Weekly round-up

Another round-up of the most interesting analysis of Brexit I have read in the last week.

Former Tory MP Matthew Parris tore into Conservative Brexit incompetence in The Times. It’s paywalled, but this tweet provides a readable version.

Philosopher Helen de Cruz wrote a thoughtful and moving meditation on home, immigration and Brexit on the Politics means Politics site.

A very acute summary of where the Brexit negotiations stand was provided by Brendan Donnelly on the LSE Brexit blog.

Signs of a move towards a degree of realism amongst thoughtful Brexiters came from Vote Leave activist Oliver Norgrove in an open letter to hard Brexiters on his blog.

Labour politician Denis MacShane’s discussion of Brexit and Foreign Policy on the Carnegie Europe site was thoughtful, if depressing.

There have been a lot of excellent things written this week about what is belatedly being recognized as the crucial issue of the Irish border, and this by Siobhan Fenton in Prospect was perhaps the best of them. Simon Jenkins’s piece in The Guardian is also worth a read.

Professor Kenneth Armstrong of Cambridge University’s discussion of Brexit ‘originalism’ on The Conversation site is – sorry for the pun – an original take on the schisms within the Brexiter camp.

My two favourite Brexit commentators wrote great pieces this week: Ian Dunt on Brexit transitional agreements on politics.co.uk and David Allen Green on the same topic in the FT. Green also wrote a very incisive piece on the Referendum question and an excellent analysis of the ‘EEA option’ both also in the FT (paywalled). These two are stand-out commentators for being invariably well-informed and on the pulse of Brexit debates, and whilst both write elegantly and sharply they are quite different in style: Green forensic and limpid; Dunt rhetorical and elegiac.

Almost undiscussed in the debates on Brexit so far has been its effect (for both the UK and the EU) on the numerous agreements, both trade and non-trade, between the EU and third parties. This piece (written a few weeks ago, but I only read it this week) by Guillaume van der Loo and Steven Blockmans on the CEPS site is a clear introduction to this very complex issue.

Pick of the week for me, for its punchy writing and neat drawing together of numerous aspects of the Brexit debacle, was this scathing polemic by Jenni Russell in the New York Times.

Recommended only because they lay bare the paucity of Brexiter thinking are two stupendously dishonest pieces. The first by Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator argues that leaver voters are heroic because a poll shows that they are happy with Brexit even if it means economic damage to the UK and to their own families, an argument which would carry slightly more weight had Leave campaigned on the basis that this would be the effect of Brexit rather than having claimed that any such damage was just ‘Project Fear’ scaremongering; the second by Daniel Hannan (he of “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place the single market” fame) on the ‘good news’ of Brexit in the New York Times which is tendentious and mendacious in equal measure: there is not a single line in it which could inspire anything other than contempt from anyone remotely wedded to honest debate.

Finally, anyone reading this who missed my own blogposts this week will find an analysis of the Brexiter myth peddled by Liam Fox and others that existing regulatory harmonization makes a Brexit trade deal easy, and a detailed rebuttal of John Redwood’s blogpost on the current Brexit situation. Thanks to Ceri Shields for writing to me about these posts to say that “your clean and elegant prose style is always a pleasure. People you’ll never meet out here in internet land appreciate it”. Much appreciated.

[Acknowledgements: Thanks to Polly Polak of Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, Jennifer Zerk of Jennifer Zerk Consulting and Associate Fellow of Chatham House, and Oliver Norgrove of Royal Holloway, University of London for alerting me to some of the things cited (and to others not cited). Neither they nor the institutions with which they are affiliated are, of course, responsible for any interpretation I have put upon those citations here].

Updated with minor edits 5 August 2017.

Brexit news

After I started this blog last September, there were periods when very little seemed to be happening with Brexit, and much of what was happening was only visible through coded and ambiguous statements from various people and bodies. Now, events are happening apace and it is getting very difficult to keep a handle on what is happening and what it means. There is certainly far too much for me to analyse on my own, because even though I assiduously read up on developments I just don’t have enough time to write about all of them. So in this post I am going to give a brief round-up of some of the best pieces of Brexit reporting, analysis and comment I have read this week as well as some sources I find generally useful.

For an overall assessment of where Brexit stands now, see Guy de Jonqières’ piece on Borderlex and put this in the context of the Referendum campaign with Alistair Campbell’s latest, forceful blog and a good article by Nick Cohen in The Observer.

For a one year report on Theresa May’s premiership, with (inevitably) the main focus on Brexit, this by Ian Dunt on politics.co.uk can’t be bettered.

Also by Ian Dunt is this great analysis of ‘the Great Repeal Bill’ which can be read alongside a good article on the same topic by Adam Bienkov of Business Insider UK.

Martin Wolf of the FT wrote a scathing piece on the Brexiter Jacobins and the catastrophe they are leading us to.

The National Audit Office produced a damning report on the “horror show” of leaving the Customs Union whilst this detailed piece by Dr Peter Holmes of Sussex University on the Scottish Centre for European Relations site unpacks the Customs Union issue more broadly.

I posted about Euratom which was in the news this week (and readers of the New European newspaper will find a revised version of that post in next week’s edition) but for those who can face it the UK Government’s position paper on this has since been published and can be compared with the EU’s position paper from a few weeks’ ago. But equally important issues are emerging around, for example, pharmaceuticals, as explained in a good blog by George Peretz QC and the European Arrest Warrant, covered by Camino Mortera-Martinez of the Centre for European Reform.

The very best thing I have read this week is David Allen Green’s FT Blog where he politely but quite devastatingly pulls apart the lies still being told by Brexiters about post-Brexit trade deals.

I have not included here the many news stories this week about company re-locations, deferred investments, labour shortages and so on caused by Brexit, but a very good source for these is the Brexit Record site. For regular analysis of the evolving Brexit situation the Remainiacs podcasts are great.

The news and comment websites I find most useful (leaving aside those of UK and Irish national newspapers) for good Brexit information and comment are politics.co.uk, Reuters UK, Bloomberg, Bruegel, Centre for European Reform, Scottish Centre for European Relations, LSE’s Brexit Blog, KCL’s UK in a Changing Europe site, and the New Europeans site (not to be confused with the New European newspaper) which is especially good on EU citizens’ rights in the UK and UK citizens’ rights in the EU. [Declaration of interest: I have written for the last four on this list].

Of the many useful people to follow on twitter for (mainly) Brexit news and views consider @IanDunt, @davidallengreen, @JenniferMerode, @jonlis1, @jonworth, @lisaocarroll and @mattholehouse.

For regular postings exclusively focussed on good quality Brexit news and analysis from a wide variety of sources, follow me on twitter @chrisgreybrexit.