What follows is an open letter to the Prime Minister written by a businessperson who backed Leave at the referendum but who for professional reasons is currently unable to enter the political fray. Dear Prime Minister, I have watched with a sense of appalled inevitability your recent unsuccessful visit to Brussels, characterised as it was by a lack of ideas, an absence of combativeness and a reckless and relentless desire to cling on to every rotten element of the vassal state deal that you and your small Remainer clique of advisers in Downing Street have concocted with the EU. Harsh words? Perhaps, but they are words that are endorsed – sometimes in more polite phrases, sometimes in less polite phrases – by the vast majority in our country and even of our Parliament. Why are you so recklessly clinging to every suspect element of this ‘Brexit in name only’ deal? Many believe the problem all began with your still-secret promises made to Nissan, the car manufacturer in Sunderland, shortly after you took power in 2016. You have never published those promises. Many of us guess that it was partly as a result of those promises that in your talks with the EU you then gave away – whether in ignorance or because you never truly meant to leave the Customs Union – every possible negotiating element that would allow the United Kingdom to pursue its own independent economic and trade policies. Was that so? Can you not come clean with the electorate and tell us what those Nissan promises were, how much they are now constraining you and how much your desire to cling to your secret agreement with one company, Nissan, has led you to all this foolishness? Because if that is the case, then the honourable thing for you to do would be to resign and let someone else – someone not burdened by that promise – create a way forward for our country that is not shackled by that apparently all-constraining Nissan cursed promise. If there was no such promise, then I am puzzled by your insistence that a WTO-terms deal – what is most truthfully termed a ‘Sovereign Brexit’, the thing that 17.4 million people actually voted for – must be ruled out by you. Your Remainer friends who dominate the media have managed to spin non-facts into a general belief that a Sovereign Deal would be catastrophic. Your grid in Downing Street has, month after month, delivered to a credulous press and public a remorseless stream of doom-laden statements by those rent-seeking members of the business community on whom you have chosen to rely to spin your message. Yet neither you, nor the spinners, nor your business allies, actually ever credibly articulated what the specific negatives of such a deal would be (the contemptible catastrophe forecasts by your discredited Treasury modellers, and by your apparently politically motivated Governor of the Bank of England, are no longer believed by anyone – as I am sure you must know). What could go wrong, and what would go right, in a Sovereign Brexit? The claims of your Remain-loving enablers as to what might go wrong are economic. They relate first to exports from the EU into this country and second to exports from the United Kingdom into the EU. Once even the briefest analysis is conducted, both sets of claims are quickly seen as hogwash. Exports from the EU into the UK – no disruption threat there There have been the most extraordinary and juvenile claims of potential (albeit very short-term) shortages in this country after 29th March 2019. Even you, lamentably, mentioned your diabetes and your desire for being sure of your supply of insulin. Who persuaded you to say that? Did you give the slightest thought to how ridiculous that scare story was? Insulin is sold under a wonderful system we call private enterprise, from one company to another. In the UK’s case, it’s mostly a Danish company selling insulin to companies in Britain. The insulin is put on a plane or a boat and comes over to our country. What, do you assert, would prevent this from happening after a Sovereign Brexit? Come on, what? Are you saying that the EU would somehow seek to prevent insulin being placed on a ship or a boat and exported to us? You aren’t saying that, are you? Such an action would be illegal. Or, OK: let’s even say that, however unlikely, the EU indeed decided on 29th March to start acting entirely illegally (again: for a short period of time only, which is all they could possibly ever do). Then the UK would get its insulin from the US, or the Danish company would sell the insulin to Norway, or some other non-EU country, which would then export it on to the UK. Businesses successfully deal with complications of this sort all the time. All that the EU’s (highly, highly unlikely) illegality would result in is the Danish company losing money, one way or another. But you and I know that the EU wouldn’t shoot itself in the foot like that. So, were you claiming instead that Britain would somehow put up barriers against Danish insulin coming into the country after 29th March? We wouldn’t, would we? Come on, you know that, don’t you? So why did you raise a false scare story, that would have had tens or hundreds of thousands of diabetics worried that their supply of insulin was suddenly going to dry up, when you know it’s hogwash? Isn’t that the sort of rabble-rousing nonsense that we try not to do in the Conservative Party? Insulin is just an example of any other product that comes into the UK from the EU. We would not prevent any product from arriving; the EU would have no legal locus (or indeed any physical ability) to prevent any product from being sent; can you please just stop being silly and admit that there would be no supply shortages in the UK? (And please, can we in particular try to keep our Conservative ministers from making fools of themselves, in their eagerness to support you, by escalating the level of ludicrousness of such scare stories from a possibility of momentary disruption of a day or two, through to six-week problems, through to six-month problems? The more outlandish their claims get, the less anyone believes them – though some Remainers tactically pretend to. We will actually need to have a set of ministers who are seen as competent by the UK electorate after all this settles down, if the Conservatives wish to remain in power.) The UK’s exports to the EU – not credible to assert any long-term or even short-term disruption Let’s turn to the second set of scare stories running against a Sovereign Brexit. We keep being warned about “lorry parks in Kent”. The idea is that Calais will somehow impose restrictions on us, so that we won’t be able to get our goods speedily into France and through to the rest of the EU. Of course, we send just 6% of the UK’s exports through Calais, and those exports can swiftly be diverted to go through other ports, were Calais were to seek to prevent the easy flow of UK goods into Europe. But we needn’t particularly worry about anything like that happening, because every local official from Calais, and the Pas de Calais region, has said that this will not happen. It would take an edict from President Macron – an edict that would be entirely illegal, whether in EU law or in the WTO agreement – to impose such a blockade (Indeed: if you really were to believe – and I for one don’t think you do – that Macron would truly seek to impose an illegal blockade, then it would be utterly abject of you, and unworthy of the Prime Minister of our sovereign nation, to bow to a perception of a threat of this sort). In any event, let us assume that the worst happens and that Macron does indeed seek some way of blocking British exports into the EU. The French did that once before, when they for a while diverted Japanese VCRs to Poitiers, so that EU manufacturers could win in the VCR market. They were very swiftly brought to court by the WTO and made to stop. Japanese VCRs continued to dominate the world (and the EU) market. France have never tried that trick again. And what would be the result for the French, were they to try it on us? Well, within a couple of weeks, as their just-in-time-systems were affected, thousands of French and German auto workers – possibly tens of thousands, in the unlikely event that the French were successful for more than a few days – would be thrown out of work, as French and German car manufacturing plants had to shut down. Do you really think, Prime Minister, that this would be allowed to happen? Or is your assertion, that somehow the EU would inflict such a monstrous act of self-harm upon itself, just a stance that you are pretending to believe in, so as to insist on this foolish deal that you and the EU are trying to impose upon the British people? In either case – exports or imports – the very wildest claims are of a possible disruption that would last for, even your wildest claims allege, only a few months. Why, then, should this be the dispositive consideration, when we are talking about Britain’s future for many decades to come? Why would you shackle the country permanently to a lordly EU, in order to avoid a very temporary (and, if you read my above arguments, not going to happen anyway) disruption? Why would you abandon even the threat of a WTO terms deal – and in so abandoning it, allow us to become the hapless prey of what everyone now knows are entirely ruthless EU negotiators? The Irish Border and the Backstop – a Hoax On the Backstop, and its claimed urgency and importance, the trick is to look at your language, where one finds your people always using the passive mood – a classic giveaway. You say you are worried about a hard border “being imposed” (passive mood). You do not offer a noun in front of the verb, to show who it is, exactly, that is predicted to be going to do this “imposing”. That’s because, in fact, nobody wants to, nor do they intend to, impose such a border. You have said that Britain will never impose a hard border. The EU has said that it will never impose a hard border. The Irish have said that they will never impose a hard border. The Revenue of the UK has said that imposing a hard border will in all circumstances be entirely unnecessary. Talk of a hard border is nonsense, and you know it. Plan after plan has been published showing how the Irish border question can easily be dealt with, away from the border. To assert that this issue might bring back the IRA, that there will be one disaster or another if we don’t have the Backstop, is irresponsible. Which brings us back to what many aver, that the Backstop is just a cover for implementing some promise you made to the auto industry in 2016, that we would be in some form of Customs Union with the EU – precisely the thing that 17.4 million people voted against. (And by the way, could you please get your people to stop briefing the credulous media as to how the EU don’t like the Backstop? To believe that – if indeed you do – would be a colossal, monumental piece of self-delusion. The EU love this Backstop, created as it is without an exit clause, with the EU entirely in control as to when – if ever – the backstop is removed. And Leo Varadkar is of course – and rightly – terrified of a Sovereign Brexit because the Irish economy would, unlike the UK’s economy, drastically contract as soon as we stopped buying Irish agricultural products and started buying cheaper, alternative produce from New Zealand and Argentina, were the EU to fail immediately to agree a free trade deal with the UK.) As constituted in your proposed deal, the Backstop turns Britain into a permanent, shackled vassal state of the EU, subject to all its laws, on which we’d have no say; gradually reduced to a pathetic vestigial outcropping of the EU, with German goods and French produce increasingly defined under EU laws as the only sources that we will be allowed to accept. If the EU wishes – and why should they not? – that Backstop would be for good. Our manufacturing, already half destroyed by our membership of the EU, would continue to shrink, and our farmers and fishers would continue to be at a disadvantage – forever. The positives of a Sovereign Brexit So much for the specious arguments that a Sovereign Brexit would be problematic, and that your surrender deal is therefore necessary. But what about the positives for a Sovereign Brexit? I sometimes wonder what Downing Street’s grasp of numbers is like. Do you have any true feel for what £39 billion, so insouciantly promised to the EU in return for illusory favours, could do for this country were we to spend it on ourselves, as we could if we opted for a Sovereign Brexit, rather than giving it away? For a start, were there any sector (including your much-loved auto sector), but let us say, for example, the agricultural or the fisheries sector, that indeed for some (unlikely) reason suffered during any years of further negotiations, then just a small fraction of this £39bn would be enough to keep those industries whole, for the (in the scheme of things) short period it took to get a free trade deal with the EU. We do not owe this £39bn to the EU. It’s possible that the EU could make an argument for us paying over a small fraction of that amount as one or another obligation, that we might eventually agree, but we certainly wouldn’t pay it any time soon, were the EU to keep on playing the sort of hardball with us that they have adopted so far as their negotiating posture; it would take them years, possibly decades, to establish legally that we owed the money. Regardless, there is no way that the UK would ever have to pay anything but a small fraction of the full sum. Don’t you think, Prime Minister, that the EU are rather keen to have that money? Do you not see that by ruling out a Sovereign Brexit, and by promising to pay the money before you have agreed a trade deal with the EU, you have taken two enormous bargaining chips off the table? Wouldn’t keeping that money in a Sovereign Brexit scenario make a huge positive impact for the UK? So, for a start, we’ll have that £39 billion (a sum that in your deal, as we pay it to the EU, will massively and worryingly increase this country’s debt – for no clear return). But a Sovereign Brexit will give us so much more than just that money; we’ll retain our ability to do free trade deals with that part of the global economy from which 90% of future global growth will be coming (you may know this as the ‘not the EU’ world. I hope you sometimes think about it?); we’ll keep our ability to unshackle our entrepreneurs from EU regulation (so that, as just one random example, we can regain the 12% of the global clinical trials industry that we used to have, until EU regulations in 2002 suddenly collapsed our share to around 2%); and above all, the clothing, food and other essentials that the people of the United Kingdom buy in the future being far cheaper as we move outside the protectionist barriers of the EU’s Customs Union and Internal Market. You know very well, Prime Minister, how all of your allegedly neutral and objective advisers have ostentatiously ignored all of these benefits. You know they have failed to seriously review the many analyses that show that far from a Sovereign Brexit being negative for the British economy, it is likely instead to have a significant positive effect. You know that the insistence of your Treasury officials on publishing neither their models, nor the assumptions they put into those models, make an absolute nonsense of the credibility of those models and a mockery of the alleged impartiality of those officials. Please, Prime Minister: you are juggling with the future of this country. At the very least, you should be honest with the people of this country – both in acknowledging the above points, and in forcing your officials to own up to the way they have jammed their thumb onto one side of the scales of public opinion. Prime Minister, you are offering us a deal where you propose to break up the Union and hand Northern Ireland over to the EU. You intend to hand over money ahead of any trade deal, thus assuring that whatever is agreed in that deal will be even more horrendous than what you have come up with so far – Gibraltar threatened, our fisheries destroyed, our people deprived of their chance for the benefits of free trade and subjected to semi-permanent, quite likely perpetual, enshacklement to the EU. You have gone back on every single promise you made when the Conservative Party made you their leader, when you gave your Lancaster House speech, when you said “Brexit means Brexit”. The sorry band around you are desperate for your deal to go through because if we went for a Sovereign Brexit instead, they, and their enablers in the media and big businesses, would be exposed as the complete charlatans that they are, when a WTO terms Leave is implemented (the Leave that those 17.4 million voters expected to happen). This is why your myrmidons are fighting so hard, because all of them – your advisers, the civil servants involved, the Treasury forecasters, your small clique of Remain ministers, The Economist, the FT, the BBC, and on and on – would have no choice but permanently to disappear from public life once we implemented a Sovereign Brexit and all their egregious negative spinning and outrageous scare stories were proved as false as their original 2016 Project Fear was. You, however, Prime Minister, have a glorious chance to escape their fate, by doing one thing: you can still, now, and energised by Juncker’s utterly disrespectful behaviour to you in this past week, turn around to the European Union and say, finally: “Fine. I understand you don’t want to do a deal. We’re now going to go full bore for a Sovereign-terms Brexit. Let’s sort out some administrative things like us allowing you to fly your planes over the UK, but other than that, let’s see each other in Geneva at the WTO. Do come back to us if you want to discuss some kind of Canada-plus deal, but otherwise, let’s all spend our time constructively in the next three months preparing for Britain’s Sovereign Exit from the EU.” For the sake of our country Prime Minister, please take this chance. Now.