Thread by @uk_domain_names

My response to Theresa May's Brexit letter (also available in PDF at the link below)

"Dear Prime Minister,

As I read your letter, penned on the occasion of the signing of the Brexit deal, I find myself confused, saddened and angry in equal parts."
drive.google.com/file/d/1jDOXqJ…

Confused, because your letter contains so many clear contradictions and outright lies, it is impossible to understand what we are supposed to make of it. Indeed, I am not even sure that you believe what you have written. What exactly do you hope to gain by putting forward

something so full of holes?

Saddened, because it proves beyond doubt that you have abandoned your duty – enshrined in the Code of Conduct every MP pledges to adhere to – to work in the national interest, in the interest of your constituents, and to make every decision on merit.

Brexit fails all three of those tests.

And angry because, despite overwhelming evidence that the hodgepodge frankendeal you are agreeing to will please nobody and has zero chance of being carried in Parliament, you persist in running down the clock by pretending it is viable.

Each passing minute brings us closer to Brexit Day, and the waiting cliff-edge of no deal. No deal remains the default Brexit outcome, a consequence of you having triggered Article 50 when you did. We are on the conveyor belt towards the pool of sharks. Absent a deal, we will

fall off the end of it on 29 March 2019 at 11pm.

From the outset of your premiership, you have interpreted a razor-thin margin for Leave in an advisory referendum as a mandate for pursuing Brexit at any cost. But the outcome of a vote cannot affect the outcome of the

negotiations themselves, any more than someone could vote to win the lottery or vote for their team to triumph in a key match. Cause and effect don’t work like that. By the same token, it is impossible to vote for Brexit to be good.

At best, the advisory referendum result imposed a duty to try and make Brexit work. And nobody could accuse you of not trying. Your Government has spent £4.2 billion on Brexit planning and preparations, money that could have gone to a desperate NHS, to failing schools, to an

over-stretched police force. Instead, you opted to spend it in pursuit of Brexit. Thousands of civil servants have worked on the problem full-time, and an entire new ministry, DExEU, has been devoted to nothing else. (DExEU alone has consumed £100 million in salaries to date).

Having expended all that money, all that effort, it is now overwhelmingly clear that every possible form of Brexit will leave the UK poorer, weaker and more isolated in the world, at a time when we are beset with dangers on every side. From Russia’s meddling in the democratic

process to China flexing its economic muscles, from Donald Trump’s disdain for NATO and the UN to the rise of hard-right governments across the world, this is the worst possible time to retreat behind closed borders. Instead, we should be reaching out to our neighbours – our

friends – and clubbing together with them to fend off these and other challenges.

The deal on the table cannot be in the national interest. It locks us into the EU’s structures without giving us any say as to how the EU is run. We will leave the EU on Brexit Day, that much is

certain. But, like someone jumping out of a plane without a parachute, we will be reliant on the thick cord of transition to shield us from the horrors of no deal. For so long as the transition period continues, the worst Brexit consequences will be held at bay. But we will be

hamstrung in our ability to sign new deals, and we will be forced to stay in lock-step with every rule change introduced by the EU, regardless of whether it advantages or hurts UK interests. We can cut the transition cord, sure, but then we’re immediately back to the no deal

scenario which your own Government figures estimate will gouge 8.8% off GDP.

The EU made a strong, generous offer on free movement. You chose to rebuff it, and perpetuate instead a new, more virulent form of the aggressive “hostile environment” you instigated as Home Secretary.

Your chosen approach is sickening to any fair-minded person. We don’t need the overwhelming statistical evidence that immigrants contribute far more than they cost the UK to know that what you are proposing is just plain wrong. We can already see its impact writ large on the

faces of our EU friends and family, colleagues and neighbours, and it is heartbreaking. Your tune may play well to the hard right of your party, but it is a harsh, clanging discord to everyone else.

Furthermore, your letter fails to address reciprocity. If we are going to deliberately make life tough for the three million EU citizens who make the UK their home, then the EU27 will logically do the same for the over one million UK citizens who have chosen a life in the EU27.

It is worth noting that the beta test of the Home Office registration system, meant to be used to register all EU citizens within 3 years of Brexit Day, took two weeks to process a little over a thousand people from a carefully defined, homogeneous pool of applicants.

At that speed, it will take over 130 years to register every EU citizen. The beta test also threw up dozens of edge cases, which suggests that the full registration process will potentially leave tens of thousands of people at risk of the kind of errors that have so grievously

afflicted the Windrush generation.

Britain used to have a reputation as an open, friendly, tolerant society. No longer. That is entirely on you. You chose to rebuff the EU’s overture, and instead pursue a narrow-minded, petty regime that is already sending valuable workers

fleeing for friendlier climes.

In your letter, you refer to spending an extra £394 million a week on the NHS after Brexit. But that money has nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit. It is going to come from extra Government borrowing, and from better than expected tax receipts.

Indeed, the best estimates to date suggest that the economy is already £500 million a week worse off because of Brexit than if the result of the referendum had been to stay. Conflating the NHS money and Brexit in the same letter must therefore be interpreted as a wilful deceit,

an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of a UK population you see as gullible enough to swallow the lie. We deserve better.

Meanwhile, Brexit has real consequences, even ahead of Brexit Day. Jobs are moving, investment is drying up, firms are moving assets to the EU27 or

redomiciling. The key passporting system that the financial sector relies on to sell their services across the EU has been abandoned somewhere along the Brexit negotiations in favour of a much weaker equivalence regime. Already firms such as Lloyd’s of London, Bank of America,

HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Standard Chartered, Daiwa Capital Markets and CME Group have transferred aspects of their business out of the UK. Similarly, dozens of insurance firms have moved their EU27 clients away, and hundreds more are poised to follow. The financial services

sector employs 3.5% of people, so the job losses may be consequential, but it also contributes a vital 11% of all taxes to Government coffers. The loss of even a slice of that tax revenue will leave a gaping hole come Budget time.

You talk about the deal delivering for all

parts of the UK, but two out of its four component countries voted to stay in the EU. You also mention that it protects Gibraltar, but the assurances given to the Spanish government on Saturday mean that it will do no such thing. Furthermore, polls taken since the referendum

show an overwhelming shift from Leave to Remain, with the gap widening every single poll. So you can be sure that the narrow majority (of voters – not of the entire UK) that came out in favour of Leave during the referendum no longer exists today.

You describe being able to seize the opportunity to do new trade deals with the fastest-growing economies, but many of those are only growing fast because they are starting from a very low base. Their growth may look good in percentage terms, but that’s playing tricks with

numbers. The total size of their market is a rounding error compared to the vast EU market we are turning our backs on. We cannot escape geography. The EU is close as well as rich. Only 0.5% of our trade is done by air, the rest goes by sea, so it is impossible to replace trade

with our near neighbours with trade with far-flung nations. Even if businesses were prepared to absorb the extra costs of doing so, there is simply no capacity to ramp up air freight to the extent needed to achieve such a step change.

You talk of Brexit being settled.

That is the biggest deceit of all. Brexit Day is Day Zero of Brexit. It marks the transition between the phoney war of the exit negotiations and the hot war of trade deals and treaties. We are out of all the EU treaties and agreements on Brexit Day, but the impact of leaving them

will be cushioned by the transition mechanism. But just because we don’t experience the result of something doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

Through our EU membership, we enjoy free trade deals with countries covering 60% of all our trade. All those trade deals will need to be

replaced just to achieve the status quo we currently enjoy, even before we can start to see any benefits from Brexit. Indeed, Jacob Rees-Mogg believes that it may take half a century for the economic benefits of Brexit to present themselves. He may not be right about many

things, but he is surely right in this. We have at least 78 trade deals to replace (the EU signs new ones every few months, so we are chasing a moving target). On average, countries such as the US, India and China take between 3-5 years to agree one new trade deal. We simply do

not have the capacity to negotiate dozens effectively in parallel, so we are going to have to pick and choose and prioritise. It is self-evident that this work will not be complete by the end of transition.

So, far from being a moment of reconciliation between Leave and

Remain, Brexit Day marks the starting point of a blame game that may endure for generations. Outside the EU, there will be no more pretending, no way to ignore the facts of Brexit, because we will be experiencing them every day. And naturally, when things go wrong – as they

inevitably will, due to the nature of Brexit itself – the impulse will be to lash out, to find someone to blame. That blame starts at the top, with those who lead us on an avoidable course to doom, but it will spread until it poisons every corner of society. That too is on you.

Prime Minister, you still have the power to take the UK in a dramatically different direction. Instead of sticking to a course that will see our economy founder on the Brexit rocks, it is within your purview to rescind Article 50 and concentrate instead on the important things

you highlight in your letter: the NHS, giving children the right start in life, building the homes that people need, tackling burning injustices, and building a forward-looking country that works for everyone.

None of those things are possible if you persist with Brexit.

If you change course, suddenly everything opens up.

I urge you to abandon your messianic quest to secure Brexit at any cost, and instead consider the true best interests of your constituents and of the UK as a whole. Hold up the prism of merit to Brexit and see it for what it

is: an unachievable pipe-dream that will rob us of our future. Make the right choice. Campaign with your heart and soul for a better future for our country, not one dictated by a vote that could never be realised in practice.

Edwin Hayward