No.5 - Mrs May Asks us All to Come Together!

Dear James, 

I have read Mrs May’s ‘Letter to the Nation’ and I am afraid that all I can feel is very sorry for her. She has been doing an impossible job and has come up with an impossible answer. And in her inimitable style, she has decided to plough on regardless. I am afraid however, she is heading into an abyss. I am willing to admit however, that she may have done our country a service. She has revealed how any deal outside the current deal with the EU will be inferior to the latter. We will now have, for the first time, a clear set of data (The Withdrawal Agreement and the Political Declaration) to compare and contrast with what we have already. That is a kind of progress and I am sure our MPs in the coming ‘meaningful vote' will use this opportunity to come to the right conclusion for our very special nation.  

Mrs May is asking us to come together as one nation ‘in the National Interest’. The question is, what is ‘The The National Interest’? Since the Second World War every party manifesto in our nation has stated Implicitly or explicitly that its aim is to maximise the wealth of the nation. From within this overall understanding virtually everything else has come. The NHS requires ever more funding. Security always needs more cash. Our schools are hungry for extra money. We need more homes and we need more employment at levels of wages that can sustain a family independently of the state. Mrs May’s Withdrawal Bill promises, for the first time in our recent history, to make us poorer. On my previous calculations about the loss already suffered by this country since July 2016 (about £100bn), it will take us well towards 2025 before we begin to recover those losses.  Today’s NIESR report suggests that our economy will be 3.9% worse off by 2030 than if it stayed in the EU.  I have rehearsed my arguments about this in previous e-mails to you, but on Mrs May’s appearance on BBC phone in programme last Friday Mrs May was asked this precise question.  Would her Withdrawal Bill be better or worse than our existing deal within the EU? She would not, could not answer. She was unable to utter the truth. She had to reply limply that ‘things would be different.’ And that, I am afraid, sums up the mess our nation finds itself in. The Withdrawal Bill will not heal the nation any more than a band aid would heal the massive self inflicted wound upon the body politic caused by the long running Tory Civil War. 

I am afraid that many other aspects of her letter are incorrect. She says that we will ‘take control of our money’. It is the markets that will mostly take care of our money through their pricing of our pound. That is already 10-15% lower than in May 2016. She says it will ‘end the vast annual payments into the EU budget.’ It won’t. We are committed to continue paying in during the transition period. And if we wish to gain access to EU markets in the longer term, we shall still have to pay. 'We will take back control of our laws’. But we won’t . We shall continue to be subject to the ECJ during transition and again, in the longer term, if we wish to have close access to the EU, then we shall still be is-subject to their laws. Mrs May has proved that to regain our pre-2016 levels of growth we shall need to stay close to our major markets and to do that we shall either have to stay in that market or to leave but pay for its privileges. The truth is that as a Third Country to the EU, the closer we wish to have access to their markets, the less ‘independence’ we shall have to go our own way. That is the case now and it will be the case in the long term. 

The fact is that the UK is going through a massive reality check that will, if we accept Mrs May’s deal, convert us into a small, island hovering in glorious independence off the coast of the largest free trade block that the world has ever known. For what? In order for us to delight in the delusion that we can regain our lost amour propre as the nation that defeated Germany and once ruled the world?  The world has moved on. Things have changed. Our country needs to move on too.  

Our nation is in crisis. It is serious. We need to sit down as a nation to discuss the reasons behind the Brexit vote of 2016, to identify the causes of the anger and to come up with possible solutions. This is what Mrs May should have done immediately after the 2016 vote. Instead she decided to listen to the raucous cries within her own party’s Brexiteers despite the fact that the country was evenly split. To hear her constantly saying that she represents the people’s will is grating. To hear her saying that the 2016 referendum was the greatest democratic vote in our history is insulting. 48% of our nation voted to remain and Mrs May should have reflected this in her approach to the aftermath of the vote. Instead she veered towards the manic right and this is the result.  

There is no way that one of our current parties can come forward with such solutions since all the main parties were complicit in the pre-2016 situation. Unless, of course, one of the parties can come up with a radical solution that hits the problems of the UK at base. Issues of fairness, social equality and sharing in the wealth of the nation must be uppermost among such questions. Jeremy Corbyn, does not have the answers and I agree it would dangerous for him to get power with which to initiate his warmed up version of 1980’s socialism. But Jeremy Corbyn does have one quality that seems to endear him to the populace. He is offering something radical. That appeals to those who were left behind. They have nothing to lose or so they think. If Jeremy Corbyn is not the answer, what then is the answer? It may be in some sort of Unity government but I do not see that happening unless things get much worse. It may require some sort of National Commission off Enquiry to go out amongst the people to really understand their issues with the status quo. Or it may just be a new party arises with a radical agenda which offers solutions to the underlying issues of inequality, the modification of so-called free market capitalism and so on. Anything less than such outcomes will only prolong our agony. 

At the moment you are backing Mrs May as she attempts the futile objective of asking the UK population to follow her in to more endless muddle. I have also read your recent article in the Free Press and you seem to be covering yourself for most eventualities including, I suspect, a way back to the Remain camp? If I am right,  I am afraid that at this time of national crisis we will need much less Conservatism and much more root and branch restructuring of our nation’s economy and politics. 

As I said, I feel sorry for Mrs May but the time has come to move on. 

Please allow her Withdrawal Bill a decent and respectful death.  And please then vote to give the decision about the future of our country back to the nation. 

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent