If Brexit is about listening to the people, why hasn’t Boris called it off for coronavirus?

New polls show that the majority of voters across all age groups want Brexit paused while the country recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic – and the economic damage it will cause. Denis MacShane writes

The prime minister told the nation it would enter into lockdown via a televised speech on 23 March (AFP)

Why is Downing Street insisting that the nation’s top priority has to be breaking as many links as possible with Europe instead of focusing all government resources on coronavirus?

With the prime minister sick with Covid-19 - as well as his chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost - surely the time has come for Boris Johnson to practise a little political distancing and lock down the more fervent of his anti-European associates like Michael Gove and Dominic Raab.

A new poll shows two out of three voters want Johnson to put Brexit on hold until the coronavirus crisis, now expected to run well into the summer or even later, is resolved.

Britain is going to face a gargantuan task of rebuilding the economy with a drop of up to 10 per cent in the nation’s wealth. Some economists think an even higher figure is now likely.

Earlier forecasts by bodies such as the National Institute of Economic and Social Research found that leaving the EU to trade on World Trade Organisation terms – the desired outcome for most Tory Brexit ideologues - would lead to a 3.2 per cent reduction in GDP and spark an immediate recession.

It seems economic folly of the highest order to add a Brexit hit to the British economy to the coronavirus damage. Yet each time this point is put to No 10 and other ministers the answer comes back that Johnson has no intention of pressing the pause button and looking to push back the Brexit negotiations into 2021.

The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, told Stephen Kinnock MP in the commons just before parliament was suspended that: “I don't think delaying Brexit negotiations would give anyone the certainty on either side of the Channel that they need."

In a comment piece for the Daily Telegraph, Ben Habib, a property speculator and ardent adorer of Nigel Farage, argued that: “Far from requiring delay, coronavirus strengthens our hand in post-Brexit talks.” Not even Raab, Gove or Johnson have made quite such a surreal claim, but they do all insist that Brexit has to happen on their terms, this year.

Gove was revealing on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show BBC this weekend when he refused to answer the interviewer's question about the email the EU Commission had sent to the government about the UK joining in a collaborative venture with other European nations, including non-EU nations, to procure ventilators. Gove burbled about Britain being “an independent nation”, as if France and Germany were not and as if that mattered one jot to a seriously ill Covid-19 patient who needs a ventilator to avoid imminent death.

He also admitted that the government had stockpiled essential supplies to cope with a no-deal Brexit but had not acted similarly to prepare for the coronvirus pandemic, despite a massive 2016 exercise undertaken by the government to prepare and plan for a then-theoretical viral epidemic similar to the one we are currently experiencing.

The negotiations cannot take place with the two principal negotiators, Michel Barnier and David Frost, felled by illness. The talks involve writing a major new treaty and that cannot simply be completed on Skype or Zoom; every word has to be weighed for legal effect and negotiators have to constantly go back to principals – including on the EU side, as 27 sovereign governments get sign off.

Now the British public agree that the talks should be postponed. A Focaldata poll, commissioned by Best for Britain and Hope Not Hate, found that 64 per cent of voters want Johnson to “request an extension to the transition period in order to focus properly on the coronavirus”. A majority of voters in every age group backed a delay, although support was lower among Tory voters at 44 per cent. Downing Street went into instant denial mode and insisted that any idea an extension will be sought is "totally untrue".

This will add to the fear and worry of businesses that Brexit on top of coronavirus is very bad economic news.

The CBI and British Chambers of Commerce should make public the concern of their members and urge Johnson to lift the shadow of his hard Brexit recession, so that all energy is focused on coping with the impact of Covid-19 on jobs, workers’ incomes, profits and public revenues.

Johnson has already delivered the referendum decision to Leave the EU. Adding almost terminal damage to British business and jobs by insisting on full speed ahead with Brexit this summer is an obsession too far.

Denis MacShane is the former minister of Europe. His latest book, Brexiternity: The Uncertain Fate of Britain, is published by IB Tauris