The caption on screen below my face on Britain’s Newsroom read: “Elephant in the room.” This so amused my wife, Claire, she tweeted about it.
But the whopper GB News referred to was not me but Brexit. We were discussing an article in The Guardian by Labour MP Stella Creasy, chair of the Labour Movement for Europe.
She questioned why any foreign business would want to invest in a country which had cut itself off from the world’s largest trading bloc. She called Brexit “the elephant standing across our trade flows”.
And she quoted Aston University research which shows exports and imports to and from the EU down nearly a third since 2021. That, she said, represents an eye-watering annual loss to the UK of £183 billion.
But if Brexit is putting overseas fat cats off setting up in the UK there was no sign of it at Keir Starmer’s International Investment Summit this week.
The Government is now trumpeting £63 billion of extra business creating nearly 38,000 new jobs.
And the only elephant in the room they gathered in at the City of London’s Guildhall was Transport Secretary Lou Haigh’s unfortunately timed call to boycott P&O.
Fortunately, after some behind-the-scenes wrangling, it didn’t dissuade P&O’s parent company from pumping another £1 billion into the London Gateway port in Thurrock, Essex.
Like Stella, I was a Remainer at the referendum. But I despaired at the dishonesty of the Project Fear campaign run by David Cameron and George Osborne, and the Vote Leave shenanigans of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings.
Last time I looked basic rate income tax was still 20 per cent, George, not the 28 per cent you predicted. And that NHS nonsense on the side of a bus, Boris, was just risible.
As the vote approached eight years ago I wrote: “My personal position on Europe is that we are better off in, though I don’t think it would be a disaster if we pulled out.” And that is still my position.
We are a little worse off, although with all Britain’s other economic woes, we hardly notice the bits which stem from Brexit. Food is 25 per cent more expensive than five years ago, but it would have gone up 17 per cent anyway had we stayed in the EU.
If you voted for UK sovereignty – “taking back control”, as Cummings’ put it – then you got what you wanted. But there was always going to be an economic cost. The decision rested on whether it was a price worth paying.
Stella recognises, as I do, that rejoining Europe is a non-starter because of the long-term uncertainty it would cause.
She writes: “We spent years walking out, and it would take years to crawl back.” We must work instead towards making Brexit a success.
That’s why I welcome Starmer’s plan to get closer to the EU – without becoming part of it again. The more we align rules on food, animal welfare and plant safety the easier it will be for traders to move traffic through our ports.
The PM was too quick to rule out a youth mobility scheme to allow Brits aged 18 to 30 to live and work in Europe for two years and vice versa. He seems to have been frightened off by Brexiteers howling about a return to free movement – which it’s not.
Such schemes are already working smoothly. And not just with Commonwealth countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. South Korea, Japan, Iceland, Monaco, San Marino and Uruguay also operate these exchanges without any problems.
Thanks to Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework for Northern Ireland ‘sausages’ now flow freely across the Irish Sea and a vet no longer has to sign off a shipment of cheese crackers because of their tiny dairy content.
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As long as no one does anything stupid such as ditch the European Convention on Human Rights the province should be able to settle into its new hybrid relationship with Britain and the EU.
Tory leadership contenders Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch are talking about renegotiating our membership of the ECHR or leaving it. But it is built into the Good Friday peace agreement so I’m assuming they plan to leave Northern Ireland’s place in it alone.
That may not be open to them because we cannot pick and choose which parts of the UK are subject to ECHR oversight and which are not.
Article 1 says: “Parties shall secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms defined in this convention.”
The silence from Jenrick and Badenoch over how they intend to get around that really is the elephant in the room.