CHRISTOPHER BOOKER THE LAST WORD

Only now has it dawned on the Government that leaving the EU was made deliberately difficult

There is one crucial figure which scarcely ever gets mentioned in our discussions of Brexit, although it should have been absolutely central to the debate all along. This is that, according to the latest official figures, we last year earned £274 billion from our exports to the EU, representing one pound in every eight of our national income.

Much of that is what is now at stake as we lurch towards next March, whether we drop out of the EU without a deal or somehow manage to achieve one when in vital respects we are still no further forward than when negotiations began. And the fundamental reason why we have made such an utter shambles of Brexit is that our politicians have never really grasped the true nature of this strange entity we have been part of for 45 years.

The EU has only ever had one real agenda in all that it does: to weld its member states ever more tightly together under an evergrowing thicket of laws which provide the legal authorisation for almost every kind of economic activity imaginable. And a country seeking to leave will only discover how enmeshed it has become in that system when it tries to leave.

That the UK Government is belatedly waking up to this is evidenced by the series of “Technical Notices” it has recently been publishing in answer to the European Commission’s “Notices to Stakeholders”, which for months have been setting out the legal implications for one economic sector after another of our decision to drop completely out of that system.

In each case these make for chilling reading. Take, for instance, the two documents on aviation published last week. Rather less fully than the Commission’s version, these explain how every tiniest detail of what our aviation industry does – from making aircraft to the right of airliners to fly in and out of UK airspace – is now authorised, licensed and permitted by EU rules and international agreements to which we are party only by virtue of belonging to the EU.

The Government’s view is that, if we exactly transpose every last detail of all this into UK law, our airliners can continue to fly, and our airports and factories can continue to function just as now. But again and again, like the tolling of a great bell, the notices then have to admit that the EU “takes a different view”.

In fact what the Commission’s versions repeatedly explain is that, from the moment we leave, these “permissions” will lapse and “cease to be valid”. No ifs or buts. If we choose to leave the European Economic Area, we shut ourselves out from the entire legal system which allows so many of our most successful industries to continue exporting to the EU. We may replicate every detail of those EU laws, but under the EU’S own law it simply cannot recognise them.

As Government is finally beginning to admit, with or without a deal some “disruption” will be inevitable. And that is to put it mildly. The truth is that we have no real idea of the chaos that is coming down the track at us next year. It will not be pretty.

When Jeremy Corbyn told us that his new flagship policy is to create “400,000 jobs” by doubling our number of wind turbines, it was pointed out that this was only resurrecting a policy first announced in 2009 under Gordon Brown’s “Green New Deal”.

A report based on computer modelling at that time explained how all these new jobs were to be created by 2015. For instance, 69,300 would be created by the wind industry. The “geothermal sector” would create 39,600 more, even though it was claimed that this then almost-non-existent sector was already employing “75,000”.

Going through a long list designed to justify Brown’s figure, as I wrote at the time, made it clear that all these predictions were wholly fictitious: like the jobs the model claimed would be created by the “waste management industry” at a cost of “£30 billion”, equating to £1.2 million for each job.

What was nothing but makebelieve then is even more so now, three years after all this was meant to have happened. But of course if Mr Corbyn’s dream that we could rely on unreliable windmills for most of our electricity came about, this would not so much create any fantasy new jobs as destroy millions of real ones, as our computer-dependent economy ground to a halt.

The moment we leave, ‘permissions’ will ‘cease to be valid’