Banannas

Since I'm bored.... 1. Do you feel you were mislead to by Johnson and Gove about the benefits of Brexit? Not personally, no. I do not look to politicians when it comes to important decisions - especially not Beavis and Butthead. I believe it was broadly misrepresented as an economic proposition when it was always a constitutional question as to whether the British people wished to be subsumed into a political union in which they have very little say. 2. Should we have left the EU? Yes. We should never have joined. At most, we should have joined Efta and been a partial signatory to the EEA single market. 3. Have you seen any benefit being out the EU? Not as yet. The political class has refused to capitalise on any of it because it's beyond their imaginations to do anything differently - which is why we're increasingly an economic basketcase with ruinously expensive infrastructure and energy. 4. Have you or your business suffered in anway? If I wasn't a political writer, I'd be hard pressed to tell you if anything had changed at all. 5. Would you like to rejoin the EU? No. I do not want Britain to be a mere region in a federal Europe. I could be persuaded to join a successor organisation were it confined to trade and voluntary economic cooperation. With the organisation being what it is, I wouldn't be sorry to see Russian tanks roll into Brussels. I'd regard them as liberators.

Re-joining the EU doesn't rebuild power stations. It doesn't rebuild oil refineries or steel mills. Quite the opposite in fact. It doesn't make any facet of our decrepit governance function any better. Re-joining isn't a magical time machine that takes us back to 2016. It doesn't undo the costs of lockdown or reverse the Boriswave. In most practical respects you would be hard pressed to notice we'd re-joined, not least because we never set about dismantling the regulatory constructs of the EU. All it would really do is bake in the decline. But it's not going to happen anyway. The EU is barely inclined to change the existing relationship without major concessions on fishing and free movement, has zero interest in taking us into a customs union, and there is no re-joining the single market without joining Efta and the EEA. There's even less enthusiasm for a protracted accession process that will be reversed by the next right wing government. Burnham only thinks any of it is a political possibility because he doesn't know anything about the EU - and learned nothing whatsoever from Brexit. My hunch, though, is that he won't touch it with a barge pole. It causes him as many political problems as it solves, and he's just saying it to show a bit of ankle to the remainer obsessives in the party. Nothing Burnham says or does is sincere. Everything about the man is fake. Most of what he believes can, should or will happen will crash into the reality barrier before the next budget. He's already a lame duck PM. He just doesn't know it yet.