If you say David Davis should now resign, you’re thinking too small

by Martin Odoni

Irrespective of whether we think Brexit is a good idea or a bad one, there can be no escaping the reality that its execution is going incredibly badly. After Monday’s utterly shambolic wall-crash over finding a new settlement for the Irish border – perhaps the single most important conundrum that needs solving – matters somehow plumbed even danker depths today. David Davis, Secretary of State for Exiting The European Union, finally revealed in Parliament what many of us had been suspecting for weeks.

Answering questions from the House Of Commons Exiting the EU Committee, Davis admitted that neither he nor anyone else inthe Government had carried out the so-called ‘Brexit Impact Assessments’ i.e. the many complex and detailed calculations about how leaving the EU is going to affect British society, particularly its economy. This was after over a year of his repeated assurances to the House and the wider country that over fifty such assessments had been completed.

This deceit amounts to Contempt-of-Parliament, and could have dire repercussions for Davis’ future as an MP. Quite rightly, other MPs such as David Lammy, anti-Brexit campaigners such as Gina Miller, mainstream media commentators such as Rafael Behr, and many left-wing bloggers such as my old comrade-in-arms Mike Sivier of Vox Political, are calling for Davis’ resignation, and for the DExEU Committee to press for formal charges of contempt.

Yes, David, that’s pretty much everybody else’s reaction, to every aspect of Brexit.

I certainly do not oppose such demands. Davis’ behaviour has been outrageous, and in most industries it would not only mean summary dismissal, but also possible legal proceedings. Thanks to Parliamentary Privilege – neither House of the Palace Of Wesminster is subject to the Law of the Land – fraud charges may not be possible. But the Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow, does have it in his power to suspend Davis from the House, or possibly refer the matter to the public under the Recall Of MPs Act of 2015.

Parliament is already a bad comedy thanks to its domination for decades by shallow, media-friendly, image-obsessive automata. For it to retain any credibility it has left, it has to sanction Davis, and sanction him hard. If an MP can be found to lie casually within the House of Commons on this scale, after all, what point will Parliament have at all? Its first purpose is to hold incumbent Governments to account, and that cannot happen if the precedent is set that there are no consequences for measurable deceit.

But I would not stop at Davis. Nor would I stop at his department. The entire administration now has to go.

Every MP on the Opposition benches, in Labour, in the SNP, in the Liberal Democrats, in Plaid Cymru, Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, and all the ‘Others’, must now unite to demand that the whole Government of Theresa May resign. The position of the entire administration is untenable, and not just because of Davis’ fabrications. The Government’s position has in fact been indictable since the day Article-50 was activated in March, and so the whole Government has to stand down.

What Davis has admitted is even more serious than some people realise; no one in the Conservative Party has been making necessary assessments of Brexit’s likely effects. The Referendum was effectively called in May 2015 when the Tories won that year’s General Election, including it as a gesture to ‘buy’ up assurances of support from the party’s extremist fringe. Since then, two-and-a-half years have passed, during which the Referendum has been and gone, the Leave vote won, Article-50 has been activated, and we have had approximately six months of fruitless negotiations in Brussels. In all of that time, no one in either Cameron’s Government or May’s has even bothered to assess what the actual impact of Brexit will be?

That admission is even more appalling than Davis’ fictitious boasts about what a thorough assessment his department had carried out. After all, if the country does not know what impact ending the current settlement with the EU will have, how can it know what it will need from the new settlement? Little wonder therefore that negotiations with the EU’s representatives are going so badly, when British officials and politicians do not even know the implications of anything they ask for, or even precisely what they need to ask for, or for that matter what will happen if they do not get what they ask for. They have been driving in the dark without headlights for half a year, which has meant progress has not only been difficult, it has been logically impossible; how can progress be made towards a destination that has not even been identified or defined?

These details were central to everything about how Brexit is to be carried out, and until they were properly calculated, it was insanity on Theresa May’s part choosing to activate Article-50 so soon. It started a two-year countdown, and over half of the first year of precious negotiating time has been wasted on a reckless General Election backfire, and aimless thrashing-about when finally at the table. There is no point in childishly continuing to blame EU officials for the logjams, the fault is entirely on the British side.

Have we ever known chaos in Government quite like this? In living memory, the UK has seen infighting, economic tribulations, weak Governments and social unrest. But the current instability is something of a quite unusual order, and as yet, we have not even withdrawn from the EU. Can you imagine what will happen when we do? Brexit has exposed incompetence unprecedented in any British Government since before the World Wars, and Theresa May’s whole administration is implicated in it from top to bottom.

By failing to carry out the Brexit impact assessment, the Conservative Government is guilty of dereliction-of-duty, and so must resign and call a fresh General Election for early in the New Year.