28/04/2016
Before going any further on this, I need to say that there is no intention on my part to give up. I intend to fight to the bitter end, and fight to win. And nor in any way do I concede that we are losing the battle. The EU referendum is still very much winnable.
That said, one can concede that the ever-more bizarre conduct of Vote Leave is causing serious concern. In particular, its refusal to offer a coherent exit plan is not backed by any intelligent argument which would support their stance.
Our best understanding of the situation is that Vote Leave does not wish to commit to a specific plan on the basis of arguments offered by
Dominic Cummings in June of last year. "There is much to be gained by swerving the whole issue", he wrote - in a statement that has turned out to be the guiding principle of the official "leave" campaign.
The fatal weakness of "swerving the whole issue", however, is that if the leave campaign does not commit to a specific plan, they leave a vacuum for the naysayers to fill with any number of possibilities. And since these are not concerned with promoting the "leave" agenda, the scenarios presented will always be less than attractive.
Storming into this category comes
yesterday's report from the OECD which paints a distinctly unflattering picture of a post-Brexit UK.
Specifically, the OECD sees the UK leaving without gaining unrestricted access to the Single Market and preferential access to 53 non-EU markets. It asserts that UK trade would be initially be governed by WTO rules, leading to higher tariffs for goods and to other barriers in accessing the Single Market, notably for financial services.
In their scenario, bilateral UK-EU trade would contract and by 2020, these effects could shave off over three percentage points of UK GDP, representing costs equivalent to £2,200 per household. Not until 2023 would a free trade agreement with the EU be concluded, similar to the one between the EU and Canada. It would provide a partial offset for UK trade but the costs of accessing the Single Market would still be higher than they are now.
The UK would also continue to face additional barriers on third-country markets to which preferential access was lost as a result of EU exit. Negotiating new trade treaties would take time. Longer term, therefore, Brexit would continue to generate substantial structural changes in the economy, reflecting the new relationship with the EU and new policies over 2024-30.
There are more details, many more, but they don't really matter. The point is that the scenarios on offer from the OECD are so far distant from what we suggest in
Flexcit that, had this plan been officially on the table, we could have blown the OECD out of the water. We would simply say that the organisation did not represent anything we had suggested or could endorse.
That is the point that completely contradicts the Cummings "strategy". To counter spurious exit plans, dressed up as disaster movies, we need to have our own plan. To have one completely wrecks the current opposition game. Their substitute plans can no longer purport to represent anything other than attempts to sabotage the "leave" agenda.
At that point, however, the alternative Cummings thesis cuts in. And plan that the leavers produce, he says, becomes the target for all comers. He is worried that, as in the Scottish referendum, defects will be exposed which will destroy the leave case and wreck the campaign.
The weakness here is that Cummings had constructed this scenario before he had read Flexcit, and with a less than perfect knowledge of the EU. This is a man, after all, who asserts that the Commission tells us that the Single Market comprises the euro and the Schengen area, and that there still is in force a Clinical Trials directive.
What he hasn't factored in is that the process of globalisation is making the EU redundant. This makes Flexcit, with its highly developed globalisation agenda, a cast-iron plan that sets an impossible task for the remainers. They cannot deny that globalisation is happening, they cannot deny that global bodies are taking over the legislative agenda and they cannot deny that the EU is progressively ceding its powers to those global bodies.
Furthermore, they cannot fight is their own logic. If getting rid of 28 sets of regulations and replacing it with one is the justification for the European Single Market, then the advantages of replacing 160-odd sets of regulations with one, to develop a Global Single Market cannot be denied.
The barrier to Flexcit, therefore, is not the "remain" camp, but the "leavers". It is they who are wedded to the idea of getting rid of all the troublesome regulation. It is they who are failing to recognise that it is coming not from the EU but from the distant and largely anonymous globalisers - that by embracing global regulation we render the EU superfluous to requirements. Thus, it is leavers in denial who are creating the problem.
Nor indeed is this the extent of their denial. Their rejection of the need to retain for a temporary period the freedom of movement that comes with keeping the EEA as an interim option is also holding us back. Never mind that, as the globalisation agenda eventually leads to the abolition of the EEA, the institutionalised freedom of movement is also abolished. They can't think that far ahead.
And nor can the likes of Cummings cope with the inherent simplicity of a plan that can set out all the necessary detail in just over 400 pages. Back last June, the man was suggesting that "the sheer complexity of leaving would involve endless questions of detail that cannot be answered in such a plan even were it to be 20,000 pages long". And the longer it was, he wrote, "the more errors are likely".
But, if we adopt an already existing template, in the form of the EEA, and then repatriate the
acquis, there is no need to restate the detail. And there need be no concern about introducing errors. We simply take on that which already is. The 20,000 pages already exists. There is no need to rewrite them.
On that basis, the few arguments that Vote Leave ever had against adopting a coherent exit plan fall by the wayside. Yet the very reasons for having an exit plan are getting stronger by the day. We see this in the OECD report, and this is by no means the last we will see of this tactic.
In my view, therefore, we are at a turning point in the campaign. If we are to win, Vote Leave must listen to its critics, concede it was wrong and move rapidly to publish a coherent exit plan - and then stand by it. If it does not, I don't see how we can win.
We perhaps have a window of two, maybe at the most three weeks for Vote Leave to deliver a sensible exit plan. If they do not, we will in any event be pushing Flexcit for all we are worth and such is its strength that maybe we could just about prevail on our own.
Frankly though, I would prefer to avoid the
Kasserine Pass scenario where we have to fight through our own side to get at the enemy. We haven't got the time or the energy to defeat Vote Leave as well as the remains. We would prefer to win with them, rather than have them undermining our efforts.
