Carl Mortished: Advice to Brexit charlatans — remember the Seventies

If you wished to provoke capital flight from the UK on a massive scale, you couldn’t do a better job than the Tory Party. If you wanted to scare foreign investors, if you wanted to make English industrialists quake in their boots, keep British chief executives awake into the small hours, you could do worse than take lessons from a former cabinet minister — Dominic Raab, say, the last Brexit secretary, who said he had not been aware how greatly British trade relied on the Dover-Calais crossing.

Or follow his predecessor, David Davis, a man who spent a lifetime in Parliament campaigning to leave the EU. But when he was offered the job on a plate, he dropped it with a great crash, trod the mess of stew into the Downing Street carpet and ran away. The man charged by the Prime Minister to frame the UK’s economic and political future had thought that his job was to strike a back door deal with Germany. He would swagger off to Berlin, round up a few bosses from Volkswagen, BMW and Siemens and offer “free access for their cars and industrial goods, in exchange for a deal on everything else”.

He ran off with a flea in his ear, just like the baffled Boris Johnson who could not understand why the EU had united in defence of the interests of little Ireland. He thought, like Davis and Raab, that the tiresome Irish would be put in their place. The high rollers at the table, Germany, France and the UK, would play the Great Game; the big boys would tell those time-serving Eurocrats to carve out of their Union a big slice of pie for good old Blighty. This is a man who spent years in Brussels writing silly jokes about the EU. But it seems no one told him the EU has a constitution, a basic law, a bit like America or Canada, countries we are supposed to understand well. You don’t ride roughshod over the basic law to satisfy the whim of a spoilt, grizzling child. You set the constitutional wheels in motion and the bulldozer of law is applied, to devastating effect.

The scale of the incompetence demonstrated by the leadership of Britain’s oldest and grandest political party is breathtaking. It explains why Theresa May was at pains at the CBI this week to reassure the massed ranks of British industry. She needed to tell them that all was not entirely lost. Her agreement with chief negotiator Michel Barnier could salvage something if everyone rallied. The unspoken message was: please don’t remove your business to the eurozone, please don’t sell the pound.

How is it possible that the party of business, the political grouping that is closest to the requirements of capital and enterprise, the party that is supposed to believe in free markets, could get this so wrong, so miscalculate the interest of a trillion-dollar economy? How could the Tory leader find herself in a position where she must pander to xenophobes across the political spectrum and then wheedle and beg for the support of Labour MPs? The lost tribe of Blairites is both appalled by Brexit and terrified of the prospect of a government led by a Che Guevara wannabe and an economy managed by a Stalinist. Can the Labour softies be won over to her side or is it, again, too late?

Even so, as the Prime Minister schmoozed the business classes at the CBI this week, she threw a few stale scraps to nationalists in her party and in Labour’s northern strongholds. She would “take back control” and Europeans would no longer “jump the queue” at Britain’s borders.

After two years of weakening investment, adrift on May’s Raft of the Medusa, I wonder whether Britain’s bosses feel entirely happy about giving back control of our laws to this Government and this Parliament. For anybody who was awake in the Seventies, it is absolutely clear that the EU brought prosperity to the UK. As the doors opened to European industrial and financial power, old British businesses struggled and many failed, unable to compete. What happened to ICI, GEC and British Leyland? But the EU brought with it an avalanche of investment and in the competitive crucible of the EU, new British businesses emerged and thrived.

Just as the EU once exposed the weakness of protected British business, it is now revealing to us the weakness of Westminster’s insular politics. Our Parliament is bipolar and utterly transactional, incapable of running a modern economy and society. Stuffed with incompetents, place-men and time-servers, it cannot create coalitions of enlightened self-interest. It needs fundamental reform.