Does the Euro Maze have an exit?

Houdini would have had problems escaping the EU. We were told that the inclusion of an exit clause in the Lisbon treaty was a triumph for Britain just as we’d been told earlier that “subsidiary” would result from the Maastricht treaty. Neither claim was true.

Article 50 was drawn up by Lord Kerr of Bilderberg, a Foreign Office mandarin who’d gone native in Brussels. He couldn’t conceive that Britain could ever be so ungrateful as to leave the EU. So he provided that anyone daft enough to try to depart had to jump enough hurdles to intimidate them into going back.

Realising this, rampant Remainers then set out to undermine Britain’s negotiating position. They coordinated their moves with Junker, dragging things out in the hope that the May government would fall and a massive dose of fear would frighten the crazy Brits off while Junker commissioned his Naysayer, Michel Barnier to translate “non” into English for long enough for Brexit to fall apart.

Masterful. It frightened Theresa May enough to offer them enormous bribes, dilute the electorate’s demands and impose them on a reluctant cabinet. When even this produced more “noes” she tried to appeal over the heads of the Commission to their puppet masters, the heads of state. Now that isn’t working either because no one really runs the EU.

We should have learned from the humiliation of Harold Macmillan in 1962. He asked the other countries to overrule De Gaulle’s veto of Britain’s membership but they were too scared to do so. Now the smaller states have been so badly bashed by the unworkable Euro and the refugee crisis that they’ve no charity to spare for Britain. Mutti Merkel who did so little for Cameron has her own problems and the EU’s Mini Napoleon, Macron, wants to profit from our difficulties. The only chain any of them will pull is the lavatory chain.

Which is why with the EU too constipated to negotiate, the member governments too worried, and most governments desperate to show their angry electorates that bad as things are in the EU, leaving would be worse, the prospects of a reasonable deal look slim.

So the rampant Remainers and the Blair fifth column began Operation Fear Mark III, undermined Theresa’s negotiation position and clamoured for a “soft” Brexit in the hope of dragging out the agony and exhausting the nation into giving up and going back in a kind of Cleggcit.

I say call their bluff. The horrors won’t happen and the EU can’t afford to ruin us. They can’t stop flights, trade, medical supplies, or try to cripple a major market. WTO rules require fair treatment and most favoured nation rules mean that everything conceded to other outsiders, like Canada or Turkey, will be available to us.

Recognise too that a soft Brexit poses difficulties for the EU because it requires them to break basic rules, the only thing that holds the shambling mess together. The Commission knows that if the the rules are broken or diluted for Britain, other members will want the same. The rules are almost as important to them as our money.

We’ve nothing to fear but fear itself (I’ve heard that before somewhere). Make it clear that no deal means no dosh. Stop arm-wrestling the octopus and leave on WTO terms. The Common external tariff is not large. It can easily be leapt over by a competitive currency which we need anyway, in or out. If they impose the CET on us we’ll impose it on them as a useful source of revenue and a check on Germany’s  growing dominance. Trade doesn’t require treaties, but we can prepare them with a whole range of countries presently excluded by the EU’s insistence on agricultural protectionism, to come into force when we leave next March.

This requires more clear heads than we’ve shown so far. Yet it does allow us to fulfill the electorate’s wishes, to go for the world’s expanding markets rather than clinging to a foundering hulk and to manage our economy for our purposes not those of French farmers, German manufacturers or Brussels Eurocrats telling us what’s best for them.

That’s Brexit.