Let’s get Britain undone

I fear that Boris Johnson’s battle cry of “Let’s get Brexit done” will in effect be replaced with the notion in the title above.

Say what you will against the EU, and God knows I said a fair bit, but it offered HMG an invaluable asset: a scapegoat. Our leaders could effortlessly blame many of Britain’s ills on that pernicious contrivance, with its red tape, restrictive trade practices and swarms of infra dig immigrants inundating our shores.

However, that chalice was poisoned. Rather than reducing the whole issue of Brexit to its core, regaining sovereignty, Johnson et al. dragged in a wide raft of economic benefits supposedly to be accrued as a direct result of leaving the EU.

Such benefits can indeed come our way, but not against the backdrop of the government’s asinine home-spun policies. New opportunities are there, but it takes wisdom and resolve to take advantage of them.

Thanking, as we all should, Boris Johnson for getting Brexit done, we must still keep a watchful eye on his plans, to make sure that Britain won’t be undone should they come to fruition. Alas, what I’ve seen so far comes close to that tired cliché: a recipe for disaster.

“This government has a very clear agenda to use this moment to unite and level up and to spread opportunity across the government,” writes Mr Johnson, making one wonder whether he meant to say “across the country”. After all, the government is already replete with opportunities for its members and their staffs.

And, if I read Johnson’s intentions correctly, it’s there, and not among common folk, that the best opportunities will remain concentrated. For that’s the inexorable consequence of any attempt by any state to ‘level up’.

If the trimillennial experience of recorded history is anything to go by, a state can only level down, not up. A government may succeed in making everyone (except its own members and their retinue, naturally) equally poor, but it’ll never be able to make everyone equally prosperous.

The very nature of market economy precludes upward levelling because, for the economic activity to remain robust, economically active people must compete for higher rewards. And any competition has its losers as well as winners.

Granted, a civilised society mustn’t let its people lose too badly, by, for example, leaving them to starve to death. But that desideratum falls far short of the levelling up inscribed on the banners of our newly sovereign government.

Free markets may at times be cruel to some people, but they have been proven historically to be the only guarantor of a prosperity spread widely, if not equally. History also shows that any attempt to interfere with the free operation of markets in the name of equality will only spread penury.

Edmund Burke knew this more than two centuries ago: “The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.” The intervening period has done nothing to disprove this statement.

So far HMG hasn’t regaled us with many concrete plans, but even the general outline vouchsafed to the public makes me cringe. There are broad hints at giant construction projects financed out of the public purse, whose strings will be loosened to reduce unemployment and increase equality.

This stratagem has failed, except in the very short term, everywhere it has ever been tried, be that within the framework of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, Hitler’s copycat Four-Year Plan or Roosevelt’s New Deal. Such is the brutal truth of every hue of socialism: it fails.

Whether the chains binding the economy are made at home or abroad, they are just as restrictive and painful. And the early indications are that HMG is deaf to the clanking sounds of those tethers. For another big project mooted by Johnson is frankly couched in Rooseveltian terms: the Green New Deal.

This again constitutes what Burke described as economic subversion, and it would be destructive even if undertaken at a time of economic boom. Even thinking of something like this when the country has been crippled by Covid is tantamount to sacrificing the economy at the totem pole of ideology. It’s with avuncular pride that Comrades Lenin, Stalin and Mao may be looking at Comrade Johnson out of their graves.

In the same article, he mentions in passing that his Brexit deal “perhaps does not go as far as we would like” on financial services. Allow me to translate: British financial institutions will only be granted access to EU markets if they continue to be bound hand and foot by EU regulations.

Labour critics spotted the problem with their eagle eye, but they didn’t comment on the true depth of the pitfall. Being institutionally more concerned with employment than economic success, they gnashed their teeth at the potential problem for those employed in financial services, about seven per cent of our total labour force.

But the real problem is that those seven percent generate almost a quarter of Britain’s GDP, making the City both the most important and the most vulnerable of our economic institutions. Hence the EU’s continuing ability to lord it over our financial services exposes Britain’s economy to grave risks.

Germany and France have been toying with the possibility of replacing London with Frankfurt even when Britain was still in the EU. Now they may see that possibility as a punitive measure, much needed to prevent further exits.

And make no mistake about it: EU leaders still think in those terms. In one of his increasingly strident speeches, Manny Macron said two astonishingly insane things the other day. First, France’s sovereignty is more secure when vested in a supranational setup; second, Brexit threatens the sovereignty of the EU in general and France in particular.

While showing a feeble grasp of political theory, the speech is a veiled statement of practical intent: for all the reassurances of lasting friendship, the EU sees Britain as a direct threat to be thwarted. Johnson’s failure to protect the City thus takes on dimensions vaster than merely the need to protect one in 14 British jobs.

None of this should imply that my enthusiasm for Brexit is in any way diminished. Since EU membership made mockery of Britain’s history, constitution and her whole political ethos, stopping that abomination was the just thing to do.

I only hope HMG won’t live to regret losing the ready EU excuse for its own ineptitude.