Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

It’s time to challenge the Brexit Pollyannas

In his admirably brief and necessarily brutal, Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now, Ian Dunt tells how civil servants brief business leaders while they wait to meet David Davis.

For all his appearance as a tough guy with the strength to handle the most complicated diplomatic crisis the British have faced since the Second World War, Davis seems closer in spirit to a bubbly PR girl than a hard-headed statesman. He wants to hear only good news. He wants to see only smiling faces. Like Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union thinks we should all accentuate the positive.

On no account must businessmen and women say they are worried about Britain abandoning its membership of the single market, the civil servants warn. They needed to ‘go into the meeting saying that they were very excited by the possibilities of Brexit. Anyone who felt differently tended to be asked to leave in the first five minutes’. If he is thrown out of politics, Davis could make a new career as a happy-clappy vicar.

Readers of the right-wing papers will find Davis’s pig-headed refusal to listen to bad news familiar, as will any fair observer of the Tories and Ukip. The conservative political and media classes are in a nationalist hysteria that shuttles from denial to rage and back again.  They treat serious questions about our future as a kind of treason. Wonder where we are going and how we are going to make a living in the world, and you become an opponent of democracy and an enemy of the people.

Whatever your position during the referendum, you ought to read Dunt because he is willing to face uncomfortable facts. The only country in the world with absolute sovereignty is North Korea. 

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