The customs row reveals the fundamental paradox of Brexit politics

For weeks now, and with intensifying fury, the government have been bitterly split between two versions of what will succeed Britain’s membership of the Customs Union. It is a row that is beyond satire. Both versions (‘customs partnership’ and ‘maximum facilitation’) are impossible, resting upon technologies that do not currently exist and which could not be delivered in the necessary time frame even if they did. Both versions are markedly inferior to what they would replace. Both versions have already been rejected by the EU. Neither of them, even if they could be made to work and even if they could be agreed with the EU, would completely solve one of the main things they are supposed to solve – an Irish border with no physical infrastructure. And this, which is in any case but one aspect of a far larger set of issues that need to be resolved, is occurring almost two years since Britain voted to leave the EU, well over a year since Britain began the process of doing so, and less than six months before the terms of withdrawal need to be ready for ratification.

To call this situation absurd would be excessively generous. It is demented. But, strangely, in the perverse politics of Brexit it makes complete sense. To understand why, it’s necessary to understand the fundamental structural paradox built into those politics. It consists of two, irreconcilable, imperatives.

The first imperative is that Brexit, and specifically hard Brexit, must be done because it is the ‘Will of the People’ as interpreted by the high priests of the ERG and accepted as her duty by Theresa May. The second imperative is that which bears down upon all governments: they will be destroyed if they pursue policies which significantly damage the economic well-being of the country.

If it were really true, as many of the Ultras claim, that it is the Will of the People to leave the EU regardless of any economic consequences, then there would be no problem at all for the government. It could do as the Ultras urge, and leave with no deal or the most minimal of deals. The ‘People’ would applaud them for doing their will. In any case, contradictorily, the Ultras claim that those economic consequences are only Project Fear anyway.

But no serious evaluation – including that of the government itself - of what such a Brexit would mean is so sanguine. The Prime Minister certainly isn’t, warning during the General Election campaign that getting Brexit terms ‘wrong’ would be a disaster. No responsible, or just self-interested, government could do it. If that is true, the logic is obvious: those who voted for Brexit simply didn’t understand the consequences of doing so and must be told so. But that is unsayable in the new political correctness that Brexit has ushered in: it would be elitist disdain for the ‘People’.

Caught between these two irreconcilable imperatives – that hard Brexit must be done, but it must not have any adverse consequences – May’s government has, ever since the Brexit White Paper, tried to find a way of reconciling them. This is what I have called in a previous post the Mobius Strip of Brexiter madness - trying to keep almost all the features of being in the EU, whilst leaving the EU. The government is trying to do so over issues as diverse as data protection and Euratom, it remains the hope of what the future ‘trade deal’ will be, and, right now, it is what the debate (if it can be graced with that name) over future customs arrangements is about: an attempt to be ‘in and yet not in’ or ‘out and yet not out’.

Given that the imperatives are irreconcilable, it’s inevitable that the attempt to do so will fail. But what the customs issue is revealing is something different and even worse. By trying to satisfy both imperatives the Prime Minister is trying to pursue a course which can satisfy neither: a customs partnership which is both unacceptable to the Ultras (because it is not really ‘out’) and yet also does not avoid the damage (because it is not really ‘in’). There can be no middle way between mutually exclusive alternatives, and the pretence that there is could only be sustained if Brexit were just a matter of domestic political debate. It hasn’t been that since the Article 50 process was, by the choice of the British government, begun; the now rapidly nearing end to that process enforces the question: are you in or out? To which the answer can’t be ‘a bit of both’.

It was entirely predictable that the government’s attempt avoid the structural bind imposed by these two incompatible imperatives would fail. It was less predictable that it would have flared up over the customs union, since the more important issue is the single market. That it has flared up reflects, primarily, the fact that Labour changed their stance on a customs union, thus changing the parliamentary arithmetic.

What happens on customs will almost certainly shape what happens on the single market. Because it is not just the government who are dodging the structural bind, the same basic flaw is present in Labour’s ‘jobs first Brexit’. If Labour get to the point of recognizing that for the nonsense it is, and their position on the single market changes, then that, too, will come up for grabs. The recent vote in the House of Lords carrying the single market amendment the Withdrawal Bill now puts Labour’s stance clearly in the spotlight. So it is becoming at least conceivable that the inbuilt Commons majority for soft rather than hard Brexit will prevail.

And if we get to that point then the question as to why leave the EU at all will become irresistible, for a rather ironic reason. Before the Referendum, many Brexiters argued that all they wanted was a ‘soft Brexit’, and many voted leave accordingly. If they had stuck with that ambition, they would probably have succeeded. Instead, since then, most leading Brexiters have argued that soft Brexit would be no Brexit at all. So if it turns out that soft Brexit is all that can be delivered then they will have little to complain about if that morphs into the proposition that we might as well stay in. Which also explains why we are in the current bizarre situation. For the Ultras know, quite as well as anyone else, where it potentially leads: making the choice that the government have so far ducked between the two incompatible imperatives that frame Brexit.

If that choice is faced up to honestly then, again ironically, the structural bind will disappear. For it is only by virtue of the Ultras’ sleight of hand and May’s poor leadership that the Will of the People imperative translates into hard Brexit. In fact, numerous opinion polls show a clear majority for remaining in the single market. If that policy were pursued, then – whilst it would still be damaging to Britain both economically and in terms of wider geo-politics – the second imperative would also be met. Rather than satisfying neither imperative, the government could satisfy both. Unless or until we get to that point the Brexit debate will continue in its present form, as exemplified by the customs row. That is to say, a situation more ludicrous that even the most audacious political satirist would have dared imagine.

Why is there so little Bregret and what might change that?

Polling shows relatively little evidence of ‘Bregret’ (Brexit Regret). There has only been a small shift towards people thinking that in retrospect it was the wrong decision to vote to leave, and were there another in or out referendum today there is no real reason to think that the outcome would be different to what it was in 2016.

This might seem surprising in view of the mounting evidence of economic damage and the evident lack of progress in the exit negotiations, and whilst it is quite possible that opinions will change as that evidence continues to grow I suspect that they are unlikely do so to any great extent. That matters, because only sustained and significant polling evidence that a significant majority of people now want to remain will change the political dynamic of Brexit, and if that is going to have any effect there is not much time left for it to happen.

One reason explaining the lack of Bregret goes back to the Referendum itself, which showed that the political saw ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ is not a reliable guide and, hence, the almost entirely transactional case for EU membership put by the Remain campaign failed to win enough support. Hence David Davis’ comment to German business leaders on Friday that it is a mistake to put politics ahead of prosperity was so widely mocked, since that is precisely what Brexit does.

However, that does not mean accepting what is now often said, that the vote to leave was about cultural identity rather than economics. For one thing, the NHS £350M claim, which certainly had some effect on the result, was, for all its well-documented flaws, an economic argument. More generally, apart from the fact motivations to vote leave were variegated (as were those of remain voters) and all single factor explanations are facile, culture and economics are not separate realms but interact in all sorts of ways. For example, during the campaign I heard some leave voters talk about issues of deindustrialisation and its malign effects on community. Their mistake, in my view, was to believe that EU membership was the cause of this and that leaving the EU would redress it – but my point here is rather that these voters made an explicit link between economics and culture.

So instead of thinking about the vote – and any propensity now for Bregret – in terms of economics versus culture I think it is better to think in terms of the gap between Brexit as a symbolic act and Brexit as a series of concrete legal, economic and political arrangements. In a post last May, I wrote about how there is the strange sense from those who argue most vociferously for Brexit that, somehow, Brexit won’t change anything. For example, I’ve seen Brexiters ridicule the idea that leaving the EU could mean needing visas to travel to the EU or that it could mean restrictions on air travel within the EU. Or that security cooperation with EU countries would be diminished. Or that European fruit and vegetables might be less easily sourced. Or that British people would face restrictions on retiring in EU countries. Or, possibly the most ubiquitous (and for those on the receiving end, most hurtful and infuriating) since the referendum, leave voters saying to their friends and neighbours from EU countries: ‘oh, but we didn’t mean you when we said there were too many immigrants’.

I don’t think that these things are necessarily to do with the idea that Britain can ‘cherrypick’ some parts of the EU that they like. Rather, what underlies such sentiments is two related things. One is a taking for granted of the familiar accoutrements of modern life without realising that they are the product of extensive, albeit largely invisible, institutional arrangements. So of course ‘nowadays’ planes fly us to wherever we want without restrictions, as if this were not the outcome of complex agreements such as the European Common Aviation Area (ECAA), and of course we can travel visa-free in Europe, as if that were not the outcome of freedom of movement rights. In some ways, Brexiters, who despise technocrats and bureaucrats and rail against extra-national decision making, also treat it as an act of nature that there are Europe-wide regulatory systems. But they are not an act of nature – they are concrete legal arrangements from which, on Brexit, British citizens can be excluded. There is no ‘of course’ about it.

The related underlying issue is that for many Brexiters the vote to ‘take back control’, with all its emotional resonance, was not thought about in concrete legal or institutional terms but as a kind of symbolic, feel-good act. That, indeed, is the implication of the Brexit White Paper which affirms (para 2.1) that sovereignty was never lost by EU membership but that “it has not always felt like that”.

What this now means is well-illustrated by the Channel 4 News report this week about how Grimsby, where some 70% voted to leave, is now seeking special exemption from any new tariffs or barriers for its principal fish-based industries. There have been similar calls from leave voting areas like Cornwall and Wales for special protection from the loss of EU grants and subsidies. The Grimsby report was widely mocked by remainers for indicating stupidity or hypocrisy, but I think it is better understood as an expression of this disconnect between Brexit as a symbolic act and as something that entails non-symbolic consequences.

The same kind of disconnect can be seen across many aspects of the ongoing Brexit developments. In my previous post I mentioned the example of those Brexiters who are blaming the EU for suggesting that hard Brexit means a hard border in Ireland, rather than being an inevitable consequence of Britain’s choice to leave the single market and customs union. That argument is being heard more and more widely as the border issue rises in public consciousness – for example, it was made very vociferously by the Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley on the BBC’s Dateline London show today.

The underlying thought process seems to be – these are not the consequences that we wanted from the Brexit vote and ‘therefore’ they are either nothing to do with that vote (denial) or are being unnecessarily forced on us by the EU and/or obstructive remainers (blame). It is true that there are some pro-Brexit people who do neither of these things and who not only accept that Brexit brings certain adverse consequences but, even, think that this can be seen as positive in terms of restoring national resilience. I have heard some leave voters say something like this, and it seems to be the view of, for example, pro-Brexit blogger Pete North and, in a different way, one of the Leave campaign’s biggest donors, Peter Hargreaves, the latter arguing that the insecurity caused by Brexit will be fantastic.

This, explicitly in the case of Hargreaves, is the kind of ‘Dunkirk’ vision of Brexit but – whatever else one could say about it – it is not the platform that the Leave campaign fought on, and it certainly does not seem to be how most leave voters see things. The Grimsby voters, for example, appear not to be embracing their new-found insecurity but are seeking an exemption from it, just as those making the Janet Daley argument want there to be no border controls once we have taken back control of our borders. But nor is there any evidence that they regret voting to leave the EU. Writ large, this is significant for those expecting widespread Bregret to put a last minute halt to Brexit. If the consequences of Brexit are either denied or blamed upon the EU, and not attributed to or accepted as resulting from the vote to leave, then no such Bregret can be expected.

If all this is right, then there are only two ways that Bregret could occur. One would be for the narrative to change and for leave voters to link the consequences with their vote. But this is extremely unlikely for basic, psychological reasons - there is a technical term for this which I can’t recall, but it is essentially because people don’t find it easy to admit that they have made a mistake. And that’s likely to be especially so if this is pointed out to them by precisely the disdainful ‘elitists’ and ‘experts’ who proved so ineffective during the campaign.

The second possibility is far more conceivable. It is to redirect the narrative of blame on to the leading figures in the Leave campaign. On to all of those who repeatedly and in various ways claimed that leaving would be easy, and would lead to sunny uplands where cake would be both had and eaten. And on to all those who failed to mention, or denied, the consequences on things as diverse as nuclear medicine and the Irish border. In short, it is far more likely that leave voters will accept the proposition that they were fooled by politicians – as indeed they were – than that they fooled themselves. It is also likely to have far more traction than, for example, repeatedly insisting that the referendum was only advisory, or that only 37% of the electorate voted to leave. The idea that politicians lie is not, after all, an especially outlandish one nor is it an especially complex one. If leave voters – not all of them, but just, say, 20% of them – come to believe that they were lied to about Brexit then Bregret becomes a possibility.

 

Update (19/11/17): Thanks to various people on Twitter for reminding me that the psychological concept that eluded me in the penultimate paragraph was cognitive dissonance. This was, indeed, what I was thinking of. However, Dr Garrett M. Morris has helpfully suggested that a better psychological concept to capture what I was trying to express is one that I was not aware of, namely the backfire effect.

What does the Euratom mess tell us about Brexit?

Readers of the blog will have been aware for some time of something which has only hit the headlines this week. It is that amongst the implications of Brexit are some very serious issues to do with nuclear safety, nuclear waste and nuclear medicine. These arise because the government’s hard Brexit plan entails leaving the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and this in turn arises because although Euratom is not part of the EU it falls within the jurisdiction of the ECJ. Theresa May has made leaving all forms of ECJ jurisdiction as red line, non-negotiable and defining plank of Brexit and so leaving Euratom was included in both the Article 50 letter and also the parliamentary Act which authorised her to send that letter. This now seems likely to lead to a parliamentary rebellion amongst Tory MPs against, at least, this aspect of Brexit.

All this points up very sharply a whole series of very significant questions about Brexit in general:

·       It is an issue of great complexity and great importance, but it did not feature at all in the Referendum campaign. Can anyone say that those who voted for Brexit knew that they were voting for something that would, amongst other things, impact on the availability of cancer treatments? How many other aspects of Brexit is this true of? What, then, of the idea that Brexit is ‘the will of the people’?

·       Even Dominic Cummings, the Campaign Director of Vote Leave, has criticised leaving Euratom as “unacceptable bullshit”. But don’t leave campaigners have to take responsibility and be held to account for the practical implications of their ‘take back control’ slogan from which exiting Euratom directly flows?

·       It exemplifies the complete lack of planning for Brexit, shown also by the absence of UK position papers for the Brexit negotiations compared with detailed papers from the EU. So did the government understand what they were doing by deciding to leave Euratom? They have admitted that they did not conduct a formal impact assessment. How many other aspects of Brexit is this true of? Where are the assessments of, for example, a ‘no deal’ Brexit? Or of the different ways of enacting Brexit? Or of the government’s preferred way as expressed in the White Paper?

·       Why, relatedly, is the government still trying to dismiss the detailed, practical issues arising from Brexit as ‘Project Fear’, in the Euratom case as “scaremongering”? Are they, as widely reported, doing the same for all of the practicalities around trade, security, the Ireland border etc.? Can competent government proceed on an evidence-free basis, relying only on slogans and platitudes?

·       What does Euratom tell us about what appears to be the central tenet of the government’s White Paper, which is to create new bi-lateral shadow institutions to re-regulate what were formerly EU institutions? What will this cost? Is it possible? And, even if it is possible, what’s the point of Brexit anyway?

·       Did parliament understand what it voted for in approving the Article 50 Bill? The Euratom exit was clearly identified in that Bill, but now MPs are not happy with it. If they can revisit Euratom, then why not the other features of Act, such as single market membership or even the entirety of Brexit?

·       Relatedly, if parliament does decide that the UK wants to stay in Euratom and, therefore, to breach the red line of ECJ jurisdiction, then why not breach that red line for any number of other things (aviation, medicines, patents) up to and including the single market?

·       But even if the UK parliament were to decide it did not want to leave Euratom, what status does that have within the Brexit negotiations? Exiting Euratom was in the Article 50 notification letter sent to the EU, so does it any longer matter what the UK says? And if the UK can take back one part of that letter than does it not mean that the whole of it can be withdrawn (as discussed by Cambridge University Professor of EU Law Kenneth Armstrong)?

Or, to pose these questions at the most generic level, if there are very good reasons for avoiding the chaos, damage, cost, and complexity of leaving Euratom then do these not apply a fortiori to leaving the EU?