Fair play

Brexit will be hard. We will be poorer as a nation, we will have to make painful decisions on what we can afford and what we can't. We will be poorer ourselves, wages down, living standards down, and a reduced safety net.

We can't avoid any of that but we can get through it. The 1970s show us that. Hard choices can lead to far-sighted decisions, setting Britain up for success in the years to come.

The real damage threatened is to our institutions. The UK is rightly respected for its political system and legal system. Our politicians have managed to create a tax and welfare system more progressive than Sweden's, we have a gap in life expectancy between rich and poor which is smaller than that in almost every other developed country, and a person's chances in life depend less on his or her parents' wealth than it does in almost any other country in the world (including the USA) - the British reputation for fair play is clearly still well deserved.

These things cannot be achieved by a single headline policy, they develop from many decisions made over many years. Decisions made on both sides of the political divide, often building on what their ideological opponents first started. Politics is about working together.

Right now our two main parties are riven by internal dissent. Labour appears more coherent simply because they are not in power. Brexit has caused this factionalism, and the resultant in-fighting is preventing any progress on preparing the UK for not only Brexit's consequences, but for even bigger problems coming our way.

Mr Hammond is trying to keep a level head. He has had to abandon financial prudence, continue with quantitative easing, and agree to borrow more rather than pay down the national debt. However, he is still looking ahead to when the bills will come in. At the moment we won't be paying, it will be our children. They will be paying our pension, paying for our health care, and paying off the public debts that we ran up.

It's a hard job, though, when the Brextremists give him a hammering for not lavishing money on preparations for a hard Brexit - something we should be doing our best to avoid.

Mrs May does appreciate the problems that are coming. She has talked about the Just About Managing, and supports energy price caps. She even suggested retired people with their own house should pay for their own care rather than expecting young workers who can't afford to buy a house to cough up. She backed off soon enough though when the flak started firing, though fair play to the health minister, Ms Doyle-Price, who still publicly supports the idea.

Another suggestion is to reduce the rate of income tax for the under 30s. Given that many are choosing to access higher education and have to pay for the privilege - which older generations didn't - this sounds like fair play too.

We know what is coming, we must prepare for it - Brexit or no Brexit. However, these policies, or better ones, will need backbone and commitment to implement, they will need a united party behind them. It is now up to individual MPs to make that happen, and it may only be possible if the moderates, the sensible, thoughtful ones, simply come together, leaving the ideologues behind.