Richard Tice is a British businessman, heavily involved in property management and development, and is best known as founder of the pro Brexit organisation Leave Means Leave and former co-chair of the referendum campaign group Leave.EU.

He wrote recently that May’s deal is the worst deal in history. Richard queried my quote from David Davis that “my preference would be that we should remain within the Customs Union of the EU”, even if this meant the UK would have to “give up some freedoms in terms of negotiating our trading arrangements with third countries.”

In fact that statement is still on David Davis' website.

******

I was talking over the weekend to some people who could loosely be described as politicians, and we were discussing the mathematics of Theresa May getting her newly-signed Brexit deal through the British parliament, or not as it seems.

Some British sources – it’s hard to tell whether they are May supporters or opponents, but some British sources are talking about a second vote in their parliament, perhaps a few weeks after the first vote, and that enough pressure would be inflicted on enough of the waverers to get the thing passed.

There is one point that I think they are missing – if one vote going the wrong way in the parliament can be overturned when necessary, then why not do the same with the public vote, the referendum result, especially now given that the British public seem to have at least some idea what Brexit will result in, which wasn’t the case in 2016.

But that’s just one of the options if the vote goes against May’s deal, as seems almost certain. I should put in a rider here, there have been knighthoods being given out in the strangest of ways in the past couple of weeks. Also, whatever the commitment of the DUP to the Union, I don’t think much of the argument that they will vote for the deal to avoid a Corbyn government, but I do think that their commitment to the queen is only surpassed by their commitment to the queen’s shilling; they can be bought, the only question is the price.

But let’s assume that the vote goes down. Then what? The dream of the Brexit hardliners is that it triggers a no-deal exit, the least-supported scenario happens by default. That’s a possibility. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a dream that there would be another referendum, a people’s vote that would halt Brexit altogether.

I think that those two scenarios are unlikely, although the situation is so unstable that they can’t be ruled out. What I think is most likely is that the men in grey suits step in and prevent total chaos, and that Britain ends up in some sort of half-in, half-out EFTA-style situation.

The one difficulty with that assumption is that the famed British civil service, which prides itself on having once run an empire where the sun never set, yadda yadda will be able to save the day. But that’s just the problem. They still believe in their competence despite the overwhelming evidence against that. They’re not so much running on fumes, as being Wiley Coyote, running off the cliff edge and keeping on going until they look down, just before gravity kicks in.

But my problem with this whole discussion is that right across the political spectrum in Ireland there is a hint of smug self-satisfaction. Aren’t we great, we’re not half as daft as these idiot Brits, see how stupid they are, messing up their whole country.

Well, maybe. But we’re not the Roadrunner. The predictions if the UK goes to something like an EFTA association with the EU are bad; if they crash out it’s dire. But Ireland’s economy is intimately linked with the UK. If it’s bad for them, it’s almost equally bad for us. And if it’s dire for them, we get that too.

There are no good outcomes here, but some are for sure worse than others.

Comments