Theresa May's directionless incompetence never ceases to amaze. Her latest chaotic blunder came when she decided to sling some anti-immigrant red meat to the powerful hard-right Brextremist faction of her own party by claiming that EU citizens in the UK would lose their freedom of movement rights during the transition period that she's just spent so much time begging the EU for.
The problem of course is that the EU27 have no intention of allowing the Tories to cherry-pick which bits of EU legislation they want to abide by during the Brexit transition period.
As the EU negotiating team have stated a ridiculous amount of times before, the four freedoms are indivisible.
If the British government want free movement of goods, capital, and services to continue between the UK and the EU during the transition period, they also have to accept free movement of labour too.
Then there's the fact that Theresa May's proposal to revoke the rights of EU citizens appears to be completely unworkable anyway because the UK government has no infrastructure in place to actually enforce the proposed rules that May appears to have just made up on the hoof just to placate the rabid Tory Brextremist mob.
Then there's the leaked immigration analysis from the Brexit Impact studies that Theresa May and her Tory chums were trying to hide.
The impact studies have revealed what a lot of us knew to be the case already; that tighter immigration rules on European workers will significantly harm the UK economy, and no trade deal with the US to asset strip the NHS, and flood the UK market with their chlorinated chicken and their hormone-riddled beef will make up the shortfall.
If her government's own impact studies show that draconian new immigration restrictions on EU workers are set to harm the UK economy, then why on earth is Theresa May so keen to try to bring them in early?
The answer of course is that she's a powerless prisoner of fortune who is entirely beholden to the secretive hard-right ERG Brextremist faction of her own party.
She knows that her position as Prime Minister is entirely dependent on their support, so she feels the need to regularly promote their leaders into her government (Steve Baker and Suella Fernandes so far, with Jacob Rees-Mogg next in the queue), and to placate them with unworkable anti-immigrant and anti-EU diatribes.
She knows that her Brextremist backers will be delighted if her ridiculous demand to be allowed to discriminate against EU citizens wrecks the possibility of a transition period and triggers a ruinous "no deal" Brexit, because they'll be able to cash in by buying up distressed British assets and infrastructure on the cheap in the resulting economic meltdown, which was always their game.
Theresa May has already demonstrated that she's so weak that she allows these Brextremists to go completely unpunished for spewing the most extraordinary conspiracy theories in the House of Commons, and now she's actually throwing them the red meat of fresh anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the possibility of trashing the transition period that they hate so much.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
No comments:
Post a Comment