Hidden behind a Shamrock fig-leaf, Boris Johnson is planning a brutal Brexit. The promises of 2016 – continuing easy access to the single market, higher wages for working people, £350 million a week extra for the NHS – have disappeared.
Any form of Brexit will damage our country’s prosperity, security and global standing. But the Prime Minister’s plan is particularly severe. It will cut income per head by 6.4% compared to staying in the EU, according to a new report by UK in a Changing Europe. By contrast, Theresa May’s deal would have knocked it by “only” 4.9%. (See page 9).
Johnson’s plan has three elements.
First, he is offering Northern Ireland a softer Brexit, although it may not be negotiable and it will be fiendishly complicated to operate in practice even if the EU agrees to it. What’s more, it won’t replicate the easy trading arrangements that businesses in Northern Ireland have now, both with the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
Secondly, Johnson no longer wants frictionless trade between Great Britain – 97% of the UK’s population – and the EU. Not for him May’s compromise that would imperfectly have kept the UK in a partial customs relationship with the EU. Instead, Johnson wants to throw away all the advantages of single market membership, whether for goods or services. We have gone from “Canada plus, plus, plus” to “Canada minus”.
Finally, the Prime Minister no longer wants to maintain regulatory alignment with the EU. When the former Chancellor Philip Hammond suggested the UK could adopt a Singapore-style low tax, low regulation economy, he was widely ridiculed. But that’s exactly what Johnson is now trying to achieve. Over time, the level playing field across the EU that has legislated for equal pay for men and women, paid holidays for all and a universal health and safety net at work may wither away.
And there’s what is not on the table but hidden from view. What will happen to the other forms of cooperation with the EU? The security cooperation so essential to the fight against terrorism, drugs and people smuggling? Science and education programmes that are so important for our long-term future? And are we now to replace EU foreign policy cooperation with saying “yes” to Donald Trump?
This is a miser’s Brexit – an anti-business, anti-Union, anti-jobs Brexit. It might benefit the richest, to whom Johnson promised £8 billion of tax cuts during the Tory leadership election. But it is a devastating blow to working people who voted Leave out of despair at the unfairness and lack of opportunity in Britain. And it comes on top of the government’s own analysis showing that Leave-voting areas would be the biggest losers from Brexit.
What Johnson offers the country is a Brexit that would be brutal in its economic, social and human consequences, worse even than May’s deal and nothing like the Brexit promised in 2016. This is why the people must have the final say in a new referendum.