I have copied and pasted the article below - written by Allister Heath in today's Telegraph. As usual I agree with his analysis. I am posting it because the article is powerful - makes sense - and serves as a clear warning. If we move to the left because the electorate are duped and because of Boris's miss management - Britain is surely going to run in accelerated decline. It does not have to be like that. I think Liz Truss can emerge as a Margaret Thatcher and wake the country up with a dose of reality and the strong medicine the UK surely needs. We should desperately hope so.
Truss is the Brexiteers’ last hope. If she can’t deliver on the benefits of Leave, we may end up rejoining.
Allister Heath
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Beware Brexiteers, the Remainers are on a roll. They are mobilising as if this were 2019 all over again, convinced that their moment has finally come. Their excitement is palpable: Boris Johnson is finished, the Tories are sliding in the polls, and Britain has been engulfed by a tsunami of crises, all caused or exacerbated by the incompetence, short-termism or stupidity of our ruling class.
The Remainers’ strategy is two-fold. They are attempting to blame Brexit for almost all of Britain’s myriad difficulties, claiming that the pain is self-evidently worse in the UK (“Brexit Britain”) than it is in Europe, and even portraying problems that are entirely unrelated to the European question as a Vote Leave broken promise.
Some Remainers are redefining themselves as outsiders, as rebels, as supporters of windfall taxes and nationalisation, and seeking to depict Brexiteers as an elite responsible for the energy and water crises. As the political climate shifts Left-wards, they hope the anti-capitalist mud will stick, paving the way for a Labour government at least privately sympathetic to the Rejoin cause.
The propaganda is sickening, but some, including ordinary voters in focus groups, are falling for it. Inflation: didn’t Brexiteers promise that prices would fall, and real wages rise, the Remainers repeat over and over again, a bad faith and out of context argument?
The imploding NHS: what about the £350 million a week, they cry, ignoring Covid, the health system’s gross mismanagement and the actual massive increase in funding? The cross-Channel arrivals: isn’t that proof that borders can’t be controlled? Even filthy rivers are blamed, absurdly, on Brexit. Many who make these nonsensical arguments genuinely believe them, and are convinced that the evidence is in, the case is closed and that Brexit has conclusively been proved to have failed.
Eurosceptics need to take this new push to overturn Brexit extremely seriously. The good news is that figures around Liz Truss are well aware that voters are disenchanted, that some feel betrayed by the chaos and in particular by the Government’s immigration policy. There is a sense, in some quarters, that Brexiteers haven’t delivered on their promises. This must urgently be tackled.
As a result of the staggering implementation failures of the past six years, we have so far borne the costs of leaving the EU – the majority of which were the result of a choice by vindictive European protectionists, rather than the necessary outcome of leaving – while only enjoying a small fraction of the possible benefits. It was stupid not to remove VAT from energy. The trade deals and GM food changes were great, but insufficient to shift the dial.
The propaganda is sickening, but some, including ordinary voters in focus groups, are falling for it
Britain needs to diverge radically from EU economic, tax, environmental, energy and regulatory policies to attract capital, business, entrepreneurs, and scientists. We need a lot more free trade (with non-hostile countries) to ensure prices are as low as possible, and the full panoply of “Singapore-style” measures that Eurosceptics had spent 15 years advocating prior to Brexit must be implemented.
We must build the requisite infrastructure to deal with Channel blockages, and reduce our reliance on French ports. We should pull out of Joe Biden’s corporation tax harmonisation plan. Brexiteers knew there would be costs to leaving: their “Nike swoosh” theory postulated a dip followed by a sharp bounceback. The former turned out to be lower than even many Eurosceptics expected, especially when it comes to the City, but for the latter to materialise Truss must deliver the radical pro-growth policies her predecessors refused to implement.
Truss will also need far better communications, and to wage a permanent campaign for Brexit. Not enough has been made of the Australian defence deal: it would have been inconceivable while we were an EU member. The vaccine purchases were the greatest benefit of Brexit so far, single-handedly more than cancelling out all of the costs of leaving the EU. We could theoretically have pursued it within the EU but it would have been a psychological impossibility, and other countries didn’t go it alone.
Remainers are making endless false or exaggerated claims relating to Britain’s economy. When one looks at GDP numbers over several quarters, rather than absurd forecasts or dodgy model-based “counterfactuals”, the UK is doing roughly as badly as comparable big European economies.
We don’t have the highest inflation in Europe. The claim that we are outliers on food prices is equally false. It makes little sense to compare energy price rises, as some countries are fixing prices (and subsidising firms) and others are not (and subsidising consumers, as we have so far). As to trade, the Remainer tropes are misleading.
For all of that, Truss is Brexit’s last hope: there won’t be a fourth chance after Theresa May and Boris Johnson. Continued support for Brexit is correlated with support for the Tories: a slide in the latter leads to a decline in the former.
Truss will need to show that Brexit can improve lives, bolster the economy and fix broken institutions. It will be absolutely vital to fix the Channel migrant crossings: no Tory government can survive this sort of madness, especially when it promised to take back control of our borders. This may require tough action, including on the ECHR.
The heart and soul of Conservatism is at stake: the Remainers, neo-Cameroons and other Sunak supporters will try to regain control of the party were it to be crushed in the next general election. We’ve tried Brexit, Brexiteer PMs and Right-wing solutions, and they failed miserably, they will claim.
For years, a central Remainer argument was that we were a basket case, a country in decline, a nostalgic, culturally clapped-out disaster zone plagued by poor food and bad weather, compared to the supposedly thriving, powerhouses of Europe and especially Germany. This argument was out of date by the 1980s, but it took decades for perceptions to change in Britain.
It would be a disaster if the electorate were to start to believe once again that the grass is greener in Europe. Support for Brexit goes hand in hand with the belief that we can fix our own problems. Hopelessness, a sense that all politicians are equally useless, that Britain is doomed, would deal the Brexit dream a mortal blow. For Britain to be saved, Truss will need to make the most of Brexit; and for Brexit to be saved, she will need to fix Broken Britain.
