Vocal Voices

Ministers, former ministers, former leaders and grandees are all lining up against each other before the conference starts tomorrow; and it is all about Brexit.

We should have a 'hard Brexit', no we should go for a 'soft Brexit'. We should immediately bring in a new law to repeal the 1972 European Communities Act, or maybe we should not. We should do a deal, no we should become an independent member of the WTO and go with its tariffs. Even their official Brexiteer negotiators cannot agree.

Meanwhile their MPs, councillors and ordinary party members are all aboard, helpless onlookers as the train speeds ever faster to its crash site.

What gets me is all this piecemeal (in)action over Brexit, and that is down to the Conservative's former leader and equivalent of Michael Foot, David "cop out" Cameron. Voting to leave the EU, Brexit, was a nebulous ideology; it had no form. Cameron should have passed a law forcing the Leave camp to state exactly what Brexit would mean for trade, immigration, the environment and defence, everything, and how it would all be achieved. It would also have included a time scale for triggering A50, and all the changes would have to be implemented.

Had he done that we would have been able to compare and contrast the two options. We all knew what staying in meant, we were living it every day: it was a 'known', known. Brexit, on the other hand, was a daydream belief, a hope without any foundations - goodness knows what it is now.

So now we have this mess, and if it rips the Tories to shreds it will be all they deserve.

Well you have some of your answers today.

Cameron should have passed a law forcing the Leave camp to state exactly what Brexit would mean for trade, immigration, the environment and defence, everything, and how it would all be achieved

This was always impossible. The only categoric answer to that would have been Hard Brexit because 48% of our trade is tied up in the EU and requires 27 bickering, backstabbing, "perpetually positioning to do someone else down to their own benefit", nations, to agree to whatever we say.

Hard Brexit is a simple answer to a very complicated question. Something, I would have thought, we had learned to avoid because simple answers in these situations come with a very high price. Witness the League of Nations, the treaty of Versailles and the eventual cost.

What we need is calm, steady, progressive political leadership which will try to give us the answers we need. We have two years to achieve this from day1 and, I'm willing to bet, that even in the case of an 11th hour hard Brexit due to EU intransigence, that the end result of this journey will be better than some egotistical posturing before the referendum; to which we would have to stick.

There was a question asked during the referendum which I have not see revisited. The question was simply "If you were not in the EU today, is this an environment you would want to join?".

That was the most valid question of all because it took all of the fear out of the debate, all of the subjective politics and put the debate where it belongs. Namely "do we fit and would we want to fit, given a free choice with no fear". The answer to those two questions was NO and NO emphatically every single time it was asked.

So now it's time to stop the fear campaigns, time to roll our sleeves up and time to get on with it. I don't just meant the politicians, I mean all of us. Stop second guessing, stop the whole "what if", time to start moving forward.

For me that means asking the right questions of our representatives, voting in the right way if we don't get the answer we want and driving the country forward to a new future. I don't say better future. Not right yet, because better futures take time to create.

I recall a guy in my field who had worked for Lotus (the computer software company, creator of the 123 spreadsheet). He wanted to go out on his own and had created a whole software suite for collaboration based on his experiences developing first for Lotus and later for IBM. He asked the community the best way to get his product "out there", so he could commoditise is and sell it.

I replied to his post with quite a long one telling him it was a ten year journey and he had to be as much politician as developer if he wanted to achieve what he desired. It was not a popular response as "everyone" was getting rich quick off the Internet.

What was the eventual outcome? A decade after I wrote that post he sold his company that he had spent the last decade creating. Sold for hundreds of millions. He followed almost exactly the path I outlined. Why? Am I prescient? No I'm not prescient. It was the only possible way that he could do what he had set out to do, it was obvious if you chose to look.

So, after digressing, what was the point of those last few paragraphs? We now have a generation of Internet wannabies. The number of kids sitting at home living in lala land praying to "make it big" with just one computer game, are legion.

We, at least, should know better. Good results to bad questions take time and one hell of a lot more effort than you really want to put in. But if you put the effort in the reward is there. Brexit will take 2 years from March. The Rise of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will take a lot longer. But. Done properly. Will net a much better result.

Suff wrote:Well you have some of your answers today.

Cameron should have passed a law forcing the Leave camp to state exactly what Brexit would mean for trade, immigration, the environment and defence, everything, and how it would all be achieved

This was always impossible.

Given the make up of the two Houses then getting law through Parliament forcing the Brexit Camp to reveal what Brexit would look like, how it would be delivered and the time scale for it to become reality would have been a doddle. It would have sailed through Parliament.

The problem would have sat fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Brexit side. There were enough factions within Brexit for them not to be able to give any details because they themselves did not know what Brexit would be. They still don't, and that's why we have today's mess.

My OP was not about Brexit, per se, it was about the Tories tearing themselves apart because of it. So today we have May saying that A50 will be triggered "by the end of March". Another way of looking at that statement is that A50 will triggered towards the end of March, not Jan or Feb. Some will like it, many will not. We also have the "Great Repeal Bill" to remove the European Communities Act 1972 to be announced in the Queen's speech next May - except that she, May, announced it today. More playing at politics, which will also annoy many. Then we have the news that the Brexit negotiations are to be 'confidential' so that during the process all we plebs will get are leaks and rumours. Another issue dividing the Tory party.

May was quite open that she did not want Brexit to be the focus of the conference, and although she might get that wish in the hall there is plenty of evidence that it is the No1 topic on the fringes. The Tories are as divided as they have ever been and there is no papering over the cracks this time.

She will have to go to the country at some stage, so she has a lot of hard work in uniting the party long before then.

I agree with almost all of what you say WM, but the point I disagree with is setting out what Brexit would look like. You can't. It's simple. We have to leave and the EU have to agree any terms. Setting that out in law is insane because the EU will simply say NO and there is no room to move. None. Worst of all worlds.

The Tories took us in and the Tories will take us out. If they want to save their jobs they need to suck it up and work together. Surely the Corbyn debacle in the Labour Party should be evidence enough of how not to present yourselves to the public???

Well it is a good job I was not PM because I would have forced them to put up a document of how their promises would be achieved. If it was god enough for them to stand on their soap boxes and promise the Earth then it was fair to put them in a position where they had to deliver.

If they failed in that simple operation I would have cancelled the referendum.

I might still be PM, Brexit would be history, and we would be asking why it is that all out nuclear subs are upgraded en masse rather than a rolling programme where we had a new top of the range one with top tech every five to seven years.

Workingman wrote:we would be asking why it is that all out nuclear subs are upgraded en masse rather than a rolling programme where we had a new top of the range one with top tech every five to seven years.

Same question I asked a senior military man who was expounding on the values of 1kb ram chips in Rapier. Apparently Marconi had warehouses full of them and they were "certified"....

We do this all the time, and it drives me mad. We waited till the Lightning, my first aircraft, was obsolete before coming up with a Tornado variant and then Typhoon. We let Hunters and Phantoms come to the end of their lives before the Jaguar took over. Jaguar has never been replaced.

When we produced a world beater, the Harrier, we let the Yanks have it before we ditched it.

We never replaced the Canberra, we had to wait for the Yanks to come up with something near, the Orion. We dropped Nimrod for the US Sentry.

The Navy did the same with aircraft carriers. Invincible. Illustrious and Ark Royal were all sold for scrap between 2010 and 2016, so we have no carriers at present. QE and PoW are not due for service till 2020, or later.

I am sure the Army has similar tales to tell.

We keep leaving ourselves exposed because we do not have a rolling programme of upgrades and replacements. The Americans certainly do not do it, and the Chinese and Russians are replacing old hardware with up-to-date equipment at super-fast rates.

Workingman wrote:I am sure the Army has similar tales to tell.

How about the mobile machine shop for the TA coming over for the joint NATO exercise in the 80's. The engine fails. When we get it to the Armoured Workshop, we find it's a 1936 Albion truck. Stores ordered the engine which duly turned up and was fitted.

Your British Army, providing good value but less protection every day!