ONE certainty that Brexit has brought to all our lives is uncertainty. Of course, there are few certainties in politics – taxes and the death of hope perhaps – but, even so, most areas of public policy will have precedent upon which to draw and procedures engendered through experience. Brexit came out of nowhere and has been heading there ever since.
Somewhere in her mind, Theresa May must wonder what her premiership might have been like without it: just being a normal national leader with normal problems. We’re tempted to wonder similarly. But it is too late. We stagger on to the next round of uproar, protests and division.
Yesterday, in an otherwise inappropriately histrionic and peculiar opening speech that almost undermined his own point, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox warned MPs: “We are playing with people’s lives.” It will do as a working description of the process so far.
Outside in the real world, meanwhile, the people stagger along the rim of an abyss. Pushed towards the edge, pulled back, shoved sideways, and invited to jump, they’re expected to understand it’s for their own good.
Undoubtedly, arriving at any understanding has been complicated by the opposition parties, including the SNP, using Brexit for their own political ends, and not even competently at that. While the Tories erected a gibbet for themselves, Labour tied itself in knots with the noose.
Meanwhile, as politicians play politics, an old canard springs to mind: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Uncertainty in politics is one thing. In business, it can be catastrophic. It simply hasn’t the time for it.
And these are fractious times, with civil war in the Tory and Labour parties over Brexit and in the SNP over Scexit. These are unpredictable times, in which everyone has a Plan B, and no one a Plan A. These are interesting times, which the Chinese proverbially viewed as a curse, and which Brexit has delivered as a certainty.
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