In the final act of Macbeth, with hope fading and the enemy at his castle gates, the eponymous anti-hero reflects on the essential pettiness of life.
‘It is a tale told by an idiot,’ he says ruefully. ‘Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’
The same could easily be said of the debate over Brexit since the 2016 referendum result, especially from the Remainers who lost the vote but have never accepted its legitimacy.
Sound and fury has been their default position – railing at the alleged dishonesty of the Leave campaign, casting its voters as bigoted ‘little Englanders’ and producing endless spurious figures supposedly proving what a disaster quitting the EU has been.
Many of those diehard Remainers are prominent Labour politicians, notably Sir Keir Starmer, who led a public campaign to reverse the decision, and Andy Burnham, who described Brexit as ‘a wrong turn’.
Since coming into government, ministers have been sidling up to Brussels in the hope of negotiating a ‘reset’ in relations.
They have offered to restore ‘dynamic alignment’ with EU rules in agricultural, food and animal products to promote more frictionless trade and rejoined the Erasmus programme at a cost of £570million, most of which will go to EU students.
We have agreed to join a new European security and defence partnership and extended EU fishing rights in British waters for another 12 years. Yet in spite of these concessions, Brussels continues to punish us for having the gall to leave.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham at a meeting with the Irish Taoiseach at Number 10 North in Manchester on Friday
We have been effectively priced out of the EU’s new defence procurement programme, even though UK membership would be in our mutual interest.
Now it seems we may also be excluded from the EU’s ‘Made in Europe’ programme, intended to insulate European manufacturing, energy and chemical firms from aggressive foreign competition.
Chancellor John Healey was yesterday trying to persuade EU finance ministers of the folly of leaving Britain out, warning that it would disadvantage European firms operating in and selling to the UK. But are they listening? Of course not.
We know from bitter experience that with Brussels, it’s all take and no give. That’s primarily why we left in the first place.
Yes, we want free trade with Europe, but not at any price. Better surely to make the most of Brexit opportunities than prostrate ourselves before a protectionist club.
Despite the relentless sound and fury of embittered Remainers, Brexit has delivered benefits, from the Covid vaccine miracle to the many trade deals Sir Keir was so keen to trumpet, and regulatory flexibility over AI and other hi-tech businesses which has brought in record investment.
Just imagine what could be achieved if we finally recognised the EU for the faithless friend it is, and embraced our Brexit freedoms heart and soul.
Lessons not learned
At least 20 women had unnecessary mastectomies and hundreds more suffered harm as a result of catastrophic failures in the breast cancer unit of the Durham and Darlington Foundation Trust. Thousands of other cases are being investigated.
With staggering understatement, the trust described this scandal as ‘utterly unacceptable’. Utterly hideous and possibly criminal would be more accurate.
It’s claimed lessons will be learned, but is that true? Every time something like this arises, NHS managers say systems have been put in place to prevent it happening again. Yet it does. Again and again.