By recent standards it has been a relatively quiet Brexit week, although also a revealing one in which several chickens have come home to roost as the end of the Transition Period looms ever closer.
The official negotiations resume next week, whilst the ongoing unofficial talks are reported to be progressing “a bit better than expected” according to an EU official. That perhaps means little given how low expectations must have been after the fury in Brussels caused by last week’s events. One cause of that fury – the wholly spurious claim of an EU threat to blockade Northern Ireland’s food supplies, as discussed in my previous post – has been quietly dropped by most politicians for the nonsense it is, although even that was portrayed in the Brexiter press as ‘Barnier caving in’. The damage, of course, is already done.
The IMB fallout
The bigger cause of that fury remains in play, with the passage through Parliament of the Internal Market Bill (IMB), the measures of which include, on the government’s own admission, a knowing breach of international law. However, the rumours I mentioned in my previous post to the effect that the government would seek to slow down the passage of the legislation so as to avoid a confrontation with the EU until after no deal seems inevitable (if that is what happens) seem to be true (£). And if there is a deal the offending clauses may be pulled. Meanwhile, whilst continuing to consider the possibility of taking legal action (£) the EU is holding off doing so for now. The sense is that, for the time being, both sides want to pull back from last week’s row and, as Peter Foster of the FT puts it (£), “a grudging truce has settled back” over the talks.
Nevertheless, the reverberations of Brandon Lewis’s incendiary statement about breaking international law, which is still being defended by the Attorney General, continue to be felt. Some MPs have tried to downplay the significance of what Lewis said but Theresa May, in particular, launched a blistering attack on it during the committee stage this week. For reasons I’ve given elsewhere I do not buy the line that May’s deal was one that should have been supported, and personally I doubt that history will treat her kindly. Much of the current Brexit mess can be laid at her – and her advisers’ - door for the early decisions she made, and for those she did not. Even so, she has recognizable political principles which is a very marked contrast with the corrupt, incompetent and anarchic mess of the current administration.
One indicator of how that administration operates came with the report (£) that Brandon Lewis’s statement was effectively dictated to him by a Downing Street advisor “who gave [him] the words to say”. The advisor, Oliver Lewis (no relation, I assume), is one of several central figures from the Vote Leave campaign – he was its Research Director – who, led by Dominic Cummings, are now installed as special advisers and seem to have been allowed by Johnson to become the de facto government. Many of them are very young, have little or no experience of government and, it’s perhaps fair to say, a greater degree of confidence in their own abilities than a more objective analysis would warrant.
The report stresses that Boris Johnson was barely involved, but perhaps even more shocking is the idea that a member of the Cabinet should, apparently, be taking orders of this sort from an advisor. But it is a measure of the extent to which this under-achieving but over-empowered cadre are able to wreak havoc, whether through abrasive arrogance or plain incompetence. For Brandon Lewis’s words, spoken at the dispatch box of the House of Commons, will leave a long and damaging mark, regardless of the fate of IMB.
Are you ready? Er, no
Oliver Lewis is Johnson’s ‘no deal’ adviser, and is reported to have repeatedly blocked progress in the negotiations with the EU. Whether or not he continues to do so, this week saw the passing of the notable milestone of it being only 100 days until the transition period ends – there are far fewer working days, of course, and fewer still until a deal, if there is to be a deal, has to be finalized for ratification. A new government communication drive marked this moment by asking “are you ready?”.
The answer from numerous business sectors is a resounding no, almost as much so if there is a deal as if there isn’t. The issue here is partly that businesses are overwhelmed by dealing with coronavirus, but the truly shocking thing is the lack of clarity over what they have to prepare for. This was re-affirmed by reports of a meeting at the end of last week between the government and the road haulage industry, which pronounced it “a washout” as the government was unable to provide the details needed of how border systems will operate. As regards business more generally, the British Chambers of Commerce this week published a list showing that no less than 26 out of 35 key questions about a range of post-transition issues remain unanswered.
Road haulage is a crucial industry, so it is a very serious matter that is not likely to be prepared even if there is a deal. This week a leaked letter from Michael Gove suggested that a staggering 70% of EU-bound trucks might not be ready for the new border controls, leading to thousands of lorries facing two-day waits at Dover (in passing, note that almost all the focus seems to be on Dover: much less is said of the significant problems other ports will face).
Subsequently, speaking in parliament, Gove revealed that only a quarter of businesses believe that they are fully ready for the end of the transition period (and that doesn’t necessarily mean they are, by the way), whilst an astonishing 43% believe that the period will be extended. Unless the data were collected before the end of June that is, effectively, an impossibility and perhaps reflects a complacency born of the repeated Article 50 extensions.
But his most remarkable, almost surreal, statement was that, in order to reduce congestion at the ‘short Channel’ ports, there will be a de facto border for trucks entering Kent, which will need special ‘Kent Access Permits’ to be enforced by the police. Who knew that ‘taking control of our borders’ was going to lead not just to erecting a new one in the Irish Sea, but also one around Nigel Farage’s home county?
Separately, it has recently been reported that the development of the new IT systems that will be needed for the UK-EU border is in chaos, and a study published this week by the LSE shows the extent of the disruption to supply chains, especially in the food and drinks industry, that will occur at the end of the transition, again especially if there is no trade deal in place. And a new British Chambers of Commerce survey finds that 52% of UK firms trading internationally have not yet considered the effects of Brexit. But some industries, such as banking, are continuing to shift jobs and operations from the UK to the EU without waiting to see if a deal is done or not.
Whereas the damaging effects of the new border controls will be immediately obvious – queues, supply disruptions and price rises – those of things like banking relocations and their associated impact on tax revenues will be less visible, but no less real.
Incompetence piled on dishonesty …
Since most of the new customs requirements will exist regardless of whether there is a trade deal, the government has been woefully neglectful in leaving the preparations so late. This can be chalked up to general incompetence but there is also a specifically Brexity twist to it. For years talking about the need for such preparations was either dismissed as more Project Fear or made more difficult to admit or be taken seriously because of the ingrained power of the Project Fear narrative. Relatedly, even now there are still Brexiters, perhaps including some in government, who genuinely believe that there is some form of trade deal which avoids the need for borders, as if it were possible to have “the exact same benefits” as single market and customs union membership.
After all, it was not until February 2020 that the Border Delivery Group was established (as an aside, later, its leadership appeared to be a casualty of the witch hunt for supposedly ‘remainer’ civil servants), and although that was not the beginning of the government’s border preparation work it was the first point at which it was officially acknowledged that ‘frictionless’ trade post-Brexit was impossible.
It is worth pausing to reflect on the almost unbelievable dishonesty of this. Even soft ‘Norway style’ Brexit would have had some implications for border friction, but from the moment in January 2017 when hard Brexit became confirmed as the official position any possibility of anything like ‘frictionless’ trade disappeared. No free trade agreement could prevent that. Many experts on trade and customs, many business groups, and many commentators including relative minnows like me were screaming this. Yet it was three whole years before the government officially accepted that this was so, and even then it was not until July 2020 that it published its ‘Border Operating Model’, less than six months before it needs to come into force.
We already know that one of the government’s responses to the border chaos which on Gove’s admission now seems inevitable will be to blame businesses for lack of preparations, which is outrageous considering that the government still can’t give precise details of what they need to do. But we also glimpsed another of the ways the government will respond because it was pre-figured by DEFRA Secretary George Eustice in Select Committee evidence this week: blaming it on the “failure of the EU to plan”. It’s a charge as predictable as it is ludicrous (see the various reports in the Twitter thread link).
Such responses are at one level just boilerplate political blame deflection but, more profoundly, exemplifies the refusal of Brexiters like Eustice ever to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. For that reason alone, it’s important to keep recording and reminding people of the promises that were made for, and the lies told about, Brexit.
The consequences of no deal would of course be that much greater – as set out in an excellent, comprehensive report this week from the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank, covering not just trade but implications for transport, data, citizens, Northern Ireland, and security amongst other things. One issue not mentioned, but in the news again this week (£), is the ongoing saga of Galileo, the EU’s GPS satellite navigation system, with the announcement that the UK has abandoned attempts to build its own alternative system and the suggestion at least that the UK might try to rejoin Galileo.
This is a convoluted story, going back to 2018 when Theresa May pulled out of talks with the EU because of its insistence that the UK could have only limited, third country access to the system and announced that the UK would build its own version (although some experts thought that a compromise deal was possible) at an estimated cost of £5 billion.
That idea was enthusiastically taken up by Johnson (and reportedly driven by, again, Cummings against, or without, expert advice) who decided to buy a bankrupt satellite firm, OneWeb, to deliver it. But in June this year substantial problems emerged (the whole sorry story to that date is well told by Alex Andreou in Byline Times) and the idea has now been dropped. It is unclear at this point what will happen, but the impacts for businesses and for defence are massive. Again, there is less than 100 days to sort this out, but that timescale is a luxury compared with that faced by some UK citizens living in the EU who are customers of those banks which this week announced their accounts would be closed – in some cases before the end of the year.
Piled on even more incompetence
It is becoming clearer by the day, especially in the light of the predictable resurgence of coronavirus, that Johnson’s refusal to extend the Transition Period when he had the chance was a major and possibly catastrophic error of judgment. Far from putting pressure on the EU to ‘blink at the last minute’, it has left Britain woefully unready to cope even if there is a deal. As with the inevitability of an end to frictionless trade, the government was warned over and over again by business bodies and others that this would be the case but chose to ignore them.
Whilst far smaller in magnitude, I think it was also an error of judgment for Keir Starmer not to have at least placed on the record at the time that this was a huge mistake. Even now, in his first conference speech as leader, he said very little about Brexit and did not mention the failure to extend transition at all. I understand perfectly that he needs to avoid being depicted as a ‘remainer’, as Johnson wishes to do. But in taking the line that it is for Johnson to deliver the deal he promised, there is room to make reference to his unilateral decision to compress the time available to reach such a deal, if only as a marker for the future. It would sit well within his more general positioning of Johnson as operationally incompetent.
That critique now has real purchase, to the extent of becoming the dominant narrative, because of the way it is being taken up by so many Conservatives and former allies and supporters of the Prime Minister. Just in the last week or so it seems as if a switch has been flicked in this respect, in a way that is remarkable considering he won a majority of eighty less than a year ago. Coronavirus is of course the main driver of that, but I think that the reverberations of the IMB and the ‘breaking international law’ debacle has played its own, not insignificant, role.
On the one hand, it has created a breach between Johnson and some of the hard core Brexiters like Michael Howard. On the other, it has opened up the entire question of competence in a new way for, as Theresa May pointedly asked, “if the consequences of the Withdrawal Agreement were so bad, why did the government sign it”? This in turn links back not just to Johnson but to the arrogance and hubris of his Downing Street operation, for increasingly there are reports (£) of the resentment that experienced MPs and ministers (and, I would assume, senior civil servants) feel about the transparent contempt with which they are treated by the Vote Leave wunderkinds. Bad enough to be subjected to that indignity by those who are competent; intolerable when it comes from those who are serial bunglers.
So, deal or no deal?
All that may well turn out to be bad news for Johnson’s premiership, but it’s not at all clear what it means for the prospects of a trade deal with the EU. That can be argued in two diametrically opposite ways. One is that, stung by the criticism of his failings, making a deal becomes Johnson’s priority so that at least he can claim to have ‘delivered Brexit’, his central policy, in defiance of the ‘doomsters and gloomsters’. The other is that he pushes the button on his no deal threat in order to gain the adulation of the Brexit Ultras and stoke up the populist culture war he thrives on, and once again ignores all of the warnings of just what a disaster that would cause.
Both have very clear risks. Even the thinnest of deals will enrage the Ultras, whilst not avoiding a level of disruption that compounds the narrative of his incompetence. A thicker deal might be a little less disruptive, but enrage them even more. But no deal would be a gift to Labour and, whilst it might appeal to his core vote, the disruption, would, especially on top of the coronavirus suffering, be deeply unpopular. In particular, there is strong polling evidence of how unpopular no deal would be in the ‘Red Wall’ seats.
I’m assuming, of course, that Johnson’s calculation will be based solely upon his own self-interest and advantage, but that’s not an audaciously unrealistic assumption. Where it will lead him, I have no idea and I’ve seen nothing in any of the UK or EU commentary that suggests that anyone else has either. There is certainly no consensus view.
A straw in the wind may be the fairly upbeat report from James Forsyth in The Times this morning (£), because recently his speculations have had an uncanny knack of proving right, suggesting that he has well-informed sources. But it is perfectly possible – even likely - that Johnson himself doesn’t yet know what he intends. In any case, it should never be forgotten that, as Neale Richmond, the Irish politician who has played a leading role in shaping his country’s response to Brexit, pointedly remarked this week, the negotiations are not an internal Westminster debate, despite what the reporting of some parts of the UK media might suggest.
What is clear, for reasons I’ve argued before, and as trade expert David Henig has argued cogently this week, is that from a UK ‘national interest’ perspective a deal is important. As he says, it’s not that a deal will avoid all the disruption – there will still be plenty of that – but that it would at least begin to re-normalise UK-EU relations. I believe this would also be generally welcomed by the EU.
This is really the next big challenge for the UK, and one which erstwhile remainers can and should try to influence. Sir Simon Fraser, former Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, has recently set out the many challenges for post-Brexit foreign policy. They are considerable, because of the strategic incoherence of Brexit. But a key part of meeting them has to be to move UK-EU relations away from the entirely antagonistic framing that Brexiters give them, even after having left. That will be hard enough, but without a deal – even a very limited one – to build on it will be made impossible for years to come.
Clearly that hope is precisely why the scorched earth Brexiters want there to be no deal. For the rest of us it is important they don’t get their way. They have had their Brexit – and what a colossal mess they are making of it – but that does not give them licence to permanently poison our relationship with our closest friends.
Showing posts with label David Henig. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Henig. Show all posts
Friday, 25 September 2020
Friday, 15 November 2019
And there are still four weeks to go ...
As strongly
foreshadowed in last
week’s post, Nigel Farage did indeed retreat on his threat
to stand a Brexit Party (BXP) candidate in every seat unless Boris Johnson
shifted to a no-deal or ‘clean’ Brexit position. Instead, the party will only
stand in seats not won by the Conservatives at the last election.
There are three dimensions of this which are worth considering - motivation, reaction, and consequences - because each feeds into wider aspects of the Brexit situation.
Farage’s motivation
First, his motivation. There has been much talk of clandestine pacts with Johnson, and the possible offer of a Peerage. The former seems to be untrue (£) in that various pacts have been discussed but not agreed. As for the latter, only time will tell although it would never be possible to know for sure. My own view is that Farage expected his campaign launch to be greeted with huge acclaim and an instant opinion poll bounce. Like many populists, he tends to imagine that he is more popular than he is. Receiving no such reaction but, rather, condemnation from many of his allies and a decline in the polls he backtracked.
Whether or not that explanation is correct, the one he gave was most certainly nonsense. He claimed that he had extracted a change in policy from Johnson, such that the transition period would not be extended beyond 2020, and that a “Canada-style free trade deal without political alignment” would be sought. But Johnson has long insisted (very possibly untruthfully) that he won’t extend the transition. And a ‘Canada-style’ trade agreement has been the aspiration going right back to Theresa May’s deal.
So it is disappointing that (so far as I have seen) Farage has not been challenged in any interviews as to the supposed reason for his change of heart. Even more disappointingly he and more importantly Johnson have not been significantly challenged on the sheer impossibility of negotiating a trade deal without an extension, making it a recipe for a new kind of no-deal cliff edge at the end of 2020.
That is explained with great clarity in a recent article by trade expert David Henig, a punchy Twitter thread by Simon Fraser, former Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, and has been given greater public airing in interventions this week from the former Conservative Justice Secretary David Gauke, who is running as an independent in the election.
Brexiter reactions
The second strand of interest arising from Farage’s new stance is the reaction of his supporters. This reveals the latest version of the dynamic of purity and betrayal amongst Brexiters, the political psychology of which has so captured and deformed our entire political discourse. For in seeking to conciliate those who criticised him for a position which did, indeed, make Brexit less likely to occur, he has pleased almost no one.
Those critics, such as Arron Banks, continue to attack him because, by standing in Labour marginals targeted by the Tories, he may split the leave vote and allow Labour to hold those seats. On the other hand, by stepping back from contesting Conservative seats, Farage has now made an enemy of his most hard core supporters. Amongst them, he is being denounced as a “traitor”. It is, in a way, a delicious irony but it arises as the logical end point of what in a post last January I called the poisonous politics of betrayal which have held sway since the Referendum.
This is one reason why Brexiters have so signally failed to ‘get Brexit done’. As we saw with May’s deal, the ERG at first, and the Spartans to the last, refused to endorse it since it supposedly betrayed Brexit. Meanwhile, erstwhile remainers, such as David Gauke and Philip Hammond, were hounded out of their candidatures as traitors despite having voted each time for May’s deal and, subsequently, for Johnson’s.
Once politics gets configured this way, anything and everything can be represented as betrayal. So whilst there is some amusement in the spectacle of Farage being spit-roasted both for having compromised and for not having compromised enough - and, from either perspective, the charge is one of betraying Brexit - it’s not really funny.
For the painful truth is that if Brexit does go ahead it will be done against the wishes of the majority, who now want to remain, but, in any form it occurs, it will leave a substantial minority of those who do want it thinking it is a betrayal of Brexit anyway.
Consequences of Farage’s decision
This brings us to the third issue arising from Farage’s decision, and from events more generally. Is remaining in the EU now more or less likely? That of course is another way of asking whether a Tory victory is now more or less likely. Farage, showing a rather presumptuous attitude to the electorate for a self-styled anti-elitist, claims that he has gifted the Tories a couple of dozen seats.
That remains to be seen, and would most likely apply to Conservative held seats in the South-East, but which voted remain, which the LibDems might take, especially where they are covered by the Remain pact. In some of those seats – from Guildford to Cambridgeshire South – constituency-level polling by Survation shows potentially huge swings to the LibDems. But this polling predated Farage’s announcement, so there may indeed be an effect on the outcome in those seats.
Crucially, though, such an effect would only help Tories to hold existing seats, not to gain new ones. On that point, Chris Curtis of YouGov predicts (with caveats) that the effect will be very small in terms of enabling Tories to win Labour marginals, as they would need to do to form a majority government, because of course BXP will still be standing in those seats (indeed, that is precisely the complaint of people like Arron Banks).
However, at least one BXP candidate in such a seat has already stood down, and others may follow or not mount serious campaigns. The more this happens, the worse for Labour’s prospects of holding those seats, and the slimmer the chance of Brexit being avoided.
The doyen of psephologists, Professor Sir John Curtice, agrees that the effect will be small, making the additional point that Farage’s announcement will do little or nothing to help Tories defending their seats from SNP gains in Scotland since the BXP has little support there anyway (and, again, one BXP candidate has already stood down in protest against Farage’s new policy). It’s also worth adding that, not least because of the mixed messages Farage has sent his supporters about Johnson’s deal, the way individual BXP voters respond is far from predictable: they won’t necessarily vote Tory just because there is no BXP candidate available.
Consolidating the remain vote
With all that said, even a small effect in terms of enabling Tories to retain seats they might have lost could have a significant consequence for the outcome, and therefore for Brexit. The extent and efficacy of tactical voting therefore remains a central issue. That has been made complicated by the proliferation of rival tactical voting sites, with a swirl of conflicting claims and counter-claims about their accuracy and motivations.
However, an excellent source of reliable information about each constituency has been created by political data analyst Christabel Cooper. This is not a tactical voting site per se, but it does provide very detailed information that would allow a tactical voter – especially when combined with on-the-ground knowledge – to make a sensible choice.
Voters for whom remain is the sole, or top, priority are also not being done any favours by the behaviour of the LibDem leadership which, under Jo Swinson, is proving to be disappointingly and (to me, having had quite a high opinion of her) surprisingly tribal and unimaginative. Whilst Labour’s refusal to undertake a pact is to their great discredit, the obvious fact is that, like it or not, the only realistic way to avoid Brexit entails a Labour administration, perhaps in a minority but with support from unequivocally pro-remain parties.
It is perhaps understandable that Swinson fears she would lose the potential votes of ex-conservatives (£) if she supported a Corbyn government. Personally I think that to do so for a few months to secure another referendum would cause few problems and would even appeal to many such voters, but of course that is a judgment call. However it is simply ridiculous for her to oppose LibDem candidates pulling out of contests where the seat is marginally held by a Labour remainer, and to stand against David Gauke’s independent campaign. That makes no sense at all and, with things so finely poised, represents a substantial failure of leadership and judgment on her part.
The wider debate
It remains the case – as per my previous post - that, for all the talk of Brexit in this election campaign, very little of substance is being said about it. In that post I gave, in passing, the example of the fact that no one really knew what the arrangements for Northern Ireland in Johnson’s deal meant in practice. As if on cue, just a few hours after it was posted, it emerged that Johnson himself did not know that it meant customs forms having to be filled in on goods going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. Businesses, Johnson opined airily (some suggested drunkenly, and certainly his speech was strangely slurred), could just ‘throw the forms in the bin’.
Yet, even then, the discussion was mainly about how this exposed a rift between what Johnson and the Brexit Secretary, Steve Barclay, had said. Is there a split? Was it a gaffe? The real point, that it was one example of how Britain is in danger of entering something the consequences of which even those recommending it do not begin to understand, was hardly picked up on at all. That is staggeringly irresponsible given that, if the Tories win, that will be the reality we have to live with just six weeks after the result.
Looking further ahead, the entire notion of a ‘Canada- style’ deal – even if it could be struck in time - has never been subjected to proper examination in the Brexit debate, and is still not being. Absurd as it may seem to say so, I honestly think that the reasoning of many of those who propose it amounts to little more than: ‘Canada sounds like a nice sort of place that seems to do quite well, at least that’s the impression my brother-in-law had when he lived there in the 1970s. And they were on our side in the war. So if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for us’.
Perhaps that is unfair, but, at all events, the idea that it could substitute for full single market membership, even for goods, let alone services, and be suitable for a country which - unlike Canada - does half its trade with the EU, which – unlike Canada - has the EU as its geographically closest market, and which – unlike Canada - has 40 years of complex supply-chain and regulatory integration is simply nonsense. That isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s a basic economic and business fact.
Moreover, the notion that such an arrangement can be made ‘without political alignment’ makes the whole proposition even more fantastical. In a detailed assessment of EU preparations for the trade talks, RTE’s Tony Connelly explains how, for many EU countries, a deal without substantial UK commitments to Level Playing Field (LPF) provisions simply won’t be acceptable, especially for a country which - unlike Canada - is on the EU’s doorstep. And the extent of regulatory alignment required, with all that implies politically, can only increase the more that Brexiters add + symbols or super- prefixes - which are mainly code for more extensive services provision - to the ‘Canada’.
Connelly’s article also shows how much more prepared the EU are for these trade talks than the UK. If and when they occur we are likely to see a reprise of the way that, when it came to the phase 2 (future terms) talks of the Article 50 process, the UK had no agreed position and had created no political consensus as to the trade-offs involved. Again, no attempt whatsoever is being made during this election campaign to address any of these issues or to prepare the population for what may be about to come.
Who cares?
Bemoaning this is, of course, a waste of words and time. There are many people who understand and care deeply about the dangerous situation which will emerge within days, if not hours, of a Tory government being elected with a mandate for its Brexit ‘policy’. But most do not. In any other circumstances it would be a scandal to be flying almost blind into such a situation. Instead, it’s just accepted.
In a similar way, the failure to release the report on Russian interference in British politics, with potential implications both for the Referendum itself and for the present election is extraordinary. Of course, we have no idea what it contains. But the public interest in its publication is obvious, and the excuses given for not doing so entirely flimsy. There may be nothing of importance in it. Yet it being withheld suggests otherwise. Either way, releasing it after the election will be too late, even it is not simply kicked into the long grass in the way that the Darroch leak inquiry (remember that?) has been.
It’s the same kind of thing with each incremental piece of evidence of the economic consequences of Brexit – for example, this week, the story that Tesla will invest in Berlin and considers the UK too risky because of Brexit. And this is an industry identified by Johnson as a key part of the country’s post-Brexit future, an industry to which on the very day of the Tesla announcement he was staging an electoral visit. Yet after a brief flurry of reporting such stories get forgotten.
I’m not disposed to see in any of this as some great conspiracy. No doubt, there’s plenty of political machination going on but it arises as much as anything else from the nature of the 24 hour news cycle. And also perhaps from the desensitization which that engenders, so that minor gaffe and massive scandal are treated virtually alike.
But ultimately it’s about the lazy, cynical way too many of us shrug things off as ‘just the way things are’ - until something happens to affect us personally, when we self-righteously and angrily shout that ‘they should have done something’ (it’s always ‘they’, the despised elite; never ‘we’, who went along with it).
I very much expect that Brexit is going to see that dynamic played out in political High Definition.
There are three dimensions of this which are worth considering - motivation, reaction, and consequences - because each feeds into wider aspects of the Brexit situation.
Farage’s motivation
First, his motivation. There has been much talk of clandestine pacts with Johnson, and the possible offer of a Peerage. The former seems to be untrue (£) in that various pacts have been discussed but not agreed. As for the latter, only time will tell although it would never be possible to know for sure. My own view is that Farage expected his campaign launch to be greeted with huge acclaim and an instant opinion poll bounce. Like many populists, he tends to imagine that he is more popular than he is. Receiving no such reaction but, rather, condemnation from many of his allies and a decline in the polls he backtracked.
Whether or not that explanation is correct, the one he gave was most certainly nonsense. He claimed that he had extracted a change in policy from Johnson, such that the transition period would not be extended beyond 2020, and that a “Canada-style free trade deal without political alignment” would be sought. But Johnson has long insisted (very possibly untruthfully) that he won’t extend the transition. And a ‘Canada-style’ trade agreement has been the aspiration going right back to Theresa May’s deal.
So it is disappointing that (so far as I have seen) Farage has not been challenged in any interviews as to the supposed reason for his change of heart. Even more disappointingly he and more importantly Johnson have not been significantly challenged on the sheer impossibility of negotiating a trade deal without an extension, making it a recipe for a new kind of no-deal cliff edge at the end of 2020.
That is explained with great clarity in a recent article by trade expert David Henig, a punchy Twitter thread by Simon Fraser, former Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, and has been given greater public airing in interventions this week from the former Conservative Justice Secretary David Gauke, who is running as an independent in the election.
Brexiter reactions
The second strand of interest arising from Farage’s new stance is the reaction of his supporters. This reveals the latest version of the dynamic of purity and betrayal amongst Brexiters, the political psychology of which has so captured and deformed our entire political discourse. For in seeking to conciliate those who criticised him for a position which did, indeed, make Brexit less likely to occur, he has pleased almost no one.
Those critics, such as Arron Banks, continue to attack him because, by standing in Labour marginals targeted by the Tories, he may split the leave vote and allow Labour to hold those seats. On the other hand, by stepping back from contesting Conservative seats, Farage has now made an enemy of his most hard core supporters. Amongst them, he is being denounced as a “traitor”. It is, in a way, a delicious irony but it arises as the logical end point of what in a post last January I called the poisonous politics of betrayal which have held sway since the Referendum.
This is one reason why Brexiters have so signally failed to ‘get Brexit done’. As we saw with May’s deal, the ERG at first, and the Spartans to the last, refused to endorse it since it supposedly betrayed Brexit. Meanwhile, erstwhile remainers, such as David Gauke and Philip Hammond, were hounded out of their candidatures as traitors despite having voted each time for May’s deal and, subsequently, for Johnson’s.
Once politics gets configured this way, anything and everything can be represented as betrayal. So whilst there is some amusement in the spectacle of Farage being spit-roasted both for having compromised and for not having compromised enough - and, from either perspective, the charge is one of betraying Brexit - it’s not really funny.
For the painful truth is that if Brexit does go ahead it will be done against the wishes of the majority, who now want to remain, but, in any form it occurs, it will leave a substantial minority of those who do want it thinking it is a betrayal of Brexit anyway.
Consequences of Farage’s decision
This brings us to the third issue arising from Farage’s decision, and from events more generally. Is remaining in the EU now more or less likely? That of course is another way of asking whether a Tory victory is now more or less likely. Farage, showing a rather presumptuous attitude to the electorate for a self-styled anti-elitist, claims that he has gifted the Tories a couple of dozen seats.
That remains to be seen, and would most likely apply to Conservative held seats in the South-East, but which voted remain, which the LibDems might take, especially where they are covered by the Remain pact. In some of those seats – from Guildford to Cambridgeshire South – constituency-level polling by Survation shows potentially huge swings to the LibDems. But this polling predated Farage’s announcement, so there may indeed be an effect on the outcome in those seats.
Crucially, though, such an effect would only help Tories to hold existing seats, not to gain new ones. On that point, Chris Curtis of YouGov predicts (with caveats) that the effect will be very small in terms of enabling Tories to win Labour marginals, as they would need to do to form a majority government, because of course BXP will still be standing in those seats (indeed, that is precisely the complaint of people like Arron Banks).
However, at least one BXP candidate in such a seat has already stood down, and others may follow or not mount serious campaigns. The more this happens, the worse for Labour’s prospects of holding those seats, and the slimmer the chance of Brexit being avoided.
The doyen of psephologists, Professor Sir John Curtice, agrees that the effect will be small, making the additional point that Farage’s announcement will do little or nothing to help Tories defending their seats from SNP gains in Scotland since the BXP has little support there anyway (and, again, one BXP candidate has already stood down in protest against Farage’s new policy). It’s also worth adding that, not least because of the mixed messages Farage has sent his supporters about Johnson’s deal, the way individual BXP voters respond is far from predictable: they won’t necessarily vote Tory just because there is no BXP candidate available.
Consolidating the remain vote
With all that said, even a small effect in terms of enabling Tories to retain seats they might have lost could have a significant consequence for the outcome, and therefore for Brexit. The extent and efficacy of tactical voting therefore remains a central issue. That has been made complicated by the proliferation of rival tactical voting sites, with a swirl of conflicting claims and counter-claims about their accuracy and motivations.
However, an excellent source of reliable information about each constituency has been created by political data analyst Christabel Cooper. This is not a tactical voting site per se, but it does provide very detailed information that would allow a tactical voter – especially when combined with on-the-ground knowledge – to make a sensible choice.
Voters for whom remain is the sole, or top, priority are also not being done any favours by the behaviour of the LibDem leadership which, under Jo Swinson, is proving to be disappointingly and (to me, having had quite a high opinion of her) surprisingly tribal and unimaginative. Whilst Labour’s refusal to undertake a pact is to their great discredit, the obvious fact is that, like it or not, the only realistic way to avoid Brexit entails a Labour administration, perhaps in a minority but with support from unequivocally pro-remain parties.
It is perhaps understandable that Swinson fears she would lose the potential votes of ex-conservatives (£) if she supported a Corbyn government. Personally I think that to do so for a few months to secure another referendum would cause few problems and would even appeal to many such voters, but of course that is a judgment call. However it is simply ridiculous for her to oppose LibDem candidates pulling out of contests where the seat is marginally held by a Labour remainer, and to stand against David Gauke’s independent campaign. That makes no sense at all and, with things so finely poised, represents a substantial failure of leadership and judgment on her part.
The wider debate
It remains the case – as per my previous post - that, for all the talk of Brexit in this election campaign, very little of substance is being said about it. In that post I gave, in passing, the example of the fact that no one really knew what the arrangements for Northern Ireland in Johnson’s deal meant in practice. As if on cue, just a few hours after it was posted, it emerged that Johnson himself did not know that it meant customs forms having to be filled in on goods going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. Businesses, Johnson opined airily (some suggested drunkenly, and certainly his speech was strangely slurred), could just ‘throw the forms in the bin’.
Yet, even then, the discussion was mainly about how this exposed a rift between what Johnson and the Brexit Secretary, Steve Barclay, had said. Is there a split? Was it a gaffe? The real point, that it was one example of how Britain is in danger of entering something the consequences of which even those recommending it do not begin to understand, was hardly picked up on at all. That is staggeringly irresponsible given that, if the Tories win, that will be the reality we have to live with just six weeks after the result.
Looking further ahead, the entire notion of a ‘Canada- style’ deal – even if it could be struck in time - has never been subjected to proper examination in the Brexit debate, and is still not being. Absurd as it may seem to say so, I honestly think that the reasoning of many of those who propose it amounts to little more than: ‘Canada sounds like a nice sort of place that seems to do quite well, at least that’s the impression my brother-in-law had when he lived there in the 1970s. And they were on our side in the war. So if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for us’.
Perhaps that is unfair, but, at all events, the idea that it could substitute for full single market membership, even for goods, let alone services, and be suitable for a country which - unlike Canada - does half its trade with the EU, which – unlike Canada - has the EU as its geographically closest market, and which – unlike Canada - has 40 years of complex supply-chain and regulatory integration is simply nonsense. That isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s a basic economic and business fact.
Moreover, the notion that such an arrangement can be made ‘without political alignment’ makes the whole proposition even more fantastical. In a detailed assessment of EU preparations for the trade talks, RTE’s Tony Connelly explains how, for many EU countries, a deal without substantial UK commitments to Level Playing Field (LPF) provisions simply won’t be acceptable, especially for a country which - unlike Canada - is on the EU’s doorstep. And the extent of regulatory alignment required, with all that implies politically, can only increase the more that Brexiters add + symbols or super- prefixes - which are mainly code for more extensive services provision - to the ‘Canada’.
Connelly’s article also shows how much more prepared the EU are for these trade talks than the UK. If and when they occur we are likely to see a reprise of the way that, when it came to the phase 2 (future terms) talks of the Article 50 process, the UK had no agreed position and had created no political consensus as to the trade-offs involved. Again, no attempt whatsoever is being made during this election campaign to address any of these issues or to prepare the population for what may be about to come.
Who cares?
Bemoaning this is, of course, a waste of words and time. There are many people who understand and care deeply about the dangerous situation which will emerge within days, if not hours, of a Tory government being elected with a mandate for its Brexit ‘policy’. But most do not. In any other circumstances it would be a scandal to be flying almost blind into such a situation. Instead, it’s just accepted.
In a similar way, the failure to release the report on Russian interference in British politics, with potential implications both for the Referendum itself and for the present election is extraordinary. Of course, we have no idea what it contains. But the public interest in its publication is obvious, and the excuses given for not doing so entirely flimsy. There may be nothing of importance in it. Yet it being withheld suggests otherwise. Either way, releasing it after the election will be too late, even it is not simply kicked into the long grass in the way that the Darroch leak inquiry (remember that?) has been.
It’s the same kind of thing with each incremental piece of evidence of the economic consequences of Brexit – for example, this week, the story that Tesla will invest in Berlin and considers the UK too risky because of Brexit. And this is an industry identified by Johnson as a key part of the country’s post-Brexit future, an industry to which on the very day of the Tesla announcement he was staging an electoral visit. Yet after a brief flurry of reporting such stories get forgotten.
I’m not disposed to see in any of this as some great conspiracy. No doubt, there’s plenty of political machination going on but it arises as much as anything else from the nature of the 24 hour news cycle. And also perhaps from the desensitization which that engenders, so that minor gaffe and massive scandal are treated virtually alike.
But ultimately it’s about the lazy, cynical way too many of us shrug things off as ‘just the way things are’ - until something happens to affect us personally, when we self-righteously and angrily shout that ‘they should have done something’ (it’s always ‘they’, the despised elite; never ‘we’, who went along with it).
I very much expect that Brexit is going to see that dynamic played out in political High Definition.
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