George Orwell

• THERESA May’s mantra “Brexit means Brexit” and the Brexiteers’ McCarthy-like silencing of dissident voices are as insulting and destructive as George Orwell’s slogan, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

That was in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book he wrote while living in Islington 70 years ago.

There is nothing clean and certain in the government’s haphazard policy on the EU. In fact, three outcomes are possible. First, that the “hard Brexit” approach is executed by 2019.

That is, we exit from Europe and replace trade tariff and non-tariff arrangements with 27 countries on the continent in less than two years. And resolve key questions around Ireland, Gibraltar, security and the €60bn pensions and liabilities bill.

These things matter to our European neighbours too. They won’t roll over the same way we wouldn’t. All settled within two years? It won’t happen.

Second, there is the “cliff edge”. We drop out of the EU into World Trade Organisation rules and speedily engage with 163 countries as a neat substitute for an existing arrangement with 28 countries built over 40 years.

We become a mercantilist super-charged Singapore on Thames, free-trading the globe while at the same time rejecting our biggest trading partners across the Channel. Impossible. And the impact on high prices and low investment in this country will hurt. Badly.

Third, the hard reality dawns and we start to hear more and more about “transitional” periods, more and more about “implementation” periods, as the Tory government proves unable to deliver on its empty promises and empty posturing.

The Brexiteers will make Theresa May’s position untenable. Labour will continue to be in disarray. More and more resourcing will be moved into the Brexit departments, draining other services – the NHS, our schools, housing, transport, welfare, the environment, our police services – of necessary talent and money at a time when budgets have already been cut by years of austerity.

We will all suffer. Our children and grandchildren will suffer more.

We weren’t given the true picture before last year’s referendum. We have to hold the Tory government and its Labour supporters to account.

George Orwell also wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Doublethink means holding two contradictory beliefs and accepting both of them.” This is what “taking back control” really means, from Labour as much as from the Tories. We have to fight for a better deal and resist this self-destruction before it is too late.

NICK WAKELING
Islington Liberal Democrats