Why would anyone in business vote for Boris Johnson? His pretend courting of the CBI and others is another of his one-night stands. Just now, what he needs are the votes of “Labour leavers”, not capitalist remainers. So at the CBI conference on Monday he fobbed off the latter with Johnsonian lies.
The biggest whopper is that a vote for him would “end uncertainty over Brexit”. It will not, it will prolong it. As long as Johnson pledges to withdraw Britain from Europe’s customs union and single market, the current commercial uncertainty will continue. Serious trade talks do not begin until next year, when according to Johnson either the UK will default to WTO tariffs or a new deal must be sought with the EU. The latter will be on EU terms, of long duration and infinite complexity. Uncertainty will be total.
Meanwhile, Johnson’s only specific promise is that business’s free access to Europe’s fluid labour market will end. In its place is proposed a towering bureaucratic edifice of border controls, quotas, points systems and hostility; as already outlined by his anti-immigration home secretary, Priti Patel. No migrant will be allowed into Britain without already having a government-approved job. This is not a market at all. To employers in construction, welfare and hospitality it will be devastating. Some will lose a quarter of their labour overnight.
Alongside these structural shifts away from a free market, Johnson talks of “setting business free’” to trade with the rest of the world. This is garbage, and he knows it. There are no trade deals, other than trivial ones, with the rest of the world waiting in the wings, let alone that remotely compensate for lost European trade. Farming and fishing alone will be crippled. As for the Brexit thesis that deals with China or the US would see Britain “rule-making” rather than rule-taking – it is simply a lie.
Johnson’s business case for leaving Europe’s economic area is a xenophobic fantasy – and one that the CBI should demolish relentlessly. No one, not even Brexiters, can pretend it will boost the economy in the foreseeable future. Johnson’s spending spree – which is on the scale of that of a banana republic – may stave off trouble in the short term. But how it can be reconciled with the Tories’ reputation for economic rectitude is a mystery.
Business must join the rest of the country in hoping that Johnson’s promises are indeed those of a one-night stand. They will not see the light of the morning after. The hope must be that, if Johnson gets Brexit, he will not after all leave Europe’s economic area or its open markets. He will remain within the UK’s biggest trading partnership. He will rediscover his hero Margaret Thatcher’s faith in market economics. To this has British politics been reduced – that it must now pray for mendacity.