Sometimes it is the small things in life that speak most loudly. Any amount of carefully constructed logical explanations of a problem can be easily shrugged off by someone who wishes to believe that all is well. Once that experience becomes personalised things are very different.
Cold hard realities
That is why the queues of coaches at Dover matters. The cold hard realities of what leaving the EU really means have been illustrated with stark clarity. Children heading off for a short school trip in Europe haven’t been happily chatting to their friends as they excitedly get onto the ferry. They’ve been stuck for hours in traffic jams getting tired and fed up.
The true believers in the magic of Brexit will no doubt blame all this on the ‘pesky’ French insisting on checking every British passport at the border. The majority of parents who get a mobile phone call from their unhappy child will quickly figure out that those passports only need to be checked because Britain ended freedom of movement.
British schoolchildren have had their holidays ruined by a political theory that is slowly and steadily proving to be every bit as daft as some of us said it would. If the parents are paying a mortgage then those same daft political theories will have done long-term damage to the family finances. It might be the last time the household budget will stretch to luxuries like a school trip as food prices rise and interest payments spiral.
The career costs of carnets
Whilst that problem is looming large on social media postings, another small example of the pain of Brexit was tucked away quietly on the sports pages. The Yorkshire Post reported that talented young cyclists were struggling to make their way in the sport because every piece of equipment that they take across the new border has to have its own individual piece of paper. Giles Pidcock the father of Tour the France stage winner Tom was quoted saying:
“Brexit is a nightmare, it makes it much harder and more expensive. For teams running on a shoestring it is the difference between life and death”.
Any cycling team trying to compete in a French or a Spanish event will need hundreds of items packed away in the team support vans. The cost and the inconvenience of getting clearance for every single one is doing huge damage to the sport. Very similar problems are being encountered by the British music industry. New bands can’t break through easily if they can’t tour the festival circuit across Europe.
Instead of facing up to their responsibilities for inflicting these inconveniences on the British people, the peddlers of dreams of renewed national glory have been busy inflicting yet more pain. They’ve signed the country up for membership of the Trans-Pacific partnership.
Taking back control meant giving up control
Incredibly they have had the barefaced cheek to tell us that joining a trade block on the other side of the world will be hugely helpful for the country whilst leaving one on our doorstep is somehow an advantage. They expect us to believe that it is necessary to increase the bureaucracy of travel and trade with our immediate neighbours and biggest trading partners but helpful to expose our farmers to easy competition from food produced by methods which are banned in Britain.
In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that public opinion has turned against Brexit. What is astonishing is that the majority of the British people think it was a mistake despite both the two largest political parties in the country remaining silent about the realities, telling us that we have to stick with the plan come what may, or continuing to insist that the benefits are only just round the corner.
The real truth is that the promised benefits will never arrive and the longer we stay out of the EU the worse the damage will get and the harder it will be to undo. On the day we left all the rules and regulations in Britain and in the EU aligned nicely and regaining all the advantages of the ability to travel, work, live and love across an entire continent could have been restored with ease.
With every passing week new rules are being passed in Britain and new barriers are being created that makes rejoining more difficult. Quietly tolerating the damage to the country and refusing to give voice to the serious difficulties that are becoming evident isn’t a clever strategy. It is a cowardly failure to speak the truth to the British public that leaves us exposed to the damage for years longer whichever of the big parties wins the next election.
Fantasy collides with reality
We face one of the strangest and most damaging election campaigns ever. Two sets of politicians will be trying to convince the British public that they have the right policies to make Brexit work. Meanwhile a significant majority of the British public has figured out that it has been conned and wants the damage to come to an end.
We keep being told that we must continue to shoot ourselves in the foot because the public voted for us to do so. In reality, this country never had a referendum on the realities of Brexit. We were asked to decide whether we liked nice promises or worried about dire warnings and a narrow majority chose to have a bit more money for the NHS.
Now that the NHS is hitting record lows in satisfaction ratings and our children are spending their Easter holidays stuck in coaches outside Dover it might be nice if a few more of our politicians had the courage to admit those promises were false.
Give us a referendum on whether we like the realities of Brexit and let’s see what the British public makes of what they’ve been served up. Or give us some leaders who have the guts to fight an election campaign openly explaining the realities of what misguided and ill-conceived far right political theories have done to our country.
