I really like this article, it sums up a lot of my own thoughts about how worryingly extremist and uncompromising the government has become. You know something has gone seriously fucking wrong when Priti Patel has been allocated a key position in the trade committee - a politician who has never allowed herself to have a thought deeper than a thimbleful of piss. Dangerous days, mates.
To let in a voice like Hammond’s would mean accepting certain realities: that the risks to our future prosperity are real and present; that an economic downturn cannot be dismissed as scaremongering when it is actually in train; that we do not hold every ace, or even any ace, in the coming negotiations, and some humility may be unavoidable; that business voices, even when they say things you don’t like, are not necessarily doing so for base self-interest. These ideas cannot be permitted; the hard Brexiters have nothing but their confidence. It would not survive pluralism in the smallest amount.
Other qualities attached to extremism are less evident: you’d expect the hard Brexiters to be taking delight in their own victory, where instead there is only a querulous obsession with naysayers. You’d think, given the burning fury of their convictions, that they would be overflowing with plans, yet the plan extends no further than to protect themselves from scrutiny and debate. You’d hope for consistency and coherence; in its place, the bizarre spectacle of a party claiming to have been against the single market all along, because Michael Gove once said so.
