Preparing the public for a climbdown - Brexit edition (thread).
1. If you want Britain to stay in the single market, you need to start getting the British public to accept that this will involve concessions that Brexit voters will consider significant, if not intolerable /
2. The advantages of single market membership are the result of it being a single economic area within which economic discrimination is forbidden. That means free movement of people, no more state aid than anyone else, and so on./
3. The EU will not provide carve-outs on this for Britain. If it had wanted to it would have given them to David Cameron in his renegotiation. Now that Britain is leaving it is even less likely to. (For slow learners: less likely than not at all is still not at all) /
4. Therefore the debate in the UK, which is all about which special carve outs to ask for is a waste of time (unless you deliberately want to ask for something that will be rejected and so be justified in walking out of talks) /
5. This is time that would be better spent preparing for the consequences of that rejection when it comes. For government: doing the necessary work. For opposition, holding them to account on this /
6. If Britain is to stay in the single market, either through the EEA or by abandoning Brexit, it has to change its mind on immigration. Remainers need to explain why freedom of movement is at least on balance worth it. If they can't do that, they will fail. /
7. And if they can't persuade the British public of that, they don't deserve to succeed. There is little to be gained by somehow conning the british public into abandoning their vote to leave by pretending the EU is something it isn't./
8. The EU is a political project to promote peace and prosperity among its members by eliminating discrimination and political differences between them. If Britain doesn't or can't share those aims, it shouldn't be a member./
9. Instead of accepting what the European project was for the UK deceived itself that it was economic not political, that freedom of movement was added at Maastricht and that membership didn't entail giving up some sovereignty./
10.The REMAIN campaign failed because it was defending this false prospectus. If you wan't to reverse Brexit you need to convince people to join what the EU actually is, not what you think they might accept it being. If not, it's time to accept the vote and move on. ENDS
