Morrissey's Brexit

There’s really only been one major Brexit development this week, the vote on the Statutory Instrument to create the Stormont Brake as part of the Windsor Framework. If that sounds convoluted that’s because it is. This wasn’t about passing primary legislation, and there was only a short debate, and no amendments were allowed. It was not even about the entirety of the Windsor Framework (WF), although it seems that the government will treat it as such. Nor was there any possibility of the government losing the vote, as the Labour Party was pledged to support it.

What difference does it make?

Nevertheless, it was important in terms of how many, and who, would vote against. In the event, just twenty-nine did, of whom a mere twenty-two were Conservatives, with the others being DUP MPs plus the whipless, and increasingly unhinged, former Spartan Andrew Bridgen. The list of Tory rebels, by the way, includes some of the most disreputable and despicable politicians of our, and perhaps any, age. So it was a fairly puny revolt, and though it was notable that both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss joined it, what was more notable was that neither have the pull to have made it a significant challenge to Rishi Sunak. Johnson himself had to interrupt his ill-conceived defence against charges of having misled parliament, of which more below, in order to cast his vote.

It has been known for some time that the ERG’s membership has fallen, and the group is much less organized than in its 2018-19 heyday. Its members, or ex-members, are also split, and some of those in government, especially Chris Heaton-Harris and Steve Baker, were closely involved in, and became advocates of, the WF. Indeed, in Baker’s case, that led to the one-time ‘Brexit hard man’ being thrown out of the ERG’s WhatsApp group whilst being described as a “little weasel” by Nigel Farage. As Robert Shrimsley, Chief UK Political Commentator of the Financial Times, observed, “the revolution eats its own children”. Perhaps more to the point, it is the latest example of the difference between taking responsibility for the realities of delivering Brexit and the luxury of espousing Brexit purity from the sidelines.

Even so, there are plenty of Brexiters on the Tory benches who are not ERG members but who might have been galvanized to rebel in different circumstances. Had there been enough to mean that the vote would have been lost without Labour support that would have been a significant embarrassment for Sunak, and a sign that the Brexit Ultras are still a force to be reckoned with, but there were not. It’s true that several Tory MPs didn’t vote, but it is impossible to tell how many of these were meaningful abstentions and how many were simply absences. In any case, abstention hardly bespeaks of Cromwellian resolve.

The day before, the ERG’s ludicrously-named, if not downright ludicrous, ‘Star Chamber’ had found the WF, including the Stormont Brake, to be unacceptable. But the fatal political flaw in this, as with all the Brexiter objections to the WF, is that everything they object to about it was also contained within the Northern Ireland Protocol itself, which they voted for. Not only that, but it was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ the 2019 Tory Government was elected to deliver. Now that the reformed Protocol has, effectively, been accepted, there is little realistic prospect of these objections being resurrected. Equally, the persistent Brexiter lie that the Protocol was always intended to be temporary, wheeled out again by Priti Patel in a Telegraph article this week (£), must surely have died this week, even if any of them actually believed it. It is expected that the WF will now be formally adopted at today’s meeting of the Withdrawal Agreement Joint Committee.

There is a light that never goes out

So it is plausible to say that the grip of the ERG has finally been broken, and that Sunak, unlike any of his predecessors since 1992, has successfully faced them down. Certainly, Wednesday’s vote is widely seen to have strengthened his political position, with Jessica Elgot of the Guardian writing of it “having been a moment of pure delight for the Prime Minister”. Against that, it’s not just plausible but likely that, if the Tories go on to lose the next election, there will be a backlash from the Brexit purists, saying that the problem was that Brexit was betrayed.

By that, they will mean betrayed not just by Sunak and the WF but also by the failure of both Sunak and Johnson to deliver the deregulatory nirvana that many of the Ultras crave, for it is worth recalling that Brexiter dissatisfaction about delivering these ‘benefits of Brexit’ long pre-dates Sunak’s arrival. Johnson, if he stays the course, might seek to lead that backlash, arguing no doubt that his own failures were the fault of others. But his political stock may never recover, even if he dodges the bullet of the Privileges Committee hearing, and, anyway, the true Brexiters have always known he was not of the faith.

More likely, it will be championed by one of the true believers, perhaps one of this week’s WF rebels. Truss is probably irredeemably tainted by failure, a failure for which the greatest evidence is her own inability to recognize it, so Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg are more obvious candidates. It is already possible to see the battle lines being drawn, with Sunday Telegraph Editor Allister Heath, in an article (£) ominously yet absurdly titled “The Brexit revolt against the Remain Establishment has only just begun”, hailing the twenty-two Tory rebels as “heroes” and insisting that, if Sunak loses the next election, “the next Tory leader will be chosen by the party membership and will be a Brexiteer, anti-ECHR and anti-woke”. In other words, neither the Tories, nor British politics, have yet seen the back of the ERG.

Ask

All that is for the future. More immediately, the Windsor Framework vote could be a sign that, as I put it in a recent post, Britain’s Brexit fever has broken. However, there are several questions to be asked about that. One is what now happens about the operation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which of course is in no way resolved by the vote, even though a new opinion poll shows not just strong support amongst the people of Northern Ireland for the WF (overall 45% support, 16.9% oppose), but that even within the unionist community only 15.7% (though 22.8% of DUP voters) are opposed to it (and 45.8% support it, though only 36% of DUP voters). Wrapped up in that is whether, regardless of whether the Assembly is restored, the Protocol will go on being not just a running sore for some unionist politicians, but also, in being so, will function as a rallying point for Brexiters generally.

Another question is whether, how, and to what extent, Sunak follows up his success with the WF by moving in more pragmatic directions on Brexit policy generally. As I suggested last week, there are already signs that he will do so in relation to defence and international relations. But what about domestic policy and, crucially, the Retained EU Law Bill? If he continues with the latter, Brexitism can hardly be said to be in abeyance. If he doesn’t, will that provide a new rallying point for the Brexiters? It is of note that both this Bill and the Bill of Rights Bill are on the agenda for today’s meeting of the Partnership Council of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

Barbarism begins at home

Even if passing the Windsor Framework has broken the Brexit fever as regards government policy, it will also serve to re-enforce and perhaps grow the poisonous reservoir of Brexit betrayalism within British Conservatism in its wider sense. That matters not so much in terms of Brexit policy but the rag-bag of populist causes with which Brexit has become bound up. Those causes have their adherents amongst the Tories, of course, with Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg being obvious examples, but also within the Reform Party and the very powerful media and social media nexus that promotes Conservative populism.

Although the political parties in this space, not just Reform but the rump of UKIP, and Reclaim, which has never been more than a rump, remain angrily disunited, there is a sense of this ‘movement’ coming together, an example being the way GB News employs as hosts Tories like, again, Rees-Mogg and Anderson, as well as Nigel Farage and oddballs like Laurence Fox, alongside its wider cast of viciously aggressive presenters and freakish commentators. Similarly, an offshoot of Fox’s Reclaim was recently revealed to have funded Andrew Bridgen, whilst Bridgen himself co-hosted a lavish dinner for anti-vaxxers at the Carlton Club last month. In some ways, such loose-knit communities of interest are more effective than a political party, creating the impression of a disorganized ‘general consensus’ rather than an orchestrated agenda.

GB News is also becoming unusually favoured in being granted interviews by Tory Ministers, who sometimes are even interviewed by Tory MPs moonlighting as presenters, with the approval of Ofcom, whilst on other programmes these same Tory MPs – Rees-Mogg again is an example – feature as interviewees. And, of course, GB News is only part of the wider and more established media phalanx pushing similar agendas, especially still influential print titles including the Telegraph, Mail and Express.

Meanwhile, the increasingly cowed and compromised BBC, though certainly a very far cry from GB News, routinely hosts spokespeople of the ‘Tufton Street’ thinktanks, and bends over backwards to placate its implacable populist critics. Thus, with or without parliamentary representation, or even creating a single party, this populist movement will continue to exert a significant and malign influence on the British polity. Perhaps most alarming is how difficult it is to distinguish between some of the apparently ‘respectable’ populists and far-right street groups like Britain First.

Much of this Conservative populism has nothing to do with Brexit directly, and many of its causes and tropes long pre-date Brexit. However, Brexit is now its touchstone, being both an article of faith and the one occasion when one of its causes was voted on and won. That strengthens the longstanding populist idea of speaking for ‘the silent majority’, and by a kind of osmosis the narrow vote to leave the EU became configured as ‘the will of the people’ and then ‘the will of the people’ for Brexit got repurposed to present many other populist causes as if they, too, bore the imprimatur of having been subject to ‘the biggest exercise in democracy our country has ever seen’ (sic).

This charming man

That elision is evident not just in the rough and tumble of anonymous social media slanging matches and newspaper columns like that of Allister Heath, mentioned earlier, but in the writings of populist intellectuals. For example, in last week’s Mail, politics Professor Matthew Goodwin managed to run together issues as diverse, yet predictable, as Brexit, the paucity of further and technical education, the ‘over-representation’ of ethnic minorities in TV shows and adverts, and, of course, “’woke’ policies in our schools [and] universities” to propose that “there is a yawning gap between the values of the New Elite and the majority”.

Tellingly, Goodwin sometimes slips between referring to the majority and to “ordinary people”, something reminiscent of the Farage formulation of the Brexit vote as being “a victory for ordinary decent people” and its implication that very close to half the country is, in some way, neither ordinary nor decent. The difference is that, after that brief moment of triumphalism, Conservative populism has now reverted to its habitual sullen victimhood, a kind of hybrid of the bedsit self-pity of Morrissey’s early lyrics and the aggressive martyrdom of his more recent political stances (yes, it took a while, but now the title and sub-titles of this post make sense).

None of this is new – Goodwin talks of the ‘New Elite’, but most of what he says about it was already hackneyed when I was young, and he himself rather paradoxically asserts that “The New Elite has been on manoeuvres for decades”, leaving one to wonder how far back we have to go for the Old Elite, or even quite what it was. Certainly historians will be puzzled to learn that “in days gone by the governing classes had much more in common with the millions of ordinary people who shared their nation”, though they would probably spot it as an example of populist nostalgia in which even the elite ain’t what it used to be. And all of us might be puzzled as to why, if this ‘New Elite’ is so powerful, it is having to endure Brexit.

But, that aside, my point is that, for all that the vote on the Windsor Framework may betoken that we have passed the high-water mark of Brexiter extremism in parliament and government policy, it has metastasized into something wider or more general, but which retains Brexit as its primary point of reference. For that reason, rather than call it Conservative populism or even, taking a tip from Goodwin, the ‘new populism’, it is most apt to call it Brexitism.

That joke isn’t funny any more

For particular example, the biggest political news story this week has been Boris Johnson’s appearance before the Privileges Committee to assess whether he knowingly misled the House of Commons over infringements of the Covid rules. This has nothing to do with Brexit, except in the indirect sense that both relate to Johnson’s pathological dishonesty, and that Johnson might well never have become Prime Minister but for Brexit (and certainly only supported it in the hope that would be the consequence).

Yet the omnipresent Rees-Mogg was at pains to represent the hearing as the work of “the haters of Brexit”, despite the Committee containing four Tory MPs of whom at least one, Bernard Jenkin, is one of the most Ultra of Brexit Ultras. Indeed it turned out, as Martin Kettle noted, that “the unexpected star turn here was Sir Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative MP whose Brexit credentials are unchallengeable, who quietly carved Johnson’s evidence into pieces, leaving him spluttering and humiliated”. Perhaps Jenkin will now join Baker in the ranks of ‘crypto-remainers’, Jacobins turned Girondins.

Rees-Mogg’s attempt to discredit the process reveals his grating hypocrisy, seen also in his role in the illegal 2019 prorogation, since he so often affects to represent himself as the voice, an unctuous and preposterous voice admittedly, of parliamentary traditionalism. For, as Hannah White of the Institute for Government explains, the significance of the hearing is far less about Johnson’s future than it is about protecting the vital constitutional importance of ministerial accountability. But it also shows how Brexit continues to be the cornerstone of British populism, for all that it has ceased to have majority support. It is the talisman of Brexitism.

And, in fact, the hypocrisy and the role of Brexit in populism are linked. For the Brexit Ultras, no perversion of parliamentary rules and norms was too great if it delivered ‘the will of the people’. In that context, Johnson’s ‘anti-ruleism’ made him their ideal leader. But as I argued at length at the time, ‘Partygate’ exposed the risks and fragility of populism by opening a chasm between ‘ordinary people’ and their supposedly anti-elitist leaders. So it will be fitting if it is his lies over this, rather than all his other lies, which finally end Johnson’s political career. And it will be a fitting irony if, as argued by (£) the ferociously pro-Brexit Associate Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Camilla Tominey, the ‘implosion’ of “the cult of Boris” is taken by association to mean the implosion of “his Brexit dream”.

Still ill

For the reality, of course, is that the “dream” has imploded quite independently of Johnson. It collapsed under the weight of its repeated encounters with reality. For that matter, even if, under Sunak, government policy is becoming more pragmatic about Brexit, that does nothing at all to stop the continuing damage Brexit is causing, damage still being assiduously charted by Yorkshire Bylines’ Davis Downside Dossier. At best, it means ceasing to add new damages on top of the existing ones.

Discussing those damages is still largely taboo for both the Tory and Labour parties but, to coin a phrase, the people have spoken, at least to the extent of successfully petitioning parliament to debate a call for the government to hold a public inquiry into the impact of Brexit. The debate will be held on 24 April, and whilst little can be expected as a result it is at least something that Brexit will actually be discussed and not treated as an embarrassing medical condition that shouldn’t be mentioned in public. The Brexit fever may have broken, but the nation is still ill.

 

Afterword

In case you missed it, I wrote an extra post this week, reviewing two recent Brexit books – The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit by Meg Russell and Lisa James, and Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done by Stefaan De Rynck.

All too predictable

I’ve noticed recently that I’ve started making cynical jokes on my Twitter account, which I set up to disseminate serious news about Brexit, as well as posts on this blog. They aren’t funny enough to be worth linking to (well maybe this one is), but I think my new-found levity reflects a certain grim despair about Brexit in general and the current political situation which, as I argued in last week’s post, grows out of it. Like this apparently endless January, we seem to be stuck in a recurring cloudscape of Brexit dullness, decay and depression to which mordant humour seems the only sane response.

Business as usual

So, of course, there are reports of delays and queues at cross-channel ports. Of course there are claims that they aren’t anything to do with Brexit. But of course they are at least compounded by and at most caused by Brexit. We’ve had this on and off for over a year, and of course it will continue to happen as the rest of the import controls get introduced in the course of this year. It’s one of the things which happens when new barriers to trade are introduced.

Equally, it’s not the only thing that happens, so even when there aren’t queues it doesn’t mean the barriers are having no effect, just that the costs of dealing with them are less visible, taking the form of individual companies introducing and using new systems or of simply not engaging in trade, which in aggregate slowly feeds into declining productivity, tax base, public spending, competitiveness, employment and consumer choice, and into increased prices and taxes.

It’s not even worth arguing about this anymore. We know the economic damage that was done between the referendum vote and actually leaving the EU. We know the damage that has happened to UK-EU trade since then. We know, and no one seriously contests, the predictions for what will happen to the economy as a result.

Similarly, it’s no surprise (but still scandalous and shameful) that the EU settled status scheme is still causing misery for untold numbers of British citizens, EU citizens and their families. It’s no surprise that the talks over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) ”stagger on” with no sign of resolution, or that, as ever, they are bound up with the apparently endless crisis of the scandal-ridden, inquiry-riven, ramshackle, Heath-Robinson excuse for a government that Boris Johnson presides over.

Nor is it a surprise – in fact, it’s almost a given – that the Brexit Ultras have lighted upon a new ‘article’ as their saviour, as they have so many times before. Step aside Lisbon Article 50, GATT Article 24 and NIP Article 16, the latest wheeze is NIP Article 13 (8) which according to Bernard Jenkin, amongst other nonsenses, puts the EU under some kind of obligation to drastically revise the Protocol. Jenkin was one of those identified by Dominic Cummings as part of the “narcissist-delusional” subset of the ERG who were “useful idiots”, a harsh judgement in that it is only half-true.

If Jenkin’s barrack room lawyering had any meaning, it was as a reminder to Johnson and Liz Truss that the ERG are watching the NIP negotiations and will jump on anything which to the addled brains of its members is a betrayal of Brexit or a diminution of sovereignty. In fact, the entire Conservative Party now seems to have dissolved into a series of groupuscules in a way that used to be more associated with the political Left. Apart from the ERG there’s (at least) the Covid Recovery Group (CRG), the Northern Research Group, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, the Blue Collar Conservatism group, and the Common Sense Group (for once, the clue isn’t in the name).

Still, the ERG remains important. And since on the wilder shores of Brexiter thought (yes, I’m referring to clergyman Dr Timothy Bradshaw) the NIP is regarded as an EU annexation of British territory akin to that of the Crimea by Russia in 2014, it’s no surprise that the Ultras aren’t likely to accept any conceivable resolution to the current talks. Which is unfortunate, since it is Russia’s current territorial ambitions which point to the urgent need for a rapprochement with the EU.

Ukraine crisis policy: not a Brexit bonus

For what is very much not business as usual is the Ukraine crisis, and the continuing threat of a Russian invasion. Though here, too, there is a predictable Brexit angle in attempts to suggest that post-Brexit Britain has somehow become “freed of the shackles of Brussels” so as to be the “leading” European power, as argued by Conservative foreign policy analyst Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph (£). It is an analysis shared by the Telegraph itself in its editorial comment (£) and, inevitably, by numerous articles in the Express, including boasts that Britain has been free to act without “endless EU waffle”.

The gaping hole in this analysis is that, even as a member of the EU, the UK operated an entirely independent foreign and defence policy. Moreover, when a member, it was one of the main blocks to the EU developing its own foreign and defence policies, and to the wider project of EU strategic autonomy’ favoured, in particular, by Macron and Merkel.

It’s true that the UK now has an independent sanctions policy but, since sanctions will always be more effective the more countries that apply them, that’s of limited benefit, whilst entailing a loss of influence over EU sanctions policy. Hence Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s “diplomatic blitz” around European capitals (£) this week to garner support for the UK’s plans for sanctions against Russia. This is the reality of the alternative to the “endless waffle” of EU membership – a similar process of consensus-building but undertaken as an outsider, with correspondingly less leverage.

So the idea that what a good discussion of the whole issue by Mark Landler in the New York Times calls the UK’s “more muscular role” in the Ukraine crisis is made possible by Brexit is an absurdity. Britain has long been relatively ‘hawkish’ with respect to Russia, albeit not to the extent of investigating its possible role in influencing elections, including the Brexit referendum or of doing very much about Russian money-laundering in Britain. For that matter, it seems extraordinary that Brexiters have chafed so much against the EU’s supposed infringement of British sovereignty when, for years, Russian planes have actually violated our airspace and waters, and have actually murdered British citizens on British soil.

Brexit Britain: not in the room? 

Still, the point holds that the current British stance on the Ukraine crisis certainly could, and possibly would, have been pretty much the same even if we had still been in the EU. Equally, it is absurd to suggest that now, as an ex-member, the UK can emerge as a leader of European strategic autonomy. It’s certainly right to seek to work with the EU over the crisis, but that’s made more difficult by Brexit and certainly not easier. Indeed, the challenge the Ukraine crisis poses for the EU and the UK serves to show their common security interests and the way that Brexit is unhelpful to pursuing those interests. For whether or not Russia played a role in Brexit happening , it was Putin’s “dream policy” and both “diminishes the UK in Russia’s eyes” and contributes to the fracturing of Western solidarity that he is now exploiting.

That would be so however Brexit had been done, since at the very least it makes the structures for cooperation more complicated and cumbersome. But it is all the more the case because the way Brexit was done has engendered such profound distrust in the UK, especially over the Northern Ireland Protocol, with particular damage to relations with France (£), the only EU country with a genuinely significant defence capability. This isn’t a minor point. ‘National reputation’ is a fuzzy notion but a real one, and in the last five years Britain’s has plummeted, both because of its highly antagonistic approach to the EU and its carelessness with its relationship with Biden’s administration. That has profound consequences, especially when trying to urge EU nations to take a harder stance: even this week, as Wallace did the rounds trying to drum up support for sanctions against Russia, Johnson was denouncing the EU for its “insane” insistence that the Protocol be implemented to the letter.

One particular thing the Ukraine crisis shows is the, at best, naivety of the Brexiters’ constant claims that UK security was entirely about NATO membership and nothing to do with EU membership, ignoring the extensive and multi-layered relationship between the two. It is a folly now baked in to post-Brexit policy, with the Integrated Review of March 2020 barely acknowledging the EU’s existence, whilst Liz Truss’s first speech as Foreign Secretary pointedly did not mention the EU at all. Notably, she did not attend a major US-Germany-France meeting of her opposite numbers to discuss Ukraine (though a junior minister was sent). Instead, she was in Australia. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and it was a pre-arranged visit, but it’s indicative of priorities, and perhaps of misplaced priorities given the scathing attack from Australia's former Prime Minister (£) on Britain’s “delusions of grandeur” and on Truss herself, who he described as “demented”.

Truss did find time to meet with NATO’s Chief in Brussels, and affirmed NATO’s importance to European defence, and she will go to Ukraine next week. So she’s by no means inactive in the crisis, but seems keen to approach it in a way which downplays the EU dimension. Yet the EU has not disappeared just because the UK has left it, and pretending otherwise is silly. Thus, whilst the primary axis of the primary Western response is the US-EU discussion of economic sanctions, Truss was reduced to boasting about the UK “leading by example” without being an integral, central part of that discussion. A key rule of politics is that you need to ‘be in the room’ and Brexit Britain isn’t, at least metaphorically and sometimes literally. That doesn’t mean it has no role, or that its role is insignificant, it’s just that it’s a bit less significant than before and a bit less significant than it claims.

A post-Brexit performative policy?

Whilst EU membership would not have precluded the UK making a ‘muscular” response to Russia over Ukraine, it is absurd and potentially dangerous to think that the UK, with or without the EU, or the EU, with or without the UK, can do very much to face down the Kremlin. Regardless of Brexit, it is not even NATO but the US which plays the crucial role. The UK – and the EU – should in my view be strongly supportive of that, but neither economically nor, most certainly, militarily (including supplying equipment, training, and intelligence) can it lead the effort. It’s foolish to pretend or imply otherwise.

For if the UK gives the impression that it can do more than in it is able to there is a terrible danger that it will lead to the Ukrainian people being let down. It may be that ‘God Save the Queen’ was trending on Twitter in Ukraine on Monday, after the arrival of British anti-tank weapons and military trainers, but (as, to be fair, Wallace has acknowledged) there is little or no chance of the UK being able to do more than make very marginal contributions to Ukraine’s defence if Russia were to invade.

Again, that would be true regardless of Brexit. But there is a sense that a desire to assert its post-Brexit identity is leading the UK to take a particularly assertive posture, in order to demonstrate its self-professed status as ‘Global Britain’ (£). In Landler’s New York Times article, Lord Darroch, former UK Ambassador to the US and former National Security Advisor, is quoted as saying “I suspect this is part of showing we’re not bound up with the European Union”.

Seen in this way, UK policy on Ukraine might be as ‘performative’ as its independent trade policy – where trade deals are celebrated simply for being made independently, regardless of their economic value. If so, that would be deeply reprehensible. Performative trade policy is ludicrous; performative defence policy is reckless, and not only for the UK. For whilst no British politician is suggesting direct military involvement in Ukraine, expectations may be very different amongst ordinary members of the Ukrainian public, perhaps overly-impressed by Global Britain’s posturing.

I don’t suppose The Sun is that widely read in Kiev, but headlines such as “Ukraine needs our help. Being British means we stand up for FREEDOM” above an article by the Armed Forces Minister James Heappey, which starts with a reference to British soldiers’ lives lost in the Korean War, might suggest a promise of more than the UK can realistically deliver. Moreover, as a matter of fact, British public support for NATO to commit to defend Ukraine is, at 47%, the lowest of the six countries surveyed, slightly below Germany (49%) and well below France (57%). In any case, it’s at least arguable that the best approach to Russia is the combination of economic and military pressure and the kind of diplomatic efforts at de-escalation being pursued by France and Germany within the ‘Normandy format’ meetings.

Brexit point-scoring

Even if post-Brexit posturing isn’t what drives Britain’s Ukraine policy, it is impossible to read the press coverage of that policy without spotting how it is shot through with Brexit point-scoring. Most predictably, that is at the expense of the EU and especially Germany: “Europe shamed” as “Brexit Britain cares more than Germany”, as the Express renders it. On this showing, cocking a snook at the EU, rather than aiding Ukraine, is the important part of the story. Even more grotesque in this coverage is the jeering that the policy has somehow put one over on “bitter remainers” and the “American liberal elites” which “similarly sneered at Brexit”, in Gardiner’s words.

Less grotesque but even more fatuous is the suggestion, again in the Express, that the crisis discredits the “remainers’” claims “that the EU was the best hope for peace on the continent”. It’s fatuous for the same reason as it was when deployed during the referendum campaign in relation to the Bosnian War: the claim about the EU’s role in peace was only ever about it ensuring peace amongst its members, originally and most notably France and Germany.

That fact is neatly avoided in Heappey’s Sun article, which doesn’t mention the EU at all as part of the Western response to the Ukraine crisis, but trots out the standard line that it was NATO (alone) that “guaranteed peace in Europe for over 70 years”. Nor does he mention Brexit directly, but can’t resist a Brexity culture war jibe at “people who sneer at patriotism and the Union Jack”. Meanwhile, a Sun editorial explicitly repeats the strawman of what remainers supposedly claimed about the EU and peace (as well as explicitly trumpeting Britain’s Ukraine policy as some kind of justification of Brexit).

It has been familiar since the referendum that Brexiters’ main pleasure seems to come from discomfiting remainers but, even if there were grounds for discomfiture in this case which, as I’ve argued, there aren’t, it would be a terrible rationale for defence policy. About the only less defensible one would be to distract from the government’s ongoing domestic crises, as some commentators suggest is what Johnson is doing. Equally indefensible is the attempt to downplay the seriousness of those domestic crises by suggesting they are trivial compared with the Ukraine situation. The problem is rather that Johnson’s government is so pre-occupied with trying to scrabble out of its mire of scandal that it’s incapable of serious focus on Ukraine and other policies, including, indeed, the ongoing damage caused by Brexit.

Two years on

As we approach the second anniversary of Britain leaving the EU, things have settled into a drearily predictable and monotonous pattern, with this week a fairly typical example. The drag weight of Brexit to the economy in plain sight yet denied or ignored. The lingering scar of what was done to Northern Ireland, and the preposterous bluster of the Brexiters about it. The steady undertow of declining influence and damaged reputation. The bogus claims of Brexit benefits and the pumped-up posturing of post-Brexit Britain. The gimcrack government that created Brexit and was bequeathed by it.

In such circumstances cynical jokes are not just permissible but Inevitable, even if any laughter they give rise to is that of desperation.

Britain - the neighbour from hell

As predicted in recent posts, including last week’s, there is no sign that the government’s confrontational approach to the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) is going to change. Neither the Biden intervention nor the EU’s agreement to extend the chilled meats grace period, plus other recent flexibilities, is going to make any difference. What may just be beginning to change is the willingness of Labour to challenge it, with Keir Starmer making some unusually critical comments about Johnson's and Frost’s failings over Brexit.

The Frost-Lewis article

The continuing antagonism of this approach was sharply intensified by an article co-authored by David Frost and Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in the Irish Times last weekend, which has had reverberations throughout the week. It articulates what has emerged as the standard Brexiter case against the NIP, including the familiar dishonesty about the significance of the EU’s aborted proposal to invoke Article 16, but a few features are worth flagging up. In particular, it is important in its formulation of the central problem as being “the inflexible requirement to treat the movement of goods into Northern Ireland as if they were crossing an external EU frontier” (my emphasis added). This is noteworthy because it effectively rejects the core meaning of the NIP, and the reason why it exists. For it is not a matter of ‘as if’: the NIP is, precisely, an agreement about where the external EU frontier will be.

The refusal – repeated by Frost at an event this week - to accept this basic fact actually gives the lie to the recurrent motif in the article that the issue is that UK did not “expect” the border to be enforced as it is required to be, or had “assumed” that it would not be. Even taken in its own terms, this suggests rank incompetence on the part of Frost and the government. But that is actually far too generous, because they must have known at the time and were certainly advised of it by civil servants. Frost and Lewis write as if the NIP was just a general document, with all the details left to be filled in later, but whilst it’s true that there is scope for it to evolve over time, it also contains detailed provisions in the annexes for how it will work.

So whilst Frost and Lewis claim that EU insistence on implementing these provisions is to take a “theological approach”, as if to imply that all they seek is a little flexibility, their rejection of the central tenet of the NIP shows that this is not the case at all. Nor is their implication that their objections have only arisen as a result of trying to implement the NIP true. In fact Lewis, like Johnson and other ministers, denied from the outset that a sea border had been agreed at all. Moreover, as Professor Ronan McCrea points out, what Frost is proposing about the sea border neglects the wider context of compromises and trade-offs of which it is only one element. Meanwhile, lurking behind Frost, Lewis and Johnson is the DUP’s new leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, pushing for sea border controls to be removed “within weeks” (£).*

Irish reactions to Frost-Lewis

The placing of this article in the Irish media is both significant and deliberate. It signals that the UK stance is not just for domestic consumption, but is one the government is intent on pursuing. That this is so is underlined by the fact the that the UK Ambassador to Ireland approached RTE shortly before the article was published, knowing its content, and proposing that this meant it would be a “good time” to give an interview. This duly went ahead on Saturday and consisted of an uncompromising defence of the article.

So Frost-Lewis had not committed some accidental diplomatic gaffe: there appears to be a concerted British strategy in play which can’t be dismissed as playing to the Brexiter gallery (since neither the Irish Times nor RTE is the right theatre for this). It may be part of an attempt to garner support in Ireland for the UK case, perhaps with the idea that the Irish government might act as the UK advocate within the EU. If so, the reaction to it suggests it will fail and, indeed, that the article is seen as an unnecessarily provocative gesture.

Thus Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign minister, was highly (though diplomatically) critical of it, remarking that it seemed to amount to an attempt to “dismantle elements of the protocol piece by piece”. Media reports in Ireland quote senior officials saying the Irish government will not act as a go-between for the UK, and also that “there was a growing feeling on the EU side that the UK were ‘banking’ concessions offered by the EU”.

Subsequently, there was a much more robust response, the more striking given his traditionally pro-British stance, from the former Taoiseach John Bruton, lacerating Frost-Lewis for refusing to take responsibility for what the UK had signed, and for behaving in a “menacing” manner towards Ireland. It is well worth reading as a comprehensive dismantling of the UK position, including the abundantly clear fact that Frost has no intention of using the chilled meats grace period extension for the purpose of reorganizing supply chains, which was why it was granted (and why it existed in the first place).

Wider implications for UK-EU relations

The article caused ripples well beyond Ireland, as such ‘megaphone diplomacy’ was bound, and presumably intended, to do. Later in the week Maros Sefcovic spoke of a lack of trust, deepened by the Frost-Lewis article, and others of a growing feeling that Frost-Johnson never intended to honour the NIP. Meanwhile the EU Ambassador to the UK suggested that the UK was not interested in finding solutions to the NIP’s operations (implying, I assume, that it wants to ditch it altogether).

In short, all of the things I’ve been saying on this blog for weeks are now increasingly appearing in public statements (I don’t mean to imply any special insight on my part, it’s just that, obviously, I’m not subject to any of the diplomatic constraints that politicians and officials have on what they can say). The question of how the EU responds remains difficult to answer, and probably won’t be clear until the autumn, at the earliest. Sefcovic is talking about stepping up legal action over the unilateral extension of grace periods, but the real issue isn’t this or that disputed issue but the overarching refusal of the UK government to accept the basic tenets of the agreement it signed, and the antagonistic manner with which it conducts itself.

Some in the EU may still think, as some British commentators do, that the UK will quietly become more reasonable whilst continuing to bluster for domestic purposes. I think that is unlikely and, as mentioned, the placing of the Frost-Lewis article in the Irish Times is one indication of that. It also underestimates the extent to which post-Brexit British politics has become detached from rational calculation or, perhaps, operates according a rationality of its own. Thus, as I’ve remarked before, it seems clear that Frost-Johnson believe that their approach works, has no domestic downsides and will have few international repercussions.

The problem for the EU is how to react to a country which behaves in a hostile way, but hasn’t quite gone rogue; a country which alternates sabre-rattling about breaking international law with passive-aggressive talk of ‘our European friends and partners’.  My sense is that the default EU position is to keep talking and to try to dampen down or postpone outright conflict, but for how long is that sustainable?

Increasingly, the situation for the EU seems like that of a law-abiding citizen stuck with the neighbour from hell. At first, you try polite, rational argument – surely, if you just calmly explain your point of view the noisy all-night parties, drunken rows and revving engines will stop? But they just swear at you and turn the music up louder. So you explore legal sanctions, but these are weak and treated by the neighbour as an affront, even a justification for behaving even more badly. The aggravation worsens, but never quite to the point where you can take decisive action. All the time there are more-or-less implicit threats which you, used to reasonable conduct, don’t really know how to deal with. You keep trying to talk, but the more you do the more your neighbour senses your weakness. Perhaps one day, goaded beyond endurance, you lash out – only to have your neighbour report you for harassment. Or perhaps you give up trying, and put up with your nerves being shredded by broken nights and endless rows. It’s an intolerable, yet insoluble, situation – the more so as in this case moving house is impossible.

Brexit bites hard at home

So much for UK-EU relations. Meanwhile, the domestic damage of Brexit is racking up. Six months on from the end of the transition period, there is ever-more detail emerging about the damage to a wide variety of sectors where exporting has become more difficult and more expensive, with 17% of companies that used to trade with the EU having stopped doing so (£). Inevitably it will have been smaller traders who are most likely to have given up, but firms which have incorporated the new costs will also suffer in terms of reduced competitiveness.

All this has downstream consequences for employment and tax revenues, but the immediate looming crisis is the supply disruptions caused by a lack of HGV drivers. This is substantially, though by no means entirely, linked to Brexit and although there have been warnings for months it is only now feeding through into tangible gaps on supermarket shelves (as well as shortages of, for example, construction materials), even as food rots unpicked in fields. Astonishingly, the government response is to temporarily allow even longer working hours for HGV drivers, something greeted with dismay by the haulage industry as being neither a safe nor a sustainable solution.

The wider issue is that of skills gaps caused by the end of freedom of movement of people (£). One easy, and not unreasonable, response is to say that firms should pay more and/or offer better conditions of employment and/or invest more in training. However, apart from the fact that this also implies consumers paying higher prices (which, again, may not be unreasonable), the underlying problem is not shortages in this or that sector but across the board, and it derives mainly from the ageing demographics of UK society (although there are debates about what these look like and what they imply).

Not for the first time in recent history the UK economy needs more immigration for economic reasons. The tragedy, however, is not that ending of freedom of movement ended an easy answer to this need, it is that freedom of movement meant so much more than economic migration – it enabled lives and families to be created and enriched in non-economic ways, as well. Skills shortages may be the most obvious, but are only the most superficial, sign of what has been lost.

The unending culture war

The intangible losses implied by that go wider than freedom of movement. Whilst it would be ridiculous to blame Brexit for any and every intolerance or nastiness in British society, there is a palpable sense that Britain – or England, anyway - has become meaner and coarser as a result, or at least that it has enabled the more open expression of mean and coarse sentiments. That can’t be proved but, if nothing else, the fact that Johnson’s government extended what worked in campaigning for Brexit into the wider, now daily fought, culture war has pushed things in that direction. After all, you can’t have a culture war in which there are no cultural casualties. Perhaps worse than that, in a culture war neither victory nor defeat can ever be declared: it must always feed on some new outrage.

That is one, and arguably one of the most severe, legacies of Brexit. Not just because of a general coarsening but because ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ are now conflated with the wider culture war battles. Empirical evidence doesn’t really support it, but pro-Brexit commentators like Matthew Lynn (£) explicitly link ‘pro and anti-maskers’ with remainers and leavers. Others make the same linkage with ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ opinions, and this in turn gets linked with all the stuff about ‘cancel culture’ and so on. To see how these and other things get mashed up together by the culture warriors, a good place to look is the recent interview on GBNews – itself a medium and outcome of the culture war – with Douglas Murray. Even the football tournament which some readers may be aware is currently underway is being linked to Brexit in a wide variety of ways (there’s a whole post that could be written just about that).

Brexit is crucial to this culture war, not just as having been a gateway to it but because there was a vote on Brexit. It was this victory – narrow and tainted as it was – which gave a new inflection to what had always been rhetorically claimed as ‘the silent majority’ by putting a number on it. With that came the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and the positioning of its opponents as not only wrongheaded but anti-democratic.

The paradox of Brexit

At the risk of labouring the earlier analogy, imagine yourself, now, an unwilling occupant of the house of the neighbour from hell. Your home has been taken over by anti-social hooligans and you are stuck with it as they rampage from room to room, smashing things up. This is effectively the situation of half the British people. Of course you might decide to leave if you can and, unbelievably, Brexiters are now denouncing an “EU plot” to attract British citizens to take up citizenship in EU countries because, as Bernard Jenkin explains, “their career opportunities are so limited [compared] with what they were”. The specific loss being raised was that of their freedom of movement, and the refusal of the government to have a mobility agreement with the EU. Only a dolt like Jenkin could fail to understand it is a consequence of the Brexit he advocated.

The two components of the analogy are linked. Inherent in any populist politics, and one of the ways in which ‘populist’ is not the same as ‘popular’, is that it claims to speak for a people always under attack (thus Lynn, again, writes of an “EU plot to destroy the City” [£]). That is why it is so belligerent in its use of symbols, such as the flag, in a way that a truly popular politics would be too self-confident to need to be. The perceived attack is both from external enemies who would dominate the people and internal traitors who would undermine and weaken them. Waving the flag is meant to scarify the external enemy, whilst exposing the traitors who do not fly it or of whom it can be claimed, no matter how absurdly, that they mock it.

Yet the two elements often come into sharp conflict, as can be seen in the current situation regarding asylum seekers. On the one hand, the government is developing an ever-more spiteful and mean-spirited policy with its Nationality and Borders Bill published this week, in clear pursuit of its domestic culture war. On the other hand, it has discovered that Brexit makes it harder, not easier, to pursue such a policy and that it needs the agreement of other countries to replace the UK’s previous membership of the EU’s ‘Dublin regulations’.

As the BBC’s Home editor Mark Easton put it, it is “the paradox of Brexit that taking control of your borders requires more international co-operation, not less”. That doesn’t just apply to control of borders, of course. It exposes the entire fantasy of a sovereignty that can be exercised without regard for that of others, and the lie inherent in the ‘take back control’ slogan. It really is time that David Frost and Boris Johnson understood this, but there’s absolutely no sign that they will.

 

*For an assessment of Donaldson, the DUP and the NIP see Dr Lisa Claire Whitten’s analysis on the UK in a Changing Europe website

Still stuck on the Mobius Strip

David Frost presumably speaks for the whole government in his claim that Britain is “now looking forward”. It can only be presumed, since virtually no other government minister, including the Prime Minister, actually says anything in public about Brexit any more. That in itself is remarkable, as if Brexit was either a triviality or, perhaps more to the point, an embarrassment, like a relative whose drunken rantings are studiously ignored at family parties.

Yet the even more remarkable thing about Brexit is how the government – in the person of Frost – continues to go around precisely the same old loop about what it actually means. Central to this Mobius Strip of Brexiter madness, as I’ve been calling it for some years, are two inter-related false claims. One is that there is a form of trade deal which can largely replicate single market membership but without freedom of movement of people or ECJ involvement. The other is that such a deal would also mean that ‘the Irish border issue’ would substantially disappear. Its generic form is the recurring fantasy that we’ve left the EU, but we shouldn’t be treated as if we’ve left the EU.

It might have been thought that these fantasies had been jettisoned when Boris Johnson agreed both the Withdrawal Agreement which, via the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), established the Irish Sea border, and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) which created a trade arrangement entirely different (and necessarily inferior) to that of single market membership. The two are linked, in multiple ways, but most importantly because the relative thinness of the TCA entails a relative thickness to the Irish Sea Border.

The enduring fantasies of Brexit

However, as the ongoing disputes over the NIP show, the fantasies still endure. In the latest post on his invariably excellent Europe blog, RTE’s Tony Connelly dissects Frost’s stance on these disputes. At its heart (as per numerous recent posts on this blog) is the idea that ‘regulatory equivalence’, described in the latest version of Frost’s proposals as “equivalence with teeth”, removes the need for regulatory alignment and, supposedly, the need for most border checks. This possibility also means, in Frost’s view, that the whole thinking behind what was originally Theresa May’s backstop was flawed and, in turn, that the frontstop (that he negotiated) was not necessary, and really only an artefact of the concessions that May had already made.

This is now locked-in as the Brexiters’ analysis of why their project has gone so horribly wrong as shown, for example, in a recent article by Bernard Jenkin. Some of this is the boilerplate stuff about obstructive remainers and the nasty EU, but at its core is the claim that what should have been agreed (and still may be!) is “a proper free trade agreement with mutual recognition of product standards, and regulatory equivalence”. This in turn would do away with the need for the NIP which, like Frost, he regards as “the forced inheritance of Mrs May’s backstop” and resulting (of course) from EU and Irish perfidy, with Leo Varadkar painted as the particular villain.

In these assessments, Frost and Jenkin are still stuck in the confusion that has dogged the Brexit process, namely the fundamental difference between a free trade agreement and a single market. It was present during the referendum campaign, expressed later by David Davis in his “exact same benefits” formulation, repeated endlessly in the promises of ‘frictionless trade’, and it lives on in Jenkin’s refusal to understand the failure of Brexit and, most dangerously, in Frost’s continuing attempts to turn a fantasy into a reality.

For it is a fantasy. Commenting on Frost’s proposals on regulatory equivalence, the leading trade expert David Henig points out that “the major problem is this doesn’t exist anywhere in the world”. It simply isn’t true to say, as Jenkin does, that a “proper” trade agreement would or could have the characteristics he claims. Limited agreements on mutual recognition and equivalence do exist, but they fall very far short of the scope that is being proposed and that would be necessary to address the volume and diversity of UK-EU trade. As so often, Brexiters latch on to half-understood concepts to imagine that there is some ‘magic bullet’ that will enable the UK to leave the single market and yet enjoy its benefits.

But we’ve been all round this loop before, endlessly, throughout 2017 and 2018 (for explanation of why Jenkin’s and Frost’s proposals are a non-starter, see, for example, the Institute for Government briefing of September 2017, the UK Trade Policy Observatory article of August 2018 and the EU Law Analysis blog post of March 2018). It’s all old, utterly discredited, ground. The respected Eurasia Group analyst Mujtaba Rahman, in an almost despairing comment on Jenkin’s article puts it this way: “Why can’t Bernard Jenkin and his idiotic Merry Men understand? The full benefits of Single Market are unlocked for those who accept its entire ecosystem: dynamic reg[ulatory] alignment, oversight, 4 freedoms. The terms he is wining [= whining? pining?] for are fantasy; have no basis in reality”.

The corollary of that fantasy is the entirely dishonest notion that the NIP was unnecessary, growing from the dishonest view that the backstop was unnecessary, growing from the dishonest view that the Irish border issue was confected and is nonsense. It is bizarre, and really rather despicable, that even five years on so many Brexiters claim this. It’s not as if it is a particularly difficult idea to grasp: the single market and customs union removed regulatory and customs borders; leaving them reinstates those borders. But, collectively, the Brexiters have persuaded themselves this is not true, egged on by the echo chamber of their think tanks and discussion groups. They don’t understand because they don’t want to understand.

Chilled meat – latest news

The psychological or anthropological peculiarities of Brexit tribalism matter as they are a large part of what got us into this mess and, more importantly, because under Frost they continue to shape post-Brexit policy. The most recent argument over chilled meats has been temporarily dealt with by the EU accepting the UK’s request to extended the grace period for their movement between Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and announcing some relaxations of other rules). But this only postpones the conflict, and in fact itself expresses aspects of the conflict.

The EU have emphasised that this is not a postponement in order to agree a way to keep the movement flowing permanently. It is to allow businesses to re-organize supply chains so that Northern Ireland sells chilled meats sourced there or in the EU (most obviously Ireland), the point being that there is a general ban on third countries sending chilled meat products into the single market. This was accepted by the UK in the NIP, and in the original creation of the grace period last December the government’s declaration also appeared to recognize it was only in order to allow an adjustment. However, now, Frost is saying that the extension is to allow the creation of an agreement whereby chilled meats will continue to go GB>NI permanently.

This is wrapped up with the bigger issue of the UK’s desire for an equivalence regime rather than a dynamic alignment regime for sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) regulations. However, even were there to be an equivalence regime (on the lines of the EU-New Zealand arrangement) it would not prevent the chilled meats ban coming into effect. All this is now set to be the ‘battle of the autumn’, when a variety of grace periods, including those extended by the UK without EU agreement which are the subject of legal action, are set to expire*.

It has become quite common, not just amongst Brexiters, to point out that the chilled meats issue is only a relatively minor one, and to suggest that the EU ought to show flexibility over it. But it is important to recognize why it is so pivotal. The UK has not made any fuss about the fact that the ban already applies to GB>EU trade (there was no grace period, so this has been the case since 1 January); it is its application to GB>NI trade that is contested. So what is at stake is the UK’s more general refusal to accept that Northern Ireland remains effectively within the EU single market for goods. This is at the heart of the NIP and, therefore, the chilled meats dispute is not a triviality because were the EU to be ‘flexible’ about it then, in principle, the entire edifice of the NIP would be threatened.

The fact that the UK sought, and obtained, EU agreement to the latest chilled meats extension, rather than extending it unilaterally, might be read as a sign of a more conciliatory approach, perhaps as a result of the intervention of the Biden administration. However, Tony Connelly’s sources suggest that “the Johnson-Frost hardball approach has survived intact”. I don’t have Connelly’s sources (in fact, I don’t have any sources other then those publicly available to everyone) but this is consistent with what I have been arguing for weeks.  

Without repeating those arguments, there is no doubt in my mind that Johnson and Frost have persuaded themselves that their approach has worked, and I am sure that they interpret the EU’s acceptance of extension, in the face of their threat otherwise to unilaterally extend, as evidence of that. Their ultimate aim is to chip away at the NIP until it becomes meaningless and, if the EU allows that to happen, leaving it, and especially Ireland, with the problems of dealing with potentially non-compliant goods finding their way into the single market, including the possibility of outbreaks of animal or even human diseases.

Dangerous nonsense

All this is obviously much more dangerous than in the earlier iterations of Brexiters’ refusal to understand what Brexit meant. In the past, that was an internal UK matter, shaping the debate about what kind of agreements might be sought with the EU. Now those agreements have been made but, as I noted at the time of the Withdrawal Agreement (December 2019), “many in the ERG will now be thinking that Johnson’s deal was only the bastard offspring of May’s ill-fated premiership and the ‘remainer parliament’, and feel no allegiance to it. They kept quiet during the election campaign, which required them to pledge support for Johnson’s deal, but that won’t necessarily last”.

That proved true as within months Brexiters began agitating to abandon it, including some of those ERG MPs who had voted for it. One outgrowth of this was the legal action launched last February which aimed ultimately at having the NIP declared illegal, which has this week been rejected by the High Court in Belfast (there may be an appeal). The case was brought by Unionist Brexiters, including Ben Habib who, as was drily noted in the judgment, had, when a Brexit Party MEP, voted for the agreement that he now wanted declared illegal. That isn’t a legal flaw in the case, but it does expose its political ludicrousness.

The latest iteration of this nonsense comes from pro-Brexit economist Graham Gudgin who also argues that the NIP was only agreed because in 2019 Parliament, and especially the Benn Act, had deprived the government of the leverage of threatening no deal – itself an absurd proposition. Even more extraordinarily, he then argues that the government may not have really understood what it had agreed to, perhaps because of lack of experience within the civil service. This is really the most tragi-comic of ironies. For whilst constantly bellowing that Britain is a sovereign nation and the sovereign equal of the EU, the Brexiters are also saying we want a new deal because we didn’t understand the one that we signed!

The vain imagination is that if they go once more around the Mobius strip they will end up at the promised land. They won’t, of course, but the process of trying will create yet more instability and yet more deterioration of the UK’s reputation. That will not deter Frost, though, because built in to the ‘hardball’ theory is that you have to live through some ‘turbulence’ in order to achieve victory. Gudgin, meanwhile, recognizes that this might ultimately end in a trade war, but is not concerned as “the imbalance in trade” is to the UK’s advantage. In other words, they are now round to that part of the loop where ‘the EU need us more than we need them’ and, by implication, all the stuff about German car makers.

Sovereignty and reality

As Maros Sefcovic re-iterated this week, a solution to most of the practical problems caused by the NIP is on offer from the EU in the form of a ‘Swiss-style’ regulatory alignment agreement, which could even be temporary were the UK to decide to diverge in the future. This is still rejected by the UK on grounds of ‘sovereignty’ and yet, although the mechanism is very different, this is pretty much the situation which now obtains with data protection. For this week the EU announced that it would treat UK data protection regulations as ‘adequate’ for purposes of commercial and other data sharing activities between the UK and the EU. This is hugely important for both business and security, so is good news (though it wasn’t done out of kindness). But the point is it is predicated upon, and its continuation is contingent upon, the fact that UK law in this area continues to be essentially the same as EU law.

This doesn’t say much for the Brexiters’ concept of sovereignty, since it is entirely in the EU’s gift, and reflects the reality of the UK’s economic and geographical proximity to the EU which makes that concept so silly. Still, it’s true that the UK is free to diverge in the future, if it is willing to take the consequences of losing adequacy approval. So, by the same token, why not do the same over SPS regulations, especially since the government’s avowed policy is not to lower standards? There is no logical difference in terms of sovereignty (and, as someone used to say, would it really be so awful to be like Switzerland?), so I think the answer can only lie in the point made earlier: that it is part of an attempt to resile from the NIP in toto.

It is the reality of economic and geographical proximity, and the limitations of naïve ideas about sovereignty, which tie together many of the latest Brexit events and will go on doing so. For example, this week planned legislation was announced for the UK’s post-Brexit state aid policy. But we have yet to see what it will actually allow us to do that we couldn’t whilst in the EU (£), it will still have to be compliant with the level playing field commitments in the TCA, and also with WTO rules. Far less high profile was the announcement that the British Standards Institute will be accepted as a non-EEA member of various European standards committees (this isn’t an EU decision, per se, but it is relevant to post-Brexit standards alignment).

Then there was the news of Nissan’s investment in electric car and battery production. That is good in itself, though we do not know how much government support was involved, but again it reflects the proximity of the EU market (few, if any, UK-built Nissans will be sold anywhere else, no matter how many trade deals the UK makes on the other side of the world). Bringing battery production to the UK (via a Chinese partner) is part of ensuring that Nissan’s cars will continue to meet the rules of origin requirements of the TCA so that they can be sold tariff-free in the EU. It’s an accommodation to Brexit, rather than a benefit of Brexit. From this point of view it is possible to argue (but impossible to prove) that it wouldn’t have happened but for Brexit, although it’s also bound up with the move to electric vehicles in both the EU and the UK.

Naturally, despite normally being so insistent on proof of causality, Brexiters are crowing that this discredits the warnings of Nissan and remainers, conveniently forgetting that those warnings related mainly to the no-deal Brexit so many of them advocated. In fact, car makers are an important case where the TCA has considerable value, although it has by no means been a panacea for them or for Japanese companies in the UK. Other significant industries have fared less well, such as financial services where it has this week been rather quietly announced that the UK is giving up on seeking a regulatory equivalence deal with the EU.

Accommodation, too, lies behind the extension of Jersey’s ‘amnesty’ on French fishing rights in its waters, avoiding a resumption of the high-profile conflicts earlier this year. As with the NIP grace periods, or the postponement of UK import controls, it seems that Brexit works best when it isn’t actually implemented. No extension, though, to the deadline for EU citizens to apply for settled status which expired this week amidst technological chaos and a huge backlog. None of the ‘flexibility’ or ‘pragmatism’ Frost keeps calling for from the EU for them. For the one thing which Brexiters show no sign of wanting to revisit is their unremitting hostility to foreigners, even if that is not true of the public in general (£) and even if post-Brexit immigration policy is beginning to cause massive problems across multiple sectors. Hence also the continuing refusal to countenance a mobility agreement with the EU, despite the damage to Britain’s touring arts industry which Frost rather sneeringly dismissed this week.

The Danse Macabre

So the Danse Macabre of Brexit continues, with fantasy and reality locked in a grotesque embrace, or what The Sun would perhaps call a ‘steamy clinch’.

On the one hand, there are all these disparate daily attempts across multiple areas of life and commerce to reconcile, accommodate, work round or endure the conflict between a half-baked theory of sovereignty and the practicalities of an interconnected continent – whether they be about regulations and standards, trade, fishing, or individuals and families trying to secure their residency rights. In a sense one might say that, in doing so, people are trying to ‘move on’ from Brexit and to ‘look forward’ as Frost declaims.

On the other hand, even as institutions, companies and individuals try to make workable the mess that Brexit has created for them, the Brexiters themselves, Frost included, can’t move on at all. Hence they remain stuck on the same loop they have been going round since 2016. In that fetid stagnancy, they endlessly revisit the contradictions between their delusions of what Brexit should be, the realities of what it could be, and the facts of what they agreed that it actually would be. There’s no good reason to expect it to end any time soon.

 

*There is a confusing little legal wrinkle in all this which, to the best of my non-lawyer’s understanding is this: the chilled meats extension announced last December was technically ‘unilateral’ on the part of the UK, but was nevertheless agreed (‘taken note of’) by the EU as a pragmatic way of avoiding a formal treaty change. As such, it was uncontentious. By contrast, the extension of various other grace periods last March was literally done unilaterally by the UK with no EU agreement, hence it is this which has given rise to ongoing legal dispute.

The descent into political insanity

The relatively quiet summer has ended with a bang, and Brexit has now pushed Britain into a dark and dangerous place. The developments this week have been extremely complex, so this will be an unusually long post.

We have seen numerous political and cultural conventions slashed aside by the Brexit Jacobins – the full-frontal media assault on the judiciary and the illegal prorogation of parliament being the most egregious examples. Now, a cabinet minister speaking at the dispatch box of the House of Commons has, almost casually, announced that the government is proposing to “break international law” in pursuit of its Brexit policy. The qualification that it will be only “in a very specific and limited way” was almost immaterial and its ludicrousness is obvious if imagined as a defence in any criminal law trial.

Earlier the same day, Sir Jonathan Jones, the senior civil servant who heads the government’s legal department resigned. He joins a growing list of such resignations, with Brexit always at the centre, and in this case with extra force since it was clearly the result of his refusal to go along with the government’s proposed law-breaking (£). This represents a very serious moment, not just in the history of Brexit but in modern British political history more generally, and it is vital not to be inured to its significance by the continual outrageous acts of the Brexit governments. For when has a government minister ever announced an intention to knowingly break the law?

This is a very big event. Even Theresa May, who in her time often behaved with contempt for parliament and in other highly divisive ways, was moved to warn bluntly of the consequences for any international trust in the UK if the government went down this route. Another former Prime Minister, Sir John Major, subsequently made a similar point as – perhaps even more significantly given his pro-Brexit credentials – did former Tory leader Lord Howard. The Attorney-General, former ERG Chair Suella Braverman, then sought to provide a legal justification of the government’s position which attracted thunderous criticism from across the legal fraternity, with Mark Elliot, Professor of Public Law at Cambridge University, describing it as “utterly risible”.

Meanwhile, the EU requested an immediate meeting of the UK-EU Joint Committee following which it issued an extremely robust statement about this “extremely serious violation of the Withdrawal Agreement and of international law” and calling on the UK to drop its proposed measures by the end of the month with the at least implicit warning of legal action. The UK statement, which was blander in tone - although Michael Gove, the UK co-chair, was reportedly less than polite during the meeting - stated that the UK would not do so. The stage is therefore set for a colossal crisis.

What just happened?

It’s important to hold in mind these reactions because whilst the implications are huge, the underlying issues will, to many, seem arcane and even dull. In brief (more detail: here) the government plans to pass domestic legislation - the UK Internal Market Bill - which would contradict some of the provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), a part of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA), by allowing the UK unilaterally to make changes to its terms, rather than doing so by mutual agreement with the EU via the Joint Committee established to oversee the WA.

In particular, the legislation means that the UK government could unilaterally change or do away with customs formalities on goods travelling from Northern Ireland to Great Britain, and unilaterally remove the role of EU law and regulation in state aid policy in Northern Ireland. The latter has a significance beyond Northern Ireland in that it also aims to prevent the NIP creating any backdoor role for the EU on state aid policy within Great Britain (of which more later). When the draft legislation was published, legal experts confirmed that it empowered the government to breach international law and, indeed, that is made explicit in the Bill.

The significance of this is not that, in itself, it entails ‘ripping up the WA’ but that it creates a conflict between domestic law and the WA, which is a legally binding international treaty. The potential legal consequences of this are that the EU could take immediate action at the ECJ on the basis that even proposing this legislation breaks the ‘good faith’ clause of the WA.  Alternatively, If the powers the legislation gives government were actually exercised that could give rise to a case and, potentially, penalties within the WA’s dispute mechanism.

That is (or may be) for the future. What matter now are the political implications for Brexit (and, though I don’t focus on it here, its implications for Scottish and Welsh devolution). In particular, it explicitly and officially confirms that the UK is ready to make unilateral interpretations of what was jointly agreed and, more widely, opens up the prospect that the UK regards adherence to the WA as in some way conditional upon whatever future agreements are or are not made with the EU.

This directly undercuts the central purpose of the NIP which is to provide guarantees for Northern Ireland’s situation that apply irrespective of anything else that may happen, unless or until any further agreement is reached jointly by the UK and the EU. Moreover, by treating one part of the WA in this way, it does, ultimately, open up the possibility of the UK reneging on the agreement wholesale.

That, as I warned in June, would be to embark on the road to international pariahdom. In that post I said we weren’t on that road yet, but could see the signposts pointing us in that direction. This week, the UK took the first step along it. It is undoubtedly the case that the first such step is the most difficult to take. From here on in it will get easier to continue that journey, and harder to resist those urging that it be made.

Why is this happening?

These latest developments, startling as they may be for those who have tuned out of Brexit in recent times, have not come out of nowhere. In early June Boris Johnson was already talking about the WA as being “defective” and in need of revision (even earlier, in February, there were well-sourced rumours of plans to circumvent the NIP). That of course was the deal that he himself had signed and acclaimed less than six months before. So one part of what we’re seeing is the latest and perhaps strangest example of what I wrote about last week – the way that throughout the process the UK has been internally debating what Brexit means at the same time as actually enacting it. Thus although we’ve long known that fisheries would be a contested issue, it is only more recently that state aid emerged as another such issue. And although the arrangements for Northern Ireland had apparently been settled, the UK is now re-opening them.

There are two reasons for this. One is that Dominic Cummings’ latest obsession is an activist government policy of financial support for technology firms. This isn’t the place to discuss the merits or otherwise (£) of that policy – except to note that it is all of a piece with Cummings’ drearily cliched ‘disruptor’ world view, cribbed from 1990s airport lounge business books. Nor does it really matter that there’s no good reason to think that a robust UK state aid regime – indeed the EU state aid regime – would preclude such a policy (cynics might therefore wonder if the real problem is that such a regime would prevent the Johnson-Cummings government handing out public contracts to its cronies).

What does matter is the extraordinary democratic affront that the peccadilloes of this single unelected advisor should drive national strategy and, worse, that at this late stage it should be introduced as something that might actually scupper a trade deal, with all the economic damage that will cause, and, worse still, that it should lead to the WA itself being put in jeopardy.

The second reason is equally, if not more, shameful. As was clear to many at the time and is now undeniable, Johnson, his government, and his MPs voted for and signed the WA, including the NIP, either without understanding or without caring what it meant. This lack of understanding was not just to do with state aid, but also the border arrangements for Northern Ireland and (although not a feature of this week’s debacle) the Geographical Indications agreement.

There’s no justification for this in general, and certainly none as regards the implications of an Irish Sea border, since these were loudly flagged up by many, including the DUP, at the time. More than that, such a border had already been described by Theresa May in February 2018 as completely unacceptable (£), even though she had agreed to it at the end of the phase 1 negotiations in December 2017. It was this which led to May’s backstop agreement, which Johnson then ‘renegotiated’ to return to the sea border solution – and which he claimed as a great triumph, despite having promised categorically during the Tory leadership election that he would not agree to it. This convoluted and contradictory history is a matter of documented record, and it is simply a lie for the government and Brexiters now to deny it.

So what happened was not an accident, it was wilful, deliberate policy so as to enable Johnson to say that he had got Brexit sorted out and to put that to the electorate as an ‘oven ready deal’, and then – again at his choice - to rush it through parliament with next to no scrutiny, and with the support of every single Tory MP including every member of the ERG. In the process, he repeatedly denied that the Irish Sea border he had agreed to would have the effects that he later admitted it would and which he now wants to repudiate. He was simply too lazy, too dishonest, too impatient, too greedy, too ambitious, too selfish, and too irresponsible to care.

As for Cummings, it seems that he had already essentially lost interest in the details of Brexit (£), being instead fully occupied with both his technology wet dream and his punitive attack on the civil service. Such is the arrogance and irresponsibility of the ‘disruptor’. Having done so much to foist the Brexit disaster on us, he just ceased to care until belatedly realizing that the hitherto obscure (except, for different reasons, to Lexiters) issue of state aid might get in the way of the new toy he is playing with (that toy being what was formerly called the future of our country).

As for the MPs who voted it through, they were partly cowed by the bullying of the new Johnson-Cummings regime – which had dealt so ruthlessly with the 21 members of the ‘Gawkward squad’ in September 2019 – partly, again, too lazy and arrogant to care, and partly on the basis that whatever was agreed with the EU wasn’t really binding. Bernard Jenkin, the arch-Brexiter MP, said exactly that this week, claiming that he and others of his persuasion only voted for the WA because of assurances “that it would be superseded by a full FTA; and if needs be it could be repudiated”*.

There is no way to describe this other than grotesquely dishonest or, if there is, then the only other possibility is grotesquely stupid. How could anyone, with even the scantest knowledge, possibly have thought that this was the case? How could anyone have thought when campaigning in the election, as Jenkin and his colleagues did, to ‘get Brexit done’ with Johnson’s ‘great oven-ready deal’ that it was the case? They knew, or should have known, otherwise but went along with it for reasons of temporary expediency. Now, they are pretending that they never accepted what they had agreed to and are not bound by it.

Back to no deal 1.0?

But, again, this hasn’t come out of nowhere. As I have been warning since the general election, the Brexit Ultras have never accepted the legitimacy of the WA, and have gradually become more and more vociferous in demanding that the UK renege on it entirely. That includes the ERG MPs like Iain Duncan Smith who voted for it, as well as the Brexit Party whose ever-present shadow hangs over the Tory Party (and whose MEPs also voted for the WA, in the European Parliament).

For these people, the issue isn’t this or that detail of the agreement, such as those of state aid or customs formalities, but an ideological fixation with a totally cretinous idea of ‘sovereignty’ in which Britain can simply act with total unilateral autonomy, and do so without any consequences. Tellingly, this was in essence the claim of the Attorney-General’s reasoning as to why the UK can break international law. So not only are they prepared for the ‘no deal 2.0’ of having no trade deal, they want to go back to what the 2017 parliament prevented by reinstating the ‘no deal 1.0’ of having no Withdrawal Agreement.

I also warned in July that, as has happened throughout the Brexit process, what seemed like the fringe opinions of a few obsessive extremists would quickly become mainstream. That is what has started to happen this week. They don’t seem to have been the direct architects of these events – Cummings despises the ERG, and Johnson has never been of the true faith – but they and their media cohorts leapt on the possibility of undermining the WA with glee.

If pandering to them was not the government’s motive then it was certainly its effect. Johnson has already treated the Political Declaration as an irrelevance. Now he is saying that the – his – “Brexit deal never made any sense”, and that he will break international law to flout some of it. That is bound to ramp up expectations amongst the Ultras that their dream of reneging totally is a real prospect. And, indeed, with grim inevitability, within hours of the publication of the Internal Market Bill, ERG members were talking of amendments to extend its provisions even further. As always, the moment they get one thing, no matter how extreme, they will immediately demand something even more extreme.

‘The adults are no longer in charge’

The endless dramas, zig-zags and downright chaos of the UK approach to the Brexit process are in marked contrast with that of the EU. For despite the constant refrain of ‘sovereign equality’, the two have certainly not been at all similar in the dignity of their conduct. The EU has been consistent, rational and principled in its approach. It is hard to think of anything that it has done in the last four years which is in any sense surprising and which hasn’t been long-trailed.

That is not said in a spirit of starry-eyed worship. It’s not, after all, some huge triumph to meet the base line for how we expect international relations to be conducted by liberal democracies. It is how, in the past, the UK would have been expected to behave. That it has not has caused bewilderment and, now, real anger in the EU and is a source of shame for those of us who are British and actually care about our country’s reputation, of which the Brexit faux-patriots are so careless. To get a measure of the damage, it is only necessary to imagine how the Brexiters would react if it were the EU which proposed unilaterally to tamper with the provisions of the WA, and to shamelessly admit that it was ready to do so in defiance of international law.

But as Bobby McDonagh - former Irish Ambassador to the EU, UK and Italy, so not one likely to use undiplomatic language lightly -  observed this week, “the adults are no longer in charge in Downing Street”. Instead, he compares those running the UK to tantrum-throwing toddlers. And, indeed, such tantrums have been a recurring feature of Brexiter behaviour, with repeated cries of ‘it’s not fair’ throughout the long process. In the early years, Theresa May played the role of a governess misguidedly trying to soothe these shrieking man-babies. Now they are in charge.

This makes it harder than ever to understand what the government is doing or to predict what it will do next. It’s almost pointless to try to understand this week’s events in terms of whether or how they might be ‘negotiating ploys’, for example to make the talks so toxic that the EU would walk out in exasperation (as some politicians in the EU are now suggesting) so it could be blamed for no deal; or to make the EU believe that the UK is ready to rip up the entire WA if there is no trade deal, so as to secure such a deal. For what it is worth I don’t think either of these things will happen. As for the motivation, as likely as not all we have seen is an example of the Cummings mantra of ‘doing the unexpected’, as if that had a virtue in itself.

What are the effects of this week’s events?

Whatever the intention, the immediate effect is obvious. In what was already an atmosphere of almost no trust from the EU, the UK government have now eviscerated what little remained. Whilst the issues posed by the Internal Market Bill are a matter for the Joint Committee, their malign influence is bound to spread to the trade negotiations as well. These negotiations have not been helped by the parallel developments this week about UK state aid policy, which have also been very convoluted.

Whilst the Internal Market Bill is partly aimed at avoiding the application of EU state aid rules in any way in the UK, the question remains as to what the UK state aid regime is to be. This is a central bone of contention in the trade negotiations. The EU has softened its initial wish for the UK to follow EU rules, but has asked the UK to specify what its own rules will be. This week, the government announced that, on the one hand, post-transition, it would follow WTO state aid rules and, on the other, that it would develop its own system but not until next year (£).

WTO state aid rules are very different from those of the EU and they do not apply to services, and would obviously not meet the EU’s requirements for a trade deal with the UK (something confirmed by Michel Barnier’s statement at the end of this week’s talks). Yet the UK’s announcement did not rule out developing a new system that would do so, and was explicit in saying that it might agree new obligations within future free trade agreements (including, presumably, with the EU). So this part of the announcement does not scupper the trade talks, but does not advance them, either.

Equally, though, the announcement that the UK’s own system will not be developed until after the transition is over means that the EU request for details of it has been refused which is, as one EU official is quoted as saying, “tantamount to taunting us” (£). So this part of the announcement makes a trade deal more difficult. In effect, it asks the EU to take on trust that the UK will develop a suitably robust regime, just at the moment that with the Internal Market Bill bombshell trust has been so badly undermined. If there is a logic to this, it is impossible to discern. Unsurprisingly, this week’s trade talks ended with no apparent progress having been made.

There will also be repercussions beyond the negotiating tables, as ordinary citizens across Europe view the extraordinary reports of the UK’s behaviour. And there will be repercussions well beyond Europe and Brexit, given the many international disputes in which the UK calls for respect for international law. Such calls will now invite an obvious retort of hypocrisy. Already, senior US politicians are warning of the folly of the government’s conduct (£) and a CNN report suggests that “it could take the UK’s reputation years to recover from the backlash”.

Where might this lead?

I doubt, though, that any of this will concern the Brexit Ultras. Always a nihilist cult, the passage of time has made them utterly indifferent to anything other than Brexit in its most extreme form, and always moving the definition of what that means to a new extremity. They are now willing to sacrifice anything and everything to a cause that has long since ceased to bear any resemblance whatsoever to the promises they made. It has now become – and I don’t use this term lightly or carelessly – a form of political insanity, and it is an insanity which has spread to the entire government.

It’s not clear who can stop this insanity. It’s possible that this latest debacle might finally galvanize sensible voices in the Conservative Party – and there are still a few – to finally draw a line they will not allow the Ultras to cross. Michael Howard’s intervention in particular might be a sign of that, and there are some stirrings of backbench rebellion at the prospect of breaking international law. Even Bernard Jenkin seems slightly uneasy about it. So the most optimistic version is that this new low also marks a floor beneath which we will not sink. But other ERG MPs, such as Andrew Bridgen, remain obdurate. My sense is that things are simply too far gone now for the party to be reclaimed from them.

That aside, the opposition parties can do little in the face of the Tory majority and Keir Starmer, mistakenly in my view, appears unwilling to go anywhere near anything related to Brexit, though that too could change. The House of Lords may delay the Internal Market legislation but is relatively powerless to prevent the wider drift to extremism. Civil servants have limited power, and their final weapon of resignation only strengthens the ideologues. Much of the media are cowed or complicit. The public, for now anyway, are largely apathetic and perhaps understandably more concerned about coronavirus than Brexit.

So it seems that little stands in the way of the government taking ever-more extreme stances. I think that when the dust settles on this week’s events their legacy will have been to bring reneging on the WA, in its entirety, more centrally into political discourse and to have moved the UK one step closer to actually doing it. If this seems far-fetched, then consider that until a few days ago the idea of the UK overturning even one part of the WA would have been laughed at by most, and that of the government announcing its willingness to break international law deemed preposterous.

A complete repudiation, of course, would be a calamity far worse than this week’s news, far worse than no (trade) deal and, actually, far worse than if there had been no (WA) deal in the first place. For, along with all the economic damage, and the likely impact on the Northern Ireland peace process, it would irrevocably mark the UK out as a liar and cheat on the international stage. We aren’t there yet, and it’s not inevitable that we will get there, but we got a step closer this week.

It is worth remembering, as always, that nothing remotely like what is happening now was ever suggested to the voters in the 2016 Referendum or, indeed, the 2019 Election. Indeed there is a level of mendacity in the current re-writing of what was said and promised not years but only months ago which is sickening even to those of us who thought we could no longer be astounded by the incontinent dishonesty, boundless incompetence, and bankrupt morality of the Brexit Ultras.

 

*So much Brexit history has come and gone that it might easily be forgotten that this proposition – that a WA could be made and then later dropped – did not simply emerge as an artefact of the political situation of Johnson’s 2019 governments. Exactly the same idea had been put forward by Michael Gove in September 2018 in an ill-fated attempt to get the Ultras to support May’s Chequers proposals which, had they succeeded, would have become part of the WA. So it is not unreasonable to claim that such chicanery had long been in prospect. All this, as I’ve explained numerous times on this blog, including last week, ultimately roots back to the basic refusal of the Brexiters to accept, or to understand, the sequencing of the Brexit process.