Raab, Brexit and the Civil Service

One day there will undoubtedly be a book written about the impact of Brexit on the civil service, and it will be one of the most important parts of the story of the harm Brexit has done to Britain. Some elements of the story it will tell have already been outlined on the blog. In the very first post, in September 2016, I wrote that “there are already noises from Brexiters that civil servants are obstructing British exit. We will hear much more of that in the coming years as the complete lack of realism of Brexit becomes impossible to avoid. Over a whole swathe of issues … the Brexit position is composed of, at best, half-truths or just outright fantasies. It is therefore inevitable that the coming months and years will see a series of collisions between these fantasies and the realities (and equally inevitable that Brexiters will blame this on others)”.

Not every prediction I’ve made about Brexit proved true but that one most certainly has, and since 2016 I’ve returned to it in detail several times. Particular moments have included the resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers in January 2017, the concerted attacks on Olly Robbins and the civil service in general, especially in the wake of the Chequers Agreement in 2018, the 2019 resignation of Sir Kim Darroch and what it betokened, the 2020 ‘hitlist’ of senior civil servants deemed to be anti-Brexit, the resignation of Sir Philip Rutnam and the associated allegations of bullying by Priti Patel, and the resignation of Sir Mark Sedwill.

The consequences of faith-based politics

These are just a few of the key episodes in a very complex story. Of course, tensions between civil servants and government ministers didn’t begin with Brexit, but I think it is fair to say that there has never been such sustained hostility from politicians, and their media supporters, towards both individual civil servants and the institution of the civil service as Brexit has engendered.

Moreover, as with Brexit itself, that hostility has become entwined with a more general culture war attack on ‘the liberal elite’ and ‘wokeness’. For example, supporting the attacks made by Boris Johnson and Dominic ‘hard rain’ Cummings on civil servants, the ferociously pro-Brexiter Sunday Telegraph Allister Heath insisted (£) that “Brexit is not enough” and that “our arrogant overrated civil service must now face a political reckoning”.

The former senior civil servant Jonathan Powell has described these attacks as part of a “rolling coup against institutions”. And, indeed, under Liz Truss it became even clearer that Brexiters and the wider populist Right consider not just civil servants, the judiciary, universities, the Bank of England, the OBR, and the BBC to be part of an ‘anti-Brexit Establishment’ but also the IMF, OECD and even currency and bond market traders. Welcome to what David Frost and Jacob Rees-Mogg are pleased to call “National Conservatism” (£), or what I have called ‘Brexitist Conservatism’.

Without repeating all of the analysis in the previous posts I’ve linked to above, the core reason why Brexit has provoked a particular issue for the civil service is that it is a politics based upon faith rather than rationality or evidence. This inevitably brings Brexiter politicians into conflict with the civil service in a way that very rarely happens over ‘normal’ policy and has never happened over what amounts to a complete change in national strategic direction. As Jill Rutter, a leading expert on the civil service, has put it: “for many Brexit supporters, Brexit is an article of faith that people believe in ‘in their heart’. Ideas like sovereignty and autonomy are not amenable to the usual civil service approach of solving problems by looking at the costs and benefits”.

Thus Brexit wasn’t simply a ‘policy’: it betokened a completely different principle of political and governmental conduct. At the most extreme, it led to Brexiters demanding of civil servants things, such as ‘frictionless trade’ outside of the single market and customs union, which were simply undeliverable, or things, such as the clauses in the Internal Market Bill that led to the resignation of the head of the Government Legal Department, which were illegal. In a faith-based politics, that inevitably gave rise to the accusations of ‘obstructionism’ and ‘sabotage’ that were levelled at the civil service throughout the Brexit negotiations, as if a different civil service of ‘true believers’ could have changed the facts and would not have been bound by the law.

Raab’s resignation

Against this background, what of Dominic Raab’s resignation last Friday and its aftermath? Ostensibly, it has nothing to do with Brexit. Raab faced eight accusations of bullying civil servants, two of which were upheld by an independent report prepared by Adam Tolley KC, and as such demonstrated that Raab had violated the Ministerial Code. This report also showed that, even where bullying was not proven, Raab’s conduct was “abrasive” and “intimidating”. As former Justice Secretary David Gauke put it, it “may well have been that it was only evident that Raab crossed the line on a couple of occasions but it is also clear that he was at or near the line as a matter of course”.  It could be argued that, even leaving aside any breaches of the Ministerial Code, this showed him to lack the effective leadership skills needed by a senior minister. At all events, as a result of the report, Raab resigned.

To read Raab’s account of these events (£), and those of his many supporters, it might be thought that he had been entirely exonerated and his resignation was an act of principled nobility; that he was a victim if not indeed a martyr in the whole affair. That piece of moral gymnastics was achieved through three moves. Firstly, he implied that because most of the complaints of bullying weren’t upheld, he was somehow more innocent than guilty. Secondly, he suggested that those which had been upheld had applied a ludicrously “low bar” in defining bullying. Thirdly, he suggested that he only resigned because he had promised to do so if any of the accusations of bullying were upheld, thus, far from being disgraced, this was an honourable and actually needless act of self-punishment. The implication - which, given the fact that Priti Patel was not punished by Boris Johnson for her bullying of civil servants, might actually be true - was that, but for Raab’s promise, Rishi Sunak might have decided that he need not resign.

All of this could be read as the slippery self-justification of a discredited Minister or, as with the Patel case, an example of the ludicrous inadequacy of how the Ministerial Code operates. Instead, it became twisted round, as if it was not Raab who had been investigated for misconduct but civil servants. On this account, as with Patel, the suggestion was that all Raab had done was to demand good performance of civil servants, whose complaints arose from a combination of covering up their own incompetence and a ‘snowflake’ inability to accept criticism. Hence Oliver Dowden, now installed as Deputy Prime Minister, rushed to insist not, as one might expect after such a Ministerial resignation, that higher standards would be expected of Ministers in future, but that “there would be no letting up in the high standards I expect of civil servants”. At the same time, further weight was added to the pre-existing suggesting of making civil service roles the subject of political appointment.

Yet even this wouldn’t have amounted to a direct connection with Brexit, had Raab himself not made it in blaming his downfall on “anti-Brexit activist civil servants”. This accusation, eagerly repeated across the Brexit bubble, obviously related to Brexit itself, with Raab having at different times been Brexit Secretary and Foreign Secretary, but also to post-Brexit policies on the judiciary and migration. So here, once again, was the same accusation that has been made ever since 2016, although the Tolley report had made neither explicit nor implicit mention that opposition to Brexit had in any way motivated the complaints about Raab.

In this sense, Raab’s resignation is, indeed, the latest episode of the story of Brexit and the civil service. It is all too easy to envisage the collision of Raab’s own fanatical belief in Brexit and his dealings with civil servants who had to cope with the realities of implementing it. After all, it was Raab who, at a Select Committee in 2016, was totally bemused by the fact that hard Brexit would increase, rather than decrease, border red tape; it was Raab who, as Brexit Secretary in 2018, announced that he “hadn’t quite understood” the UK’s reliance on the Dover-Calais crossing for its goods trade; and it was Raab who admitted in January 2019 that he hadn’t read the Good Friday Agreement.

Thus Raab, who apparently prides himself on his meticulous attention to detail, seems to have lacked an understanding of some of the most basic facts about Brexit, a policy for which he campaigned for years and had a key role in implementing. So, given the general picture of his conduct given by the Tolley Report, it isn’t hard to imagine how he would have reacted to civil servants having to tell him, for example, what hard Brexit would mean for border controls or cross-channel goods flows. The ‘abrasiveness’ of that reaction might be attributable to his personality, but the likely ascription of the civil servants’ advice to their “anti-Brexit” bias would be a consequence of the systematic refusal of Brexiters to accept reality, as well as their almost wilful ignorance about what Brexit entails.

A scapegoat for the failures of Brexit

However, whilst Raab’s case is in part an illustration of what Brexit has meant for the civil service, the current debate around it reflects two slightly different, though related things. One is just the general extension from Brexit into culture war, the targets of which all have ‘remainer’ as the foundational ascribed characteristic, to which can be added indiscriminately any or all of ‘liberal’, ‘elite’, ‘establishment’, ‘woke’, ‘declinist’, and ‘unpatriotic’ to make up the dismal bingo card of the populist imagination. But the other is about Brexit itself, and the now unavoidable evidence of it having failed to deliver any of the promises Brexiters made for it and of its massive damage to almost every part of economy and society.

It's true that there is still a small industry of Brexiter politicians and commentators who deny every single example of such damage, using every trick of sophistry to do so. But it is hardly convincing, perhaps even to themselves given that so many of them, often the very same people issuing the denials of damage, are equally adamant that ‘the Brexit I voted for’ hasn’t been delivered. Moreover, they can’t avoid the clear polling evidence that most of the public believe that Brexit was a mistake and (which isn’t necessarily the same thing) that the government is handling it badly. So an alternative strategy is to blame this on, well, everyone but themselves. Theresa May, the EU, and the ‘remainer parliament’ are all amongst the targets, but none more so than civil servants.

Thus, recently, the first Brexit Secretary, David Davis, denounced the “crap job” the civil service did of the Brexit negotiations. The charge sheet again is one of entrenched opposition to Brexit and ‘pro-EU’ sympathy. The alleged result was that Brexit was unnecessarily delayed and that Britain failed to get a good deal, still less the deal which would have allowed the promises of Brexiters to be realised. However, there are three big problems with this analysis – or perhaps four if you count the fact that, as I identified in that first blog post, and many others also said at the time, it was obvious from day one that this was where Brexit was going to end up.

The case for the defence

The first problem is that what is believed to be the biggest research study of the civil service ever conducted, led by Andrew Kakabadse, Professor of Governance and Leadership at Henley Business School, concluded unequivocally that “there is no evidence of bias against Brexit by the Civil Service or civil servants. I found no civil servants who attempted to frustrate or disrupt the Brexit negotiations due to their alleged anti-Brexit or pro-European sentiments”. This goes to the heart of the entire issue, and could not be a clearer refutation of the Brexiters’ case against the civil service.

Of course, they have never accepted the findings of this study, and have continued to make those claims since it was published in 2018. Nor does it take a huge leap of imagination to think that, if confronted with it, they would dismiss it as ‘remainer bias’, since academics are regarded as being just as suspect as civil servants (unless, of course, they are one of those academics who supports Brexit, such as Patrick Minford or Robert Tombs, who then automatically become distinguished intellectuals and totally free of all bias).

The second problem is with the accusation that civil servants (or for that matter others) delayed Brexit. This has become an unquestioned belief amongst many Brexiters, and many of the general public. In fact, what is most striking about Brexit is how quickly it was done. The initial Article 50 period of two years was, it’s true, extended by eight months from March 2019 to January 2020, but that was almost entirely due to the fact that the Tory government chose to hold not just one but two General Elections, as well as a leadership contest, after having triggered Article 50. Together, these knocked at least six, and probably seven, months out of the negotiations. As for the subsequent trade negotiations, few thought they could be completed as quickly as the year they actually took, a year in which the massive disruption of the pandemic occurred.

So there is no basis for saying that Brexit was delayed by the civil service. In any case the real problem with the tempo of Brexit was the excessive speed with which it was undertaken. It is now widely agreed on all sides (£) that Article 50 was triggered far too early, without proper preparation or agreement on the UK position, and this was entirely because Theresa May accepted (or agreed with) Brexiter insistence that delay would be betrayal. Subsequently, what Johnson and Frost were later to denounce as a wholly unacceptable agreement about Northern Ireland was made solely to avoid extending the negotiations, and their total refusal to extend the transition period was one of the reasons why both businesses and the government were so badly prepared for its ending, just days after the trade agreement was finalised on Christmas Eve 2020.

All of this was self-imposed by Brexit-supporting politicians, and at the urging of Brexiters, and had nothing at all to do with civil servants who repeatedly warned against it. Indeed, it was the issue of unrealistic implementation timescales that began the conflicts between Priti Patel and Sir Philip Rutnam, which ended in his resignation and a payment of £340,000 for unfair dismissal amid the bullying claims.

As for the accusation that it was civil service sabotage or ineptitude that led to Britain getting a poor deal, this is falsified by the fact that Boris Johnson, and all his MPs, fought the 2019 General Election on the claim that, as regards the Withdrawal Agreement, it was an excellent deal. They said the same thing about the subsequent trade agreement. If the civil service had negotiated such bad deals, why did these politicians even agree them, let alone sing their praises? And in any case, which comes back to the core issue, what was this better Brexit deal which would have delivered the promises? If these included the ‘exact same benefits’ as EU membership, and no Irish border anywhere, then they were never going to be delivered because they are not deliverable.

The bigger picture

In linking his resignation to Brexit, Raab revealed the ongoing hostility of Brexiters to the civil service, as well as aspects of the still ongoing ‘battle for the Brexit narrative’. That battle has now largely shifted from a debate about whether Brexit has failed because, with the exception of a handful of admittedly very vocal diehards, the Brexiters realise they have all but lost that.

One illustration of this was the outcome of this week’s parliamentary debate about holding a public inquiry into the effects of Brexit, a debate held because a public petition demanded it. The fact that the government refused to hold such an inquiry, and the fact that no high-profile Brexiter supported the call for one – indeed only one Brexiter MP, Adam Holloway, even attended the debate – is a tacit admission that any such inquiry would show the effects to have been hugely damaging. Hence the ‘battle for the narrative’ is increasingly turning to arguments about who is to blame for the failures and damage of Brexit – Allister Heath, again, supplying a splenetic and spectacularly illogical contribution this week (£) – with the civil service being amongst those most frequently lined up.

Equally, and as the Raab resignation also illustrates, Brexiters are shifting their focus to a wider contestation between ‘Brexitist’ or ‘National’ Conservatism and what they would no doubt call the ‘Wokerati’ or the ‘New Elite’. In that context, the post-Brexit discussion about the civil service, with which Raab’s resignation has become explicitly linked, is potentially quite different to the more familiar one of the possible desirability of party-political appointments to the civil service or the possible problem of party-political bias amongst civil servants.

Indeed, the key to understanding this whole issue of Brexit and the civil service is that it isn’t the party-political impartiality of the civil service that Brexiters have called into question. Rather, it is the more fundamental question of whether the civil service should operate on the basis of belief rather than facts and be guided by zealotry rather than legality. (It’s actually a very similar question to that posed by Brexit for the BBC, in the way that factual reporting of Brexit is readily perceived and portrayed by Brexiters as being animated by lack of belief in Brexit, but that is a story for another time.)

The stakes in this question are very high, and if Brexiters could but see it they are higher even than Brexit. For what Brexiters should be considering is not the desirability of having a civil service imbued with true belief in Brexit, but the dangers to them, quite as much as to everyone else, of a future civil service imbued with true belief in a creed that they find obnoxious, and willing to sacrifice both reason and legality in pursuit of that belief.

The great Brexit bodge job

It has been a complicated week for Brexit news. If there is a unifying thread that runs through it, it is of the consequences not just of Brexit but of the particular way that Brexit was done becoming clearer. In parallel, there is a concerted attempt by Brexiters to ignore, deny, disown, obscure or distract from these consequences and the decisions they made.

Brexit and trade update

There can be no serious doubt now that Brexit is inflicting significant damage on UK trade with the EU, the only debate is about how great that damage is which won’t be known for a while. Last Friday, just as I was posting, the Office for National Statistics reported a massive fall of 40.7% in UK exports to the EU in January 2021, the first month after the transition period ended, with imports from the EU falling by 28.8% compared with December 2020. Some sectors’ exports have been devastated, most notably food and live animals which fell by 54%.

The ONS report allows some wriggle-room for Brexiters (which they are taking full advantage of) to downplay, if not deny, the extent to which Brexit is the cause, rather than the pandemic. This, of course, was to be expected not least because, even before the pandemic struck, they ascribed any piece of Brexit bad news to some other factor. In effect, they have set up a circular - or more accurately ‘unfalsifiable’ – argument. When the effects of Brexit were predicted they were dismissed as Project Fear because no one could ‘prove’ they would happen. Now the effects are happening they are dismissed as having another cause because no one can ‘prove’ they are down to Brexit. Thus, happily for them, no evaluation of Brexit is deemed possible.

However, detailed analysis by John Springford of the Centre for European Reform, which corrects for pandemic effects, and uses a sophisticated ‘doppelganger’ method to model Brexit against the counterfactual of no Brexit, finds a 22% fall in total goods trade with the EU in January. There is still scope to argue that some of this is explained by anticipatory stockpiling of traded goods and it remains to be seen the extent to which that was a factor, but some supply chain experts suggest it will not have had a major impact. The 22% fall comes on top of a 10% fall in UK-EU goods trade since the 2016 Referendum. These figures all relate to goods trade. The picture for services trade is more difficult to establish yet, and more difficult to separate from pandemic effects, but it is not going to be good (£).

Whatever emerges in the longer-term, there are two particular points that stand out. One is that, given that the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) established zero tariffs in UK-EU trade it follows that what we are seeing, and will see, are the effects of non-tariff barriers, including customs formalities, as well as of tariffs due to rules of origin in some cases. This is important, because going right back to the Referendum campaign, Brexiters continually failed to understand the difference between a ‘free trade deal’ and single market and customs union membership and, in tandem with that, focused far too much on tariff barriers to trade and, even within that, ignoring what rules of origin would mean for international supply chains. That was a conceptual failure, and one which is now beginning to be quantified. In turn, this shows the deep flaw in David Frost’s claim, mentioned in my previous post, that economic models over-stated the significance of non-tariff barriers.

The second point of note is that exports have been much harder hit than imports so far. The most obvious reason for that is that the UK has not yet introduced import controls and, indeed, announced last week that their introduction would be delayed by a further six months. That will be welcome news for importers, but creates a quite extraordinary situation, especially when viewed from a Brexiter perspective, since it means that British exporters face controls which EU exporters to the UK are spared, a disparity not lost on farmers, for example. I’m not sure that this was what Brexiters had in mind when they argued that German car makers would ensure that a good deal was assured, but it is certainly a good deal for them. It will also be handy for those minded to offload substandard or dangerous products into Britain’s welcoming arms. Again, I’m not sure if this is what Brexiters meant by taking back control of our borders.

The legacy of stupidity and arrogance

Why has this happened? The answer is in part, again, because Brexiters didn’t understand or accept what leaving the single market, even with a free trade agreement, would mean. Indeed it was not until February 2020 that any government minster formally and publicly admitted that it would mean border controls on imports. Beneath that lies an astonishing mixture of stupidity and arrogance. Even before Article 50 was triggered, Brexiters were agitating against the idea of any transition period to implement the terms of a future trade deal, and both the principle and the length of a transition were the subject of ongoing rows within the Tory Party throughout the Brexit negotiations.

In November 2016 the then Brexit Secretary, David Davis, of whom it is almost no exaggeration to say that every word he ever uttered about Brexit has been wrong, languidly opined (£) that he “wasn’t really interested” in a transition but might consider one to “be kind” to the EU. By July 2017 he said that the practicalities would be ‘doable’ for the UK without transition but countries like France, Belgium and the Netherlands wouldn’t be ready and would need extra time.

In the event, the original Theresa May exit deal set a transition period that was to have lasted from the then planned Brexit day of March 29 2019 until the end of 2020. Even then, she and other ministers insisted that this was an ‘implementation period’, when in fact there would be nothing to implement until a trade deal was struck (this also reflected persistent failures to understand that the trade deal and the exit deal were separate things). That would have given some twenty-one months to negotiate the deal and ‘implement’ it but of course Brexit day didn’t happen until January 31 2020. Yet the original end of transition date was not changed, and Johnson refused to extend the period, when it was possible to do so, even though the pandemic had already started.

Thus, now that it is exposed that the EU was, in fact, ready in time but the UK was not, the government is reduced to prolonging the one-sided introduction of border controls. Doing so is not a violation of any of the agreements with the EU and although, conceivably, it could violate WTO non-discrimination rules with respect to non-EU countries it is highly unlikely that this will lead to any action against the UK. Apart from anything else, these are still temporary measures and it would take far too long for a dispute to be raised – and in any case the WTO dispute settlement process is still in chaos.

The drive to ditch the Northern Ireland Protocol

What is much more serious is violating the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) by unilaterally extending the ‘grace periods’. This led to the EU this week beginning legal action against the UK for breaching the NIP, as well as a political letter complaining of bad faith. In normal times this would be a big news story, and perhaps a scandal. The combination of Covid, Brexit fatigue, and a lack of political opposition and public interest means that, now, it hardly registers - but the damage being done to the UK’s international standing is considerable. That damage is not just to relations with the EU but, potentially, the US.

It has been suggested by one influential Conservative commentator this week (£) that the politics of US involvement might move things in the direction of the EU accepting much softer arrangements for the Irish Sea border than those entailed by the NIP. The rationale for this argument is the claim, long made by unionists but now being adopted by the British government, that the NIP is itself a violation of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement (GFA). Since the Biden administration is committed to upholding that agreement then, the idea goes, it will support the UK against the EU in flexing or even dropping the NIP.

This argument was tested in a speech in the US this week by Dominic Raab, and explains his bizarre claim that the EU is erecting an Irish Sea border (when in fact this is what the UK and the EU agreed). He then sought to present this, or at the very least the way that it is being implemented, as a violation of the GFA. Presumably the same argument is being made by the senior official the UK has sent to Washington. Meanwhile, the EU and Ireland have recently made representations to Biden about the need to uphold the Protocol, with the St Patrick’s Day (virtual) meeting between the US President and the Irish Taoiseach providing a potently symbolic focus.

It is already clear that Biden’s administration is not going to accept the UK’s line. To his existing statements of support for the GFA, this week he went further in articulating his support for the NIP and, by clear implication, for the Irish Sea border which it sets in place. The most obvious issue in all this is, indeed, the fact the UK signed up to the NIP, and Johnson hailed it as a great triumph of his negotiation to have ‘ditched the backstop’ that had been in Theresa May’s deal. The government did so knowing full well what its effects would be, yet from the outset has pretended otherwise. Thus having, like Boris Johnson, denied that it meant an Irish Sea border, Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary, is now engaged in a new pretence, which is being echoed in the wider phalanx of Brexiter ideologues.

This pretence has two prongs. One is to suggest that the whole thing is just a triviality, almost a joke. So Lewis talks lightly of just wanting “the great British banger” to be enjoyed in Northern Ireland, as if checks on processed and chilled meats did not have a serious purpose. Lower down the Brexiter food chain the same dismissive sentiment is found, for example in  suggestions that the EU is prioritizing “the inspection of lettuce before peace in Northern Ireland”.

The other prong, which also relates to the claims about the GFA, is that the NIP was, somehow, provisional and a step towards, as Lewis calls it, a “permanent solution”. Down the food chain that appears in the false claim from Iain Duncan Smith (£) that the Protocol “was originally not intended to be permanent … the Withdrawal Agreement was very clear that the Protocol would be ‘superseded’”. In fact, the Protocol allows for the possibility that it (or parts of it) may be superseded by subsequent agreement, not that it “would be”. That could happen were the UK to align with EU SPS rules, for example, but not simply by ignoring them. (Smith also, wrongly, says that “the EU still hasn’t ratified” the Protocol which is, at best, a misunderstanding: it has, it’s the TCA which hasn’t yet been ratified.)

Whether Biden’s slowly hardening stance will make a difference remains to be seen, but as things stand it is clear that the UK is toying with the idea of not just violating the NIP but of trying to completely revise or even abandon it. That may only be the beginning, if the Brexit Ultras get their way. Already some are agitating (£) for the UK to renege on the financial settlement payments. It is easy to dismiss such calls as coming from fringe and peculiar figures – and few merit that description better than Mark ‘World War Two’ Francois, the culprit in this case – but the Brexit process has showed over and over again that what starts with such figures ends up being government policy.

Global Britain?

The irony that this should be happening even as the government trumpets its commitment to leadership in shaping global rules could hardly be more glaring. This commitment was part of this week’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy which ostensibly sets the strategic direction for Britain’s international role for years to come or, perhaps more candidly, articulates an overblown version of that role to appeal to voters’ nationalism and Johnson’s predilection for boosterish phrase-making. In effect, it reverses the British decision in the 1960s to retreat from ‘East of Suez’. Some argue that there is a logic to that, but political historian Professor Robert Saunders points out that the strategic and financial reasons for the 1960s decision still exist, and to an even greater extent.

This isn’t the place to discuss the review in detail, but from a Brexit perspective three things stand out. One is just that Brexit is what frames it – both because this is what Britain’s post-Brexit place in the world is meant to be and also because of the central emphasis placed on the Brexiters’ buzz word of sovereignty. The second thing is that, whatever its merits or otherwise, there is very little in it which could not have been done without Brexit and much in it that would have been done had Brexit not happened. The third is that it says relatively little about the EU, as opposed to bi-lateral relations with some EU members, as if to suggest that ‘Global Britain’ is above such parochialism.

That was certainly the implication of Johnson’s dismissive reference, when presenting the review to the House of Commons, to “the cramped horizons of a regional foreign policy”. But it makes little sense. On the one hand, the UK’s foreign policy has never been constrained by, or limited to, the EU. On the other, in relation to many of its objectives the review will entail collaboration with the EU, for example over climate change, or would benefit from closer and more harmonious relations with the EU, for example over security. An ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’ is all very well if you like that sort of thing – though whether Britain has the money and resources to make it more than tilting at windmills seems questionable – but, as the Brexiters used to say, we are leaving the EU, not leaving Europe. So Johnson’s words might best be interpreted as showing a preference for grand gestures over mundane practicalities (indeed that also characterises his entire approach to politics, including Brexit), as well as an attempt to cock a snook at the EU.

Yet, in fact, the UK’s most pressing foreign policy and security need is to regularise its relations with the EU, not least as this is a prerequisite for improving relations with the US which, as the review affirms, remain the cornerstone of UK policy. Lurking beneath this is the recurring Brexiter idea that defence and security are primarily, or even solely, linked to NATO with the EU a near irrelevance. This is, at best, deeply out-dated, as the recent statement by NATO shows, and in relation to some of the cutting edge issues of cyber-security simply false. It is also hard not to raise an eyebrow at the recognition that Russia is the most acute threat to UK security, given that it is not necessary to posit Russian interference in the 2016 Referendum to recognize that Brexit was a huge gift to Putin.

The ingrained antagonism towards the EU is vividly illustrated by this week’s absurd accusations (in the headlines, even if the stories don’t sustain them) that it is suspending use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as some kind of anti-Brexit statement. Everything about that is nonsense. The EU is not suspending the vaccines use – and the EMA, the EU’s medicines regulator, has and continues to approve its use – but rather some individual states, not all of them even EU members. It may very well be that these suspensions are unnecessary, and it seems that many of them will be lifted very soon, but the idea that national regulators are animated by, or even remotely interested in, Brexit is preposterous. If this story shows anything about the EU it is that its individual members have, and can exercise, sovereignty in the same way as non-members. But, absurd as it is, it has taken root in the fertile soil of post-Brexit bellicosity in which, as per my last post, Brexiters remain obsessed with the EU and assume that the EU and all its members are obsessed with Brexit, so that in the UK the entire vaccine mess is seen through the lens of Brexit.

At first sight these two things - the vaccine rows and the Integrated Review - may seem very different, but they come from the same mentality, which is also evident in relation to trade. At the end of my previous post, I used the metaphor of a stroppy teenager storming out of the family home and it applies here, because that mentality licences both an imagination of the EU as malevolently tyrannical and a fantasy that ‘we don’t need them anyway’. The crucial link is that both responses are supposedly assertions of independence but remain bound by, and defined through, that from which independence is sought. If Global Britain is supposed to be a mature, self-confident, sovereign state exercising international leadership – though that is hardly how post-Brexit Britain appears to the bemused world - then Brexiters need first to lose that adolescent mentality.

Bodged Brexit

As these various post-Brexit realities play out, it’s worth separating out those things which arose inevitably as a consequence of Brexit, or of hard Brexit, such as the introduction of non-tariff barriers, from those which have arisen from the incompetent and dogmatic way in which (hard) Brexit has been undertaken. The timescale and preparedness issues are undoubtedly of the latter sort, as is the relentless antagonism towards the EU. Given that Brexit was, on any account, a major change in national strategy and, on the Brexiters’ account, a vital one, then it was entirely unnecessary to do it with such haste and with such ill-grace. That happened partly because the Brexiters didn’t know what they were doing but, more, because their hatred of the EU and, perhaps, the political calculations of the Conservatives about the threat from Farage led them to do a rushed, botched, bodged job of both the Withdrawal Agreement, including the NIP, and the TCA.

The consequences of that bodge job are becoming more and more evident with every day that passes. But just as their lies, ignorance and incompetence brought us to this situation so do the Brexiters now seek to address it with more lies, ignorance and incompetence. Almost everything that is happening now was warned of. The Brexiters were told over and over again what the consequences would be for trade, for Northern Ireland, for international relations. Every single time they did not just ignore the warnings but ridiculed them, and traduced those who gave them as misguided at best and treacherous at worst.

Now everything that they promised is coming unstitched but there is no contrition, and not even any recognition. Just more lies, and new lies about the lies they told before. No amount of grandstanding about Global Britain can conceal the squalid mess Johnson and his cronies have made back at home.

Blockades, mythical and metaphorical

The Internal Market Bill (IMB) and its repercussions have been the predominant theme of this week’s developments. Almost as soon as I wrote my previous post, Brexiter MPs started justifying that Bill in terms of the supposed EU threat to ‘blockade’ food supplies travelling from Great Britain (GB) to Northern Ireland (NI). In particular, it was this threat which was used to justify the incendiary step of including the clauses in this legislation which would break international law. This justification has now been widely repeated, including by the Prime Minister.

This was a dishonest linkage to make, because there is nothing in the IMB which would prevent this mythical ‘blockade’ (though there are rumours that the forthcoming Finance Bill will do so). The two areas in which the Bill proposes powers to defy international law are – as detailed in the previous post – goods flows from NI to GB and  the state aid rules in the NI Protocol (NIP). This point was made in a very effective parliamentary performance from Ed Miliband during the IMB second reading debate this week, in which he challenged Boris Johnson to explain his claim – which, unsurprisingly, as it would have been impossible, the Prime Minister refused to do.

The myth of the ‘blockade’ threat

As so often in the Brexit saga, disentangling the different strands of what is being said and why is complex. The first time a linkage between the IMB and the ‘blockade’ threat was suggested seems to have been in a report in The Sun on Tuesday of last week, where it was said that Michel Barnier had made “veiled threats” about GB to NI food flows during the trade negotiations and that it was these which had provoked the government to its move against the NIP (quite how the timings of this would have worked is unclear, by the way).

The story was given legs by a reference in Barnier’s statement at the end of last week’s talks when he said that “more clarity is needed [about GB’s proposed future sanitary and phytosanitary regime] for the EU to do the assessment for the third-country listing of the UK”. Such listing will be needed for GB agricultural produce to enter NI at the end of the transition. The UK position – as articulated by David Frost - is that this is a non-issue as GB will continue to follow EU standards, and if it proposes to change these will give the EU and the WTO plenty of notice.

Whether this issue is being used as negotiating leverage in the trade talks or not I don’t know. But it certainly doesn’t amount to the threat of a ‘blockade’ with its connotations of naval interdiction. Rather, it is a reminder of the procedural, rules-based nature of the EU as an institution and, for that matter, of international trade. It is not enough for the UK just to say it will follow the EU’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) standards and, as Boris Johnson asserted at this week’s liaison committee, that the EU should automatically list the UK with its failure to do so meaning it is not acting in good faith. Rather, like any third country, which is what the UK has chosen to be, it needs to submit the relevant documentation for assessment.

If it is compliant, then the EU would have no grounds to refuse third country listing, and there is no suggestion that it would do so. Even if it did, the UK’s correct response would be to seek redress through the WA dispute system (and, perhaps - I am not sure - through the WTO) and in the meantime to make use of the existing provision within the NIP whereby “serious economic … difficulties” can be addressed by unilateral action, thus avoiding any ‘blockade’.

In short, there’s no reason to think that the EU is minded to punish the UK in this way, even if it was it couldn’t, even if it could the UK has no need to break international law to respond to it, and even if it did need to the IMB doesn’t provide the means.

My guess is that the UK has not wanted to submit its SPS plans because of the likely contradictions between following EU SPS rules and making trade deals with other countries, especially the US (although it is reported that the government now says it will do so by the end of October). For the EU’s part, there is presumably a reluctance just to take it on trust that the UK will comply and will give adequate notice of any changes. Similarly, it is reluctant to take on trust that the UK’s post-Brexit State Aid regime will be robust and wants to see the precise detail before agreeing a trade deal.

Such a lack of trust is the inevitable consequence of the bellicose, negative and sometimes duplicitous way that the UK has approached the Brexit negotiations over the last four years. Doing so has consequences, and those consequences have caught up with Britain. They can only be compounded by the current threat to break international law, so if that threat was indeed meant as a counter to Barnier’s position about third country listing then it is counter-productive anyway.

The wider attack line

However, the initial reporting was not the same as what came to be said, in that it only suggested the IMB clauses were being used to ‘talk tough’ in reply to the EU’s ‘threats’. It was not until a few days later that it began to be falsely claimed that the Bill was actually a way of neutering those threats.

The obvious reason is that the ‘blockade’ line offers, to Brexit supporters in the population and the media, something that sounds sufficiently serious to justify the breaking of international law. Perhaps it was developed in part because of the backlash against that plan. However, it is only one strand within a wider and much more dangerous narrative that the Brexiters are developing. For the ‘blockade’ allegation is part of a thoroughgoing attempt to claim that the EU are not negotiating in ‘good faith’. As noted above, the Prime Minister himself explicitly linked third country SPS listing with good faith this week.  But the wider attack is that not just for this reason but more generally it is the EU and not the UK which is in breach of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and, therefore, of international law.

It takes quite some brass neck – actually, it takes a sociopathic lack of self-awareness and pathological dishonesty - to make such a claim, but none of these qualities are alien to the Brexit Ultras. As usual (cf. GATT Article XXIV) they seize like barrack-room lawyers everywhere on some half-understood (if that) legal text to give themselves a veneer of authority with which to impress the gullible. Currently, it is Article 184 of the WA (see p.287 of link) according to a semi-literate briefing produced by the ERG (described by law Professor Steve Peers as “perhaps the worst legal analysis I have ever seen, and I am including students who leave their exam booklet blank”).

This article requires both sides to negotiate in good faith and to use their best endeavours to secure agreements on the future relationship. Risibly, the Brexiters interpret this to mean that if the EU doesn’t give the UK a deal that it wants then that violates the article and means the EU is not acting in good faith. They also conveniently ignore that Article 184 refers to the agreements to be sought as those referred to in the Political Declaration – the very document which, with its references to level playing field conditions, they and the Brexit government have disowned. Even in its own terms it’s nonsense since if, as claimed, the EU is in breach of the WA then, as with the ‘blockade’ non-issue, the remedy is to use the dispute resolution procedure within the WA rather than unilaterally to break its terms.

Never mind. Like so many other bogus Brexiter claims this one – along with other equally footling ideas such as that the NI Protocol was only designed to be temporary – are now being pumped out by any and every Brexiter MP and their social media foot soldiers. So too is the Brexiters’ idea that since the Miller case (which forced the parliamentary vote on triggering Article 50) confirmed the primacy of parliamentary sovereignty over the Executive then ‘therefore’ this means parliament doesn’t have to obey international law. It’s hard to be too scathing of the woeful intellectual inadequacy and dishonesty of such gibberish.

The motivation here is obvious. Even in these post-truth times it strains public credulity that a government that signed a deal six months ago can now claim it is deeply flawed. Admittedly Bernard Jenkin now openly says that “the UK made a mistake in signing the WA” – something he and the rest of the ERG voted to do - but if that becomes the Brexiter message then it suggests that the entire basis on which the Tories campaigned and won the General Election was also a mistake. It might even invite the heretical thought that if MPs can change their minds about what they voted for then so too could the electorate that voted for Brexit.

So, instead, the blame is being ascribed to the EU for bad faith and for making ‘extreme’ interpretations of the WA. This, rather than Brexiter delusion or duplicity, is then used to justify reneging on parts of it or in due course – as I have been suggesting for some time is the Ultras’ hope – on its entirety.

The IMB at home and abroad

For the time being that only extends to the provisions of the IMB, assuming it passes. This is now likely because it seems the government has conceded to its ‘rebels’ that the provisions which would break international law can only be activated with a further parliamentary vote (and with some other new caveats). It is only a fig leaf, with little substantive meaning, although it does show that there are still lines – even if only shakily drawn in the sand – that Johnson isn’t quite able to cross.

But as so often in the Brexit process – the Chequers Proposal and the ‘Malthouse Compromise’ come to mind – attempts to broker domestic agreement, even if successful, myopically ignore international consequences. In particular, the existence of this legislation even in very slightly softened form is anathema to the EU.

There seems to be some dispute as to whether simply passing (or even just proposing) such a law would, in itself, be grounds for the EU to take legal action, or whether that would require the powers granted to be exercised. It is also a political question as to whether the EU would do so even if legally able, to which the answer seems to be ‘not yet’. Either way, assuming the relevant clauses pass in any form the damage will have been done to the last residue of the EU’s trust. The EU won’t walk away from the trade talks, and a deal is still possible, but the inviolability of the WA as a condition for such a deal has been forcibly reaffirmed. And it will taint the UK’s international reputation as Ursula von der Leyen has warned (£), with potential effects going far beyond Brexit.

Already this week we have seen signs of that, with robust statements from Joe Biden and other US politicians re-confirming that a UK-US trade deal is unthinkable if the Good Friday Agreement is compromised. Breaching the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) in the ways proposed by the IMB doesn’t in itself necessarily do that, but it could be a move in that direction.

Indeed Dominic Raab’s visit to the US, which occasioned these statements, showed how this could be. For in defending the IMB he made the extraordinary comment that it was only necessary because the EU was trying to erect a regulatory border down the Irish Sea. Yet that it is precisely what the UK has agreed to. So if Raab actually understood and meant what he said – an open question, since he appears to be totally out of his depth - then the entire basis of the provisions in the NIP which prevent a land border with Ireland, and therefore the GFA, would be compromised.

Brexiter MPs reacted with fury to Biden’s intervention but, like it or not, as a consequence of Brexit Britain has, as it were, blockaded itself into isolation, and can be booted around by the big players whether that be the US, EU or China. Arch-Brexiter John Redwood may blithely opine that “trade deals are nice to have but not essential … Getting back full control of our money, our laws and our borders is essential”, but that always hollow slogan now sounds increasingly like the last desperate cry of a country sinking into oblivion. Not waving, but drowning.

Domestically, the IMB may initially have looked smart. The Tories could depict Labour’s opposition to the Bill as “siding with the EU”, and many voters will surely take the view that breaking international law isn’t ‘really’ breaking the law. And as one said on a vox pop on Radio 4 this week ‘it’s not as if we’ll be torturing people’. Plus for many Tory core voters almost anything that seems to further the Brexit cause, or even just sticks fingers up at the EU, or even just enrages the liberal metropolitan elite, will be greeted with rapture.

Yet those voters – and more importantly the Brexit Ultras – may be infuriated at having been marched up the hill of flouting the WA only to be marched half-way back down again when Johnson encountered some opposition. There are also rumours that the legislation may now be delayed, despite the initial claim that it was so urgent it had to be rammed through quickly, which would be a further climbdown.

So the IMB is beginning to look like yet another Johnson fiasco. He has raised the Ultras’ hopes of ditching the WA – or at least of ‘sticking one’ on the EU - then backtracked. Yet the damage to relations with the EU and to the UK’s wider reputation is done anyway, and won’t be forgotten for a very long time. In this respect, too, he seems to have blockaded himself into a corner.

The underlying problem: trying to turn lies into policy

Aside from their immediate motivations and effects, these latest events re-emphasise something more fundamental about Brexit. It has always been based upon a denial of, or at best a naivety about, reality. In particular, as Tom McTague wrote in The Atlantic this week, a denial of the reality of the meaning of Brexit for Northern Ireland (or of Northern Ireland for Brexit). Consider the absurd dismissal of this reality by Boris Johnson and others in 2016, insisting that Brexit would have no impact on the Irish border because of – again, invoking a bit of legal-sounding mumbo-jumbo – the longstanding existence of a Common Travel Area. But there has to be a border somewhere. Having for reasons of expedience accepted that it would be across the Irish Sea, Johnson is now trying yet again to deny the need for a border.

Brexit wasn’t just a denial of the reality of Northern Ireland but also of the nature of the single market, the nature of the EU, and much else besides. Looking at the Vote Leave campaign documents now, there is scarcely a sentence in them that anyone could now seriously defend. The line in the final page summary about “having better relations with our European friends” has a particularly hollow ring to it this week, whilst the core economic claim that “there is a free trade zone from Iceland to Turkey to the Russian border and we will be part of it”, always a lie, now looks like the ravings of a lunatic.

As I wrote in March 2019, you can lie but you can’t turn lies into policy. The attempt to do so is the reason the UK is being driven to more and more extreme positions. It is that which has given the events of the last few years their strangely repetitive quality as, like moths dashing themselves against a window pane, the Brexiters keep trying to buck reality. A small example of that came this week when Geoffrey Cox refused to support the IMB on the basis that it broke international law by unilaterally over-riding the WA. Cox – himself a Brexiter, demonstrating that they are not all Ultras – had also as the then Attorney-General refused in the face great pressure to advise that the government could legally unilaterally exit what was then the backstop in May’s WA. That was eighteen months ago, but the Ultras are still convinced there is a way around having to honour what you agree to.

What we see in the government’s present contortions over the IMB is, as Rafael Behr wrote with customary insight this week, “the dawning, desperate realisation that there is no way to reconcile responsible statecraft with the fulfilment of Eurosceptic fantasy”. But the realisation, if that is what it is, has come too late. The UK government and Eurosceptic (or Brexiter) fantasy are now inseparable and – in their aims to reshape the civil service and judiciary – they threaten also to capture the institutions of the state.

Of course, for those who have the true faith, it is neither fantasy nor lies, and no event or experience can shake them into accepting reality. Some, at least, still genuinely believe that there is some kind of trade agreement that can largely replicate single market membership without any of the obligations. They still believe that either now or after a few months without a deal the EU will make such an agreement, no doubt at the behest of German car makers. They still believe that it doesn’t matter much anyway, as ‘WTO terms’ will be just fine. They still believe that the Irish border issue is one confected by Brussels and perhaps Dublin. The real blockade is of their brains: fanatical Brexiter ideology prevents the entry of reality.

What now?

Their fantasy will, as it always has done, seek to drive Brexit policy in a harder and harder direction. It is the only way of outflanking encroaching reality – if we push harder our dreams will come true, and if they don’t come true it is because we aren’t pushing hard enough - and is also the only way of sustaining the populist culture war that secures them the votes they need. Derogation from the European Convention of Human Rights is the already emerging next step, perhaps after a no (trade) deal Brexit and, if so, the subsequent ripping up of the WA in its entirety. For there is surely no way that either the financial settlement or the NI provisions would survive Brexiter pressure in the absence of a trade deal (though one must pray that those for citizens’ rights would).

That seems a perfectly feasible short-term scenario, and at the beginning of this week might have seemed the most likely. Certainly Sir Ivan Rogers, who has been right about most things to do with Brexit, believes that that there will be no deal.  But in this febrile atmosphere, and with a Prime Minister so lacking in consistency, principle, or even basic competence, Brexit predictions are more difficult than ever. So as the week ends it still looks possible that after all the chaos of this autumn (of which there is much more to come) clears away, some kind of fairly limited deal will be done. At least, there are a few straws in the wind – as regards both fisheries and even state aid – that this might be so.

If so, the economic consequences will be bad but not dramatic and not very visible, just a gradual decline of prosperity. Relations with the EU will be sour but not totally destroyed. Resentfully the UK will comply with the Irish Sea border, and the complex, rickety mechanisms for doing so may just about work. There will be years of ongoing negotiations on a piecemeal basis, and constant attempts by the UK to push to the limit and beyond what it had agreed. The Brexiters will be sulphurous and constantly urging more antagonistic stances, and still convinced that their fantasy would have been possible had it not been betrayed.

It’s hardly an inspiring vision, yet, limited though it is, an optimistic one which in another week may seem hopelessly unrealistic. For there are many obstacles to reaching even this very modest destination. Brexit has blockaded Britain from any more convivial one.

Brexit stasis

The delusion that the Brexit negotiations are ongoing, as discussed in my previous post, continues and in doing so becomes ever more surreal. Last Friday, spokespeople for both the UK and EU stated that each side was analysing and clarifying the other’s draft texts. David Frost apparently talked to Michel Barnier’s deputy this week, and Michael Gove wrote of ‘recognising the importance of negotiations’ (within the Joint Committee framework) over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Meanwhile, a still convalescing Michel Barnier said he’d be talking to David Frost next week to organise future negotiating rounds.  In short, nothing of significance is happening.

This is entirely unsurprising and has been evident for weeks: the coronavirus crisis is, rightly and necessarily, all-encompassing. So there are thin pickings for any analysis of Brexit, although of note is the launch of LSE’s new weekly Brexit news round up. Such analysis remains warranted, despite the gravity of other events precisely since, despite those events, Brexit continues to tick away in the background.

The extension debate

In substance, though, all that matters is the debate about if, whether, when, and how the transition period might be extended. In that regard, Professor Simon Usherwood of Surrey University has written a smart ‘devil’s advocate’ argument as to why it should not be, whilst Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government has provided an analysis of the EU perspective on extension.

From within the EU come reports that the idea of completing a deal before the end of the year are “fantasy”, although no official statement of this sort has been made. The UK government remains unequivocally committed to the existing timetable and the doctrinaire Brexiter position (£) is that any extension is unthinkable. A tiny sign that this position may be cracking came this week when Nick de Bois (described as a “leading Brexiter” although I must confess that, despite probably following Brexit more closely than most, I had never heard of him before) called for its abandonment (£). Leading figure or not, he is a former aide to Dominic Raab who most certainly is. De Bois’ argument, quite logically, is that the public would not forgive any diversion from dealing with the pandemic.

The key issue, picked up on by Peter Foster, now Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times, is that pushing ahead on the existing timetable would not just be a diversion, but a self-inflicted one. I think this is insufficiently understood by those who anticipate the government using coronavirus as a cover for leaving with no deal (or some very limited deal), pretending that the adverse effects of the latter were just part of the fall out of the former. That’s a possibility, of course, but it would be a monumental political gamble to assume that, outside of a hard core of leave voters, the public would swallow it.

Imagine the situation if after – perhaps, for none of us know how coronavirus will play out – a series of intermittent lockdowns throughout 2020 the UK finally emerges from the casualties, sufferings, fears and privations of these to suddenly encounter new disruptions and a new crisis at the beginning of January. Reputable current forecasts suggest that GDP will have fallen by over 5%, the biggest recession in UK post-war history. And people are unlikely to be using the ‘that’s your bloody GDP, not ours’ line of the Referendum, given the likely impact on employment (though there are other views on this) quite apart from all the other thing they will have had to endure. Tell them then that to keep the true flame of Brexit alive another few per cent must be lopped off and I suspect the backlash would be huge.

Coronavirus and Brexit entwined

In that scenario, coronavirus and Brexit would have been decoupled, in that people would see their effects as separate. But, of course, for now the political reality (and in many ways the practical reality as well) is that the two are completely intertwined, as I have been arguing since the beginning of March. Paul Mason has suggested that Brexit calculations framed the government’s initial, flawed, coronavirus strategy. I am not sure that is quite true (it relies on a particular reading of both, and puts heavy weight on a couple of sentence in Johnson’s Greenwich speech) but as recorded on this blog some weeks ago and more recently confirmed in detail by a Reuters report it is clear that Brexit lay behind the government’s failure to participate in EU-wide ventilator procurement systems.

In any case it is certainly true, as Luke McGee of CNN writes, that coronavirus and Brexit are currently inseparable because of the transition period question. And that was written at the point when Johnson had been diagnosed with, but before he was hospitalised by, the virus.

This, by far the biggest development of the week, adds another very obvious layer of problems to the looming decision on extension, which needs to be made by the end of June. Hopefully, Boris Johnson will be fully recovered by then and his health, at least, won’t be a factor in the decision. But even if so, the issues of time and governmental bandwidth, and the possible illness of other politicians and officials on both UK and EU sides will remain. For example, Michael Gove, a key figure in the negotiations, is currently self-isolating, whilst of Dominic Cummings, the power behind the Johnson throne, who has the virus, nothing has been heard for days.

In the meantime, the Prime Minister’s hospitalisation in an intensive care unit has drawn attention to another of the connections between Brexit and coronavirus, in addition to those discussed in my recent post on the subject. There, I pointed out that one connection was that someone elected as a ‘Brexit Prime Minister’ had, perforce, to become a ‘coronavirus crisis Prime Minister’. With his illness, what has come into stark relief is how the entire cabinet – and indeed the entire parliamentary Conservative Party – has been remade for one purpose and with one, overweening test of political loyalty: enthusiastic embrace of Brexit and monocular determination to complete the process by the end of the year.

This means, on the one hand, that questions of competence are a very distant second to those of ideological conformity. Few looking at the current cabinet would regard it as self-evidently well-equipped with the skills needed to manage a major national crisis, or see in the Tory backbenches a reservoir of such talent. Nor does Dominic Raab, the stand in Prime Minister, necessarily impress as having many leadership credentials beyond his no doubt exemplary record as a Brexit Ultra, a record not undermined but cemented by his admitted ignorance of even the most basic facts about the project he so assiduously supports.

On the other hand, the New Model Tory Party makes it very hard for Johnson to backtrack on the extension. For him to do so would entail a major conflict with the ERG, whose numbers are more than enough to defeat him in the Commons. Yet, still, he might be able to bring it off given his long track record of about-turns and his freedom from the inconvenient shackles of principle or consistency. That would be much less true for Raab (or any other deputy), for whom extending would mean not just ‘betraying Brexit’ but betraying Johnson (whose principles would, in these circumstances, be seen as less plastic than if he, himself, were at the helm).

Either way, the decision on extension won’t go away, and it will have to be taken whilst the coronavirus crisis is ongoing and, possibly, whilst the Prime Minister is still unwell.

An adult in the room 

I mentioned earlier the likely backlash if the government doesn’t extend, and 2021 begins with ‘No deal 2.0’, to which can be added the political pressure, as the end of June 2020 approaches, to avert this. Both the pressure and the backlash are all the more likely given the other major political event of the week, the election of Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader. As Tom McTague argues in The Atlantic, this represents a moment of “deep importance”. It offers the potential for a far more effective official Opposition than in recent years, including an opportunity to improve on Jeremy Corbyn’s woeful inadequacy with respect to Brexit – admittedly, a decidedly low bar to set - about which I have written many times on this blog.

Of course, the situation is different now in that Brexit as such is an accomplished fact. Starmer is clearly not going to make re-joining the EU Labour’s position and he is not going to make reliving the Brexit battles a priority. That is wise, since the former would be premature and the latter worse than pointless. I do not even expect him to make extending the transition period the centre piece of his first months as leader, not least since by definition those months are going to be dominated by coronavirus.

What can be expected is that he will stake out his obvious claim – and his most obvious political appeal – for responsibility, diligence and competence. Those are not only his natural political calling cards, they are also the way in which he can most effectively be seen as a foil to Johnson’s very different persona. And, especially in the context of crisis, that could well be extremely appealing in saying, in effect: at last, there is an adult in the room. Within that – not as the headline but as a sub-clause or at very least a footnote – the case for transition extension will sit comfortably. It’s not a stretch. His persona is one of being sensible; extension, self-evidently, is just that.

Time marches on

For all that we are living through strange and unprecedented events, as regards Brexit there has been at least one continuous theme since the “bleak and bitter day” when Article 50 was triggered just over three years ago. Time. Since then, everything that has happened has happened under time pressure. That needn’t have been so, since nothing in the Referendum vote specified a date by which it should be done. But the Brexiters’ impatience and paranoid fear of betrayal - and their accurate diagnosis that Brexit was only fleetingly and, then, only marginally the ‘will of the people’ - made it so.

The same is true now, as the clock ticks down to the government’s supposedly immutable deadline of 31 December 2020 via the procedural one of 30 June. In that respect, my comment in the opening paragraph that nothing of significance is happening with Brexit is wrong. With every day that passes we get closer to the point of decision on extension and, depending on that decision, closer to the point at which leaving with no future terms deal could happen.

We are about eleven weeks away from the extension decision. For comparison, it is now about eleven weeks since the first reported cases of coronavirus in the UK. The conclusion to be drawn is that there is almost no time left but that, within such a time, a great deal can change.

Decision time

As the election campaign enters its final days my warning at the outset that, despite this being an election defined by Brexit, there would be no substantive discussion of Brexit has come true.

Labour have failed to fill out what their ‘sensible Brexit’ would look like, especially as regards the single market. But at least they are being clear in offering voters the choice, if and when the time comes, of whether they want this Brexit or not - even if they are not engaging seriously with the timetable for such a referendum. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have said little beyond their ‘get Brexit done’ slogan, apart from Johnson’s usual blustering non sequiturs.

Difficult choices deferred

Even so, within that bluster can be seen the outlines of some of the real and difficult choices which, if he is elected, Johnson would immediately face over Brexit. The most obvious and widely discussed example is the insistence that no extension will be sought to the transition period. Beyond that, a piece by Denis Staunton, the London Editor of The Irish Times, argues that statements made by Johnson in relation to a possible future US trade deal, to the abandonment of EU state aid and public procurement rules, and to post-Brexit UK-EU arbitration mechanisms could all significantly affect the options open to him if he wins the election.

In particular, Staunton argues, Johnson is setting up a scenario in which the UK is too distantly aligned with the EU to achieve decent terms of trade with them, whilst – partly because of the promises he has made about the NHS, and agriculture and food standards –being too closely aligned to the EU to achieve a meaningful, or any, trade deal with the US.

Underlying causes

This observation grows from one of the central contradictions of Brexit. Sold to voters by a largely nationalist and protectionist campaign, it was immediately re-described after the Referendum as an endorsement of globalism and trade liberalization. Hence the shift from a referendum campaign dominated by immigration policy to a post-referendum debate dominated by trade policy, which had been only peripheral before. Unsurprisingly, for the purposes of this election campaign in which he hopes to rebuild the leave alliance and, in particular, woo Labour leave voters, Johnson has reprised the nationalist and protectionist message, including anti-immigration sentiment.

Beyond these immediate political issues lies the strategic incoherence of the entire Brexit project. In a world characterised by two, or arguably three, regulatory super blocs (US, EU and, arguably, China) there is no space for a country viably to ‘go it alone’, be it the fifth or the fiftieth largest economy. A similar lesson was in evidence in this week’s NATO summit: increasingly defence – and even more clearly diplomatic and foreign policy – entail a choice between alignment with the US or the EU.

With that comes a political reality of having to obey rules and follow policies made outside of national parliaments - either by multilateral engagement or simply by force majeure in consequence of isolation - rendering the entire ‘regaining sovereignty’ or ‘taking back control’ argument redundant. By leaving the EU, Britain will have less rather than more control over its regulation and policy choices, and will be poorer and less influential into the bargain. It’s a definitional lose-lose made inevitable by a world characterised not so much by globalization as by economic and political regionalization.

These complex strategic realities and trade-offs that Brexit entails are precisely what should have been discussed by its advocates (and critics) as the central theme of this election. Instead, as Matt Ross explained in detail in an excellent analysis on Global Governance Forum this week, Johnson is set to reprise all of the problems and mistakes that have dogged the Brexit process to date (many of which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog).

The post-truth election

Of course, it’s very likely that Johnson did not fully understand the implications of the things he said. And, even if he did, it’s hardly inconceivable that he will backtrack on them if he wins the election, dumping promises made about protecting British industries and public services. For the most depressing thing about this campaign is the extent to which we have seen the full (though perhaps still not yet final) flowering of the post-truth politics that characterised the Referendum.

That is very different from the traditional, and rather lazy, refrain that ‘all politicians lie’. Rather, it is a politics in which the truth does not matter, or even – and perhaps more accurately - that there is no truth to be told and no way of telling what the truth is anyway. In a punchy assessment in the New York Times, Peter Geoghegan and Mary Fitzgerald itemise some of the ways that has characterised the campaign. For example, after the Conservatives were found to have created a supposed ‘fact checker’ Twitter account, the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, opined that voters “don’t give a toss” about what happens online.

More insidiously, when asked about the fake fact-checker in a Channel 4 News interview, Michael Gove attacked the interviewer for asking ideologically loaded questions and, even, refused to look at the evidence of its existence on the reporter’s laptop on the grounds that it might have been doctored. So ‘fake news’ is defended on the basis that the accusation is itself fake news, creating a dizzying spiral in which no one knows what to believe and, perhaps, concludes that they might as well believe whatever they want to believe. And who’s to say that your belief is better than my belief – except an elitist?

Depressing and despicable as these and many similar incidents have been, they do contain at least a glimmer of hope. For, of course, many voters do ‘give a toss’ about what is said on line. If they did not, then why bother with on line political campaigning at all? And they do care about facts and some attempt at objectivity. If they did not, then why pretend to be an objective fact-checker? And they do see ideological loaded-ness in reporting as problematic. If they did not, then why use the accusation (unfounded as it was) as an attack line against reporters?

That’s not to say that politics could ever be simply about ‘the facts’, absent of interpretation and judgement. Indeed, where facts are not disputed they do not generally form part of normal politics, whilst much of what normal politics consists of is a contestation over securing widespread acceptance of facts and designing policy accordingly. But that only works if there is some shared commitment to evidence, logic, and rules of argument. It’s this which is under attack in post-truth politics.

Voting matters

Even in this world, democracy can still be a powerful force. Whatever manipulations may occur, people still have agency, and have the capacity to make their own choices based on evidence, logic and argument. Voting still matters, and the right to vote should not be cynically dismissed – as those denied it, such as EU nationals in UK elections, can attest. Despite – perhaps because of – the squalid and dishonest campaign for this election, people have a responsibility to use that vote. Not voting, however attractive some find it, does not evade that responsibility since it also has an impact on the outcome.

But in many constituencies the British first-past-the-post electoral system makes it hard to make your vote count. This election is likely to see tactical voting and party-switching on an unprecedented scale, not least because of the way that Brexit cuts across party allegiances. And because of the anticipated closeness of the outcome, these decisions will matter. However, the very volatility of opinion polls and the complex local variations make it difficult for individual voters to make tactical voting decisions (£).

In my previous post I highlighted Jon Worth’s tactical voting information site. Since then, he has refined it to create a short video for every single seat in which tactical voting can make a difference to the outcome of Brexit. For those who want to keep open the possibility of preventing Brexit, it provides a well-informed steer as to how to vote. Another useful site is VoteSmart2019. These sites cannot entirely solve all of the indeterminacies caused by voter volatility but are certainly a helpful guide, especially if used in conjunction with new polling data as it emerges and local conversations with other voters.

Dilemmas for tactical voters

Whatever the difficulties of assessing how to vote tactically, for voters who want to prevent Brexit there is no excuse for refusing to do so because ‘the LibDems supported Austerity’ or because ‘Labour supported the Iraq War’. If you want to stop Brexit, then, to be brutal, those things, important as they are in their own right, are not relevant to doing so. Even intense concern about and opposition to anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, which is understandably creating anguish for some potential tactical voters, can arguably, as suggested by Jonathan Lis, be combined with voting Labour.

Whilst that is a genuinely agonizing dilemma, those remain voters – perhaps especially habitual Tory and LibDem voters – whose fear is that a Corbyn administration would be too economically extreme face a less difficult choice. For they should recognize that the only realistic alternative to a Johnson majority government is a Corbyn minority government. There is no realistic prospect of Labour having a majority. So Corbyn would be highly constrained in what he could do. Yes, some increased public services spending – which will also happen under a Tory government – and taxation but nothing very radical.

That may or may not be a good thing but, as always on this blog, I am only concerned with the implications for Brexit. And with LibDem and SNP support what a minority Labour government would be both able and obliged to deliver is another referendum and, with it, the chance – only the chance, but the only chance – of remaining in the EU. No other realistic combination of events does this.

The other side of that coin is that whereas a minority Labour government would be highly constrained, a majority Tory government would be a very different beast from any that we have seen in the past. Every Tory MP elected will have pledged to an immediate Brexit and to no extension of the transition period, even if there is no trade deal in place. Compared with the last parliament, the more liberally and independently minded will have gone, whether those who left by choice or those who lost the party whip. They include, don’t forget, the deeply Eurosceptic Philip Hammond, and not just the veteran Europhile Ken Clarke.

So the next Tory benches are going to be far more extreme than, even, those of the Thatcher years, and not just in relation to Brexit. Voters who may for decades have been unhesitatingly Tory should note that Michael Heseltine now advocates voting LibDem. Neither he nor Ken Clarke (who, despite his latter-day cuddly image, was also a central figure in Thatcher’s governments, and the architect of the NHS internal market) are really ‘centrists’, but the rapid shift of the Tory Party has made them strangers to it.

If it is no longer even the party of Thatcher, still less is it that of Macmillan, Heath or Major. It is certainly very different to any previous Tory Party in its unsympathetic, even disdainful, attitude to business (£). So whilst voting tactically will only mean a constrained minority Labour administration, the alternative is an unconstrained Tory majority government in the grip of its own extremism.

A test for remainers’ commitment

Throughout these election period blogs, I’ve been using a formulation along the lines of ‘those voters for whom remain is their primary or sole objective’. Ultimately, the question of tactical voting by remainers and, therefore, very possibly the election outcome will come down to the extent to which they do indeed prioritise remain in that way. If they do, it will cut through party loyalties and habits and all other misgivings and concerns.

That will be testing for those whose commitment to remain is relatively weak, or weaker than it has been, compared with other concerns. It will actually be even more testing for the most passionate and committed remainers. For some, perhaps many, of them, there is a strong temptation to ‘purity’ which could lead them to voting, probably, LibDem in seats where a tactical vote for Labour would be more likely to defeat the Conservative candidate.

Such voters may consider Labour not to be a ‘true remain’ party, may recall the dithering and ambiguity of Labour over Brexit, and may consider that Corbyn, himself, is ideologically pro-Brexit. All of which may be fair comment and may provide a rationalisation for the comfort of staying true to a party which is unequivocally anti-Brexit. That will be their choice, but it will be a choice with an undeniable consequence. That consequence will be to make the slim chance of avoiding Brexit slimmer still.

A decisive moment

This time next week I will be writing my next blog post. If it is discussing the fact that Brexit is now a certainty the responsibility for that will lie in part with remain voters who valued something else – remainer purity, party loyalty or simply another political consideration – more than they did the possibility of avoiding Brexit.

Of course if that is the outcome there will be many who are responsible for it, well beyond remain (non-)tactical voters. Most obviously it will have been caused by those who genuinely want Brexit, or a Tory government, or both – which is perfectly reasonable, though they will be surprised at the Brexit they get – including any tactical voting decisions made by Brexit Party supporters. But there is another group of voters who out of boredom or ignorance are apparently simply content to accept the lies they have been told and to ignore the lack of proper discussion of what Brexit will entail, petulantly insisting that they ‘just want it done’.

Perhaps if, as happened with the Referendum, enough people of such a mind-set vote in this election to endorse Brexit then they will get what is due to them. For, as H.L. Mencken – a deeply anti-Semitic and generally rather vile character, by the way – in his oft-used quotation had it, “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”.