Recently, a rash of molehills has appeared in my garden, the visible eruptions of a vast subterranean network of tunnels and burrows. Brexit lurks in a similar way beneath the surface of British politics, a constant presence which, however much it is ignored – perhaps the more that it is ignored – continues to break out here, there, and everywhere.
That, surely the most tortuous and tortured of the many metaphors that have been applied to Brexit, is intended to introduce the fact that this post doesn’t have any particular unifying theme other than the latest ways in which Brexit has been in view over the last fortnight.
Robert Jenrick and the Tory madness
We don’t yet know how the story is going to end, but it is looking increasingly likely that, when history is written, Brexit is going to figure as the central cause of the decline and perhaps demise of the Tory Party. For all that numerous political commentators, most recently Andrew Rawnsley, urge the party to re-discover its more moderate and pragmatic traditions, for now it seems stuck in the spiral of madness of which Brexit is the proximate cause. Thus possibly the least surprising development of the last fortnight was that their party conference showed the Conservatives to be firmly in the grip of Brexitism.
At the conference, the most obvious manifestation, or even exemplification, of this was the latest stage in Robert Jenrick’s long journey from “bland centrist solicitor” to gurning ideologue. It’s a journey made stranger because he has somehow retained his blandness along with the way, managing to be, as Ian Dunt puts it “at once banal and monstrous”. Much attention focused, rightly, on his complaint about the lack of white faces in Handsworth, a complaint made not less but more objectionable by his absurd suggestion that this remark “was not about the colour of your skin”. Less discussed, but objectionable and absurd in a different way, were his remarks about the judiciary.
Jenrick’s thesis, if we can grace it with that term, is that when judges ‘don the wig’ – a point he sought to make dramatic by flourishing such a wig – they at the same time put aside personal interests and identity so as to apply the law impartially. So far, so good. But he also claimed that, having, like every internet troll, ‘doNe he’s Own ResEArch’, he had made a shocking discovery. Apparently, there are “dozens of judges” who have used social media to “broadcast their open borders views” (whatever that means; does anyone advocate ‘open borders’?), or have “spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country” (which seems to mean, based on his other remarks, that Jenrick imagines barristers to be invariably sympathetic to their clients’ causes, and retain a lifelong commitment to them).
Jenrick is either too dense or too dishonest to see that his first observation made his second claim irrelevant. To make his thesis stick, he would need evidence that the judges he identified had also given judgments which, in legal terms, were demonstrably wrong, and wrong in ways biased in the direction he claimed. Moreover, he would need to show that they had done so to a greater extent than judges who he had not identified as having this alleged bias. But of course, and this is part of what makes this an example of Brexitism, reliable evidence is irrelevant to Jenrick. What is relevant, and what makes it definitively Brexitist, is the attempt to undermine the judiciary as an institution and, with that, the rule of law. It is ‘enemies of the people’ territory again. And it hardly needs to be said that Jenrick’s supposed solution, the political control of judicial appointments, would make the supposed problem he supposedly wants to solve worse.
Whether Jenrick has become a convinced Brexitist ideologue or is just opportunistically seeking to burnish his leadership credential hardly matters. Either way, it shows that Brexitism is an obligatory posture for those who aspire to lead the current Tory Party. That fact was underlined by Kemi Badenoch’s long-expected adoption of leaving the ECHR as official party policy, a policy which is the central prescription of ‘Brexit 2.0’.
It is also, as I noted in my previous post, a policy being ‘sold’ in exactly the same way that Brexit itself was sold, even though recent polling shows that 46% of those planning to vote Tory at the next election think Brexit has been a failure (and only 22% think it has been a success). Perhaps that is why Badenoch made only a couple of passing references to Brexit in her conference speech, in itself a telling fact: far from boasting of it, the very party that delivered Brexit feels too ashamed to talk about it.
Farage’s culpability and Labour’s problem
So much for the Tories. In my previous post I also noted that Keir Starmer had begun to attack Nigel Farage on the grounds of the damage done by Brexit. That attack has escalated, with Labour now starting to argue (£) that Farage will be to blame for anticipated tax rises in the forthcoming budget because, having used “easy sloganeering” to persuade the public to vote for Brexit, he then walked away and took no responsibility for it, leaving the economic consequences which ultimately explain the need tax raises.
Farage and his supporters, and no doubt others, object that he had no control over the delivery of Brexit, so the accusation is unfounded. But that is simplistic. Farage was not in power, it is true, but he exercised considerable power, always ready to denounce as ‘betrayal’ whatever form of Brexit was proposed and never once putting forward realistic proposals for delivering it in ways that were less economically damaging than what was enacted. Moreover, at the 2019 election, he backed Boris Johnson’s ‘oven-ready Brexit’ even to the extent of standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats.
So, yes, Farage is very much amongst those responsible for Brexit and, in any case, it is more than reasonable to point out that the main cause of his political life has proved to be a failure. It’s certainly clear that this line of attack is being made increasingly often by Labour politicians or sympathetic commentators, an example this week being an opinion piece by Kevin Maguire, Associate Editor of the Mirror.
Where the Labour government is on much trickier ground is that, to the extent it acknowledges the economic damage of Brexit it opens the question of why it has no plans to seek more than marginal limitations to this damage. Perhaps that is why Starmer’s conference speech, like Badenoch’s, had a telling lacuna, in his case avoiding any mention of his ‘reset’ policy. For if Brexit is a sufficiently serious problem to make attacking Farage’s culpability for it worthwhile, what is the government’s solution?
That is the question which Starmer has, until now, avoided and to which he cannot give a credible answer without abandoning his cast iron ‘red line’ manifesto promises, as well as ensuring that the entirety of British politics during this parliament, and probably the next election, is dominated by Brexit again. He isn’t going to do that, and that is one exemplification of the Brexit impasse that Britain as a whole is in: its entire national strategy is admitted, even by many of its advocates, to have failed, and public opinion firmly and consistently endorses the view that it was wrong to leave, but there is no presently viable political route to its rectification.
I’ve been arguing consistently, since December 2022, that there is a better approach for Labour, which would be to honestly admit that Brexit is damaging and has failed, and ought to be reversed, but to be equally honest in saying that this isn’t a political possibility until there is cross-party consensus (at least amongst parties that might credibly come to power) to make an application to rejoin. That means, in the present context, identifying Reform and the Conservatives as the barrier, making them responsible not just for the original problem but for the continuing absence of a solution. I still think that would be Labour’s best option, and with the latest line of blaming Farage for Brexit it becomes the logical next step.
A Royal Commission?
If there is ever to be a solution, one part of the route to it could be an interesting proposal made over the summer (although I have only just come across it) by former MEP Andrew Duff. Noting the “deadlock” in British post-Brexit politics, he proposes the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the position and future of the UK in Europe. It’s not often that a new idea about Brexit surfaces, and it’s a reasonable one in all sorts of ways, the most minimal, but not unimportant, being that, as I argued in June, it is surely right to review, given the time that has passed and the experience we have had, what Brexit has actually meant for the UK.
If nothing else, it would be a way of drawing together the now massive, but highly dispersed and fragmentary, body of evidence about Brexit, and providing some accountability for decisions made. For example, at this week’s Tory Party conference, Michael Gove admitted that the trade deals his government did with Australia and New Zealand were poorly negotiated and damaging to farmers, going on to say “we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working.” Yet these highly revealing remarks were barely reported, even though they confirm exactly what so many of us said at the time, what civil servants warned ministers of at the time, and what the government denied at the time.
Assembling an authoritative single review of what happened with Brexit would, in itself, be a contrast with the evidence-free, faith-based, reality-denying politics of Brexitism. However Duff’s proposal is primarily intended as a future-oriented exercise, which could begin a process to create, to the extent it is possible, the basis for a future national consensus.
From that point of view, he is surely right to say that “the most likely outcome of such a Royal Commission will be a report that furnishes the Prime Minister with a cast-iron case for reversing Brexit.” I’m not so sure Duff is right that “it will prepare the ground for the referendum campaign that must inevitably follow”, since it wouldn’t in itself create the kind of cross-party agreement needed to make rejoining a viable possibility for the EU. But it would be a step away from the current absurdity of a nation which effectively knows it has made a mistake but can’t find a route to rectify it. At the very least it offers a practical suggestion to create such a route, in a way that eludes those who simply demand a ‘rejoin now’ policy. [1]
Still Brexiting
Whatever the wider issues in play (or which ought to be in play), it shouldn’t be forgotten that, as a matter of fact, the post-Brexit UK-EU relationship continues to limp along, largely undiscussed in public. One facet of that, which has had some media discussion, is that since the beginning of this week the EU Entry-Exit System (EES) has begun to be enforced. I should clarify that wording, perhaps, in that, whatever the pro-Brexit press may imagine (£), the EES isn’t something particular to the UK-EU relationship, as if it were a ‘punishment’ for Brexit, but, rather, applies to the EU’s relationship with third countries generally. However, in that sense, for the UK it is a consequence of Brexit and one which will introduce new complexities and, potentially, delays and queues for travelers (although in the last few hours it has been reported that, to avoid this, it is only being partly implemented for now). Sloganizing about ‘securing our borders’ suddenly looks less attractive when we are its target.
In an analogous way, whilst the Brexiters have long used the feeble pun of a ‘protectionist racket’ to describe the EU, that suddenly looks even less funny with the prospect of a massive increase in its tariffs and reduction in its tariff-free quotas for steel imports. That would be a very serious blow, perhaps even an “existential threat”, for the already beleaguered British steel industry, since almost 80% of UK steel exports go to the EU. Again, this is a consequence of being a third country although, again, with wearying predictability, the pro-Brexit press reported it as if it were aimed specifically at Britain (£).
It may or may not be that the British government manages to negotiate an exemption but, taken in conjunction with the now indefinitely stalled negotiations with the US over steel tariffs, it is a stark reminder of Britain’s post-Brexit isolation. That reminder has several dimensions, including the fact of the relative importance of the EU market as compared with the US (which, for steel, takes less than 10% of UK exports). More generally, for all the Brexiter rhetoric about Brexit enabling the UK to have a ‘nimble’ independent trade policy, it is a reminder that size matters more than agility in a world dominated by regional blocs. That is especially so when these lumbering trade monsters go to war, the wider context of the EU’s announcement being, in large part, the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the Chinese steel industry. [2]
The same ‘better in than out’ lesson applies to the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) which is due to come into force in January 2026, and which also has implications for steel, amongst other products. This is an issue which has been lurking in the Brexit undergrowth for years (I think the first time I discussed it on this blog was in September 2023, and that post includes several links explaining some of the complexities involved), but now it has been reported that a temporary deal to exempt the UK is in prospect. [3] The longer-term likelihood is that the EU CBAM will be linked to the UK CBAM (due to come in to force in 2027), along with an associated linkage of UK and EU Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS), a possibility within the scope of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
A permanent agreement on CBAM and ETS linkages sits alongside other elements of the still to be agreed details of the ‘reset’, including potential deals on a Youth Mobility Scheme, UK participation in Erasmus +, and a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement. The latter has a particular urgency in the context of food price inflation, as Naomi Smith of Best for Britain pointed out this week, and might be agreed and implemented “within a year”, according to a recent statement from Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s Trade Commissioner.
That may be optimistic, and it is worth remembering that, price issues aside, until there is an SPS deal in place, the UK (or more accurately Great Britain) will continue with the risky policy of partial border security, having never fully implemented import controls and having now given up even the process of doing so, in the expectation of this still-to-be agreed deal. Sometimes, apparently, ‘securing our borders’ isn’t a priority.
Also sitting within the reset basket is the question of possible partial UK involvement in the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative for defence procurement. It’s an issue of particular and growing salience in the context of the ever-growing threat from Russia and the declining reliability (to put it mildly) of the US as a security partner. Whilst, as Jannike Wachowiak of UKICE explains, the UK would not, as a third country, be eligible for loans from SAFE defence funds, it could, potentially, have access to joint procurements.
The growing charge list
All of these, and other, issues are a reminder not just of the ongoing negotiation of the UK-EU relationship, but of the cumbersome nature of that process, the uncertainties of its outcomes, and the limited scope of those outcomes even if the most favourable of them were to result. One consequence of that, although it is probably impossible to quantify, or even to find much information about, must be to deter investment and, therefore, economic growth. In all kinds of sectors, for all kinds of reasons, the terms of the UK-EU relationship are in flux which, necessarily, creates an unpropitious environment for investment.
Domestic political uncertainty is also a factor since Farage is already threatening to tear up any new agreements the present government makes with the EU. Even if that doesn’t make the EU wary of such agreements, it will prey on the minds of investors and indeed others trying to plan for the future. That, too, is something to be added to the growing charge list against the Reform leader and the other ‘guilty men’ of Brexit. Ultimately, there will need to be not so much a Royal Commission as a Public Inquiry if they are to be held accountable. Only by excavating the subterranean maze of Brexit will its eruptions be quelled.
Notes
[1] Duff’s proposal attracted several social media comments denouncing it as ‘British exceptionalism’ (in line with my usual policy, I only link to social media posts if they come from public figures). This is nonsense and reflects a wider problem. It is nonsense because there’s nothing ‘exceptionalist’ about a domestic political debate and, in this case, the idea that Britain needs a process of honest self-reflection about what has done to itself is almost the opposite. It is for the UK to face up to the consequences of its collective decisions, and to do otherwise, for example by blaming the EU for those consequences, or expecting the EU to provide solutions to them, is what might be exceptionalist.
The wider problem is that, whilst it is absolutely true that throughout the Brexit process British exceptionalism has been, and continues to be, greatly in evidence, sometimes amongst ‘remainers’ as well as Brexiters, there is a cadre of social media posters that simply parrots the word in any and every discussion of any and every aspect of Brexit (very often the same posters who ignorantly trot out ‘cherry-picking’ to describe any and every aspect of post-Brexit UK-EU relations).
Some (or more accurately one person, a rather creepy stalker who continually creates multiple pseudonymous social media accounts to harass me and various other people, including Jon Henley, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, on the basis of entirely false accusations of anti-Irish racism) also object that my use of the word ‘Brexitism’ is ‘British exceptionalism’, since it denotes a British form of populism (I explain why that is warranted in my definition of Brexitism), which is as transparently stupid as saying that the word ‘Brexit’ is ‘exceptionalist’. Brexit happened here; Brexitism is happening here. Specific doesn’t mean exceptional.
[2] There is of course a much wider point here than trade or, rather, trade is imbricated within the wider point of the multiple areas – economy, security, defence - in which the UK is horribly caught between the US, China, and the EU. But that would need another post.
[3] Reading that September 2023 post again, I was reminded of the sad, sorry, stupid saga of the UKCA mark, the long, lingering death of which quietly continued over the summer, with the announcement that it will not be required for medical devices.
Showing posts with label Accountability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Accountability. Show all posts
Friday, 17 October 2025
Friday, 1 April 2022
Admissions, denials and amnesia
It came with a whimper not a bang, but finally this week a government minister – Chancellor Rishi Sunak, no less – admitted at least some of the truth about Brexit. Speaking at a Select Committee hearing this week he, almost casually, said that “it was always inevitable there would be a change in our trading intensity as a result of the change in the trade relationship” [link in quote is my addition, to show latest data on trade intensity].
Yet even as he accepted this fact, he tried to deny it by arguing that it is too early to separate Brexit from other factors, meaning, presumably, the pandemic. Actually, at least as regards trade in goods, it is possible to more or less separate out the Brexit effect, and the Office for Budgetary Responsibility this week re-affirmed it, identifying that overall UK trade volumes are and will continue to be 15% less as a share of GDP than if Brexit had not happened. That in turn means 4% less GDP growth (twice the damage of Covid), 4% less productivity over 15 years, and higher taxes to fund the NHS and other public services than would have been the case but for Brexit.
There’s nothing new in this. These figures have been around for some time and are actually – despite the myth that has developed about the discrediting of economic forecasts – broadly in line with most of the mainstream long-term modelling, going back to 2016, of what hard Brexit (in the meaning of a Free Trade Agreement, rather than ‘no deal’ or single market membership) would do to trade. What has been discredited is the only forecast of positive gains which came – no surprise – from Patrick Minford’s Economists for Free Trade, formerly known as Economists for Brexit.
However, it is new that a minister has admitted, after years of denial from Brexiters, that Brexit means not just ‘teething problems’ of adjustment but permanently disadvantageous structural change to trade with the EU. Even so, what was missing was any acknowledgement of precisely that longstanding denial. For whilst Sunak himself has never been a very vocal Brexiter, though always a committed one, most of his high-profile colleagues categorically dismissed all suggestions that Brexit would be in any way economically damaging as ‘Project Fear’. Again despite the myth that has developed, Brexit was sold to the electorate as something which would be unequivocally economically beneficial to the country.
That was so not just during the referendum campaign but in the years after, when Theresa May repeatedly promised ‘frictionless trade’, when David Davis said there would be the “exact same benefits” as a member of the single market and customs union, and when Boris Johnson proclaimed that he had achieved a ‘cakeist’ trade deal. None of this is ancient history, and even this week Johnson denied the realities of post-Brexit trade. Yet now we are told, authoritatively if quietly, that damage was “always inevitable” and are apparently expected to forget all that was promised and all that was denied.
Brexit bitterness: a healthy and justified obsession
This matters. Brexit isn’t some passing event. It is a major, ongoing re-set of the entire direction of national strategy, including economic and trade strategy, and the most politically contentious such re-set for at least a generation and, arguably, since the Second World War. Indeed, Brexiters themselves only devoted such energy to it on the basis that it was a fundamental change. In the process, they made promises for which they are accountable and urged a project for which they are responsible.
So it simply won’t wash for them now to complain, as – writing about another aspect of Brexit’s consequences this week – Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley did, that “arch-remainers cannot move on from yesterday’s hurt” and to dismiss concerns about the consequences of Brexit as an “unhealthy obsession”. Nor will it wash, despite the laboured humour of a Lower Sixth Form magazine that Stanley attempts, to deride this supposed obsession by sniggering comparisons with “Morris dancing and incest” and sneering references to “Lord Lucan and the Bermuda Triangle”. The promises Brexiters made are on the record, and can be judged by reference to facts.
And, of course, that’s the reason for the sniggering and sneering. It is a sign of just how comprehensively Brexit has failed. If there were any genuine examples of its success, Brexiters would be delighted to have them discussed. Instead, so bereft of achievements has Brexit been that almost all the successes claimed for it – most notably the early vaccine roll-out – are untrue. Hence there is a mood around, and Stanley actually uses the words, that talking about the failures of Brexit is something that should “be marginalised in polite society”. But this is not some matter of etiquette, in which snooty drawing-room arbiters of taste get to decide what should and shouldn’t be discussed. It is fundamental to any democracy – perhaps to any functioning polity – that the promises made and rationales given for policy are evaluated in the light of what they deliver. Thus to be ‘obsessed’ with this is, in fact, ‘healthy’.
The attempt to dismiss concerns about its consequences as ‘boring’ is as much a part of the dishonesty of Brexit as all the lies told and false promises made to garner voters’ support for it. Tellingly, Brexiters always insist that the time is not right to judge – either because it is too early to know what will happen or, now, as with Sunak, because what has happened as a result of Brexit can’t be disentangled from other things. With claims that it will take up to 100 years (or 47 years as one Brexiter suggested this week) before it can be judged, it’s easy to see that what the Brexiters really want is to avoid any meaningful judgement.
Certainly, more than most, the present government habitually operates on the basis that people should simply ignore any scandals, promises or events – for example the handling of the pandemic, Partygate, or just the endless reviews and inquiries it instigates – dismissing them as old news from the past or punting them into the future. Hence the present is never the moment to be accountable, preventing any accountability at all. This general approach also applies to the government’s handling of Brexit.
However, just because that is what Brexiters and the Brexit government want it does not follow that they will get it. A remarkable feature of Brexit – indicative of both its scale and its folly – is how, despite the relatively little voice they have been given by MPs, erstwhile remainers have not been willing to forget or to be bullied into keeping quiet. Yes, some may have lost interest or become resigned, but many remain galvanized and vocal. That may indeed be a matter of bitterness, for there is much to be bitter about and no shame attaches to that except for those who provoked it. As such, it is likely to be exacerbated if, as Gerhard Schnyder discusses, the Tories seek to frame the next election in terms of its delivery of Brexit (if they do, it will be a risky strategy). At all events, it seems highly unlikely that David Frost’s test for the success of Brexit – that in 10 years’ time, meaning 2031, no one will be questioning Brexit as it was self-evidently the right thing to do – will be met.
The ongoing failures of Brexit
That will not be due to the failure of those who are against Brexit to ‘let go’, it will be because Brexit will continue to fail to deliver its promises. So far as the economics is concerned, the bad news that Sunak has now admitted to is still only the first instalment of the damage. It relates primarily to goods trade, and even on that there is worse to come if full UK import controls get introduced during the course of the year. However, this week there have been reports that yet another delay, the fourth, is in prospect (£), as once again the government finds that Brexit works best when not implemented.
The reason is both lack of preparedness of business supply chains and concerns about the impact on, especially, food prices and availability. In and of itself that makes it sensible to delay – given the baleful effects that even those controls so far introduced are having - but it is also another failure of the Brexit project. More accurately, it is two failures: the introduction of checks shows the damage of Brexit, whilst the failure to do so on time shows inept planning as well as the unnecessarily rushed transition period.
Yet, in ways similar to Sunak, this at least tacit admission of failure is accompanied by a denial, with Jacob Rees-Mogg reported to be pushing the idea that looser import controls are actually an advantage of Brexit. This isn’t a surprise, as he had already hinted at it in an interview last month (£). The same belief is held by David Frost, the architect of the trade agreement, who tweeted this week that not only would a delay be welcome news but that it would be better simply to eschew full controls on a permanent basis.
Rees-Mogg and Frost apparently don’t realise, or care, that this would build in a structural asymmetry whereby British firms exporting to the EU face higher barriers than EU firms exporting to Great Britain. Or to care about the potential scandals, with animal diseases the most likely example, especially if and when British and EU regulatory standards diverge. But, of course, it is just a smokescreen: if what they are now saying was really a good idea, then why were full import controls ever even envisaged? Or, to put it another way, it is a tacit admission of the unworkability of what Frost negotiated – and what Johnson, Rees-Mogg et al. signed up to. But apparently we’re meant to forget that happened.
Then there is services trade, where only now that the pandemic restrictions are easing are we beginning to see more of the implications for the many kinds of services which entail international travel. As with goods trade, it is smaller firms which are being worst affected (£). But, again as with goods, the fact that larger firms may cope doesn’t mean that they don’t incur increased costs, which then impact on competitiveness, prices, taxes paid, or investments foregone. And, trade aside, services industries, especially hospitality, continue to suffer domestically from lack of staff. As with trade, both Covid and Brexit are issues but, as one restaurant chain owner pungently expressed it, “Covid is one thing … with Brexit I am completely screwed”.
Financial services is perhaps the most significant of the UK’s service industries, and this week it was reported that the Brexit-related loss of jobs has so far been less than most predictions, at just over 7,000. Whilst this is a lot less than some predictions at the time of Brexit, it is not actually that much less than the highest estimate of 12,500 jobs made by, specifically, EY (the source of the 7,000 figure), which may well end up being about right. The same report shows relocations of assets from the City to have flattened at about £1.3 trillion – a colossal sum, but, again, less than some forecasts. What isn’t recorded or known is what new jobs and assets might have come to the UK had Brexit not happened. But what is even more to the point is that whilst Brexiters point to damages being less than warned of as vindicating them, it does no such thing. For they claimed Brexit would be positive or, at very worst, not damaging at all.
The ongoing lies and broken promises
It's not only in relation to economics that Brexiters expect the rest of us to forget their promises and lies. When Johnson agreed his revised Withdrawal Agreement with the EU in 2019, the government’s own impact assessment spelt out accurately and in detail its implications, including those of the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). Yet, ever since, Brexiters, including Johnson, have either denied or sought to renege on what was in it.
The Brexit Ultra MPs, in particular, have mounted a concerted campaign against it, with the latest example coming, not for the first time, from Iain Duncan Smith (£). They do not acknowledge, and we are supposed to forget, the fact that they campaigned on the NIP as part of Johnson’s wonderful ‘oven ready deal’ in the 2019 election, and then voted for it in parliament. At the same time, they continue to lie about everything to do with the Protocol and often, as in Smith’s most recent article, to tell the specific lie that it “was only ever meant to be a temporary measure”. That’s categorically false. It can be replaced if there is mutual agreement to do so, but there is no requirement to agree such a replacement and in and of itself it is permanent. That is key to what replacing May’s ‘hated backstop’ with a ‘frontstop’ meant, which Brexiters hailed at the time as a triumph.
Those of them who are in government, such as Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, weave even more complex patterns of lies. This week, he claimed at a Select Committee that the grace periods agreed with the EU for the implementation of some aspects of the Protocol were to allow for a negotiated solution to some of the problems it created (specifically, for movement of chilled meats such as sausages between GB and NI). In fact, it was to give supermarkets time to adjust to the new rules, not to change them. Again that is clear from the government documents at the time, and is a prime example of how the Brexiters try to use abstruse detail to gaslight the public into forgetting what happened and why*. For, whilst less brazen than Smith’s false ‘temporary measure’ claim, it has the same character in suggesting that, at least in this limited aspect, the UK has an established right to change the terms of the Protocol.
It currently remains unclear whether, and if so when and how, the row over the UK’s refusal to accept the terms of what it agreed to will flare up again, and whether that will involve the use of Article 16 as Boris Johnson has so long and so frequently threatened. But if it does then, like the unfolding economic damage, it will be a reminder of how, starting with their original denials about the implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland, everything they have said about the Protocol has been proved false. So whilst they admit – indeed denounce – the consequences of the NIP they continue to deny that they, or indeed Brexit itself, had any part in creating them.
Admission-yet-denial
One of the strangest manifestation of the Brexiter ‘admission-yet-denial’ of what they have done is the pages of the Express, perhaps the most ferociously pro-Brexit of all the papers. Here, it is increasingly common to find articles highlighting the damage of Brexit (for example to trade in general, or to specific issues like post-Brexit flight compensation, mobile roaming charges and, as mentioned above, imported animal disease) yet never with any acknowledgement that this is the result of the policy it advocated. Actually, it sometimes seems to me as if Express journalists are trolling their own readers and editors, so great is the gap between many of its Brexit articles, on the one hand, and the headlines above and reader comments below, on the other.
Be that as it may, there’s a more diffuse sense in which Brexiters seem to be bemoaning consequences whilst remaining silent on causes. This week, for example, Foreign Office Minister James Cleverley (who is also Minister for Europe) announced that “a key part of Putin’s plan was to fragment and divide international groupings like NATO” and decries the ‘useful idiots’ who don’t realise this. Fair enough. Yet he apparently doesn’t realise, and certainly doesn’t acknowledge, that another example of such ‘international groupings’ is the EU, and that the Brexit which he supported was also something Putin wanted and gained from.
Or, to take a different kind of example, Robert Colvile, co-author of the 2019 Tory manifesto, bemoaned the flatlining of the UK economy (£), in an analysis enthusiastically endorsed by Nick Timothy, co-author of the 2017 Tory manifesto. Yet neither man seems to have any sense that the things they endorsed (including though not confined to Brexit, which Colvile only mentions in passing), whether in those manifestos or more generally, might have anything whatsoever to do with Britain’s economic woes.
Undoubtedly the weirdest example is that of the peculiar former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib. Despite having voted for the Withdrawal Agreement, including the NIP, in the European Parliament, he has since been vocal in opposition to the Protocol and is one of the litigants in the case that keeps failing to have it declared illegal. One might wonder how such a level of cognitive dissonance could be sustained and this week there was an answer of sorts, when it emerged that the hapless Habib appears to believe that “we didn’t leave” the EU. Therefore, he argues, he “can’t regret Brexit until we’ve actually got it”.
The grotesque idea of Brexit amnesia
Back to the real world, and to Sunak’s admission, at once unequivocal about the ‘inevitability’ of the damage of Brexit and slippery in accepting the degree of that damage. What’s remarkable about it, apart from being the first a government minister has made, is how shameless it is. This is a Chancellor of the Exchequer talking as if it is some minor matter that he supported a policy that has poleaxed British trade, with no sense of contrition or remorse. It exemplifies the way that Brexiters seem to imagine they can just shrug and move on, and that everyone else should join them.
Such an amnesia is a grotesque idea even in relation to the economic damage of Brexit, and an obscene one for the families whose lives have been ripped up by loss of freedom of movement of people, as the In Limbo project continues to attest. But, almost worse than that, it’s spectacularly naïve. Did they really think that they could punch the nation – leave and remain voters alike - in the face and then walk away grinning? Did they really think that everyone else would just forgive and forget?
In January 2020, with Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement in place and him calling for the nation to unite and get behind the approaching leaving date, I wrote that we would now see a prolonged battle between ‘remembering and forgetting’. Much as Brexiters would like the rest of us to forget what they have done, and forget the promises and lies they made along the way, that battle is still ongoing. It may never be resolved, and there’s certainly no sign of it ending.
*On the subject of abstruse detail, those following the link given will find it refers to a “unilateral” declaration by the UK, and perhaps wonder why I refer to it as an “agreed” grace period. But – unlike subsequent ‘unilateral’ extensions which the EU did not agree and which are the subject of a currently suspended legal action by the EU – the initial grace period in question had the de facto agreement of the EU even though, formally, it was a UK initiative.
Yet even as he accepted this fact, he tried to deny it by arguing that it is too early to separate Brexit from other factors, meaning, presumably, the pandemic. Actually, at least as regards trade in goods, it is possible to more or less separate out the Brexit effect, and the Office for Budgetary Responsibility this week re-affirmed it, identifying that overall UK trade volumes are and will continue to be 15% less as a share of GDP than if Brexit had not happened. That in turn means 4% less GDP growth (twice the damage of Covid), 4% less productivity over 15 years, and higher taxes to fund the NHS and other public services than would have been the case but for Brexit.
There’s nothing new in this. These figures have been around for some time and are actually – despite the myth that has developed about the discrediting of economic forecasts – broadly in line with most of the mainstream long-term modelling, going back to 2016, of what hard Brexit (in the meaning of a Free Trade Agreement, rather than ‘no deal’ or single market membership) would do to trade. What has been discredited is the only forecast of positive gains which came – no surprise – from Patrick Minford’s Economists for Free Trade, formerly known as Economists for Brexit.
However, it is new that a minister has admitted, after years of denial from Brexiters, that Brexit means not just ‘teething problems’ of adjustment but permanently disadvantageous structural change to trade with the EU. Even so, what was missing was any acknowledgement of precisely that longstanding denial. For whilst Sunak himself has never been a very vocal Brexiter, though always a committed one, most of his high-profile colleagues categorically dismissed all suggestions that Brexit would be in any way economically damaging as ‘Project Fear’. Again despite the myth that has developed, Brexit was sold to the electorate as something which would be unequivocally economically beneficial to the country.
That was so not just during the referendum campaign but in the years after, when Theresa May repeatedly promised ‘frictionless trade’, when David Davis said there would be the “exact same benefits” as a member of the single market and customs union, and when Boris Johnson proclaimed that he had achieved a ‘cakeist’ trade deal. None of this is ancient history, and even this week Johnson denied the realities of post-Brexit trade. Yet now we are told, authoritatively if quietly, that damage was “always inevitable” and are apparently expected to forget all that was promised and all that was denied.
Brexit bitterness: a healthy and justified obsession
This matters. Brexit isn’t some passing event. It is a major, ongoing re-set of the entire direction of national strategy, including economic and trade strategy, and the most politically contentious such re-set for at least a generation and, arguably, since the Second World War. Indeed, Brexiters themselves only devoted such energy to it on the basis that it was a fundamental change. In the process, they made promises for which they are accountable and urged a project for which they are responsible.
So it simply won’t wash for them now to complain, as – writing about another aspect of Brexit’s consequences this week – Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley did, that “arch-remainers cannot move on from yesterday’s hurt” and to dismiss concerns about the consequences of Brexit as an “unhealthy obsession”. Nor will it wash, despite the laboured humour of a Lower Sixth Form magazine that Stanley attempts, to deride this supposed obsession by sniggering comparisons with “Morris dancing and incest” and sneering references to “Lord Lucan and the Bermuda Triangle”. The promises Brexiters made are on the record, and can be judged by reference to facts.
And, of course, that’s the reason for the sniggering and sneering. It is a sign of just how comprehensively Brexit has failed. If there were any genuine examples of its success, Brexiters would be delighted to have them discussed. Instead, so bereft of achievements has Brexit been that almost all the successes claimed for it – most notably the early vaccine roll-out – are untrue. Hence there is a mood around, and Stanley actually uses the words, that talking about the failures of Brexit is something that should “be marginalised in polite society”. But this is not some matter of etiquette, in which snooty drawing-room arbiters of taste get to decide what should and shouldn’t be discussed. It is fundamental to any democracy – perhaps to any functioning polity – that the promises made and rationales given for policy are evaluated in the light of what they deliver. Thus to be ‘obsessed’ with this is, in fact, ‘healthy’.
The attempt to dismiss concerns about its consequences as ‘boring’ is as much a part of the dishonesty of Brexit as all the lies told and false promises made to garner voters’ support for it. Tellingly, Brexiters always insist that the time is not right to judge – either because it is too early to know what will happen or, now, as with Sunak, because what has happened as a result of Brexit can’t be disentangled from other things. With claims that it will take up to 100 years (or 47 years as one Brexiter suggested this week) before it can be judged, it’s easy to see that what the Brexiters really want is to avoid any meaningful judgement.
Certainly, more than most, the present government habitually operates on the basis that people should simply ignore any scandals, promises or events – for example the handling of the pandemic, Partygate, or just the endless reviews and inquiries it instigates – dismissing them as old news from the past or punting them into the future. Hence the present is never the moment to be accountable, preventing any accountability at all. This general approach also applies to the government’s handling of Brexit.
However, just because that is what Brexiters and the Brexit government want it does not follow that they will get it. A remarkable feature of Brexit – indicative of both its scale and its folly – is how, despite the relatively little voice they have been given by MPs, erstwhile remainers have not been willing to forget or to be bullied into keeping quiet. Yes, some may have lost interest or become resigned, but many remain galvanized and vocal. That may indeed be a matter of bitterness, for there is much to be bitter about and no shame attaches to that except for those who provoked it. As such, it is likely to be exacerbated if, as Gerhard Schnyder discusses, the Tories seek to frame the next election in terms of its delivery of Brexit (if they do, it will be a risky strategy). At all events, it seems highly unlikely that David Frost’s test for the success of Brexit – that in 10 years’ time, meaning 2031, no one will be questioning Brexit as it was self-evidently the right thing to do – will be met.
The ongoing failures of Brexit
That will not be due to the failure of those who are against Brexit to ‘let go’, it will be because Brexit will continue to fail to deliver its promises. So far as the economics is concerned, the bad news that Sunak has now admitted to is still only the first instalment of the damage. It relates primarily to goods trade, and even on that there is worse to come if full UK import controls get introduced during the course of the year. However, this week there have been reports that yet another delay, the fourth, is in prospect (£), as once again the government finds that Brexit works best when not implemented.
The reason is both lack of preparedness of business supply chains and concerns about the impact on, especially, food prices and availability. In and of itself that makes it sensible to delay – given the baleful effects that even those controls so far introduced are having - but it is also another failure of the Brexit project. More accurately, it is two failures: the introduction of checks shows the damage of Brexit, whilst the failure to do so on time shows inept planning as well as the unnecessarily rushed transition period.
Yet, in ways similar to Sunak, this at least tacit admission of failure is accompanied by a denial, with Jacob Rees-Mogg reported to be pushing the idea that looser import controls are actually an advantage of Brexit. This isn’t a surprise, as he had already hinted at it in an interview last month (£). The same belief is held by David Frost, the architect of the trade agreement, who tweeted this week that not only would a delay be welcome news but that it would be better simply to eschew full controls on a permanent basis.
Rees-Mogg and Frost apparently don’t realise, or care, that this would build in a structural asymmetry whereby British firms exporting to the EU face higher barriers than EU firms exporting to Great Britain. Or to care about the potential scandals, with animal diseases the most likely example, especially if and when British and EU regulatory standards diverge. But, of course, it is just a smokescreen: if what they are now saying was really a good idea, then why were full import controls ever even envisaged? Or, to put it another way, it is a tacit admission of the unworkability of what Frost negotiated – and what Johnson, Rees-Mogg et al. signed up to. But apparently we’re meant to forget that happened.
Then there is services trade, where only now that the pandemic restrictions are easing are we beginning to see more of the implications for the many kinds of services which entail international travel. As with goods trade, it is smaller firms which are being worst affected (£). But, again as with goods, the fact that larger firms may cope doesn’t mean that they don’t incur increased costs, which then impact on competitiveness, prices, taxes paid, or investments foregone. And, trade aside, services industries, especially hospitality, continue to suffer domestically from lack of staff. As with trade, both Covid and Brexit are issues but, as one restaurant chain owner pungently expressed it, “Covid is one thing … with Brexit I am completely screwed”.
Financial services is perhaps the most significant of the UK’s service industries, and this week it was reported that the Brexit-related loss of jobs has so far been less than most predictions, at just over 7,000. Whilst this is a lot less than some predictions at the time of Brexit, it is not actually that much less than the highest estimate of 12,500 jobs made by, specifically, EY (the source of the 7,000 figure), which may well end up being about right. The same report shows relocations of assets from the City to have flattened at about £1.3 trillion – a colossal sum, but, again, less than some forecasts. What isn’t recorded or known is what new jobs and assets might have come to the UK had Brexit not happened. But what is even more to the point is that whilst Brexiters point to damages being less than warned of as vindicating them, it does no such thing. For they claimed Brexit would be positive or, at very worst, not damaging at all.
The ongoing lies and broken promises
It's not only in relation to economics that Brexiters expect the rest of us to forget their promises and lies. When Johnson agreed his revised Withdrawal Agreement with the EU in 2019, the government’s own impact assessment spelt out accurately and in detail its implications, including those of the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). Yet, ever since, Brexiters, including Johnson, have either denied or sought to renege on what was in it.
The Brexit Ultra MPs, in particular, have mounted a concerted campaign against it, with the latest example coming, not for the first time, from Iain Duncan Smith (£). They do not acknowledge, and we are supposed to forget, the fact that they campaigned on the NIP as part of Johnson’s wonderful ‘oven ready deal’ in the 2019 election, and then voted for it in parliament. At the same time, they continue to lie about everything to do with the Protocol and often, as in Smith’s most recent article, to tell the specific lie that it “was only ever meant to be a temporary measure”. That’s categorically false. It can be replaced if there is mutual agreement to do so, but there is no requirement to agree such a replacement and in and of itself it is permanent. That is key to what replacing May’s ‘hated backstop’ with a ‘frontstop’ meant, which Brexiters hailed at the time as a triumph.
Those of them who are in government, such as Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, weave even more complex patterns of lies. This week, he claimed at a Select Committee that the grace periods agreed with the EU for the implementation of some aspects of the Protocol were to allow for a negotiated solution to some of the problems it created (specifically, for movement of chilled meats such as sausages between GB and NI). In fact, it was to give supermarkets time to adjust to the new rules, not to change them. Again that is clear from the government documents at the time, and is a prime example of how the Brexiters try to use abstruse detail to gaslight the public into forgetting what happened and why*. For, whilst less brazen than Smith’s false ‘temporary measure’ claim, it has the same character in suggesting that, at least in this limited aspect, the UK has an established right to change the terms of the Protocol.
It currently remains unclear whether, and if so when and how, the row over the UK’s refusal to accept the terms of what it agreed to will flare up again, and whether that will involve the use of Article 16 as Boris Johnson has so long and so frequently threatened. But if it does then, like the unfolding economic damage, it will be a reminder of how, starting with their original denials about the implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland, everything they have said about the Protocol has been proved false. So whilst they admit – indeed denounce – the consequences of the NIP they continue to deny that they, or indeed Brexit itself, had any part in creating them.
Admission-yet-denial
One of the strangest manifestation of the Brexiter ‘admission-yet-denial’ of what they have done is the pages of the Express, perhaps the most ferociously pro-Brexit of all the papers. Here, it is increasingly common to find articles highlighting the damage of Brexit (for example to trade in general, or to specific issues like post-Brexit flight compensation, mobile roaming charges and, as mentioned above, imported animal disease) yet never with any acknowledgement that this is the result of the policy it advocated. Actually, it sometimes seems to me as if Express journalists are trolling their own readers and editors, so great is the gap between many of its Brexit articles, on the one hand, and the headlines above and reader comments below, on the other.
Be that as it may, there’s a more diffuse sense in which Brexiters seem to be bemoaning consequences whilst remaining silent on causes. This week, for example, Foreign Office Minister James Cleverley (who is also Minister for Europe) announced that “a key part of Putin’s plan was to fragment and divide international groupings like NATO” and decries the ‘useful idiots’ who don’t realise this. Fair enough. Yet he apparently doesn’t realise, and certainly doesn’t acknowledge, that another example of such ‘international groupings’ is the EU, and that the Brexit which he supported was also something Putin wanted and gained from.
Or, to take a different kind of example, Robert Colvile, co-author of the 2019 Tory manifesto, bemoaned the flatlining of the UK economy (£), in an analysis enthusiastically endorsed by Nick Timothy, co-author of the 2017 Tory manifesto. Yet neither man seems to have any sense that the things they endorsed (including though not confined to Brexit, which Colvile only mentions in passing), whether in those manifestos or more generally, might have anything whatsoever to do with Britain’s economic woes.
Undoubtedly the weirdest example is that of the peculiar former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib. Despite having voted for the Withdrawal Agreement, including the NIP, in the European Parliament, he has since been vocal in opposition to the Protocol and is one of the litigants in the case that keeps failing to have it declared illegal. One might wonder how such a level of cognitive dissonance could be sustained and this week there was an answer of sorts, when it emerged that the hapless Habib appears to believe that “we didn’t leave” the EU. Therefore, he argues, he “can’t regret Brexit until we’ve actually got it”.
The grotesque idea of Brexit amnesia
Back to the real world, and to Sunak’s admission, at once unequivocal about the ‘inevitability’ of the damage of Brexit and slippery in accepting the degree of that damage. What’s remarkable about it, apart from being the first a government minister has made, is how shameless it is. This is a Chancellor of the Exchequer talking as if it is some minor matter that he supported a policy that has poleaxed British trade, with no sense of contrition or remorse. It exemplifies the way that Brexiters seem to imagine they can just shrug and move on, and that everyone else should join them.
Such an amnesia is a grotesque idea even in relation to the economic damage of Brexit, and an obscene one for the families whose lives have been ripped up by loss of freedom of movement of people, as the In Limbo project continues to attest. But, almost worse than that, it’s spectacularly naïve. Did they really think that they could punch the nation – leave and remain voters alike - in the face and then walk away grinning? Did they really think that everyone else would just forgive and forget?
In January 2020, with Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement in place and him calling for the nation to unite and get behind the approaching leaving date, I wrote that we would now see a prolonged battle between ‘remembering and forgetting’. Much as Brexiters would like the rest of us to forget what they have done, and forget the promises and lies they made along the way, that battle is still ongoing. It may never be resolved, and there’s certainly no sign of it ending.
*On the subject of abstruse detail, those following the link given will find it refers to a “unilateral” declaration by the UK, and perhaps wonder why I refer to it as an “agreed” grace period. But – unlike subsequent ‘unilateral’ extensions which the EU did not agree and which are the subject of a currently suspended legal action by the EU – the initial grace period in question had the de facto agreement of the EU even though, formally, it was a UK initiative.
Friday, 10 December 2021
Not my Brexit
The evidence that Brexit is causing mounting damage has been growing since the transition period ended, and has been catalogued in almost every post on this blog since then. It is also to be found on Professor Gerhard Schnyder’s Brexit Impact Tracker, Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downsides Dossier, the now closed ‘Keleman Archive’ of 1000 examples, the Brexit database, and a newish substack blog I have only just come across, Nick Tyrone’s This Week in Brexitland. The latest dollop of evidence comes with an excellent new report on the impact of Brexit on services industries by Professor Sarah Hall and Matt Heneghan for the UK in a Changing Europe centre.
That damage isn’t just economic. Those who believed promises of a boost for Britain’s global stature have been rewarded with at best international bemusement and at worst a country deemed untrustworthy and liable to break international law and treaty obligations. Those expecting a revivified national democracy have instead seen an illegal prorogation of parliament and a spectacular and ongoing power grab by the Executive.
Yet, for reasons ranging from the Trappist vows both Tory and Labour politicians seem to have taken, through to media and public pre-occupation with Covid, relatively little is heard of this Brexit damage (though, just this morning, the Express seems to be catching on). Those politicians, journalists, and academic or other experts who do speak of it are ignored or traduced by Brexiters as ‘remoaners’. Brexiters themselves, perhaps unsurprisingly, are reticent to discuss what is happening and when they do the guiding theme is to evade responsibility for it. Astonishingly, the government itself, according to leaked documents, has no measure of whether Brexit has been a success or failure. For some, Brexit was simply ‘the right thing to do’ so the consequences are irrelevant. Others ignore or deny the evidence of Brexit damage. Still others just disown it on the basis that ‘this is not my Brexit’.
Businesses suffer in silence
Amongst those we might expect to be making a noise and to be heard are businesses. It is they that are bearing the brunt of the economic damage, especially those which trade with the EU. A new report this week showed that cross-Channel delays are actually worsening, and there is a lot more pain coming in just three weeks’ time when the UK begins to introduce full import controls. As with all the new trade barriers, it is small firms which will struggle to cope the most and a recent Federation of Small Businesses survey suggests that only a quarter of such firms that import from the EU are ready for what they will face. Beyond trade, almost all business sectors are suffering from labour and supply shortages.
If we hear relatively little public clamour from businesses, and where we do it is more likely to be from representative bodies rather individual companies, it is for good reason. The story of Brexit and business is a complicated one, well told by Iain Anderson, Chairman of Cicero Group, and also discussed in a Mile End Institute podcast featuring Nicole Sykes (then Head of EU negotiations for the CBI), me, and Professor Tim Bale of Queen Mary, University of London. In brief, businesses have been reluctant to speak out for fear of attracting government reprisals in one form or another, and of alienating leave voting customers.
Meanwhile Brexiters have never forgiven the fact that most businesses and their representative bodies opposed, albeit not very vociferously, Brexit before the referendum, and often warned against hard Brexit and no-deal Brexit in the years thereafter. One consequence is that throughout the Brexit process businesses have tended to be excluded from government consultation unless very clearly pro-Brexit, reflecting the cult-like approach to Brexit taken by both the May and Johnson administrations. Even now, anything they say is likely to be dismissed as remainer ‘negativity’ or ‘fearmongering’ as happened over warnings about HGV driver shortages and fuel supplies. On that occasion, an anonymous “senior government source” also ominously threatened the Road Haulage Association that “we will deal with them when this is over”.
To the extent business is able to influence government Brexit policy it is very much behind the scenes, as seems to have happened in relation to this week’s news that the UK is likely to postpone introducing its independent chemicals industry regulatory system. It follows previous postponement of things like the UKCA quality mark after intensive lobbying from the manufacturing sector. Backtracking on such things is welcome, and it could even be a prelude to abandonment, but neither is cost-free. The problem is the disruption and uncertainty, as well as the lobbying effort, engendered by the original rushed timescales and the ideological symbolism of creating meaningless independence. In a similar way, a National Audit Office report this week suggested that in rushing to make trade deals the government is neglectful of consulting businesses and consumer groups and, hence, of their substantive needs.
Pro-Brexit business voices
Overall, it seems fair to say that whilst businesses may be resigned to the reality of Brexit, they continue to be critical of the way it is being done. It is certainly not ‘their Brexit’, and whilst the state is on some accounts supposed to be the executive committee of the bourgeoisie that doesn’t seem to apply to Johnson’s ‘f*** business’ Brexit regime.
But what of those business leaders who were pro-Brexit? One difficulty here is that, compared with politicians, journalists, academics and media commentators, the numbers involved are quite small. Repeated attempts to construct pro-Brexit business umbrella groups, the most sustained being the Alliance of British Entrepreneurs (ABE), have made little headway. It is hard to know who such groups speak for anyway – the ABE, for example, “does not offer formal membership”, and what little is known about it is, to say the least, underwhelming.
At all events, both before and since the referendum, whenever a pro-leave business person appeared in the media you could list on virtually the fingers of one hand which of the white, middle-aged and mainly titled men heroically taking on ‘the establishment’ it would most likely be. Tim Martin (66), Sir James Dyson (74) Lord (Anthony) Bamford (76), Lord (Simon) Wolfson (54), Sir Jim Ratcliffe (69) and Sir Rocco Forte (76) just about covered the main possibilities.
So far as I know neither Sir James nor Sir Anthony – both of whom have had extensive legal disputes with the EU (£) - have ever suggested that Brexit has had any downsides. In fact Dyson this week re-iterated (£) his opposition to the EU’s approach to regulation (though since in the example he uses, his own legal case, he won and the regulation was dropped, it isn’t a strong argument for Brexit unless he believes that British regulations are infallible). To the extent that he worries that the UK may continue to align with many EU regulations, which it probably will, it’s at least possible that he will come to think it was ‘not his Brexit’. As for Sir Jim, he too hasn’t recanted, although his decisions in 2020 to shift production of the Ineos Grenadier from Wales to France and his own tax domicile from the UK to Monaco were perhaps not exactly ringing endorsements for Brexit Britain.
Amongst the other high-profile figures, their most obvious criticism has been over the consequences of ending freedom of movement of people. Tim Martin of Wetherspoons spoke in June of the need to liberalise the immigration system, with special treatment for “countries geographically closer to the UK”. Lord Wolfson, CEO of Next, has also repeatedly called for more open immigration, especially given the labour and supply shortages which have emerged this year.
They were joined last weekend (£) by Sir Rocco, Chair of Rocco Forte Hotels, who also wants a relaxation of immigration controls which are too restrictive for his, and many other, businesses which face the fact that “it is obvious that there is no ready supply of labour available in the UK to fill vacancies”. Forte has the grace to note that “I am sure that some will say I should have been careful what I wished for in supporting Brexit. I would respond that the only issue determined in the referendum result was that the UK should decide its own immigration system. As a Brexit supporter, I wanted proper control over our borders, not their virtual closure”. It’s not his Brexit, it seems.
Yet this does not go so far as to take responsibility for the fact that he used his authority as a business leader to decry those warning of precisely what he is now bemoaning. For example, writing in the Daily Mail in July 2018, he said “concerns voiced by the big business lobby are little more than scaremongering, like the claim that any restriction on European freedom of movement will badly hurt recruitment by British firms. This is untrue. My family's hotel chain hired staff from all over the world, including Europe, long before the EU was even created. We will continue to do so after Brexit, especially because so many young people from Europe want to come here to learn English. Contrary to the hollow warnings from the pro-EU campaigners, migration controls will not mean an end to European migration.”
Wolfson, too, argues that Brexit only meant the UK setting its own immigration policy, rather than being anti-immigration per se. Yet before the referendum, when it would have counted more, his formulation that we must “place our trust in the collective intelligence and endeavour of Britain’s 30 million-strong workforce” did not, at the least, do anything to challenge the centrality being put upon immigration control during the campaign.
In fact, as I noted in my previous post, Brexiters on the free-market right were not, in general, especially bothered about immigration. But they chose to ‘ride the tiger’ of a project which had as one of its central selling points, if not the central point, profoundly anti-immigration sentiment. Within that same central narrative, softness on immigration, and opposition to Brexit, was associated with the self-interest of the “big business lobby” referenced by Forte. Moreover, in the post-referendum drive towards hard Brexit, it is undoubtedly the case that continuing freedom of movement was critical to the argument that soft Brexit would not honour the referendum result. Yet, far from questioning hard Brexit, both Forte and Martin made the case for an even harder ‘no-deal Brexit’, whilst Wolfson suggested that no-deal would cause only “mild disruption”.
The consequence of how Brexit was sold and then executed, whatever they may have wanted or expected, was to make it virtually impossible for the post-Brexit immigration regime to be a liberal one and, certainly, this government isn’t going to deliver it. So, in the absence of any suggestion that they now recognize they made a mistake in championing Brexit, the position of Forte, Wolfson and Martin would appear to be that of ‘this isn’t my Brexit’. It is a position shared by many of those, such as former Brexit Party MEP June Mummery, who regard what has been delivered by Brexit as a betrayal of the fishing industry. Indeed, following the complaint of one enthusiastic leaver about the airport queues he now experiences, “this isn’t the Brexit I voted for” has become shorthand to denote those who, whilst still supporting Brexit, rue some of its consequences.
Johnson and Frost: it’s not our Brexit, either
That some of the most committed Brexiters would regard what got delivered as, at best, unsatisfactory and, at worst, as betrayal was baked into Brexit from the beginning, of course, because what it would mean was never specified. So it’s not a surprise that they are now saying that it isn’t their Brexit or (which is slightly different, as it also suggests that their Brexit was real Brexit) that Brexit hasn’t been done properly.
What is far more surprising, not to say downright grotesque, is the fact that Boris Johnson and David Frost, whose Brexit it actually is, also consider that Brexit hasn’t been done properly, at least as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol. And they, too, suggest it is not their Brexit but, rather, the one forced on them by remainer MPs in 2019 and by the EU taking advantage of their temporary weakness (the golden rule for understanding Brexiters is that they are never responsible and are always the victims).
That has been their repeated complaint for months now, and it looks very much as if their attempts to negotiate a different Brexit to the one they agreed, signed and said was a triumph will now drag into the New Year. That may still bring a triggering of Article 16, although the fact that it has not yet been used, whereas in the summer the implication from Frost was that it would happen very quickly if UK demands weren’t met, suggests a degree of caution on the part of, presumably, Johnson. That may be as a result of the clear messages from the EU that it would make a robust response and/or because of US pressure, including the delayed removal of steel and aluminium tariffs. If that caution holds, and Article 16 isn’t used, we can expect years of being told that, yet again, the Brexiters didn’t get the Brexit they wanted because of EU bullying and US meddling.
History will judge?
This idea that Brexit hasn’t been ‘tried properly’ resembles, as I and many others have frequently remarked, the claims of some apologists for communism. It’s a slippery argument but at least has the merit of acknowledging that things haven’t gone as promised. But, again like some apologists for communism, they have a different trick in their book which is to say that it cannot be evaluated on present appearances or achievements but only in the (very) long-run. Be patient, comrades, our great cause will be proved right by the onward march of history.
It’s a trick that has already been deployed by Jacob Rees-Mogg, who suggested it might be 50 years until the success or otherwise of Brexit is known. Lord (Digby) Jones, the buffoonish former head of the CBI who declared that “there’s not going to be any economic pain” from Brexit, subsequently suggested a timeframe of 100 years for judgment. This week it has surfaced again in an article on the Conservative Home website by Ryan Bourne of the CATO Institute (formerly Head of Policy at the Institute for Economic Affairs and, apparently, though all information about the group’s membership seems to have disappeared, at one time part of Patrick Minford’s Economists for Brexit).
Bourne argues that it is premature to gauge the economic effects of Brexit, and also wrong to conflate Brexit with whatever the Johnson government does or does not do, because the real issue is the possibility that British institutions will prove more economically liberal and more likely to create permissive regulatory regimes than those of the EU. Bourne believes this will be so, but suggests that whether it proves to be the case will only be known in the long-term, which he implies to mean something like 30 years.
Needless to say, this is sophistry of the highest order, arising solely because it has become impossible for any half-way serious person to argue that Brexit has been an economic success so far, or even that such success is imminent. So, conveniently, we are told to defer giving our verdict for a few decades. But Brexit was never proposed to the British people as something which might, perhaps, in many decades be a success but then again might not. Had it been, far fewer people would have voted for it than did – almost certainly too few to have won the referendum. Moreover, if Brexiters had really been serious about the long-term nature of their project, they would not have pushed so recklessly to ‘get it done’, treating all extensions, whether to the Article 50 process or the Transition Period, as treachery rather than careful preparation for an epochal change.
Avoiding accountability
It may be that in 30, 50 or 100 years there will be a consensus view but, in the absence of some decisive ‘Berlin Wall’ moment, it’s equally likely that Brexit will continue to be contested. Indeed we can already see how Brexiters have created the conditions for never having their project judged at all.
For when forecasts are made of Brexit damage, they invariably dismiss them as ‘just predictions, no one can know for sure what will happen’. But as soon as there is actual data about Brexit damage they say ‘ah, but this cannot be proved to be the result of Brexit’ - most notably, so far, because of the pandemic, but 30 years on there will be any number of other reasons to give, and it will get ever-harder to disentangle Brexit from them. Meanwhile, any time that anything good happens to the UK, or on any occasion that the EU experiences difficulties, they will say that this ‘proves’ it was right to leave.
In this way Brexiters protect themselves in a hermetically sealed bubble where both prospective and retrospective scrutiny is ruled out. It will always be either too early to say or too late to know. It is this which is the real significance of the ‘history will judge’ test. For Brexiters, it at worst defers and at best avoids accountability for what they have done. If nothing else it ensures that those who advocated Brexit will be so old, and so distant from having had any power or influence, as to be totally unaccountable for what they promised and what they did.
Take the high-profile pro-Brexit business leaders mentioned above: in 30 years’ time the youngest of them will be 84 and the oldest 106. Amongst the political leaders, Johnson and Farage will both be 87 whilst veteran Eurosceptic Bill Cash will be 111 years old. If we apply the Digby Jones time frame of 100 years, they will all be long dead. And if, by chance, some of the more youthful Brexiters are still around, or some miracle – or horror-film nightmare - of cryogenic storage preserves, say, Jacob Rees-Mogg to face the music, well, they will always have the first and last-ditch evasion of responsibility available. Yes, they may conceivably admit, it was all a ghastly mistake, but only because what was done was ‘not my Brexit’.
I will be taking a break from blogging for the rest of the year. My review of Brexit since the end of the Transition Period will be published in the December print edition of Byline Times. And if you haven’t read it, or are stuck for a Christmas present, you could always buy my book Brexit Unfolded. How none got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) published by Biteback earlier this year and available from all good booksellers.
That damage isn’t just economic. Those who believed promises of a boost for Britain’s global stature have been rewarded with at best international bemusement and at worst a country deemed untrustworthy and liable to break international law and treaty obligations. Those expecting a revivified national democracy have instead seen an illegal prorogation of parliament and a spectacular and ongoing power grab by the Executive.
Yet, for reasons ranging from the Trappist vows both Tory and Labour politicians seem to have taken, through to media and public pre-occupation with Covid, relatively little is heard of this Brexit damage (though, just this morning, the Express seems to be catching on). Those politicians, journalists, and academic or other experts who do speak of it are ignored or traduced by Brexiters as ‘remoaners’. Brexiters themselves, perhaps unsurprisingly, are reticent to discuss what is happening and when they do the guiding theme is to evade responsibility for it. Astonishingly, the government itself, according to leaked documents, has no measure of whether Brexit has been a success or failure. For some, Brexit was simply ‘the right thing to do’ so the consequences are irrelevant. Others ignore or deny the evidence of Brexit damage. Still others just disown it on the basis that ‘this is not my Brexit’.
Businesses suffer in silence
Amongst those we might expect to be making a noise and to be heard are businesses. It is they that are bearing the brunt of the economic damage, especially those which trade with the EU. A new report this week showed that cross-Channel delays are actually worsening, and there is a lot more pain coming in just three weeks’ time when the UK begins to introduce full import controls. As with all the new trade barriers, it is small firms which will struggle to cope the most and a recent Federation of Small Businesses survey suggests that only a quarter of such firms that import from the EU are ready for what they will face. Beyond trade, almost all business sectors are suffering from labour and supply shortages.
If we hear relatively little public clamour from businesses, and where we do it is more likely to be from representative bodies rather individual companies, it is for good reason. The story of Brexit and business is a complicated one, well told by Iain Anderson, Chairman of Cicero Group, and also discussed in a Mile End Institute podcast featuring Nicole Sykes (then Head of EU negotiations for the CBI), me, and Professor Tim Bale of Queen Mary, University of London. In brief, businesses have been reluctant to speak out for fear of attracting government reprisals in one form or another, and of alienating leave voting customers.
Meanwhile Brexiters have never forgiven the fact that most businesses and their representative bodies opposed, albeit not very vociferously, Brexit before the referendum, and often warned against hard Brexit and no-deal Brexit in the years thereafter. One consequence is that throughout the Brexit process businesses have tended to be excluded from government consultation unless very clearly pro-Brexit, reflecting the cult-like approach to Brexit taken by both the May and Johnson administrations. Even now, anything they say is likely to be dismissed as remainer ‘negativity’ or ‘fearmongering’ as happened over warnings about HGV driver shortages and fuel supplies. On that occasion, an anonymous “senior government source” also ominously threatened the Road Haulage Association that “we will deal with them when this is over”.
To the extent business is able to influence government Brexit policy it is very much behind the scenes, as seems to have happened in relation to this week’s news that the UK is likely to postpone introducing its independent chemicals industry regulatory system. It follows previous postponement of things like the UKCA quality mark after intensive lobbying from the manufacturing sector. Backtracking on such things is welcome, and it could even be a prelude to abandonment, but neither is cost-free. The problem is the disruption and uncertainty, as well as the lobbying effort, engendered by the original rushed timescales and the ideological symbolism of creating meaningless independence. In a similar way, a National Audit Office report this week suggested that in rushing to make trade deals the government is neglectful of consulting businesses and consumer groups and, hence, of their substantive needs.
Pro-Brexit business voices
Overall, it seems fair to say that whilst businesses may be resigned to the reality of Brexit, they continue to be critical of the way it is being done. It is certainly not ‘their Brexit’, and whilst the state is on some accounts supposed to be the executive committee of the bourgeoisie that doesn’t seem to apply to Johnson’s ‘f*** business’ Brexit regime.
But what of those business leaders who were pro-Brexit? One difficulty here is that, compared with politicians, journalists, academics and media commentators, the numbers involved are quite small. Repeated attempts to construct pro-Brexit business umbrella groups, the most sustained being the Alliance of British Entrepreneurs (ABE), have made little headway. It is hard to know who such groups speak for anyway – the ABE, for example, “does not offer formal membership”, and what little is known about it is, to say the least, underwhelming.
At all events, both before and since the referendum, whenever a pro-leave business person appeared in the media you could list on virtually the fingers of one hand which of the white, middle-aged and mainly titled men heroically taking on ‘the establishment’ it would most likely be. Tim Martin (66), Sir James Dyson (74) Lord (Anthony) Bamford (76), Lord (Simon) Wolfson (54), Sir Jim Ratcliffe (69) and Sir Rocco Forte (76) just about covered the main possibilities.
So far as I know neither Sir James nor Sir Anthony – both of whom have had extensive legal disputes with the EU (£) - have ever suggested that Brexit has had any downsides. In fact Dyson this week re-iterated (£) his opposition to the EU’s approach to regulation (though since in the example he uses, his own legal case, he won and the regulation was dropped, it isn’t a strong argument for Brexit unless he believes that British regulations are infallible). To the extent that he worries that the UK may continue to align with many EU regulations, which it probably will, it’s at least possible that he will come to think it was ‘not his Brexit’. As for Sir Jim, he too hasn’t recanted, although his decisions in 2020 to shift production of the Ineos Grenadier from Wales to France and his own tax domicile from the UK to Monaco were perhaps not exactly ringing endorsements for Brexit Britain.
Amongst the other high-profile figures, their most obvious criticism has been over the consequences of ending freedom of movement of people. Tim Martin of Wetherspoons spoke in June of the need to liberalise the immigration system, with special treatment for “countries geographically closer to the UK”. Lord Wolfson, CEO of Next, has also repeatedly called for more open immigration, especially given the labour and supply shortages which have emerged this year.
They were joined last weekend (£) by Sir Rocco, Chair of Rocco Forte Hotels, who also wants a relaxation of immigration controls which are too restrictive for his, and many other, businesses which face the fact that “it is obvious that there is no ready supply of labour available in the UK to fill vacancies”. Forte has the grace to note that “I am sure that some will say I should have been careful what I wished for in supporting Brexit. I would respond that the only issue determined in the referendum result was that the UK should decide its own immigration system. As a Brexit supporter, I wanted proper control over our borders, not their virtual closure”. It’s not his Brexit, it seems.
Yet this does not go so far as to take responsibility for the fact that he used his authority as a business leader to decry those warning of precisely what he is now bemoaning. For example, writing in the Daily Mail in July 2018, he said “concerns voiced by the big business lobby are little more than scaremongering, like the claim that any restriction on European freedom of movement will badly hurt recruitment by British firms. This is untrue. My family's hotel chain hired staff from all over the world, including Europe, long before the EU was even created. We will continue to do so after Brexit, especially because so many young people from Europe want to come here to learn English. Contrary to the hollow warnings from the pro-EU campaigners, migration controls will not mean an end to European migration.”
Wolfson, too, argues that Brexit only meant the UK setting its own immigration policy, rather than being anti-immigration per se. Yet before the referendum, when it would have counted more, his formulation that we must “place our trust in the collective intelligence and endeavour of Britain’s 30 million-strong workforce” did not, at the least, do anything to challenge the centrality being put upon immigration control during the campaign.
In fact, as I noted in my previous post, Brexiters on the free-market right were not, in general, especially bothered about immigration. But they chose to ‘ride the tiger’ of a project which had as one of its central selling points, if not the central point, profoundly anti-immigration sentiment. Within that same central narrative, softness on immigration, and opposition to Brexit, was associated with the self-interest of the “big business lobby” referenced by Forte. Moreover, in the post-referendum drive towards hard Brexit, it is undoubtedly the case that continuing freedom of movement was critical to the argument that soft Brexit would not honour the referendum result. Yet, far from questioning hard Brexit, both Forte and Martin made the case for an even harder ‘no-deal Brexit’, whilst Wolfson suggested that no-deal would cause only “mild disruption”.
The consequence of how Brexit was sold and then executed, whatever they may have wanted or expected, was to make it virtually impossible for the post-Brexit immigration regime to be a liberal one and, certainly, this government isn’t going to deliver it. So, in the absence of any suggestion that they now recognize they made a mistake in championing Brexit, the position of Forte, Wolfson and Martin would appear to be that of ‘this isn’t my Brexit’. It is a position shared by many of those, such as former Brexit Party MEP June Mummery, who regard what has been delivered by Brexit as a betrayal of the fishing industry. Indeed, following the complaint of one enthusiastic leaver about the airport queues he now experiences, “this isn’t the Brexit I voted for” has become shorthand to denote those who, whilst still supporting Brexit, rue some of its consequences.
Johnson and Frost: it’s not our Brexit, either
That some of the most committed Brexiters would regard what got delivered as, at best, unsatisfactory and, at worst, as betrayal was baked into Brexit from the beginning, of course, because what it would mean was never specified. So it’s not a surprise that they are now saying that it isn’t their Brexit or (which is slightly different, as it also suggests that their Brexit was real Brexit) that Brexit hasn’t been done properly.
What is far more surprising, not to say downright grotesque, is the fact that Boris Johnson and David Frost, whose Brexit it actually is, also consider that Brexit hasn’t been done properly, at least as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol. And they, too, suggest it is not their Brexit but, rather, the one forced on them by remainer MPs in 2019 and by the EU taking advantage of their temporary weakness (the golden rule for understanding Brexiters is that they are never responsible and are always the victims).
That has been their repeated complaint for months now, and it looks very much as if their attempts to negotiate a different Brexit to the one they agreed, signed and said was a triumph will now drag into the New Year. That may still bring a triggering of Article 16, although the fact that it has not yet been used, whereas in the summer the implication from Frost was that it would happen very quickly if UK demands weren’t met, suggests a degree of caution on the part of, presumably, Johnson. That may be as a result of the clear messages from the EU that it would make a robust response and/or because of US pressure, including the delayed removal of steel and aluminium tariffs. If that caution holds, and Article 16 isn’t used, we can expect years of being told that, yet again, the Brexiters didn’t get the Brexit they wanted because of EU bullying and US meddling.
History will judge?
This idea that Brexit hasn’t been ‘tried properly’ resembles, as I and many others have frequently remarked, the claims of some apologists for communism. It’s a slippery argument but at least has the merit of acknowledging that things haven’t gone as promised. But, again like some apologists for communism, they have a different trick in their book which is to say that it cannot be evaluated on present appearances or achievements but only in the (very) long-run. Be patient, comrades, our great cause will be proved right by the onward march of history.
It’s a trick that has already been deployed by Jacob Rees-Mogg, who suggested it might be 50 years until the success or otherwise of Brexit is known. Lord (Digby) Jones, the buffoonish former head of the CBI who declared that “there’s not going to be any economic pain” from Brexit, subsequently suggested a timeframe of 100 years for judgment. This week it has surfaced again in an article on the Conservative Home website by Ryan Bourne of the CATO Institute (formerly Head of Policy at the Institute for Economic Affairs and, apparently, though all information about the group’s membership seems to have disappeared, at one time part of Patrick Minford’s Economists for Brexit).
Bourne argues that it is premature to gauge the economic effects of Brexit, and also wrong to conflate Brexit with whatever the Johnson government does or does not do, because the real issue is the possibility that British institutions will prove more economically liberal and more likely to create permissive regulatory regimes than those of the EU. Bourne believes this will be so, but suggests that whether it proves to be the case will only be known in the long-term, which he implies to mean something like 30 years.
Needless to say, this is sophistry of the highest order, arising solely because it has become impossible for any half-way serious person to argue that Brexit has been an economic success so far, or even that such success is imminent. So, conveniently, we are told to defer giving our verdict for a few decades. But Brexit was never proposed to the British people as something which might, perhaps, in many decades be a success but then again might not. Had it been, far fewer people would have voted for it than did – almost certainly too few to have won the referendum. Moreover, if Brexiters had really been serious about the long-term nature of their project, they would not have pushed so recklessly to ‘get it done’, treating all extensions, whether to the Article 50 process or the Transition Period, as treachery rather than careful preparation for an epochal change.
Avoiding accountability
It may be that in 30, 50 or 100 years there will be a consensus view but, in the absence of some decisive ‘Berlin Wall’ moment, it’s equally likely that Brexit will continue to be contested. Indeed we can already see how Brexiters have created the conditions for never having their project judged at all.
For when forecasts are made of Brexit damage, they invariably dismiss them as ‘just predictions, no one can know for sure what will happen’. But as soon as there is actual data about Brexit damage they say ‘ah, but this cannot be proved to be the result of Brexit’ - most notably, so far, because of the pandemic, but 30 years on there will be any number of other reasons to give, and it will get ever-harder to disentangle Brexit from them. Meanwhile, any time that anything good happens to the UK, or on any occasion that the EU experiences difficulties, they will say that this ‘proves’ it was right to leave.
In this way Brexiters protect themselves in a hermetically sealed bubble where both prospective and retrospective scrutiny is ruled out. It will always be either too early to say or too late to know. It is this which is the real significance of the ‘history will judge’ test. For Brexiters, it at worst defers and at best avoids accountability for what they have done. If nothing else it ensures that those who advocated Brexit will be so old, and so distant from having had any power or influence, as to be totally unaccountable for what they promised and what they did.
Take the high-profile pro-Brexit business leaders mentioned above: in 30 years’ time the youngest of them will be 84 and the oldest 106. Amongst the political leaders, Johnson and Farage will both be 87 whilst veteran Eurosceptic Bill Cash will be 111 years old. If we apply the Digby Jones time frame of 100 years, they will all be long dead. And if, by chance, some of the more youthful Brexiters are still around, or some miracle – or horror-film nightmare - of cryogenic storage preserves, say, Jacob Rees-Mogg to face the music, well, they will always have the first and last-ditch evasion of responsibility available. Yes, they may conceivably admit, it was all a ghastly mistake, but only because what was done was ‘not my Brexit’.
I will be taking a break from blogging for the rest of the year. My review of Brexit since the end of the Transition Period will be published in the December print edition of Byline Times. And if you haven’t read it, or are stuck for a Christmas present, you could always buy my book Brexit Unfolded. How none got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) published by Biteback earlier this year and available from all good booksellers.
Friday, 6 August 2021
Britain's Brexit slow puncture
At the corner of my road is a display board for local notices and, recently, the council have put one up about a project to support local businesses and community organizations to re-open as Covid restrictions ease. Prominently and, to my mind, poignantly displayed on the sign is an EU logo, for this project is part-funded by the EU Regional Development Fund. I assume it is the very last trickle of money from the 2014-2020 programme.
It’s a reminder that although the Brexit process has been going on for years, we are actually only eight months into being substantively outside of the EU. Not only that, but in many respects we have not yet experienced the full reality of it.
Travel to and within the EU
The pandemic is one obvious reason, because it has curtailed both leisure and business travel to EU countries. The latter will be especially significant for services trade, as Head of Trade Policy at the British Chambers of Commerce explained this week. A particular sub-set of this, which has received much media attention, is the impact on European touring for musicians and other performance artists. A highly misleading government announcement this week implied that some new agreements had been reached on this, but, despite reports taking this implication as if it were a fact, it actually only confirmed what was already known about visas and didn’t address the underlying problems of touring.
In any case, many people who would otherwise have done so have yet to encounter the new complexities and restrictions such travel now involves for British people, with more to come in 2023 when the European Travel Information and Authorisation Scheme begins (inevitably described as “new Brexit punishment” by the Express). Similarly, anyone who in lockdown has watched old episodes of those TV shows about relocating to Spain, France, Cyprus and so on will be in for a nasty shock if they are inspired now to try it for themselves. For whilst it is still possible, it is much more difficult: one of the more incoherent Brexiter ideas was that ending freedom of movement of people would radically reduce the number of EU citizens moving to Britain yet, somehow, would scarcely, if at all, impact on British citizens’ freedom to move to EU countries.
Introducing import controls
Then there is the staggered introduction of so many aspects of Brexit. The various grace periods in the operation of the Northern Ireland Protocol have featured fairly prominently in the media. Perhaps less widely reported is the fact that the UK has yet to introduce full controls on EU imports. This might seem surprising given that the decision that Brexit meant leaving the single market and customs union was taken in January 2017 and, after all, the EU was ready to impose its import controls at the end of the transition. The reason is a mixture of the persistent failure to understand that this was bound to mean border controls, the political problem of admitting it when it seemed conceivable that Brexit might still be reversed, and the stubborn refusal to extend the transition period when it was possible.
So in the government’s desperate hurry to declare ‘independence day’ it ignored its own lack of preparation to be independent. Indeed, in March, it postponed phases two and three of the Border Operating Model so that controls which were due to begin in April and July of this year have been pushed backwards. However, as with the expiry of the Northern Ireland grace periods, in the absence of further postponements the date for these controls to begin is rapidly approaching.
This means that from October 1 2021 - less than two months away - there will be checks on agri-food and feed documentation, with the next and main tranche of controls coming in on January 1 2022, and the final stage, covering live animals and low-risk plant products, being introduced in March 2022. Only then will the Brexit controls on UK-EU trade in both directions be fully in place. One significant problem, which already exists but will be exacerbated once import controls are in place, is a chronic shortage of the vets needed to undertake the necessary checks, itself caused in part by the end of freedom of movement of people.
Still later – in March 2023, it was announced this week – will the much-delayed Customs Declaration Service IT system be fully up and running (in the meantime, the antiquated and creaking CHIEF system [£] will remain in place). It wouldn’t exactly be surprising, given the history of government IT projects, including this one, if there were further delays. All these dates become the more remarkable considering that the entire Trade and Cooperation Agreement will be up for review after five years of being in force, meaning the end of 2025, whilst the Northern Ireland Assembly will vote on continuing consent to the Protocol in December 2024.
Although it may be that introducing import controls results in some significant disruption it would be better, as I’ve argued before, to see the effects of Brexit in terms of a slow puncture than a dramatic tyre blow-out. It will probably be like the immediate and visible effects of export controls (i.e. EU import controls), which have ‘settled down’ in the sense of beginning to make a long-term adjustment to trade being at lower levels than before. This has important political (non-)consequences, because, despite what some have expected and may still expect, there’s unlikely to be any ‘moment of realisation’ when public opinion registers the damage of Brexit.
Instead, there will be a gradual decline which, as with the current widespread reports of empty shelves and unpicked produce, causes inconvenience but probably no dramatic crisis (though some warn of it). The underlying issue of labour shortages means it will be the same story across many sectors, from construction to hospitality. But, because this isn’t a controlled experiment, it was always going to be hard to definitively explain the decline in terms of Brexit, and the pandemic makes that even more difficult. Even if it’s true that it is only the UK, and not EU countries, which is seeing these problems, that isn’t going to register with most voters.
Investment and regulation
Still less will the negative impact on foreign direct investment (FDI) in the UK register, although in the long-run that may be much more important than supply chain disruptions. Here again there will be debates amongst commentators and politicians about the role of Brexit but, as with UK-EU trade, the key point is that in what are inevitably multi-factorial issues the contribution of Brexit can only be a negative one. By definition it depresses UK-EU trade compared with not-Brexit, even if there is scope to argue about the precise extent, because it introduces new barriers to trade.
On FDI (not to be confused with overseas acquisitions of UK businesses, often by private equity firms, which is happening apace because of low company valuations caused in part by Brexit [£]) and related issues the only argument that Brexit would be beneficial is based on the creation of a more attractive regulatory environment. But, so far, ideas for what this would consist of have proved elusive, hence the recent TIGRR report was so anodyne.
The reason for this is that, despite years of propaganda to the contrary, neither EU regulation nor regulation in general have been major problems for UK business. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in a key industry often cited as a prime example for the advantages of regulatory freedom, financial services, recent regulatory reforms, whilst extensive, have not been radical (£). And, interestingly, despite the claims sometimes made about the ‘real agenda’ of Brexit, the government, at least for now, is resistant to removing the EU cap on bankers’ bonuses (£).
Conformity assessment
Meanwhile, as I’ve been flagging up since March, manufacturers, far from being freed from ‘red tape’, will have to implement the new UK Conformity Assessment (UKCA) registration and marking system in order to sell most goods in Great Britain from January 2022. This replaces the CE mark which will, however, continue to be needed to sell goods in the EU. The CE mark will also be valid in Northern Ireland, as will the UKNI mark (though not the UKCA mark) which can also be used by Northern Irish companies selling in Great Britain, but not in the EU, including Ireland, which will require a CE mark. There are also rules about the various combinations of CE, UKCA and UKNI markings that are permissible within different markets.
It’s exactly the kind of double (or triple?) regulatory burden that the single market abolished, and it’s also very unclear whether the UKCA assessment system will be up and running in time. Even if it is, it’s equally unclear whether firms will be ready. It is small firms which are most likely to struggle, as with the new trade barriers (of course it is also, itself, a new trade barrier but it will also affect those firms which only sell domestically).
Regulatory issues go beyond the generic one of UKCA registration, so that different industries and sectors face different challenges. A complicated example is the medical devices sector (which has secured an extension on the use of the CE mark until June 2023). An EU-wide system was still under development as Brexit happened, and the UK is set to develop its own system but it is not yet in place and it is as yet unclear how it will work. Another example is the huge cost to the chemicals industry (and, actually, beyond) of creating the UK REACH system in place of REACH, the EU system, which has also often been mentioned before on this blog, and has had quite a bit of media coverage (£). A sub-set of this is the particular problem faced by suppliers of biocidal products, which from the end of 2022 will have to achieve ‘GB Article 95 listing’ to supply the British market.
What all these examples, and many others that could be given, share is the basic issue that the UK/GB market in itself is relatively small, thus having its own regulatory system may simply make that market too costly to service, especially for smaller firms, and more costly for those who continue to do so. This in turn means it will be more difficult and costly – or in some cases simply impossible - for British customers to buy the goods they want. For example, the UKCA mark will be needed to sell goods in Great Britain but will not be recognized anywhere other than Great Britain, so the incentive not just for companies in the EU but anywhere else in the world to register is relatively small, and for some products may be tiny.
The bizarre irony is that, in many and probably most cases, it isn’t that actual product standards are set to diverge from EU standards and, quite possibly, they never will. It is that there are, or will be, different processes (and associated costs) of testing and registration in Great Britain and the EU (and Northern Ireland). Nor is this an inevitable consequence of Brexit or even of hard Brexit: it flows for the most part from the Johnson approach of prioritizing sovereignty above all else. So we pay a massive price – how much is hard to say, but just the cost to the chemical industry of UK REACH is estimated as £1 billion (£) - simply for the theoretical possibility of regulatory divergence.
Spending our own money
Apart from regulatory freedom, Brexit also promised freedom to spend ‘our money’ as we wished. So, going back to that notice about EU regional funding, the Brexiter response would be that it is only our own money being (partially) returned to us. This, of course, was the Leave campaign’s central economic case - the £350 million a week for the NHS. The idea was that all the EU funds for regional development, farming support, science and so on would still be available, plus a dollop on top. It was always (even stripped of the dishonest conflation of net and gross payments) a lie, because it treated the budget deficit as an entire cost-benefit analysis of EU membership. So, in fact, because of the overall effects of Brexit, none of that promised money exists. Instead, as for example Wales is currently finding, replacing former EU funds is a hit-and-miss battle within the context of general government spending allocations, as it was always going to be, for a share of a smaller pie than there would otherwise have been. Some may get lucky, others won’t.
Away from economics (although not without an economic dimension) it is only gradually that things like the end of participation in the Erasmus + scheme will be felt. A rather boosterish piece in the Sunday Times (£) extolled the “wider opportunities” of the UK’s replacement Turing scheme. But, aside from the perhaps limited attractiveness of some of the destination countries, the key fact that the scheme doesn’t guarantee tuition fee waivers means it is a far from adequate replacement. And whilst the UK will continue to participate in Horizon Europe, the EU science programme, the post-referendum experience of Horizon 2020, its predecessor, suggests that here, too, the UK will be in a worse place.
All of these impacts are to some degree tangible and measurable, even if that doesn’t translate into public awareness. And as the extraordinary ‘Kelemen Archive’ (the link is to item #754, currently the latest entry) documenting Brexit damage stories shows, they extend to almost every sector of British society and economy. Yet they do not exhaust the slow-burn damage of Brexit. That includes the many ways in which political conventions have been strained or broken, and political discourse made more toxic. It also includes the erosion of geo-political status associated with Brexit itself, as well as the reputational cost of the government’s serial dishonesty, especially as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol.
As regards the latter, having written at such length about it in several recent posts, and with events having temporarily quietened because of summer holidays, I’ll say no more except that playing with the stability and security of Northern Ireland is one of the worst aspects of what Brexit is doing. But, again, how much does it register with the electorate in England, at least?
Judgment day?
Although they didn’t mention it at the time of the referendum, it has become common now for Brexiters to say that the benefits of Brexit will not reveal themselves for years. That is convenient cover in all kinds of ways, including how it falsifies another Brexiter claim – made again recently by Dominic Cummings - that, by ‘taking back control’, the public will hold MPs accountable for systemic failings. There’s little chance of that if we have to wait 50, or even 100, years before passing judgment on Farage, Johnson, Gove et al.
Even if that judgment comes sooner, there seems very little prospect of some cathartic moment in which it becomes ‘received wisdom’ that Brexit was a colossal, historic blunder. It’s true that things can change – public support for Munich, Suez or Iraq dissipated more or less quickly – but it is possibly easier to recognize and admit foreign policy failures than those deeply embedded in domestic politics and cultural identity. It’s also true that these are, indeed, very early days and something – more likely something political, like Scottish independence, than something economic, like declining trade – could jolt England out of its apathy.
But for the time being I think it’s more likely that we will get gradually poorer than we would have been, living more restricted lives than we would have had, having more complex and burdensome regulation, and with our standard of living - in both economic and more extensive senses - slowly slipping behind those of other North and West European countries.
To re-iterate, no one lives in the counterfactual world in which Brexit didn’t take place. So although those of us who recognize what is happening will mourn our losses and rail against them, just as many, if not more, will deny the reality or be unaware of it, or simply – in one of the more endearing of English ways – mutter ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘it could be worse’ and settle down with a nice cup of tea.
That assumes that there is still tea in the shops, of course, despite supply chain disruptions. It would be strange if after all the World War Two nostalgia surrounding Brexit, Johnson found, as his hero Churchill knew only too well, that lack of tea might be the one thing to spell real trouble for the government.
I may not post every week over the summer – it will depend on whether there is any important or interesting Brexit news. If you want some holiday reading in its place, and haven’t read it yet, you might consider getting hold of my book! It’s called Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) and was published by Biteback on 23 June 2021. It can be ordered from Biteback, or via other online platforms, as a paperback or e-book. For reviews, podcasts etc. see this page.
It’s a reminder that although the Brexit process has been going on for years, we are actually only eight months into being substantively outside of the EU. Not only that, but in many respects we have not yet experienced the full reality of it.
Travel to and within the EU
The pandemic is one obvious reason, because it has curtailed both leisure and business travel to EU countries. The latter will be especially significant for services trade, as Head of Trade Policy at the British Chambers of Commerce explained this week. A particular sub-set of this, which has received much media attention, is the impact on European touring for musicians and other performance artists. A highly misleading government announcement this week implied that some new agreements had been reached on this, but, despite reports taking this implication as if it were a fact, it actually only confirmed what was already known about visas and didn’t address the underlying problems of touring.
In any case, many people who would otherwise have done so have yet to encounter the new complexities and restrictions such travel now involves for British people, with more to come in 2023 when the European Travel Information and Authorisation Scheme begins (inevitably described as “new Brexit punishment” by the Express). Similarly, anyone who in lockdown has watched old episodes of those TV shows about relocating to Spain, France, Cyprus and so on will be in for a nasty shock if they are inspired now to try it for themselves. For whilst it is still possible, it is much more difficult: one of the more incoherent Brexiter ideas was that ending freedom of movement of people would radically reduce the number of EU citizens moving to Britain yet, somehow, would scarcely, if at all, impact on British citizens’ freedom to move to EU countries.
Introducing import controls
Then there is the staggered introduction of so many aspects of Brexit. The various grace periods in the operation of the Northern Ireland Protocol have featured fairly prominently in the media. Perhaps less widely reported is the fact that the UK has yet to introduce full controls on EU imports. This might seem surprising given that the decision that Brexit meant leaving the single market and customs union was taken in January 2017 and, after all, the EU was ready to impose its import controls at the end of the transition. The reason is a mixture of the persistent failure to understand that this was bound to mean border controls, the political problem of admitting it when it seemed conceivable that Brexit might still be reversed, and the stubborn refusal to extend the transition period when it was possible.
So in the government’s desperate hurry to declare ‘independence day’ it ignored its own lack of preparation to be independent. Indeed, in March, it postponed phases two and three of the Border Operating Model so that controls which were due to begin in April and July of this year have been pushed backwards. However, as with the expiry of the Northern Ireland grace periods, in the absence of further postponements the date for these controls to begin is rapidly approaching.
This means that from October 1 2021 - less than two months away - there will be checks on agri-food and feed documentation, with the next and main tranche of controls coming in on January 1 2022, and the final stage, covering live animals and low-risk plant products, being introduced in March 2022. Only then will the Brexit controls on UK-EU trade in both directions be fully in place. One significant problem, which already exists but will be exacerbated once import controls are in place, is a chronic shortage of the vets needed to undertake the necessary checks, itself caused in part by the end of freedom of movement of people.
Still later – in March 2023, it was announced this week – will the much-delayed Customs Declaration Service IT system be fully up and running (in the meantime, the antiquated and creaking CHIEF system [£] will remain in place). It wouldn’t exactly be surprising, given the history of government IT projects, including this one, if there were further delays. All these dates become the more remarkable considering that the entire Trade and Cooperation Agreement will be up for review after five years of being in force, meaning the end of 2025, whilst the Northern Ireland Assembly will vote on continuing consent to the Protocol in December 2024.
Although it may be that introducing import controls results in some significant disruption it would be better, as I’ve argued before, to see the effects of Brexit in terms of a slow puncture than a dramatic tyre blow-out. It will probably be like the immediate and visible effects of export controls (i.e. EU import controls), which have ‘settled down’ in the sense of beginning to make a long-term adjustment to trade being at lower levels than before. This has important political (non-)consequences, because, despite what some have expected and may still expect, there’s unlikely to be any ‘moment of realisation’ when public opinion registers the damage of Brexit.
Instead, there will be a gradual decline which, as with the current widespread reports of empty shelves and unpicked produce, causes inconvenience but probably no dramatic crisis (though some warn of it). The underlying issue of labour shortages means it will be the same story across many sectors, from construction to hospitality. But, because this isn’t a controlled experiment, it was always going to be hard to definitively explain the decline in terms of Brexit, and the pandemic makes that even more difficult. Even if it’s true that it is only the UK, and not EU countries, which is seeing these problems, that isn’t going to register with most voters.
Investment and regulation
Still less will the negative impact on foreign direct investment (FDI) in the UK register, although in the long-run that may be much more important than supply chain disruptions. Here again there will be debates amongst commentators and politicians about the role of Brexit but, as with UK-EU trade, the key point is that in what are inevitably multi-factorial issues the contribution of Brexit can only be a negative one. By definition it depresses UK-EU trade compared with not-Brexit, even if there is scope to argue about the precise extent, because it introduces new barriers to trade.
On FDI (not to be confused with overseas acquisitions of UK businesses, often by private equity firms, which is happening apace because of low company valuations caused in part by Brexit [£]) and related issues the only argument that Brexit would be beneficial is based on the creation of a more attractive regulatory environment. But, so far, ideas for what this would consist of have proved elusive, hence the recent TIGRR report was so anodyne.
The reason for this is that, despite years of propaganda to the contrary, neither EU regulation nor regulation in general have been major problems for UK business. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in a key industry often cited as a prime example for the advantages of regulatory freedom, financial services, recent regulatory reforms, whilst extensive, have not been radical (£). And, interestingly, despite the claims sometimes made about the ‘real agenda’ of Brexit, the government, at least for now, is resistant to removing the EU cap on bankers’ bonuses (£).
Conformity assessment
Meanwhile, as I’ve been flagging up since March, manufacturers, far from being freed from ‘red tape’, will have to implement the new UK Conformity Assessment (UKCA) registration and marking system in order to sell most goods in Great Britain from January 2022. This replaces the CE mark which will, however, continue to be needed to sell goods in the EU. The CE mark will also be valid in Northern Ireland, as will the UKNI mark (though not the UKCA mark) which can also be used by Northern Irish companies selling in Great Britain, but not in the EU, including Ireland, which will require a CE mark. There are also rules about the various combinations of CE, UKCA and UKNI markings that are permissible within different markets.
It’s exactly the kind of double (or triple?) regulatory burden that the single market abolished, and it’s also very unclear whether the UKCA assessment system will be up and running in time. Even if it is, it’s equally unclear whether firms will be ready. It is small firms which are most likely to struggle, as with the new trade barriers (of course it is also, itself, a new trade barrier but it will also affect those firms which only sell domestically).
Regulatory issues go beyond the generic one of UKCA registration, so that different industries and sectors face different challenges. A complicated example is the medical devices sector (which has secured an extension on the use of the CE mark until June 2023). An EU-wide system was still under development as Brexit happened, and the UK is set to develop its own system but it is not yet in place and it is as yet unclear how it will work. Another example is the huge cost to the chemicals industry (and, actually, beyond) of creating the UK REACH system in place of REACH, the EU system, which has also often been mentioned before on this blog, and has had quite a bit of media coverage (£). A sub-set of this is the particular problem faced by suppliers of biocidal products, which from the end of 2022 will have to achieve ‘GB Article 95 listing’ to supply the British market.
What all these examples, and many others that could be given, share is the basic issue that the UK/GB market in itself is relatively small, thus having its own regulatory system may simply make that market too costly to service, especially for smaller firms, and more costly for those who continue to do so. This in turn means it will be more difficult and costly – or in some cases simply impossible - for British customers to buy the goods they want. For example, the UKCA mark will be needed to sell goods in Great Britain but will not be recognized anywhere other than Great Britain, so the incentive not just for companies in the EU but anywhere else in the world to register is relatively small, and for some products may be tiny.
The bizarre irony is that, in many and probably most cases, it isn’t that actual product standards are set to diverge from EU standards and, quite possibly, they never will. It is that there are, or will be, different processes (and associated costs) of testing and registration in Great Britain and the EU (and Northern Ireland). Nor is this an inevitable consequence of Brexit or even of hard Brexit: it flows for the most part from the Johnson approach of prioritizing sovereignty above all else. So we pay a massive price – how much is hard to say, but just the cost to the chemical industry of UK REACH is estimated as £1 billion (£) - simply for the theoretical possibility of regulatory divergence.
Spending our own money
Apart from regulatory freedom, Brexit also promised freedom to spend ‘our money’ as we wished. So, going back to that notice about EU regional funding, the Brexiter response would be that it is only our own money being (partially) returned to us. This, of course, was the Leave campaign’s central economic case - the £350 million a week for the NHS. The idea was that all the EU funds for regional development, farming support, science and so on would still be available, plus a dollop on top. It was always (even stripped of the dishonest conflation of net and gross payments) a lie, because it treated the budget deficit as an entire cost-benefit analysis of EU membership. So, in fact, because of the overall effects of Brexit, none of that promised money exists. Instead, as for example Wales is currently finding, replacing former EU funds is a hit-and-miss battle within the context of general government spending allocations, as it was always going to be, for a share of a smaller pie than there would otherwise have been. Some may get lucky, others won’t.
Away from economics (although not without an economic dimension) it is only gradually that things like the end of participation in the Erasmus + scheme will be felt. A rather boosterish piece in the Sunday Times (£) extolled the “wider opportunities” of the UK’s replacement Turing scheme. But, aside from the perhaps limited attractiveness of some of the destination countries, the key fact that the scheme doesn’t guarantee tuition fee waivers means it is a far from adequate replacement. And whilst the UK will continue to participate in Horizon Europe, the EU science programme, the post-referendum experience of Horizon 2020, its predecessor, suggests that here, too, the UK will be in a worse place.
All of these impacts are to some degree tangible and measurable, even if that doesn’t translate into public awareness. And as the extraordinary ‘Kelemen Archive’ (the link is to item #754, currently the latest entry) documenting Brexit damage stories shows, they extend to almost every sector of British society and economy. Yet they do not exhaust the slow-burn damage of Brexit. That includes the many ways in which political conventions have been strained or broken, and political discourse made more toxic. It also includes the erosion of geo-political status associated with Brexit itself, as well as the reputational cost of the government’s serial dishonesty, especially as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol.
As regards the latter, having written at such length about it in several recent posts, and with events having temporarily quietened because of summer holidays, I’ll say no more except that playing with the stability and security of Northern Ireland is one of the worst aspects of what Brexit is doing. But, again, how much does it register with the electorate in England, at least?
Judgment day?
Although they didn’t mention it at the time of the referendum, it has become common now for Brexiters to say that the benefits of Brexit will not reveal themselves for years. That is convenient cover in all kinds of ways, including how it falsifies another Brexiter claim – made again recently by Dominic Cummings - that, by ‘taking back control’, the public will hold MPs accountable for systemic failings. There’s little chance of that if we have to wait 50, or even 100, years before passing judgment on Farage, Johnson, Gove et al.
Even if that judgment comes sooner, there seems very little prospect of some cathartic moment in which it becomes ‘received wisdom’ that Brexit was a colossal, historic blunder. It’s true that things can change – public support for Munich, Suez or Iraq dissipated more or less quickly – but it is possibly easier to recognize and admit foreign policy failures than those deeply embedded in domestic politics and cultural identity. It’s also true that these are, indeed, very early days and something – more likely something political, like Scottish independence, than something economic, like declining trade – could jolt England out of its apathy.
But for the time being I think it’s more likely that we will get gradually poorer than we would have been, living more restricted lives than we would have had, having more complex and burdensome regulation, and with our standard of living - in both economic and more extensive senses - slowly slipping behind those of other North and West European countries.
To re-iterate, no one lives in the counterfactual world in which Brexit didn’t take place. So although those of us who recognize what is happening will mourn our losses and rail against them, just as many, if not more, will deny the reality or be unaware of it, or simply – in one of the more endearing of English ways – mutter ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘it could be worse’ and settle down with a nice cup of tea.
That assumes that there is still tea in the shops, of course, despite supply chain disruptions. It would be strange if after all the World War Two nostalgia surrounding Brexit, Johnson found, as his hero Churchill knew only too well, that lack of tea might be the one thing to spell real trouble for the government.
I may not post every week over the summer – it will depend on whether there is any important or interesting Brexit news. If you want some holiday reading in its place, and haven’t read it yet, you might consider getting hold of my book! It’s called Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) and was published by Biteback on 23 June 2021. It can be ordered from Biteback, or via other online platforms, as a paperback or e-book. For reviews, podcasts etc. see this page.
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