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.
Showing posts with label David Allen Green. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Allen Green. Show all posts
Friday, 7 February 2025
Friday, 14 May 2021
Parallel universes
To anyone who has followed, even cursorily, reports about the effects of Brexit since the vote to leave, and especially since the end of the transition period, or even just in the last week or so, this week’s Queen’s Speech, with its disconnected rag-bag of policies, will suggest that the government inhabits a strangely parallel universe.
Nothing in it began to address the realities of the damage that Brexit has already caused, such as that shown, misleading claims by David Frost to the contrary, by the latest UK-EU goods trade figures which suggest that by March 2021 trade was 11% lower than it would have been without Brexit, on top of a 10% fall between the referendum and the end of the transition period. Moreover, despite Panglossian claims from the usual suspects (£) about how companies are now adapting to the new trade arrangements, what that ignores is that where adaptation does not mean stopping trading altogether it means incorporating new costs, with impacts on prices and competitiveness. As ever it is amusing to see erstwhile cheerleaders for free trade tying themselves in knots to explain that introducing barriers to trade doesn’t suppress it. And of course all this is before the UK has started introducing import controls on goods coming from the EU.
Nothing, either, on the emergent damage to the services sector (£), the looming threat of supply disruptions due to shortages of truck drivers(£), the scandal in the making in the settled status scheme for EU citizens or the actual scandal about detention of EU nationals at the UK border. There are also now warning noises that the UK could run out of construction materials. This arises from the shift from CE to UKCA conformity assessment which has to be completed by the end of this year and, as I have been warning for a while, is a ticking time bomb in terms of business preparedness.
However, there are at least now signs that Labour is willing to start challenging the government on the effects of Brexit. Rachel Reeves, when shadowing Michael Gove, had already done so and her elevation this week to Shadow Chancellor is therefore significant. Immediately, in the Queen’s Speech debate, she has raised the problems being caused by Brexit to businesses and the damage to exports.
This matters not as a way of continuing the debate on the merits of Brexit but because it’s not possible to discuss the realities of the British economy without mentioning the effects of Brexit. To put it another way, just because there is a Brexit culture war, it doesn’t mean that the economics of Brexit should be a no-go area. Indeed were it to be so it would be one sign that the Brexiters had won the culture war.
Benefitting from Brexit (sic)
Equally, anyone still expecting Brexit to herald some exciting new world of opportunity will have been disappointed by the Queen’s Speech. It scarcely lived up to the Brexiters’ billing of this as a moment of national liberation (£) from the supposed colonial yoke of the EUSSR (also known as the Nazi EU and the neo-liberal EU, which might suggest that Brexiters’ grasp of political philosophy is a little shaky). Rather, ‘taking back control’ turns out to be something of a damp squib. For which there is a simple explanation: it was an illusion.
Thus, tucked away in a few pages (starting p.48) within the briefing notes that accompanied the speech, under the heading ‘Benefitting from Brexit’ were various all but meaningless, or simply dishonest proposals. These included: promises about unspecified better regulation for business, a reprise of the old ‘Brexit will slash red tape’ line, which will provoke a hollow laugh amongst businesses mired in the red tape Brexit has (re)created; new policies on state subsidies, procurement, and planning which to some extent consolidate what existed under the EU, and make no reference to the level playing field constraints of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement or for that matter the WTO’s procurement constraints; freeports (of course), which didn’t require Brexit and are anyway pretty pointless; a bill to recognize international professional qualifications which didn't require Brexit; an animal welfare bill which may include provisions to end live animal exports, which wouldn't have been possible without Brexit*; and the introduction of the Turing Scheme, which will be less good than the Erasmus scheme it replaces.
Pursuing the Brexit culture war
But if there was little here that required, or was a benefit of, Brexit, there was plenty more which was distinctly ‘Brexity’, in the sense of pursuing the culture war of which Brexit was the biggest battle and which Boris Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ continue to prosecute through endless skimble-skamble raids. Thus there were long-trailed provisions to hobble judicial review, to clamp down on public protest, to bring ‘woke’ universities to heel, and to discourage voting amongst the unwashed. No doubt it was designed to appeal to the kind of ‘red wall’ Tory voters that Labour sentimentalists still persist in regarding as their ‘heartlands’. It was also (or therefore), as David Allen Green observes, “a multi-pronged attack on our liberties” growing from the ‘authoritarian populism’ expressed in Brexiter notions of the ‘will of the people’.
The first two of these measures can be seen to grow at least in part from Brexit. Resentment of the role of the judiciary via the Article 50 case and the prorogation case still smoulders. Rather more ludicrously, at least one part of the planned legislation on protests seems to derive from the way that Steve Bray’s one-man ‘stop Brexit’ demonstration so infuriated Brexiter MPs. But the wider and more sinister purpose is to remove both checks on and challenges to government power, again a hallmark of the Brexit process but now to be made a general principle.
Whilst more obviously an elite power grab than anything to do with the popular will, it is the hallmark of authoritarian populism to present the powerful as the incarnation of ‘the people’ and, thus, any checks upon the powerful as thwarting the people. This is the “grotesque political spoonerism” of populism that emerged with such force with Brexit.
The third item, on ‘free speech’ in universities, relates to the pervasive hostility to ‘liberal intellectuals’, and perhaps to (university) education itself, that characterizes Brexit and post-Brexit politics. In part, as with the proposed judicial review and protest bills, it is about trying to close down those parts of civil society that might challenge government. It also reflects the sense amongst Brexiters that universities in general are wellsprings of the social liberalism which they abjure, and in particular that the graduates produced tend to reject the politics of authoritarian populism.
This proposal is already revealing a mass of contradictions, including the possibility that the new law will protect the rights of holocaust deniers to speak on campus and yet also require universities to prevent anti-Semitism on campus. This is only one of the many problems which ensue when in the name of ‘free speech’ it is proposed to create a state directorate to oversee it. As with the free traders now justifying trade barriers, the free speech libertarians are in the contradictory position of advocating state policing of this freedom.
This contradiction flows less from intellectual confusion than from dishonesty. For the fundamental problem is that the ‘free speech warriors’ want to prevent political correctness ‘stopping us saying what we think’ whilst also putting a brake on ‘woke intellectuals’ banging on about slavery. Free speech ‘for us but not them’ isn’t quite the principled position they seem to think, and despite the preferred self-description of many such warriors being that of ‘Classical Liberal’, one can only imagine that they haven’t read much John Stuart Mill. (For more on this proposed legislation, which seems in equal measure both pernicious and silly, see Professor Steve Peers’ twitter thread).
The fourth of the authoritarian populist provisions is the plan to require photo-ID of voters. It’s ostensible purpose, to combat electoral fraud, is so paper thin that even the naked rambler could wear it on his walks without compromising his principles. There are virtually no cases of in-person electoral fraud in the UK. Its purpose is, almost flagrantly, to prevent voters from ethnic minorities and marginalised groups, who are less likely to have such ID, from voting because they don’t tend to vote Tory. Yet it is possible that this will backfire given Johnson’s new-found reliance on older voters in ‘red wall’ seats who may also be relatively less likely to have photo-ID. Either way, it is a shabby little trick.
The rot beneath the pomp
There was another way in which the Queen’s Speech bespoke of a parallel universe. On the surface, here was the pomp and ceremony of centuries of tradition in the ‘mother of all parliaments’. And media coverage was awash with the breathless commentary which, apparently, is now required of broadcasters, especially the BBC, to show that they are of the people and not the liberal metropolitan elite when covering any vaguely royal ritual (we might, perhaps, call this doctrine ‘Witchellism’).
But ‘surface’ is all it was. Like a rotten piece of fruit with its skin intact, underneath was a slimy, suppurating flesh. Not just because it announced measures that were so transparently anti-democratic but because it concealed how the Union itself is falling apart because of Brexit, most obviously as regards Scotland for reasons spelt out sharply by the eminent psephologist Professor Sir John Curtice this week.
So even as it proposed measures to ‘strengthen the union’ the Queen’s Speech left resolutely unaddressed how profoundly Brexit has weakened it. Whilst hardly a new observation, it bears saying that not only was Brexit primarily a project of the English regions, but it was pursued in a form to cause maximum distress to those parts of the UK that had not voted for it. The Brexiters were able to do it, and they called it the will of the people, but there will be a huge reckoning.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in relation to Northern Ireland where, in his hurry to ‘ditch the hated backstop’ that Theresa May had agreed, Johnson, apparently without understanding or caring, effectively segmented the UK single market. Although the British media has recently gone rather quiet about this, intensive discussions continue between the UK and the EU over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
It is hard to be sure, but there is little obvious sign of progress. The EU has rejected UK proposals for a light-touch ‘risk-based’ approach to border checks, and David Frost is now speaking of the NIP being “unsustainable” and hinting at further unilateral breaches by the UK. It hardly needs saying that it was Frost, himself, who negotiated it and Johnson who signed it, nor that any additional breaches will be profoundly damaging to both UK-EU and UK-US relations. Meanwhile, unionist opposition to the NIP is hardening ominously and the marching season is not far off.
Johnson will meet the Irish Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, today to discuss a variety of UK-Ireland matters, and reports suggest that he will use it to try to enlist Martin’s support for the UK’s preferred ‘equivalence regime’ (see last week's post for explanation). That seems to be implied by the fact that David Frost will also attend. If so, Martin is unlikely to engage in such a discussion, since it is a UK-EU matter, and it would suggest that even after all these years the UK government still hasn’t grasped that the EU negotiates as a bloc, and in this case through the structures established by the NIP.
The culture war of attrition
This is just the most high-profile way in which Brexit continues to develop and be negotiated – other examples include the now-linked issues of fishing and financial services, with the prospects for a financial services equivalence agreement now looking remote. It is this, along with the still emerging economic realities of Brexit, which makes calls, such as those of Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, to “draw a line under Brexit” and to “embrace it” so fatuous. For whilst it’s right to say that rejoining the EU is simply not in prospect, you can’t draw a line under, or embrace, something which is a still unfolding process. Nor, as Burnham wants, can the focus now be on the Union without recognizing what Brexit is doing to it.
As Anthony Robinson discusses in his wide-ranging Yorkshire Bylines piece this week, Brexit is neither stable, nor sustainable, nor settled. At least one reason for that, long-evident but underscored by this week’s Queen’s Speech, is that Brexit has now morphed into a much wider domestic political and cultural battle. Brexiters seemed to think that winning the referendum was enough, a view falsified by the protracted Brexit process it engendered, and that it would take us to the ‘sunny uplands’, which the Brexit process has failed to reveal.
That process is still continuing so that, rather as happened with the confident predictions that the First World War would be over by Christmas, we are now stuck in a long, gloomy and vicious culture war of attrition. In those trenches, even the dimmest, most chinless, subaltern no longer talks blithely of sunny uplands to come. Only in a parallel universe, far from the mud and rot, are those old lies still told with such high zest.
*Updated 16/05/21 to correct my original, incorrect, claim that nothing in this Bill would require Brexit. Thanks to Professor Anthony Glees for the correction.
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Nothing in it began to address the realities of the damage that Brexit has already caused, such as that shown, misleading claims by David Frost to the contrary, by the latest UK-EU goods trade figures which suggest that by March 2021 trade was 11% lower than it would have been without Brexit, on top of a 10% fall between the referendum and the end of the transition period. Moreover, despite Panglossian claims from the usual suspects (£) about how companies are now adapting to the new trade arrangements, what that ignores is that where adaptation does not mean stopping trading altogether it means incorporating new costs, with impacts on prices and competitiveness. As ever it is amusing to see erstwhile cheerleaders for free trade tying themselves in knots to explain that introducing barriers to trade doesn’t suppress it. And of course all this is before the UK has started introducing import controls on goods coming from the EU.
Nothing, either, on the emergent damage to the services sector (£), the looming threat of supply disruptions due to shortages of truck drivers(£), the scandal in the making in the settled status scheme for EU citizens or the actual scandal about detention of EU nationals at the UK border. There are also now warning noises that the UK could run out of construction materials. This arises from the shift from CE to UKCA conformity assessment which has to be completed by the end of this year and, as I have been warning for a while, is a ticking time bomb in terms of business preparedness.
However, there are at least now signs that Labour is willing to start challenging the government on the effects of Brexit. Rachel Reeves, when shadowing Michael Gove, had already done so and her elevation this week to Shadow Chancellor is therefore significant. Immediately, in the Queen’s Speech debate, she has raised the problems being caused by Brexit to businesses and the damage to exports.
This matters not as a way of continuing the debate on the merits of Brexit but because it’s not possible to discuss the realities of the British economy without mentioning the effects of Brexit. To put it another way, just because there is a Brexit culture war, it doesn’t mean that the economics of Brexit should be a no-go area. Indeed were it to be so it would be one sign that the Brexiters had won the culture war.
Benefitting from Brexit (sic)
Equally, anyone still expecting Brexit to herald some exciting new world of opportunity will have been disappointed by the Queen’s Speech. It scarcely lived up to the Brexiters’ billing of this as a moment of national liberation (£) from the supposed colonial yoke of the EUSSR (also known as the Nazi EU and the neo-liberal EU, which might suggest that Brexiters’ grasp of political philosophy is a little shaky). Rather, ‘taking back control’ turns out to be something of a damp squib. For which there is a simple explanation: it was an illusion.
Thus, tucked away in a few pages (starting p.48) within the briefing notes that accompanied the speech, under the heading ‘Benefitting from Brexit’ were various all but meaningless, or simply dishonest proposals. These included: promises about unspecified better regulation for business, a reprise of the old ‘Brexit will slash red tape’ line, which will provoke a hollow laugh amongst businesses mired in the red tape Brexit has (re)created; new policies on state subsidies, procurement, and planning which to some extent consolidate what existed under the EU, and make no reference to the level playing field constraints of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement or for that matter the WTO’s procurement constraints; freeports (of course), which didn’t require Brexit and are anyway pretty pointless; a bill to recognize international professional qualifications which didn't require Brexit; an animal welfare bill which may include provisions to end live animal exports, which wouldn't have been possible without Brexit*; and the introduction of the Turing Scheme, which will be less good than the Erasmus scheme it replaces.
Pursuing the Brexit culture war
But if there was little here that required, or was a benefit of, Brexit, there was plenty more which was distinctly ‘Brexity’, in the sense of pursuing the culture war of which Brexit was the biggest battle and which Boris Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ continue to prosecute through endless skimble-skamble raids. Thus there were long-trailed provisions to hobble judicial review, to clamp down on public protest, to bring ‘woke’ universities to heel, and to discourage voting amongst the unwashed. No doubt it was designed to appeal to the kind of ‘red wall’ Tory voters that Labour sentimentalists still persist in regarding as their ‘heartlands’. It was also (or therefore), as David Allen Green observes, “a multi-pronged attack on our liberties” growing from the ‘authoritarian populism’ expressed in Brexiter notions of the ‘will of the people’.
The first two of these measures can be seen to grow at least in part from Brexit. Resentment of the role of the judiciary via the Article 50 case and the prorogation case still smoulders. Rather more ludicrously, at least one part of the planned legislation on protests seems to derive from the way that Steve Bray’s one-man ‘stop Brexit’ demonstration so infuriated Brexiter MPs. But the wider and more sinister purpose is to remove both checks on and challenges to government power, again a hallmark of the Brexit process but now to be made a general principle.
Whilst more obviously an elite power grab than anything to do with the popular will, it is the hallmark of authoritarian populism to present the powerful as the incarnation of ‘the people’ and, thus, any checks upon the powerful as thwarting the people. This is the “grotesque political spoonerism” of populism that emerged with such force with Brexit.
The third item, on ‘free speech’ in universities, relates to the pervasive hostility to ‘liberal intellectuals’, and perhaps to (university) education itself, that characterizes Brexit and post-Brexit politics. In part, as with the proposed judicial review and protest bills, it is about trying to close down those parts of civil society that might challenge government. It also reflects the sense amongst Brexiters that universities in general are wellsprings of the social liberalism which they abjure, and in particular that the graduates produced tend to reject the politics of authoritarian populism.
This proposal is already revealing a mass of contradictions, including the possibility that the new law will protect the rights of holocaust deniers to speak on campus and yet also require universities to prevent anti-Semitism on campus. This is only one of the many problems which ensue when in the name of ‘free speech’ it is proposed to create a state directorate to oversee it. As with the free traders now justifying trade barriers, the free speech libertarians are in the contradictory position of advocating state policing of this freedom.
This contradiction flows less from intellectual confusion than from dishonesty. For the fundamental problem is that the ‘free speech warriors’ want to prevent political correctness ‘stopping us saying what we think’ whilst also putting a brake on ‘woke intellectuals’ banging on about slavery. Free speech ‘for us but not them’ isn’t quite the principled position they seem to think, and despite the preferred self-description of many such warriors being that of ‘Classical Liberal’, one can only imagine that they haven’t read much John Stuart Mill. (For more on this proposed legislation, which seems in equal measure both pernicious and silly, see Professor Steve Peers’ twitter thread).
The fourth of the authoritarian populist provisions is the plan to require photo-ID of voters. It’s ostensible purpose, to combat electoral fraud, is so paper thin that even the naked rambler could wear it on his walks without compromising his principles. There are virtually no cases of in-person electoral fraud in the UK. Its purpose is, almost flagrantly, to prevent voters from ethnic minorities and marginalised groups, who are less likely to have such ID, from voting because they don’t tend to vote Tory. Yet it is possible that this will backfire given Johnson’s new-found reliance on older voters in ‘red wall’ seats who may also be relatively less likely to have photo-ID. Either way, it is a shabby little trick.
The rot beneath the pomp
There was another way in which the Queen’s Speech bespoke of a parallel universe. On the surface, here was the pomp and ceremony of centuries of tradition in the ‘mother of all parliaments’. And media coverage was awash with the breathless commentary which, apparently, is now required of broadcasters, especially the BBC, to show that they are of the people and not the liberal metropolitan elite when covering any vaguely royal ritual (we might, perhaps, call this doctrine ‘Witchellism’).
But ‘surface’ is all it was. Like a rotten piece of fruit with its skin intact, underneath was a slimy, suppurating flesh. Not just because it announced measures that were so transparently anti-democratic but because it concealed how the Union itself is falling apart because of Brexit, most obviously as regards Scotland for reasons spelt out sharply by the eminent psephologist Professor Sir John Curtice this week.
So even as it proposed measures to ‘strengthen the union’ the Queen’s Speech left resolutely unaddressed how profoundly Brexit has weakened it. Whilst hardly a new observation, it bears saying that not only was Brexit primarily a project of the English regions, but it was pursued in a form to cause maximum distress to those parts of the UK that had not voted for it. The Brexiters were able to do it, and they called it the will of the people, but there will be a huge reckoning.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in relation to Northern Ireland where, in his hurry to ‘ditch the hated backstop’ that Theresa May had agreed, Johnson, apparently without understanding or caring, effectively segmented the UK single market. Although the British media has recently gone rather quiet about this, intensive discussions continue between the UK and the EU over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
It is hard to be sure, but there is little obvious sign of progress. The EU has rejected UK proposals for a light-touch ‘risk-based’ approach to border checks, and David Frost is now speaking of the NIP being “unsustainable” and hinting at further unilateral breaches by the UK. It hardly needs saying that it was Frost, himself, who negotiated it and Johnson who signed it, nor that any additional breaches will be profoundly damaging to both UK-EU and UK-US relations. Meanwhile, unionist opposition to the NIP is hardening ominously and the marching season is not far off.
Johnson will meet the Irish Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, today to discuss a variety of UK-Ireland matters, and reports suggest that he will use it to try to enlist Martin’s support for the UK’s preferred ‘equivalence regime’ (see last week's post for explanation). That seems to be implied by the fact that David Frost will also attend. If so, Martin is unlikely to engage in such a discussion, since it is a UK-EU matter, and it would suggest that even after all these years the UK government still hasn’t grasped that the EU negotiates as a bloc, and in this case through the structures established by the NIP.
The culture war of attrition
This is just the most high-profile way in which Brexit continues to develop and be negotiated – other examples include the now-linked issues of fishing and financial services, with the prospects for a financial services equivalence agreement now looking remote. It is this, along with the still emerging economic realities of Brexit, which makes calls, such as those of Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, to “draw a line under Brexit” and to “embrace it” so fatuous. For whilst it’s right to say that rejoining the EU is simply not in prospect, you can’t draw a line under, or embrace, something which is a still unfolding process. Nor, as Burnham wants, can the focus now be on the Union without recognizing what Brexit is doing to it.
As Anthony Robinson discusses in his wide-ranging Yorkshire Bylines piece this week, Brexit is neither stable, nor sustainable, nor settled. At least one reason for that, long-evident but underscored by this week’s Queen’s Speech, is that Brexit has now morphed into a much wider domestic political and cultural battle. Brexiters seemed to think that winning the referendum was enough, a view falsified by the protracted Brexit process it engendered, and that it would take us to the ‘sunny uplands’, which the Brexit process has failed to reveal.
That process is still continuing so that, rather as happened with the confident predictions that the First World War would be over by Christmas, we are now stuck in a long, gloomy and vicious culture war of attrition. In those trenches, even the dimmest, most chinless, subaltern no longer talks blithely of sunny uplands to come. Only in a parallel universe, far from the mud and rot, are those old lies still told with such high zest.
*Updated 16/05/21 to correct my original, incorrect, claim that nothing in this Bill would require Brexit. Thanks to Professor Anthony Glees for the correction.
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My book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) will be published by Biteback in June 2021. It can be pre-ordered from Biteback, or via other online platforms, as a paperback or e-book.
Friday, 26 February 2021
Brexit constipation
It was always going to be the case that post-Brexit the UK and the EU would be in ongoing negotiations, for which the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) would be the basis and from which the relationship would evolve. That was assured if only by the Brexiters’ truism that ‘we are leaving the EU, but we are not leaving Europe’. The basic facts of geography, economics and international relations make such continuing negotiations inevitable.
Boris Johnson’s recent G7 speech at the Munich security conference may have tried to ignore that inconvenient truth - by mentioning the EU only twice, and then disparagingly – just as he wants to avoid all mention of Brexit, but it doesn’t change the reality. It’s a reality which takes the concrete form of the crisis that is silently engulfing Britain’s trade with the EU, its biggest trading partner. There are increasing delays in the shipping of goods, with shortages and price rises as a result. Some firms, especially smaller ones, have simply given up on trading. Meanwhile there has already been significant damage to the financial services industry and warnings of worse to come.
So, whilst rarely in the news headlines, sector after sector is now reporting the impact of the new barriers which were the inevitable result of leaving the customs union and the single market. Professor Daniel Kelemen of Rutgers University has created an astonishing archive of, so far, 200 reputable news stories over the last month or so about the quite extraordinary damage which is being done by Brexit.
However, what was not inevitable, although always highly likely, was that rather than these ongoing negotiations being about a relationship evolving from the TCA they continue to endlessly revisit and replay the debates that led to it. Brexit is thus stuck. At the heart of this lies the continuing refusal of the government, and Brexiters more generally, to accept what Brexit means and to accept what the UK agreed to, both in the TCA and in the Withdrawal Agreement (WA), including the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP).
One index of that refusal is the replacement of Michael Gove as co-chair of the Joint Committee overseeing the WA/NIP by David Frost, who negotiated the TCA. Frost will also be the UK chair of the new Partnership Council to oversee the TCA. This in itself is suggestive of a desire to frame the post-Brexit negotiations in terms of those which led to the TCA rather than in terms of what might develop from it. It is also indicative of a more hard-line approach (£), in contrast to Gove’s supposed weakness, with Frost’s monocular focus on ‘sovereignty’ at its heart (the EU, meanwhile, has moved on, although as Jon Worth explains on his blog that presents its own issues).
A hard Frost
The irony is that it was Frost’s approach, enabled, of course, by Johnson and building on the red lines established by Theresa May, which created precisely the trade barriers which are now causing so much damage. The only way in which these supposed ‘teething problems’ will be reduced (they cannot be eliminated without reversing hard Brexit altogether) is if the UK agrees to align more closely with EU rules.
In particular, aligning on sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) rules would, as suggested in my previous post, ease the pressure on some of the industries suffering the most visibly, such as fishing and agriculture, and unblock some of the problems that Northern Ireland is facing. It seems clear that the EU would be amenable to this. Heeding calls from the chemicals industry to reconsider how the UK relates its regulation to the EU REACH system would be another way of improving on the TCA. Similarly, were the UK to accept a mobility agreement with the EU it could reduce some of the damage to services trade, along with other measures such as those suggested by Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform.
Perhaps Frost will prove more pragmatic than his previous conduct suggests, but the signs are not good, as Mujtaba Rahman, the respected analyst at Eurasia Group, has convincingly argued this week. What seems more likely is a continuation, or an escalation, of the bellicose rhetoric of ‘retaliation’ against the EU for implementing the agreement that the UK itself has signed up to. As both Rahman and Rafael Behr – in an interesting analysis which I’ll return to later – suggest, there is considerable domestic political mileage in continuing to pick fights with the EU. The economic damage, which might in other contexts be a national crisis, seems hardly to matter to this government and it doesn’t seem to be paying any political price for this.
Labour’s deafening silence
One reason for that is Keir Starmer’s deliberate and now deafening silence on what is happening. The one thing which an Opposition leader can do is influence the news agenda. If Labour were minded to, what are currently a stream of apparently disconnected stories, often buried in the business pages, could be pulled together to create headline news of massive governmental economic incompetence. Of course Johnson would try to twist this as Labour being anti-Brexit, or seeking to reverse Brexit, but if Starmer were canny he would position the attack in the fertile soil of Johnson having betrayed Brexit by hastily signing a deal for his own political convenience without regard for what it meant for ordinary people and for the country in general.
That is, after all, what some and perhaps many leave voters now think and so would not even necessarily entail alienating former Labour leave voters in the ‘red wall’. Such voters were probably not, for the most part, those for whom Brexit was a huge over-riding issue in and of itself but, having voted for it, they then ‘lent Johnson their vote’ to ‘get Brexit done’. That implies only the softest of commitments to voting Tory, and one very receptive to the charge that Brexit may have been ‘done’ but it was ‘done wrong’ by the Tories. The other side of the coin is that, in pussy-footing around the supposed sensibilities of red wall voters, Labour are treating the bulk of their supporters with contempt.
Electoral considerations aside, Starmer’s failure of leadership on, not Brexit, but the UK’s post-Brexit future is a catastrophic dereliction of duty. Who else is going to speak up for those being damaged by what is happening to this country’s trade? It’s also a major strategic error. He has a once in a generation opportunity to cast Labour not only as the party of business but, in doing so, as the protector of the working-class jobs and communities that are dependent on trade with the EU. It is ironic that Starmer is now replicating the way that, as I once described it, Jeremy Corbyn approached Brexit like an inordinately straitlaced Victorian confronted with a piano leg. In this way, too, Brexit is stuck.
The Brexit Ultras are stuck in the same old loops
Whilst the government is being given a free pass by Labour to escape scrutiny of the effects of the Brexit it agreed, it does not follow that it is giving Brexit Ultras what they want. Again, Brexit is stuck in a recurrent loop because even as Johnson doubles down on ‘sovereignty’ with Frost’s appointment, he is finding, like all his recent predecessors, that the Ultras want more. So, rumbling away, are all the same old battles. Hence former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib, bemoaning the new barriers to trade that come with the TCA, makes – apparently in all seriousness - the bizarre jump of logic that the TCA should therefore be scrapped, thus resurrecting no-deal Brexit 2.0. Bizarre because, of course, that would simply mean that in addition to those barriers of trade there would also be tariffs and quotas. Yet he surely isn’t alone in wanting to revive the ‘Go WTO’ call of yore.
Meanwhile, Arlene Foster and other Northern Irish unionists (plus, for some reason, the hapless Habib) are seeking a judicial review of the NIP. The DUP have, of course, always been opposed to Irish Sea border but now the ERG are also calling for the NIP to be scrapped (£). They believe, quite wrongly, that Article 16 of the Protocol allows the UK to do just that (for an accurate explanation of what Article 16 does and does not allow, see David Allen Green’s limpidly clear blog post). In a rational, or even half-honest, politics, this might seem truly astonishing. After all, the WA/NIP was the ‘oven ready deal’ on which Johnson fought and won a General election and for which all the ERG MPs subsequently voted.
But as I noted at the time, “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 to be true, because soon after having voted for it, and Johnson signing it, many of them denounced the entirety of the deal as not being “sovereignty compliant”. Now the issue is coming to a head, and it could spell real political trouble for Johnson and, more importantly, for the country.
The obvious problem is what is the alternative to the sea border? And on this the Brexiters are again stuck, returning to the endlessly debunked ideas of ‘technological solutions’ to create (as in David Trimble’s recent article in the Irish Times) an “invisible” land border or, as the ERG have it, “alternative arrangements” for the “mutual enforcement of the North/South border” (I fear it is only a matter of time before the ‘Malthouse compromise’ gets another airing). That is again bizarre since if these solutions really did exist then why could they not be used for the sea border? But, more to the point, it simply returns us to all of the issues about the Irish border that were discussed ad nauseum during May’s premiership. The underlying realities of the Good Friday Agreement have not changed. But nor, too, has the underlying refusal of the Ultras to accept these realities – regarding them instead as a contrivance of the EU and of Ireland to thwart Brexit.
As things stand, the government this week re-affirmed its commitment to the full implementation of the NIP. But this was at a meeting of the Joint Committee with Gove still co-chairing. It may be that when Frost takes over that will change, especially with the new pressure from the ERG. If so, there will be a monumental crisis. That meeting also saw the UK seek extensions to the various grace periods on full implementation, in order to develop the necessary systems. Yet, as with the entirety of both the WA/NIP and the TCA, the lack of readiness stems from the government’s own decisions – in this case not to extend the transition period. This too roots back not simply to Johnson’s refusal last year to extend, but to the heated arguments within the Tory Party during the summer of 2017 about the very idea of there being any transition period.
In these and other ways the Brexiters are proving incapable of ‘moving on’ from Brexit. As a result, the whole country is stuck in the debates of 2017-2019 when, it will be recalled, ‘Go WTO’ and ‘alternative arrangements’ were endlessly proposed as alternatives to the Brexit deals. But those deals are now done, leading to the question, posed this week by (another) blog by David Allen Green, of whether, if this recursivity continues, the WA/NIP and TCA “will be able to withstand such sustained political assaults.”
The political psychology of Brexit, part 94
Green’s discussion begins with reference to the remarks of Mujtaba Rahman and Rafael Behr which I linked to above, both of which suggest that continuing antagonism is more or less assured. Behr, in particular, locates this within a political psychology of Brexiter grievance and victimhood, with its associated “heroic defiance”. I think that is right, and it is a psychology I have been writing about on this blog since November 2016. But I’d push the point a bit further.
What seems to be happening now is the drawing together of several strands within that psychology. One is the persistent idea that any actual Brexit ‘isn’t what we meant’ or, in other words, a refusal to accept the actual consequences of Brexit as being the result of the UK’s choices. That then morphs into the idea of EU ‘punishment’ and even into behaving as if Brexit is, somehow, being forced on the UK. In some ways it has always seemed as if the Brexiters would have been happier had they lost the Referendum but, now, they have found a new way to wallow in bellicose victimhood. The result is certain kind of cakeism: Brexiters have the cake of a Brexit delivered and yet are still able to eat the cake of Brexit grievance.
The consequence of this is that no one else can ‘move on’ either. Erstwhile remainers, or for that matter those who are neutral about it, can hardly ‘try to make Brexit work’ when the government’s rigidities preclude assisting in that, whilst the Ultras are still calling into question the entirety of the Brexit deals. Not only are they stuck, but so is the whole country.
But the context has changed
However, although in all these ways the Brexit saga is repeating itself, what is crucial is that the formal Brexit process has moved on. Before the Referendum, the Brexit debate was purely domestic. Afterwards, at least once Article 50 was triggered, that debate continued to be parochial but at least ran into the realities of negotiating with the EU. But, now, Brexit has been defined in international agreements. The WA/NIP, in particular, is binding in international law and the NIP is of especial interest to the new US administration. So the legal and geo-political costs of breaking or flouting it would be very high, as would the economic costs of breaking the TCA (which has still to be ratified by the European Parliament, by the way).
Brexit is therefore no longer simply a matter of domestic politics. This means that the childish refusal of Brexiters to be realistic about what Brexit means and to take responsibility for the consequences of the choices they have forced upon the country gets more dangerous and damaging by the day. That damage is most obviously economic, but it is also reputational. Many Brexiters, even as they angrily denounce others for ‘talking Britain down’, will be ignorant of, or indifferent to, it, but they have made Britain a laughing stock internationally, as shown by a recent scathing article in the New York Times.
More concretely, as illustrated by the striking image at the Munich security conference of Merkel, Macron and Biden discussing transatlantic security, far from emerging as ‘Global Britain’, Brexit is rendering the country marginal. The Brexit press whined about Biden ‘snubbing’ Britain at the conference by not mentioning it in his speech, but this is what marginalization brings. Yet even as it is happening the Brexiters indulge themselves in fantasies such as Daniel ‘single market’ Hannan’s idea of a UK-India trade deal (£) based upon what he fondly imagines to be the ‘sentimental’ attachments between the two countries. Like the CANZUK fantasy that some are still pushing, it’s a good example of what has been called the ‘Ladybird’ thinking behind Brexit, which as a prospectus for Britain in the twenty-first century it is worse than risible.
The urgent need is to improve trading and diplomatic relations with the EU, but that can’t happen whilst Brexiters are stuck in the past, whether that be the 1800s, the 1950s or the endlessly revisited battles of the last five years.
Painful
I don’t think there is any reason to think that any of this is going to improve. Looking back over the last few years of this blog I find periodic posts (also here) arguing that ‘now’ Brexiters and the Brexit government need to get real. It never happens. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it can’t happen, as it is in the nature of Brexit to deny reality. I had some hopes - never great, certainly naive and now pretty much dead - that with the TCA there could be some kind of re-set or normalization of UK-EU relations. It’s already clear that that will not happen, at least in this political generation.
There is a report today from the invariably reliable Tony Connelly of RTE that “senior EU figures are contemplating a major re-set of relations with the UK” to coincide with the ratification of the TCA in the hope of creating a more harmonious atmosphere. But the reality is that ever since 2016 almost all the antagonism has been generated by the UK’s Brexit Ultras rather than the EU. At all events, it takes two to tango and for the reasons given in this post Brexit Britain seems unlikely to dance, stuck as it is in the same old patterns.
This Brexit constipation is here to stay. There is, to continue the scatological metaphor, currently no political laxative powerful enough to shift it. It will take an enema, which is not yet in prospect and, if and when it comes, will be undignified and painful.
Apologies that there was no post last week – I was unwell – but many thanks for those who sent good wishes or who remarked that they missed (and valued) the blog.
My book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) will be published by Biteback Publishing in June 2021. It can be pre-ordered from Biteback or via other online platforms, including Waterstones, as a paperback or e-book.
Boris Johnson’s recent G7 speech at the Munich security conference may have tried to ignore that inconvenient truth - by mentioning the EU only twice, and then disparagingly – just as he wants to avoid all mention of Brexit, but it doesn’t change the reality. It’s a reality which takes the concrete form of the crisis that is silently engulfing Britain’s trade with the EU, its biggest trading partner. There are increasing delays in the shipping of goods, with shortages and price rises as a result. Some firms, especially smaller ones, have simply given up on trading. Meanwhile there has already been significant damage to the financial services industry and warnings of worse to come.
So, whilst rarely in the news headlines, sector after sector is now reporting the impact of the new barriers which were the inevitable result of leaving the customs union and the single market. Professor Daniel Kelemen of Rutgers University has created an astonishing archive of, so far, 200 reputable news stories over the last month or so about the quite extraordinary damage which is being done by Brexit.
However, what was not inevitable, although always highly likely, was that rather than these ongoing negotiations being about a relationship evolving from the TCA they continue to endlessly revisit and replay the debates that led to it. Brexit is thus stuck. At the heart of this lies the continuing refusal of the government, and Brexiters more generally, to accept what Brexit means and to accept what the UK agreed to, both in the TCA and in the Withdrawal Agreement (WA), including the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP).
One index of that refusal is the replacement of Michael Gove as co-chair of the Joint Committee overseeing the WA/NIP by David Frost, who negotiated the TCA. Frost will also be the UK chair of the new Partnership Council to oversee the TCA. This in itself is suggestive of a desire to frame the post-Brexit negotiations in terms of those which led to the TCA rather than in terms of what might develop from it. It is also indicative of a more hard-line approach (£), in contrast to Gove’s supposed weakness, with Frost’s monocular focus on ‘sovereignty’ at its heart (the EU, meanwhile, has moved on, although as Jon Worth explains on his blog that presents its own issues).
A hard Frost
The irony is that it was Frost’s approach, enabled, of course, by Johnson and building on the red lines established by Theresa May, which created precisely the trade barriers which are now causing so much damage. The only way in which these supposed ‘teething problems’ will be reduced (they cannot be eliminated without reversing hard Brexit altogether) is if the UK agrees to align more closely with EU rules.
In particular, aligning on sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) rules would, as suggested in my previous post, ease the pressure on some of the industries suffering the most visibly, such as fishing and agriculture, and unblock some of the problems that Northern Ireland is facing. It seems clear that the EU would be amenable to this. Heeding calls from the chemicals industry to reconsider how the UK relates its regulation to the EU REACH system would be another way of improving on the TCA. Similarly, were the UK to accept a mobility agreement with the EU it could reduce some of the damage to services trade, along with other measures such as those suggested by Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform.
Perhaps Frost will prove more pragmatic than his previous conduct suggests, but the signs are not good, as Mujtaba Rahman, the respected analyst at Eurasia Group, has convincingly argued this week. What seems more likely is a continuation, or an escalation, of the bellicose rhetoric of ‘retaliation’ against the EU for implementing the agreement that the UK itself has signed up to. As both Rahman and Rafael Behr – in an interesting analysis which I’ll return to later – suggest, there is considerable domestic political mileage in continuing to pick fights with the EU. The economic damage, which might in other contexts be a national crisis, seems hardly to matter to this government and it doesn’t seem to be paying any political price for this.
Labour’s deafening silence
One reason for that is Keir Starmer’s deliberate and now deafening silence on what is happening. The one thing which an Opposition leader can do is influence the news agenda. If Labour were minded to, what are currently a stream of apparently disconnected stories, often buried in the business pages, could be pulled together to create headline news of massive governmental economic incompetence. Of course Johnson would try to twist this as Labour being anti-Brexit, or seeking to reverse Brexit, but if Starmer were canny he would position the attack in the fertile soil of Johnson having betrayed Brexit by hastily signing a deal for his own political convenience without regard for what it meant for ordinary people and for the country in general.
That is, after all, what some and perhaps many leave voters now think and so would not even necessarily entail alienating former Labour leave voters in the ‘red wall’. Such voters were probably not, for the most part, those for whom Brexit was a huge over-riding issue in and of itself but, having voted for it, they then ‘lent Johnson their vote’ to ‘get Brexit done’. That implies only the softest of commitments to voting Tory, and one very receptive to the charge that Brexit may have been ‘done’ but it was ‘done wrong’ by the Tories. The other side of the coin is that, in pussy-footing around the supposed sensibilities of red wall voters, Labour are treating the bulk of their supporters with contempt.
Electoral considerations aside, Starmer’s failure of leadership on, not Brexit, but the UK’s post-Brexit future is a catastrophic dereliction of duty. Who else is going to speak up for those being damaged by what is happening to this country’s trade? It’s also a major strategic error. He has a once in a generation opportunity to cast Labour not only as the party of business but, in doing so, as the protector of the working-class jobs and communities that are dependent on trade with the EU. It is ironic that Starmer is now replicating the way that, as I once described it, Jeremy Corbyn approached Brexit like an inordinately straitlaced Victorian confronted with a piano leg. In this way, too, Brexit is stuck.
The Brexit Ultras are stuck in the same old loops
Whilst the government is being given a free pass by Labour to escape scrutiny of the effects of the Brexit it agreed, it does not follow that it is giving Brexit Ultras what they want. Again, Brexit is stuck in a recurrent loop because even as Johnson doubles down on ‘sovereignty’ with Frost’s appointment, he is finding, like all his recent predecessors, that the Ultras want more. So, rumbling away, are all the same old battles. Hence former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib, bemoaning the new barriers to trade that come with the TCA, makes – apparently in all seriousness - the bizarre jump of logic that the TCA should therefore be scrapped, thus resurrecting no-deal Brexit 2.0. Bizarre because, of course, that would simply mean that in addition to those barriers of trade there would also be tariffs and quotas. Yet he surely isn’t alone in wanting to revive the ‘Go WTO’ call of yore.
Meanwhile, Arlene Foster and other Northern Irish unionists (plus, for some reason, the hapless Habib) are seeking a judicial review of the NIP. The DUP have, of course, always been opposed to Irish Sea border but now the ERG are also calling for the NIP to be scrapped (£). They believe, quite wrongly, that Article 16 of the Protocol allows the UK to do just that (for an accurate explanation of what Article 16 does and does not allow, see David Allen Green’s limpidly clear blog post). In a rational, or even half-honest, politics, this might seem truly astonishing. After all, the WA/NIP was the ‘oven ready deal’ on which Johnson fought and won a General election and for which all the ERG MPs subsequently voted.
But as I noted at the time, “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 to be true, because soon after having voted for it, and Johnson signing it, many of them denounced the entirety of the deal as not being “sovereignty compliant”. Now the issue is coming to a head, and it could spell real political trouble for Johnson and, more importantly, for the country.
The obvious problem is what is the alternative to the sea border? And on this the Brexiters are again stuck, returning to the endlessly debunked ideas of ‘technological solutions’ to create (as in David Trimble’s recent article in the Irish Times) an “invisible” land border or, as the ERG have it, “alternative arrangements” for the “mutual enforcement of the North/South border” (I fear it is only a matter of time before the ‘Malthouse compromise’ gets another airing). That is again bizarre since if these solutions really did exist then why could they not be used for the sea border? But, more to the point, it simply returns us to all of the issues about the Irish border that were discussed ad nauseum during May’s premiership. The underlying realities of the Good Friday Agreement have not changed. But nor, too, has the underlying refusal of the Ultras to accept these realities – regarding them instead as a contrivance of the EU and of Ireland to thwart Brexit.
As things stand, the government this week re-affirmed its commitment to the full implementation of the NIP. But this was at a meeting of the Joint Committee with Gove still co-chairing. It may be that when Frost takes over that will change, especially with the new pressure from the ERG. If so, there will be a monumental crisis. That meeting also saw the UK seek extensions to the various grace periods on full implementation, in order to develop the necessary systems. Yet, as with the entirety of both the WA/NIP and the TCA, the lack of readiness stems from the government’s own decisions – in this case not to extend the transition period. This too roots back not simply to Johnson’s refusal last year to extend, but to the heated arguments within the Tory Party during the summer of 2017 about the very idea of there being any transition period.
In these and other ways the Brexiters are proving incapable of ‘moving on’ from Brexit. As a result, the whole country is stuck in the debates of 2017-2019 when, it will be recalled, ‘Go WTO’ and ‘alternative arrangements’ were endlessly proposed as alternatives to the Brexit deals. But those deals are now done, leading to the question, posed this week by (another) blog by David Allen Green, of whether, if this recursivity continues, the WA/NIP and TCA “will be able to withstand such sustained political assaults.”
The political psychology of Brexit, part 94
Green’s discussion begins with reference to the remarks of Mujtaba Rahman and Rafael Behr which I linked to above, both of which suggest that continuing antagonism is more or less assured. Behr, in particular, locates this within a political psychology of Brexiter grievance and victimhood, with its associated “heroic defiance”. I think that is right, and it is a psychology I have been writing about on this blog since November 2016. But I’d push the point a bit further.
What seems to be happening now is the drawing together of several strands within that psychology. One is the persistent idea that any actual Brexit ‘isn’t what we meant’ or, in other words, a refusal to accept the actual consequences of Brexit as being the result of the UK’s choices. That then morphs into the idea of EU ‘punishment’ and even into behaving as if Brexit is, somehow, being forced on the UK. In some ways it has always seemed as if the Brexiters would have been happier had they lost the Referendum but, now, they have found a new way to wallow in bellicose victimhood. The result is certain kind of cakeism: Brexiters have the cake of a Brexit delivered and yet are still able to eat the cake of Brexit grievance.
The consequence of this is that no one else can ‘move on’ either. Erstwhile remainers, or for that matter those who are neutral about it, can hardly ‘try to make Brexit work’ when the government’s rigidities preclude assisting in that, whilst the Ultras are still calling into question the entirety of the Brexit deals. Not only are they stuck, but so is the whole country.
But the context has changed
However, although in all these ways the Brexit saga is repeating itself, what is crucial is that the formal Brexit process has moved on. Before the Referendum, the Brexit debate was purely domestic. Afterwards, at least once Article 50 was triggered, that debate continued to be parochial but at least ran into the realities of negotiating with the EU. But, now, Brexit has been defined in international agreements. The WA/NIP, in particular, is binding in international law and the NIP is of especial interest to the new US administration. So the legal and geo-political costs of breaking or flouting it would be very high, as would the economic costs of breaking the TCA (which has still to be ratified by the European Parliament, by the way).
Brexit is therefore no longer simply a matter of domestic politics. This means that the childish refusal of Brexiters to be realistic about what Brexit means and to take responsibility for the consequences of the choices they have forced upon the country gets more dangerous and damaging by the day. That damage is most obviously economic, but it is also reputational. Many Brexiters, even as they angrily denounce others for ‘talking Britain down’, will be ignorant of, or indifferent to, it, but they have made Britain a laughing stock internationally, as shown by a recent scathing article in the New York Times.
More concretely, as illustrated by the striking image at the Munich security conference of Merkel, Macron and Biden discussing transatlantic security, far from emerging as ‘Global Britain’, Brexit is rendering the country marginal. The Brexit press whined about Biden ‘snubbing’ Britain at the conference by not mentioning it in his speech, but this is what marginalization brings. Yet even as it is happening the Brexiters indulge themselves in fantasies such as Daniel ‘single market’ Hannan’s idea of a UK-India trade deal (£) based upon what he fondly imagines to be the ‘sentimental’ attachments between the two countries. Like the CANZUK fantasy that some are still pushing, it’s a good example of what has been called the ‘Ladybird’ thinking behind Brexit, which as a prospectus for Britain in the twenty-first century it is worse than risible.
The urgent need is to improve trading and diplomatic relations with the EU, but that can’t happen whilst Brexiters are stuck in the past, whether that be the 1800s, the 1950s or the endlessly revisited battles of the last five years.
Painful
I don’t think there is any reason to think that any of this is going to improve. Looking back over the last few years of this blog I find periodic posts (also here) arguing that ‘now’ Brexiters and the Brexit government need to get real. It never happens. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it can’t happen, as it is in the nature of Brexit to deny reality. I had some hopes - never great, certainly naive and now pretty much dead - that with the TCA there could be some kind of re-set or normalization of UK-EU relations. It’s already clear that that will not happen, at least in this political generation.
There is a report today from the invariably reliable Tony Connelly of RTE that “senior EU figures are contemplating a major re-set of relations with the UK” to coincide with the ratification of the TCA in the hope of creating a more harmonious atmosphere. But the reality is that ever since 2016 almost all the antagonism has been generated by the UK’s Brexit Ultras rather than the EU. At all events, it takes two to tango and for the reasons given in this post Brexit Britain seems unlikely to dance, stuck as it is in the same old patterns.
This Brexit constipation is here to stay. There is, to continue the scatological metaphor, currently no political laxative powerful enough to shift it. It will take an enema, which is not yet in prospect and, if and when it comes, will be undignified and painful.
Apologies that there was no post last week – I was unwell – but many thanks for those who sent good wishes or who remarked that they missed (and valued) the blog.
My book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) will be published by Biteback Publishing in June 2021. It can be pre-ordered from Biteback or via other online platforms, including Waterstones, as a paperback or e-book.
Friday, 2 October 2020
The theatricals of 'deal or no deal' are a distraction
As this supposedly final week of Brexit trade talks ends, the ‘will they, won’t they?’ show continues to play out like an amateur production of an absurdist play or, perhaps more appositely, a Whitehall farce.
At all events, a theatrical metaphor is called for because what we are seeing is a manufactured drama. It is manufactured in the most obvious sense by the fact that the impending end of year time limit, and with that the timescales for agreement and ratification, are entirely down to the UK government’s choice not to seek an extension to the Transition Period. Even more important, the choreography of there being two opposing ‘sides’ going mano a mano until one of them blinks is almost entirely the creation of British Brexiters who have antagonistically constructed the EU as ‘opponents’ to be outwitted in some macho battle of wills.
None of this was necessary. The EU response from the outset has been one of sadness rather than antagonism, and its approach one of dry technical rationality rather than histrionics. It is the Brexiters who have both chosen and needed to make it otherwise, which can be traced right back to 2016 when, far from revelling in their victory, they displayed a sullen suspicion that quickly escalated to bellicosity at the slightest trigger, as with the absurd sabre-rattling over Gibraltar in April 2017. Now, like neighbours from hell with whom all reasonable discussion has been tried, the UK has goaded the EU into starting legal proceedings.
As for who the audience for all this is, that’s a matter of interpretation. Brexiters would claim that it is the EU – to show them that Britain is a ‘sovereign equal’ and will not be pushed around. But of course that is just another line from the play rather than a serious analysis of it. All the signs are that the EU, and the wider world, looks on with bewilderment at the peculiar and undignified conduct of a country formerly seen as rather sensible.
It may, as some think, be the government playing tough for the gallery of the Brexit Ultras as a prelude to letting them down. It may be for leave voters, via the headlines that the government can get in the pro-Brexit press. It may be for the electorate as a whole, softening them up for what is to come – deal or no deal – as being the product of EU intransigence which plucky Britain has fought tooth and nail. Or it may be aimed, again at the whole electorate, as a prelude to a ‘triumphant’ announcement of a ‘great deal’ having been struck at the last minute, much as Johnson did with the Withdrawal Agreement last year.
But even to engage in such speculations is to get sucked into the performance that is being put on, for they are really just another version of the ‘will they, won’t they?’ script. So too are the endless and contradictory predictions of pundits about what the outcome will be, including those who declare that a deal was ‘always inevitable’ and the equal number who declare with equal certainty that no deal was ‘the plan all along’ (whatever happens, half of these are guaranteed their moment of triumph).
Deal or no deal, this isn’t what was promised
What we should be focussing on is that we are approaching the point where all the possible outcomes are hideously etiolated versions of what was promised by Brexiters, let alone of what Britain enjoyed as an EU member. Any deal that is likely to be made, and no deal, and no deal followed (as it probably would be) by some piecemeal deals are all to varying degrees bad outcomes. I’ve argued before (and continue to believe) that a deal of any sort would be the best – or perhaps one should say least-worst – of these available outcomes, but that is all it is.
Thinking just of trade - although that is far from all that matters, as leading security experts pointed out this week (£) - it is bound to be worse than EU membership. To leave the largest, most integrated, transnational market in the world and the one which is also geographically closest can’t help but be highly damaging, whatever terms on which the UK then trades with it. That’s a truism, but it is worth noting that whenever it is pointed out – as, most recently, by Ursula von der Leyen in January – it is greeted by hardcore Brexiters with paroxysms of fury. So, truism as it may be, it contradicts what some still see as an entitlement.
But what is in prospect isn’t just worse than what we had as members, it’s also far worse than the Brexiters assured us would be the case as a non-member. The words of the Vote Leave campaign documents, repeated with such authority by Michael Gove and others so many times in 2016, should never be forgotten: “there is a free trade zone from Iceland to Turkey to the Russian border and we will be part of it”.
Whether this meant single market membership, as it seemed to imply, and they later reneged on it, or whether they really believed that some other “zone” existed doesn’t matter. It is clear that whatever happens now it will not be this, and it has been for a long time. But, during that long time, they made other promises – of a ‘deep and special partnership’, of a Canada + or even Canada +++ or Super-Canada trade deal. Indeed during the 2019 Election campaign Boris Johnson promised “a super Canada-plus” deal by the end of 2020. All that has disappeared, since the only meaning such terms could have had would have entailed far more extensive integration than the UK is now willing to countenance.
None of this is ancient history. The referendum campaign itself was only four years ago, and voters are entitled to recall that what is happening now flows from, and claims mandate from, the vote. Nor do we have to go back that far, since the groundwork for Johnson’s “super Canada-plus” deal was laid with the Political Declaration (PD) that was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ he was elected on just last December. Yet he immediately repudiated the key elements of that Declaration that would have made a more extensive deal possible, and since then the UK has insisted that it wants no more than a Canada-style deal, with no ‘pluses’ or ‘supers’.
It’s true that even within this there is considerable disingenuity, for two reasons. On the one hand the UK is actually asking for more than ‘Canada’ (e.g. in terms of cabotage rights). On the other hand, the EU has always made it plain, and in the PD the UK accepted but now denies, that any form of trade deal would come with level playing field conditions. But the point holds that all talk of an ambitious deal going well beyond a standard free trade agreement has now been dropped.
One aspect of that is that whereas under the terms of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement (WA) there was the possibility that the trade deal could have had generous terms on ‘rules of origin’, Johnson’s WA removed that option and as a consequence it has just been revealed (though it was not a surprise) that such terms will not be agreed, with significant negative consequences for several industries, including car making. Again, this contradicts what Johnson promised during the election about protecting automotive supply chains. (Rules of origin are complex but important, see the primer by Alex Stojanovic of the Institute for Government).
It beggars belief that the government should now be contemplating, not as its worst scenario but as its best and indeed preferred scenario, the thinnest of trade arrangements with the EU. It was not entailed by Brexit – even leaving aside the soft ‘Norway’ model, an Association Agreement of the Ukraine type was a possibility, albeit one open to criticism, or some more imaginative hybrid could have been constructed. But Britain has been driven by the implacable extremism of the Brexit Ultras to a situation where the only future relationship options are distance or dislocation.
This is not what was sold to the British people. Nor is it what they currently want, given opinion polls showing that 80% think maintaining a close relationship with the EU is important and that the biggest gap since the Referendum between those thinking leaving is wrong and those thinking it’s right (50% to 39%) has now opened.
Deal or no deal brinkmanship is itself damaging
All this is not just the context for, but is actually more important than, all the excited talk about whether or not – and, if so, when - the negotiators are going to enter ‘the tunnel’ to finalise a trade deal. That matters, but it is the sub-plot to the bigger story and in many ways a distraction from it.
For that matter, the manufactured drama of ‘brinkmanship’ is not just a distraction but itself has serious adverse consequences in terms of the uncertainties facing so many people and industries as a result. For example, for both the UK in general, and Northern Ireland in particular, the present situation calls into question the security of medical supplies, with one Irish MEP saying that “people’s lives are at risk”.
It should be noted that the issues here relate not just to the future terms talks but to the equally important operation of the Joint Committee (JC), charged with implementing the Withdrawal Agreement and Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), which also met this week. For whilst these are separate processes they have become very much linked in recent weeks as a result of the ongoing row over the Internal Market Bill (IMB). This has created a huge trust problem with the EU over the UK’s willingness to abide by the NIP and work through the JC, rather than to make unilateral decisions that flout the Protocol and thereby, on the government’s own admission, to break international law.
At this week’s JC meeting Gove confirmed the UK was proceeding with the legislation and, contemptibly, the Bill passed its final reading in the House of Commons, with the Tory backbench rebellion fizzling out. Even Theresa May, despite her much-vaunted opposition, did not actually vote against it but abstained. It is a new and shameful low, showing the extent to which all constraints and norms are being jettisoned in the name of Brexit. Unsurprisingly, as it had indicated would happen if the offending clauses were still in play by the end of the month, the EU began legal action. However it has given the UK a month to respond to its initial legal notice (it could have been shorter) and is meanwhile willing to continue trade talks.
The IMB now goes to the House of Lords, where no doubt it will be mauled, but as trailed in my last two posts the government has delayed the timetable for this. Taken together with the terms of the EU’s legal action, this means that there is a tiny window in which the trade talks can proceed without the Bill actually becoming law. That creates a theoretical possibility that the illegal clauses might be dropped in the light of a deal being done, according to Simon Coveney, Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, and others. Thus by the middle of October, conceivably, there might be a trade deal and an end to the threatened international law breach.
But massive damage to trust has already been done, with the result that the issue of enforcement for the governance mechanism for any trade deal has now taken centre stage in the future terms negotiations. The obvious concern is that the Johnson will once again sign a rushed deal with implementation details to be filled out later, perhaps especially tempting given the ongoing coronavirus crisis, only to backtrack later when it comes to putting what was agreed into practice as has happened with the IMB. Shamefully, thanks to the behaviour of Johnson’s government, our country is no longer trusted to behave honestly.
Deal or no deal, the outlook is unremittingly grim
Meanwhile, all the costs and inconveniences of Brexit, deal or no deal, continue to rack up. Having already lost the European Medicines Agency and the European Banking Authority – inevitably, though Brexiters claimed otherwise (£) – it has now emerged that the UK-based European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), a key body for climate change research, is all but certain to be ineligible to go on hosting EU funded activities and programs. Month by month, Brexit is already inexorably impoverishing and damaging us, in ways small and large, and which, as in these cases, reach deep into the core strategic strengths and priorities of our country. But as Brendan Donnelly, Director of the Federal Trust, wrote in a hard-hitting blog this week, “the worst is yet to come”, and Simon Nixon in The Times was equally forceful in arguing that “business is about the be thrown under a bus” (£).
As a Select Committee heard this week from leading figures in the aerospace, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals industries – again, all key sectors – trade will become “a day-to-day struggle”, with huge new costs and paperwork, reduced investment and some products being unavailable. Each witness was asked if any reason could be given to welcome the impending end of the transition period. None of them could give one.
Separately, a new report (£) shows that leaving the EU platform for electricity trading will cost hundreds of millions of pounds in increased energy bills. The latest figures on the financial services sector suggest that it has moved 7,500 employees and more than £1.2 trillion (yes, that is trillion) of assets to the EU since the Referendum, with accelerating relocations as the end of transition approaches. And Michael Gove officially confirmed the long-touted figure of £1 billion as the cost of regulatory re-registrations in the chemicals industry. It remains unclear whether the new UK regulatory system will even be ready by the end of the year.
An obvious huge change in January will be the end of Freedom of Movement, which is set to cause serious problems for many sectors of the economy, with a particular and immediate impact on care homes, already in crisis because of coronavirus. And those EU nationals living in the UK with settled status face the nightmare caused by the government’s refusal to provide physical, documentary proof of their status. The digital-only system is unreliable and creates horrendous problems for accessing housing and services, heaping further pain on the already shameful way this group of our neighbours, friends, colleagues and families has been treated since 2016.
The adverse effects in prospect – again, regardless of whether there is a trade deal - will touch every aspect of daily life. The RSPCA is warning of shortages of pet foods and medicines (£) and, although it’s not exactly news, the BBC has produced a listing of things that will change at the end of the transition, mainly focussed on individuals and travel. Unsurprisingly, and in line with the government’s ‘Check, Change, Go’ information campaign, every single thing makes life worse and more difficult. Every single thing.
We are no longer at the point of debates and claims, in which ‘balanced’ coverage supposedly meant pitting a rosily optimistic Brexiter against a ‘Project Fear’ remainer. We are now at the point of news reporting, in which every Brexit story is a bad news story because there aren’t any good news stories.
Nor can this be ascribed to anti-government bias, because if the broadcasters did nothing but read out, North Korea style, every single page of the government’s ‘Check, Change, Go’ website then it would be an unrelenting diet of misery. And this isn’t precautionary stuff for the event of no deal. Everything on that site is bad news – there’s literally nothing that makes life easier or better - it’s just even worse if there were to be no deal. This all comes on top of the COVID-19 crisis but, unlike the virus, is entirely self-inflicted. Britain is doing this – not just Brexit, but the way it is going about Brexit – to itself.
Deal or no deal, the highest price of all?
The previous section summarised only a selection of stories and reports from the last week. Multiple other examples can be found, not least in many previous posts on this blog, all testifying to the terrible price – economic, political, cultural and even moral – of Brexit largely irrespective of a trade deal. The final example is at first sight more trivial. It was reported this week that the Tory MP Esther McVey has accused teachers of left-wing indoctrination of their pupils and more particularly that “white working-class lads” in Brexit-voting areas would be alienated by having “their family’s beliefs” questioned by anti-Brexit teachers.
Everything about this is obnoxious, not least its evidence-free assumptions about teachers’ beliefs and conduct, the homogenization of whole areas, social classes, and ethnicities in terms of their Brexit stance, its faux-egalitarianism - and, even were it all true, why is it only the ‘lads’ who are so delicate? Worse is the grotesque implication that teachers’ political views be monitored. Whilst only a fragment, it forms part of a bigger picture in which being pro-Brexit is being made a condition for appointment to public bodies, or for being rewarded with ennoblement, or is being used to re-shape the civil service – with supposed remainers within it being described by an ‘anonymous Whitehall source’ this week as “the enemy within” who “will be rooted out”.
The noisy barrage of the ‘enemies of the people’ headline is giving way to the quieter but more lethal seeping poison gas of political loyalty tests conducted under cover of populist rhetoric – populist, but not even popular given that support for Brexit is now a minority opinion. Each example in isolation seems trivial, or can be given some justificatory spin, but their accumulation may end up being the highest price of all that Brexit inflicts.
There is a telling line in Sam Byers’ post-Brexit satirical novel, Perfidious Albion: “Brexit was over, but the energy it accumulated had to be retained. Fears needed to be redirected. Hatred had to pivot” (2018, p.119). It seems prophetic in the light of Farage’s new hobby of hanging about grubbily on beaches looking for migrants to denounce. And it conjures up a country – of which the McVey story provides a tiny glimpse – in which the Brexit divide segues into a wider assault upon immigrants and intellectuals, on ‘woke’ culture in schools and universities, on ‘unelected judges’, on civil service neutrality, and on the rule of law (the latter link is to the first of a three-part blog by David Allen Green, so check the follow-on posts for the full argument).
There’s nothing new in the existence of such ideas, but this is the first time that Britain has had a government that subscribes to them. Governments doing so is the script of a story we know well, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.
So as the uncertainty over whether or not there will be a deal continues – and it will for a little while yet – and, for that matter, when that uncertainty ends, it’s important to see it for what it is. Not without any significance, certainly, but a distraction from what is much more significant: the damage, decay and danger of Brexit itself. That drama - of lies told, promises broken, and a country on the brink of calamity - is the etiology of what afflicts us, rather than the tedious theatrics and accompanying breathless predictions which are one of its symptoms.
At all events, a theatrical metaphor is called for because what we are seeing is a manufactured drama. It is manufactured in the most obvious sense by the fact that the impending end of year time limit, and with that the timescales for agreement and ratification, are entirely down to the UK government’s choice not to seek an extension to the Transition Period. Even more important, the choreography of there being two opposing ‘sides’ going mano a mano until one of them blinks is almost entirely the creation of British Brexiters who have antagonistically constructed the EU as ‘opponents’ to be outwitted in some macho battle of wills.
None of this was necessary. The EU response from the outset has been one of sadness rather than antagonism, and its approach one of dry technical rationality rather than histrionics. It is the Brexiters who have both chosen and needed to make it otherwise, which can be traced right back to 2016 when, far from revelling in their victory, they displayed a sullen suspicion that quickly escalated to bellicosity at the slightest trigger, as with the absurd sabre-rattling over Gibraltar in April 2017. Now, like neighbours from hell with whom all reasonable discussion has been tried, the UK has goaded the EU into starting legal proceedings.
As for who the audience for all this is, that’s a matter of interpretation. Brexiters would claim that it is the EU – to show them that Britain is a ‘sovereign equal’ and will not be pushed around. But of course that is just another line from the play rather than a serious analysis of it. All the signs are that the EU, and the wider world, looks on with bewilderment at the peculiar and undignified conduct of a country formerly seen as rather sensible.
It may, as some think, be the government playing tough for the gallery of the Brexit Ultras as a prelude to letting them down. It may be for leave voters, via the headlines that the government can get in the pro-Brexit press. It may be for the electorate as a whole, softening them up for what is to come – deal or no deal – as being the product of EU intransigence which plucky Britain has fought tooth and nail. Or it may be aimed, again at the whole electorate, as a prelude to a ‘triumphant’ announcement of a ‘great deal’ having been struck at the last minute, much as Johnson did with the Withdrawal Agreement last year.
But even to engage in such speculations is to get sucked into the performance that is being put on, for they are really just another version of the ‘will they, won’t they?’ script. So too are the endless and contradictory predictions of pundits about what the outcome will be, including those who declare that a deal was ‘always inevitable’ and the equal number who declare with equal certainty that no deal was ‘the plan all along’ (whatever happens, half of these are guaranteed their moment of triumph).
Deal or no deal, this isn’t what was promised
What we should be focussing on is that we are approaching the point where all the possible outcomes are hideously etiolated versions of what was promised by Brexiters, let alone of what Britain enjoyed as an EU member. Any deal that is likely to be made, and no deal, and no deal followed (as it probably would be) by some piecemeal deals are all to varying degrees bad outcomes. I’ve argued before (and continue to believe) that a deal of any sort would be the best – or perhaps one should say least-worst – of these available outcomes, but that is all it is.
Thinking just of trade - although that is far from all that matters, as leading security experts pointed out this week (£) - it is bound to be worse than EU membership. To leave the largest, most integrated, transnational market in the world and the one which is also geographically closest can’t help but be highly damaging, whatever terms on which the UK then trades with it. That’s a truism, but it is worth noting that whenever it is pointed out – as, most recently, by Ursula von der Leyen in January – it is greeted by hardcore Brexiters with paroxysms of fury. So, truism as it may be, it contradicts what some still see as an entitlement.
But what is in prospect isn’t just worse than what we had as members, it’s also far worse than the Brexiters assured us would be the case as a non-member. The words of the Vote Leave campaign documents, repeated with such authority by Michael Gove and others so many times in 2016, should never be forgotten: “there is a free trade zone from Iceland to Turkey to the Russian border and we will be part of it”.
Whether this meant single market membership, as it seemed to imply, and they later reneged on it, or whether they really believed that some other “zone” existed doesn’t matter. It is clear that whatever happens now it will not be this, and it has been for a long time. But, during that long time, they made other promises – of a ‘deep and special partnership’, of a Canada + or even Canada +++ or Super-Canada trade deal. Indeed during the 2019 Election campaign Boris Johnson promised “a super Canada-plus” deal by the end of 2020. All that has disappeared, since the only meaning such terms could have had would have entailed far more extensive integration than the UK is now willing to countenance.
None of this is ancient history. The referendum campaign itself was only four years ago, and voters are entitled to recall that what is happening now flows from, and claims mandate from, the vote. Nor do we have to go back that far, since the groundwork for Johnson’s “super Canada-plus” deal was laid with the Political Declaration (PD) that was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ he was elected on just last December. Yet he immediately repudiated the key elements of that Declaration that would have made a more extensive deal possible, and since then the UK has insisted that it wants no more than a Canada-style deal, with no ‘pluses’ or ‘supers’.
It’s true that even within this there is considerable disingenuity, for two reasons. On the one hand the UK is actually asking for more than ‘Canada’ (e.g. in terms of cabotage rights). On the other hand, the EU has always made it plain, and in the PD the UK accepted but now denies, that any form of trade deal would come with level playing field conditions. But the point holds that all talk of an ambitious deal going well beyond a standard free trade agreement has now been dropped.
One aspect of that is that whereas under the terms of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement (WA) there was the possibility that the trade deal could have had generous terms on ‘rules of origin’, Johnson’s WA removed that option and as a consequence it has just been revealed (though it was not a surprise) that such terms will not be agreed, with significant negative consequences for several industries, including car making. Again, this contradicts what Johnson promised during the election about protecting automotive supply chains. (Rules of origin are complex but important, see the primer by Alex Stojanovic of the Institute for Government).
It beggars belief that the government should now be contemplating, not as its worst scenario but as its best and indeed preferred scenario, the thinnest of trade arrangements with the EU. It was not entailed by Brexit – even leaving aside the soft ‘Norway’ model, an Association Agreement of the Ukraine type was a possibility, albeit one open to criticism, or some more imaginative hybrid could have been constructed. But Britain has been driven by the implacable extremism of the Brexit Ultras to a situation where the only future relationship options are distance or dislocation.
This is not what was sold to the British people. Nor is it what they currently want, given opinion polls showing that 80% think maintaining a close relationship with the EU is important and that the biggest gap since the Referendum between those thinking leaving is wrong and those thinking it’s right (50% to 39%) has now opened.
Deal or no deal brinkmanship is itself damaging
All this is not just the context for, but is actually more important than, all the excited talk about whether or not – and, if so, when - the negotiators are going to enter ‘the tunnel’ to finalise a trade deal. That matters, but it is the sub-plot to the bigger story and in many ways a distraction from it.
For that matter, the manufactured drama of ‘brinkmanship’ is not just a distraction but itself has serious adverse consequences in terms of the uncertainties facing so many people and industries as a result. For example, for both the UK in general, and Northern Ireland in particular, the present situation calls into question the security of medical supplies, with one Irish MEP saying that “people’s lives are at risk”.
It should be noted that the issues here relate not just to the future terms talks but to the equally important operation of the Joint Committee (JC), charged with implementing the Withdrawal Agreement and Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), which also met this week. For whilst these are separate processes they have become very much linked in recent weeks as a result of the ongoing row over the Internal Market Bill (IMB). This has created a huge trust problem with the EU over the UK’s willingness to abide by the NIP and work through the JC, rather than to make unilateral decisions that flout the Protocol and thereby, on the government’s own admission, to break international law.
At this week’s JC meeting Gove confirmed the UK was proceeding with the legislation and, contemptibly, the Bill passed its final reading in the House of Commons, with the Tory backbench rebellion fizzling out. Even Theresa May, despite her much-vaunted opposition, did not actually vote against it but abstained. It is a new and shameful low, showing the extent to which all constraints and norms are being jettisoned in the name of Brexit. Unsurprisingly, as it had indicated would happen if the offending clauses were still in play by the end of the month, the EU began legal action. However it has given the UK a month to respond to its initial legal notice (it could have been shorter) and is meanwhile willing to continue trade talks.
The IMB now goes to the House of Lords, where no doubt it will be mauled, but as trailed in my last two posts the government has delayed the timetable for this. Taken together with the terms of the EU’s legal action, this means that there is a tiny window in which the trade talks can proceed without the Bill actually becoming law. That creates a theoretical possibility that the illegal clauses might be dropped in the light of a deal being done, according to Simon Coveney, Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, and others. Thus by the middle of October, conceivably, there might be a trade deal and an end to the threatened international law breach.
But massive damage to trust has already been done, with the result that the issue of enforcement for the governance mechanism for any trade deal has now taken centre stage in the future terms negotiations. The obvious concern is that the Johnson will once again sign a rushed deal with implementation details to be filled out later, perhaps especially tempting given the ongoing coronavirus crisis, only to backtrack later when it comes to putting what was agreed into practice as has happened with the IMB. Shamefully, thanks to the behaviour of Johnson’s government, our country is no longer trusted to behave honestly.
Deal or no deal, the outlook is unremittingly grim
Meanwhile, all the costs and inconveniences of Brexit, deal or no deal, continue to rack up. Having already lost the European Medicines Agency and the European Banking Authority – inevitably, though Brexiters claimed otherwise (£) – it has now emerged that the UK-based European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), a key body for climate change research, is all but certain to be ineligible to go on hosting EU funded activities and programs. Month by month, Brexit is already inexorably impoverishing and damaging us, in ways small and large, and which, as in these cases, reach deep into the core strategic strengths and priorities of our country. But as Brendan Donnelly, Director of the Federal Trust, wrote in a hard-hitting blog this week, “the worst is yet to come”, and Simon Nixon in The Times was equally forceful in arguing that “business is about the be thrown under a bus” (£).
As a Select Committee heard this week from leading figures in the aerospace, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals industries – again, all key sectors – trade will become “a day-to-day struggle”, with huge new costs and paperwork, reduced investment and some products being unavailable. Each witness was asked if any reason could be given to welcome the impending end of the transition period. None of them could give one.
Separately, a new report (£) shows that leaving the EU platform for electricity trading will cost hundreds of millions of pounds in increased energy bills. The latest figures on the financial services sector suggest that it has moved 7,500 employees and more than £1.2 trillion (yes, that is trillion) of assets to the EU since the Referendum, with accelerating relocations as the end of transition approaches. And Michael Gove officially confirmed the long-touted figure of £1 billion as the cost of regulatory re-registrations in the chemicals industry. It remains unclear whether the new UK regulatory system will even be ready by the end of the year.
An obvious huge change in January will be the end of Freedom of Movement, which is set to cause serious problems for many sectors of the economy, with a particular and immediate impact on care homes, already in crisis because of coronavirus. And those EU nationals living in the UK with settled status face the nightmare caused by the government’s refusal to provide physical, documentary proof of their status. The digital-only system is unreliable and creates horrendous problems for accessing housing and services, heaping further pain on the already shameful way this group of our neighbours, friends, colleagues and families has been treated since 2016.
The adverse effects in prospect – again, regardless of whether there is a trade deal - will touch every aspect of daily life. The RSPCA is warning of shortages of pet foods and medicines (£) and, although it’s not exactly news, the BBC has produced a listing of things that will change at the end of the transition, mainly focussed on individuals and travel. Unsurprisingly, and in line with the government’s ‘Check, Change, Go’ information campaign, every single thing makes life worse and more difficult. Every single thing.
We are no longer at the point of debates and claims, in which ‘balanced’ coverage supposedly meant pitting a rosily optimistic Brexiter against a ‘Project Fear’ remainer. We are now at the point of news reporting, in which every Brexit story is a bad news story because there aren’t any good news stories.
Nor can this be ascribed to anti-government bias, because if the broadcasters did nothing but read out, North Korea style, every single page of the government’s ‘Check, Change, Go’ website then it would be an unrelenting diet of misery. And this isn’t precautionary stuff for the event of no deal. Everything on that site is bad news – there’s literally nothing that makes life easier or better - it’s just even worse if there were to be no deal. This all comes on top of the COVID-19 crisis but, unlike the virus, is entirely self-inflicted. Britain is doing this – not just Brexit, but the way it is going about Brexit – to itself.
Deal or no deal, the highest price of all?
The previous section summarised only a selection of stories and reports from the last week. Multiple other examples can be found, not least in many previous posts on this blog, all testifying to the terrible price – economic, political, cultural and even moral – of Brexit largely irrespective of a trade deal. The final example is at first sight more trivial. It was reported this week that the Tory MP Esther McVey has accused teachers of left-wing indoctrination of their pupils and more particularly that “white working-class lads” in Brexit-voting areas would be alienated by having “their family’s beliefs” questioned by anti-Brexit teachers.
Everything about this is obnoxious, not least its evidence-free assumptions about teachers’ beliefs and conduct, the homogenization of whole areas, social classes, and ethnicities in terms of their Brexit stance, its faux-egalitarianism - and, even were it all true, why is it only the ‘lads’ who are so delicate? Worse is the grotesque implication that teachers’ political views be monitored. Whilst only a fragment, it forms part of a bigger picture in which being pro-Brexit is being made a condition for appointment to public bodies, or for being rewarded with ennoblement, or is being used to re-shape the civil service – with supposed remainers within it being described by an ‘anonymous Whitehall source’ this week as “the enemy within” who “will be rooted out”.
The noisy barrage of the ‘enemies of the people’ headline is giving way to the quieter but more lethal seeping poison gas of political loyalty tests conducted under cover of populist rhetoric – populist, but not even popular given that support for Brexit is now a minority opinion. Each example in isolation seems trivial, or can be given some justificatory spin, but their accumulation may end up being the highest price of all that Brexit inflicts.
There is a telling line in Sam Byers’ post-Brexit satirical novel, Perfidious Albion: “Brexit was over, but the energy it accumulated had to be retained. Fears needed to be redirected. Hatred had to pivot” (2018, p.119). It seems prophetic in the light of Farage’s new hobby of hanging about grubbily on beaches looking for migrants to denounce. And it conjures up a country – of which the McVey story provides a tiny glimpse – in which the Brexit divide segues into a wider assault upon immigrants and intellectuals, on ‘woke’ culture in schools and universities, on ‘unelected judges’, on civil service neutrality, and on the rule of law (the latter link is to the first of a three-part blog by David Allen Green, so check the follow-on posts for the full argument).
There’s nothing new in the existence of such ideas, but this is the first time that Britain has had a government that subscribes to them. Governments doing so is the script of a story we know well, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.
So as the uncertainty over whether or not there will be a deal continues – and it will for a little while yet – and, for that matter, when that uncertainty ends, it’s important to see it for what it is. Not without any significance, certainly, but a distraction from what is much more significant: the damage, decay and danger of Brexit itself. That drama - of lies told, promises broken, and a country on the brink of calamity - is the etiology of what afflicts us, rather than the tedious theatrics and accompanying breathless predictions which are one of its symptoms.
Updated 04/10/20 to correct misleading phrasing of the story about the ECMWF.
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