In his respected Times column (Thursday 19^th July), Iain Martin suggested that Tory divisions over a so-called hard Brexit – which go back to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 – will lead to the break up of the Tory party.

In fact a proper Brexit, i.e. a free trade agreement like EU-Canada and EU-Korea having the present EU-UK zero tariffs and standards, maintained for say 5-8 years, after which there could be mutually agreed modifications in the light of experience – is the path of sanity and would take the EU issue right out of British politics for ever. Presumably not even the Scot Nats would support EU efforts to exclude British-registered aircraft landing at EU airports.

Anything less than complete separation as the rest of the world understands it, would simply maintain the Tory and Labour EU arguments. But with a proper Brexit the Tory remainers would simply disappear, having nowhere to go and having no more purpose than their grandfathers had with opposition to Irish Home Rule after the First World War.

The same would be true of the “remain” factions in the other parties, except possibly the Scottish Nationalists, who would doubtless continue to put the case for an independent Scotland being free to throttle itself in the Euro, the European Court of Justice, the EU budget and the EU’s coming policy of distributing asylum seekers across the emptier parts of the EU (which Scotland at 170 people per square mile could certainly qualify as)^[1]. To recall a phrase from the past – “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

Reference

[1] England’s population density mid 2018 is estimated as 1,106 people per square mile.