Mark Casci: May's deal isn't perfect but we should back for our national unity

I was on leave last week and spent part of it reading Daniel Coyle’s masterfully written book, The Culture Code. Coyle looks at successful teams, be they military outfits, sporting teams, tech giants or gangs of jewel thieves and gets a sense of what makes them better than the rest.

One key common theme he identified was the ability to bring everyone at the organisation together by making them feel protected and empowered to drive the organisation’s future success.

Fostering such a culture on a national scale in modern Britain will be far from easy.

It has been a dark few years for our country as the issue of our membership of the European Union has pitted family members, friends and colleagues against one another in a debate that has far to often resembled hysteria.

This week Theresa May will continue her forlorn attempt to get her deal over the line.

In her view it delivers on the mandate handed to Government by the electorate. We will leave the EU and no longer be a member state.

Mrs May has been consistent in her defence of the deal, saying that from March we will be able to continue to enjoy frictionless trade with EU member states, forge deals with other nations on our own terms and gain control of our borders.

However this is Brexit and of course people are still unhappy, whether they back leave or remain. On the face of it seems the deal is doomed to fail to achieve the support of the House of Commons.

So where do we go from here?

We need our own national Culture Code to bring us together again and remind all citizens that we all share the same belonging to this proud and great nation.

It is extremely rare, almost unheard of, that people walk away from major negotiations with everything they wanted.

The polarised nature of this debate means that one hand will accept nothing less than a total separation with Europe on every score, regardless of the consequences. The other camp meanwhile cannot accept the result of the referendum and wants another one to be held, presumably a process that must continue until a vote to remain is delivered.

Both of these views are sadly impracticable.

The people of this nation were given a binary choice, to leave or to stay, and they picked the former. However there were no supplementary questions on how we would leave. That was left up to Government.

This is a deal which avoid the catastrophe of No Deal, a scenario no sane person covets. It delivers on the will of the people and allows for a future in which business can continue to trade effectively and which keeps our citizens safe.

Is it perfect? Of course not, it never was going to be. I wrote as much in this column over a year ago and received an equal amount of emails condemning me in equal measure as a “Remoaner” and “Brexiteer” - two words I hope will vanish from our national lexicon in short order.

The time has come for us to move on. Now is the time to back this deal or we risk increased uncertainty, more squabbling and further division.

We are a United Kingdom of centuries standing. We are a proud and prosperous trading nation which prizes taking care of one another and setting an international agenda.

Once this issue is out of the way we can focus on what really matters for Yorkshire, be that an increase of meaningful devolved powers, vastly improved infrastructures and an economic and education system that is ready for the incredibly fast-moving advances in technology.

When I speak to business leaders these are the issues that people care about. Brexit seldom comes up and if it does there is always a rolling of the eyes.

Once this interminable debate is behind us we can hopefully foster that inclusive and empowered culture which can lead us to greater future success than any argument over trade deals, immigration or misshaped bananas could ever hope to achieve.