A good Brexit deal is already signed – it’s called WTO rules

We have usually been governed by fools, but lately the cretins have taken over. Across Britain and the continent of Europe, like a mediaeval plague, hangs a dense miasma of impenetrable stupidity that future historians will struggle to comprehend. Were these extravagant fatuities really committed, they will wonder, or is there some secret archive that might re-cast them in a sane light?

Did a German chancellor truly invite a million Africans into her country? Did governments really enact laws based on the notion that sex is unrelated to biology? These and many other implausible scenarios will challenge the credulity of future generations; but where they will find themselves most baffled and most sceptical of the accuracy of historical records is when they confront the chronicle of Britain’s Brexit negotiations.

Two years and four months after the decision by the British electorate to leave the European Union, the Conservative government is proposing a plan that envisages this country remaining in the Customs Union – a notion that was definitively discarded two years ago – with no right ever to leave it unless Brussels and Dublin agree. In the words of an article in The Irish Times sniggering at the impotence of the Ould Enemy: ‘And it is a miserably anti-climactic ending to what was supposed to be an epic of national liberation: the UK will remain tied to the EU for a “temporary” period that will end on the Twelfth of Never.’

Yet again, the Cabinet eunuchs have gone into a meeting with Theresa May breathing fire and emerged having achieved nothing. Meanwhile, May’s Chequers plan has metamorphosed into an even worse farrago of nonsense: it is Remain Plus, enslavement to the Brussels hoods even more servile than the pre-referendum status quo, amounting to continuing EU membership minus parliamentary representation or input into laws and regulations. British subjects would remain under the jurisdiction of European courts.

The Tory Party is engaged in its favourite post-War pastime: snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The Conservatives had everything in their favour. As an overwhelmingly pro-Brexit party they were in office at the moment in history when the British government’s chief responsibility was to lead Britain out of EU membership, authorized by the largest mandate ever recorded in democratic politics. It was a unique opportunity to translate the public will into political reality and to reassert the Conservatives’ credentials as the natural party of governance by executing the transition seamlessly and kick-starting an exciting new era of sovereign trade opportunities.

Instead, the Tories elected a Remainer prime minister, she selected a Remainer chancellor and predominantly Remainer cabinet, and embarked on the suicidal path of appeasing Brussels and the anti-Brexit faction within her parliamentary party, whittling Brexit down to negligible proportions. Excluded from any consideration were the 17.4 million voters who had instructed their government to implement a clean Brexit.

The pretext for this betrayal was a canard so infantile that any sane person would have laughed it out of court: the notion that there was an axiomatic requirement for the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland to be so “soft” as to be non-existent. Even the cynical Brussels apparatchiks who dreamed up this absurdity must have been surprised to find it taken seriously. Yet almost immediately Theresa May began to parrot the “no hard border” mantra.

As its instrument in this transparent stratagem the Brussels nomenklatura selected Ireland, the only EU member state with a land frontier with the UK and, fortuitously, with an historical grudge against Britain. The Irish lent themselves joyously to this farce, very naturally, and only Britain’s incompetent and unpatriotic politicians are to blame for its success.

The need for a soft Irish border is the Big Lie. The real need, Brexit considerations aside, is for a very hard border. Already it is a focus of serious criminal activity. The National Crime Agency (National Strategic Assessment of Serious Organised Crime, 2018) has revealed the Irish border is a venue for drug trafficking, people trafficking, transportation and purchasing of firearms, money laundering and many other criminal activities. According to the NCA and the Northern Irish police around 40 organized criminal gangs are currently operating across the border.

Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, lagging behind the Merkel curve but attempting to catch up, has set the objective of bringing one million immigrants into Ireland by 2040. His problem will be retaining them for more than 12 hours, as they travel on to Britain across the porous Northern Ireland border. As those who have already made the journey have testified to the BBC, from landing at Dublin to entering Britain they never encountered any identity check.

What is the point of the British authorities tightening security around French ports and at domestic points of entry if there is a 310-mile land frontier with the EU offering open access to all comers? It is simply untenable. And in an era when EU member states such as Hungary have secured their borders with fences, when post-Brexit the migration abuses of the Irish border become evident the British public will not tolerate a yawning breach in this country’s security on so massive a scale. The demand for a hard border will become irresistible.

Any responsible British government should have made that clear to Brussels and Dublin on the first day this canard was canvassed. Yet no whiff of reality has impinged upon the Cabinet’s delusory deliberations. For it is not just Theresa May who will be held to account by the British electorate for this fiasco. Collective Cabinet responsibility applies. At any time, cabinet ministers could collectively have walked out of a meeting and directed kindly personnel in white coats to attend to the patient sitting by herself at the cabinet table.

Instead, their cowardice has made them complicit. That is why the consequences will not be restricted to Theresa May but will render the next election an extinction event for the Tory Party. (“But we have a healthy lead in the polls…” “You had a 22-point lead at the last election, which you lost, and the full scale of the betrayal has not yet been exposed.”)

The supreme irony, as future historians will instantly identify, is that the whole negotiation process was totally unnecessary. A Brexit deal was already signed, sealed and delivered before the referendum result was announced. It was agreed on 1 January 1995, when both Britain and the EU became signatories to the World Trade Organization. There is no such thing as ‘no deal’: the alternative to Article 50 was not being cast out into exterior darkness, but a WTO deal.

We should have implemented that two years ago and would now be past the worst difficulties of transition and vigorously striking global deals. We can still belatedly do that: so-called ‘no deal’ is now the most desirable possible option. That is what we should now actively promote. And sowing a minefield along the southern fringes of Fermanagh might demonstrate to the giggling Irish that we have a sense of humour too.