MPs need to get real about Brexit

If, as is widely expected, MPs reject the deal that Theresa May has done with the EU, they will have put this country in a very dangerous position. I say this not to encourage acceptance of the deal, but to emphasise that this negative act needs to be accompanied by a collective positive one. If it isn’t then we either leave without any deal (an outcome that only the ill informed, the mad and the Brexiter wish for) or MPs will just end up accepting May’s deal.

Like annoying noise on a railway train, the best thing to do with complaints from Brexiters is to ignore them. Once May’s deal falls, they are no longer part of the equation. They will never get rid of the backstop unless there is No Deal. May extended the backstop to cover the whole UK and so now the UK is in the backstop until the EU says we can leave. The best way to look at what the Brexiters are doing is that they want to sabotage any solution so we leave with No Deal. Luckily we can ignore them if MPs, rather than May, is in control.

There seems to be a lot of talk about Norway plus a Customs Union as a potential way out once May’s deal is rejected. It is, after all, what any Prime Minister worthy of that title would have had in mind from the start, because it superficially appears something that could unite the 52% and 48%. But as I have argued before, thinking about compromises of this kind does not work with Brexit. Here is a not very pretty diagram that illustrates what I mean. It plots various options on two axes, economic welfare and sovereignty, in relation to where we are within the EU. (Staying in the EU is where the two axes cross i.e. zero on both axes.)

Leave voters wanted more control over events and a better life. That is what they were promised. That combination is just not possible by leaving the EU.

A compromise of sorts for Leavers would be to give them greater sovereignty at a very large economic cost to themselves and others. This is No Deal. It is not an option that most MPs can accept for very good reasons. Even if you believe the reports that some leavers would sacrifice everything for more control (I don’t), you cannot justify imposing that kind of cost on the other (more than) half of the country. It will only happen if MPs really screw things up.

May’s Deal is a large yellow square because it leaves many issues unresolved, partly in an attempt to keep Brexiters on board. Any deal May does will end Freedom of Movement (FoM), so you have a little more control if you never intend to work abroad, but a lot less control if you wanted this as an option. But any positive on this account is negated by making the backstop UK wide. By leaving the Single Market for services, it has a significant economic cost (details here, summary here).

The position of Norway plus a Customs Union, which is very similar to staying in transition or what I call Brexit in Name Only (BINO), is that it reduces as far as possible the economic cost of Brexit. However it quite clearly loses a lot of control compared to staying in the EU. In the EU we have a say and a veto over key issues, while with BINO there is no UK veto. I prefer to call this BINO rather than EEA+ or whatever because this name describes what it is.

To be clear, BINO is better than May’s deal (as the forward to this should perhaps have made clearer). They both give up sovereignty, but because BINO keeps us in the Single Market and Customs Union it is clearly better in economic terms. But once May’s deal falls at the first attempt, MPs need to come up with an alternative that commands a majority in the house if they are really going to take back control from ruinous May. Going back to renegotiate the deal, even if it were possible which seems unlikely, is not going to produce anything that is fundamentally different from the deal MPs reject.

If MPs want to take back control they will have to choose between a second referendum (or just revoking A50) and BINO. Which you prefer I suspect depends entirely on how you see the politics of Brexit. If you think the first referendum requires Leavers to have something to take away as a victory, then BINO is a price worth paying to avoid alienating voters. The problem with that argument is that the Brexiters and more importantly the press will be quick to point out that they now have even less control over their lives (they have been ‘cheated’), and for once they would be right. BINO can be seen as the ultimate insult to Leave voters: you asked to leave the EU, so we have technically done so, and we hope you do not notice that you now have even less of what you wanted Brexit to give you.

Would a Corbyn Brexit heal the nation or wound Labour?

Just suppose May fails to get a deal, or her proposed Withdrawal Agreement (WA) fails to be passed by a majority of MPs. Suppose for some reason this results in an election that Labour wins. Labour have not pledged to have a referendum in those circumstances, and I think this is more than triangulation. It is increasingly clear that the Labour leadership want to do a Brexit deal with the EU.

I think it is also becoming clear that this deal will be essentially Brexit in Name Only (BINO): we stay in the Customs Union and Single Market. The Labour leadership will want assurances on nationalisation as well as other elements in their manifesto, and the EU will give the (substantial) assurances it can without changing EU policy in any way. Labour will I suspect also come back with a package on Freedom of Movement that involves enforcing the existing rules (EU nationals have to find work within 3 months) and any other sweeteners the EU care to throw them. That all adds up to BINO.

The key characteristic of BINO (which is what gives it its name) is that everything it does can be achieved by staying in the EU. As far as any sweetners are concerned, it is plausible that the UK is more likely to get those being part of the EU than being outside it. All that BINO achieves is to give up a direct say in how the EU evolves, and giving that up without any compensation cannot be in the national interest.

So why would Labour bother to do this? The answer I think is that they want to keep the minority of Labour voters who still favour Leave voting Labour. When the leadership says that they must respect the referendum result they do not really mean that it is undemocratic to hold another referendum: they are not that stupid. What they mean is that they do not want to antagonise Labour Leavers. In addition they believe that BINO with sweeteners would convince enough Labour Leavers that Labour had got the job done, and these voters would not worry too much about the details.

Before getting on to whether they are right, it is worthwhile noting that this has nothing to do with the Labour leadership being Leavers at heart. In a smart tactical move, Corbyn in his closing conference speech said he would back a WA that came from May if she delivered “a deal that includes a customs union and no hard border in Ireland, if you protect jobs, people’s rights at work and environmental and consumer standards - then we will support that sensible deal.” The inclusion of Ireland and protecting jobs means in practice staying in the Single Market. You just wouldn’t make that pledge if you wanted Lexit.

Of course exactly the same question arises for Theresa May and the Conservatives, if as I suspect the EU is not prepared to extend the backstop to the UK and so BINO is the only deal that avoids an Irish border anywhere.

So would BINO heal the wounds opened up by the original referendum or would it satisfy no one? A positive argument would start by suggesting that most Remainers will not mind losing any say in the EU, because they would be so relieved that we had avoided a hard Brexit. The people who should be worried about this loss of sovereignty are Leavers, but they will be more concerned with actually leaving. And both groups will be relieved it is all over.

The argument against is that BINO is clearly inferior with being a member of the EU, so Remainers will know we have done something that is clearly nonsensical. Leavers on the other hand will be convinced (by the Brexit press in particular) that this result is a sham Brexit, and therefore a betrayal of the original referendum, which is roughly how May herself has described it. As time goes on both sides will forget that the government was fulfilling a democratic mandate, and instead blame it for agreeing a Brexit that nobody likes.

I don’t see how it is possible to know which of these outcomes will come to pass, which in turn means a government that enacts Brexit is risking a lot. Of course politicians are used to taking risks, but these risks normally involve trying to achieve something they think will do the country, or part of it, some good. It is somewhat novel to take risks to achieve something that in itself does nothing but reduce the country’s influence and sovereignty.

Brexit Endgame: second stage (which is unlikely to end with no deal)

We have entered the stage where everyone seems to be worrying about a No Deal Brexit. It was inevitable that the EU would use this as a threat - that is the whole point of the A50 process. Rather less obvious is that the UK would do so as well: we have master tactician David Davis - this is going to hurt us more than you so you should be very afraid - to thank for that. But to be fair, appearing irrationally stupid enough to contemplate No Deal is about the only weapon the government has in its negotiations with the EU. So both sides talk up its chances, which naturally leads everyone to panic. If you want an antidote, this post is for you, although please bear in mind that what follows is about probabilities not certainties, and you can never rule out the possibility of this government doing something really stupid.

Stage one, recounted here, was the break with the Brexiter hardliners to re-engage with the EU after six months backtracking from the December agreement. I call the second stage as what Theresa May has to do to get over the March 2019 hurdle that sees the UK exit from the EU. [1] Unfortunately, given parliament’s failure to provide any guide to the executive, our only clue about what this entails is to think about what is in Theresa May’s interests. (For May, unlike the Brexiters, there is no Brexit ideology we need to worry about, so its interests rather than ideas that matter.)

May’s primary interest is to get a deal. She does not want to go down in history (and down is where she would go if there was no deal) as the Prime Minister who led us to a disastrous No Deal Brexit. Her secondary interest is in perpetual Brexit, by which I mean negotiations that continue to keep Brexit in the news so that a majority of Conservative MPs dare not allow an election for leader and so she stays as PM. These interests tell us what May will try to do.

Perpetual Brexit requires leaving most of the negotiation of what the final relationship will be with the EU until the transition period. That might seem odd, given that this final relationship is what the Chequers document is all about, but see below. I think the EU will probably be broadly OK with that (although I do not think they should be [2]), as long as May agrees to the Irish backstop. As I argued here, May will do all she can to convince the EU that it is politically impossible for her to agree to this backstop. But the likely outcome is that she will fail, and her interests therefore require that she does accept the backstop to get a deal.

The reason why accepting a backstop is politically difficult for her is that any deal that includes it is likely to be opposed by both the DUP and Brexiters. If Labour vote against the final deal then she does not have the votes in parliament for the deal. A potential way around DUP opposition is to convince them that the UK during transition will negotiate a deal that makes the backstop redundant. (For some speculation on all this, see Peter Foster here.)That is a key reason for the Chequers document. But the DUP are as unlikely to accept her word as the EU, so they would require some form of words in any EU agreement that could be held as a commitment.

In passing, if you have a sense of deja vu about all this, you are not imagining anything. This is what happened at the final stages of the December agreement.

The problem with this approach is that anything that would make the DUP happy is likely to worry Brexiters. The more that May says the UK will stay close to Europe so the backstop will never happen, the more the ERG will talk about becoming a vassal state to the EU. It looks, at the moment, like an impossible position. But many things can happen between now and parliament’s vote on any deal with the EU, so I think it will be foolish to discount the possibility that she might just succeed. If she does, we have what I’ve called perpetual Brexit, which in reality means transition=BINO for some time if not forever. (The final deal will probably be BINO with face saving: perhaps I should call this BINOFACE.)

What threats could May invoke to get any deal through parliament. In the negotiations leading up to the deal both the UK and EU will use the threat of No Deal. However once the deal is made threatening No Deal if parliament fails to vote for it is counterproductive if she is trying to convince Brexiters, because No Deal is exactly what these idiots want. A threat of no Brexit however might inspire her Remain rebels. The same would be true of a threat of a second referendum. Perhaps the best threat for her is a general election, because neither the Brexiter nor Remain rebels would want to be responsible for a Corbyn government. The problem with any threats however is that this is not a repeated game, so there is no incentive for her to go through with her threat if it also conflicts with her interests, and people know that.

If she fails to win a vote on the final deal, I still cannot see leaving without any deal as a likely option. It just isn’t in anyone’s interests to let that happen, apart from the Brexiters. But it would be hard for the EU to agree to an extension of A50 on the hope that something turns up. This is where a referendum might become a reality (combined with an extension), as a way out of an impasse. If that happens, it will be the ultimate irony that Brexiter intransigence gives the Remainers what they want. However there is a caveat, and that is that May will propose a referendum with a two way choice between her deal and No Deal. There would be a final fight in parliament to get Remain on the ballot paper in some way.

I doubt, however, that May would want to fight a referendum where Remain is a possibility, because it is quite likely that Remain would win, particularly if Labour leads the campaign for Remain. That would make her position very difficult. As a result, she may prefer the option of a general election. A lot will depend on the polls at the time. But the bottom line is that either an election or a referendum (accompanied by an A50 extension) are more likely than crashing out with No Deal if parliament rejects the final deal. But don’t expect either side to tell you that.

The possibility of parliament voting down any deal and even the possibility of no deal, with the government stockpiling medicines etc, should focus open minds on how ridiculous our position has become. Brexit may get voted down because no one is happy with the form of Brexit we will get. Yet neither the government or parliament is able to say this is ridiculous and we should stop in now. Ostensibly this is because they feel they have to implement the ‘will of the people’. But this is so short sighted, because even the people who voted Leave will be unhappy with the Brexit they get when they see what it is. They voted, it should always be noted, for the “easiest trade deal in history” (Fox) where “we hold all the cards” (Gove). We now know better, but it seems our representative democracy is paralyzed by a vote for a fantasy.    

[1] I’m not going to stick my neck out even further than I am in this post by saying how many stages there will be, beyond saying that it is at least three. The point about calling it an endgame is that the result is clear with best play from the winning side.

[2] Some Remainers do not like me saying so, but the willingness of the EU to keep the terms on which we leave vague when it is voted on in parliament is a bit of an insult to democracy. None of their business, you may say, but they are as much part of theis negotiation as the UK. The majority of UK voters, and probably MPs, would not vote for a BINO type deal where we pay, obey but have no say, and the EU side must know that is where we are heading if a border in the Irish Sea is ruled out.

Brexit: The Endgame

The logic of the Brexit project’s demise has been there for all to see as soon as it was clear the EU would stand by Ireland’s wish for no border. The need to avoid a hard border in Ireland, now accepted by the UK government, dictates that we stay in the Customs Union (CU) and at least part of the Single Market (SM). That is what the UK government signed up to in December, without apparently realising what it had done. The only alternative, which is to take the deal offered by the EU for Northern Ireland and have a border in the Irish Sea, is not politically acceptable to the Prime Minister and many in parliament.

The EU have now made it clear that the deal offered to Northern Ireland (staying in the SM for goods without Freedom of Movement (FoM)) is not available to the UK as a whole. It is a special deal recognising the unique problems of Northern Ireland, and cannot be something offered to any member state that decides to leave. The political reason is obvious, as such a deal might become attractive to populist politicians in other EU states.

That is the EU’s position, but the UK has not even tried to test it in negotiations, because it has spent all the time since the December agreement arguing with itself. The Brexiters, who include our chief negotiator, have with the help of their Legatum helpers spent their time making various proposals each more fantastic than the last. Their final argument is that we should leave everything to the last minute because only at the last minute will the EU cave and offer us complete access to the Single Market on whatever terms we like.. Perhaps some really believe that, but there is an alternative interpretation of what the Brexiters are doing. They are trying to delay because that way they may get their own favoured outcome of no deal by default. In short, by intent or not, they are trying to sabotage a Brexit deal.

That is not the only reason why Theresa May has to finally stop appeasing the Brexiters and formally make the proposal to the EU of extending the N.I. deal to the rest of the UK. She needs to impress on the EU, face to face, that a border in the Irish Sea is not possible, and that therefore the UK is also special in that particular sense. She also needs to argue that she needs to be able to go back to the people with something better than BINO, because BINO was not what most Leavers voted for. It might lead to, for example, the UK having something like the Swiss option of favouring (in a very small way) local markets for certain types of jobs. The EU of course may not be in any mood to be kind to a government and Prime Minister that has for so long been out of touch with reality, but just in case they are she needs to give them time to be generously creative on her behalf.

To do all this she has to finally break with the Brexiters. I have seen it said that this will bring her down - it will not. As the Brexiters are a minority she would win any vote of no confidence among her party. Would they take the ultimate step of supporting in parliament a vote of no confidence in the government? With many of the Brexiter leaders having ambitions to succeed May, I doubt it. Partly as a result, I suspect all most will do is register their dissent, and say forever more that if only the UK had hung on a bit longer the EU would have caved. It will also be difficult for some Brexiters in the cabinet to stay there, but somehow I don’t think that will worry May too much. The people who will go for her in a big way will be the Brexit press, but right now as far as Brexit is concerned they are paper tigers.

The reason why May needs to dress the deal up as something it is not (or persuade the EU to leave the door open to non-BINO options until after we leave the EU) is that otherwise everyone will ask what is the point of BINO: Brexit in name only. Like transition, it will be pay, obey but no say, and to all intents and purposes freedom of movement will remain. The Brexiters will be the first to make that point until perhaps they realise it might jeopardise Brexit itself. So May has to pretend we got something worth leaving for. As I wrote in January, Brexit will end not with a bang but a whimper.

If she does manage to do all this, Labour will find themselves in a very difficult position. In the days when they were triangulating, I said it was crucial that they always stayed the Remain side of the Conservatives to keep their members and voters on board. But now they have nailed their colours to the wall: stay in the Customs Union but leave the Single Market because of its position on state aid and maybe to avoid freedom of movement. It is a position that they can get away with so long as the Conservatives are still negotiating with themselves. But if May has to agree to stay in the single market to get a deal two problems with Labour’s position become clear.

First, how does Labour’s position prevent a hard border in Ireland? If the EU will not allow the UK to be in a single market for goods only, that means the Irish border dictates BINO. If May has finally recognised reality, why haven’t Labour. An argument that Corbyn could somehow achieve a settlement that May could not is not completely stupid, but I doubt it will play well. Second, they will now be arguing for a harder Brexit than May, which the majority of their members and voters will not like. You could even see the Brexiters joining with Labour in voting against what is essentially a BINO final deal. So if May is forced to accept staying in the complete Single Market as part of the deal, expect Labour to change their position or suffer some serious political damage.

If things go as I outline here, there will be a short period where people who are not Remainers will rightly ask why are we doing this if the only substantial thing we have achieved is to have no say on how the budget we pay into is spent, and how the rules and regulations we have to obey are changed. But our political class will not draw the obvious implications of that. A true statesman of a Prime Minister would say I did the best I could, but for the sake of peace in Ireland and the unity of the UK Brexit cannot happen, and so the best thing for the UK to do is to remain in the EU. And if I then ask why that does not happen in the UK, my best answer is because of an ideologically driven right wing press. Their great achievement will have been to campaign for a Brexit that gives sovereignty back to the people which ends up doing the opposite.

Theresa May’s perpetual Brexit and Labour's forsaken base.

Two pieces of recent Brexit news are that a majority of the ‘war cabinet’ outvoted May on the choice between two unworkable, and therefore unacceptable to the EU, proposals to keep the Irish border infrastructure free, and Labour plans not to support a Lords amendment to keep the UK in the Single Market (SM). I want to consider each in turn.

The Brexiters, and their followers who just want to be PM and are signaling to party members, have put their collective foot down over the Irish border. This could imply that May will have to finally break with the Brexiters. But first she will try to do what she has done since negotiations began, which is to find a fudge that is good enough for the EU and which just keeps the Brexiters on board. I have no idea if such a fudge is possible, but suppose she manages to achieve one and prevents a revolt from the rebels in her party, so we leave in 2019 as planned.

If that happens, we are in danger of having perpetual Brexit. A final deal cannot be fudged, and the reality is that no deal is possible that will keep the Brexiters happy and be acceptable to the EU. The stumbling block is the Irish border: the EU will not negotiate an FTA that requires a hard border, and the Brexiters will not accept either the UK staying in the Customs Union (CU) and SM for goods, or a border in the Irish Sea. A crunch point could come at the end of 2020, but to avoid that May will plead for an extension which the EU may grant. And so it will go on: perpetual Brexit.

In a strange way, it is in May’s interest for this to happen. No one thought she would last for more than a few years after the 2017 fiasco, but Brexit keeps her in place. The majority of the parliamentary party dare not allow her to go because they will get a Brexiter in her place, given that it is members who ultimately decide. Furthermore, the closer we get to 2022 the less the party will want a bust up over how transition ends, so she fights another election.

If she wins the 2022 election would that finally give her the confidence to do a deal with the EU and ignore the protests from the Brexiters? Two factors suggest not. First, the new intake of Conservative MPs could mean that she would lose a vote of no confidence over Brexit. Second the right wing press, with the election out of the way, might not hesitate to call betrayal if she agrees any kind of deal with the EU. Both the press and Brexiters, knowing that BINO was not at all what they had in mind, would be looking to break off negotiations with the EU and go for No Deal. If she gets an outright majority a deal that puts a border in the Irish Sea becomes possible, but I doubt she will take it or the party will allow it.

The underlying logic is simple. For Brexiters, transition is only bearable because they see it as a stepping stone to a hard Brexit. The EU will not negotiate an FTA without a border in the Irish Sea and no hard border in Ireland. These are irreconcilable positions, a point which the media have just not taken on board. So if May does fudge her way to agreement on the withdrawal bill, it means perpetual Brexit negotiations. Transition, or Brexit in Name Only (BINO), may not sound too bad, but it means never ending uncertainty because business cannot rely on this arrangement lasting decades.

One way to stop fudge is to force the government to break with the Brexiters. One of the difficulties Tory rebels will always have is that it is difficult to vote against a final deal that is fudge, because just as with the original Leave vote fudge can mean almost anything the fudgers want it to mean to get votes. As the polls I discussed here show, it is only by talking about something concrete that voters say wait a minute that was not my Brexit. Which is why votes on Lords amendments to the UK’s withdrawal bill to stay in a CU and (tomorrow) the SM via the EEA can be so useful. Conservative rebels think that with Labour’s support they could win both votes in the Commons. But while Corbyn has been persuaded to back the rebels on a CU, he appears unwilling to do the same on the SM.

I have talked a lot about Labour’s triangulation strategy. That strategy works best when all those who want something that is softer than Theresa May’s Brexit think Labour in reality wants what they want, whatever Labour might actually say. In a purely two party system with rational voters Labour can get away with disclosing that they really only want a slightly softer Brexit than May, because Remainers have nowhere else to go. But reality isn’t like that in two important respects: Remainers can vote for the LibDems or Greens (many thought the Greens would be hammered in the local elections - they gained seats), or they can not vote at all.

Until now, I think we have evidence that Labour has largely succeeded in being all things to all those wanting something softer than May, including those who want to Remain. But as crunch time comes closer this is going to be difficult to sustain. So what does whipping your Lords against voting for the EEA option disclose: that, as long as May is in charge, you are content to see the UK leave the Single market. [1] That might firm your support among some Labour leavers, but it pisses off all Remain supporters and those Leavers who want to stay in the SM.

I think this is a mistake, although I am happy to have experts tell me otherwise. I think it is a mistake because you will lose more votes from disillusioned Remainers than you will gain from reassured Leavers, even when you allow for where each are in parliamentary seats. I keep being told that this is the Tories Brexit, but the moment Labour enable it they become complicit. If car factories in the North East go because we leave the SM, they cannot claim this is not our fault because we abstained on a vote that could have prevented this. Voting to stay in the SM indicates economic competence, which always matters in elections and particularly matters for Labour. 

It also seems like a political mistake beyond votes and reputation. The theory seems to be that a vote to stay in the CU, which the Lords did pass with Labour’s help, will do all the required damage to May. But there are those who argue that such a vote can help her, by giving her an excuse to ignore the Brexiters and do a deal. The Brexiters will be furious, but what can they do at the end of the day, as May can defeat any vote of confidence because Conservative Remainers do not want a leadership election. Wth UKIP dead, they have nowhere to go. May, free of the Brexiters, might even achieve a final deal by 2020 (although crossing her own red lines to do so), and fight the subsequent election as the Prime Minister who got Brexit done.

Which is a long winded way of saying that a vote on the CU may not be enough. If Labour does kill a vote on the SM, they lose another chance to cause problems for May, and this time over an issue she really does not want to lose. Put simply by doing this Labour may be passing up a chance to do great, and possibly terminal, damage to May’s leadership. So the Lords decision looks bad in terms of votes, and bad in terms of politics.

Perhaps most importantly it is also bad in principle. Staying in the SM as well as the CU is the right thing to do if someone else is doing the negotiation. We need to stay in the SM for goods to avoid a hard border in Ireland, and therefore to get a deal with the EU. But the UK is really strong in exporting services, so leaving the Single Market for services is just another act of self harm. I have always been worried, since my time on Labour’s EAC, that the leadership underestimated the damage leaving the SM could do. And if truth be told the Leave vote was won on false pretenses, which means few voted Leave thinking they would be poorer. Which is why there is no mandate to leave the Single Market.

To those who say that Labour have to appease those who voted Leave in our traditional heartlands I would say this. Past Labour leaderships have for many years neglected their traditional heartlands, partly in efforts to appeal to the middle class and partly by embracing neoliberal ideas. They have subsequently tried to win back their traditional base through appeasement over immigration. It did not work then, and it will not work now with Brexit. You win Leavers back to Labour by focusing on the economic issues that matter to them, and not by votes in the House of Lords. 

Appeasement over Brexit is a mistake because Labour alienates its base, just as happened with austerity and immigration. It is time Labour stood up for its principles, which include better public services. Leaving the Single market will mean less money for public services [2], which is why 87% of Labour party members want to stay in the Single Market. Leaving the Single Market is a policy that should be opposed, not enabled.  

Postscript: The Lords amendment was passed by 247 votes to 218. 83 Labour and 17 Conservative peers defied their party and voted for the amendment. Only 3 Labour peers voted against the amendment. Jeremy Corbyn now has to decide whether he regards leaving the Single Market as more important than inflicting what could be a mortal blow to Theresa May. 

[1] We need to dispense with one red herring here. Abstaining does not mean neutrality. If the Lords amendment succeeds it puts the issue on the table, and Conservative rebels think they have the vote to support it with Labour’s support in the Commons. If it fails, it is less likely to be resurrected in the Commons. To say that the EEA option is not Labour's preferred option is irrelevant because they are not in charge and they have limited influence on the outcome. This vote is one point of influence, and they have gone for the worse option. 

[2] Whether they intended it or not, the writings of MMT seem to have convinced many people responding to me on twitter that lower UK GDP has no implications for the level of UK public services. Lower GDP, caused by lower labour productivity because Brexit diminishes UK trade, reduces the resources available to go to private and public consumption. The only way you can avoid less resources going to public consumption is to cut those going to the private sector. Nothing in that statement contradicts or can be changed by anything in MMT theory. If resources are underutilised they should be fully utilised, whether we are in or out of the EU. This is not about utilisation of resources.