Your
immigration is running at 500,000 a year. Your new blue passports are made in Poland by a company majority-owned by the French state. Your
economy is £33billion in the hole. Your boy Boris is out of power and going on trial. Your sole border with the EU is not being controlled, nor can it be. Your fishing industry, your farmers, and your trade deals, are all worse. The left behind are still there, and living standards have slumped. Your Parliament was illegally closed, then told what to do, and your NHS still hasn't seen that £350million a week.
Brexit just isn't working, and no-one's doing bugger all about it. "But... but... well that's not MY fault!" ( Image: Getty Images) Tory Brexit deal to face huge test on same day as
Boris Johnson Partygate grilling A survey on the day of the 2016
referendum to leave the EU found that half of those who voted out did so to restore Britain's sovereignty, and a third wanted to control immigration. Studies found that poorer, less-educated voters backed it because they were losing out, and gambled on change to try and break even. A survey this week by Redfield & Wilton Strategies has found 61% would vote to rejoin the EU. If you include the 'don't knows', there's still a healthy 56% majority. More than half of people polled want a referendum in the next five years. While some on both sides who've changed their minds, more of those who voted to Leave have switched to Rejoin. But perhaps the most telling fact is this, from a poll for More in Common and reported by Politico: only 22% of people who voted Tory in 2019 want to rejoin, but the figure is 82% among those who backed Labour. Throw in a few million under-24s who didn't get a vote last time, and it becomes politically vital we go back to the EU and ask them to try again. The only question is for how long after he takes office could Keir Starmer afford to keep saying the matter has been settled. Rishi Sunak heads to
Paris for crunch Channel migrant talks with
Emmanuel Macron "Well, um, er, it's not my priority to prioritise the thing voters want me to prioritise. Not yet. Maybe in a bit" ( Image: PA) The boats haven't been settled. Deterrence hasn't worked against irregular immigration since
Labour banned asylum seekers from working in 2006. It didn't work when we set up border posts in France, didn't work when we fenced off the Channel Tunnel, and didn't work after Brexit forced us to re-establish border posts in the
UK. In fact the only way to truly smash the people trafficker's' business model is to have a returns agreement with
France - like the one we had before Brexit, and which the Tories can't ask for because it would show that Brexit was based on a lie. We had more control over our borders as a member of the EU than we do outside it. But the current batch of Tories only know how to win
elections using dog-whistles and fear, and cannot get their heads around the fact immigration has an economic dividend. So they have to keep banging the angry drum about a thing they cannot, and will not, fix - forced into campaigning to make themselves look worse. The Leave campaign said we'd have sunlit uplands, the easiest trade deals in history, and a financial boost worth billions. In fact we've lost 4% of our gross domestic product, signed just four new trade deals and duplicated another 71 from the deals we had in the EU, and haven't even bothered to use our new-found independence to cut the VAT on energy bills. We did cut the 5% VAT on period products - but prices dropped by just 1%, with retailers pocketing the difference. It's the only Brexit success we've had - tuppence off a packet of tampons, for half the population, for 12 weeks a year. Don't spend it all at once, ladies! Ardent Leavers will say the war in
Ukraine and Covid had an impact on how badly it's going. Maybe. But other countries who suffered from those things aren't doing as badly as us, and are bouncing back quicker.
Britain is, by comparison even with Michael Gove, more sluggish. Didn't put that on the bus, did they ( Image: Sean Hansford | Manchester Evening News) Rishi Sunak knows this. Brexit backers worth millions know it too. They all know it, which is perhaps why those who argued for Brexit have gone so schtum. Whither Nigel Farage, these days? That bloke from Wetherspoons, the millionaire plumber, the mobile phones bloke? They're all still around, but have been remarkably quiet on the topic of how it's turned out. Kate Hoey and John Redwood are still going, but they could probably only be stopped if the sun went supernova, and perhaps not even then. It turns out that supporting a thing also supported by Marine Le Pen and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was not wise. Please insert your own eyeroll here. The economic gloom, the boats they can't stop, the left behind dropping even further back, is what will do for the Tories come the next general
election. The only way to undo it is to undo Brexit, but that in itself would be political suicide, so they're stuck doing nothing, a rabbit caught in its own meta-headlights. And their Great Blond Dope, the man who got Brexit won and then said he'd got Brexit done, who won a landslide and was supposed to be secure for life as a great statesman in the mould of Winston Churchill, spaffed his popularity up the wall in an orgy of parties and gold wallpaper, and next week will be ritually humiliated in a Parliamentary hearing into his lockdown lies. The Tories are ready and willing to move on from Boris. But with four-fifths of their voters still determined to stick with their self-destructive Brexit, Sunak has to stick with it too. "Apres nous, le deluge, eh bro?" ( Image: Liewig Christian/ABACA/REX/Shutterstock) But if Labour comes to power, the political maths changes. With four-fifths of his voters demanding realignment with the EU, but no appeteite for another referendum, Starmer has to at the very least row in behind the EU rules and regulations which would mean we could trade, move, and ignore the Northern
Irish border again. And if we asked to rejoin, would the EU even have us? After all the trouble we caused, our insistence on vetoes and rebates, and our consistently sending
Nigel Farage to piss them off., we'd be about as welcome as his yellow trousers in a
Brussels bar. The simple facts of the matter are that Brexit has been catastrophic, the Tories do not want, and cannot try, to fix it, and Labour has to. The EU wouldn't let us back in case we sent Nigel too, but the
Democratic maths demands we either rejoin in full or do so in all but name. It all depends on Labour winning next time. If Sunak can pull it round, there'll be another five years of Tory economic gloom while they wrestle with what they can't admit was their fault. And if Starmer wins, he wouldn't dare do too much to alter the status quo with Europe until a second term, when hopefully some of our cross-Channel rudeness has been forgotten. But there's one more question that has yet to be answered. Whenever the fateful day materialises that a Prime Minister announces a wish to be back in Europe, does Boris Johnson possess enough brass neck to do what he did last time - and cynically choose to back the side that's bound to win, purely so he can say it was Boris wot won it? There's a shortage of tomatoes, gas, and Tory voters, but Johnson's never been short of cheek. He'll be back - and once again try to take the credit, and not the blame.