TIME is running out. The stakes are high. The cost of failure is immeasurable. Serious times call for serious people acting in the national interest.
Instead, the new Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson is sabotaging efforts to block a No-Deal Brexit by acting like a petulant and self-important student politician.
Only 75 days remain until October 31, the default deadline for the UK leaving the European Union with or without a deal.
In the next 11 weeks, the UK parliament is mostly in recess and there are just over 20 sitting days of the House of Commons.
For both Remain and Leave-supporting parliamentarians who want to avoid a damaging No-Deal Brexit, the options to successfully use parliamentary procedures are limited and if unsuccessful the stakes are high. The cost of failure is immeasurable.
According to the UK Office for Budget Responsibility, a recession will begin in the final three months of 2019 if the UK leaves the EU without agreement on
October 31. Already battered and devalued, the UK pound is predicted to drop in value again and unemployment will rise significantly. Economic growth is forecast to drop by 2% by the end of 2020, which doesn’t sound like much but is the same as the recession of the early 1990s.
In turn, this will add to additional government borrowing totalling £577m a week, which amounts to £30,000,000,000 in one year and a hike UK to net debt by 12%. This is all bad enough, but the forecasters at the neutral OBR say that their stress test is “by no means a worst-case scenario”.
As we have heard at great length, the imposition of a No-Deal Brexit will have a massive impact on us all as citizens and as consumers.
It will damage trade and the economy. It imperils peace in Northern Ireland and ignores the democratic wishes of people there and in Scotland, who voted to remain in the European Union.
Given the huge damaging prospects of No-Deal Brexit and the clock ticking down fast to the deadline, you would expect all serious and responsible politicians to act in the national interest.
Then along came new LibDem leader Jo Swinson, who shot herself and the rest of us in both feet.
READ MORE: Jo Swinson in humiliating U-turn over bid to stop No-Deal Brexit
After an initiative from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to force a no-confidence motion in Boris Johnson, form a short-term caretaker government and call early parliamentary elections, you would have thought that the sensible response might be: “all serious suggestions should be seriously considered and discussed as a matter of urgency”. That is pretty much the position of the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Greens and other parliamentarians.
The illiberal and scarcely sensible democratic response from Swinson has been to seek to torpedo the Corbyn initiative via media interviews.
From a politician who propped up the austerity-driven Tories in government, it is the worst kind of gesture politics imaginable. She thinks a short-term Corbyn-led government is a worse thing than No-Deal Brexit. I think most people in the country who want to avoid a No-Deal Brexit would disagree.
Swinson has suggested that a joint ticket of senior Tory Ken Clarke and former deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman should lead an emergency government to avoid a No-Deal Brexit. This may or may not command a better chance of cross-party success in a crunch parliamentary vote.
READ MORE: Scots Labour and Tories are content to be pathetic supplicants
Having, however, launched her wrecking initiative against the Corbyn plan in news bulletins, rather than seek to iron out differences in private meetings, it makes things nigh on impossible for Corbyn to backtrack with dignity.
This is the kind of pathetic political manoeuvring that takes place in the National Union of Students between political factions who represented nobody but themselves.
For Swinson, who has clearly drunk the political Kool-Aid since regaining a parliamentary seat in a by-election, has forgotten that this is high stakes stuff not a student debating society.
If we end up crashing out of the European Union without a deal in a few months time, the history books will look unkindly on political manoeuvres like those executed by Swinson.
We would have been better served by key parliamentarians meeting in private to discuss tactics, rather than grandstanding in public.
Just at the time when we need grown-up politics to deal with the kamikaze Brexit tactics of Johnson, we are being let down by Swinson. Not content just with her illiberal undemocratic approach to a Scottish independence referendum, she is seeking to undermine opposition to a No-deal Brexit. We all deserve much, much better.
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