Even Sir Ed ignores the obvious pachyderm

Enter "cartoon elephant Brexit" into a search engine and you will be rewarded with a swathe of images such as this from Riddell in The Guardian. In Monday's Commons session dealing with prime minister Sunak's statement on the Windsor Framework, only one of the main parties dared breathe the Br**** word, and that was the SNP. The Nationalists' leader in the Commons, Stephen Flynn, stated the obvious:

we cannot and should not forget the damage that has been done by leaving the European Union. Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster —[Interruption.] Conservative Members do not have to believe me; what they should do is read the reports of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which outlined that there would be a 4% hit to GDP as a result of Brexit. Or perhaps they should reflect on the fact that the trade deficit between the UK and the EU is at its highest level on record. Perhaps they could listen to the private sector and to those businesses that are unable to trade, unable to get the workforce they require and unable to get the goods they need. Or perhaps they could listen to the public sector, which is facing severe problems as well, many of which are driven by workforce shortages. Indeed, many of problems that face all our NHSs across these isles come from the fact that we have significant staff shortages in social care. Each and every one of those points is a result of the disaster that has been leaving the European Union, and I find it astonishing that we have a situation where the leader of the Labour party and the leader of the Conservative party are hand in glove when it comes to their position on Brexit.

The fact is that, while Rishi Sunak and his team achieved a remarkable diplomatic success and potentially* put the UK back on the legal side of the Belfast Agreement, they were making the best of a bad job - a bad job that had been botched as a result of the 2019 general election. The Johnson administration was ideologically opposed to any cooperation with foreigners (except Russian donors, it appears) so neglected to at least negotiate our remaining in the European Single Market. Ironically, this is just what self-proclaimed Brexiteer Sunak has achieved for Northern Ireland, a fact which was with some bitterness hammered home at Prime Minister's Question Time today. If access to both the UK and the Single Market was good enough for Northern Ireland, why not for Scotland - or Wales, for that matter?

I do not expect Sir Ed to labour the point that we were better off in the EU than we are out of it, but I do expect him to acknowledge party policy on the matter in his public utterances. However, he did at least name-check our sister party Alliance (Northern Ireland's best hope, in my opinion) in his otherwise innocuous question.

*the Framework has yet to be ratified by the UK and EU parliaments. One should not put it past certain prominent UK politicians to find a way to wreck it.