In the doldrums

Brexit is in one of its periodic doldrums. That’s not to say that all the ongoing problems and miseries it has created have abated, or that the almost daily reminders of them have ceased. And of course the perennially unresolved Northern Ireland Protocol row continues.

More of the same

What also continues is the rather lame and repetitious attempt by Brexit ideologues, which I discussed last week, to refute the now irrefutable fact of Brexit’s economic failure. This week, the baton was passed to Larry Elliott, the Lexiter Economics Editor of the Guardian, and Telegraph columnist Roger Bootle (£), one of the members of Patrick Minford’s now disbanded Economists for Brexit group. I call it ‘baton passing’ because there is an inescapable sense of, if not actual coordination, then, at least, shared endeavour in what these people write. For example, Elliott, like Robert Tombs last week, invokes an IEA-dominated ‘Briefings for Britain’ report as his evidence for the lack of Brexit damage, showing, incidentally, the latest strange conjunction of left and right that Brexit has created.

The main line that all of them currently share is the deeply illogical one that, since the UK is experiencing severe economic problems, and since other countries are experiencing severe economic problems, then ‘therefore’ the UK’s economic problems cannot be due to Brexit. They also invariably anchor their dismissal of all negative economic assessments of Brexit in what they take to be the failure of the pre-referendum short-term economic forecasts of a vote to leave.

That is a tricky claim to unpick, because it’s true that remain campaigners were at fault in using it as if it were an unconditional prediction. In fact it was based, like all such forecasts, on numerous assumptions, some of which were not met (e.g. that David Cameron would, as he had promised, immediately trigger Article 50, or that the Bank Of England would not make any interventions to stabilize financial markets, which in the event it did). So although the worst warnings proved false, and perhaps would have done so even if all the assumptions had been met, that isn’t the slam-dunk the Brexiters imagine it to be. Anyway, whilst the remain campaign did use those forecasts in a highly simplified and therefore misleading way, that’s not something which those whose campaign included slogans like ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’ and ‘Turkey’s joining the EU’ are in a good position to criticize, frankly.

In any case, why keep bringing all this up now? The answer is that it is in order to pursue another deeply illogical argument: that since a warning of possible damage was (supposedly) once proven false, then ‘therefore’ all warnings of damage are false, and ‘therefore’ all reports of damage are false. The same goes for another commonality in the current round of Brexiter denial, shared by both Elliott and Bootle, along with Dominic Lawson as discussed last week, which is to take Mark Carney’s recent, and highly questionable, claim that due to Brexit the UK economy has fallen from being 90% the size of Germany’s in 2016 to being 70% of its size now. But, even if that is bogus, to keep repeating it is again to suggest that since one statement of the damage of Brexit is false then ‘therefore’ all such statements are false.

Bootle, whose article is slightly more balanced than most of them, does concede that Brexit has adversely impacted trade and investment, something Elliott ignores or dismisses, but both of them continue to insist that the benefits of Brexit remain in the future. That’s something else they share with the other Brexiter apologists discussed last week, though the important issue is the ever-present one that they undoubtedly have totally different ideas of what those benefits would be.

We can expect all this to rumble tediously on at the abstract level of arguing over macro-economic indicators, even as just about every business affected by Brexit groans under its impact. Those complaining include Next’s Chief Executive Lord Wolfson, an advocate of Brexit but now one of the many saying “this is not the Brexit I wanted”. Yet again the issue is the multiple meanings of Brexit, and the original sin of the Vote Leave campaign’s deliberate refusal to specify any particular one. I won’t discuss Wolfson’s latest intervention here because I did so on the previous occasion when he said the same thing, along with some other pro-Brexit business leaders, almost a year ago, in a post entitled ‘Not my Brexit’, and, depressingly, most of it still applies, a sign of the glacial slowness of the entire Brexit debate.

Reality wins, but painfully slowly

Also rumbling on is the gradual death of all the hopes and promises of Brexiters. This week it was finally announced that the plan to replace the Royal Yacht Britannia has been shelved. It was one of those symbols, like restoring Imperial units of measurement (of which we have heard nothing since the pathetic ‘public consultation’), that used to swell Brexiter hearts and hopes (£). Those hopes have now been dashed on the prosaic, but revealing, fact that Brexit Britain is simply too poor to afford such fripperies, and with potential Russian attacks on undersea internet cables the Navy has better uses for £250 million than a Boris Johnson vanity project.

Rather more substantive are the new concerns that have been raised about the reckless plan to scrap EU retained law by the end of next year, the more reckless as it has emerged this week that there is an even greater volume of law affected than was previously realised. This plan is also symbolic, though in a particularly asinine sense since the symbolism of getting rid of ‘foreign law’ is negated by the fact that, as retained EU law, it was written in to UK law by parliament as part of Brexit. Not to mention the fact that much of it was heavily influenced by UK priorities when an EU member. But, unlike the yacht plan, it is something that has the potential to cause real chaos.

That possibility reveals the underlying reality that, far from being some horrible regulatory burden holding the UK back, most of it is the vital regulatory infrastructure than enables to the UK to function at all. To properly go through, check, adopt, amend or repeal all this might take decades, according to law and policy commentator David Allen Green. Originally conceived by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the legislation involved was strongly endorsed by Rishi Sunak during his original (failed) leadership campaign, but there have been rumours for weeks that, with Rees-Mogg out of the government, Sunak wants to delay or even abandon it.

Already Rees-Mogg is fighting back from the backbenches, with a ludicrous article in the Telegraph (£) that simply denies all the practicalities. It was robustly taken apart by legal expert George Peretz KC, but legal issues aside Rees-Mogg is on shaky political ground when he insists that those questioning – or, as he puts it, “squealing” about – the legislation do so out of opposition to Brexit itself. For what is significant about the latest reports is that the concerns come from a committed Brexiter, Theresa Villiers, on the grounds of their impracticality. Again, reality is gradually winning out against Brexiter fantasies, but only at a crawl. As Nick Tyrone put it this week “Brexit is melting - but slowly”.

Northern Ireland: stasis

It's worth recalling the most notable role Villiers played in the Brexit referendum. For it was she, then the Northern Ireland Secretary, who used the weight of that office to echo Boris Johnson in saying that Brexit would have no implications for the Irish border. It is of course that falsehood, or what has arisen from it, which is now the main reason why the present doldrums are likely to be only a temporary calm. Most of us are so inured to it that what is actually astonishing hardly registers now: a full three years since the Northern Ireland Protocol was agreed, almost two years since it supposedly came into operation, and some eighteen months since the UK first unilaterally extended the grace periods on some of its provisions, the fundamental nature of the Protocol is still not settled and is still under negotiation.

The process has itself effectively been in the doldrums for over a year, to some large degree because of the political chaos of having  had three Prime Ministers during that period. In public, at least, nothing much has changed in terms of UK demands since the July 2021 Command Paper, or in terms of the EU position since the October 2021 proposals for adjustments to the Protocol (apart from the EU unilaterally granting an assurance of the supply of medicines to Northern Ireland). Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) Bill continues to trundle through Parliament, whilst, formally, EU infringement proceedings against the UK for its failure to implement the original terms also continue.

The sense is that neither the UK nor the EU really know what to do. The EU position seems to be to wait and see how the politics plays out in the UK, whilst the UK government seems to just be hoping that something turns up. Both sides, of course, have many other things to occupy them. But this limbo can’t continue forever, not least because of where that leaves Northern Ireland and Northern Irish politics. By not, as he had promised – or threatened – immediately triggering Assembly elections, and this week continuing to postpone setting a date for them, the current Secretary of State, Chris Heaton-Harris, has apparently acknowledged that the likely outcome would not change anything in the absence of a resolution to the negotiations with the EU.

In so doing, the government has either deliberately or by default accepted that what exists is now what I have called a ‘quadrilemma’, in which restoring functioning devolved government is one of the moving parts along with the original ‘trilemma’ of hard Brexit/ no land border/ no sea border. One likely outcome of this quadrilemma is that no conceivable version of the NIP would be accepted by the DUP, unless it softens its demands, and if that is so then devolved government is in effect permanently suspended, with all that implies for the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement (GFA), which will be 25 years old next year.

That anniversary is significant in all kinds of ways, including likely US displeasure with the UK if, by the time it falls, the Assembly is still not functioning. It is hard to feel sympathy with the DUP, given its support for hard Brexit, but it is certainly possible to do so for the unionist community. For the way things have developed was always one possible version of the way in which Brexit, unless in the very softest of forms, and perhaps even then, was bound to de-stabilise the fragile calibration of the GFA.

This is exactly what Tony Blair and John Major warned of in 2016 and exactly what Villiers, Johnson and other Brexiters denied. As for the consequences of the specific form the NIP took, for all that Heaton-Harris now says that these were not known when it was agreed, they were spelt out in detail in a civil service briefing at the time. In any case, the core objection of unionists is not to the details of its operation but to the basic principle of a trade border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. It’s simply absurd to pretend that this was an unforeseen consequence of the 2019 deal: it was the front and centre of that deal.

However, as everyone knows, the main barrier to Sunak agreeing a deal with the EU lies less in Belfast than in London, with his own fractured party. This week, Maros Sefovic has again been making very conciliatory statements about flexibility, and it’s clear that a deal is there for the doing (£). But that’s been true for a long time. Whether Sunak can and will do it remains unclear.

Sunak: no discernible agenda

In fact, Sunak’s entire agenda as Prime Minister, beyond that of clearing up the mess of the Truss mini-budget, is difficult to discern, and nowhere more so than as regards the NIP. So far as I know he has very little knowledge of, or prior interest in, Northern Ireland, although to his credit he attended the British-Irish Council summit this week, the first Prime Minister to do so since 2007. It’s known, or at least reported, that as Chancellor he opposed taking a ‘hard’ (i.e. illegal) line on the negotiations by pursuing the NIP Bill, apparently for fear of the economic consequences, but his overall position is ambiguous.

Similarly, it is unclear how he might approach the EU. There is some mood music that the tone of his interactions with EU leaders have been positive, with Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney making some especially optimistic comments, and he seems to have had harmonious meetings with Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen this week. Nevertheless, he is extremely inexperienced in foreign policy, and his blunder in only going to COP27 under pressure either indicates a maladroitness in international affairs, or a lack of interest in them compared with domestic issues or, worse, that he initially saw ignoring COP27 not just as having lower priority than those issues but as a way of signaling sympathy to the right of his party that he, like them, is sceptical about Net Zero.

Even if that wasn’t the case, it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if Sunak’s overwhelming priority is to prevent another outbreak of Tory civil war. And given that the ERG and like-minded Tory MPs are likely to oppose any deal with the EU over the NIP, it’s questionable whether he will be strong enough to over-ride them, even assuming he wanted to.

Same old Tory Party

That isn’t going to change however long the process drags on for, and it isn’t going to be resolved by the ongoing ‘technical talks’ because it is a political decision. In fact, by having gone on for so long, it is now very likely to intertwine with what happens over EU retained law. The ERG might conceivably swallow ‘backsliding’ on one of these, if only to avoid the sheer absurdity of potentially bringing down yet another leader, but not both. And with them and the Tory right generally - including someone I’d been happily unaware of before, Lee Anderson, but who even on first encounter seems worthy of a special award for his prolier than thou self-importance, nastiness and ignorance - frothing with spittle-flecked anger over asylum seekers, how long before their existing disdain for Sunak ‘the socialist’ turns into open revolt?

These three issues are linked not just in being pre-occupations of the Tory Right, but in showing the persistence of Brexity post-truth politics. For, as Professor Gerhard Schnyder sets out in his latest Brexit Impact Tracker, hopes that the collapse of the Truss mini-budget in the face of reality would be a turning point towards realism and pragmatism have proved over-optimistic, except in terms of the forthcoming budget and then only in a limited way, if at all. It’s notable, for example, that Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch seems still to be talking down the validity of OBR calculations.

Certainly as regards the scrapping of EU retained law, along with Rees-Mogg’s continuing denial of reality, David Jones of the ERG  is quoted as saying (£) he “absolutely believed” it could be completed by the end of 2023. Regarding asylum seekers, it is reported that “Ministers insist that the arrival of small boats must simply be stopped, but Home Office staff say the focus should now be on improving the dysfunctional asylum processing system”. And, of course, as regards the NIP, Brexit Ultras have simply never accepted the basic reality that hard Brexit entails a border. The one way in which the NIP issue is different is that, if Sunak does completely give in to the Tory right, which would put the UK on the path of breaking international law as well as a potential trade war, he might very well encounter a rebellion from the other wing of the party.

Politics on hold

For now, almost everything in UK politics is on hold until the Budget statement, but it is hard to see how the NIP can be left unresolved for very long after that. Perhaps it will be settled via some fudge that the DUP and ERG will accept. Perhaps, too, the scrapping of EU retained law will quietly be extended to the almost indefinite future. Perhaps, as happened under Johnson and looked set to continue under Truss, there will be a gradual loosening of immigration restrictions. Perhaps, even, and if only for the most disreputable of reasons, a fair, workable and legal asylum system will be established, including a sensible agreement with France.

Indeed perhaps Brexit itself will be permanently in the political doldrums, a constant drag on the British economy and on British international standing, yet scarcely discussed as if it were the habitual drunken lechery of an elderly uncle at family parties: unpleasant to contemplate and considered in bad taste to mention, until he finally dies at which point everyone says how much they loathed him.

Or perhaps this is just a hiatus until the next crisis, such as a massive rebellion from the Brexit Ultras over one or other, or all, of the NIP, retained law, and immigration. That would require the Ultras to be willing to place extreme dogma ahead of both practicality and political loyalty, but that is not exactly to put an outlandish strain on the imagination.

It’s not easy to say which scenario is the more likely, nor which is the more depressing.