Trump’s new world chaos offers possibilities for post-Brexit Britain

Last week, if anyone can remember that far back, the fifth anniversary of the UK leaving the EU provoked a welter of comment and detailed analysis from which it is hard to escape the conclusion that what I’ve sometimes called ‘the battle for the post-Brexit narrative’ is over. The public view that it was wrong to leave and that leaving has not been a success is entrenched and growing. The bulk of sensible and serious commentary, both in the UK (£) and abroad, endorses that.

Meanwhile, Brexit’s remaining defenders, such as Boris Johnson (£) and Nigel Farage, can only wail about the need to “believe” in Brexit, and the benefits they claim for it range from trivialities to demonstrable lies, the most frequent and most egregious being that it enabled an early Covid vaccine rollout. The very weakness of that defence, combined with the notable absence of celebration of the anniversary, show the abject failure of Brexit to deliver the promises made for it by its advocates.

The core problem in current British politics is that the Brexiters are too shameless to admit this failure, and utterly resistant to even the most modest attempts to address the consequences. Since, public opinion notwithstanding, this stance is baked in to both the Reform and Tory parties, and large and noisy section of the media, Brexit Britain is, as I wrote in my previous post, stuck. Like squatters, having trashed the house, they will neither get out nor allow the owners to repair it.

Thus a reversal of Brexit is politically unrealistic in any immediate timescale, and the government’s promised ‘reset’ is the only game in town. Yet even that has been pursued with frustrating timidity and slowness, not least because of the opposition of the Brexit wreckers.

However, in what has been a tumultuous two weeks, there are at least signs of the reset being pursued with more urgency and a little more resolve. Perhaps more importantly, the tumult, which derives from Donald Trump’s return to power, depressing and disorientating as it is, could present an opportunity to finally break out of the stale circles of the Brexit debate.

Reset: a new urgency?

It’s hard to deny that, even though these events were already planned, Trump’s explosive arrival in the White House put new meaning upon Starmer’s attendance at a meeting of EU leaders, to discuss defence and security issues, and the meeting next day of the EU-UK Forum, where EU Relations Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds delivered a major speech. At all events, although it was scarcely the first time that Starmer has talked about wanting an “ambitious” security partnership and reset with the EU, it was the first time that he and Thomas-Symonds set out a desire to agree a reset deal within the next three months.

It’s not clear how realistic this is, since the related announcement of a UK-EU summit to be held in May would imply that negotiations be completed in advance of this. Nevertheless, both the summit itself, which will be hosted by the UK, and the identification of a timetable, can be read as recognizing the need to deliver, and deliver quickly, on a reset which, so far, has mainly consisted of warm words.

Thomas-Symonds also spoke of the need to approach the reset with “ruthless pragmatism” in place of “ideologically-driven division”. Quite what this means is also unclear. Hopefully, it is a signal to British Brexiters (£) that the government is willing to take on their backlash against the reset, which I discussed in a recent post and which has been much on display in utterly ludicrous attacks on this week’s meetings in the pro-Brexit press*. If that is so, then it would be helpful for Thomas-Symonds, or Starmer himself, to give a big, uncompromising, and full-throated speech demolishing those attacks and advocating, with enthusiasm, a detailed agenda for the government’s still far too vague ‘ambition’. If not now, when?

Less optimistically, it might have been (or have also been) a signal to the EU that the government still clings to the familiar Brexiter line that Brussels should be more ‘flexible’ and less ‘ideological’ in its application of rules for third countries. That line is still, at least implicitly, what Farage believes would “improve” the existing deal, as if post-Brexit ‘red tape’ were an EU imposition rather than an inevitable consequence of decisions taken by UK and urged by Farage himself. I’m only guessing, but it seems to me at least possible that there are still people in the civil service and the cabinet who have the same view, if only because, even after all these years, there is still so much ignorance about how the EU works and what Brexit means.

But even the most optimistic reading of these developments (i.e. that Starmer intends to stand up to the Brexiters and to work realistically and rapidly to agree the most maximalist version of the reset), for all that it would mark a shift in gear compared with the last eight months, already seems inadequate to the scale and pace of events. For, based even on the short period since Trump returned to office, there is a good case for thinking that the fundamental recalibration of global politics, which I foreshadowed in a post in November, is now unfolding in plain view.

Trump’s global coup

That recalibration isn’t only, or even primarily, about Trump’s trade tariffs, which I’ll come back to. There is already a long list of other developments, including the pardoning of the J6 rioters; the forced deportations (with the associated bullying of Colombia and the planned re-opening and re-purposing of Guantanamo Bay); the quite extraordinary handing of access to government finance systems to Musk; the hounding of Federal agencies including the FBI; the attempts to suborn the CIA; the freezing of foreign aid; the purge of all forms of diversity initiatives; the bullying territorial claims made on Panama, Greenland and Canada; the grotesque and yet absurd proposal to “take over” Palestine and create a “Riviera of the Middle East”; the withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the World Health Organization.

That is only a partial list of what has happened so far, and there will undoubtedly be more to come, probably even as I am writing. But it is enough to eviscerate any lingering idea that Trump will show even the restraints of his first presidency. It may be chaotic, but is also a coup of sorts, and arguably an assault on the constitution. Under Trump, the US has launched a global attack on liberalism in its most general meaning, and on many of its specific attributes at home and abroad.

Even acknowledging that many of Trump’s announcements and executive orders are merely performative, that much of what he does will be heavily resisted, that his administration is likely to be characterized by incompetence and infighting, will not last forever, and may become domestically unpopular, it seems certain that the US will be permanently changed and, as a result, so will the rest of the world. Apart from anything else, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Trump is, in fact, doing what he promised he would do, and was given a clear endorsement for it by US voters. So, even if some of those who did so turn against him, it really can’t be denied that there is a deep groundswell of desire for the US to be a very different kind of country to that which, at least, the UK has known, or believed it has known, since, say, 1941. (I realise there is a lot that can be debated in and around that claim.)

Trump’s tariff weapon

When it comes to Trump’s new tariffs, these can be seen as an attack on economic liberalism, and to an extent they are motivated by economic protectionism. But they are not really, or at least not simply, about waging trade wars (although trade wars with China and the EU may be the result). More fundamentally, Trump is using trade as a weapon to intimidate other countries into doing his bidding in both economic and non-economic matters. The non-economic motive was most evident in the threat to Colombia, but was also present in those made to Mexico and Canada, and carried through against China.

The fact that Mexico and Canada struck last-minute deals on border protection to avoid the tariff attacks is in part an illustration of this, but it is also an irrelevance. For one thing, they are only temporary deals, and there is every reason to believe that, like a blackmailer, Trump will come back for more (and, even if he doesn’t, this episode will have done long-term damage to, for example, US-Canada relations). For another, the very rapidity of the reprieves is all of a piece with Trump’s almost cliched desire to ‘do the unexpected’ as a weapon designed to de-stabilize his perceived enemies. Indeed, as legal commentator David Allen Green has pointed out this week, although Trump is often described as ‘transactional’, his approach to deal-making is actually “anti-transactional”, so that “an agreement offers an opportunity to gain leverage, for a new negotiation, for a new exertion of power.”

However, whilst what is happening may be inflected through Trump’s baroque psychology (£), it is not reducible to that. He is both an expression of, and a vehicle for, a deep seam of sentiment in the US which sees the country as the put-upon victim of the international order (despite that order being largely the creation of the US). In that sense, Trump’s tariff attacks are part of the wider picture of a regime determined to use force to dismantle the constraints of law and convention abroad quite as much as those within the domestic sphere. That he has even spoken of the use of military force, extending to the sequestration of territory, against some of the US’s own allies means that, at the most basic level, the US can no longer be trusted by any of its allies.

Trump’s words and actions have therefore already fractured global society. It’s tempting to reach for historical analogies, which might range from Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to the America First Committee, to the endless debates about whether Trump is a fascist. But they really aren’t necessary. It’s enough to observe that he is what he is, now; doing what he is doing, now. Perhaps in the future it may seem an overblown claim but, just at the moment, it is plausible to say that we are seeing the beginning of a new global divide between rules and brute force. It is also not necessary to romanticize ‘the rules-based international order’, or to sanitize the history of US foreign policy, to see this as a momentous and highly dangerous development, with the potential to shatter previous alliances and enforce more-or-less binary choices on almost every country in the world.

What of Brexit Britain?

If this analysis, or anything like it, is correct, then the issues it poses for the UK, specifically, go well beyond those of UK-EU relations, although they encompass those relations, and beyond those of tariffs. Thus most current discussions, which focus on Britain having to navigate a careful path in the event of a US-EU trade war, don’t fully address what is at stake. It is not even as simple as picking a side between the US and the EU. It is about picking a side between liberalism and illiberalism (or worse).

This would have created profound problems for the UK even without Brexit, given the role it had roughly established for itself as a ‘transatlantic bridge’. But EU membership would have half-addressed those problems, anchoring one end of the bridge even as the other imploded. As it is, the combination of Brexit and Trump 2.0 has burnt both ends. This poses questions about UK-EU relations, of course, but Trump hasn’t simply turned on the EU. In some ways, the bigger issue his presidency has raised for the UK is illustrated by his assault on Canada, not just with tariffs but with the extraordinary suggestion that it might “cease to exist” as an independent country and could become “America’s 51st State”.

This, then, is an attack on one of Britain’s closest and most longstanding allies, and, indeed, a country of which the British monarch is still the Head of State. The UK-Canada relationship is also, let us not forget, a prime example of the kind of ‘old friendship’ which the Brexiters claimed would be rekindled by leaving the EU. Some even continue to fantasise about ‘CANZUK’ and ‘the Anglosphere’. Moreover, Canada’s relationship with the EU was constantly held up as the template for what Britain’s should become.

In this sense, Trump’s hostility to Canada, quite as much as his hostility to the EU, presents a moment of choice. What, now, should Britain do? Keep quiet? Seek to ‘navigate’ a path to spare itself Trump’s disfavour whilst its ‘old friend’ takes its chances? Indeed one might ask what Farage, the man who always claims to stick to his principles, to care deeply about national sovereignty, and to have a hot-line to Trump, had to say about Canada this last week or so. The answer, so far as I can find, is nothing.

Similar questions apply not just to the UK’s relations with the EU, generally, but to those with Denmark, in particular, and with Greenland. They also apply, in a different way, to its relations with China, which Starmer’s government has recently tried to reset. And they also apply, again in different ways, to its relations with global institutions. To put all this a different way, the vision of, at least, the global Brexiters was of being ‘freed from the shackles of the EU’ in order to participate fully in a global order, including but not limited to a global trade order, an order to which the US now is wholly opposed and bent on destroying. Even the Brexiters’ more limited notion of the Anglosphere was predicated on the US as a bulwark of the ‘rules-based’ order. Equally, they looked to NATO as the sole international basis of UK defence and security, an approach which now looks increasingly precarious. So even if there had ever been a geo-political logic to Brexit, which there wasn’t, the entire basis of that logic is now rapidly disappearing.

A UK-US deal?

To the extent that the Brexiters have any response to this situation, it is the idea of the UK creating a Free Trade Agreement with the US (and/or an exemption from new punishment tariffs). Indeed, some clearly imagine that this, finally, will be a concrete demonstration of the benefits of Brexit.

However, it is an utterly inadequate response. Although there is no doubt that Trump will dangle this possibility in front of Starmer, that doesn’t mean he will do such a deal. In fact, as is already beginning to happen, he is likely to alternately hint that he is going to spare Britain or that he is going to punish us, just as a way of demonstrating his power. But even if he does a deal, his protectionism and nationalism, not to mention his own concept of deal-making, will mean that it will not be a good deal for the UK, and will come with numerous conditions. In any case, as Mexico and Canada are finding as regards USCMA, a deal with Trump is not worth the paper it is written on. His “anti-transactionalism” means he is always liable to make some new demands for obedience from the UK.

Most importantly of all, were a US-UK trade deal to happen in the new context Trump has created it would, for what at best would be only a small economic benefit, engender not just dismay but disgust from most of Britain’s friends and allies. Brexit Britain would cease to be regarded by them, as it has been since 2016, with bewilderment and even sympathy, but instead with loathing and revulsion, a Quisling in Trump’s global war.

The very idea that Brexiters like David Frost should think that their project is justified by the ‘freedom’ to act in such a cowardly and contemptible way shows the depths and desperation they have reached. Certainly their advocacy of dancing a humiliating jig to the tune of a capricious bully removes any vestigial illusion that they are in any way patriotic.

Starmer’s opportunity

The temptation for Starmer, partly as a matter of temperament, but partly because Brexit has left Britain in such an enfeebled position, will be to go on doing nothing and saying little other than platitudes. But inaction and quietude will amount to taking sides or, even worse, will be seen by each side as taking that of the other. Likewise, it will not silence the Brexiter call for doing a deal with the US, with Farage and his acolytes acting as Trump’s Fifth Column in British politics.

Conversely, Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies. Doing so would go with the grain of public opinion. Trump and his side-kick Musk are not popular in the UK. Equally, there is public support for closer relations with the EU rather than with the US, and probably (though I haven’t found polling data) for siding with Canada, Greenland/ Denmark, and perhaps even Panama, against Trump’s aggression.

In this way, all the talk still coming from Badenoch, amongst others, of ‘honouring the will of the British people’ and ‘retaining our hard-won Brexit freedoms’ as a reason to oppose the reset could at a stroke be derided as the tired repetition of long-outdated slogans, wrenching political discourse free of the detritus of 2016 and its aftermath. That wouldn’t imply re-opening the Brexit question, or crossing Labour’s ‘red lines’, but it would imply pursuing a maximalist reset with the EU, at speed, and with open enthusiasm rather than coyness and reluctance. Doing so would not just reset UK-EU relations, it would also reset UK international relations generally and, perhaps most importantly, reset the terms of domestic political debate.

Starmer may never have a better chance than now, and, if he is to take it, then the sooner the better if he is to get kudos for being at the forefront of this new global divide. Standing up to Trump in this way would not be easy or cost-free for Britain. Doing so would have significant security and economic ramifications. But the same is true of not doing so. And it’s even possible, given Trump’s bullying temperament, that standing up to him might earn Starmer a degree of grudging respect.

In some ways, Starmer is ideally placed to take this kind of stance. As I wrote recently, his persona and politics are very clearly aligned with the principles of ‘rational-legal authority’ in both the domestic and international spheres, placing him in direct contrast to Trump’s ‘anti-ruleism’. However, at the same time, and relatedly, he is almost preternaturally cautious, lacking vision and perhaps distrustful of the very concept of vision, and as a result inclined to ‘wait and see’ and to dodge hard choices. Hence his current rejection of the bare idea that there is a choice to be made between the US and the EU. That is misguided even if the choice is framed in that way. It is even more misguided when the choice is framed, as it should be, between accepting or rejecting Trump’s new barbarism.

 

*Of these attacks, probably none was more ludicrous than that of Kate Hoey. It isn’t only that she sees betrayal in the UK Prime Minister meeting EU leaders, it is that having campaigned for years against membership of the EU because of its supra-national powers she now proposes that the UK need not deal with the EU at all, but simply with its individual members. And this is only one aspect of the idiocy on display in just this short clip.

Brexit: a mug's eyeful

When I was a teenager, after much saving up from my ‘Saturday job’ money, I bought my first ever stereo device, a portable radio cassette player (younger readers may need to consult a dictionary). Not only did it have – gulp! – two speakers, but a whole array of controls, lights, and little graphs printed on it, as if precisely measuring all sorts of important sound variables.

It was my pride and joy until I showed it to my brother-in-law, a marketing manager, who took one look at it, laughed, and said “that’s what we call a mug’s eyeful”. I had never heard the expression, but he explained it meant something which was made to look impressive with all sorts of superficial features but, not only did they have no real function, they disguised the underlying shoddiness of the product itself. And, indeed, he was right. The only control that served any purpose was the volume knob, and that soon broke, although not as soon as the cassette player began to mangle tapes, the aerial snapped, and the carrying handle fell off.

To anyone with any understanding of what it meant, it was obvious from the outset that Brexit was a mug’s eyeful. All the things which it was promised would follow from ‘taking back control’ were as illusory as the supposedly sophisticated controls on my pitiful boombox. Meanwhile, all the technical-sounding explanations, from the UK’s trade deficit guaranteeing a great deal to semi-digested factoids about, for example, GATT Article XXIV, that were littered throughout the Brexit prospectus were as meaningless and misleading as the pathetic fake graphs on its stupid plastic case.

Damaged goods

It is now four years since the UK actually left the EU, and, despite the government producing a predictably misleading though highly glossy anniversary brochure extolling ‘Britain’s Brexit success’, it is obvious to all but the most dull-witted or obtuse of Brexiters that it has been a failure. Nigel Farage said as much months ago. And just this week, Ben Habib – the creepy Brexit Party ex-MEP now standing for Reform in the by-election caused by creepy Brexiter Tory Peter Bone’s scandal-ridden demise – tweeted that those who voted for Brexit had “got nothing”. But of course, since they were the ones who sold this mug’s eyeful to a gullible public, they ascribe that failure to it not having been done properly. Thus Daniel Hannan, rather than apologise for his magniloquent visions of a post-Brexit utopia, discussed in last week’s post, can now only offer a threnody (£) for what might have been, but for “the Blob”, illustrated by a peculiar, and somewhat inaccurate, discussion of tariffs on Moroccan tomatoes.

And where once Brexiters petitioned for January 31 to be celebrated annually as ‘National Independence Day’, the best Roger Bootle, a one-time member of the ‘Economists for Brexit’ group, could come up with (£) was that it has not “brought the disaster that some other economists envisaged”. Underwhelming as that claim is, it was only achieved by the now-standard tricks of referring to parts of one of the pre-Brexit Treasury forecasts, whilst also dismissing as “elaborate guesswork” the various post-Brexit estimates of its costs.

Perhaps the nearest thing to an admission of their folly came in an article on the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) website, suggesting that “in retrospect, the libertarian argument supporting Brexit appears to have been fundamentally flawed in its understanding of the European Union’s nature and functions”. It’s the closest I’ve seen to a recognition that it’s not just that Brexit hasn’t led to the UK becoming ‘Singapore-on-Thames’, but that it was never likely to – something rarely acknowledged by either the libertarian Brexiters who wanted that outcome or, for that matter, by those anti-Brexiters who feared it was ‘the real agenda’ behind Brexit. It is also an interesting piece in revealing what to others is obvious, given their anti-state ideology, which is that libertarians never had any interest in the UK state ‘regaining sovereignty’, even though many of them opportunistically parroted that line.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, evidence of the damage of Brexit mounts up at an alarming, and possibly accelerating, rate. Recent examples are chronicled by Anthony Robinson for Yorkshire Bylines and Edwin Hayward in the New European, and I won’t try to cover them all here. But it is fitting that, around the time of this anniversary, the three biggest of them relate to very central parts of Brexit.

Trade in British and Canadian goods

The first is the stalling of the UK-Canada trade talks. This is important both in itself and for wider, partly symbolic, reasons. One of the things which I, and many other commentators, got wrong in the early days of the Brexit process was to think that it would prove very difficult, and perhaps impossible, for the UK to ‘roll over’ the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) made between the EU and various third countries, and especially do so on the same terms, and by the end of the transition period. In fact, this was largely achieved, usually maintaining similar terms and occasionally, as in the case of Japan, slightly improving them (although to little, if any, practical benefit according to the UK Trade Policy Observatory).

As regards Canada, a continuity agreement was reached in November 2020, but certain parts of it contained temporary provisions, the permanence of which formed part of negotiations for a new trade agreement to replace the continuity agreement, and it is these negotiations which have now broken down. This does not put an end to the continuity agreement in its entirety, although it was originally intended only to be an interim agreement, but it does mean that those parts which were temporary will lapse or have done so. The most high-profile example of the temporary provisions related to the quota for tariff-free exports of British cheese to Canada, which expired at the end of 2023, and to rules of origin for tariff application in the automotive sector, as well as, in rather more complicated ways, trade in beef and pork.

Along the lines that I suggested in my previous post, it is necessary to be careful not to treat this simply as a Brexit bad news story. After all, the main criticism of the new trade deals the UK has done with Australia and New Zealand was that, in its desire to demonstrate its ‘post-Brexit freedom’ the government had simply accepted any terms they were offered, regardless of their effects on, especially, British farmers. So this breakdown of talks with Canada, which was initiated by the UK, can be read as a sign of a less dogma-driven approach and, certainly, has been welcomed as the “right decision” by the National Farmers Union mainly because the alternative would have been to lower UK food standards, especially as regards hormones in beef, in exchange for tariff-free access for cheese.

Nevertheless, as the British Chambers of Commerce emphasised, it is a blow for British cheese exporters and also for car-makers, and a blow which is, specifically, a cost of Brexit since it was the continuity agreement which made temporary what, under the EU-Canada agreement, would have been permanent had Britain stayed in the EU. This may only be a small blow to the Brexiter claim that they would be able to rollover trade deals, but it is a much bigger blow to their proposition that, outside the EU, the UK could negotiate deals which fitted its specific interests rather than for those interests to be subordinated to, and diluted by, those of the EU and its members.

This matters, because the central plank of the Brexiters’ trade case is the freedom to have an independent trade policy, and it’s pretty much the only argument they have for not being in a customs union with the EU. The benefits of that freedom are never remotely going to outweigh the costs of leaving the EU single market – and it is a mystery why so many ‘free-trader’ Brexiters, like Bootle, continue to insist that those costs are very low, whilst also insisting that the benefits of trade deals could be high – but it’s not even clear that they outweigh the costs of having left the customs union.

It also matters in particular ways because the country in question is, specifically, Canada. On the one hand, that is significant symbolically given the idea held by ‘Ladybird Brexiters’ like Hannan, that Commonwealth countries and, especially, the ‘Dominions’, would fall over themselves to ‘renew old friendships’. That, and the associated ‘CANZUK’ fantasy, was based on a mixture of imperial nostalgia, ignorance about the modern nature of those countries, and quite breath-taking naivety about the tough realities of trade negotiations. On the other hand, it is significant practically, at least potentially, because Canada is a member of CPTPP and has yet to ratify Britain’s membership, something the Brexiters have made the centrepiece of their claims for the benefits of Brexit. As things stand, the Canadian government has said that this latest development will not affect CPTPP accession, but it is quite possible that it will revive opposition from Canadian farming lobbies to ratification.

Import controls on EU goods

The second big story is the next stage of the introduction of import controls on certain goods coming from the EU. It isn’t quite accurate to say, as some media reports do, that it is the beginning of such controls, because controls on some high-risk imports did start when the transition period ended. However, these latest controls on medium-risk goods, mainly cut flowers, fish, meat and dairy products, have been much delayed.

I discussed last week, as I have done in the past, what the likely consequences of their introduction will be, but one thing left hanging was what last week’s announcement about fruit and vegetables meant. My understanding now is that it moved most such produce into the medium-risk category, thus including it in the new paperwork requirements that started this week and the new inspection regime which will come into force at the end of April, but temporarily kept it as low-risk until the end of October, at which point fruit and vegetables, too, will require paperwork and be liable for inspection.

All of this will necessarily add to the costs of trade, and comes against a background in which already, according to a survey reported in the Financial Times this week (£), three-quarters of British firms who trade with the EU say that their sales and profitability have declined as a result of Brexit. The new controls will add to this burden, and, for consumers, adversely impact prices and choice, and probably shelf-life.

I also discussed last week why it is that import controls are necessary, despite some Brexiters still being unable to grasp this and, right on cue, up popped Jacob Rees-Mogg to squeak that introducing them is “totally stupid”, and that he had opposed doing so when Brexit Opportunities Minister (a post, be it noted, that no longer exists, and small wonder since it was the definition of a sinecure). That ignorance or dishonesty goes to the heart of why Britain was not ready to introduce the controls on time, for, astonishingly, it was not officially admitted by any government minister  –  Michael Gove – that they were inevitable until February 2020, after Britain had actually left the EU.

That in turn points to a deeper dishonesty. Anyone who understood the issue knew this from the moment that Theresa May explicitly confirmed that Brexit meant hard Brexit, in January 2017, and the government itself began to prepare for it from at least 2018. The reticence about telling the public was surely because, whilst there was even the thinnest chance of Brexit being abandoned, the government didn’t want to be open about what it meant.

Great Britain and Northern Ireland Internal Market goods

And finally, Northern Ireland, the hardy perennial of Brexit mess and dishonesty. That the Northern Ireland Assembly will resume sitting because the DUP have done a deal with the government is unalloyed good news. What that deal consists of and how it will play out in both practical and political terms is much less easy to assess, and no doubt I will write more about it in the future. Its detail was released by the government as a Command Paper entitled 'Safeguarding the Union' on Wednesday, parts of which need to be read in conjunction with a draft decision of the Joint Committee overseeing the Withdrawal Agreement (JCWA), released rather more quietly the evening before.

These documents are quite long and, in places, highly technical but my initial understanding* is that the changes are substantive in offering easements to border processes, especially on movements from Great Britain (GB) to Northern Ireland (NI). In very brief, the most important of these is to designate most goods (though not including most of those designated for further processing in Northern Ireland) moving between GB and NI as ‘low risk’, therefore exempting them from customs paperwork and removing routine checks if they come from companies signed up to the ‘Trusted Trader’ register and if they are destined never to leave NI.

Such goods will now be able to use the ‘green lane’ which, symbolically, but in a context where symbols greatly matter, is going to be renamed the UK Internal Market line. There is also some relaxation of processes and checks relating to products, including agrifood products, imported from the rest of the world so long as they are not at risk of entering the EU, and this also means that Northern Ireland will have the benefits (such as they are) of the UK’s independent trade policy.

However, the fundamental architecture of the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework remains unchanged. This is important, since it explains why there is very little indication, at least so far, that the EU (or, especially important, Ireland) are or will be unhappy with what has been agreed, though there was just a hint yesterday that that could change. Indeed, much of the Command Paper seems to be a restatement of the ways in which the Windsor Framework acts to make the Protocol more workable with, in some cases, proposals to ‘enshrine’ these in UK law by amending various pieces of legislation including the EU (Withdrawal) Act and the Internal Market Act.

Even so, aspects of the changes mentioned in the Command Paper and fleshed out by the JCWA document do amount to legal changes in the Windsor Framework, at least according to Sir Jonathan Jones (the former head of the Government Legal Service who resigned over the potentially illegal clauses of the Internal Market Bill) who surely speaks with authority. Actually, that in itself is an indication that what is under way is occurring within the Windsor Framework and in conjunction with the EU, and the Command Paper is explicit that some of its proposals will need further JCWA agreement. In other words, we do not seem to be back to the days of the Internal Market Bill, or for that matter the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, where there had been proposals for the UK unilaterally to change the terms of what had been agreed with the EU.

At the same time, that de facto legal changes have been made to the Windsor Framework could be regarded as a victory for the DUP, who say it confounds critics who had said this was impossible, but such changes do not affect the fundamental fact of there still being an Irish Sea border, claims by DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson notwithstanding. Nor do they change the fact of Northern Ireland still being in the EU single market for goods. This means that there continues to be some opposition to the deal from within the DUP, and even more from other unionist parties, most notably Traditional Unionist Voice. Perhaps all these changes amount to is a ladder for the DUP to climb down, knowing full well how limited they are. Or perhaps the DUP have been gulled into believing them to be more significant than they are. Nor are these two possibilities mutually exclusive, since it may suit the DUP to accept them now but, in the future, to declare that they were deceived. In this and others senses, the long-run impact on Northern Irish politics remains unclear.

Regulation of goods

There is also a UK political dimension, since these changes entail the use of Statutory Instruments and some legislation, the crucial pieces of which were passed yesterday. This haste was presumably in order to get a swift resumption of the NI Assembly, but that may, as has happened before in the Brexit process, lead to very technical things having been agreed without anyone quite knowing what they mean in practice. There is a particular question, which is already exercising Brexiters (£), about whether the implication of it all may be to make future UK divergence from EU rules harder. This is because part of the deal means that parliament will have to be told if any future UK legislation has “significant adverse implications for Northern Ireland's place in the UK internal market”, as regulatory divergence related to goods surely would.

The government has denied that this prevents future divergence, and to the letter of the law I suppose that is true, since such legislation could still be passed regardless of what it means for Northern Ireland’s place in the UK internal market. But were that to happen, it would (or could) immediately re-open the issue of what checks are needed for the Sea border. Equally, it’s clear that the DUP believe the deal ensures that there will be no dynamic alignment of EU law and Northern Ireland law, yet it is hard to see how that can be true (as regards goods) under the basic terms of the Protocol, so again it suggests that what it will mean in practice is the UK as a whole staying aligned with such law so that unionists can depict the situation as simply one of Northern Ireland being the same as the rest of the UK whilst, effectively, still following EU law.

To add to the confusion, what I have not seen discussed anywhere yet is what all this means for any passive divergence from EU regulations. That, by definition, would happen without UK legislation being passed, yet it, too, could have implications for the need for border checks. Might we end up with de facto ‘dynamic alignment’, at least for goods, through the back door and, if so, why not gain the greater advantages of doing so by de jure dynamic alignment? Might we even end up with something not so far from the ‘common rule book’ for goods and agrifood envisaged by Theresa May’s ill-fated Chequers Proposal?

In all of this, it bears saying that, apart from those technical changes to the Windsor Framework being agreed with the EU through the JCWA, the legal changes envisaged are solely changes to UK law. Some of these, as noted above, simply make explicit what is already in the Windsor Framework. This is utterly pointless, since the UK is already bound to these by its agreement with the EU.

Pointless in a different way (in that neither is an existing treaty obligation) are the commitments to legislate for the government’s existing policy of making ‘Not For Sale in the EU’ labelling mandatory across the UK, and to ‘enshrine’ in an Act of Parliament that no government will be permitted to agree a new Protocol with an adverse effect on Northern Ireland’s position in the UK Internal Market. But such legislation is effectively meaningless, given that no parliament can bind its successor. So, as with much – but not quite all – of this ‘Safeguarding the Union’ deal announcement, there is a great deal of fluff and rather less to it than meets the eye.

If that gets the Assembly up-and-running again, then all to the good. But there is much in it which remains unclear, practically and politically. Four years since leaving the EU, and over seven years since deciding to do so, the question of what Brexit means for Northern Ireland can still not be said to have a settled answer.

Utterly defective goods

It’s said you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. Brexit never fooled all of the people, and a poll this week found that only 13% of people think that Brexit has been more of a success than a failure. Even so, other polling shows that 33% still think Brexit was the right thing to do, the discrepancy presumably being explained by yet another recent poll showing that 26% think it was the right thing to do but that the government has handled it badly.

Given that a hardcore will no doubt always support Brexit, it’s that latter group, along with the many ‘don’t knows’ in all of these surveys, who are probably the key to where public opinion eventually settles. If and when these groups swing to the view that Brexit has not only failed but was never going to succeed the demand for a refund will grow, as will the demand for those who sold the public this mug’s eyeful to be held to account.

 

*For more detailed and, no doubt, better-informed analysis (though I don’t think it is incompatible with mine), see Professor Colin Murray’s post on the EU Law Analysis Blog.

Update (02/02/2024 at 10.40): One aspect of the Command Paper/ JCWA changes I was aware of, but didn’t discuss as I didn’t understand it, relates to Tariff-Rate Quotas (TRQs). This has since been explained by trade expert Sam Lowe in his latest Most Favoured Nation Substack. Interestingly, this somewhat contradicts what I said (and it was not my invention, it is what the NI Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris said in the House of Commons) said about how the deal would enable NI to benefit from the UK’s independent trade policy. At least as regards TRQs, this seems not be true (see Lowe’s comments about the UK-Australia trade deal). Perhaps this is an example of what I warned of about how all this is being passed very quickly with MPs and others possibly not understanding all of the implications?

Update (02/02/24 at 15.15): An update my previous update! Sam Lowe has now amended his Substack post to explain that NI will be able to use the new TRQs in FTAs such as UK-Australia. A reminder of just how complex some of this stuff is, even to the experts!

A normal week in crazy Brexit Britain

It has been a pretty standard week for directly Brexit-related news – I put it that way because in many ways almost everything the government does, from demanding that the BBC project ‘British values', to badging the new rail system as ‘Great British Railways’, to giving British people the borders they ‘deserve' can be seen as framed by Brexiter sensibilities. And, of course, this week’s Dominic Cummings show grows organically out of the politics of Brexit, not least because but for Brexit neither he nor, possibly, Boris Johnson would ever have been in power. It can also be seen as the (final?) implosion of the elevation of the Vote Leave cabal to the centre of government in 2019.

More of Cummings below, but, these wider issues aside, what has been going on with Brexit this week is mainly a continuation of the issues discussed in my previous post, namely the row over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) and the nature of Britain’s post-Brexit trading relationships.

The NIP: the calm before the next storm?

As regards the NIP, RTE’s Tony Connelly provided his usual excellent commentary of the current situation in his blog post last Saturday. It gives a wealth of detail on the issues at stake, which I won’t repeat. Nor will I repeat the points I made last week about the deeper roots of this current situation in Northern Ireland.

However, there is one aspect of those roots which I didn’t mention but which is an important part of what is happening now. From the beginning, it was an article of faith amongst Brexiters that a trade deal with the EU would be easy because the UK was already aligned with EU rules. This was stated by numerous leading Brexiters before the referendum, was the substantive rationale for Liam Fox’s much-mocked ‘easiest deal in history’ claim, and was re-stated in David Davis’s preface to the first Brexit White Paper in 2017:

“We approach these negotiations from a unique position. As things stand, we have the exact same rules, regulations and standards as the rest of the EU. Unlike most negotiations, these talks will not be about bringing together two divergent systems but about managing the continued cooperation of the UK and the EU.”

As I and many others pointed out whenever such claims were made, they were nonsense, precisely because this was a unique situation in which the aim was not to move towards alignment (in which case, of course, existing alignment would make that process effortless) but to move away from it; not to bring two divergent systems together, but to make two aligned systems diverge. This became all the more true under Boris Johnson and David Frost’s approach to Brexit, which made freedom to diverge from EU regulations the acid test of ‘sovereignty’.

The same basic confusion is now being played out in the NIP rows, especially with respect to sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) rules and checks. Frost repeatedly, for example at last week’s Select Committee, makes the point that the EU should operate a lighter, ‘risk-based’ approach for the UK because of “the fact that we both operate the high food standards which are, in most areas, extremely similar”. Yet at the same time he is adamant that dynamic alignment with EU rules is unacceptable.  So he wants the benefit of being aligned … without making any commitment to being aligned. It is a specific version of the more general Brexiter proposition, discussed in last week’s post, that the UK has left but shouldn’t be treated as if it has left.

It is this which creates what Connelly describes as the current “dangerous stand-off” between the UK and the EU, and although there is seemingly a lull in hostilities at the moment it seems highly likely that there will be a further outbreak in the next few weeks. The European Commission President, at the EU leaders’ meeting this week, made it clear that the NIP must be fully implemented, whereas the UK continues to seek “common sense” solutions (translation: don’t hold us to what we agreed), and wants these in place in time for the mid-June ‘marching season’ in Northern Ireland.

Some believe that Frost will quietly cave in, via some face-saving formula, and that is quite possible. But my sense remains (for reasons discussed in detail in my post a couple of months ago) that he and the government are convinced that the ‘hardball’ tactics of flouting the NIP pay dividends. If so, then after this period of resumed negotiations there will be another explosion. That diagnosis is given extra weight by calls this week from International Trade Secretary Liz Truss to scrap Irish Sea border controls altogether.

Strange days indeed

In this, Truss is presumably burnishing her credentials with the party membership as a possible successor to Johnson (as, no doubt, with her hardline anti-immigration stance, is Priti Patel), in which she is aided by the Brexit tabloids’ adoration of her for delivering the UK’s new trade deals – or deal, really, since the only substantively new trade deal she has (almost) done is that with Australia. Yet the Brexiters’ reactions to that deal have been mixed. Some are breathlessly enthusiastic, such as Dominic Lawson (in a Sunday Times article demolished almost line-by-line by the NFU’s Director of Trade and Business Strategy). Others, notably the ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott, are appalled that it marks “the death knell of the traditional British farm” (an outburst for which she was roundly mocked).

Certainly there is something strange in the Tory Party choosing to alienate what has always been a central part of its political constituency but, then, as its treatment of the City shows, the Brexit Tory Party is a very different beast to that of bygone years. That said, trade expert Sam Lowe argues that, in practice, the deal with Australia is unlikely to have a huge impact, whether that be on farmers or consumers, to the extent of it being “almost unobservable”. That is because, in brief, tariff abolition is no longer the central issue in terms of trade liberalization, and because nothing will change the fact that the UK and Australia are geographically remote – and, as the Brexiters never seem to understand, distance is a key determinant of trade volumes.

Nevertheless, the strangeness of the situation can be seen by imagining what would have happened if, whilst a member of the EU, the EU had struck a deal with Australia on similar terms (something highly unlikely precisely because of the possible effects on farmers). Almost certainly the Brexit press would be denouncing it as a ‘Brussels Betrayal of British Beef’ and, again almost certainly, the UK government would have vetoed any such deal. Yet when made by Britain, it is hailed as a triumph. (It’s worth noting that this point was raised by Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Trade Secretary this week, a further welcome sign that Labour are now becoming bolder in challenging the government’s post-Brexit policy).

Nor does the strangeness end there. Within the Brexiters’ central argument that what was crucial was the restoration of the sovereignty of the British parliament, a specific sub-theme was that with Britain making its own trade deals, these would be subject to debate and scrutiny by the British people’s elected representatives. Yet, in fact, as the Department for International Trade oxymoronically stated this week “we have always been clear parliament will be able to scrutinise Free Trade Agreements following signature rather than at the stage where agreement in principle is reached”. It need hardly be said that this renders scrutiny totally meaningless and represents, in microcosm, the ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’ doublethink of Brexit as a whole.

An incoherent strategy …

What lies behind all this is, as James Kane of the Institute for Government explains, the lack of a coherent post-Brexit trade strategy. To the extent that there is any strategy at all it seems to simply be that ‘signing trade deals’ is a good thing because, as a member of the EU, Britain was not able to do so. Supposedly, the ‘big prize’ now in sight is accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Barely mentioned, if at all, prior to the Referendum, this emerged under Liam Fox as being a key post-Brexit aspiration. It has become all the more so since the prospects of a UK-US trade deal have receded, and to some extent it is seen as a substitute for such a deal (if the US were to revert to the pre-Trump aspiration of also joining what is now CPTPP, which is not clear).

Thus Truss, and the government, are explicitly claiming that the US-Australia deal paves the way for CPTPP membership. This is not, as they sometimes imply, because it is a pre-requisite of membership but because it arguably smooths the way to it since what would have been Australia’s key ask during CPTPP negotiations (tariff-free access for, especially, agricultural products) will already have been satisfied. The interplay between the UK’s CPTPP accession negotiations and those with Australia (and the same, presumably, applies to New Zealand other CPTPP members) is a fascinating issue, as a discussion last week between trade experts Dmitry Grozoubinski, Sam Lowe and Anna Isaacs showed.

The general takeaway from that discussion might be that international trade negotiations comprise a series of complex interrelated trade-offs between multiple parties. For example, the most important practical consequence of what the UK has agreed with Australia about beef tariffs may be what that leads to in terms of what is demanded of it by the US or Brazil. These complexities require a strategy which goes beyond simply assuming that any deal is a good deal and the more deals the better. Or, at least, it does if the aim is maximizing the UK’s economic interest rather than the performative one of generating good headlines for domestic political reasons.

… derived from an incoherent project …

However, that brings us back to the basic incoherence of Brexit as an economic project. Since distance does matter so much, fiddling around making trade deals with remote countries is fairly pointless. Given that Brexit has happened, it’s worth doing, so far as it goes, but it isn’t a benefit, still less a triumph, for Brexit; it’s just some fairly minor damage limitation.

A new ONS trade report is a sharp reminder of this. To try (although it’s not completely possible) to disentangle Brexit and Covid effects they compare the first quarter of 2021 with the first quarter of 2018, and report that trade with the EU decreased by 23.1% (whereas trade with non-EU countries decreased by just 0.8%, suggesting that the Brexit negotiating process and its outcome, rather than the pandemic, was a key driver). The report also shows that, since the end of the transition, post-Brexit trade arrangements have become a far bigger challenge for businesses than the pandemic. The nature of those challenges, especially for small businesses, was spelt out in minute detail in testimony given to the UK Trade and Business Commission yesterday. It is also clear from a new survey showing that 56% of UK businesses think Brexit has had a negative effect on them and just 5% that it has been positive.

Given that, prior to Brexit, the EU-27 accounted for about 50% of UK trade, it’s obvious that to compensate for such massive decreases in trade with the EU, that with non-EU countries would have to be revolutionised and the constraints of distance make that virtually impossible, no matter how many, or even how good, the trade deals the UK strikes. In short, far from the promise that “Brexit will cement our status as a great trading nation” (£), it is causing Britain to become a less great trading nation. No doubt Brexiters and the government will try to spin these latest figures as showing that the UK is ‘re-balancing’ away from its dependence on the EU for trade to being a ‘truly Global Britain’, because of course it (already) means that trade with the EU is less than 50% of UK trade. But it will be nonsense – it just means that the trade pie as a whole has shrunk.

In a related development, and following from the recent failure of the UK and Norway to reach a deal on fishing, it now seems likely that the UK-Norway trade deal will collapse. This was a temporary rollover deal, agreed last December, to be superseded by a permanent and possibly more extensive agreement. But Norwegian politicians are concerned about the impact on their farmers of tariff-free British beef and cheese imports. Note that although Australia’s economy (USD 1.4 trillion, 2019) is much larger than Norway’s (USD 403 billion, 2019), Norway is a more significant trading partner for the UK (£27,436 million, 2019) than is Australia (£16,041 million, 2019).

It’s instructive to see the reactions of leave voters to the news that the Norway deal may fall through. These included rage that this is punishment for leaving the EU (apparently oblivious to the fact that Norway isn’t in the EU) and suggestions that Norway should realise that, being the smaller economy, it needs a deal more than the UK (a strange inversion of what they used to say about the UK-EU negotiations). As always, bellicose victimhood is the guiding theme.

… rooted in an inherent contradiction

The issue of protecting farmers, whether Norwegian or British, goes to the heart of the trade dilemmas Brexit poses for the UK. Whilst Brexiters deride the EU as a ‘protectionist racket’ (an accusation based more on a bad pun than a serious analysis), the protection of agriculture is, globally, almost invariably the most contentious of trade policy issues. In part, as Brexiters should appreciate, that is because of the complex interactions of national identity, soil, and foodstuffs. As regards Brexit, it is also because of the peculiar contradiction of nationalism and globalism. Many who voted leave believed that it would mean not just good news for farmers but the restoration of the heavy industries which have declined in the years since Britain joined the EEC (though of course that wasn’t the cause).

Those votes were immediately taken by the Brexit global free traders as permission to pursue their own agenda – most notably in Fox’s ‘Manchester speech’, made in September 2016 before the hard Brexit of leaving the single market and customs union had even been announced. And, as the deal with Australia suggests, the UK is going to concede tariff-free access to British markets whilst getting almost nothing in return. The gamble Johnson’s government is making is that leave voters will swallow this on politically nationalistic grounds (‘Britain is a global trading nation once more’) and ignore, or be unaware of, its consequences for economic nationalism.

In this gamble, the government may be assisted by one of the strangest features of the way that Brexiters are framing post-Brexit trade deals, and trade more generally. Rather than thinking of these issues in terms of economic rationality or the economics of competitive advantage, they seem to imagine them in terms of ‘cultural affinity’. That imagination (which is what it is, since it involves a hopelessly outdated and sentimental apprehension) is most obvious in the still thriving CANZUK fantasy, but also applies to an Australia-only deal.

The politics of “gormlessness”

It is a gamble that is quite likely to succeed. And everyone knows why, even though it is deemed unsayable in what in 2017 I called the new political correctness of Brexit: the coalition of voters which chose Brexit and which now supports Johnson’s government is largely ignorant of the realities of contemporary trade, business, and international relations. It’s this which unites the Home Counties golf club bore, pontificating about how he ran his import-export business just fine before the EEC, with the coastal town pensioner lamenting that ‘I just want my country back’. Despite the overlap between leading Brexiters and free speech union libertarians that obvious fact – far more than anything proscribed by ‘woke’ activists – is something that cannot be said because to do so is, supposedly, ‘elitist’.

It is this electoral base which chose to endorse what, as Cummings has so eloquently told us, is the “completely crazy” situation of him and Boris Johnson being in positions of power. Almost all attention has focussed, understandably, on what Cummings’ testimony revealed about the dysfunctional government and woefully inadequate leadership during the coronavirus crisis. But it is crucial to remember that at the same time this same government and this same leadership were engaged in the highly complex trade and cooperation negotiations with the EU.

More specifically, it was in this period that Johnson refused to extend the transition, despite the chaos that was going on. It was in this period that he – apparently with the support of both Cummings and Frost – threatened to break international law with the Internal Market Bill. It was throughout this period that he was constantly threatening to end the transition with no trade deal in place and claiming that the UK was fully prepared to cope with the disruption that would have ensued. And it was from the decisions taken in this period that many of the present consequences of Brexit arise.

Not only that but, whilst Cummings may have gone, Johnson and his Brexit government remain in place. And just as, vaccines notwithstanding, the government continues to bodge the management of the pandemic so too does it continue, as Fintan O’Toole put it this week (£), to “strategise gormlessness” in its approach to Brexit, especially in continuing to ascribe its malign effects to others. It remains to be seen whether the Cummings revelations about coronavirus policy dent Johnson’s support within his electoral base, but it’s unlikely that his ‘gormless’ Brexit strategy will do so. After all, it is a strategy designed precisely to appeal to that base.

A preview of the geo-political costs of Brexit

Much has been written about the economic damage that Brexit is already beginning to do to the British economy and the longer-term damage that can be expected. In the last week, we have also begun to glimpse the geo-political price that it will exact.

EU nations were quick to show solidarity with a fellow member state over the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, but the unspoken words were that this was an attack on a country who is a member state – for now. And whilst the Prime Minister and other politicians talked of seeking support from the EU and its members the inevitable reality is that British influence on, for example, the already divisive issue within the EU of sanctions against Russia is far more limited now and post-Brexit will disappear. That disappearance will also have implications for other foreign policy disputes, such as those over Gibraltar or the Falklands. The EU position on these and other issues will in future not be influenced by Britain and will not necessarily be supportive of Britain.

By contrast, the US reaction to the attack was slow, initially confused and, from Trump, equivocal. The sacking of Rex Tillerson may not have been, as some suggested, a reaction to his robust statement in support of the UK just hours before; but at the very least it showed that Trump cared nothing whatsoever for the damage done to Britain by this timing. And although the US position has becoming considerably harder in the last few days the reality is that Trump doesn’t offer reliable support partly, in relation to the present crisis, because of ongoing questions about his relationship with Russia; but in any case, because of his capricious and unpredictable nature. The idea that he was going to be a great friend to Brexit Britain because of his brief chumminess with Nigel Farage was always a fantasy.

At the same time, both in relation to Trump’s new policy on steel and aluminium tariffs and, for that matter, the Iranian nuclear deal, the divisions between the EU and the US are becoming greater and in the process exposing the incoherence of Brexit. On both of those (and other) issues it is clear that British interests align with the EU, and require EU heft to be pursued. Britain is stuck between the two, with waning influence on each of them. Crucially, even if and when a more conventional administration emerges in the US it will not help matters. Prior to Trump and presumably afterwards the standard US view is that UK membership of the EU is vital, and it gave the UK a particular transatlantic bridging role which will be lost forever after Brexit. This was clearly spelled out by numerous senior American politicians prior to the Referendum.

Brexiters’ standard response to these kinds of issues is to say that security is nothing to do with EU membership and everything to do with NATO. That response is deeply flawed, even leaving aside the current issues of Trump’s ambivalent attitude to NATO. Firstly, the EU and NATO are now inter-related in ever more deep and complex ways. Britain, as a NATO member, will continue to be part of that relationship but will no longer be pivotal to it. Secondly, security is about far more than military issues, but rather a spectrum of diplomatic and economic capacities. Again, the Iranian nuclear deal and the sanctions against Russia are examples of the EU’s role in such security. And beyond this, of course, are issues about security in the sense of policing and intelligence co-operation. The reality is that it is not possible to separate out as discrete elements military, diplomatic, economic, intelligence, policing etc. They are all connected together as aspects of geo-political relationships.

In so far as Britain has a strategy to address any of this it goes under the slogan ‘Global Britain’. But that was effectively dismissed as meaningless in a Foreign Affairs Select Committee report this week except to the extent that British foreign policy has always had a global focus, and the report pointed out that the failure to secure a British seat on the International Court of Justice for the first time since 1946 was hardly a ringing endorsement of the strategy. For that matter, the relentless hostility to immigration shown by the government scarcely speaks of a global vision. And Brexit itself has already led to reductions in Britain’s diplomatic presence outside the EU in order to bolster the staffing in EU countries (this, in turn, reflecting the misguided idea that Brexit can be negotiated bi-laterally with member states rather than with the EU-27 en bloc).

Meanwhile this week saw what should, but probably won’t, put an end to Brexiters’ fantasy about the Commonwealth as the basis for future trade. This was always, indeed, a fantasy (the Commonwealth explicitly has never been a trade project; many of its members already have deals with the EU or are developing them; many of them are members of their own regional trade groupings; and none of them has an appetite for the neo-colonial implications of the Brexiters’ dreams) but was made so unequivocally explicit this week that even the rabidly pro-Brexit Express had to report it although the readers’ comments beneath suggest that the message still has not sunk in with Brexiters. The still occasionally heard CANZUK fantasy is even more absurd.

That Britain doesn’t have a workable strategy for foreign policy post-Brexit is in any case not surprising considering who holds the post of Foreign Secretary. No one seriously thinks that Boris Johnson is the best person for the job. He has it solely and simply as an artefact of the domestic politics of Brexit, another small price we are already paying. There can surely never have been a less statesmanlike holder of this office and he is held in contempt in many foreign capitals, especially in European countries given his long record of mendacity about the EU going back to his time as a journalist. That can hardly be an asset when, as at present, the message he is carrying is a request to trust him in saying that there is strong evidence that Russia was responsible for the nerve agent attack.

I’m not suggesting (as some of the angry responses to my recent tweets on this subject imagine me to be) that the Salisbury attack happened as a result of Brexit. That’s not my point, although some, including the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, have made it. I’m arguing that responding to the attack gives an early, partial taste of what post-Brexit geo-politics are going to be like. Brexit won’t make such politics impossible, nor will it make Britain completely friendless: support has indeed been garnered for the British response. It will just make everything more difficult by jettisoning the carefully crafted role that Britain had carved out for itself in recent decades as a node between the major global institutions and a key shaper of its own continent. Yesterday the Prime Minister spoke of having sought support for Britain by taking its grievance to the UN, NATO and the EU, piling layer after layer of pressure. After Brexit, the third of these layers won’t be available.

The effect won’t be immediate or dramatic, just a gradual leaching away status and influence in the world. Against that loss, there is precisely zero geo-political benefit of Brexit: it is all downside. Nor, unlike the economic consequences, is this something that can be mitigated by soft rather than hard Brexit. Both are equally damaging. On the other hand, a no deal Brexit in which Britain walked out of its international obligations, perhaps even reneging on the phase 1 agreement, as some Ultras repeatedly urge would make the geo-political damage catastrophically worse by completely shredding Britain’s reputation as a reliable international partner.

Yet it is a huge irony that Brexit does give Britain one very strong card in dealing with Russian aggression. If we really wanted to do something in response to Salisbury that would pain Russia rather more than the slightly peculiar call to “go away and shut up” we could abandon Brexit altogether, since in isolating Britain and weakening the EU it is, as Rafael Behr argued last year, Putin’s dream policy.