A lesson in risk management, why we keep churning Prime Ministers…
Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and who knows? What we do know is that is an awful lot of Conservative Prime Ministers in not very many years. From ‘strong and stable’ to ‘avoiding chaos with Ed Miliband’ – we have ended up with a Party, in fact the Party, that see itself as the natural party of Government, in a continuous and self-destructive spiral. Why?
Looking at it from a risk management perspective the answer comes back to a singular risk, left unmanaged. One that informs us of the perils of resisting reality, adding significant consequence and risk and ultimately exacerbating the problem - something that can’t be solved if we won’t, and we can’t, acknowledge it. In risk management, denial is so often the fuel that takes an issue and turns it into a crisis that burns. And, for me that problem sits, not with Brexit itself, but with the need for a perfection and purity of Brexit post-referendum and what that has meant in political terms.
Brexit was about taking back control. Brexit was an argument about sovereignty – being in charge of our own rules. And in a democracy it is perfectly acceptable that the electorate has a say and if it chooses to - votes in referenda for more sovereignty. That part of the Brexit argument, even for someone who remains strongly pro-EU, is undeniable. Scottish independence would be the same thing. And, yes you can argue that people were not told all the facts before the referendum, but honestly that is the nature of a political campaign, and both sides had free reign to make their arguments. It is unarguable that Brexit has taken back more of our sovereignty – we have more control over our rules. So, what’s my problem?
My problem is that trade deals are deals in sovereignty, always. We trade - access to markets, cheaper goods, increased competition, the freedom to trade - against sovereignty and control. That is what a trade deal is. We do them because they grow our economy and bring real benefits of greater prosperity. Brexit meant that we left the largest single trade deal on the planet. In doing so, we enhanced our sovereignty, took back control of our rules, but in doing so made ourselves poorer.
No future trade deal with the EU was going to be as good as when we were a member, and so the inevitable conclusion is that we would be poorer as result. Our economy was going to suffer. As Mark Carney pointed out recently, in January 2016 our economy was about 94% of the size of Germany, today it is 70%.
And because this was the largest trade deal on the planet, with our closest and quite wealthy neighbours, economically it was going to be irreplaceable. Particularly, if we now had a taste for sovereignty and increasing control of our rules – because that meant we were going to find other trade deals with real economic powers, very, very difficult to do. Just look at the battle between Suella Braverman and Liz Truss on the proposed trade deal with India (to boost our economy), all because it traded economic benefits against migration controls (reducing our sovereignty over our borders).
And this is the unrecognisably truth that continues to cause the Conservative Party to self-destruct. No-one is allowed to acknowledge the economic downsides of Brexit. Yet, the more sovereignty we have fought for in our post-Brexit deal – outside the Single Market, outside the Customs Union, not like Norway – the more economic harm that has impacted us. Again, this is not an argument to say Brexit was wrong – if we want more sovereignty that is legitimate – but there is an economic price to be paid. However, by maintaining the untruth that there is no economic penalty to Brexit, the Conservative Party, has ended up in serious denial with a risk that can’t be mitigated – searching for increasingly impossible ways to hide that pain. Jacob Ress-Mogg with his Brexit benefits list - vacuum cleaners being a bit more powerful as number 2 on the list!
These are all really big issues. They are hugely politically meaningful to the public and to all our futures. It is why Brexit and EU membership became so polarising through the referendum. But the Conservative Party now finds itself in a place where it cannot acknowledge or accept the reality of the situation. And by failing to accept this truth, it can’t move on, caught in a trap of its own making. The risk remains. And so they suffer from ‘Crusade Bias’ where the end is everything, the purity of Brexit so important, that there is no truth that is allowed to deny it. Hence, our trial by leader after leader, there to take us to a mythical promised land, call it ‘Boosterism’ or ‘radical free market economics’, when all around us the reality is so very different.