if not entirely, impossible to predict. At the moment we dont even know what the changes will be, so the impact is totally uncertain but at least not pressing. As soon as we start changing things, then we will really see what is going to happen.
So if we are going to do it, and it looks as though the only two people in the country that could actually stop it are convinced it is in their best interest to let it happen, then we had better be pretty damn sure that the way in which we do it is the most optimal way of doing it. But what is that method?
We have got to stop the haemoraging of negotiating credibility which we are currently stuck in. In order to do that, we have to have another public vote on the options open to the country. In order to grant whoever is negotiating with the EU the credibility to undertake those negotiations, the options we can present are:
- Exit without negotiated period or settlement (Hard Brexit), or;
- Exit on the basis of whatever the government is able to negotiate by a pre-determined timeframe of March 31st 2019 (Negotiated Brexit), or;
- Remaining in on the basis of our existing status (No Brexit).
So whats to lose? It cannot get worse than our current siituation.
