The sound of pennies dropping over at The Telegraph....
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Now, one of things I've been called out on in this thread, and with the benefit of hindsight it's true, I hold my hands up to that, is that I post a 'bad news Brexit story' but don't include any suggestions on what might actually make it better, so I'll try to rectify that from now on.
So how about this, as a genuine suggestion that might be sellable to both sides, is that the UK seeks to rejoin the Customs Union and Single Market. For the Remainers it is made clear that the UK is not rejoining the EU, it's simply not going to happen, this is as good as it's going to get. For the Leavers the assurance is given that the UK will not rejoin the EU, and these actions will be taken to mitigate the consequences of Brexit that have proven to be more difficult than expected to deal with, but that the UK will retain its sovereign status outside the EU.
I appreciate that straight out of the gate the objection will be that we're giving up too much sovereignty in doing so, but really, of all the arguments around that which were made for Brexit, which have proven to be true? The trade deals we're getting are the same as we already had with the EU (if that), we didn't get our fish back (and now it's a lot harder to sell what we do catch to the EU), the dinghies are still coming across the channel every day and UK businesses are crying out for foreign workers to do jobs that Brits simply don't want (and if those workers don't come from the EU, they're going to come from somewhere). Also the great hope of a fantastic trade deal with the USA has come to nothing, and on top of that we've seen the Americans drop us like a hot potato in Afghanistan and as even dunover observed a couple of pages back, our obvious and logical military partners going forward are countries within the EU.
When it comes to trade and business I think it's a lot clearer, Brexit has been a failure, I honestly believe we're at the point now where it's simply impossible to pretend that whatever the intentions might have been, the end result of Brexit has been to impose massive new walls of red tape and bureaucracy on both UK businesses wishing to deal with the EU, and vice versa, to the extent that many of them have simply stopped bothering, and those that are still trading are drowning in costs and paperwork that simply didn't exist before.
Contrary to popular belief I don't just post every 'bad news story' I come across in this thread, quite the opposite (there are loads, and loads, and loads, I don't post here), but there was one the other day about UK businesses paying over £600M in tariffs on EU exports due to Rules of Origin (i.e. not quite such a tariff free deal), a report about many more medium sized UK businesses saying they've probably got 12 months left before they go bust unless something changes, M&S are closing their stores in France etc.
There's no doubt that supply chains are under massive strain and this is leading to some shortages on shelves and elsewhere in the supply chains that aren't necessarily visible to the average person on the average day, yes this is not just a UK problem (everywhere has Covid and some degree of HGV driver shortages), but we're clearly suffering more than most.
And then of course we have the situation in Northern Ireland and the NI Protocol, that's been done to death in this thread already so I won't rehash it all again, but seriously folks, can anyone even remotely try to claim that's worked out well, not least with a border in the Irish Sea?
Rejoining the Single Market and Customs Union fixes all of this, basically overnight. UK businesses would breathe a massive sigh of relief, as would many of their partners in the EU, it fixes the situation in NI and makes the sea border go away, and honestly, truthfully, would that many people really be that bothered?
I was struck by mack's posts above which kind of leans into what I've said several times in this thread, that for the longest time the EU was really a non-issue for many people, yes we had the nonsense stories about prawn cocktail crisps being banned (which once again for the record, was a lie), but hand on heart folks, prior to the kerfuffle over the referendum back in 2015/2016, how many of you were really getting all worked up about the EU on a regular basis?
Now I know straight away this will be framed as as 'betrayal of Brexit' but go back five years and folks such as Daniel Hannan were saying stuff like 'No one is suggesting we give up our place in the Single Market' and Farage was touting the 'Norway option' for quite some time before deciding to go down the Hard Brexit espousal route, and no one found these comments way off beam at the time.
For the longest time in Leave circles, it seemed to be accepted that leaving the EU but retaining the benefits of the Single Market was a sensible and pragmatic way to do things, and the Customs Union is a natural extension of that.
From the Remainer side I think we have to accept the things we got wrong, trying to frustrate the Leave vote in the Commons was a terrible mistake, as was going for a second referendum, as were all the apocalyptic warnings about the sky falling in should Leave win the referendum, going forward I think our position needs to be that the UK is out of the EU, it's staying out of the EU and we won't try to change that, but can we work together on finding some sensible middle ground that works best for Britain as a major trading partner of the EU.
Anyway, just some lunchtime musings
