From the DT today by Andrew Lillico. Says it all. Haven't posted a link as it's Premium and behind the paywall.
It’s become commonplace in political debate and media discussions of no deal to assume and assert that during the EU referendum almost everyone assumed there’d be a “deal”. Earlier this week this claim was put to Dominic Raab in a Today Programme interview. Last night Newsnight had an entire debate based around this premise. But it simply isn’t true at all, and media commentators and politicians should not be allowed to claim, unchallenged, that it is.
What does “no deal” mean? It means there will be no “Withdrawal Agreement”, that is to say, no new treaty with the EU covering the rights of EU citizens, the financial settlement, the Irish border, and a range of other issues including “non-regression” of social, environmental and labour legislation and “geographical indications” (eg “Scotch” or “Parma Ham”). So, did everyone assume there’d be such a Withdrawal Agreement Treaty during the EU Referendum?
The answer’s pretty obviously no. Indeed, I’m not aware of a single interview by any prominent Leave campaigner predicting or promising that if we voted to leave the EU there’d be a Withdrawal Agreement treaty covering these or similar topics. I don’t know of a single Leave voter that assumed, at the time, that there’d be such a treaty and I think I can safely assert that not one of the 17.4 million people who voted to Leave the EU did so conditionally on the assumption that such a Withdrawal Agreement treaty would be made.
Before early 2018, virtually no-one in the UK had heard of the concept of a “Withdrawal Agreement” at all. I first encountered it in late 2017. When I saw the first draft of it, in February 2018, I immediately wrote a piece arguing that we should refuse to sign any such agreement and should walk away from the talks unless the EU dropped the whole idea. We should never have had any kind of “Withdrawal Agreement”. We do not need the EU’s permission and blessing to leave.
This notion, so beloved of Remainers, that Leave voters all assumed we’d never leave without such a “deal” only needs to be stated out loud to be seen as preposterous. “So what you’re saying is that everyone assumed we'd only leave the EU if we got the EU's permission and blessing for doing so, and that if the EU objected then we'd Remain? That that's what Leavers voted for?"
The truth is that no-one on the Leave side predicted or promised that we’d sign a Withdrawal Agreement, and that if you’d asked almost any Leaver about the idea during the EU referendum campaign we’d have said it was a bad idea.
Until 2018, the notion of a “deal” with the EU didn’t mean a Withdrawal Agreement. It meant a trade agreement. The Withdrawal Agreement, of course, does not include any sort of trade agreement — other than binding the UK into the EU’s customs union via the notorious “backstop”.
The idea of a trade agreement was debated during the referendum. And the idea that no trade agreement would be done pre-Brexit was very widely trailed and debated.
Some Leave campaigners said there’d be no trade deal done pre-Brexit. For example, that was the consistent position of Lord Lawson, one of the founders of Vote Leave and its Chairman for the early part of the campaign. The OECD, in its widely-publicised analysis of the impact of leaving the EU, predicted that no trade deal would be done until 2023.
The UK government included a “WTO” option as one of its three Brexit “scenarios”, whereby the UK still had no trade deal with the EU by 2030. David Cameron spelled out, in television interviews, that if no agreement was come to with the EU, we would leave on “WTO rules” at the end of the Article 50 period.
It simply is not true that no-one anticipated “no deal” during the referendum. Quite the reverse, no-one anticipated what we now call a “deal” — ie a Withdrawal Agreement — and if we had anticipated it we’d have opposed it. What was anticipated and debated was whether there would be a trade deal — and there was extensive discussion of the possibility that there wouldn’t.
Leaving with “no deal” simply means that we leave the EU in October with no transition period beyond the three and a half years we’ll have already had since 2016. There’s been ample time to prepare. Now it’s time to go.