It is profoundly depressing that the United Kingdom is heading for a hard Brexit, putting ideological hatred of immigrants over continuing common-sense international relations, but it is all the more depressing that British Prime Minster Theresa May is letting the anti-Europeans in her government run British foreign policy. She seems to have given away all sense of debate and surrendered to the hard-line fanatics whom she has co-opted into both setting the UK’s Brexit policy and managing the process. Her private and much more measured approach has surfaced in an interesting, leaked tape of a talk that she gave to Goldman Sachs in May, some weeks before the referendum, when she argued that rather than leave, the UK should take the lead in Europe, and the benefits of staying in a 500-million trading block are significant.
May has refused to be drawn on what she thinks should be the British approach to Brexit. Her silence at one time seemed to indicate that she was seeking a reversal of the referendum, but she then spelt out that “Brexit means Brexit. The problem is that her government does not have a clear view of what Brexit means. It has refused to say if it means open trade with the European Union (EU), ending the single market and stopping the movement of EU citizens, imposing capital or other controls, and whether foreign investors in the UK will lose access to the single market.
The longer May and her Conservative government refuse to give a clear answer to these questions, the greater damage this deliberate uncertainty will cause to both Britain and its European partners.
