Monday 16 October 2017

The Real Deal

As he made clear in, among other places, his famous televised debate with Roy Jenkins just before the 1975 referendum, Tony Benn would always have insisted on a trade deal. For him, there was never any question of a No Deal Brexit. The people who are now positing, and even advocating, such a thing are johnny-come-latelies anyway, and they have no idea what they are talking about, however confident they have been trained to sound.

Not for the first time, they are making the whole cause of opposition to the EU look like a peculiarity of cranks and weirdos to a public that, once again, finds the entire subject boring beyond endurance. I have long suspected that the ersatz Eurosceptical Right that appeared out of nowhere, to lavish coverage, from the very late 1980s onwards was all a ruse to save the Eurofederalist project in Britain. I am more and more convinced that that was, and is, the case.

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