A preview of the blame games

No one knows if there is going to be a UK-EU trade and other future terms deal, and nothing has happened this week to make that clearer. The last two months’ talks, despite Johnson’s call to put some “oomph” into them, have shown that no more progress can be made at a ‘technical’ as opposed to a political level. Hence it was announced this week that Brexit will be taken off the agenda of next week’s EU Ambassadors’ summit due to a “completely wasted” summer. In this relatively quiet limbo-period we are seeing the outlines of a series of blame games and recriminations in the UK which are only likely to intensify in the coming months.

Brexit matters more to Britain than to the EU

Ending this limbo is primarily dependent on political decisions in the UK, in particular about disclosing what its post-Brexit state aid policy is to be. The EU has already shifted from seeking direct application of its state aid rules to accepting something like equivalence between the two regimes – which needs the UK spells out what its regime is to be. It seems very unlikely the EU could soften further on this key issue.

The reality is that Brexit simply doesn’t matter that much anymore for the EU - there’s clearly a preference for some sort of deal, but, as Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government wrote this week, a no deal scenario has long been planned for. It also seems increasingly to be expected. Nor does Brexit have anything like the same political saliency for any EU country – not even Ireland, which will be most affected but is not split over it – that it does for the UK where it is still potential political dynamite.

That dynamite is – obviously – because of the continuing deep divisions over Brexit, but also because of the very practical consequences of no deal for the UK. Without rehearsing all these again, a leaked report this week of government preparations was a reminder of what is potentially at stake, including troops on the streets to keep order, water rationing and major food shortages. This is not ‘Project Fear’, it is planning by a pro-Brexit government, and there is nothing remotely like it in prospect for any EU country.

That difference of priority is insufficiently appreciated in the British polity and media, which, because in general it sees the EU entirely through the lens of Brexit, assumes that Brexit is central to the EU. But although when the UK was a member state, including during the Article 50 negotiations, its internal politics were of interest to, and often accommodated by, the EU all that changed once the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) was signed. At that point, the most crucial EU concerns about Brexit were dealt with, to be replaced with bewilderment and irritation that the UK seems to have decided that the Political Declaration that accompanied it is an irrelevance.

Who would get the blame for no deal?

This is the background to an interesting and widely-discussed report in the Sunday Times (£) by Tim Shipman, a journalist with strong sources in the government and the author of excellent books on the politics of Brexit. The thrust of the report is that the government thinks the EU is dangerously failing to understand that Johnson’s government, unlike – supposedly - May’s, is fully committed to Brexit and willing to entertain no deal. Yet such an analysis itself shows precisely a failure to understand that the whole show has moved on: no deal under May meant no WA, but the WA is now signed and Britain has already left the EU.

Beyond that, the government’s position as reported – I would think accurately – by Shipman remains hopelessly stuck in the same mire as May’s government, itself a result of the impossible promises made by Vote Leave. For although the report presents the UK as humbly seeking a ‘bare bones’ deal because it, unlike May’s administration, embraces and accepts Brexit as a change from membership to third country status that simply isn’t true at all.  Instead, as Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent, pointed out, over a huge swathe of things the UK is still seeking continuity with what it enjoyed as a member state.

That, of course, does still matter to the EU. Not in order to ‘punish’ an ex-member but for the obvious reason that if non-members have the same things as members then membership becomes meaningless. In that respect, far from Johnson’s government having accepted that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, and moved on to a new phase, it is still wedded to at least a version of his familiar ‘cakeist’ fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the EU continues to bat back attempts by the government to turn these fantasies into ‘legal texts’ without any agreement to them having been negotiated.

It obviously doesn’t take a genius to work out what is going on here, not least since it has been in prospect for months, indeed years: the ground is being prepared to blame the EU for no deal because it failed to understand that it was dealing with a British government fully prepared to go down that route if necessary. This was made explicit in a typically bullish editorial in the Sun this week.

That isn’t to say that no deal is inevitable, or that the government has decided on that course. In fact, I suspect the truth is as simple as that the government genuinely believes the dogma of the Brexit echo chamber it now entirely inhabits which insists that ‘the EU always blinks at the last minute’. So on the one hand we’re seeing that strategy repeated and, on the other, getting a taste of how the government and media will present things if no deal turns out to be the consequence: ‘we tried to warn the EU what would happen if it didn’t meet our perfectly reasonable requests but they wouldn’t believe us’.

The logic of this is circular in that the more the EU makes it clear that it will countenance no deal if necessary, the more it confirms the Brexiter view that nothing will change until the very last moment. At the same time, it’s a highly peculiar strategy given that the adverse effects of no deal will be felt much more heavily by the UK than the EU. In effect, it’s a game of chicken which has strapped every man, woman and child in the UK in the path of an oncoming train, and the closer a collision comes the more it justifies staying there. The fallback plan, apparently, is to tell the maimed victims that it was the train driver’s fault.

So that’s the first and, clearly, the foremost blame game on display, that between the UK and the EU. Again, it’s a purely domestic game, because the EU itself won’t be that interested in it, and the member states even less so.

Would the Brexiters be blamed for making false promises?

There are alternatives to blaming the EU. The most obvious – ongoing since the referendum, but which has new zest as the end of the transition approaches – is the disjuncture between what is happening and what was promised by Brexiters. That disjuncture will exist almost as much if there is a deal as if there isn’t, since it is clear that any deal will be far less commodious than was proposed to leave voters in 2016.

We had a small taste of this when former cabinet minister David Gauke pointed out this week (in response to the Shipman article) that Brexiters have long-promised that “the EU will give us whatever we want as long as they believe we’re prepared to walk away” and – in line with my analysis above - are lining up the excuse that “the EU underestimated our determination”. This engendered a huge and furious reaction and what was interesting about that was how precisely it exposed the central flaw of Brexit.

On the one hand, Iain Dale said that Gauke was talking “utter bollocks. Literally no one argued that the EU would give us all we wanted” and Julia Hartley-Brewer said simply “no it isn’t” (i.e. that what Gauke had said was the Brexiters’ position was not). But only a couple of days before during a (separate) discussion of the issue of what Brexiters had promised Hartley-Brewer had re-affirmed that “we do hold all the cards because we will do just fine with or without a deal and the EU knows it” (emphasis in original, but denoted with the symbol “*”).

Since some of the debate about Gauke’s tweet has descended into who has used the literal words “whatever we want”, let me spell out that if one side ‘holds all the cards’ it must follow that it could get whatever it wants since the other side would have no cards, and if those cards consist of being able to do fine without a deal then the leverage consists of being able to walk away. So in all substantive senses, Hartley-Brewer is still making the same claim that Gauke says Brexiters made all along but which both she and Iain Dale say was never made by Brexiters.

I’ve deliberately focused on this micro-fragment of what is in itself a relatively minor discussion because in the welter of all that has been said over the last four years it has become easier and easier for Brexiters to muddy, disown or misrepresent the claims they made. As it would now be an impossible task to subject the entirety of the Brexit debate to the same level of detailed reconstruction, it’s useful to give an illustration of how it works.

What’s especially difficult is that Brexiters often conveyed their message by means of an overall upbeat tone (e.g. that there would be a deal, and a good one) even if sometimes adding in, as it were, the small print some qualification to this message (e.g. but if not we can fall back on WTO terms and that will be fine too). Thus when, now, faced with the overall message, they are able to quote the small print as a ‘get out’ so as to deny they made any promises at all. It is a tactic familiar to dodgy salespeople the world over. Although in this case, in fact, the ‘we hold all the cards’ line was widely used, most famously by Michael Gove, and that is so well-documented as to be beyond reasonable dispute.

That such claims and promise were made matters, and it is important not to allow history to be re-written. But the present point is that, even now, two leading pro-Brexit broadcasters, each with large audiences and presumably significant influence, are able to make diametrically opposite statements – I assume in good faith, and I am not casting aspersions on either of them - about the nature of the Brexit negotiations and what was promised for them. And Dale and Hartley-Brewer are just two examples – the same story could be told using any number of Brexiters in politics or the media. This is not, by the way, an example of the familiar theme of ‘history being written by the victors’, in that what it shows is that the victors give as varied an account of that history as, at the time, they made promises about the future.

This is central to how the Brexit vote was won, because quite contradictory claims and promises were made as a deliberate campaign technique. It is also why the process of actually delivering Brexit has been so fraught, because what those claims meant and how those promises would be delivered was not defined or agreed. This in turn sets up what will inevitably be years of recrimination, denial and counter-attack.

So that is the second of the main emerging blame games: what Brexiters said and promised versus what actually happened or will happen, and of course this goes well beyond the specific example given by Gauke this week.

Would it be blamed on those who didn’t back May’s deal?

Also rumbling away in the background are assessments of what happened during the convoluted and complex political events of 2019. These include, in particular, the idea that politicians (and others) who favoured remain, or at least a soft Brexit, are at fault for not having backed May’s Withdrawal Agreement. On this account, especially if there is no deal, but even if there is a hard Brexit deal, the blame lies with those who were too recalcitrant to back May.

This involves several highly dubious propositions and, again, a certain amount of re-writing of history. It forgets, or downplays, how the hard core of opposition to May’s deal came from the ERG and, especially, the self-styled Spartans amongst them. It forgets that throughout much of 2019 every Brexit outcome was conceivably possible (or, as it often seemed, impossible) and so all shades of opinion opposed to May’s deal had reason to hold out against it in the greater or lesser hope that their preferred outcome would triumph.

Crucially, it neglects the fact that May’s deal was itself ‘hard Brexit’ – out of the single market and customs union - pointing to the eventual Canada-style outcome that remains Johnson’s stated aim – the only real difference being the extent to which she seemed to accept the realities of what that would mean, especially as regards the Level Playing Field. It also neglects that May, too, was not averse to threatening no deal. So hers was by no means the ‘compromise’ approach it is now spoken of as being. And, related to that, it neglects the fact that as the Brexit Ultras now say, as quoted in the Shipman report for example, Johnson’s WA is “basically the same as May’s deal. It’s more than 99% the same”.

Given that the major difference between the two was the substitution of the Irish Sea border for the Irish backstop arrangements, about the only group who can really be criticized for not supporting May’s deal are the DUP – and of them a better critique would be that from the outset, long before the WA or even the triggering of Article 50, their entire support for Brexit was a massive mistake given their core political priority of preserving the union.

Would it be blamed on those who enabled the 2019 election?

A somewhat related revisionism is that those opposed to Brexit were guilty of a terrible error in enabling the 2019 General Election. This charge is aimed especially at the LibDems and also at remainers within the Labour Party. Perhaps it could apply to the SNP, too, but that is less likely to stick since it’s easy to argue that the SNP’s central goal of Scottish independence is well-served by Brexit and, for wider reasons, by a Johnson government – indeed developments since the election seem to bear that out.

This criticism of remainers neglects the fact that there was no prospect of a parliamentary majority for a referendum (and still less for a revocation of Article 50) in the 2019 parliament. Moreover, Johnson had already passed his (then) Withdrawal Agreement Bill at second reading by some 30 votes. So there was a strong argument – and I made it at the time, as did others including Ian Dunt – that, highly risky as it was, a general election was the best and possibly only way to head off the eventual passage of the Bill and to re-constitute parliament in ways more propitious to remain.

None of that is to defend the way that Labour and the LibDems fought the election as regards Brexit, and the LibDem Article 50 revocation policy was – as again I argued that at the time – a total fiasco both in principle and practice. But the fact that agreeing to an election turned out to put a definitive end to the remain cause does not mean that it was a mistake to take that risk, though it is obviously true that taking it did not pay off.

Nor is any of this to deny that the internal state of the People’s Vote movement was – as we now know in more detail (£) – shambolic or that remainers made plenty of mistakes in 2019, including a failure to work together with soft Brexiters (and vice versa). But the calculated risk of the election was not one of them, and can only be presented as such by ignoring what was actually happening in parliamentary votes at that time.

Why does any of this matter?

It may seem pointless to revisit the, often, arcane details of the last four years of Brexit. But doing so is not a scholastic exercise: it is still very much live politics. Brexit was never going to be – and surely everyone can now see this? – a single, quick, or simple event. It is a long, complex, ongoing process which we are still living through. In that context it is vital to retain an accurate record of what was said, by whom, and of who did what, when, and why. The purpose being not, in fact, to assign blame but, rather, responsibility and also, perhaps, to hold on to a sense of reality in the face of the Zersetzung-style techniques that increasingly characterize Brexit.

Much of what is now happening  –  and Johnson’s whole strategy, most obviously in his ban on the use of the word ‘Brexit’  –  can be thought of as a battle between remembering and forgetting. The coming months are going to be crucial ones for defining what Brexit is going to mean for Britain and that is now certain to be very different to what those who voted leave were told it would be. So it’s going to be important to recall how we got to this juncture. After all, if, to reprise an earlier metaphor, a massive national train wreck is in prospect, it’s not unreasonable to ask what led to it - even if it’s small comfort to know the answers.

Four years on, we need a whole new Brexit debate

It is now four years since the Referendum result which convulsed British politics and set the country on a path whose destination remains unknown. In this post I’m not going to review what has happened during those years but instead will suggest that we now need a whole new Brexit debate. No doubt many, probably most, people are heartily sick of hearing about Brexit, so that idea will seem perverse if not downright masochistic. But such a debate is now possible, necessary, and, arguably, inevitable.

Back in October 2018, the leading law and policy commentator David Allen Green made an intriguing and typically elegant argument. It was that – notwithstanding remainers’ disputes about its legitimacy – the 2016 Referendum had created a mandate for Britain to leave the EU. This could only be discharged by doing so, but once Britain had left it would, indeed, have been fully discharged and would (or should) have no further purchase. Then, it would be possible for debate to shift to what kind of relationship Britain should have with the EU.

The Referendum mandate has been discharged in full

On 31 January 2020 we arrived at that point. It is no more, or less, than a truism to say that Britain is no longer a member of the EU. Yet it seems fair to say that political debate has not fully caught up with that fact (perhaps because, almost immediately afterwards, all attention shifted to coronavirus). For example, just a few days ago an opinion poll showed that a clear majority – 56% - would vote to remain in the EU if another referendum were held now. That is an important result, in that it suggests that Brexit is not what the majority want, but it is also strictly speaking a meaningless one. There could be no such referendum because there is no such thing as ‘remaining’ any more. Likewise, there is no such thing as ‘leaving’ any more. Both of those policies ceased to be possible at the end of January. The only thing that could meaningfully be asked is whether to ‘stay out’ or ‘re-join’ – a very different question (and one which would not necessarily yield the same result).

By the same token, as per Green’s original argument, the fact of Britain having left the EU means that it is no longer meaningful for the 2016 Referendum to be invoked as an argument for how the ongoing process of ‘doing Brexit’ should be undertaken. I’d actually go further than that, because since that referendum didn’t specify a form of Brexit it never had any relevance to how Brexit was done. But, even without accepting that, there is now certainly no basis on which ‘the 17.4 million’ have any more say in what happens than the rest of the population or on which that number can be invoked in discussions about what happens.

That includes the question of whether to extend the Transition Period. Recently, the pro-Brexit Bruges Group tweeted, correctly, that it now seems clear that there will be no extension but went on to say, incorrectly, that this will be “a victory for Brexit voters”. That cannot be so, since Brexit voters voted for one thing only, and it has now been done. There can be no further victories or further demands based upon that original vote.

17.4 million is no longer a relevant number

This matters, hugely, because it means that the ‘will of the people’ and the sanctification of the 17.4 million which since 2016 have been used as a cudgel not just to stifle but to stigmatize as undemocratic any debate about Brexit has now gone from being entirely bogus to being entirely redundant. There’s no doubt that, for particular example, the vote to trigger Article 50 was only supported in such numbers, or even passed at all, because of the force with which that cudgel was wielded. But it is now possible, and right, and necessary, to debate and question every single way in which Brexit is being enacted without any reference at all to the Referendum result.

This includes, of course, the terms of any deal which may be done with the EU as well as the possibility of no deal being done at all. It also includes challenging decisions such as refusing to participate in the EU scheme to revive tourism in the wake of the coronavirus or in the EU’s fast track vaccine scheme. Or the idea of setting up a supposed global rival to the Erasmus scheme (mirroring the now failed approach to the Galileo project). Or refusing to create any formal institutional framework for foreign policy cooperation. On all of these, and many other, Brexit issues there is, or should be, an entirely new debate framed not in terms of the referendum result but in terms of what, given that Britain has left, its relationship with the EU should be like.

What about the election?

A potential objection to this argument is that the present scenario is different to that envisaged by Green in that, prior to leaving the EU, a General Election was held. Since the Conservatives won, this gives them a mandate, separate to that of the Referendum, as to how to undertake the Brexit process. Their manifesto stated that this would mean leaving the single market and customs union, ending “the role of the European Court of Justice”, and not extending the implementation period (sic) beyond the end of December 2020. Therefore, all of these are settled matters.

Against that there are several counter-arguments. Unlike a referendum on a single question, a General Election victory does not imply voters endorsed every line of the winning party’s manifesto. In a first past the post system it doesn’t mean majority support. And in a democratic system it certainly doesn’t imply that the enactment of their policies can no longer be discussed and debated. This includes recognizing that changing circumstances mean that governments necessarily do things that run counter to party manifestos, which in this case might mean, in particular, that the force majeure of coronavirus entails a revision of the transition extension policy. On the other hand, if the manifesto is taken to be a rigid and immutable set of commitments, then there is no mandate for no deal, because it makes no mention of that possibility and, instead, states unequivocally that “we will negotiate a trade deal next year”.

Beyond all that, as I discussed at the time, the election campaign was remarkable for the lack of discussion of any detail at all of how Brexit would be done, including and especially any discussion of what the future relationship with the EU would be like. Indeed, the whole message from the Conservatives was that Brexit would simply be “done” by the end of January, obscuring the entire issue of the future terms negotiations. Even the manifesto line quoted above about the ECJ carries no precise meaning as regards, for example, participation in various EU projects. So all the myriad of details about things like, for example, Erasmus lie outside of any mandate that may be claimed from the election. And this goes wider than such details in that it is also legitimate to question the entire tenor in which the government is conducting its relations with the EU.

A new set of issues

In short, it is now entirely reasonable for a new debate to be held, and an ongoing one, too, as circumstances change because of coronavirus or because of emerging global issues such as the evolving/ deteriorating UK-China relationship or the outcome of the US Presidential election. It is entirely reasonable to discuss the clear evidence of the rising costs of Brexit to date (all the more so given the costs of coronavirus). It is entirely reasonable for voters and politicians to demand of the government that it approaches the EU in a positive and cooperative manner rather than with the truculence that has prevailed so far. And it is entirely reasonable to expect that approach to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic.

When Green made his argument, I suggested that, whatever its logic, one flaw in it was that it was highly unlikely that the Brexiters would drop the idea that the Referendum mandated their preferred form(s) of Brexit. And it is, indeed, far too much to expect this ERG-dominated, continuity Vote Leave government to do so, or to heed any of these entirely reasonable requests.

Yet, on the other hand, it could be argued that Boris Johnson has a duty to do so. As Dan Hodges recently pointed out in The Mail, Johnson won the election by pledging to end the culture war of Brexit, not to continue it. The statesmanlike thing to do after all the divisions of the last few years would be to seek to heal rather than inflame them, the more so given that Brexit now only has minority support.

Labour has a key role to play

If – and, really, it’s not in doubt -  such hopes are a pipe dream, then it is still the case that the Labour Party (and others of course, but Labour is the official opposition) can and should be vocal in insisting on this new debate about how to create pragmatic and amicable relations with the EU. It is disappointing and, I think, misguided that Keir Starmer has not called for an extension to the Transition Period (though for a counter-argument, see Professor Tim Bale’s article in the New Statesman). It may well come back to haunt Labour to have been – through silence – complicit in non-extension.

But whether or not that proves true, it will be an even more serious error if he does not start to articulate a new approach to the EU. It is not enough just to ‘hold the government to account’. It’s also necessary, as Andrew Rawnsley argued in last Sunday’s Observer, to show what Labour would do differently. Of course there are many aspects to that, but one would be to show how it champions a better and – Starmer’s calling card – ‘more adult’ approach to the EU. It would be entirely consistent with the growing critique of the government for lacking basic competence (£). Yes, Brexit is happening, but it doesn’t have to be done in this scorched earth fashion which is so reckless of British national interests and international reputation, and which threatens to rip up the cultural fabric and the union itself.

The key to that is, precisely, the recognition that the Referendum mandate has now been discharged. Johnson would no doubt respond to Labour by trying to reprise the ‘will of the people’ line, but it will have less and less traction. And, just from a tactical point of view, those amongst whom it will have traction are voters who are almost certainly already a lost cause for Labour. Whereas, by contrast, there is a large and probably growing constituency of voters, which transcends the leaver-remain distinction, who are appalled at the prospect of no deal and, probably, are out of sympathy with the relentless pathological hatred of all things European that the ERG exhibit.

It is now open to Starmer to find a new kind of ‘centre ground’ encompassing erstwhile leavers and remainers who would welcome a fresh approach, and more specifically a competent approach. At the very least, given that the most important foreign policy question of the moment is relations with the EU it simply can’t be treated as a taboo subject by Labour. With the Referendum mandate now discharged, Brexit should be treated as a political issue just like any other rather than as a culture war shibboleth.

A new approach is needed with or without a deal

This will be true even if, as some well-informed reports this week suggest to be the case (£), a trade deal with the EU is becoming slightly more likely (though, on my reading of Michel Barnier’s comments this week and given those of David Sassoli and David Frost this seems optimistic). On the one hand, it would require intense scrutiny for the damage it is likely to do to manufacturing industry and perhaps particularly to services trade and the wider implications of that for investment generally. On the other hand, any such deal is unlikely to resolve all the many non-trade issues, and even on trade there are likely to be many future, or ongoing, matters to settle. Also in doubt is the extent to which new customs facilities and regulatory systems (for example for chemicals) will be up and running  in time.

For what seems to be in prospect if there’s a deal is, all but inevitably given the time frames, precisely the kind of rushed, can-kicking bodge that happened in January, with numerous, complex, loose ends left to be resolved or disputed later. Moreover, the measures currently being touted as the basis for a deal, whereby a zero tariff regime is adjusted (only) if and when the UK diverges from level playing field provisions, are predicated on a constructive and trusting partnership (£).

So even with such a deal, and certainly in the absence of one, there will be many more years in which the relationship will be under negotiation and, in any case, that relationship will itself evolve, if only through the ongoing operation of the Joint Committee overseeing the Withdrawal Agreement. Even though it has been restricted by what has happened over the last four years, there is still a spectrum of possibilities of what that relationship might evolve into over the coming years, ranging from the minimalist, hostile one to which the ERG is dragging us through to an extensive, cooperative one perhaps along the lines of an Association Agreement.

And to re-emphasize, the issue is as much about the tone as the institutional form of the relationship. With the referendum mandate done and dusted why should we accept that future relations with the EU be conducted in the unremittingly negative, suspicious, accusatory manner of the Vote Leave campaign? They won the right to leave, not to permanently poison and pollute UK-EU relations.

Reframing the debate

To put all this a different way, under the influence of Tory Eurosceptics, UKIP, and their media supporters the entire debate about Britain’s relationship with the EU has for at least 30 years been dominated by a single question: stay or leave? That is a testament to the indefatigability of the Brexiters but also, it should be admitted, due to the supine attitude of pro-EU politicians. They rarely, if ever, made a positive case for membership and when they did it was almost invariably in entirely transactional terms. But all that is past history now and, in particular, that single question has been asked and answered. It can no longer serve as the frame through which UK-EU relations are viewed and it mustn’t be allowed to.

The challenge of ensuring that doesn’t just lie with politicians. It also lies with journalists, academics, business and civic society leaders and perhaps especially grass roots organizations and activists. Those who used to be remainers, when remaining was a possibility, mobilized to a remarkable extent after the Referendum was lost and very nearly pulled off a reversal of the result. In the aftermath of that first, emotionally crushing, loss four years ago (my feelings at the time were recorded on a different blog site, if of interest) and the perhaps even more exhausting tension of last year’s long drawn out battles and hopes it’s not surprising that they are drained and demoralized.

Some continue to revisit the rights and wrongs of the 2016 vote and to re-litigate the Referendum. Others have retreated from the fray, seeing any chance to salvage anything as having gone. Still others have flipped to campaigning to re-join the EU. These three responses are all understandable but they are also all unrealistic. The first is hopeless – and actually panders to Brexiters’ attempts to keep the focus on the Referendum result. The second has too little hope. The third has too much. Rejoining the EU may happen, but if so it is years, very likely decades, away.

But there are still things to argue for, and to do so is both worthwhile in itself and necessary if the ground is to be laid for rejoining in the future or even simply creating an amicable partnership. That has at least three aspects. The first lies at the political level of attempting to influence the evolving shape and tenor of UK-EU relations, as discussed above. The second is to nurture all those remaining ties – be they cultural, academic, familial, or whatever – which will persist despite the wreckage of Brexit. It’s still possible to remind our counterparts in the EU that, despite the noisy voices of the Brexiters, plenty of British people never wanted this and are still their friends and allies. And, third, it means re-engaging in the domestic debate in this new post-referendum mandate world.

In that regard, whereas Johnson’s huge election victory in December seemed like a terminal moment – and was, as regards any hope of stopping Brexit – only a few months later things look different. To a remarkable extent for a new government with a large majority it already feels tired and crisis-ridden. That’s largely because of coronavirus, of course, but also because the virus has only speeded up and made more visible its underlying weakness and ineptitude (as per my last post). The Cummings affair wrecked its dominance of the polls. It almost weekly gets into unnecessary tangles that lead to U-turns and, despite its majority, routinely faces backbench rebellions on everything from Huawei to food standards to Sunday trading. Having reshuffled his cabinet in February, only three months after winning, and losing his Chancellor in the process, it’s reported that Johnson is going to do so again in September.

The point isn’t that government is about to fall. It’s that it isn’t the hegemon it seemed to be in December. It doesn’t control the terms of debate, including debate about Europe. A different debate is now, for the first time since 2016, at least possible. And, since January, the lashing, quasi-fascist whip of the ‘will of the people’ has lost all of its force as their will has now been done. The question is no longer ‘leave’ or ‘remain’ and indeed in that sense is no longer even about Brexit, but about Britain’s relationship with Europe. Which actually makes a different debate not just possible but, sooner or later, inevitable.

Johnson's 'no deal 2.0' virtue signalling

The first week of Johnson’s new administration has seen both speculation about, and the beginning of some answers to, how he intends to undertake Brexit. The outrageousness of that situation shouldn’t pass without comment. We have just had an election campaign in which Johnson made ‘getting Brexit done’ the central theme. Yet, as pointed in a previous post, he avoided saying almost anything about how it would be done – and neither the opposition parties nor the media were able to pin him down.

So he will now claim a mandate from voters for doing it any way he wants. It is a travesty of democracy, which replicates the way that during the Referendum Brexiters refused to tell voters what they were voting for, only to define it later and claim it as the ‘will of the people’. Thus whilst a reasonable interpretation of the election was that people were voting for ‘Johnson’s deal’, as expressed in the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) with the EU and operationalised domestically by the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB), Johnson is already changing the latter.

Amongst these changes, the most striking is to make it illegal for the government to seek an extension to the transition period, with the associated removal of a parliamentary vote on extension. It might be argued that this is consistent with Johnson’s campaign pledge not to seek such an extension, but that pledge did not entail (legally) removing the option just (politically) not exercising it.

Of course, doing so is, in a way, a meaningless gesture. Just as with the ‘enshrining in law’ of the 29 March leaving date, it is something that can always be removed by further legislation if necessary. In that sense, it is simply what in other contexts would be called ‘virtue signalling’.

A signal to the Tory Party

Yet gestures and signals matter, and so in another way it is not meaningless. It carries a message, perhaps to voters though I think at this point more to his party, that Johnson will not renege on his campaign pledge. This in turn underscores that, as I pointed out in my post-election post, the ERG remain a powerful force.

Indeed, given the near unanimously pro-Brexit character of the new intake, the ERG are larger and more powerful than ever before. As this new signal indicates, any idea that Johnson’s majority frees him to pursue a softer Brexit – even assuming he wanted to – is surely mistaken. Forty-five rebels can take it away, and there are certainly that number who would have no compunction in doing so, as their track records show.

This incipient possibility is underscored by the very fact of the ERG’s continued existence. For what is the purpose of this ‘party within a party’ now that the Conservatives as a whole are fully committed to Brexit and are led by the erstwhile figurehead of the Leave campaign?

The answer to this question is, as again pre-figured in my earlier post, that the endless civil war within the Tory Party is far from over, and is almost certainly going to revive in the coming months. Indeed, less than a week after their landslide win, it is reported that there are splits within the cabinet (£) over, precisely, revisions to the WAB (although, in this case, potential changes to the powers of British courts vis a vis the ECJ, rather than over the transition period extension).

These splits probably won’t amount to much now, but they lie waiting in the wings. And they were manifested in a different way this week. Early reports suggested that the revised WAB would scrap the previous commitments to workers’ rights. Later, this was disowned. Then it emerged that they had indeed been removed from the WAB. In this can be seen how there is still a political juggling act going on, and very likely a degree of administrative chaos. Far from being master of all he surveys, Johnson is, like any other Prime Minister, subject to diverse pressures (e.g. from the ERG but also from his new ex-Labour seats). But, anyway, just as enshrining no extension to the transition period in law does not mean that the law can’t be changed, neither does the enshrining – or not – of workers’ rights.

So the conclusion is the same: what matters about these legal signals is not that they set in stone what will happen, but that they reflect the political messages Johnson wants to send which, in turn, reflect the political exigencies he faces.

A signal to the EU

Party issues aside, there is another audience for the transition period gesture and it is the EU. Johnson, and the Brexiters generally, have always believed that Theresa May failed to be sufficiently hardball in negotiations and think that they can do better. One aspect of that is, simply, having a majority. Interviewed on Radio 4 this week, the former Brexit Secretary David Davis – a man who has been wrong in just about everything he has ever said about Brexit – opined that this in itself strengthened the UK’s hand because it meant that remainer politicians would no longer be able to disrupt the government’s plans.

This is based on the Brexiter myth that what happened in the WA negotiations was that the UK was undermined domestically – and by remainers rather than by the Brexiters who opposed May’s deal - rather than it arising from the UK’s own negotiating red lines, as enthusiastically approved by the Brexiters. But even if that were not a myth it could actually be argued that having a majority makes negotiations more difficult – the familiar tactic of international negotiations of saying ‘we cannot agree to this because we will never get it through parliament’ is eroded.

That aside, the signal the transition period law is meant to send the EU is that the UK is ready to leave without a future terms deal if necessary, and to pressurise the EU into agreeing such a deal quickly, a point made this week by, again, David Davis. It is about as ill-judged an approach as could be imagined, having learnt none of the lessons – or the wrong lessons – from what happened with the Article 50 (A50) negotiations.

For, then, as soon as A50 was triggered, it was the UK which was always most under time pressure. And that pressure was all the greater because of not having an agreed, detailed, plan for what was being sought from the future terms during phase 2 of the A50 negotiations. The latter is likely to be the same this time, because of the tensions between ERG purism and business and economic pragmatism.

Time pressure exists in the future terms negotiations anyway, since the transition period cannot be easily or endlessly extended. Johnson’s WAB gesture just increases that, making it more difficult, politically, to extend. So it just recreates the time dynamic which was so damaging to the UK in those previous negotiations. For, make no mistake, the timescales proposed are ludicrous. It is not even just a matter of the eleven months between the UK leaving and the end of the transition period, since some, at least, of this will be needed for ratification. And the timescale for extending the transition period is even tighter – just until the end of June.

For the EU, the effect of Johnson’s signal was only ever going to be to lead them to say – as they immediately did (£)  - that, given this self-imposed additional time constraint, only a very minimal deal will be available. As before, the threat of no deal is a rather empty one (and may even breach the good faith requirements of the WA)  since it would be so much more damaging for the UK than the EU for simple reasons of economic scale and the asymmetry of the trading relationship.

It could have been different, but it’s going to be the same

So all that Johnson has achieved so far is to limit his options, purely for reasons of domestic politics despite the fact that his majority might have freed him from such constraints. As with Theresa May, but with even less excuse, he is repeating the errors which have dogged Brexit from the beginning.

For whilst I’ve never thought Brexit is viable, still less desirable, those who do have consistently made a mess of it. It’s not completely unimaginable that a self-confident, pragmatic Brexit government could approach the complexities of undertaking it in a realistic way. That would entail dropping the confrontational, aggressive and paranoid posturing towards the EU and instead approaching the negotiations as the technical, bureaucratic exercise they to some large extent are.

It would also mean eschewing all the grandstanding about deadlines and recognizing that it would be a long and gradual process, requiring extensive consultation with parliament, businesses, civil society and others as to how to deliver it. By contrast, the revised WAB removes the role of parliament in setting negotiating objectives and even its right to receive updates on progress.

It would – again, for those who seriously believe in it – be conducted with the confidence of knowing that it was about building a desirable and durable new national and geo-political strategy which involved patience, the formation of new relationships externally, and the development of consensus domestically. Nothing like that has happened. Instead, the process has been, and continues to be, rushed, and conducted in a way which has destroyed trust and good will with the EU and credibility beyond the EU.

Meanwhile, at home, remainers – or even just those who are concerned or perplexed – have been stigmatised and insulted, and consultation confined to those who are ‘true believers’. Yet if Brexiters want their ‘great national project’ to succeed they need to bring with them a decent proportion of the nearly half who voted to remain, the more than half who would now do so, and the two parts of the United Kingdom which did so.

Theresa May set the stage for most of this – not least in her desperate wish to be accepted as a true convert – and Johnson is continuing it. At root, it is driven by the constant suspicion of the Brexit Ultras, both inside and outside the Tory Party, that they will be betrayed, and fear of what they will do as a result. Like a metastasising tumour, that suspicion and that fear have now spread throughout the body politic.

If there was a chance to press the re-set, it would have to have been begun by Johnson immediately. It would take great leadership, and it might well fail – but it is already clear that he isn’t even going to try. And, thus, any possibility of doing Brexit in a half-way sensible manner has now disappeared.

Hence, now, Johnson even with his big majority is still making the same mistakes for the same reasons and is now digging himself, and the UK, into a deeper and deeper hole. He is either going to have to do the mother of all U-turns and extend the transition period, or do an extremely limited deal – perhaps to be followed by several years of supplementary deals – or end the transition period with no deal.

No deal 2.0

It’s important to clarify that the ‘no deal’ now being entertained at the end of the transition period is not the same as that which would have obtained had there been no WA. The new version – call it no deal 2.0 – would be different because the WA terms would be in place. That is, primarily, the agreement on the financial settlement, on Citizens’ Rights and on the Northern Ireland arrangements. So it would be somewhat less damaging than the original no deal (‘no deal 1.0’) and that matters, in particular for EU-27 nationals in the UK and for UK nationals in the EU-27. Moreover contingency planning for ‘no deal 2.0’ will presumably be more advanced than before.

Equally, it’s important to recognize that there are three, partially overlapping, features to what has to be done during the transition period.

Trade

The first, which gets by far the most attention, is future trade terms. I’ve written a lot about that on this blog, but just briefly to recap. Future trade terms matter, economically, because about half of UK trade is with the EU. It is true by definition that even the most ambitious Free Trade Agreement (FTA) will have little provision for services, because that is the nature of FTAs and one of the ways they differ profoundly from single market membership.

Thus any FTA will be worse for a service-based economy, such as the UK’s, than single market membership. But even considered as primarily goods-based agreement, FTAs can have varying depths and extents. The quicker a deal is done, and the less that the UK agrees to in terms of Level Playing Field (LPF) conditions (e.g. state aid rules, competition rules and environmental standards), the shallower and more limited it will be.

Johnson has already indicated an unwillingness to accept extensive LPF (some think that could change, but if so it will open up a row with the ERG), and the added time pressure he has created simply increases the chance that any deal done will be so limited – for example with respect to coverage of intellectual property rights and data management - as to significantly damage even goods trade. The more limited it becomes, the closer it is to the no trade deal position of falling back on ‘WTO terms’ which would be the least advantageous of all the outcomes.

Non-trade

The second feature of the transition period negotiations, which gets far less media attention than it should, relates to future terms for all the non-trade issues as set out in the Political Declaration. These include security, law enforcement, aviation and other transportations, fishing, science, energy and much else. Here, again, the less time there is the more difficult and more limited a deal becomes.

However, on these issues, there is not even the fall back of something like WTO terms, as there is for trade. Instead, what would happen under ‘no deal 2.0’ would be some limited, temporary workarounds in at least some of these areas. Some have already been developed by the EU in preparation for ‘no deal 1.0’, for example a basic framework for aviation.

This shouldn’t be mistaken for the ‘micro-deals’ that ‘managed no-deal’ Brexiters used to speak of. They are not deals at all, they would be unilateral measures taken by the EU and in the interests of the EU which might have the side-effect of protecting the UK from the worst disruption. Even so, the implications of no deal for, perhaps especially, security would be very serious.

Northern Ireland

The third feature of ‘no deal 2.0’ relates to Northern Ireland. Failing to reach a trade deal would have particular consequences for Northern Ireland since, by virtue of the WA, it will be in a different position to the rest of the UK and, in this scenario, there would be a sudden and sharp divergence. Moreover, with or without a trade deal, the Northern Ireland protocol of the WA needs to be operationalised.

This entails considerable complexities, as set out by Professor David Phinnemore of Queen’s University, Belfast, some of which would vary according to the nature of any trade deal that might be done, others of which need to be resolved anyway. Under ‘no deal 2.0’ the time available to do so would be extremely tight, perhaps impossibly so.

So this is a qualitatively different aspect compared with the first two features of ‘no deal 2.0’. For whereas the first two arise from what does or does not develop from the political declaration on future terms, this third one, whilst interacting with those future terms, arises from the way that an unextended transition period would impact on the capacity to deliver the agreed terms of the WA which, of course, will be a legally binding international treaty.

Whether Boris Johnson, given his comments during the election campaign, begins to understand what this treaty entails must be open to question. But his government will have to get to grips with it, and fast, especially given his clear intention not to extend the transition period.

Johnson’s gamble

Just from the first week of his new premiership, it’s possible to see that Johnson has embarked on a series of gambles in the domestic management of his party and in the negotiations with the EU. But he is taking a far bigger gamble without, apparently, realising it.

That gamble relates to the UK economy, and the investment and location decisions of businesses from some of the very largest right down to some self-employed individuals. An indicator that this is indeed the story of the week can be seen in how the pound, having risen on news of Johnson’s election victory, returned to its previous level when the transition period policy was announced.

For Johnson is saying, unequivocally, that from January 2021 businesses will be outside of the single market and customs union and that, unequivocally, if necessary that will be without any new trade deal being in place. He is also, therefore, telling them that they will face increased barriers to trade of a greater or lesser extent, whatever happens. For example, even if there were a zero tariffs, zero quotas goods trade deal, there will still be the extra costs of new customs procedures and, of course, new barriers to the hiring and deployment of staff.

In the time horizons of both business and personal planning that is a short period. Johnson perhaps believes, like so many Brexiters, that despite all the evidence to date the ‘Project Fear’ warnings were just that, so he can virtue signal about no deal with impunity. He’s doing so for political reasons but, in doing so, creating a potentially horrible economic trap. For the more his party, the electorate and the EU believe him the more likely it is that businesses will do so too, and act accordingly.



Huge and heartfelt thanks to Matt Roxburgh @mattroxburgh for responding to my Twitter appeal for help and patiently fixing the technical problems that prevented some readers from accessing last week’s posts, a task made more difficult by my techno-uselessness. Hopefully, no problems with this post – but if so down to me not Matt - although previous posts may still have problems until I have completed work on them.

This will be the last post on the blog this year. I will resume at the beginning of January. Many thanks to all who have read, publicised or said kind things about it this year. Very pleased to have the 3 millionth visit recently. Hugely appreciated, and never taken for granted.

General Election 2019: the aftermath

In my previous post, the morning after the election, I discussed what the result is likely to mean for what follows with Brexit. Even in the short time since then we have seen the beginning of the contours of what was said there developing. In particular, as Tony Connelly’s assessment of the election implications spells out, the practicalities for the construction of the Irish Sea border will now have to be worked out. Agreed to by Boris Johnson in his almost indecent haste to get a deal done, possibly without even understanding what he had agreed to, it now has to be turned into a reality, with all the economic and political consequences that will bring.

We also see the beginnings of the row over transition period extension, with reports that the EU (rather than the UK) may propose such an extension, perhaps via a sequencing process in which some sectors are dealt with first and others deferred to an extended period. On the other hand, Michael Gove has repeated the promise that all the future terms negotiations will be completed by the end of December 2020. The only way I can see that coming true would be if, first, the UK effectively accepted whatever terms the EU propose or, second, if the deal done was so limited in scope as to be highly damaging to the UK.

But these and other issues will be the stuff of the future. This post is going to finish off the series concerned with the analysis of the General Election itself, by considering some of the causes of the result. Clearly there is already a mass of commentary about that, but here the focus will be mainly on the Brexit-related aspects.

What just happened?

The first thing that happened is that the Tory Party made a good fist of Brexit, in an electoral sense. The ‘Get Brexit Done’ theme was, as pointed out elsewhere, deeply dishonest and will set up many problems for the future. But, as a slogan, it had undeniable political cut through. They were also lucky in that Farage lost his nerve and did not stand in Tory-held seats. Yet, in another way, by standing in Labour held seats he deprived the Tories of an even bigger win and saved several Labour seats where the BXP vote was larger than the Labour majority. One side-effect of the campaign is that it should now see the end of Farage as a political figure, if only because the Tories have now embraced ‘Faragism’.

Even in the face of this, it is surprising that the LibDems did not manage to make some gains, even allowing for their longstanding disadvantage in the first-past-the-post system. When, before the election, they announced their ‘revoke Article 50’ policy I received a lot of criticism from some for writing that this was a mistake of both principle and tactics that would dog them if and when an election came. But on that it is pretty clear that I was right. In particular, it made it far less likely that they would attract the votes of Conservative remainers, and its partial abandonment late in the campaign was, simply, too late.

On the other hand, the criticism of the LibDems and Labour, made by Anna Soubry and many others, for having facilitated the election in the first place is probably unfair. It’s a difficult judgment, and we’ll never know if it was the right one, but I thought then and still think that – once the Withdrawal Agreement Bill had passed its second reading - the alternative would have been that it would eventually have passed and Brexit would happen. And there was no sign of a parliamentary majority for another referendum. In those circumstances, an election was the last hope but, clearly, it proved a false one.

Labour's disaster

As for Labour, they deserve some though not all of the criticism they are receiving. It is nonsense to claim as many, such as Len McCluskey, are that they would have done better, still less won, had they embraced Brexit and not had a confirmatory referendum policy. That claim ignores the fact that had they done so they would have lost support amongst the majority of its 2017 voters, who were pro-remain.

It also wrongly assumes that it would have been appealing to Labour leave voters. For it is very clear that, irrespective of Brexit policy, those were exactly the kind of Labour voters who were repelled by Jeremy Corbyn – seeing him not necessarily as ‘too left-wing’, but as unpatriotic and just plain alien. It doesn’t matter whether that perception is fair or not, or whether it was trumped up by the media or not. Whatever its cause, it was the case, and it would have been the case whatever Labour’s Brexit policy had been. The polling evidence is clear that Corbyn rather than Brexit was the main problem amongst those who ceased to support Labour.

What is certainly the case – and has been highlighted on this blog many times over the last three years - is that Labour’s entire positioning on Brexit since 2016 has been a disaster of oscillation, ambiguity, and shifts that came too late or with too little clarity. From Corbyn’s early call for an immediate trigger to Article 50, through to his belated acceptance of a confirmatory referendum, to his dithering over what side he’d be on in such a referendum to his, in my view reasonable but far too belatedly adopted, ‘neutrality’ stance, it has always been grudging, shifty and unconvincing.

Moreover, Labour were wrong to vote to trigger Article 50 – thereby being forever open to the accusation of having supported Brexit in principle – wrong to eschew single market membership as a compromise form of Brexit, if Brexit was to be done, and wrong to wait so long before endorsing another referendum. By the time they got to this election, they were still talking in the meaningless terms of single market access (or variants of that) which had been so misleading during the Referendum itself. Their ultimate ‘renegotiate and then refer to the people’ position made the best of a bad job given what had gone before, but it was too late to atone for what had gone before.

Much of the blame for all this can be laid at Corbyn’s – or his inner team’s – door. He never showed much interest in or understanding of Brexit, which would be bad enough given that it is the dominant issue of the day. But, worse, he did not seem to understand that delivering on his preferred terrain of anti-austerity policies could not be separated from Brexit itself.

In fact, polling evidence suggests that the actual policy platform was not unpopular with those former Labour voters who abandoned Labour. Things like rail nationalisation, for example, are vote winners. In that sense, despite being widely mocked for it, Corbyn’s claim about having ‘won the argument’ is not entirely risible. And it should be of some comfort to the Left were it not for the diversion of the personality cult around Corbyn as the person to deliver it: singing ‘oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ was never a substitute for serious politics.

Deeper roots

However, asking what happened in this election is, in a way, the wrong question, in that some of what happened has been building for years, if not decades. There’s always been a tension between working-class and middle-class Labour, between nationalists and internationalists, and between class-based and identity-based politics. In particular, the decline of Labour’s traditional vote reflects the long-term decline of the regional, industrial, unionised working-class. Similarly, the tension between the remnants of that and the middle-class, public sector worker and London-centred parts of its base has been going since at least the New Labour years.

But Brexit and its aftermath have inflected, sharpened and perhaps finally cemented these divisions. Immediately after the Referendum I wrote an academic analysis in the Socio-Economic Review of how it had clarified a new politics of ‘cosmopolitans and locals’. Many others have made a similar diagnosis, even if using different terminology (e.g. ‘nativists and globalists’) to make essentially the same point. I speculated that in due course the two party structure of UK (or, at least, English) politics would come to reflect that.

Arguably, that has come half-true in this election, with the Tory Party having emerged as the ‘local’, or English nationalist, party. If so, and assuming that there will be no change to the first-past-the post-system, then what now needs to happen is the construction of the other, ‘cosmopolitan’ party – reflecting the cleavages of age, education, social liberalism that are already in play. Tactical voting is not, as we have just seen, going to be the answer. That implies not the reconstruction of the Labour Party but the wholesale merger of Labour and LibDems with, in the process, a redefinition of each of them.

A new party?

This would not be the ‘remain party’. Painful as it is for remainers to accept, remain is now a dead cause. Pointing to the fact that 52% of voters backed ‘remain parties’ in the election is as much of a dead end as the ‘only 37% of the electorate voted to leave’ rabbit hole. In the medium to long-run it might become a ‘rejoin party’, but for the time being it would be pushing for the least damaging Brexit deal, developing a wider policy programme within the confines of the fact of Brexit, and opposing what is already emerging as the populist agenda of the new government.

Nor would it be a ‘centrist party’, because the very notion of centrism is predicated on a politics that has now disappeared. It would be on one wing of this new local-cosmopolitan landscape. One reason to think it could emerge is that it is already clear that the ‘Local Party’, despite Johnson’s talk of “healing divisions”, is going to humiliatingly grind its victory into the faces of what that horny-handed son of the soil Dominic Cummings (Durham School and First Class degree from Oxford) sneeringly calls “educated remainer types”.

It’s a strange, Pol Pot-like, move for the Tories to turn on the educated in this way but it reflects the peculiar mix of Maoist and Silicon Valley disruptor thinking which has now captured that party. It's no longer the party of business and the professions. It's not even the party of 'grammar school aspiration' in the way it was under Heath or even Thatcher. Rather, it's a bizarre melange of public school entitlement and the resentment of those with no post-compulsory schooling. This new positioning can only have the effect of cementing the new divide, since the more it asserts a new ‘them’, the more it creates a new ‘us’.

However, calls for a Liberal-Labour rapprochement are almost as old as the Labour Party itself and so it’s probably unlikely to happen now. Even so if, as many now think, the break-up of the United Kingdom is not very far away, and if, as is at least possible, Labour suffer another crushing defeat in 2024 then it’s perhaps not impossible in the not too distant future. It would be a vehicle for, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote this weekend, a ‘European England’ that might still eventually emerge from the wreck of Brexit.

The future of this blog

Coming to the more immediate future, and to less weighty matters, several people have asked me if this blog will continue now that Brexit is a certainty (and been kind enough to suggest that they hope it will). The answer to that is ‘yes’, for two reasons.

One is just because, to repeat a point made ad nauseam, Brexit will not end with Britain’s departure from the EU at the end of next January. It will continue for many months, and very likely years, to come. Over that time, it may become (even) more difficult to separate out Brexit per se from British politics more generally. Still, the blog will continue to focus primarily on Brexit-related issues. Some of these may be highly technical, for example on trade and customs issues, but my approach will continue to be one of trying to place these within a wider political analysis.

The second reason is the original rationale for this blog. At the time of the first post in September 2016, when of course there were very few readers, I wrote that “the blog will not attempt to re-argue the case for remaining in the EU or for the reversal of the decision, as I do not think that this is in prospect. Instead, I will analyse the unfolding consequences”.

In the intervening years, there have been many times when I thought that the decision might, in fact, get reversed. This was partly because of the total incompetence with which Brexit has been pursued, but mainly because of the extraordinary resilience and ingenuity of the remain campaign. That campaign has made some mistakes but, overall, has done far more than could ever have been expected. It nearly won - and may yet be the springboard for a future movement.

So now that it is once again the case that there is no prospect of Brexit being reversed, the rationale for the blog remains as it was from the beginning. So too does my original sentiment in that first post that Brexit is a national catastrophe. But that does not take away the need to provide an ongoing analysis of it which, whilst clearly and avowedly partisan, aspires to be based on evidence, logic, and fair and rational argument.

If nothing else, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country, not least as a reminder that this is so very different to what, in 2016, Brexiters promised. So it can make its own very small contribution to holding them to account for what they have done.


Note: I am aware that in the last few days some people have been having problems reading the blog, with a large yellow box covering over most of the text. It seems to only affect Android devices. I’m sorry about this but I do not know the reason or the solution, though some people have reported that it also depends on what browser you use.