Is the Brexit ideology running out of road? – RTE.ie

Many Conservative party members will be wondering where they go from here.

There is talk of damage limitation and trying to save as many seats as possible in the next election.

The latest polls show the Tories on just 19%, with Liz Truss's approval rating at 9%. These are historic lows.

Electorally those figures would represent a wipeout never seen before in British parliamentary history.

Party members might look at how they got here, and it is hard to find anyone who disagrees with the idea that the Tories, and Britain as a whole, has arrived at its present state of political disarray on a journey that started with Brexit.

For a start it is hard to see how Liz Truss would have become Prime Minister if she had not fitted the demands of the hard Brexiteers. She was not a front runner for the leadership race but she was willing to unilaterally rip up an international treaty with her Northern Ireland Protocol Bill and won the support of the powerful ERG group.

Sure, she was a Remainer at one stage but then again so also were the vast majority of the British people.

However, there was a revolution and a lot of it had to do with a rejection of established ideas.

The vast majority of economic experts argued against Brexit. When the skies did not fall in after the vote in June 2016, Michael Gove gleefully announced that the "country has had enough of experts ... saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong".

Ever since the Brexit referendum campaign started there has been this idea - almost a conspiracy theory - that there were shadowy forces or institutions holding Britain back. Almost like the "deep state" theory in the US.

For Brexiteers it was mainly "unelected Brussels bureaucrats". However, it was also often the British establishment itself - "the blob" as Dominic Cummings called it.

In her leadership campaign, Liz Truss posed as a disruptor who would take on the "Whitehall Machine".

The party membership enthusiastically endorsed her vision of economic prosperity despite warnings that the sums did not add up just as they had done with Brexit.

In her conference speech Ms Truss widened her attack to the "anti-growth coalition" including those who "taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC studio to peddle the status quo".

As well as continuing to blame others, there has also been a consistent reluctance on the part of the Conservative leadership to provide a plan.

There was no detail for the Brexit project. "Not even the sketch of a plan" as Donald Tusk then President of the European Council once put it.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng tried to avoid providing detail for their economic revolution by saying it was not even a budget and therefore not subject to scrutiny by the official watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

Even in his speech Mr Kwarteng did not give even the vaguest notion as to how the government would manage the 45bn hole in public finances resulting from the tax cuts.

The markets who free marketeers usually regard as the source of wisdom recoiled. The IMF issued a warning.

Instead of Brussels or economic experts, there were new targets. Incredibly, Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly started criticising the IMF as biased. They both said the IMF is "not a friend of the UK".

Liz Truss even accused the markets of "group think" and the Bank of England was also being blamed.

Take this quote from a column in The Spectator by Charles Moore complaining about the IMFs warning being "insulting" to Britain.

"It is best seen as part of a pattern, like the early attempts to reverse Brexit, or the US governments related interventions over the Northern Ireland Protocol".

Mr Moore urged the Prime Minister and Chancellor to "fight back".

However, Rishi Sunak, himself a Tory Brexiteer, had described Ms Trusss economic plan as a fairytale. And there were already signs that some of the almost delusional thinking behind Brexit was beginning to clear.

Liz Truss was the architect of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill and did not deny saying once that the impact of a no deal on Ireland would only "affect a few farmers with turnips in the back of their trucks".

But ironically the Irish Government is reporting a sea-change in attitudes since she became prime minister or a "different space" as Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney put it.

Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker recently apologised for his hardline Brexit stance and even talked of "eating humble pie".

There are different theories on why this has happened. Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris himself said it was the war in the Ukraine and the resulting economic difficulties that brought home the need for co-operation

Another theory is Heaton-Harris and Baker saw for themselves the complexity of the Northern Ireland Protocol situation and, as they are both hardline Brexiteers, there was no one left to criticise them for being willing to negotiate.

Maybe Liz Truss was anxious to get a deal to avoid a trade war at a time of economic difficulty.

Or maybe it was just the Brexit ideology running out of road.

In any event there will be those saying that the Conservative party needs to get out a map and, this time, plan a route for the road ahead.

Go here to see the original:

Is the Brexit ideology running out of road? - RTE.ie