A depressing anniversary

It’s now exactly five years since I started this blog and, as it enters its sixth year, with a pleasing symmetry, it will today have its six millionth visit. I must admit that I didn’t really anticipate when I started that I'd still be writing it now, over 300 posts and about a million words later, or that it would settle into a kind of weekly newsletter. I most certainly hadn’t imagined that it would become so widely read. I’m enormously grateful to everyone who has read it or in some way shared or recommended it to others.

Looking back at the very first post there are several things in it which I’d express slightly differently (unlike a certain more famous blogger, I don’t retrospectively change old posts) but, on the whole, it has held up fairly well, and these lines, in particular, now seem almost prophetic:

“Over a whole swathe of issues (the leaving process, the nature of the single market, the way that the WTO and trade deals work etc.) the Brexit position is composed of, at best, half-truths or just outright fantasies. It is therefore inevitable that the coming months and years will see a series of collisions between these fantasies and the realities (and equally inevitable that Brexiters will blame this on others).”

Here we are, five years later, and exactly this dynamic continues to play out though, given that Britain has now left the EU, in ever more bizarre ways.

The concrete impacts of being outside the single market and customs union in terms of damage to trade, supply chain disruption and labour shortages are, as discussed in last week’s post, becoming harder to ignore. But as also noted in that post, though only in passing, this is provoking contradictory responses from Brexiters.

Initially, they argued that these impacts were just a remainer invention. That has become untenable as the shortages continue to grow, affecting everything from school meals to the profound and deepening social care crisis, threatening the ‘cancellation’ of Christmas and even, to the amusement of some, shortages of some beers in arch-Brexiter Tim Martin’s Wetherspoon’s pubs. Meanwhile, the latest trade figures show what the Food and Drink Federation call a “disastrous” decline of food and drink exports to the EU since the end of the transition, with meat and dairy products especially hard hit.

In the face of this, there is now a split between those arguing that the shortages and/or trade declines are essentially nothing to do with Brexit, and that to say otherwise is remainer propaganda, and those admitting they are very much to do with Brexit, but claiming that this is the fault of the EU.

It’s not Brexit!

The first of these is a continuation of the tired old Project Fear line that has served Brexiters so well both before and since the referendum. It is achieved by the familiar sleight of hand of exaggerating warnings (or, now, reports) of Brexit damage so as to create an absurd and easily-demolished straw man. The current straw man is that the shortages are entirely caused by Brexit.

Thus former Brexit Party MEP Ann Widdecombe scoffs that “you cannot put the absence of food on the shelves solely down to Brexit” and thus, supposedly, “clinically crushes attempts to blame Brexit for the UK supply chain crisis”. At the more intellectual end of the spectrum, the pro-Brexit former Chief Economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Julian Jessop, points, rightly, to global issues, including the pandemic, as a major cause of the supply shortages with Brexit as “an additional factor”. Thus remainers are wrong “to have seized on the ongoing disruptions to supply chains as proof that ‘Project Fear’ was right all along”.

The first difficulty with such arguments is that, so far as I am aware, there are no serious or reputable claims that all the shortages are “solely” or even mainly caused by Brexit. There may well be people posting on social media saying it, just as such postings can be found making just about any claim, but basing counter-arguments on that is, precisely, to erect a straw man.  ‘Mainstream media’ reporting invariably says Brexit is only one cause and, if anything, tends to downplay its role. I said the same thing last week, whilst making the point that it is also the factor which is unique to Britain and, uniquely, chosen by Britain.

The other difficulty, most evident in Widdecombe’s case, is the slippage from correctly saying the shortages are not solely or mainly due to Brexit to at least implying that they are nothing to do with Brexit. That is both incorrect in itself, but also misses the way that, even without being the main factor overall, Brexit inflects the shortages in the UK in particular ways for particular products. Thus whilst Brexit is almost certainly not a factor in shortages of, for example, semiconductors, and only one of the factors in, for example, the shortage of timber – both of which can be seen globally, and affect the UK in a way similar to other countries – it is almost certainly the major factor in shortages of fresh produce.

This is because of the nature of UK supply chains which are heavily reliant on EU produce, and the specific way Brexit impacts on cabotage rules (where and how often a haulier can load/ unload goods). For these and other Brexit-related reasons (e.g. shortage of labour to pick UK produce) we see widespread shortages of fresh produce in UK shops but not in EU shops. Again it’s not an all or nothing explanation – there are some produce shortages in the US, for example – but the point is that whereas Brexit is low to non-existent on the list of causes in the case of semiconductors it is high on the list for fruit and vegetables.

Of course such shortages have a particular significance in that they impinge directly on the general public. So the ‘denialists’ have important reasons to discredit or downplay Brexit as a cause of such shortages. One is simply a psychological investment in Brexit as an unalloyed good. That presumably explains the contradiction that at the same time as disowning the shortages, some Brexiters are hailing rising wages as a Brexit benefit – a dubious claim in itself, but bizarre when, for it to be true, the shortages would have to be caused by Brexit. But more importantly it is political. There is a battle underway to control the narrative of what the shortages mean because if they come to be associated in the public mind with Brexit then that will do much to discredit the entire project.

The stakes in that battle are likely to increase because the shortages are likely to intensify assuming UK import controls are introduced over the coming months, and will do so in any case to the extent that UK demand for EU fruit and vegetables always peaks in the winter. It is also likely that food prices will rise (£). This battle to control the narrative has been underway since the end of the transition period, and so far it has been fairly easy to blame disruptions on the pandemic. As that wanes in credibility, and to the extent that simple denial is implausible, so too do Brexiters switch the emphasis to blaming others for Brexit damage.

It is Brexit (but it’s not our fault)!

Hence last weekend’s Mail on Sunday carried an editorial with a striking headline: “Let’s unite with the EU to crush the curse of border bureaucracy”. This attracted much ribald comment since, at first blush, it sounded like a call to re-join the EU. Needless to say it was no such thing. Instead, acknowledging the reality of border checks and delays, it was a roll out of almost all the fantasies the Brexiters have nurtured for so long. In particular, it revived the idea (without using the word) that there could be still be something close to frictionless trade despite having left the single market and customs union. The familiar suggestion is that this could be achieved by a mixture of new border technology and accepting UK product standards as ‘equivalent’ to the EU’s because they haven’t, in fact or as yet, changed very much from those of the EU.

At heart, this represents a complete refusal to accept the consequences of hard Brexit, embodying the persistent ideas that none of the things Brexiters like need to change as a result and/or that the UK should have a special status different to other third countries. In some discussions of the article it was suggested that this should indeed be possible because not all third country-EU relationships are identical. But whilst that is true (recall, for example, the Barnier staircase), it is only true within a restricted range of possibilities. It certainly doesn’t mean that the EU could simply grant the UK the benefits of a regulatory union (i.e. the single market) and a customs union without the UK being bound by their conditions and constraints.

Fundamentally, the article shows a continuing and total misunderstanding that it is the single market and customs union which abolished the red tape which, with Brexit, the UK has re-instated for itself. The complaints about that, in turn, reprise the peculiar way that Brexiters talk as if Brexit had been done to the UK, in this case by the EU raising trade barriers, rather than chosen by the UK. Existing regulatory alignment is irrelevant to this because the UK refuses to relinquish the right to diverge, or to accept external enforcement, on grounds of sovereignty. That is its choice, but it brings consequences. Similarly, whilst the MoS bemoans that “we are supposed to impose our own tiresome and self-harming restrictions on goods coming into the UK from the EU” (i.e. import controls) it refuses to understand that ‘tiresome and self-harming restrictions” are what the UK chose for itself in enacting hard Brexit.

Rather than accept these basic facts, the article and its defenders ascribe Brexit’s failure to the EU’s inflexibility and its supposedly ‘political’ approach to the Brexit negotiations. This recycles all the ideas which have been endlessly debunked since 2016, both by commentators and by events. Embedded within them is the implication that the EU has not just punished the UK unnecessarily but miscalculated its own interests (a revived version of the ‘German car makers’ argument), and that as an ex-member the UK should have some sort of ‘alumni’ status or could be ‘out and yet in’.

Mentioned in passing within the MoS article is the role of Michel Barnier, with the suggestion that he pursued a particular, political, agenda that was both punitive to the UK and, by implication, damaging to the EU. This is becoming the received Brexiter wisdom and is a thesis elaborated by Matthew Lynn in the Spectator recently. Its fatuity has been pulled apart by Tom Hayes of the Brussels European Employee Relations Group (who has also provided a separate analysis of Barnier’s negotiating approach), and I won’t add to that.

However, there is one particular aspect I want to highlight: Lynn writes as if the terms of Brexit, both as regards the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) including the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), were the creation of Barnier. That is in line with the habitual refusal of Brexiters to take any responsibility whatsoever for Brexit. But the fact is that both deals were negotiated with and agreed by the UK.

Stuck in the past

This has two implications. One is that the agreements were framed and limited by the UK’s own red lines about Brexit – especially exiting the single market and customs union, but also, under Johnson and Frost, of prioritising sovereignty above all else in the TCA and of removing May’s backstop in the case of the NIP. It was these choices rather than the EU’s (still less Barnier’s) ‘inflexibility’ which meant Brexit took the form it did. The other is that both the agreements were trumpeted by Boris Johnson as triumphs. In the case of WA/NIP it was lauded as the ‘oven-ready deal’ upon which he was subsequently elected. In the case of TCA he said he had confounded his critics by delivering the ‘cakeist’ deal they had said was impossible. Nowhere in any of this was it said that these were sub-optimal deals forced on the UK government against its wishes and priorities.

These facts make current Brexiter narratives both wearyingly the same as they have been since 2016 and yet newly idiotic. For they are talking as if it were still 2016 (or 2017 or 2018) and these deals were still to be made. For that matter, they talk as if the approach they currently advocate hadn’t already been tried and failed in the first half of the May administration. In a sense it doesn’t even matter if all their beliefs about what the EU could, would or should do were correct. As a matter of empirical fact the deals have been done and they are not in line with what Brexiters claimed and promised they would deliver. There is scope for the TCA to be reviewed, but it can be stated with categorical certainty that there is no way that the EU would ever agree, or would even be able to agree, to revise it in the way that the Brexiters envisage.

With almost as much certainty it can be said that the EU will not agree to change the core provisions of the NIP, and in part for similar reasons. For whilst the DUP have yet again stated their opposition to the NIP, an opposition shared by many Brexiters and, to a large degree, the British government, none of them has come up with a plausible alternative. In this sense, again, it’s as if we were still in the pre-agreement period and, moreover, it’s based on the fundamental refusal of many Brexiters to even accept that the Irish border issue is a real one, rather than the concoction of Brussels and Dublin.

It is beyond ridiculous that the Brexiters still don’t understand these obvious facts, which they could if only by imagining what the UK’s stance would have been as a member of the EU had it been another country that was leaving, including to the Irish border if that country had been Ireland. Or, if that involves too much of an intellectual stretch for them, then they might simply consider the matter in their own terms: having spent decades denouncing the EU as an inflexible, bureaucratic, legalistic, lumbering, self-serving ‘protectionist racket’ – decades, indeed, giving these as reasons the UK should leave – why is their entire strategy for how to do Brexit ‘properly’ predicated on the EU being flexible, creative, nimble, accommodating and non-protectionist?

Nothing new, except deepening depression

Very little in this post is new, but that is unavoidable whilst the Brexiters remain stuck on the same Mobius Strip in which the same failed solutions are proposed to the same problems. It also means that, as per last week’s post, we are still in a situation where there is a certain amount of realism developing (e.g. in recognizing the reality of things like supply shortages and trade barriers), but absolutely no truthfulness from Brexiters about the reasons for these realities. With that comes their pathological inability to take responsibility for the choices they made – and urged upon voters – and, always, the sickening insistence, at once treacly with self-pity and sodden with aggression, that it is all someone else’s fault.

There’s something extraordinarily depressing about the fact that all this is going to be played out yet again in the next few weeks as the NIP grace periods some to an end (I suspect they will be extended again by agreement with the EU), and David Frost resumes his attempt to renege on what he and the government agreed in 2019-20. That this is in prospect is shown by this week’s announcement that the government is to postpone implementing the rules on which goods qualify for “unfettered access” when travelling from Northern Ireland to Great Britain (and because this issue interacts with the wider one of introducing import controls, and because the necessary port facilities aren’t in place, it seems quite likely that they, too, will slip again).

Crucially, the reason given was the government’s intention to negotiate major changes to the NIP, which means the pre-summer collision with the EU will resume and intensify. That isn’t to deny there may be some scope for revising parts of it, perhaps including the Article 10 provisions on state aid (£). But it has been clear from the time it was agreed that (despite having agreed it) Johnson’s government don’t accept the basic premise of the Irish Sea border and all that comes with it.

It’s even more depressing to think that, if I am still writing this blog in five years’ time, I will probably be able to refer to that very first post five years ago as containing a still relevant truth. For what it is worth, I think I will still be writing it, at least if there are still readers for it. After all, there may be some value in having kept a continuous record of the folly and failure, the dishonesty and dimwittedness, of what has been done to all of us by the worst of us. There would seem to be no prospect of that, if nothing else, being in short supply.

 

My book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) recounting and analysing what happened from the referendum result to the end of the transition period was published by Biteback on 23 June 2021. It can be ordered from Biteback, or via other online platforms, as a paperback or e-book. For reviews, podcasts etc. see this page.