‘The Brexit implementation fiasco’ runs a headline over a comment piece in today’s Financial Times, authored by GB News, Spectator and Unherd owner Paul Marshall.
Lamenting the poor decisions taken by successive governments since the fateful decision to leave the EU – a decision cheered on loudly by hardline Brexiteer Paul Marshall – he admits that “public opinion in the UK is settling on the view that Brexit has been an economic failure” and concedes “so far, it is hard to argue with the pollsters”.
“At the time of the Brexit referendum, many of its supporters (myself included) took the view that there would be short-term economic downside but that this was more than outweighed by the longer-term political benefits of regaining national sovereignty,” writes Marshall. “We wanted to be governed from Westminster and not from Brussels, for good reasons.”
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Curiously, however, there appears to be nothing on record to show that Marshall ever thought there would be “short-term economic downside” to Brexit, in any of his public utterances or articles. Indeed, in the Financial Times of June 27, 2016, four days after the referendum, he wrote how “the immediate reaction of financial markets to Britain’s decision to leave the EU has been telling. Sterling has fallen sharply but gilt yields have rallied and the FTSE 100 has been one of the better performing equity markets in the world. Instead, the locus of pain is peripheral Europe.” That aged well!
Still, though, rather than being convinced it was all a mistake, Marshall has other excuses.
“Unfortunately, what Brexit has revealed is that our governing class is not up to the challenge of governing,” he writes. “This was perhaps the biggest error of the Brexiters. We assumed that the UK governing class would rise to the challenge.”
You see – like the Communists before them, the problem is not that it doesn’t work – it’s that it hasn’t been tried properly…
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