Friday 23 February 2024

Britain is slowly learning what Brexit means

Shortly after last week’s post about Brexit, Russia, and defence went up, the news of Alexei Navalny’s death was announced, and although its cause is still shrouded in secrecy it can hardly be regarded as an accident, if only because of the brutal regime obtaining at the ‘Polar Wolf’ penal colony where he was incarcerated. It was a further reminder of the nature of Putin’s regime, and the anniversary, tomorrow, of its unprovoked attack on Ukraine will provide another. That is even without considering the crazy threats last weekend from Russia’s former President and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev that Washington, London, Berlin, and Kyiv would be obliterated by nuclear missiles if his country was forced out of Ukraine.

As I argued in that post, the combination of the Putin threat and a possible Trump Presidency is provoking renewed debate about, and possible progress towards, closer defence and security integration between the UK and the EU. It is telling that, just as I was writing it, the German Finance Minister even floated the idea of closer Anglo-French nuclear weapons cooperation, with financial support from EU countries, so as to develop a European capability (not that this week’s events have been much of an advert for Britain’s nuclear prowess). Shortly afterwards, that idea was alluded to by a close ally of Emmanuel Macron, on a visit to London to discuss the UK’s possible role in European defence more generally.

Nuclear defence integration isn’t in prospect, but that it is even being discussed is an indication of the seriousness of the situation, and the integrative logic of that situation. That logic was certainly on display last weekend at the annual meeting of the annual Munich Security Conference, which brought perhaps the strongest statement yet from Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy that a Labour government would seek a deep security and defence pact with the EU. At the same time, Valérie Hayer, who leads the Renew Group, the third largest bloc within the European Parliament, indicated strong support for a new defence treaty with the UK.

School for scoundrels

If growing threats are once more teaching the perils of isolation, passing the test will not be easy. Even without Brexit, a defence agreement would have been difficult and Brexit has made it harder. Hayer referred to such an agreement as having been spoken of in Theresa May’s time. That’s true, but it has a convoluted history, which remains important. When May submitted the letter triggering Article 50 in March 2017, there was a strong implication, much resented within the EU, that the UK would use its security and military capabilities as a bargaining tool in the exit negotiations. It’s worth recalling this partly because there is a tendency as time has gone by to depict May as (according to taste) the reasonable and pragmatic face of Brexit or, as Brexit Ultras would have it, unwilling to play ‘hardball’ with the EU.

In fact, apart from security, it was May and the then Chancellor Philip Hammond who threatened the EU with an ‘alternative economic model’ of aggressive tax cuts and deregulation if the UK did not get the kind of trade deal it wanted. Recalling this isn’t just a matter of setting the domestic record straight. It is directly relevant to the present because, although UK-EU relations are now generally better than they have been, there is still a legacy of distrust to be overcome which is not solely connected to how Boris Johnson conducted himself. Having never exactly been an easy partner even before the referendum, Britain came very close to making itself a pariah state in the years after 2016 and the memory of that, along with the spectacle of so many Tory MPs and their allies still obsessively demanding a cleaner break with the EU, as well as derogation from the ECHR, means that creating a new relationship of deep trust will not be easy.

May became considerably less antagonistic in tone in her September 2017 Florence Speech, to the extent that ironically, as I observed at the time, it sounded more like an explanation of why the UK should be joining the EU rather than of why it was leaving. As regards security, specifically, she was also notably diplomatic in her own speech to the Munich Security Conference, in 2018, although as I discussed then it continued to have some ambiguities. (By contrast, Boris Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, had used his appearance at the conference, the year before, to raise hackles by gloating about Britain’s “liberation” from the EU.)

However it was the Russian nerve poison attacks on Salisbury, just a couple of weeks after May’s Munich speech, which really brought home – literally – the fact that the UK needed European allies. That provided the background to the possibility of a deep security and defence pact that Hayer referred to, which was envisaged by the Political Declaration that accompanied May’s Withdrawal Agreement. But once Johnson came to power, he and David Frost proceeded to question its parameters and once again it was suggested, including by Nick Timothy, May’s one-time adviser who had been a key architect of hard Brexit (and, reportedly, had had an input into the Article 50 letter ‘threats’), that security and defence could be used as “leverage” to gain concessions on trade.

It’s not clear that any such concessions were achieved and, at all events, what emerged in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement was, as regards security, a “dialled down” relationship and, as regards foreign and defence policy, no agreement at all. It was really only the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 which created an impetus to greater cooperation, but “the relationship remains unstructured”. As I argued last week, the continuing threat of Russia, plus the threat, and, if it happens, the fact, of a Trump Presidency – along with the advent of a Labour government – may well be a catalyst for a closer and more structured relationship. Certainly some Brexiters have become alive to that possibility, with the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (£) counselling that “if you want to keep Brexit, pray for a Biden victory” and a Spectator article warning (£) against attempts to ‘lock’ Britain into defence integration with the EU. It’s a reminder that however compelling the logic of cooperation, it will encounter opposition from the stubbornly unteachable, which in turn will undermine trust in the UK’s reliability.

Learning the facts of life  

Yet the logic is compelling, and exerts a remorseless pressure. The fundamental point concerns the interconnectedness of the UK and the EU, which didn’t cease to exist because of Brexit. It is an interconnectedness which takes numerous forms, certainly not just in relation to security and defence, but trade, supply chains, culture, education, science, and families. Some of that is to do with the simple fact of being in geographical proximity; some of it is because of the fact of the UK having been a member of the EU, or its predecessors, for almost fifty years, leaving a deep legacy of integration. Brexiters gave no thought to the implications of any of this, and seemed to imagine that many of the conveniences of membership would just carry on as before, despite leaving, whilst relationships with the rest of the world outside the EU, and perhaps even the social mores and values of life before the EEC, could just be picked up as if they had been pickled in aspic since 1973.

The consequence is that Britain is now a learner in the world that it created for itself with Brexit, and a very slow learner at that. The lessons of interconnected defence are being taught the most quickly because the Russian invasion of Ukraine was such a seismic event that even the dullest of pupils couldn’t ignore it. Similarly, galvanized by his self-imposed political imperative to ‘stop the boats’, Rishi Sunak is about to agree a deal, possibly to be signed today, to share information with Frontex, the EU’s border protection agency. It turns out that international irregular migration flows can’t be dealt with at national level, something underscored just yesterday by the news that Europol have dismantled a major gang involved in cross-channel people-smuggling. Who knew?

The same tutorials are being given in other domains. Reality just keeps intruding on Brexiter fantasies. Thus, despite some die-hard Brexiter bumptiousness, it has become obvious from impartial analysis that ‘doing our own trade deals’ is not just of virtually no economic value but is a lot more complicated than the early ‘sign up to anything’ approach that led to the agreements with Australia and New Zealand. At all events, UK trade remains strongly connected to the EU. The lessons about the interconnected nature of regulation are also gradually being learnt. Sometimes, as with the effective abandonment of the UKCA mark, it happens through the laborious process of trial and error. Sometimes, as with this week’s news that UK officials are lobbying the EU to tighten its financial services regulation, it happens through the belated realization that what the EU does actually has a huge effect on Britain and, in this particular case, that robust regulation serves a useful purpose. Once again, who knew?

Cookery lessons

A currently widely-reported example of these dawning realities is Rishi Sunak’s sudden attention to food security, and his newfound interest in farming generally. Much of that interest is no doubt motivated by widespread reports that Tory support in its rural English heartlands is imploding, many of the roots of which lie in Brexit, in (at least) four ways.

First, there is the issue of the increased barriers to trading with the EU, which have added substantial costs to UK food exports, with more costs to come with the introduction of full import controls this year. Second there is the adverse impact on farmers of the new post-Brexit trade deals. Third, there is the impact of freedom of movement of labour having ended. And, fourth, there is the continuing saga of the replacement for the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) system of payments and support. Clearly all of these are inter-related, as the problems faced by farmers reduce UK production, thus aggravating food insecurity (something also brought into focus by the Ukraine war), and, alongside the increased costs of trade with the EU, this contributes to food price inflation and supply disruptions for consumers.

The replacement of CAP is a particularly sorry story. Here is something which was the bête noire of British Eurosceptics since the 1970s and so the one area, above all, for which they should have been prepared for when they finally achieved Brexit. Instead, the introduction of the confusing Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) was botched and chaotic, leading to endless reviews and delays, changes, and much of the promised financial support has never materialized. Even by Brexit standards it is a convoluted story, but the basic fact is that there is still no fully-functioning replacement for the CAP, or even any strategic clarity about whether the aim is to incentivize food production or countryside stewardship.

Computer club

If farming and food security is a case study in post-Brexit Britain’s slow schooling in reality, it also provides illustrations of one of the most significant, if least discussed, aspects of the theme of interconnectedness. A recent article by TC Callis in Kent and Surrey Bylines, discussing the introduction of import controls, drew attention, amongst other things, to how Brexit deprived the UK of access to relevant EU databases. It is a point I have stressed repeatedly in the past, but one which rarely features in media coverage of the issue. Indeed, even now, reports of the dangers of food crime under plans to shift testing facilities from Dover to inland Sevington ignore this issue. But Callis explains how food crime and other risks have been exacerbated by loss of full access to the EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) and, as I’ve pointed out before (although I failed to mention RASFF), there is a whole ecosystem of databases in this sphere, including the EU’s Animal Disease Information System (ADIS) and Trade Control Expert System (TRACES), to which the UK no longer has full access.

Such issues of data-sharing are part of the crucial, if unglamorous, infrastructure which, along with much regulatory infrastructure, keeps daily life going. A litter of acronyms, they are like the hardware and software of the computers we all use but which few people know or care about so long as they work. In the economic sphere, it is lack of access to the EU REACH database that has meant the UK having to develop a separate system, increasing costs in the chemicals industry*, and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is set to be another (as discussed in previous posts). In both these cases, linkage of the UK and EU databases may well be the ultimate outcome, underlining both the pointlessness of duplication as well as the persistent logic of integration and interconnectedness  

In the policing and criminal justice sphere, as with food and diseases, there is a complex EU eco-system of which the UK is no longer a part even though, of course, crime and other security threats to the UK are not confined to national borders. So we remain connected to Europe as regards these threats, but at best semi-connected as regards the means of meeting them. Thus some cooperation, albeit on reduced terms, continues, for example with EUROPOL and EUROJUST, but the UK has lost access to the Schengen Information System II (SIS II) and the European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS), significantly undermining policing.

Notably, it is database access which is central to the deal, mentioned above, that Sunak is doing with the EU over cooperation with Frontex, notably the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR). However that has another implication, which also applies to those EU security databases - like DNA, criminal records, fingerprints and air passenger lists – to which the UK has already negotiated post-Brexit access: it makes it highly unlikely that the UK could abandon the data protection standards of GDPR**. So, in this sense, interconnectedness in one domain begets interconnectedness in others.

Messy work

What we are seeing across all these areas, and many others, is therefore a very complex and untidy picture, which is almost impossible to summarise, or to characterize in any one way. It consists of a series of ad hoc accommodations, sometimes entailing duplication (e.g. UK REACH), sometimes entailing piecemeal deals with the EU (e.g. EUROSUR), sometimes simply meaning loss of functionality or capacity (e.g. SIS II). It should not be forgotten that all of these accommodations come at a financial cost, fragmented in ways which make it impossible to quantify, all of which used to be rolled into the UK’s budgetary contribution to the EU, in return for which we used to have full access to everything rather than to a jumble of patches.

To add to the complexity, almost none of these issues are static, with new systems – whether they be data management systems, regulatory systems, or sector-specific systems like farming support – being rolled out, each with varying transition or implementation periods. Likewise, to the extent that these developments involve recalibrations and redefinitions in particular aspects of the UK-EU relationship, they are also evolutionary rather than static. It is obviously also the case that the pace and scale of change in any particular area varies according to economic or political exigency, which is why the case of defence has a particular momentum just now, but they are all in flux to some degree or another.

But for all that the overall picture is messy and hard to characterize, in almost all cases the direction of travel is the same in pointing to integration. The well-documented tendency to non-divergence in regulation is an aspect of that, but non-divergence really only codes continuation of existing integration. The wider picture is one of closening relationships with the EU, either in the sense of reversing some of the distances initially created by Brexit (e.g. the Frontex deal or, not discussed in this post, rejoining Horizon), even if in clumsy or sub-optimal ways, or in the sense of moving to a greater degree of integration than existed even as an EU member (defence being potentially by far the most important example). For Brexiters, all this betokens the failure to ‘do Brexit properly’, but what it really shows is the failure of Brexit as a concept, or at least as a realistic policy.

A slow and unwilling pupil

There have been many faces of Brexit over the years. The gurning anger of Farage. The blustering buffoonery of Johnson. The psychotic glitter of Braverman. The vapid pipsqueakery of Grimes. The blokeish thuggery of Banks. The creepy unctuousness of Gove. The mad narcissism of Cummings. The born-again zealotry of Truss. The porcine truculence of Frost. The smug spitefulness of Rees-Mogg.

They all still exist, but the dominant image, now, is that of a lumpen, sulky, schoolboy dullard. Kept in for an umpteenth detention, tongue-between-teeth, he ponderously repeats the basic textbook exercises that his juniors mastered long ago, and with painful slowness comes to realize that the things his teachers had been trying to drum in to him for years past are, indeed, true.

 

*Some of these costs have been reduced by recent government changes to the UK REACH system, although, as is typically the case with regulation, this involves trade-offs in terms of creating higher levels of risk.

**Were the UK to do so, the EU would almost certainly withdraw recognition of the UK data protection system, and that would have the effect of locking us out of those EU databases to which we still have full access, as well as having profoundly damaging consequences for the commercial use of data. It remains an open question whether the measures in the current UK Data Protection and Digital Information Bill will constitute sufficient divergence from EU GDPR to lead the EU to revoke its 2021 adequacy decision about the UK regime.

36 comments:

  1. The lumpen, sulky, schoolboy dullard is Mark Francois

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  2. I occasionally read your posts from the EU and I find them extremely informative. This one, for instance, gives a very good idea about the huge grade of complexity of the issues under examination. Living in the EU, I had no idea about the many mechanisms at work behind food safety. And this complexity is perhaps the crux of the matter. People are not used to that and the medial revolution we are going through make things worse. People selling easy solutions to their disinformed public are successifull everywhere in Europe. There is a further additional problem, namely the traditional media. I'm learning a lot about the EU thanks to the Brexit debate in the UK. The media don't explain this or they do that in an extremely fragmented way. The difference between here and the UK is perhaps a cultural one. People here moan about the EU all the time but the hate-driven verve you see in the British online forums is something impressive. Large strata of the UK population seems to be addicted to EU bashing and that's alone seems to be the final target of Brexit. A huge cultural and identity problem, from my perspective. Sorry for the long and unfocused comment.

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    1. I wonder whether it really is large sections? They’re certainly loud, but I wonder just how many of them there are?

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    2. Yes, this is indeed a question that I pose to myself. I can only say what I see online. Hundreds, if not thousand of comments under each of the countless EU bashing articles in the comment section of the Daily Express... well, that's impressive. And yes I believe that most of the Brexit voters are not the bumpkins I see online. Let alone the UK as a whole. Whatever the real number of these people, it is quite evident that you (and I mean the UK) do have a cultural and identity problem. Because many people do evidently define "Britishness" as "anti-Eu". Please, don't misunderstand me. I'm completely open to discuss the cultural problems of my own country (Italy).

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    3. I think that's one of the most important points that has taken so long to become obvious. ie that it's the complex systems you describe behind the scenes that make things so easy day to day for us as individuals and businesses that we don't need to think about them.

      We're seeing that much of what the EU handles is the really boring (to most of us) detail to make this stuff work that is just really painful for a national government to construct separately with its neighbours in the way the UK is now having to do. OK, Switzerland in particular and Norway to an extent have some of this complexity for historical reasons but they're either actually (Norway) or effectively (Switzerland) in both the single Market and Schengen which mitigates the headache.

      But the whole network of systems and agreements to facilitate the easy cross-border things that we take for granted and that our modern way of life relies on is really complicated and breaking many of them just to try to reconstruct them like the UK has is mad - entirely pointless and takes time and resource that the UK government just can't afford.

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  3. "When May submitted the letter triggering Article 50 in March 2017, there was a strong implication, much resented within the EU, that the UK would use its security and military capabilities as a bargaining tool in the exit negotiations."

    "In fact, apart from security, it was May and the then Chancellor Philip Hammond who threatened the EU with an ‘alternative economic model’ of aggressive tax cuts and deregulation if the UK did not get the kind of trade deal it wanted."

    These are important points. The promises made by Brexiteers could only have been achieved by trying to bargain in this way with the rest of the EU, and the UK should not have been trying to bargain in this way with the rest of the EU. Brexiteers are as transactional as Trump, with the same potential consequences.

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    1. The promises made by Brexiters could not have been achieved by any bargaining because they were fundamentally incompatible with each other

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  4. Thank you for “porcine truculence”. I have been struggling for a long time to find words which are not obscene to describe Frost. These two words capture exactly what he is, although I confess to being fond of pigs in general.

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    1. Indeed, that entire paragraph characterising (most of) the Brexit players is a masterpiece.

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    2. We need a schema linking each epitome of vice, or to be kind, human frailty, to an EU activity intended to mitigate each vice/frailty. Why does Braverman get away with a mere glitter - could we at least have glister, in allusion to her falsity?

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  5. Yes, the intervening chaos of the Johnson government does have a tendency to put May's administration in the memory hole, and also leaves an impression of relative competence. But thanks for the reminder. During the time, it was a case of May talking tough during the negotiations, but the Chequers statement that caused Johnson to resign and throw his lot in with the Brexit hardliners was more reasonable than they had been led to believe.

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    1. And don’t forget the vacuousness of Davis, who remained clueless from start to premature end.

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    2. Her "Citizens of Nowhere" speech was the worst thing I have ever heard from a UK PM till that point. It was my "oh shit" moment, when I realised Brexit was going to be very, very bad, rather than a sensible EFTA style compromise.

      I got my family out to the relative sanity of New Zealand - best decision I ever made - within six months.

      Maybe I should be grateful to her for showing me what Brexit really meant.

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    3. The Lancaster House speech, widely attributed to Nick Timothy, can only be described as unhinged. The strong suspicion has to be that May's precarious health allowed her to be bullied into this needless and undemocratic act of national self harm. So much for taking back control.

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  6. If May was accused of trading UK military protection for trade deals, NICE! we would have had a strong motivation before the war in Ukraine to create an EU army.

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    1. Yes. And even more: it would have been the occasion to go beyond the 2 world war equilibrium. An outdated geopolitical arrangement that leaves Europe in the hands of another continent.

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  7. You might add, the extreme selfishness of Rees-Mogg. The blustering buffoonery of Johnson is still evident as he talks about 'Brexit Betrayal' in order to generate a pat on the back from the Daily Hate Mail, which given that he is an erstwhile remainer is particularly mad. It is of course almost impossible to get people to admit that they made an uninformed mistake.

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  8. Love the metaphor but have added one concept I think was missing from the description of the reluctant scholar "the dominant image, now, is that of a lumpen, sulky, schoolboy dullard. Kept in for an umpteenth detention, tongue-between-teeth, the would-be bully ponderously repeats the basic textbook exercises . ."

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  9. Another very illuminating article. Thank you.
    The EU has developed a common bureaucracy and associated systems and databases primarily to eliminate cross-border complexity and cost between member states.
    I don’t doubt the attraction for UK businesses and administrators but it is inconceivable that the EU would provide access to third countries to its systems and databases without compliance with GDPR and a demonstrable benefit to EU members/citizens.
    The cavalier and antagonistic approach of successive UK prime ministers and other government ministers to the EU (and to the very concept of international law) makes the granting of access to the UK a non-trivial consideration for EU members.

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    1. 1) Access to all this databasery stuff will inevitably not just mean continued GDPR-implementation, but also ECHR membership and compliance.
      2) The EU noted the threats from May et al. The lesson that UK defence support might be - inevitably would be - contingent means that it is also not to be relied upon. And that the moment one most needs to rely upon it, is the moment when it is least likely to be made available. The EU are well aware that not all the shadowy actors behind Brexit came from the West, and so inevitably any future Eastern crisis would be accompanied by a fifth column unhinging UK. The logical conclusion is that the EU's development of a military/defence/security pillar will be entirely internal and organic, with the UK as a nice-to-have additional bolt-on. But not one to be relied upon. This will in turn have implication for the UK. If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.

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  10. You are one of the most acute and informative commentators on the smaller details of Brexit and its implications. And also very accessible although the tragedy is that few, if any, Brexiters will read this and ponder their positions. This is the biggest mystery, akin to Dangerfield's 'strange death of Liberal England'. Something concerning and significant is going on here in terms of political and democratic communications, a very rough approximation of the agonising expiry of the traditonal US Republicans. Whatever it is has, sadly, already happened.

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  11. What about Freeports and SEZ Professor Grey? I am afraid even your comments and rationale do not inspire confidence in any aspect of this initiative.

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    1. If you're interested in a detailed, ongoing & forensic breakdown of the scandal-in-waiting of our freeports may i suggest you read Private Eye, who have been covering the subject in the same excruciating detail as they applied to the Post Office Horizon disaster long before it was known to the wider public.
      The only Brexit angle to freeports of which I can think is the Brexiter falsehood that freeports are a Brexit freedom, when in fact we had them - and scrapped them - during our EU membership. They're not much use.

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    2. What about Freeports? And what have I ever said about them that suggests any attempt to “inspire confidence” in them? Indeed, when I’ve discussed them (e.g. https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-sound-of-silence.html) it has been to critcise them. Unless, as I fear may be the case from the tone of your comment, you are one of those peddling (or taken in by) the nonsense that they are ‘Charter Cities’.

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  12. What about Freeports? And what have I ever said about them that suggests any attempt to “inspire confidence” in them? Indeed, when I’ve discussed them (e.g. https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-sound-of-silence.html) it has been to critcise them. Unless, as I fear may be the case from the tone of your comment, you are one of those peddling (or taken in by) the nonsense that they are ‘Charter Cities’.

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    1. As you say Chris. Freeports are dumb but not particularly threatening. Anyone still caught up in the Carter City paranoia should read the article by Richard Brooks in the New European. The scourge of Ben Houchen in Teesside he note it's just simply the usual Tory dodgy business dealing.

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  13. Thank you, Chris. A very frightening scenario.

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  14. Interesting times we live in - whilst not disagreeing that the UK is (slowly ) learning what Brexit means it seems highly likely that the EU and particularly Germany & France is finally beginning to understand what the cost or disbenefit is of not having a formal defence & security agreement with the UK.

    It's not to say one can't be agreed but given how negotiations ended up with the TCA , it's likely that the UK will want to get something for a defence & security agreement.

    Depending on who you read, most informed commentators observed the realities at MSC 24 and the brutal recognition by the EU that irrespective of who wins the US presidential election, Defence spending by member states is going to have to increase dramatically over the coming years - this isn't going to be easy, hence the potential need for Germany, France and the UK to work more collaboratively together.

    It will be interesting to see what, if any, incentives, we can give each other in the upcoming month's/years - it isn't going to be easy but then EU and UK relationships are, by definition, not designed to be easy.

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    1. Well, there is a formal defence and security agreement: NATO. The question is: is it enough? And I agree with the commentator above: if the UK wants something else in exchange for more defence integration, then it means it's something that cannot be relied upon in the long term.

      If the UK does not consider a closer defence relationship worth it on its own merits, then it's not even wirth discussing.

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    2. Fortunately, when it comes to defence the UK continues to work closely with its neighbours, particularly France, and as far as I'm aware that at least hasn't been damage by Brexit as it's too important (also as the other reply points out there's NATO as a framework with its structures and bases so that helps).

      There are definitely discussions along the lines Chris describes and references much better than I could and eg Macron's "strategic autonomy" concept for Europe is becoming more seriously considered albeit not necessarily in those terms while Germany is seeing need (and quite possibly the advantages) for it to change its self-imposed restrictions and work to be able to arm Europe.

      I certainly won't criticise you for not providing links to sources - it would be totally hypocritical because I don't have anything prepared either - but contrary to your assertion it seems to me that the importance of defence cooperation is the one area there has been comparative sanity about and has continued.

      It will have to deepen though and there's a question about how the UK press will react.

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    3. "also as the other reply points out there's NATO as a framework with its structures and bases so that helps"

      This requires NATO. Let's assume a certain US president is not longer interested in NATO, then a logical alternative would be a similar structure of European countries under the EU umbrella. Not being EU member does not really help in such a scenario....

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    4. So Munich provided an outlet for the US to dictate terms to the EU - I'm not sure what Chris ' view is of links on this blog as it puts additional legal/time pressures to ensure links are kosher. Happy to oblige if ok with Chris?

      Defence & security has definitely changed since Brexit - Aukus created and still creates tension with France as it's a strategic pivot away from the EU and again emphasises the very big differences in Five eyes from Nine Eyes security.

      France's take on strategic autonomy is as you indicate an issue - equally, the US has given notice that membership of NATO comes at a significant cost - not just in money - but in skills & resources which appear to be in short supply & committment from the EU.

      The EU needs to really work out what if anything strategic autonomy means in its broadest sense. It's had a great run for 70 years - it's now make your mind up time as the UK has already made its mind up ( or had its mind made up by the US).

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  15. Thank you very much Chris.

    The irony is beautiful. Cherry picking in reverse. The EU will decide which interconnected bits the UK can have!
    In other words, the bits that suit them, and the best benefits reserved only for member countries in the rest of Europe.

    Here is some very dark humour from Badenoch:

    https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65ba6d52f51b1000136a7e3d/brexit-4th-anniversary-accessible-version.pdf

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  16. I can’t add anything to the learned comments on another excellent piece, but would just like to express my appreciation for all the time and effort you put into these blogs, which are so illuminating (and entertaining). As a retired lawyer with some experience of EU law, my first reaction on hearing the outcome of the vote was horror at the sheer amount of utterly tedious complexity which would be involved in disentangling ourselves from the EU. I take no pleasure in the complete vindication of that reaction in the years since 2016.

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  17. Excellent post

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