Last week, if anyone can remember that far back, the fifth anniversary of the UK leaving the EU provoked a welter of comment and detailed analysis from which it is hard to escape the conclusion that what I’ve sometimes called ‘the battle for the post-Brexit narrative’ is over. The public view that it was wrong to leave and that leaving has not been a success is entrenched and growing. The bulk of sensible and serious commentary, both in the UK (£) and abroad, endorses that.
Meanwhile, Brexit’s remaining defenders, such as Boris Johnson (£) and Nigel Farage, can only wail about the need to “believe” in Brexit, and the benefits they claim for it range from trivialities to demonstrable lies, the most frequent and most egregious being that it enabled an early Covid vaccine rollout. The very weakness of that defence, combined with the notable absence of celebration of the anniversary, show the abject failure of Brexit to deliver the promises made for it by its advocates.
The core problem in current British politics is that the Brexiters are too shameless to admit this failure, and utterly resistant to even the most modest attempts to address the consequences. Since, public opinion notwithstanding, this stance is baked in to both the Reform and Tory parties, and large and noisy section of the media, Brexit Britain is, as I wrote in my previous post, stuck. Like squatters, having trashed the house, they will neither get out nor allow the owners to repair it.
Thus a reversal of Brexit is politically unrealistic in any immediate timescale, and the government’s promised ‘reset’ is the only game in town. Yet even that has been pursued with frustrating timidity and slowness, not least because of the opposition of the Brexit wreckers.
However, in what has been a tumultuous two weeks, there are at least signs of the reset being pursued with more urgency and a little more resolve. Perhaps more importantly, the tumult, which derives from Donald Trump’s return to power, depressing and disorientating as it is, could present an opportunity to finally break out of the stale circles of the Brexit debate.
Reset: a new urgency?
It’s hard to deny that, even though these events were already planned, Trump’s explosive arrival in the White House put new meaning upon Starmer’s attendance at a meeting of EU leaders, to discuss defence and security issues, and the meeting next day of the EU-UK Forum, where EU Relations Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds delivered a major speech. At all events, although it was scarcely the first time that Starmer has talked about wanting an “ambitious” security partnership and reset with the EU, it was the first time that he and Thomas-Symonds set out a desire to agree a reset deal within the next three months.
It’s not clear how realistic this is, since the related announcement of a UK-EU summit to be held in May would imply that negotiations be completed in advance of this. Nevertheless, both the summit itself, which will be hosted by the UK, and the identification of a timetable, can be read as recognizing the need to deliver, and deliver quickly, on a reset which, so far, has mainly consisted of warm words.
Thomas-Symonds also spoke of the need to approach the reset with “ruthless pragmatism” in place of “ideologically-driven division”. Quite what this means is also unclear. Hopefully, it is a signal to British Brexiters (£) that the government is willing to take on their backlash against the reset, which I discussed in a recent post and which has been much on display in utterly ludicrous attacks on this week’s meetings in the pro-Brexit press*. If that is so, then it would be helpful for Thomas-Symonds, or Starmer himself, to give a big, uncompromising, and full-throated speech demolishing those attacks and advocating, with enthusiasm, a detailed agenda for the government’s still far too vague ‘ambition’. If not now, when?
Less optimistically, it might have been (or have also been) a signal to the EU that the government still clings to the familiar Brexiter line that Brussels should be more ‘flexible’ and less ‘ideological’ in its application of rules for third countries. That line is still, at least implicitly, what Farage believes would “improve” the existing deal, as if post-Brexit ‘red tape’ were an EU imposition rather than an inevitable consequence of decisions taken by UK and urged by Farage himself. I’m only guessing, but it seems to me at least possible that there are still people in the civil service and the cabinet who have the same view, if only because, even after all these years, there is still so much ignorance about how the EU works and what Brexit means.
But even the most optimistic reading of these developments (i.e. that Starmer intends to stand up to the Brexiters and to work realistically and rapidly to agree the most maximalist version of the reset), for all that it would mark a shift in gear compared with the last eight months, already seems inadequate to the scale and pace of events. For, based even on the short period since Trump returned to office, there is a good case for thinking that the fundamental recalibration of global politics, which I foreshadowed in a post in November, is now unfolding in plain view.
Trump’s global coup
That recalibration isn’t only, or even primarily, about Trump’s trade tariffs, which I’ll come back to. There is already a long list of other developments, including the pardoning of the J6 rioters; the forced deportations (with the associated bullying of Colombia and the planned re-opening and re-purposing of Guantanamo Bay); the quite extraordinary handing of access to government finance systems to Musk; the hounding of Federal agencies including the FBI; the attempts to suborn the CIA; the freezing of foreign aid; the purge of all forms of diversity initiatives; the bullying territorial claims made on Panama, Greenland and Canada; the grotesque and yet absurd proposal to “take over” Palestine and create a “Riviera of the Middle East”; the withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the World Health Organization.
That is only a partial list of what has happened so far, and there will undoubtedly be more to come, probably even as I am writing. But it is enough to eviscerate any lingering idea that Trump will show even the restraints of his first presidency. It may be chaotic, but is also a coup of sorts, and arguably an assault on the constitution. Under Trump, the US has launched a global attack on liberalism in its most general meaning, and on many of its specific attributes at home and abroad.
Even acknowledging that many of Trump’s announcements and executive orders are merely performative, that much of what he does will be heavily resisted, that his administration is likely to be characterized by incompetence and infighting, will not last forever, and may become domestically unpopular, it seems certain that the US will be permanently changed and, as a result, so will the rest of the world. Apart from anything else, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Trump is, in fact, doing what he promised he would do, and was given a clear endorsement for it by US voters. So, even if some of those who did so turn against him, it really can’t be denied that there is a deep groundswell of desire for the US to be a very different kind of country to that which, at least, the UK has known, or believed it has known, since, say, 1941. (I realise there is a lot that can be debated in and around that claim.)
Trump’s tariff weapon
When it comes to Trump’s new tariffs, these can be seen as an attack on economic liberalism, and to an extent they are motivated by economic protectionism. But they are not really, or at least not simply, about waging trade wars (although trade wars with China and the EU may be the result). More fundamentally, Trump is using trade as a weapon to intimidate other countries into doing his bidding in both economic and non-economic matters. The non-economic motive was most evident in the threat to Colombia, but was also present in those made to Mexico and Canada, and carried through against China.
The fact that Mexico and Canada struck last-minute deals on border protection to avoid the tariff attacks is in part an illustration of this, but it is also an irrelevance. For one thing, they are only temporary deals, and there is every reason to believe that, like a blackmailer, Trump will come back for more (and, even if he doesn’t, this episode will have done long-term damage to, for example, US-Canada relations). For another, the very rapidity of the reprieves is all of a piece with Trump’s almost cliched desire to ‘do the unexpected’ as a weapon designed to de-stabilize his perceived enemies. Indeed, as legal commentator David Allen Green has pointed out this week, although Trump is often described as ‘transactional’, his approach to deal-making is actually “anti-transactional”, so that “an agreement offers an opportunity to gain leverage, for a new negotiation, for a new exertion of power.”
However, whilst what is happening may be inflected through Trump’s baroque psychology (£), it is not reducible to that. He is both an expression of, and a vehicle for, a deep seam of sentiment in the US which sees the country as the put-upon victim of the international order (despite that order being largely the creation of the US). In that sense, Trump’s tariff attacks are part of the wider picture of a regime determined to use force to dismantle the constraints of law and convention abroad quite as much as those within the domestic sphere. That he has even spoken of the use of military force, extending to the sequestration of territory, against some of the US’s own allies means that, at the most basic level, the US can no longer be trusted by any of its allies.
Trump’s words and actions have therefore already fractured global society. It’s tempting to reach for historical analogies, which might range from Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to the America First Committee, to the endless debates about whether Trump is a fascist. But they really aren’t necessary. It’s enough to observe that he is what he is, now; doing what he is doing, now. Perhaps in the future it may seem an overblown claim but, just at the moment, it is plausible to say that we are seeing the beginning of a new global divide between rules and brute force. It is also not necessary to romanticize ‘the rules-based international order’, or to sanitize the history of US foreign policy, to see this as a momentous and highly dangerous development, with the potential to shatter previous alliances and enforce more-or-less binary choices on almost every country in the world.
What of Brexit Britain?
If this analysis, or anything like it, is correct, then the issues it poses for the UK, specifically, go well beyond those of UK-EU relations, although they encompass those relations, and beyond those of tariffs. Thus most current discussions, which focus on Britain having to navigate a careful path in the event of a US-EU trade war, don’t fully address what is at stake. It is not even as simple as picking a side between the US and the EU. It is about picking a side between liberalism and illiberalism (or worse).
This would have created profound problems for the UK even without Brexit, given the role it had roughly established for itself as a ‘transatlantic bridge’. But EU membership would have half-addressed those problems, anchoring one end of the bridge even as the other imploded. As it is, the combination of Brexit and Trump 2.0 has burnt both ends. This poses questions about UK-EU relations, of course, but Trump hasn’t simply turned on the EU. In some ways, the bigger issue his presidency has raised for the UK is illustrated by his assault on Canada, not just with tariffs but with the extraordinary suggestion that it might “cease to exist” as an independent country and could become “America’s 51st State”.
This, then, is an attack on one of Britain’s closest and most longstanding allies, and, indeed, a country of which the British monarch is still the Head of State. The UK-Canada relationship is also, let us not forget, a prime example of the kind of ‘old friendship’ which the Brexiters claimed would be rekindled by leaving the EU. Some even continue to fantasise about ‘CANZUK’ and ‘the Anglosphere’. Moreover, Canada’s relationship with the EU was constantly held up as the template for what Britain’s should become.
In this sense, Trump’s hostility to Canada, quite as much as his hostility to the EU, presents a moment of choice. What, now, should Britain do? Keep quiet? Seek to ‘navigate’ a path to spare itself Trump’s disfavour whilst its ‘old friend’ takes its chances? Indeed one might ask what Farage, the man who always claims to stick to his principles, to care deeply about national sovereignty, and to have a hot-line to Trump, had to say about Canada this last week or so. The answer, so far as I can find, is nothing.
Similar questions apply not just to the UK’s relations with the EU, generally, but to those with Denmark, in particular, and with Greenland. They also apply, in a different way, to its relations with China, which Starmer’s government has recently tried to reset. And they also apply, again in different ways, to its relations with global institutions. To put all this a different way, the vision of, at least, the global Brexiters was of being ‘freed from the shackles of the EU’ in order to participate fully in a global order, including but not limited to a global trade order, an order to which the US now is wholly opposed and bent on destroying. Even the Brexiters’ more limited notion of the Anglosphere was predicated on the US as a bulwark of the ‘rules-based’ order. Equally, they looked to NATO as the sole international basis of UK defence and security, an approach which now looks increasingly precarious. So even if there had ever been a geo-political logic to Brexit, which there wasn’t, the entire basis of that logic is now rapidly disappearing.
A UK-US deal?
To the extent that the Brexiters have any response to this situation, it is the idea of the UK creating a Free Trade Agreement with the US (and/or an exemption from new punishment tariffs). Indeed, some clearly imagine that this, finally, will be a concrete demonstration of the benefits of Brexit.
However, it is an utterly inadequate response. Although there is no doubt that Trump will dangle this possibility in front of Starmer, that doesn’t mean he will do such a deal. In fact, as is already beginning to happen, he is likely to alternately hint that he is going to spare Britain or that he is going to punish us, just as a way of demonstrating his power. But even if he does a deal, his protectionism and nationalism, not to mention his own concept of deal-making, will mean that it will not be a good deal for the UK, and will come with numerous conditions. In any case, as Mexico and Canada are finding as regards USCMA, a deal with Trump is not worth the paper it is written on. His “anti-transactionalism” means he is always liable to make some new demands for obedience from the UK.
Most importantly of all, were a US-UK trade deal to happen in the new context Trump has created it would, for what at best would be only a small economic benefit, engender not just dismay but disgust from most of Britain’s friends and allies. Brexit Britain would cease to be regarded by them, as it has been since 2016, with bewilderment and even sympathy, but instead with loathing and revulsion, a Quisling in Trump’s global war.
The very idea that Brexiters like David Frost should think that their project is justified by the ‘freedom’ to act in such a cowardly and contemptible way shows the depths and desperation they have reached. Certainly their advocacy of dancing a humiliating jig to the tune of a capricious bully removes any vestigial illusion that they are in any way patriotic.
Starmer’s opportunity
The temptation for Starmer, partly as a matter of temperament, but partly because Brexit has left Britain in such an enfeebled position, will be to go on doing nothing and saying little other than platitudes. But inaction and quietude will amount to taking sides or, even worse, will be seen by each side as taking that of the other. Likewise, it will not silence the Brexiter call for doing a deal with the US, with Farage and his acolytes acting as Trump’s Fifth Column in British politics.
Conversely, Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies. Doing so would go with the grain of public opinion. Trump and his side-kick Musk are not popular in the UK. Equally, there is public support for closer relations with the EU rather than with the US, and probably (though I haven’t found polling data) for siding with Canada, Greenland/ Denmark, and perhaps even Panama, against Trump’s aggression.
In this way, all the talk still coming from Badenoch, amongst others, of ‘honouring the will of the British people’ and ‘retaining our hard-won Brexit freedoms’ as a reason to oppose the reset could at a stroke be derided as the tired repetition of long-outdated slogans, wrenching political discourse free of the detritus of 2016 and its aftermath. That wouldn’t imply re-opening the Brexit question, or crossing Labour’s ‘red lines’, but it would imply pursuing a maximalist reset with the EU, at speed, and with open enthusiasm rather than coyness and reluctance. Doing so would not just reset UK-EU relations, it would also reset UK international relations generally and, perhaps most importantly, reset the terms of domestic political debate.
Starmer may never have a better chance than now, and, if he is to take it, then the sooner the better if he is to get kudos for being at the forefront of this new global divide. Standing up to Trump in this way would not be easy or cost-free for Britain. Doing so would have significant security and economic ramifications. But the same is true of not doing so. And it’s even possible, given Trump’s bullying temperament, that standing up to him might earn Starmer a degree of grudging respect.
In some ways, Starmer is ideally placed to take this kind of stance. As I wrote recently, his persona and politics are very clearly aligned with the principles of ‘rational-legal authority’ in both the domestic and international spheres, placing him in direct contrast to Trump’s ‘anti-ruleism’. However, at the same time, and relatedly, he is almost preternaturally cautious, lacking vision and perhaps distrustful of the very concept of vision, and as a result inclined to ‘wait and see’ and to dodge hard choices. Hence his current rejection of the bare idea that there is a choice to be made between the US and the EU. That is misguided even if the choice is framed in that way. It is even more misguided when the choice is framed, as it should be, between accepting or rejecting Trump’s new barbarism.
*Of these attacks, probably none was more ludicrous than that of Kate Hoey. It isn’t only that she sees betrayal in the UK Prime Minister meeting EU leaders, it is that having campaigned for years against membership of the EU because of its supra-national powers she now proposes that the UK need not deal with the EU at all, but simply with its individual members. And this is only one aspect of the idiocy on display in just this short clip.
Friday, 7 February 2025
Friday, 24 January 2025
Five years on: stuck
As we approach the fifth anniversary of officially leaving the EU, even those who still profess to support Brexit are hard-pressed to explain what the point of it was, and scarcely bother to try. That lack of purpose was underscored by Kemi Badenoch's recent admission that the Conservatives took Britain out of the EU “without a plan for growth”. This wasn’t, as some have taken it to be, an expression of ‘Bregret’, but it was the first time a senior Tory has accepted that the manner in which Brexit was enacted was flawed and, at least by implication, flawed in ways which have done economic damage. Effectively, Badenoch repeated the critique Farage made in 2023 of the Tories’ handling of Brexit, one which Rishi Sunak denied at the time.
In that sense, it was a relatively easy critique to make, since the Tories are no longer in power, and Brexit is always at its shiny best when presented by those without responsibility for its implementation. What, like Farage, Badenoch cannot admit is that this lack of a growth plan (or any plan) was inherent to Brexit and not simply a matter of ‘mismanagement’. On the one hand, there was no way of delivering Brexit that would not have been economically damaging. On the other hand, there was no consensus view amongst Brexit’s advocates and voters as to what the (economic) plan of Brexit was meant to be. So it’s not just that any Brexit plan would have been damaging, it’s that there was no political basis on which to make even a damaging plan.
A Brexit wobble?
Nevertheless, Badenoch’s admission is significant, especially when taken in conjunction with the very different intervention from the LibDem leader Ed Davey, calling for the UK to agree a new customs union with the EU. As Lewis Goodall of the News Agents pointed out on his Substack last week, these developments mark a “wobbling” of the “shallow but broad political consensus in Westminster [whereby] no-one much liked [the Johnson agreement] but few wanted to re-open it, for fear of the daemons therein”. That assessment of Westminster is broadly true, especially given the reduced SNP presence in the current parliament, and it is certainly true that for both Tories and LibDems what their leaders have now said represents a departure from their election manifestos.
It is, however, only a ‘wobble’. Brexit still isn’t, for now at least, a major, overt part of political debate, and I think Goodall is right to say that the immediate consequences for how the government acts in relation to post-Brexit decisions are quite limited. Badenoch’s comments at least give cover for Keir Starmer’s line that the Tories made a mess of Brexit, whilst those of Davey at least potentially extended the terrain of what is discussable. But – and it is a very big ‘but’ – there is very little sign that the government has any desire, or even any idea, of how to escape from the very narrow parameters it has assigned to Brexit.
Labour’s narrow vision
More specifically, it is striking that, the ‘reset’ notwithstanding, Starmer’s government’s approach to Brexit sounds very similar to Badenoch’s, and, actually, to Rishi Sunak’s. Thus, Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds dismissed Davey’s intervention as showing that the LibDems “only ever think about Europe” and babbled about how “this is a government that wants to improve that relationship with the EU but also wants to do work with the US, with India, with the Gulf”. That’s boilerplate Brexiter stuff, which could as easily have been said by Sunak.
Where both Reynolds and Rachel Reeves have an at least arguably better case is in saying that part of the cost of Brexit was the political instability and business uncertainty it created, and that revisiting the question of a customs union would mark a return to that. After all, how viable would it be to do so when there is a fair prospect of a Tory, or even a Tory-Reform, government returning, Trump-like, in 2029 to reverse it? On other hand, if economic growth is the government’s central mission, that is what should be driving policy. There’s not much point in banging on about having a ‘Plan for Change’ and then discounting change because it would produce instability. At all events, even if the government judges that a customs treaty is not politically feasible now, Starmer could still have made use of the opportunity Davey provided to nudge Labour’s Brexit parameters just a little.
Even leaving aside a customs union, the most obvious way to do so would have been to signal an intention to rejoin the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention on rules of origin. The case for doing so has been discussed again recently by customs expert Dr Anna Jerzweska and, crucially, it is something which would sit within the framework of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Significantly, this week Maros Sefcovic indicated that the EU is open to the idea of the UK joining PEM.
Even for the most rabid Brexiter, PEM membership is actually fairly uncontroversial, to the extent that the ‘instability’ argument almost certainly doesn’t apply. It’s not difficult to imagine that the Sunak government would have done it, and it’s quite likely, in my view, that it will eventually become Labour policy (the government had already begun consulting businesses about the idea). But it would have been far better had the overture come from the government when Davey provided an opening (if not, indeed, before) as something the UK is pro-actively seeking as being in the national interest.
As it is, Sefcovic’s comments have already been reported in the pro-Brexit press under the headline “EU plots to drag UK back into bloc”. No doubt something similar would be said had Starmer proposed it, but had he done so it would have put the government on the front foot. Instead, Labour are reduced to making the mealy-mouthed response that the UK “does not currently have plans” to join PEM, whilst confirming that doing so would not cross the government's 'red lines'. This keeps the door ajar, but also invites cries of ‘giving in to the EU’ were the government ever to step through it. It’s truly pathetic.
An even more striking illustration of the continuity of Labour and Tory policy is how, when Badenoch was asked how she would approach Brexit if she were in power, she came out with exploiting areas like technology and AI. This, of course, was Sunak’s pet project and, now, has been adopted by Starmer as the key to delivering “a decade of national renewal” with his rather oddly-worded desire to “mainline AI into the veins of this enterprising nation”. Such an ambition might not, in itself, be related to Brexit, but the government clearly sees it as being so. Thus, according to Reeves:
“There are opportunities outside the European Union, opportunities, for example, like AI, where we have a very different regulatory approach to AI compared to the European Union’s approach. That makes Britain a more attractive place for AI and tech companies to invest than in other European countries.”
Once again, this is boilerplate Brexiter stuff.
Strategic incoherence
The convergence of how Starmer and the previous Tory government talk about AI regulation is the starting point of an excellent piece by Joël Reland of UKICE. In it, he points to other ways in which the current government shows a proclivity to “flirt” with regulatory divergence whereas, in practice, “its revealed preference … is to align with EU standards”. This preference was further revealed by the government’s decision this week not to allow the ‘Stormont Brake’ to be pulled over chemical labelling regulations. This was the latest evidence that, as the BBC’s John Campbell argues, the government’s general approach will be to align the whole of the UK with any EU rules which apply, by virtue of the Protocol and Windsor Framework, to Northern Ireland.
There are several points within Reland’s analysis which are worth flagging or amplifying. One of these is the basic fact “that the UK is a second-order regulatory power”, and always liable to be pulled by ‘the Brussels Effect’ towards EU regulations. This would be the case anyway, because so much of the UK’s trade and supply chains are bound up with the EU, but, as the story about chemicals labelling illustrates, Northern Ireland makes it more so. That’s because, at least as regards goods regulation, UK-EU divergence also has the consequence of GB-NI divergence, so to avoid the latter requires also avoiding the former.
Another important point made by Reland is that Labour’s approach has, or potentially has, numerous contradictions because decisions taken in one regulatory area can conflict with those taken in another. This, I think, is the flip-side of, or perhaps just another way of expressing, the argument I made last August about Labour’s lack of a post-Brexit strategy. That argument was more focussed on what the government wants from ‘the reset’ per se but this is inseparable from a coherent regulatory strategy.
For example, it was reported in the FT on 8 January (£) that UK plans to diverge on gene editing regulation* are being delayed as they would potentially make the government’s key stated reset objective of an SPS deal impossible to achieve. However, the article reported:
“Defra declined to comment when asked whether it was delaying the legislation as a result of the warnings from Brussels. It also declined to repeat on the record its previous commitments to introduce the legislation or set a timetable for doing so.”
Yet the next day, in the same paper, it was reported (£) that the Environment Secretary had said that the UK (presumably, Great Britain) would go ahead, with the legislation to come into force by the end of March.
It remains to be seen what will happen, but the point is that these reports, in a reputable outlet, written by reputable authors (including Peter Foster, who was a co-author of both of them), and published just a day apart, were able to tell quite different stories because the government itself failed to provide a consistent line.
What this illustrates isn’t (simply) the incoherence of the government’s approach, it is the incoherence of Brexit itself. Specifically, Brexit was wrongly seen as a way of removing regulatory ‘red tape’ and also as a way of gaining regulatory independence. From that, a great deal has flowed for what Brexit has meant in practice, but two issues, in particular, are now coming to the fore.
Lack of regulatory capacity
One, which is highlighted by Reland and by yet another recent piece by Peter Foster in the FT (£), is that it has thrown so much responsibility for regulatory infrastructure on to domestic agencies. It is not just post-Brexit trade and customs bureaucracy which have made nonsense of the Brexiter claim that leaving the EU would reduce ‘red tape’, it is also the repatriation of regulatory functions. Regulatory independence does not simply mean, as the Brexiters’ simplistic slogan had it, “taking back control of our laws.” It also entails developing regulatory capacity, as what was once provided on a pooled basis by the EU now has to be provided by the UK.
Right across the board, the British State is creaking under the weight of these demands, with underfunded, understaffed, and underperforming agencies. Examples given by Foster include the Food Standards Agency, the Competition and Markets Authority, the Health and Safety Executive, and the Medical and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Now, and partly in response to this, the government has created the Regulatory Innovation Office, to update regulation and speed up decisions, with a particular focus on high-tech areas.
This may be no bad idea, including its recognition of the interconnectedness of some of these areas, but that also means that it sits astride a number of existing agencies, including some of those just mentioned. Arguably, that just adds another layer of organizational complexity and cost to an already creaking regulatory infrastructure. After all, there is something rather ‘Yes Minister’ about a kind of ‘regulator to regulate regulators’ in order to ‘cut red tape’. So, for now, the jury must be out on whether all this can possibly add up to the regulatory ‘nimbleness and agility’ promised by Brexiters in the past, and now embraced by Labour as part of its growth agenda.
The cold world of geo-politics
Whilst the Brexit policy of ‘regulatory independence’ creates many new costs, the second issue arising from it is that it is based on an illusion which founders on the rock of geo-political reality. This is partly the familiar matter of there being two or perhaps three regulatory superpowers, the US, the EU, and China. But, more particularly, it is about how, exacerbated by the return of Donald Trump, regulation is both an arena and a weapon of international conflict and competition. That is currently most evident in relation to social media regulation and AI regulation, but it also extends to less high-profile areas.
Many of these issues are highlighted in a recent, excellent, report from Marley Morris of IPPR on UK trade strategy. It is a wide-ranging analysis which is well worth reading in full, but, to take one example, before long, the UK needs to decide about whether to seek linkage of EU and UK Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS). Doing so, as Foster points out in his discussion of the IPPR report, is likely to be seen negatively by Trump. So, whilst this may be a decision for the UK, it is not one which can be taken in isolation.
The wider implication is that Trump’s ‘with me or against me' world view means that he will treat any UK decision – not just about relations with the EU, but with China, Russia, etc. – as a hostile act and a personal affront. And, in Trump-world, that means punishment. It is this world view which, as Rafael Behr argues, is rapidly going to force the UK to make “hard choices” which need to be “informed by a coherent strategic purpose”, and these choices go well beyond, though they include, those relating to trade and regulation.
In turn, this exposes the paucity of Brexit as a project of ‘sovereignty’. Not only was ‘freedom from Brussels’ largely illusory, it also increased Britain’s exposure to international power plays at precisely the time they have become more vicious and less predictable.
Is a strategy even possible?
In this sense, post-Brexit Britain’s problems are not simply those of lacking a plan for what to do with Brexit, they are those of being saddled with something with which little can be done. Having been touted as the solution to all Britain’s problems, Brexit has now become Britain’s foremost insoluble problem.
The Brexiters certainly don’t have an answer, and, if they say anything at all, simply continue to repeat already failed ideas, the most recent example being an embarrassingly feeble analysis by ‘Brexit brain’ Shanker Singham. It includes another outing for wide-ranging ‘mutual recognition agreements’ as the solution to the damage of Brexit. Meanwhile, poor old Robert Tombs, one of the original ‘Brains for Brexit’ is reduced to pondering why he was wrong to have “imprudently predicted that life outside the EU would so quickly be taken for granted that it would be hard to find anyone admitting to having voted ‘Remain’” only to come up with the half-baked idea that “Anti-Brexitism has become part of the ‘woke’ agenda.”
However, the Labour government has no real answer either. And whilst I agree with Behr, Reland, Marley and others who, in various ways, argue about the need to develop a coherent post-Brexit strategy, perhaps the stark reality is that no such strategy is possible: Brexit was strategically incoherent from the outset, and has only become more so. If that is so, there are just different versions of muddling through, some slightly better and some slightly worse, although the difference, small as it may be, shouldn’t be completely dismissed.
Of course, many people, perhaps especially readers of this blog, would say that there is an obvious answer, and it is to join the EU. And, although that wouldn’t resolve every problem for Britain, with Trump embarking on a far more internationally aggressive presidency than his first, and his acolytes explicitly attacking our country, the case to openly re-evaluate Brexit is stronger than ever. But, the recent ‘wobble’ notwithstanding, there’s no real sign of that happening. In May 2019, I wrote about Brexit as “an aporia, a pathless path, with no way forward and no way back”. Five years on from leaving the EU, that remains the case.
*This has long been seen, not just by Brexiters but by many scientists and commentators, as a regulatory area where the UK could benefit from divergence, and legislation has long been in progress (see my post of February 2022 for some discussion). But my point here isn’t about whether it is desirable or not, but about how it illustrates the lack of a coherently designed and clearly communicated regulatory strategy.
In that sense, it was a relatively easy critique to make, since the Tories are no longer in power, and Brexit is always at its shiny best when presented by those without responsibility for its implementation. What, like Farage, Badenoch cannot admit is that this lack of a growth plan (or any plan) was inherent to Brexit and not simply a matter of ‘mismanagement’. On the one hand, there was no way of delivering Brexit that would not have been economically damaging. On the other hand, there was no consensus view amongst Brexit’s advocates and voters as to what the (economic) plan of Brexit was meant to be. So it’s not just that any Brexit plan would have been damaging, it’s that there was no political basis on which to make even a damaging plan.
A Brexit wobble?
Nevertheless, Badenoch’s admission is significant, especially when taken in conjunction with the very different intervention from the LibDem leader Ed Davey, calling for the UK to agree a new customs union with the EU. As Lewis Goodall of the News Agents pointed out on his Substack last week, these developments mark a “wobbling” of the “shallow but broad political consensus in Westminster [whereby] no-one much liked [the Johnson agreement] but few wanted to re-open it, for fear of the daemons therein”. That assessment of Westminster is broadly true, especially given the reduced SNP presence in the current parliament, and it is certainly true that for both Tories and LibDems what their leaders have now said represents a departure from their election manifestos.
It is, however, only a ‘wobble’. Brexit still isn’t, for now at least, a major, overt part of political debate, and I think Goodall is right to say that the immediate consequences for how the government acts in relation to post-Brexit decisions are quite limited. Badenoch’s comments at least give cover for Keir Starmer’s line that the Tories made a mess of Brexit, whilst those of Davey at least potentially extended the terrain of what is discussable. But – and it is a very big ‘but’ – there is very little sign that the government has any desire, or even any idea, of how to escape from the very narrow parameters it has assigned to Brexit.
Labour’s narrow vision
More specifically, it is striking that, the ‘reset’ notwithstanding, Starmer’s government’s approach to Brexit sounds very similar to Badenoch’s, and, actually, to Rishi Sunak’s. Thus, Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds dismissed Davey’s intervention as showing that the LibDems “only ever think about Europe” and babbled about how “this is a government that wants to improve that relationship with the EU but also wants to do work with the US, with India, with the Gulf”. That’s boilerplate Brexiter stuff, which could as easily have been said by Sunak.
Where both Reynolds and Rachel Reeves have an at least arguably better case is in saying that part of the cost of Brexit was the political instability and business uncertainty it created, and that revisiting the question of a customs union would mark a return to that. After all, how viable would it be to do so when there is a fair prospect of a Tory, or even a Tory-Reform, government returning, Trump-like, in 2029 to reverse it? On other hand, if economic growth is the government’s central mission, that is what should be driving policy. There’s not much point in banging on about having a ‘Plan for Change’ and then discounting change because it would produce instability. At all events, even if the government judges that a customs treaty is not politically feasible now, Starmer could still have made use of the opportunity Davey provided to nudge Labour’s Brexit parameters just a little.
Even leaving aside a customs union, the most obvious way to do so would have been to signal an intention to rejoin the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention on rules of origin. The case for doing so has been discussed again recently by customs expert Dr Anna Jerzweska and, crucially, it is something which would sit within the framework of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Significantly, this week Maros Sefcovic indicated that the EU is open to the idea of the UK joining PEM.
Even for the most rabid Brexiter, PEM membership is actually fairly uncontroversial, to the extent that the ‘instability’ argument almost certainly doesn’t apply. It’s not difficult to imagine that the Sunak government would have done it, and it’s quite likely, in my view, that it will eventually become Labour policy (the government had already begun consulting businesses about the idea). But it would have been far better had the overture come from the government when Davey provided an opening (if not, indeed, before) as something the UK is pro-actively seeking as being in the national interest.
As it is, Sefcovic’s comments have already been reported in the pro-Brexit press under the headline “EU plots to drag UK back into bloc”. No doubt something similar would be said had Starmer proposed it, but had he done so it would have put the government on the front foot. Instead, Labour are reduced to making the mealy-mouthed response that the UK “does not currently have plans” to join PEM, whilst confirming that doing so would not cross the government's 'red lines'. This keeps the door ajar, but also invites cries of ‘giving in to the EU’ were the government ever to step through it. It’s truly pathetic.
An even more striking illustration of the continuity of Labour and Tory policy is how, when Badenoch was asked how she would approach Brexit if she were in power, she came out with exploiting areas like technology and AI. This, of course, was Sunak’s pet project and, now, has been adopted by Starmer as the key to delivering “a decade of national renewal” with his rather oddly-worded desire to “mainline AI into the veins of this enterprising nation”. Such an ambition might not, in itself, be related to Brexit, but the government clearly sees it as being so. Thus, according to Reeves:
“There are opportunities outside the European Union, opportunities, for example, like AI, where we have a very different regulatory approach to AI compared to the European Union’s approach. That makes Britain a more attractive place for AI and tech companies to invest than in other European countries.”
Once again, this is boilerplate Brexiter stuff.
Strategic incoherence
The convergence of how Starmer and the previous Tory government talk about AI regulation is the starting point of an excellent piece by Joël Reland of UKICE. In it, he points to other ways in which the current government shows a proclivity to “flirt” with regulatory divergence whereas, in practice, “its revealed preference … is to align with EU standards”. This preference was further revealed by the government’s decision this week not to allow the ‘Stormont Brake’ to be pulled over chemical labelling regulations. This was the latest evidence that, as the BBC’s John Campbell argues, the government’s general approach will be to align the whole of the UK with any EU rules which apply, by virtue of the Protocol and Windsor Framework, to Northern Ireland.
There are several points within Reland’s analysis which are worth flagging or amplifying. One of these is the basic fact “that the UK is a second-order regulatory power”, and always liable to be pulled by ‘the Brussels Effect’ towards EU regulations. This would be the case anyway, because so much of the UK’s trade and supply chains are bound up with the EU, but, as the story about chemicals labelling illustrates, Northern Ireland makes it more so. That’s because, at least as regards goods regulation, UK-EU divergence also has the consequence of GB-NI divergence, so to avoid the latter requires also avoiding the former.
Another important point made by Reland is that Labour’s approach has, or potentially has, numerous contradictions because decisions taken in one regulatory area can conflict with those taken in another. This, I think, is the flip-side of, or perhaps just another way of expressing, the argument I made last August about Labour’s lack of a post-Brexit strategy. That argument was more focussed on what the government wants from ‘the reset’ per se but this is inseparable from a coherent regulatory strategy.
For example, it was reported in the FT on 8 January (£) that UK plans to diverge on gene editing regulation* are being delayed as they would potentially make the government’s key stated reset objective of an SPS deal impossible to achieve. However, the article reported:
“Defra declined to comment when asked whether it was delaying the legislation as a result of the warnings from Brussels. It also declined to repeat on the record its previous commitments to introduce the legislation or set a timetable for doing so.”
Yet the next day, in the same paper, it was reported (£) that the Environment Secretary had said that the UK (presumably, Great Britain) would go ahead, with the legislation to come into force by the end of March.
It remains to be seen what will happen, but the point is that these reports, in a reputable outlet, written by reputable authors (including Peter Foster, who was a co-author of both of them), and published just a day apart, were able to tell quite different stories because the government itself failed to provide a consistent line.
What this illustrates isn’t (simply) the incoherence of the government’s approach, it is the incoherence of Brexit itself. Specifically, Brexit was wrongly seen as a way of removing regulatory ‘red tape’ and also as a way of gaining regulatory independence. From that, a great deal has flowed for what Brexit has meant in practice, but two issues, in particular, are now coming to the fore.
Lack of regulatory capacity
One, which is highlighted by Reland and by yet another recent piece by Peter Foster in the FT (£), is that it has thrown so much responsibility for regulatory infrastructure on to domestic agencies. It is not just post-Brexit trade and customs bureaucracy which have made nonsense of the Brexiter claim that leaving the EU would reduce ‘red tape’, it is also the repatriation of regulatory functions. Regulatory independence does not simply mean, as the Brexiters’ simplistic slogan had it, “taking back control of our laws.” It also entails developing regulatory capacity, as what was once provided on a pooled basis by the EU now has to be provided by the UK.
Right across the board, the British State is creaking under the weight of these demands, with underfunded, understaffed, and underperforming agencies. Examples given by Foster include the Food Standards Agency, the Competition and Markets Authority, the Health and Safety Executive, and the Medical and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Now, and partly in response to this, the government has created the Regulatory Innovation Office, to update regulation and speed up decisions, with a particular focus on high-tech areas.
This may be no bad idea, including its recognition of the interconnectedness of some of these areas, but that also means that it sits astride a number of existing agencies, including some of those just mentioned. Arguably, that just adds another layer of organizational complexity and cost to an already creaking regulatory infrastructure. After all, there is something rather ‘Yes Minister’ about a kind of ‘regulator to regulate regulators’ in order to ‘cut red tape’. So, for now, the jury must be out on whether all this can possibly add up to the regulatory ‘nimbleness and agility’ promised by Brexiters in the past, and now embraced by Labour as part of its growth agenda.
The cold world of geo-politics
Whilst the Brexit policy of ‘regulatory independence’ creates many new costs, the second issue arising from it is that it is based on an illusion which founders on the rock of geo-political reality. This is partly the familiar matter of there being two or perhaps three regulatory superpowers, the US, the EU, and China. But, more particularly, it is about how, exacerbated by the return of Donald Trump, regulation is both an arena and a weapon of international conflict and competition. That is currently most evident in relation to social media regulation and AI regulation, but it also extends to less high-profile areas.
Many of these issues are highlighted in a recent, excellent, report from Marley Morris of IPPR on UK trade strategy. It is a wide-ranging analysis which is well worth reading in full, but, to take one example, before long, the UK needs to decide about whether to seek linkage of EU and UK Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS). Doing so, as Foster points out in his discussion of the IPPR report, is likely to be seen negatively by Trump. So, whilst this may be a decision for the UK, it is not one which can be taken in isolation.
The wider implication is that Trump’s ‘with me or against me' world view means that he will treat any UK decision – not just about relations with the EU, but with China, Russia, etc. – as a hostile act and a personal affront. And, in Trump-world, that means punishment. It is this world view which, as Rafael Behr argues, is rapidly going to force the UK to make “hard choices” which need to be “informed by a coherent strategic purpose”, and these choices go well beyond, though they include, those relating to trade and regulation.
In turn, this exposes the paucity of Brexit as a project of ‘sovereignty’. Not only was ‘freedom from Brussels’ largely illusory, it also increased Britain’s exposure to international power plays at precisely the time they have become more vicious and less predictable.
Is a strategy even possible?
In this sense, post-Brexit Britain’s problems are not simply those of lacking a plan for what to do with Brexit, they are those of being saddled with something with which little can be done. Having been touted as the solution to all Britain’s problems, Brexit has now become Britain’s foremost insoluble problem.
The Brexiters certainly don’t have an answer, and, if they say anything at all, simply continue to repeat already failed ideas, the most recent example being an embarrassingly feeble analysis by ‘Brexit brain’ Shanker Singham. It includes another outing for wide-ranging ‘mutual recognition agreements’ as the solution to the damage of Brexit. Meanwhile, poor old Robert Tombs, one of the original ‘Brains for Brexit’ is reduced to pondering why he was wrong to have “imprudently predicted that life outside the EU would so quickly be taken for granted that it would be hard to find anyone admitting to having voted ‘Remain’” only to come up with the half-baked idea that “Anti-Brexitism has become part of the ‘woke’ agenda.”
However, the Labour government has no real answer either. And whilst I agree with Behr, Reland, Marley and others who, in various ways, argue about the need to develop a coherent post-Brexit strategy, perhaps the stark reality is that no such strategy is possible: Brexit was strategically incoherent from the outset, and has only become more so. If that is so, there are just different versions of muddling through, some slightly better and some slightly worse, although the difference, small as it may be, shouldn’t be completely dismissed.
Of course, many people, perhaps especially readers of this blog, would say that there is an obvious answer, and it is to join the EU. And, although that wouldn’t resolve every problem for Britain, with Trump embarking on a far more internationally aggressive presidency than his first, and his acolytes explicitly attacking our country, the case to openly re-evaluate Brexit is stronger than ever. But, the recent ‘wobble’ notwithstanding, there’s no real sign of that happening. In May 2019, I wrote about Brexit as “an aporia, a pathless path, with no way forward and no way back”. Five years on from leaving the EU, that remains the case.
*This has long been seen, not just by Brexiters but by many scientists and commentators, as a regulatory area where the UK could benefit from divergence, and legislation has long been in progress (see my post of February 2022 for some discussion). But my point here isn’t about whether it is desirable or not, but about how it illustrates the lack of a coherently designed and clearly communicated regulatory strategy.
Friday, 10 January 2025
Welcome to 2025
In one way, it has been a quiet period for Brexit news since my previous, pre-Christmas, post. That is hardly surprising, given the season. But it is only true if Brexit is understood in its narrow and literal sense. Understood in the wider sense of the unfolding of populist politics, 2025 has started with a noisy tumult, of a volume and variety which make it hard to analyze. For personal reasons (my mother died this week), this is a much shorter post than usual, but there is already no doubt that this is going to be an eventful Brexit year.
Brexit costs, again
Starting with the narrower and more literal issues, there has been another outbreak of claim and counter-claim about the costs of Brexit, largely sparked by a report in The Independent trying to summarize these costs. It referred to many of the studies and estimates which I’ve discussed previously on the blog, and provoked the usual criticisms of those estimates from the usual Brexiters (£).
Some of those criticisms have a spark of validity. In particular, as I’ve pointed out before, it is correct to say it is misleading to describe the ‘divorce bill’ as a cost of Brexit because they are payments for liabilities the UK had incurred as an EU member so, in that sense, would have been paid one way or another regardless of Brexit. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many Brexiters insisted, amongst them Nigel Farage, that there would be no ‘divorce settlement’ to pay or, even, that the EU would owe money to the UK. Even when installed as Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson said the EU could “go whistle” for a financial settlement.
The only research mentioned by The Independent which I haven’t previously covered, because it came after I’d written my previous post, was a recent study by the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. As was widely reported, this estimated that in the in the first two years since the transition period ended the UK had “only” lost £27 billion in trade, and that although this had been a “disaster” for small businesses, this is less, so far, than would have been expected from the long-term (15 year) OBR prediction. This caused much back-slapping in Brexiter circles (where the usual objections of it being too early to tell, impossible to estimate, and academics all being remainer stooges were suddenly forgotten). Yet it is hard to see why they should be so gleeful, since Brexit was sold on the basis that it was going to be of positive benefit.
So this, coming up to five years since the day we formally left the EU, is the level to which the grand promises of Brexit have brought us: arguing over just how bad the damage has been. Not a single leading advocate for Brexit has ever apologized for the promises they made. At best, they shrug them off as having been thwarted by remainers and the EU.
How we got here, again
That, too, isn’t a news item, but I am in the process of reading Tim Shipman’s Out, a massive tome which provides a lot of crunchy detail about the politics of the Brexit process, and it serves as reminder of what actually happened in those years. Admittedly, it is only a reminder of a certain sort, not because it is biased in any crass way but because it takes as its frame of reference the idea that this was a negotiation in which the outcomes were about the political power-plays between Johnson’s government, the domestic ‘Bresistance’, and the EU.
In those terms, it is highly informative. But what is missing (unless it comes further on than I have yet read) is an understanding of the real legal parameters in play. In particular, on the key issue of the Northern Ireland border, it proceeds as if a borderless hard Brexit was, in principle, a possibility, and what was at stake was simply whether or not it could be negotiated. In this sense, intentionally or not, it accepts the essentially unrealistic position of the Johnson-Frost-Cummings period of Brexit.
Good evidence that my assessment is an accurate one comes from the laudatory review of Shipman’s book by David Frost himself. Hailing it as the “definitive” account “at least until [his] own book is written” (an implausible boast, but one displaying all his habitual delusion and arrogance), he praises it as “objective and fair” which, from so partisan a figure, suggests the opposite might be the case. More specifically, Frost sees the book as vindicating all his well-rehearsed criticisms of the ‘remainer parliament’ (£), the Supreme Court and, especially the Benn Act. No doubt he would always have been liable to read it in this way, but the fact that he is able to find Shipman’s book susceptible to such a reading (whilst criticising other accounts as biased) is an indication of its fundamentally uncritical framing.
Even so, precisely because of that, Shipman’s book is valuable, partly because it confirms just how ignorant those enacting Brexit were about its realities, and partly because it confirms just how monocular their focus was on ‘getting Brexit done’, regardless of how it was done. This, in itself, gives the lie to the idea that Brexit was undertaken in a form that was foisted on them: Johnson and Frost chose it. That, in turn, also gives credence to Starmer’s claim that, even within the red lines of hard Brexit’ a somewhat different arrangement could be possible. 2025 will be the year when he needs to make good on that claim, if he is ever going to, but that is likely to mean a year of slow grind rather than great fireworks.
Donald Trump, again
The opposite applies to Brexit in its wider sense. This year is going to be an important one for transatlantic populism, and though the connections with Brexit are indirect, they are real. At the most general level, there has always been a connection, acknowledged on both sides, between Trump and Brexit. But there are two more specific connections.
One is to do with how the UK navigates its relationship with the US, and whilst Trump’s second presidency would always pose issues for that, it does so with particular force now that Britain has cut itself off from the EU. Just how poisonous that relationship may become has already been suggested by the berserk ferocity of Elon Musk’s attacks on the UK, and the Starmer government specifically (£), and the frenzy it has engendered in domestic politics. No doubt there is much more to come and, given Musk’s attacks on other European countries, the sense that the UK’s shared interests lie with the EU will be all the more obvious.
The other is the extent to which Trump’s return will be associated with the continued insurgence of Nigel Farage and his Reform Party. But this has the opposite implication for UK-EU relations, because the more it seems obvious that Farage’s populism is a strong and permanent feature of UK domestic politics, the less likely it is that the EU will regard the UK as a stable and trustworthy partner for any kind of new agreements, even those as limited in scope as Labour’s ‘reset’. Just this week, Brexiter fury about the appointment of Sir Olly Robbins as Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office was a reminder of the hold of Brexitism in the UK.
Stay cool, again
I haven’t had time this week to give much attention to these developments, which is regrettable given how extraordinary Musk’s accusations have been, and the vile manner in which they have been endorsed by some British politicians. But, in another way, it is not regrettable at all.
I pointed out in a recent post how narcissistic politicians like Trump exert power partly by generating a frenzy of comment around their each and every utterance. That’s also true of Farage. It is probably even more true of Musk, not least because he isn’t, in the normal sense of the word, a politician. It is no coincidence that his latest stuff tries to mobilize the natural revulsion most of us feel about the disgusting crimes of grooming gangs. Nor is it any coincidence that it does so in ways calculated to mobilize counter-revulsion at its opportunism and dishonesty. These people want us – need us – to be excitable, angry, confused, befuddled, and upset. They want us to be freaked out by their freakishness.
So our best response, and, actually, our best resistance, is cool, calm, considered analysis. Not only do they hate it, but it’s also the best way of keeping sane in the face of the mad psychodramas they try to create.
I have a strong feeling that this year, more than most, it is going to be important to remember that.
Brexit costs, again
Starting with the narrower and more literal issues, there has been another outbreak of claim and counter-claim about the costs of Brexit, largely sparked by a report in The Independent trying to summarize these costs. It referred to many of the studies and estimates which I’ve discussed previously on the blog, and provoked the usual criticisms of those estimates from the usual Brexiters (£).
Some of those criticisms have a spark of validity. In particular, as I’ve pointed out before, it is correct to say it is misleading to describe the ‘divorce bill’ as a cost of Brexit because they are payments for liabilities the UK had incurred as an EU member so, in that sense, would have been paid one way or another regardless of Brexit. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many Brexiters insisted, amongst them Nigel Farage, that there would be no ‘divorce settlement’ to pay or, even, that the EU would owe money to the UK. Even when installed as Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson said the EU could “go whistle” for a financial settlement.
The only research mentioned by The Independent which I haven’t previously covered, because it came after I’d written my previous post, was a recent study by the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. As was widely reported, this estimated that in the in the first two years since the transition period ended the UK had “only” lost £27 billion in trade, and that although this had been a “disaster” for small businesses, this is less, so far, than would have been expected from the long-term (15 year) OBR prediction. This caused much back-slapping in Brexiter circles (where the usual objections of it being too early to tell, impossible to estimate, and academics all being remainer stooges were suddenly forgotten). Yet it is hard to see why they should be so gleeful, since Brexit was sold on the basis that it was going to be of positive benefit.
So this, coming up to five years since the day we formally left the EU, is the level to which the grand promises of Brexit have brought us: arguing over just how bad the damage has been. Not a single leading advocate for Brexit has ever apologized for the promises they made. At best, they shrug them off as having been thwarted by remainers and the EU.
How we got here, again
That, too, isn’t a news item, but I am in the process of reading Tim Shipman’s Out, a massive tome which provides a lot of crunchy detail about the politics of the Brexit process, and it serves as reminder of what actually happened in those years. Admittedly, it is only a reminder of a certain sort, not because it is biased in any crass way but because it takes as its frame of reference the idea that this was a negotiation in which the outcomes were about the political power-plays between Johnson’s government, the domestic ‘Bresistance’, and the EU.
In those terms, it is highly informative. But what is missing (unless it comes further on than I have yet read) is an understanding of the real legal parameters in play. In particular, on the key issue of the Northern Ireland border, it proceeds as if a borderless hard Brexit was, in principle, a possibility, and what was at stake was simply whether or not it could be negotiated. In this sense, intentionally or not, it accepts the essentially unrealistic position of the Johnson-Frost-Cummings period of Brexit.
Good evidence that my assessment is an accurate one comes from the laudatory review of Shipman’s book by David Frost himself. Hailing it as the “definitive” account “at least until [his] own book is written” (an implausible boast, but one displaying all his habitual delusion and arrogance), he praises it as “objective and fair” which, from so partisan a figure, suggests the opposite might be the case. More specifically, Frost sees the book as vindicating all his well-rehearsed criticisms of the ‘remainer parliament’ (£), the Supreme Court and, especially the Benn Act. No doubt he would always have been liable to read it in this way, but the fact that he is able to find Shipman’s book susceptible to such a reading (whilst criticising other accounts as biased) is an indication of its fundamentally uncritical framing.
Even so, precisely because of that, Shipman’s book is valuable, partly because it confirms just how ignorant those enacting Brexit were about its realities, and partly because it confirms just how monocular their focus was on ‘getting Brexit done’, regardless of how it was done. This, in itself, gives the lie to the idea that Brexit was undertaken in a form that was foisted on them: Johnson and Frost chose it. That, in turn, also gives credence to Starmer’s claim that, even within the red lines of hard Brexit’ a somewhat different arrangement could be possible. 2025 will be the year when he needs to make good on that claim, if he is ever going to, but that is likely to mean a year of slow grind rather than great fireworks.
Donald Trump, again
The opposite applies to Brexit in its wider sense. This year is going to be an important one for transatlantic populism, and though the connections with Brexit are indirect, they are real. At the most general level, there has always been a connection, acknowledged on both sides, between Trump and Brexit. But there are two more specific connections.
One is to do with how the UK navigates its relationship with the US, and whilst Trump’s second presidency would always pose issues for that, it does so with particular force now that Britain has cut itself off from the EU. Just how poisonous that relationship may become has already been suggested by the berserk ferocity of Elon Musk’s attacks on the UK, and the Starmer government specifically (£), and the frenzy it has engendered in domestic politics. No doubt there is much more to come and, given Musk’s attacks on other European countries, the sense that the UK’s shared interests lie with the EU will be all the more obvious.
The other is the extent to which Trump’s return will be associated with the continued insurgence of Nigel Farage and his Reform Party. But this has the opposite implication for UK-EU relations, because the more it seems obvious that Farage’s populism is a strong and permanent feature of UK domestic politics, the less likely it is that the EU will regard the UK as a stable and trustworthy partner for any kind of new agreements, even those as limited in scope as Labour’s ‘reset’. Just this week, Brexiter fury about the appointment of Sir Olly Robbins as Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office was a reminder of the hold of Brexitism in the UK.
Stay cool, again
I haven’t had time this week to give much attention to these developments, which is regrettable given how extraordinary Musk’s accusations have been, and the vile manner in which they have been endorsed by some British politicians. But, in another way, it is not regrettable at all.
I pointed out in a recent post how narcissistic politicians like Trump exert power partly by generating a frenzy of comment around their each and every utterance. That’s also true of Farage. It is probably even more true of Musk, not least because he isn’t, in the normal sense of the word, a politician. It is no coincidence that his latest stuff tries to mobilize the natural revulsion most of us feel about the disgusting crimes of grooming gangs. Nor is it any coincidence that it does so in ways calculated to mobilize counter-revulsion at its opportunism and dishonesty. These people want us – need us – to be excitable, angry, confused, befuddled, and upset. They want us to be freaked out by their freakishness.
So our best response, and, actually, our best resistance, is cool, calm, considered analysis. Not only do they hate it, but it’s also the best way of keeping sane in the face of the mad psychodramas they try to create.
I have a strong feeling that this year, more than most, it is going to be important to remember that.
Friday, 20 December 2024
Beware the Brexit reset backlash
In a post at the beginning of September, when I compared ‘reset means reset’ with the days of ‘Brexit means Brexit’, I pointed out that there is at least one important difference. The Brexit negotiations took place within a process and timescale which was at least semi-defined by Article 50. Any reset process will be more nebulous, and shouldn’t really be thought of as a process, in the singular. At the same time, a virulent backlash against the reset is now beginning and, with it, a new phase in the battle for post-Brexit politics.
The Brexit reset
The reset can be understood in terms of two kinds of process. The first kind consists of the things which the UK can do unilaterally, meaning without any agreement from the EU, such as maintaining regulatory alignment with the EU, both by eschewing active divergence and by avoiding passive divergence. There are many signs that this kind of reset is underway. This is beneficial, as it means that businesses do not have to produce to two different standards, but doesn’t in itself improve terms of trade with the EU. Moreover, as occurred last week with the introduction of the EU General Product Safety Regulation, there are some forms of EU regulatory change which cannot simply be ‘shadowed’ by the UK (or, in this case, and others relating to goods trade, Great Britain), but have to be accepted as new barriers to trade.
The second kind of process consists of things involving negotiation with the EU. Most obviously that means agreeing measures which go beyond the existing Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), perhaps including a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS) agreement, and a Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications agreement. It could also include a security and defence pact. However, it also includes negotiations within the various mechanisms built into the existing agreements because there are some things potentially within their scope (such as linking carbon pricing systems) which, if pursued, would contribute to a reset.
Equally, there are other things, including the full implementation of the Windsor Framework, the resolution of ongoing problems in implementing the settled status scheme for EU citizens in the UK, and the full introduction of UK import controls, which are likely to be seen by the EU as a prerequisite for any substantive new agreement(s). This was brought into sharp focus this week with the news that the EU is taking the UK to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over its failures, going back to 2020, to uphold all the citizens’ rights provisions agreed in the Withdrawal Agreement and some other matters (all of which, be it noted, go back to the Tory government’s alleged failure to do what it, itself, had agreed; note also that it agreed to the ECJ’s role in these matters).
Resolving such issues is part of the reset because it would help to rebuild trust with the EU and to improve the ‘tone’ of the relationship, something which has been underway since the election, and which saw further developments in the last fortnight. These included Rachel Reeves attending the EU finance ministers' meeting and Keir Starmer meeting the President of the European Council. It’s wrong to scoff at such things as mere symbolism: symbolism matters, not least because of the way it relates to trust.
As for substance, there have been further signs that the UK will end up agreeing some form of YMS. Doing so, along with extending the agreement on fishing rights beyond its expiry in June 2026, looks to be the basic requirement of agreeing any wider reset with the EU. How the substance of the reset develops from now on will define Labour’s post-Brexit policy and, indeed, the UK’s post-Brexit polity, and negotiations with the EU look set to be the Brexit story of 2025 and perhaps beyond.
The reset backlash
Although these two reset processes have barely begun, it is already clear that what the economics commentator Simon Nixon calls “the Brexit reset backlash” is now underway, and it has gathered force just in the last two weeks. Thus last weekend saw the reset being denounced in the Mail on Sunday as what David Frost called, with his trademark dreary predictability, the work of a “Surrender Squad” which is set on “betraying” Brexit. An accompanying editorial warned that Starmer’s plans will make Britain “a rule taker” rather than “a rule maker”.
The next day, again in the Mail, Boris Johnson fulminated about the need to “fight, fight and fight again for the freedoms people voted for in 2016”. Meanwhile, in the Express, Johnson again appeared, this time to warn that the UK’s accession to the CPTPP, which occurred last Sunday, was in danger of being sacrificed by Starmer (a particularly disingenuous comment, as there is nothing in the reset which is anticipated to preclude CPTPP membership, including an SPS deal). And in this week’s PMQs Kemi Badenoch accused Starmer of being “about to give away our hard-won Brexit benefits” whilst the Sun launched a “campaign to stop Brexit betrayal”.
These and many other examples of the backlash reprise all the rancid arguments of the last eight years with the ever-present accusations of betrayal along with those of ‘submission’ to the EU and lack of patriotism. There’s something particularly fatuous about calling the reset a ‘betrayal’ when it comes, as it often does, from those who have spent those eight years calling every single aspect of Brexit a betrayal. Just how many times can Brexit be betrayed? However, the backlash is also distinctive, or at any rate specific, in being aimed at particular possibilities envisaged within the reset such as a carbon emissions agreement and an SPS agreement. In particular, the backlash has, rather belatedly, honed in on Labour’s longstanding omission of ECJ jurisdiction from its ‘red lines’.
A new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative
Thus this reset backlash can be understood as a new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative. The first phase of that battle began in earnest after the transition period ended in January 2021, and it was decisively lost by the Brexiters. That is evidenced by the now well-established negative public view of Brexit. For example, according to the Statista data series, since June 2021 the view that it was ‘wrong to leave’ has always been greater than the view that it was ‘right to leave’, with the gap between those rising steadily. In June 2021 44% said ‘wrong’ and 43% said right, but by May 2024 (the latest date in this data set) those figures were 55% and 31%. Many other polls and similar polling questions show the same pattern. At the same time, Brexiters became increasingly unwilling to defend Brexit and increasingly convoluted in such defences as they offered.
The reset can be understood in terms of two kinds of process. The first kind consists of the things which the UK can do unilaterally, meaning without any agreement from the EU, such as maintaining regulatory alignment with the EU, both by eschewing active divergence and by avoiding passive divergence. There are many signs that this kind of reset is underway. This is beneficial, as it means that businesses do not have to produce to two different standards, but doesn’t in itself improve terms of trade with the EU. Moreover, as occurred last week with the introduction of the EU General Product Safety Regulation, there are some forms of EU regulatory change which cannot simply be ‘shadowed’ by the UK (or, in this case, and others relating to goods trade, Great Britain), but have to be accepted as new barriers to trade.
The second kind of process consists of things involving negotiation with the EU. Most obviously that means agreeing measures which go beyond the existing Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), perhaps including a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS) agreement, and a Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications agreement. It could also include a security and defence pact. However, it also includes negotiations within the various mechanisms built into the existing agreements because there are some things potentially within their scope (such as linking carbon pricing systems) which, if pursued, would contribute to a reset.
Equally, there are other things, including the full implementation of the Windsor Framework, the resolution of ongoing problems in implementing the settled status scheme for EU citizens in the UK, and the full introduction of UK import controls, which are likely to be seen by the EU as a prerequisite for any substantive new agreement(s). This was brought into sharp focus this week with the news that the EU is taking the UK to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over its failures, going back to 2020, to uphold all the citizens’ rights provisions agreed in the Withdrawal Agreement and some other matters (all of which, be it noted, go back to the Tory government’s alleged failure to do what it, itself, had agreed; note also that it agreed to the ECJ’s role in these matters).
Resolving such issues is part of the reset because it would help to rebuild trust with the EU and to improve the ‘tone’ of the relationship, something which has been underway since the election, and which saw further developments in the last fortnight. These included Rachel Reeves attending the EU finance ministers' meeting and Keir Starmer meeting the President of the European Council. It’s wrong to scoff at such things as mere symbolism: symbolism matters, not least because of the way it relates to trust.
As for substance, there have been further signs that the UK will end up agreeing some form of YMS. Doing so, along with extending the agreement on fishing rights beyond its expiry in June 2026, looks to be the basic requirement of agreeing any wider reset with the EU. How the substance of the reset develops from now on will define Labour’s post-Brexit policy and, indeed, the UK’s post-Brexit polity, and negotiations with the EU look set to be the Brexit story of 2025 and perhaps beyond.
The reset backlash
Although these two reset processes have barely begun, it is already clear that what the economics commentator Simon Nixon calls “the Brexit reset backlash” is now underway, and it has gathered force just in the last two weeks. Thus last weekend saw the reset being denounced in the Mail on Sunday as what David Frost called, with his trademark dreary predictability, the work of a “Surrender Squad” which is set on “betraying” Brexit. An accompanying editorial warned that Starmer’s plans will make Britain “a rule taker” rather than “a rule maker”.
The next day, again in the Mail, Boris Johnson fulminated about the need to “fight, fight and fight again for the freedoms people voted for in 2016”. Meanwhile, in the Express, Johnson again appeared, this time to warn that the UK’s accession to the CPTPP, which occurred last Sunday, was in danger of being sacrificed by Starmer (a particularly disingenuous comment, as there is nothing in the reset which is anticipated to preclude CPTPP membership, including an SPS deal). And in this week’s PMQs Kemi Badenoch accused Starmer of being “about to give away our hard-won Brexit benefits” whilst the Sun launched a “campaign to stop Brexit betrayal”.
These and many other examples of the backlash reprise all the rancid arguments of the last eight years with the ever-present accusations of betrayal along with those of ‘submission’ to the EU and lack of patriotism. There’s something particularly fatuous about calling the reset a ‘betrayal’ when it comes, as it often does, from those who have spent those eight years calling every single aspect of Brexit a betrayal. Just how many times can Brexit be betrayed? However, the backlash is also distinctive, or at any rate specific, in being aimed at particular possibilities envisaged within the reset such as a carbon emissions agreement and an SPS agreement. In particular, the backlash has, rather belatedly, honed in on Labour’s longstanding omission of ECJ jurisdiction from its ‘red lines’.
A new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative
Thus this reset backlash can be understood as a new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative. The first phase of that battle began in earnest after the transition period ended in January 2021, and it was decisively lost by the Brexiters. That is evidenced by the now well-established negative public view of Brexit. For example, according to the Statista data series, since June 2021 the view that it was ‘wrong to leave’ has always been greater than the view that it was ‘right to leave’, with the gap between those rising steadily. In June 2021 44% said ‘wrong’ and 43% said right, but by May 2024 (the latest date in this data set) those figures were 55% and 31%. Many other polls and similar polling questions show the same pattern. At the same time, Brexiters became increasingly unwilling to defend Brexit and increasingly convoluted in such defences as they offered.
The arrival of the new government has provided Brexiters with an opportunity to regroup. In addition to opposing the reset itself, this regroup has two main axes.
The first axis consists of trying to give the impression that all the false claims made for Brexit were, in fact, being delivered on by the Tory government and are only now being squandered, or failing to materialise, because the Labour government has turned its back on them. Thus the fact that the Tories found that substantial regulatory divergence was impractical, and regulatory freedoms were largely an illusion, is being glossed over, and the failure to deliver them blamed on Labour. In a similar way, Badenoch and others are pretending that it is only Labour’s lack of commitment (£) which stands in the way of a supposedly (though actually fictitious) “oven ready” UK-US trade deal, especially once Trump returns to power.
The second axis is to re-write the ongoing damage of Brexit as being, in fact, the failure of the Labour government. Though minor in itself, a strikingly brazen example was an article in the Telegraph (£) last week bemoaning that “London’s stock market is in danger of sliding into irrelevance under Labour”. Yet, last January, an article in the same paper (£) reported that Brexit was “the prime suspect in the death of the stock market”. Not only were they in the same paper, but both articles were co-authored by the very same journalist, Chief City Correspondent Michael Bow.
This is only a small foretaste of what is likely to come. In particular, sooner or later (and sooner, if a reset with the EU is going to happen), the government is going to have to introduce full import controls. These are a direct consequence of Brexit, but one the Tories postponed multiple times, as did the Labour government this autumn. Undoubtedly when it happens it will be blamed on Labour mismanagement and, very likely, twisted round to be blamed on the reset itself (i.e. as a ‘concession’ in order to get the reset).
Labour’s culpability
In a sense, Labour have only themselves to blame. Promising to ‘make Brexit work’ was always likely to lumber the government with responsibility for all the ways in which Brexit does not, and will never, work. Nor has the government helped itself since coming to power. For example, treating, and initially rejecting, YMS as an ‘unacceptable EU demand’ simply plays into the hands of Brexiters, enabling them to present it, if (and almost certainly when) accepted, as a ‘capitulation’. It would have been much better to treat it as a great prize, and evidence of the potential value of the reset.
Another example is the UK’s accession to CPTPP. Of course the Trade Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, was bound to speak positively about this, but he was not obliged to do so in terms almost identical to those which would have been used by his Tory predecessors, saying it showed that “Britain is uniquely placed to take advantage of exciting new markets” etc. Here, again, the government is too willing to accept the Brexiters’ framing.
In the same way, the Brexiter attack line that the reset will make Britain a ‘rule taker’ ought to be challenged head-on by emphasising that Brexit created a situation where Britain is, in practice, a rule-taker (think tethered plastic bottle caps). The reset is partly designed to deal with this reality in a more efficient way, by facilitating alignment through, for example, the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, and perhaps in due course by agreeing to, for example, dynamic alignment of SPS regulations. So, far from being the cause of rule taking, the reset is a consequence of it and, in turn, a consequence of the delusions of Brexit.
In short, if the reset is to be successfully defended against the backlash, it will be necessary to challenge, and to not to reproduce, the underlying framing Brexit of itself. Just talking of the Tories’ “botched Brexit deal” isn’t enough. What is needed is a positive justification of the reset.
Justifying the reset
The most crucial justification is that the Labour election manifesto was quite clear about its intention to seek to reset relations with the EU. Conversely, the attempt the Brexiters are now making to depict the reset as undemocratic and a betrayal of the 2016 vote is, unequivocally, a lie. To the ire of many of its supporters, the Labour government is not reversing Brexit, and there is nothing at all in the referendum or what happened afterwards to say the UK-EU relations are bound to remain in the form Johnson and Frost negotiated (a form which, anyway, included provisions for future changes). Indeed, the crux of the Brexiters’ argument was that the British parliament should be free to pursue the policies which British electors had mandated. The reset has that mandate.
The second justification is that the reset also has popular support. The latest evidence for that came with a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) which includes a lot of crunchy survey data about public attitudes in the UK and in EU member states to UK-EU relations. I won’t even try to summarise it here but, as regards UK opinion, a couple of figures are worth flagging. One is that, overall, 55% favour closer relations with the EU, 22% favour relations as they are and 10% favour more distant relations. The other is that, amongst ‘Red Wall’ voters these figures are 44%, 14% and 18% respectively. Additionally, and prominently reported, the survey found majority support, even amongst leave voters (54%), for the return of freedom of movement in return for single market “access”.
These figures, especially the latter, attracted a certain amount of exuberant comment from ‘remainers’ or ‘rejoiners’ along the lines that the Labour government no longer need fear public opinion, not just as regards a reset but as regards reversing the entirety of, at least, ‘hard Brexit’ (i.e. no single market). I don’t think it is anything like as simple as that, whether viewed in terms of the narrow calculus of Labour electoral advantage or from the broader terms of the politics of Brexit.
On the first, it may well be the case (and, though I don’t have the data, I suspect it probably is) that a relatively small number of voters who don’t want closer relations and don’t want freedom of movement, and who feel strongly about both, could prevent Labour winning the next election. The wider issue is that opinion polls have many limitations, and can’t capture how voters would react if Labour followed where these ones point, given the backlash that would result. Most importantly of all, for Labour now to abandon its ‘red lines’ would immediately deprive the government of the democratic legitimacy which the election has given to its reset policy.
It may be tempting to think that, since that reset in itself attracts the ferocious and dishonest backlash we are seeing, the government might as well go the whole hog and pursue a reversal of Brexit, just as its Brexiter critics claim it to be doing. Actually, if anything, the backlash shows how limited Labour’s space for manoeuvre is. But the more important point is that there is a huge difference between defending against a false charge and against one which would be true. Moreover, if there is ever to be a durable rejoin policy it would have to be one which clearly had democratic legitimacy. So whilst the opinion polls give strong support for Labour’s reset, that is all they do.
The third justification for the reset is its substantive benefits. Just last week saw the publication, for the first time so far as I know, of a credible estimate of its economic impact. It came from John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, and, whilst necessarily rough and ready, suggests that the reset could deliver an annual uplift of 0.3% to 0.7% in the long-term, defined here as ten years.
Of course this is fairly trivial compared with the foregone GDP growth resulting from Brexit (and, actually this is Springford’s main point). However, in a generally low-growth economy, it is not nothing. For example, on present OECD predictions, UK growth in 2024 will be 0.9%. Moreover, on this estimate the reset is of considerably greater benefit than the long-term annual uplift of the CPTPP deal, estimated to be 0.04% to 0.08% of GDP. Even the Brexiters' much-vaunted UK-US trade deal would only be worth an estimated 0.07% to 0.16% of GDP. So, small as the value of a reset may be, those who dismiss it as worthless should be careful not to inadvertently give the backlashers a free pass on how it compares with such ‘Brexit benefits’.
In any case, the reset has more than an economic value. For one thing, if achieved, it would have a defence and security value, and that at a time of huge international turmoil. For another, it could act as a confidence-building measure to be built on subsequently. Indeed - and this, too, ought to concentrate the minds of those ‘rejoiners’ who dismiss the reset as trivial or even pointless - if there is ever to be a route to joining the EU again it seems all but certain it would need to pass through something like the reset along the way.
The bigger picture
It is in this latter respect that the Brexit reset backlash is most important, and most dangerous. At one level, it is just about domestic politics. It is a transparently opportunistic attempt by both Tory and Reform parties to re-kindle the populist anger of the referendum, and the ‘Brexit wars’ which followed, in order to boost their electoral fortunes.
At another level, those attempts are inseparable from UK-EU relations. The Brexiters’ visceral hatred of the EU makes them determined permanently to pollute those relations with their political faeces. They know that the more anti-reset opposition they can whip up, the less likely it is that the EU will have the confidence to entertain even minimally closer relations, let alone anything else. Already Jacob Rees-Mogg is urging “both the Tory and Reform leaders … to promise if elected to leave any new Labour deal”, and that is quite deliberately designed to wreck EU confidence in the reset. It is hideous and, if anything deserves the label, ‘unpatriotic’ in its attempt not just to derail the elected government’s reset policy but to engender perpetual hostility with Britain’s neighbours and allies. But it is happening and it can’t be wished away.
In that sense, this new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative is a crucial one for the government but, more widely and in the longer-term, for anyone who rejects the vicious and self-harming politics of Brexitism. Labour’s reset may be frustratingly timid, but the backlash against it is a reminder of the obstacles even to timidity. If it is defeated by that backlash, or even if it allows the Brexiters to regroup, the hold of that vicious and self-harming politics on our country will be strengthened. Conversely, if the Brexiters lose this second phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative, as they did the first, those politics will be weakened. At one level, the reset is about technocratic tinkering with the UK’s relations with the EU, but there is much more stake than that. Hence, indeed, the Brexiters’ desire to destroy it.
With that, another year of Brexit blogging ends. Many thanks to all who have read this year, taking the total visits to this site to well over the 10 million mark, and the number of posts to over 450. Your readership is always appreciated, and never taken for granted, especially with the huge volume of blogs, newsletters, vlogs, and I-don’t-know-whats that compete for attention. Thanks, too, for the (generally) urbane and (often) interesting comments made since I re-opened the facility a bit over a year ago. Best wishes to all readers for Christmas and the New Year. The next post will be on Friday 10 January 2025. I think I will continue in the new fortnightly pattern, but if (as seems possible) there is a lot of Brexit-related news next year then I might revert to the weekly format.
The first axis consists of trying to give the impression that all the false claims made for Brexit were, in fact, being delivered on by the Tory government and are only now being squandered, or failing to materialise, because the Labour government has turned its back on them. Thus the fact that the Tories found that substantial regulatory divergence was impractical, and regulatory freedoms were largely an illusion, is being glossed over, and the failure to deliver them blamed on Labour. In a similar way, Badenoch and others are pretending that it is only Labour’s lack of commitment (£) which stands in the way of a supposedly (though actually fictitious) “oven ready” UK-US trade deal, especially once Trump returns to power.
The second axis is to re-write the ongoing damage of Brexit as being, in fact, the failure of the Labour government. Though minor in itself, a strikingly brazen example was an article in the Telegraph (£) last week bemoaning that “London’s stock market is in danger of sliding into irrelevance under Labour”. Yet, last January, an article in the same paper (£) reported that Brexit was “the prime suspect in the death of the stock market”. Not only were they in the same paper, but both articles were co-authored by the very same journalist, Chief City Correspondent Michael Bow.
This is only a small foretaste of what is likely to come. In particular, sooner or later (and sooner, if a reset with the EU is going to happen), the government is going to have to introduce full import controls. These are a direct consequence of Brexit, but one the Tories postponed multiple times, as did the Labour government this autumn. Undoubtedly when it happens it will be blamed on Labour mismanagement and, very likely, twisted round to be blamed on the reset itself (i.e. as a ‘concession’ in order to get the reset).
Labour’s culpability
In a sense, Labour have only themselves to blame. Promising to ‘make Brexit work’ was always likely to lumber the government with responsibility for all the ways in which Brexit does not, and will never, work. Nor has the government helped itself since coming to power. For example, treating, and initially rejecting, YMS as an ‘unacceptable EU demand’ simply plays into the hands of Brexiters, enabling them to present it, if (and almost certainly when) accepted, as a ‘capitulation’. It would have been much better to treat it as a great prize, and evidence of the potential value of the reset.
Another example is the UK’s accession to CPTPP. Of course the Trade Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, was bound to speak positively about this, but he was not obliged to do so in terms almost identical to those which would have been used by his Tory predecessors, saying it showed that “Britain is uniquely placed to take advantage of exciting new markets” etc. Here, again, the government is too willing to accept the Brexiters’ framing.
In the same way, the Brexiter attack line that the reset will make Britain a ‘rule taker’ ought to be challenged head-on by emphasising that Brexit created a situation where Britain is, in practice, a rule-taker (think tethered plastic bottle caps). The reset is partly designed to deal with this reality in a more efficient way, by facilitating alignment through, for example, the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, and perhaps in due course by agreeing to, for example, dynamic alignment of SPS regulations. So, far from being the cause of rule taking, the reset is a consequence of it and, in turn, a consequence of the delusions of Brexit.
In short, if the reset is to be successfully defended against the backlash, it will be necessary to challenge, and to not to reproduce, the underlying framing Brexit of itself. Just talking of the Tories’ “botched Brexit deal” isn’t enough. What is needed is a positive justification of the reset.
Justifying the reset
The most crucial justification is that the Labour election manifesto was quite clear about its intention to seek to reset relations with the EU. Conversely, the attempt the Brexiters are now making to depict the reset as undemocratic and a betrayal of the 2016 vote is, unequivocally, a lie. To the ire of many of its supporters, the Labour government is not reversing Brexit, and there is nothing at all in the referendum or what happened afterwards to say the UK-EU relations are bound to remain in the form Johnson and Frost negotiated (a form which, anyway, included provisions for future changes). Indeed, the crux of the Brexiters’ argument was that the British parliament should be free to pursue the policies which British electors had mandated. The reset has that mandate.
The second justification is that the reset also has popular support. The latest evidence for that came with a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) which includes a lot of crunchy survey data about public attitudes in the UK and in EU member states to UK-EU relations. I won’t even try to summarise it here but, as regards UK opinion, a couple of figures are worth flagging. One is that, overall, 55% favour closer relations with the EU, 22% favour relations as they are and 10% favour more distant relations. The other is that, amongst ‘Red Wall’ voters these figures are 44%, 14% and 18% respectively. Additionally, and prominently reported, the survey found majority support, even amongst leave voters (54%), for the return of freedom of movement in return for single market “access”.
These figures, especially the latter, attracted a certain amount of exuberant comment from ‘remainers’ or ‘rejoiners’ along the lines that the Labour government no longer need fear public opinion, not just as regards a reset but as regards reversing the entirety of, at least, ‘hard Brexit’ (i.e. no single market). I don’t think it is anything like as simple as that, whether viewed in terms of the narrow calculus of Labour electoral advantage or from the broader terms of the politics of Brexit.
On the first, it may well be the case (and, though I don’t have the data, I suspect it probably is) that a relatively small number of voters who don’t want closer relations and don’t want freedom of movement, and who feel strongly about both, could prevent Labour winning the next election. The wider issue is that opinion polls have many limitations, and can’t capture how voters would react if Labour followed where these ones point, given the backlash that would result. Most importantly of all, for Labour now to abandon its ‘red lines’ would immediately deprive the government of the democratic legitimacy which the election has given to its reset policy.
It may be tempting to think that, since that reset in itself attracts the ferocious and dishonest backlash we are seeing, the government might as well go the whole hog and pursue a reversal of Brexit, just as its Brexiter critics claim it to be doing. Actually, if anything, the backlash shows how limited Labour’s space for manoeuvre is. But the more important point is that there is a huge difference between defending against a false charge and against one which would be true. Moreover, if there is ever to be a durable rejoin policy it would have to be one which clearly had democratic legitimacy. So whilst the opinion polls give strong support for Labour’s reset, that is all they do.
The third justification for the reset is its substantive benefits. Just last week saw the publication, for the first time so far as I know, of a credible estimate of its economic impact. It came from John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, and, whilst necessarily rough and ready, suggests that the reset could deliver an annual uplift of 0.3% to 0.7% in the long-term, defined here as ten years.
Of course this is fairly trivial compared with the foregone GDP growth resulting from Brexit (and, actually this is Springford’s main point). However, in a generally low-growth economy, it is not nothing. For example, on present OECD predictions, UK growth in 2024 will be 0.9%. Moreover, on this estimate the reset is of considerably greater benefit than the long-term annual uplift of the CPTPP deal, estimated to be 0.04% to 0.08% of GDP. Even the Brexiters' much-vaunted UK-US trade deal would only be worth an estimated 0.07% to 0.16% of GDP. So, small as the value of a reset may be, those who dismiss it as worthless should be careful not to inadvertently give the backlashers a free pass on how it compares with such ‘Brexit benefits’.
In any case, the reset has more than an economic value. For one thing, if achieved, it would have a defence and security value, and that at a time of huge international turmoil. For another, it could act as a confidence-building measure to be built on subsequently. Indeed - and this, too, ought to concentrate the minds of those ‘rejoiners’ who dismiss the reset as trivial or even pointless - if there is ever to be a route to joining the EU again it seems all but certain it would need to pass through something like the reset along the way.
The bigger picture
It is in this latter respect that the Brexit reset backlash is most important, and most dangerous. At one level, it is just about domestic politics. It is a transparently opportunistic attempt by both Tory and Reform parties to re-kindle the populist anger of the referendum, and the ‘Brexit wars’ which followed, in order to boost their electoral fortunes.
At another level, those attempts are inseparable from UK-EU relations. The Brexiters’ visceral hatred of the EU makes them determined permanently to pollute those relations with their political faeces. They know that the more anti-reset opposition they can whip up, the less likely it is that the EU will have the confidence to entertain even minimally closer relations, let alone anything else. Already Jacob Rees-Mogg is urging “both the Tory and Reform leaders … to promise if elected to leave any new Labour deal”, and that is quite deliberately designed to wreck EU confidence in the reset. It is hideous and, if anything deserves the label, ‘unpatriotic’ in its attempt not just to derail the elected government’s reset policy but to engender perpetual hostility with Britain’s neighbours and allies. But it is happening and it can’t be wished away.
In that sense, this new phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative is a crucial one for the government but, more widely and in the longer-term, for anyone who rejects the vicious and self-harming politics of Brexitism. Labour’s reset may be frustratingly timid, but the backlash against it is a reminder of the obstacles even to timidity. If it is defeated by that backlash, or even if it allows the Brexiters to regroup, the hold of that vicious and self-harming politics on our country will be strengthened. Conversely, if the Brexiters lose this second phase in the battle for the post-Brexit narrative, as they did the first, those politics will be weakened. At one level, the reset is about technocratic tinkering with the UK’s relations with the EU, but there is much more stake than that. Hence, indeed, the Brexiters’ desire to destroy it.
With that, another year of Brexit blogging ends. Many thanks to all who have read this year, taking the total visits to this site to well over the 10 million mark, and the number of posts to over 450. Your readership is always appreciated, and never taken for granted, especially with the huge volume of blogs, newsletters, vlogs, and I-don’t-know-whats that compete for attention. Thanks, too, for the (generally) urbane and (often) interesting comments made since I re-opened the facility a bit over a year ago. Best wishes to all readers for Christmas and the New Year. The next post will be on Friday 10 January 2025. I think I will continue in the new fortnightly pattern, but if (as seems possible) there is a lot of Brexit-related news next year then I might revert to the weekly format.
Friday, 6 December 2024
Where is post-Brexit Britain?
I always try, and am usually able, to create an overall theme to each post on this blog. There are times, though, and this is one of them, when there is no particular shape to the latest Brexit-related events. Instead, there has been a ragbag of news, but that in itself is revealing of a more general drift.
Brexit still not done
So where to start? Perhaps with that part of Brexit which is still not, in the most basic meaning of the term, ‘done’: Gibraltar. As long ago as April, under the previous government, it was being reported that a deal was finally ‘imminent’, but nothing came of it. Last time I wrote about this, in October, I suggested that completing the deal was a key test of Keir Starmer’s ‘reset’. That wasn’t an unreasonable claim given that, just a few days afterwards, Nick Thomas-Symonds, the EU Relations Minister, said that doing so was “at the heart of” the reset policy. Yet the territory remains in post-Brexit limbo, leading to a large protest against the delays at the end of October.
Some of the urgency has been removed by the latest postponement of the new EU Entry/exit System, but that still leaves an inherently fragile ad hoc arrangement in place. Their fragility is well-illustrated by a row that broke out two weeks ago. In brief, under the ad hoc arrangements, Gibraltarians may enter Spain without having their passports stamped, so long as they have their Gibraltar ID card. However, last Friday fortnight, the Spanish border police instigated a check and stamp regime. It only lasted for a couple of hours before being countermanded by a higher official, but seems to have arisen because the local border commander did not have clear orders about whether or both Schengen area controls should be applied or not.
This is the second time the same local commander has taken this action, apparently from concern that he and his officers may be in breach of EU law by not applying normal controls. That is now a matter for the courts to decide, but it illustrates the consequences of the lack of a clear, formal agreement. Of that, the latest reports suggest only that the barriers to a deal are of a “deeply technical nature”, but that was also said last April.
In the meantime, the entire saga of Brexit and Gibraltar is the subject of an excellent new House of Commons Library Research Briefing by Stefan Fella, which amongst other things serves as a reminder of the complex issues which were obvious from the outset, but which Brexiters denounced as ‘Project Fear’. There are also signs of the situation receiving more media coverage in the UK, with a BBC Radio Four documentary on ‘the Rock that Brexit forgot” airing this week.
Reset still barely started
It may be that an agreement about Gibraltar will emerge this month or, perhaps more likely, in the new year, and be a sign of, so to speak, a reset of the reset, which began with some energy but appears to have foundered since. That seems possible because there is a sense in which any real progress was always likely to be deferred until the new EU Commission, and the second presidency of Ursula von der Leyen, were confirmed. This has now happened and, relatedly (though not necessarily directly so), Starmer has been invited to meet with EU leaders next February, the first time a British Prime Minister has done so since the UK left the EU.
That meeting is billed as being focused on security and defence issues, but the already planned EU-UK summit, which will take place next year, is likely to have a wider remit, taking in trade and regulatory relationships. A good indication of what the EU agenda for this might be was provided recently in a Bruegel policy briefing written by Ignacio García Bercero, a significant figure in the world of EU trade policy. Many of the issues it covers will be familiar to readers of the blog, and without rehearsing them here the main point I would make about the document is that it is deeply pragmatic, in the sense of recognizing both the constraints of UK and EU red lines and the possibilities that remain despite them.
That’s important because there are people, on both sides of the Brexit divide, who persist in saying that there is no prospect at all of improvements, whether they ascribe this to EU ‘punishment’ or a kind of Brexit ‘hair-shirtism’. On the remain side, in particular, there is sometimes the impression given that, for so long as Starmer remains committed to the ‘hard Brexit’ negotiated by the Tories, nothing can change. But that ignores the way that, even within the Frost-Johnson agreements, there was scope for a closer relationship, illustrated by the non-binding Political Declaration which they signed, even though they chose not pursue it. In other words, even within hard Brexit there exists a range of hardness.
Obviously, the significance of that shouldn’t be overstated. There’s a big gulf between the softest of hard Brexits and the hardest of soft Brexits. But there is an agenda, that in the past I’ve called ‘maximalist’, which whilst still ‘hard Brexit’ is different to Johnson-Frost, of the sort articulated by Peter Foster in the UK and, now, by García Bercero. Of particular relevance is a point the latter makes early on, about the apparent dropping of the UK red line against ECJ involvement under the Labour government. More generally, his key point is that “a repetition of Brexit discussions can be avoided if there is political will to explore the margins of flexibility around the red lines.”
Political will (or won’t)?
That clearly begs the core question of whether there is such a political will. If voices like García Bercero’s hold sway within the EU then, from that side, the answer might be yes. But what about the UK? One sign of a new seriousness might be the announcement of a new post of a second Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, with a specific focus on the EU, and undertaking a ‘sherpa’ role there. The interview panel will, with depressing irony, be chaired by Gisela Stuart, who chaired the Vote Leave campaign, though not because of that but because she is now the First Civil Service Commissioner. It can only be wondered what attributes she will prioritise for the post, but the appointment will be made by Starmer.
At all events, the appointee is expected to be a heavyweight figure, and it is hard to see the point of creating this role unless it reflects real political commitment to the reset. That said, my general observation about this government is that it seems to place a premium on creating structures (delivery groups etc.) as if these, in themselves, solve problems. They don’t, although they may be a necessary precondition of doing so, and in particular they don’t, in and of themselves, create political will.
In this particular case, it remains to be seen what the political will is as regards a youth mobility scheme (YMS) which, even if under some different label, is evidently going to be a, if not the, key issue for the EU (a “threshold issue” as García Bercero calls it). We’ve repeatedly seen the Labour government dismiss this on the absurd grounds that it would somehow amount to ‘free movement of people’, but the question is how intransigent it will be.
As always, the problem is that Labour remains deeply neuralgic about anything relating to immigration. This was illustrated by Starmer’s response to the latest immigration figures, which he denounced as showing that “Brexit was used … to turn Britain into a one nation experiment in open borders”. It’s nonsense, and what’s worse is that it is the same nonsense that Farage is talking. What actually happened was that Brexit was used to create exactly what the Brexiters, including Farage, said they wanted, a wholly UK-determined immigration policy which used a points system set according to the needs of the UK economy.
For various reasons, not all economic, that led to an increase in the net migration figure, and a re-distribution of the countries of origin of immigrants away from the EU. That figure is now falling, also for various reasons, but these include new restrictions which are doing profound damage, especially to social care and to universities. What the Labour government needs, as Professor Jonathan Portes, the leading academic expert on this policy area, argues, is to be honest about immigration.
That raises bigger issues than that of a YMS with the EU, but honesty about that would, just in itself, be desirable. It’s an oversimplification, but not a huge one, to say that Britain left the single market, specifically, to appease public hostility to immigration. The country is paying a substantial economic price for that, yet without even assuaging the hostility. It is certainly freedom of movement of people, rather than a commitment to regulatory divergence, which explains why Starmer’s government will not even entertain the idea of single market membership, and is apparently willing to go on paying that price.
So the question now is whether that extends even to the YMS, with Starmer sacrificing things he undoubtedly wants, and the country undoubtedly needs – most obviously an SPS deal – on the altar of this immigration fetish. Just how high a price are we all meant to pay to pander to the sensibilities of a noisy minority who will never be satisfied anyway? It’s not even as if agreeing a YMS would take much political courage: opinion polls suggest 58% of the public think it is a good idea, and only 10% that it is a bad idea. Some reports in the last few days (£) suggest the government is coming round to agreeing some version of it, and my guess is that this will be true. If so, it would have been far better in terms of creating conditions for a maximalist reset to have accepted the idea wholeheartedly rather than being dragged to it reluctantly.
Meanwhile, things don’t stand still
With the new Commission in place, and Trump installed in the White House to concentrate minds, next year is probably going to be the crucial one in determining whether or not there is going to be any kind of substantive reset in UK-EU relations (though it would take longer than that to be brought to fruition). Even for that to happen needs some urgency of purpose to be brought to bear. For the reality is that any reset is not happening against a static background. That is most obvious in relation to the broad geo-political situation. But it’s also the case UK-EU relations are themselves changing, irrespective of any negotiations about them.
Two recent examples illustrate this (others can be found in the latest UKICE regulatory divergence tracker). One is the only now emerging realization that new EU product safety rules mean that British (in the sense of Great Britain) companies selling goods to the EU (including Northern Ireland) need a ‘responsible person’ within the single market to confirm compliance. As with so much of the Brexit-created red tape this will impact most heavily on small businesses, and it comes into force at the end of next week. At a stroke, this is a new non-tariff barrier to trade with the EU, and a thickening of the Irish Sea border. It won’t, to my understanding, be helped by the government’s Product Regulation and Metrology Bill because the issue isn’t alignment with EU standards, it is the certification of compliance (i.e. a version of the issue, discussed many times on this blog, that ‘alignment doesn’t mean access’).
A second example is that the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is now beginning to bite (£) on British exporters to the EU, again with small businesses worst affected. In some ways it is a similar issue to the product safety one, in that exporters now need to provide evidence of the embedded carbon content of their products. However ultimately it will also mean not just reporting but, if necessary, tax being levied on that content.
Both of these examples are potentially within the scope of a UK-EU reset, though the word ‘potentially’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The first of them might conceivably be dealt with through formal dynamic alignment (note the tentative formulation). Less tentatively, because it is within the scope of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the second of them could be addressed by linking both UK-EU Emissions Trading Systems (ETS) and CBAMs (the UK version has yet to be created). Linkages of these are two different, though potentially related things, as García Bercero says. That is, it might be possible to link either, both, or neither (it’s also worth noting, as trade expert Sam Lowe explains, that these different possibilities could have different implications for the UK’s relationship with Trump’s US).
Everything is connected
Although I’ve bracketed that last point, because in a sense it’s a technicality, it does indicate the deep inseparability of all of the issues facing post-Brexit UK. That is to say, the more-or-less economic questions of terms of trade, including regulatory barriers to trade, with the EU cannot ultimately be separated from geo-political issues of the UK’s relations with the rest of the world. This means that not only do discussions of UK-EU relations take place within a dynamic landscape (e.g. new EU regulations) but also they do so as part of the UK’s positioning in an international order which is itself rapidly changing, and not only because of Trump’s coming presidency.
There are many moving parts in this, but they mean that my argument in a post at the end of the summer that the government needs a post-Brexit strategy already looks inadequate. I talked there as if UK-EU relations are a discrete issue. I’m not sure I actually meant to imply that but, at all events, it is now quite obvious that such are relations are imbricated in the entirety of UK economic, industrial, foreign and defence policy. It is equally obvious that articulating what this means for the UK is an urgent task.
There are limited signs that Starmer understands this, especially in the major speech he gave on foreign policy at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet this week. In it, he did at least attempt to do what Olivia O’Sullivan, Director of the UK in the World programme at Chatham House recently urged and “make an energetic case” to voters explaining the domestic importance of foreign policy and international relations. Whether it was as ‘energetic’ as needed is another question, but it was certainly an attempt to make the case. However, the content was anodyne, and didn’t give any real sense of the choices and trade-offs the UK faces.
By that, I don’t so much mean the headline reports that Starmer denied there was any need to choose between Trump’s US and the EU. That was entirely unsurprising, not least because, at this point, it’s not yet clear exactly what those choices may be (a situation which is unlikely to last, however). Rather, what was missing was an acknowledgment that Brexit has de-anchored the UK internationally, and created new constraints on its options. Instead, there were airy platitudes about Britain being “a strong, still point in a changing world.” Which, as politics professor Simon Usherwood of the Open University put it “leaves us... somewhere. With all the talk of a reset, there remains minimal evidence of a plan on Europe, in either abstract or concrete terms, which intrinsically weakens the ability to pursue whatever course is taken.”
Where is post-Brexit Britain?
It’s not enough. At the very least, there needs to be an explicit acknowledgment that the immediate post-Brexit strategy of ‘Global Britain’, already effectively abandoned by the previous government, does not provide a framework for the present government’s policy decisions. Which in turn requires specifying the framework which does. That could and should mean that where closer relations with the EU come into conflict with other demands it is the former which will be prioritised now. That wouldn’t be outrageous. Only the other day Foreign Secretary David Lammy said, as he has in the past, that a European reset is the UK’s “number one priority in foreign policy”.
Yet Starmer did not say or even imply that. Why not? Is this government policy or not? Without such consistency, Starmer’s promise that his country will be a reliable, dependable, and predictable international actor is virtually meaningless, since it gives no insight into where its priorities lie. How, then, can its actions be predicted? Conversely, unless relations with the EU are prioritised, how seriously should anyone, most notably the EU, take the reset?
That wouldn’t, in itself, entail an argument to ‘reverse Brexit’ by seeking to rejoin the EU in any form (which Starmer again ruled out in his speech). But it would entail publicly acknowledging that Brexit has created new problems, not new opportunities. Doing so would attract a flaying from the pro-Brexit commentariat, but would chime with public opinion by recognizing both that Brexit has not been a success and that there isn’t much public appetite to return to the Brexit battles in the immediate future*. In the longer run, admitting that lack of success would also be a necessary step to re-visiting Brexit itself, of course, but even those who want to rejoin at the earliest possible moment need to recognize that, whatever ‘earliest possible’ means, the UK needs, at least, an interim strategy.
However, I don’t really expect Starmer will do any of this. At best, he may put more energy into reset discussions with the EU in the coming year. At worst, he will drift along without much happening to show for the reset apart from warmish words. In that sense, the ragbag of this fortnight's Brexit events reflects more than my failure to find any shape to them. Rather, it captures the shapelessness of Labour’s post-Brexit policies and, more fundamentally, the shapelessness of the UK’s post-Brexit condition. It is a grim irony that on one edge of Europe there is war and civil unrest in countries which dearly wish to anchor their place in the world by joining the EU whilst here, on the other edge, we have given that prize away in order to drift into confusion.
The final words of Starmer’s Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech were that “Britain is back.” He didn’t say where.
*That is, support for holding another referendum doesn’t begin to approach a majority until posited as ten years hence. Interestingly, put at that time scale, Reform voters are the most supportive of it. Admittedly the polling data I cited in the link is over a year old, so things may have changed but I haven’t found anything more recent on the specific question of timescales.
I can’t even bring myself to discuss the cretinous attempt to resurrect ‘Mutual Enforcement’ as an ‘alternative arrangement’ for Northern Ireland `(the Allister Bill) but may come back to it next time. It isn’t going to pass, but it does have a purpose in the context of the forthcoming ‘consent vote’ under the Windsor Framework in the Northern Ireland Assembly. For now, see the Best for Britain Blog on this, which notes, correctly but over-politely, that “the notion that such a process of mutual enforcement is remotely achievable is remarkably misguided.”
Brexit still not done
So where to start? Perhaps with that part of Brexit which is still not, in the most basic meaning of the term, ‘done’: Gibraltar. As long ago as April, under the previous government, it was being reported that a deal was finally ‘imminent’, but nothing came of it. Last time I wrote about this, in October, I suggested that completing the deal was a key test of Keir Starmer’s ‘reset’. That wasn’t an unreasonable claim given that, just a few days afterwards, Nick Thomas-Symonds, the EU Relations Minister, said that doing so was “at the heart of” the reset policy. Yet the territory remains in post-Brexit limbo, leading to a large protest against the delays at the end of October.
Some of the urgency has been removed by the latest postponement of the new EU Entry/exit System, but that still leaves an inherently fragile ad hoc arrangement in place. Their fragility is well-illustrated by a row that broke out two weeks ago. In brief, under the ad hoc arrangements, Gibraltarians may enter Spain without having their passports stamped, so long as they have their Gibraltar ID card. However, last Friday fortnight, the Spanish border police instigated a check and stamp regime. It only lasted for a couple of hours before being countermanded by a higher official, but seems to have arisen because the local border commander did not have clear orders about whether or both Schengen area controls should be applied or not.
This is the second time the same local commander has taken this action, apparently from concern that he and his officers may be in breach of EU law by not applying normal controls. That is now a matter for the courts to decide, but it illustrates the consequences of the lack of a clear, formal agreement. Of that, the latest reports suggest only that the barriers to a deal are of a “deeply technical nature”, but that was also said last April.
In the meantime, the entire saga of Brexit and Gibraltar is the subject of an excellent new House of Commons Library Research Briefing by Stefan Fella, which amongst other things serves as a reminder of the complex issues which were obvious from the outset, but which Brexiters denounced as ‘Project Fear’. There are also signs of the situation receiving more media coverage in the UK, with a BBC Radio Four documentary on ‘the Rock that Brexit forgot” airing this week.
Reset still barely started
It may be that an agreement about Gibraltar will emerge this month or, perhaps more likely, in the new year, and be a sign of, so to speak, a reset of the reset, which began with some energy but appears to have foundered since. That seems possible because there is a sense in which any real progress was always likely to be deferred until the new EU Commission, and the second presidency of Ursula von der Leyen, were confirmed. This has now happened and, relatedly (though not necessarily directly so), Starmer has been invited to meet with EU leaders next February, the first time a British Prime Minister has done so since the UK left the EU.
That meeting is billed as being focused on security and defence issues, but the already planned EU-UK summit, which will take place next year, is likely to have a wider remit, taking in trade and regulatory relationships. A good indication of what the EU agenda for this might be was provided recently in a Bruegel policy briefing written by Ignacio García Bercero, a significant figure in the world of EU trade policy. Many of the issues it covers will be familiar to readers of the blog, and without rehearsing them here the main point I would make about the document is that it is deeply pragmatic, in the sense of recognizing both the constraints of UK and EU red lines and the possibilities that remain despite them.
That’s important because there are people, on both sides of the Brexit divide, who persist in saying that there is no prospect at all of improvements, whether they ascribe this to EU ‘punishment’ or a kind of Brexit ‘hair-shirtism’. On the remain side, in particular, there is sometimes the impression given that, for so long as Starmer remains committed to the ‘hard Brexit’ negotiated by the Tories, nothing can change. But that ignores the way that, even within the Frost-Johnson agreements, there was scope for a closer relationship, illustrated by the non-binding Political Declaration which they signed, even though they chose not pursue it. In other words, even within hard Brexit there exists a range of hardness.
Obviously, the significance of that shouldn’t be overstated. There’s a big gulf between the softest of hard Brexits and the hardest of soft Brexits. But there is an agenda, that in the past I’ve called ‘maximalist’, which whilst still ‘hard Brexit’ is different to Johnson-Frost, of the sort articulated by Peter Foster in the UK and, now, by García Bercero. Of particular relevance is a point the latter makes early on, about the apparent dropping of the UK red line against ECJ involvement under the Labour government. More generally, his key point is that “a repetition of Brexit discussions can be avoided if there is political will to explore the margins of flexibility around the red lines.”
Political will (or won’t)?
That clearly begs the core question of whether there is such a political will. If voices like García Bercero’s hold sway within the EU then, from that side, the answer might be yes. But what about the UK? One sign of a new seriousness might be the announcement of a new post of a second Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, with a specific focus on the EU, and undertaking a ‘sherpa’ role there. The interview panel will, with depressing irony, be chaired by Gisela Stuart, who chaired the Vote Leave campaign, though not because of that but because she is now the First Civil Service Commissioner. It can only be wondered what attributes she will prioritise for the post, but the appointment will be made by Starmer.
At all events, the appointee is expected to be a heavyweight figure, and it is hard to see the point of creating this role unless it reflects real political commitment to the reset. That said, my general observation about this government is that it seems to place a premium on creating structures (delivery groups etc.) as if these, in themselves, solve problems. They don’t, although they may be a necessary precondition of doing so, and in particular they don’t, in and of themselves, create political will.
In this particular case, it remains to be seen what the political will is as regards a youth mobility scheme (YMS) which, even if under some different label, is evidently going to be a, if not the, key issue for the EU (a “threshold issue” as García Bercero calls it). We’ve repeatedly seen the Labour government dismiss this on the absurd grounds that it would somehow amount to ‘free movement of people’, but the question is how intransigent it will be.
As always, the problem is that Labour remains deeply neuralgic about anything relating to immigration. This was illustrated by Starmer’s response to the latest immigration figures, which he denounced as showing that “Brexit was used … to turn Britain into a one nation experiment in open borders”. It’s nonsense, and what’s worse is that it is the same nonsense that Farage is talking. What actually happened was that Brexit was used to create exactly what the Brexiters, including Farage, said they wanted, a wholly UK-determined immigration policy which used a points system set according to the needs of the UK economy.
For various reasons, not all economic, that led to an increase in the net migration figure, and a re-distribution of the countries of origin of immigrants away from the EU. That figure is now falling, also for various reasons, but these include new restrictions which are doing profound damage, especially to social care and to universities. What the Labour government needs, as Professor Jonathan Portes, the leading academic expert on this policy area, argues, is to be honest about immigration.
That raises bigger issues than that of a YMS with the EU, but honesty about that would, just in itself, be desirable. It’s an oversimplification, but not a huge one, to say that Britain left the single market, specifically, to appease public hostility to immigration. The country is paying a substantial economic price for that, yet without even assuaging the hostility. It is certainly freedom of movement of people, rather than a commitment to regulatory divergence, which explains why Starmer’s government will not even entertain the idea of single market membership, and is apparently willing to go on paying that price.
So the question now is whether that extends even to the YMS, with Starmer sacrificing things he undoubtedly wants, and the country undoubtedly needs – most obviously an SPS deal – on the altar of this immigration fetish. Just how high a price are we all meant to pay to pander to the sensibilities of a noisy minority who will never be satisfied anyway? It’s not even as if agreeing a YMS would take much political courage: opinion polls suggest 58% of the public think it is a good idea, and only 10% that it is a bad idea. Some reports in the last few days (£) suggest the government is coming round to agreeing some version of it, and my guess is that this will be true. If so, it would have been far better in terms of creating conditions for a maximalist reset to have accepted the idea wholeheartedly rather than being dragged to it reluctantly.
Meanwhile, things don’t stand still
With the new Commission in place, and Trump installed in the White House to concentrate minds, next year is probably going to be the crucial one in determining whether or not there is going to be any kind of substantive reset in UK-EU relations (though it would take longer than that to be brought to fruition). Even for that to happen needs some urgency of purpose to be brought to bear. For the reality is that any reset is not happening against a static background. That is most obvious in relation to the broad geo-political situation. But it’s also the case UK-EU relations are themselves changing, irrespective of any negotiations about them.
Two recent examples illustrate this (others can be found in the latest UKICE regulatory divergence tracker). One is the only now emerging realization that new EU product safety rules mean that British (in the sense of Great Britain) companies selling goods to the EU (including Northern Ireland) need a ‘responsible person’ within the single market to confirm compliance. As with so much of the Brexit-created red tape this will impact most heavily on small businesses, and it comes into force at the end of next week. At a stroke, this is a new non-tariff barrier to trade with the EU, and a thickening of the Irish Sea border. It won’t, to my understanding, be helped by the government’s Product Regulation and Metrology Bill because the issue isn’t alignment with EU standards, it is the certification of compliance (i.e. a version of the issue, discussed many times on this blog, that ‘alignment doesn’t mean access’).
A second example is that the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is now beginning to bite (£) on British exporters to the EU, again with small businesses worst affected. In some ways it is a similar issue to the product safety one, in that exporters now need to provide evidence of the embedded carbon content of their products. However ultimately it will also mean not just reporting but, if necessary, tax being levied on that content.
Both of these examples are potentially within the scope of a UK-EU reset, though the word ‘potentially’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The first of them might conceivably be dealt with through formal dynamic alignment (note the tentative formulation). Less tentatively, because it is within the scope of the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the second of them could be addressed by linking both UK-EU Emissions Trading Systems (ETS) and CBAMs (the UK version has yet to be created). Linkages of these are two different, though potentially related things, as García Bercero says. That is, it might be possible to link either, both, or neither (it’s also worth noting, as trade expert Sam Lowe explains, that these different possibilities could have different implications for the UK’s relationship with Trump’s US).
Everything is connected
Although I’ve bracketed that last point, because in a sense it’s a technicality, it does indicate the deep inseparability of all of the issues facing post-Brexit UK. That is to say, the more-or-less economic questions of terms of trade, including regulatory barriers to trade, with the EU cannot ultimately be separated from geo-political issues of the UK’s relations with the rest of the world. This means that not only do discussions of UK-EU relations take place within a dynamic landscape (e.g. new EU regulations) but also they do so as part of the UK’s positioning in an international order which is itself rapidly changing, and not only because of Trump’s coming presidency.
There are many moving parts in this, but they mean that my argument in a post at the end of the summer that the government needs a post-Brexit strategy already looks inadequate. I talked there as if UK-EU relations are a discrete issue. I’m not sure I actually meant to imply that but, at all events, it is now quite obvious that such are relations are imbricated in the entirety of UK economic, industrial, foreign and defence policy. It is equally obvious that articulating what this means for the UK is an urgent task.
There are limited signs that Starmer understands this, especially in the major speech he gave on foreign policy at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet this week. In it, he did at least attempt to do what Olivia O’Sullivan, Director of the UK in the World programme at Chatham House recently urged and “make an energetic case” to voters explaining the domestic importance of foreign policy and international relations. Whether it was as ‘energetic’ as needed is another question, but it was certainly an attempt to make the case. However, the content was anodyne, and didn’t give any real sense of the choices and trade-offs the UK faces.
By that, I don’t so much mean the headline reports that Starmer denied there was any need to choose between Trump’s US and the EU. That was entirely unsurprising, not least because, at this point, it’s not yet clear exactly what those choices may be (a situation which is unlikely to last, however). Rather, what was missing was an acknowledgment that Brexit has de-anchored the UK internationally, and created new constraints on its options. Instead, there were airy platitudes about Britain being “a strong, still point in a changing world.” Which, as politics professor Simon Usherwood of the Open University put it “leaves us... somewhere. With all the talk of a reset, there remains minimal evidence of a plan on Europe, in either abstract or concrete terms, which intrinsically weakens the ability to pursue whatever course is taken.”
Where is post-Brexit Britain?
It’s not enough. At the very least, there needs to be an explicit acknowledgment that the immediate post-Brexit strategy of ‘Global Britain’, already effectively abandoned by the previous government, does not provide a framework for the present government’s policy decisions. Which in turn requires specifying the framework which does. That could and should mean that where closer relations with the EU come into conflict with other demands it is the former which will be prioritised now. That wouldn’t be outrageous. Only the other day Foreign Secretary David Lammy said, as he has in the past, that a European reset is the UK’s “number one priority in foreign policy”.
Yet Starmer did not say or even imply that. Why not? Is this government policy or not? Without such consistency, Starmer’s promise that his country will be a reliable, dependable, and predictable international actor is virtually meaningless, since it gives no insight into where its priorities lie. How, then, can its actions be predicted? Conversely, unless relations with the EU are prioritised, how seriously should anyone, most notably the EU, take the reset?
That wouldn’t, in itself, entail an argument to ‘reverse Brexit’ by seeking to rejoin the EU in any form (which Starmer again ruled out in his speech). But it would entail publicly acknowledging that Brexit has created new problems, not new opportunities. Doing so would attract a flaying from the pro-Brexit commentariat, but would chime with public opinion by recognizing both that Brexit has not been a success and that there isn’t much public appetite to return to the Brexit battles in the immediate future*. In the longer run, admitting that lack of success would also be a necessary step to re-visiting Brexit itself, of course, but even those who want to rejoin at the earliest possible moment need to recognize that, whatever ‘earliest possible’ means, the UK needs, at least, an interim strategy.
However, I don’t really expect Starmer will do any of this. At best, he may put more energy into reset discussions with the EU in the coming year. At worst, he will drift along without much happening to show for the reset apart from warmish words. In that sense, the ragbag of this fortnight's Brexit events reflects more than my failure to find any shape to them. Rather, it captures the shapelessness of Labour’s post-Brexit policies and, more fundamentally, the shapelessness of the UK’s post-Brexit condition. It is a grim irony that on one edge of Europe there is war and civil unrest in countries which dearly wish to anchor their place in the world by joining the EU whilst here, on the other edge, we have given that prize away in order to drift into confusion.
The final words of Starmer’s Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech were that “Britain is back.” He didn’t say where.
*That is, support for holding another referendum doesn’t begin to approach a majority until posited as ten years hence. Interestingly, put at that time scale, Reform voters are the most supportive of it. Admittedly the polling data I cited in the link is over a year old, so things may have changed but I haven’t found anything more recent on the specific question of timescales.
I can’t even bring myself to discuss the cretinous attempt to resurrect ‘Mutual Enforcement’ as an ‘alternative arrangement’ for Northern Ireland `(the Allister Bill) but may come back to it next time. It isn’t going to pass, but it does have a purpose in the context of the forthcoming ‘consent vote’ under the Windsor Framework in the Northern Ireland Assembly. For now, see the Best for Britain Blog on this, which notes, correctly but over-politely, that “the notion that such a process of mutual enforcement is remotely achievable is remarkably misguided.”
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