As briefly suggested in last week’s post, there are numerous, if indirect, connections between the still unfolding ‘partygate’ scandals and Brexit. At the most basic level, the very existence of the present government is down to Brexit, its central manifesto message was ‘getting Brexit done’, its composition is based on the central test of Brexit loyalty, and its advisers, from Dominic Cummings downwards, initially came from the old Vote Leave campaign team.
That team, including Cummings, has of course now been mainly expunged from Downing Street, but one aspect of the scandals now engulfing Boris Johnson is that they derive from that rift. Indeed Katy Balls, Deputy Political Editor of the Spectator – and therefore presumably well-connected to the players – suggests that the “pivotal moment” for these scandals was Johnson’s decision in November 2020 to cut ties with his Vote Leave advisers.
This led Cummings to embark on a “revenge mission” which Balls suggests included a series of damaging leaks. Certainly Cummings’ public statements have significantly contributed to the mess that Johnson is now in. So for all that there’s a certain piquancy in seeing Johnson tormented by this “extraordinary vendetta”, as Jacob Rees-Mogg squeakily calls it, it is a highly unedifying spectacle since it seems motivated by egotism and bitterness rather than principle or the public good.
Thus the present crisis can be read as part of the unwinding of the ramshackle coalition that fought for, and obtained, Brexit, with another example being the now widely expressed dissatisfaction of Thatcherite Tories with Johnson’s Brexit. However, its deeper roots lie in the incoherence of the populist politics that delivered Brexit, and the way the subsequent Covid pandemic has exposed that incoherence far more clearly than Brexit itself.
The paradox of populism
At the core of this is the central paradox of populism. Brexit was presented as the triumph of ‘the people’ over ‘the elite’; the “victory … for ordinary, decent people who’ve taken on the establishment and won”, as Nigel Farage put it the day after the referendum. In the years since then all the conflicts it has given rise to have been explicitly cast in those terms (hence, ‘will of the people’, ‘enemies of the people’, and the equation of remainers with the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’). It’s also implicit whenever there are reports of Brexit causing prices of imported foods to rise or foreign travel to be more difficult, which are always met with sneers implying that ‘ordinary, decent people’ have no experience of such fripperies.
Yet this was always a precarious construct, given that the country was and is more or less evenly split – making ‘the people’ an unconvincingly small proportion and ‘the elite’ a preposterously large one – and the self-evidently elite nature of its leaders. For the idea that the largely male, public school and/or Oxford educated Brexit leaders – a category that takes in Johnson, Gove, Farage, Cummings, Carswell, Lawson, Rees-Mogg, Hannan, Redwood and many more – are anything other than a privileged elite is plainly ludicrous. It is a fiction which is constantly vulnerable to obvious inconsistencies, but although they are often pointed out (Rees-Mogg’s investment fund company, Lawson’s French Chateau, Redwood’s advice to investors etc.) this has no 'cut through' with their supporters.
Why? I’m sure it is not that those supporters fail to spot the elite privilege of their leaders. It is that this isn’t the kind of privilege to which they object. Such figures – Johnson most obviously, Farage certainly, even Rees-Mogg surprisingly – are seen as being, despite that privilege, still in some way ‘ordinary’ and, perhaps more important, as ‘authentic’. More than anything, they may be privileged but they are not what their supporters mean by ‘the elite’ which, instead, is associated with the supposedly finger-wagging, won’t let us say what really think, prissy, moralistic, do-gooders. The Human Rights Brigade. The PC Brigade. The girly swots. The experts. The bleeding-heart liberals. More recently, the Woke police.
It’s a shadowy and amorphous group which, together, constitutes a ‘them’ to which the ‘us’ – ordinary people and our perhaps not ordinary in the ordinary sense but still authentic leaders – are opposed. For years we suffered as the ‘silent majority’, but with Brexit we found our voice. Within this is another, and crucial, dividing line. As brilliantly depicted in Jonathan Coe’s ‘Brexit novel’, Middle England, the elite in this meaning are ‘constantly telling us what to do and say’. They are interfering. They are authoritarian. They force us to be other than ourselves, and so to be humiliatingly inauthentic. They make us follow their rules, whereas Johnson, Farage and Rees-Mogg are themselves and let us be ourselves.
Taking back control
In this cultural universe, ‘taking back control’ was a doubly potent slogan. It was about freedom from EU control, but also freedom from the control of them – who, not coincidentally, were opposed to Brexit – freedom to ‘talk about immigration’, freedom to celebrate Christmas not ‘Winterval’, freedom to fly the St George Flag and the Union Jack without being sneered at. In this last way it was, of course, partly about nationalism – about ‘us’ as a nation – but also about internal divisions – about ‘us’ versus ‘them’, those who for so long had ruled over us but were now exposed as traitors and saboteurs, as anti-British Elite Remainers (£).
So Brexit provided an umbrella that could link all sorts of disparate ideologies and resentments, the spines of which were ‘freedom from the rules’. Almost all the high-profile fights of the post-referendum period were framed by this. These ranged from the Miller case on Parliamentary approval for triggering Article 50 to the row over Bercow’s “bombshell” ruling that Parliament couldn’t vote twice on the same motion (Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement), through to the court cases over prorogation. They were all battles over whether ‘the rules’ (laws, conventions) had to be followed or whether ‘the will of the people’ trumped such niceties.
It also informed the government’s brazenly announced intention to break international law over the Internal Market Bill and the decision arguably to actually do so by unilaterally flouting the Northern Ireland Protocol. It lay behind Johnson’s refusal to accept that Priti Patel had breached the Ministerial Code. And it explains the attempt to rip up the rules governing MPs’ conduct in order to get arch-Brexiter Owen Paterson off the hook, the failure of which now looks increasingly like the watershed moment in Johnson’s premiership.
Anti-ruleism
At least until the Paterson scandal, Johnson was an ideal front man for all this because of his own disdain for rules in any form. This doesn’t derive from any coherent philosophy, but seems simply to be a mix of psychological disposition and sociological entitlement. On the one hand, he is lazy, irresponsible, and financially and morally incontinent. On the other, he grew up in and inhabits a privileged milieu where ‘rules are for the little people’. So, for example, this week it was reported that during a period of isolation due to exposure to Covid, despite being a grown adult:
“We had to create a ‘cat run’ for him to get from the flat to his office so that he wouldn’t come into contact with people. The idea was we could talk to him through the open door. But he kept on coming out so we put two chairs across the door like some kind of puppy gate. There was a pattern throughout. He just simply didn’t think about following the rules. They were not for him.”
This almost instinctive disdain for rules is very different to, but for a while gelled with, the ‘anti-ruleism’ of Cummings (which is also very different to the libertarianism of some Brexiters). Despite some of the more breathless commentary, such as David Runciman’s recent portrait of him, Cummings’ views of politics and policy are not especially unusual (though the tenacity with which he pursues them may well be).
Ironically, given his, often accurate, criticism of business schools, they closely resemble those of big-league MBA students in the 1990s and 2000s. Both share the ‘work round the clock, win at all costs, smartest guys in the room’ machismo. They’re also similar in the mix of adulation for this or that business leader, Silicon Valley ‘disruptor’ schtick, and geek-macho enthrallment to science and data, the confluence of which then informs various ideas about the management and organization of big projects, often discussed on Cummings’ blog.
Whilst having some interesting insights in them, these discussions are like jelly in being a sprawling mish-mash of ideas without much in the way of disciplined thinking. At all events, the key point here is that, to the extent they have an over-arching theme, they sit within a well-worn groove of anti-bureaucratic analysis of organizations. Since the core of bureaucracy is rational-legal authority, these ideas are associated with a specific hostility to the Civil Service and to what Cummings and others call ‘the Blob’ (£), and often slide into impatience with, even disdain for, the rule of law.
In this way, the supposedly anti-establishment project of Brexit morphed into one directed at the machinery of government when Johnson and Cummings got to Downing Street. Yet, just as the idea of Brexit as anti-establishment became an absurdity once Brexiters won and became the Establishment, so too was it an in-built paradox to rule based upon an approach to politics defined by rule-breaking.
Enter coronavirus
That paradox became glaring when the coronavirus pandemic arrived, and Johnson was suddenly confronted by a situation which required the imposition of draconian rules and restrictions on everyday life that were unprecedented in peacetime. Small wonder that he did so belatedly, reluctantly, and with a nod and a wink that the rules were there to be broken.
But here the populism that had delivered Brexit took an unexpected turn. Because what was revealed were two diametrically different responses to the Covid rules from Brexit supporters. Some of the most high-profile of them became, as discussed in another post on this blog – lockdown sceptics, insisting that no free-born Englishman could submit to the yoke of Whitehall tyranny, with ERG membership closely overlapping the new ‘Covid Recovery Group’. Few could doubt that, had he not been in power, Johnson would have been amongst them. Yet amongst plenty of rank-and-file leave voters an entirely different version of cultural identity held sway, and one they shared with plenty of remainers.
This was the traditional image of the British – and for once it was the British, not just the English - as a ‘naturally’ law-abiding people of orderly queues, fair play, pulling together for the common good, and ‘all in it together’. A people who, in fact, did not disdain but played by the rules. Indeed Johnson himself, with his constant invocations of Second World War unity, mobilised exactly this cultural theme, and it proved to be remarkably powerful. Most people have followed the rules, despite the hardship, and in some cases tragedy, that entailed.
This disjuncture first emerged with force in May 2020 when Cummings was exposed as a lockdown rule-breaker in the ‘Barnard Castle’ episode*, yet defended by – oh how the wheel turns – Johnson. Finally, the incipient distinction between ‘the people’ and their anti-elitist yet self-evidently elite leadership was exposed in a way which had ‘cut through’ whereas, for example, the funding of the Downing Street flat refurbishment didn’t. The ‘freedom from rules’ umbrella of Brexit was blown inside-out by the wind of coronavirus.
Crucially, with the Cummings scandal came what Fintan O’Toole called “the unpardonable snigger of elite condescension”. It was that same sniggering which, come partygate, caused Allegra Stratton’s downfall as she rehearsed precisely the defence line of a party having been ‘a meeting’ which Johnson was subsequently to use in his ‘apology’ to parliament. And it was the same sniggering as Johnson’s when asked by a reporter about the most controversial of the parties. Suddenly, breaking the rules ceased to be funny, and ceased to be part of a popular insurrection against the Establishment, and became a potent symbol of elitist hypocrisy and contempt for ‘ordinary people’.
Rules have their uses
Whereas the scandals over PPE procurement were defended on the grounds that ‘in an emergency’ the niceties of bureaucratic rules governing the award of contracts had to be abandoned, those over lockdown rule-breaking had a very different character. Attempts to run a somewhat similar defence – that the parties were an understandable response to pressure of work – founder on the fact (£) that the same could have been said of NHS or other key workers.
So Johnson, like Cummings before him, has sought to save himself by an ironic invocation of rules and procedures. In Cummings’ case, he invoked some supposed exemptions in the detail of the regulations. In Johnson’s, he has tried to argue that the party he attended fell “technically” within the guidance, and that he “implicitly believed” he was following all the rules. Yet this cuts little ice considering the many cases where even unwitting rule breakers had been prosecuted and fined.
In another irony, as it is very much in keeping with the traditional response of the political Establishment to scandals, he has also deployed the ruse of ‘initiating a full inquiry’, hiding desperately behind the much-despised Civil Service Blob in the shape of Sue Gray. Suddenly bureaucrats are not just back in fashion but the fount of wisdom and justice, for whose words we are constantly told we must wait before passing judgment; there are rules and processes that must be followed after all!
Indeed in all the many scandals that have afflicted his short premiership it is notable that Johnson has invariably invoked procedural solutions or established customs to defend his rule-breaking, hence the seemingly endless inquiries of various types (equally notable is how often their findings have been anodyne or ignored). Even the prorogation of parliament was passed off as just a standard ritual until the Supreme Court put paid to that, something which still rankles with Brexiters and is believed to have led Johnson to want to seek revenge by ‘reforming’ its role (£).
Partygate and Brexit
However, unlike the prorogation and many other post-referendum cases of rule-breaking, reaction to the partygate scandal doesn’t follow the Brexit fault line. As was also attempted in relation to Cummings, some, such as doltish MP Michael Fabricant, have tried to pass it off as the anger of the “London Remain classes” but it’s very plain that it transcends that divide (£). That matters, because it is perhaps the only time since 2016 that this has happened. It shows that both remainers and leavers can and do share some very significant common values. In fact it is closer to the public outcry in 2009 over politicians' expenses, except for being aimed entirely at the Conservative Party (attempts to widen it to include Keir Starmer having so far failed).
It’s also of note that Operation Red Meat – the deployment of populist policy announcements to try to rebuild that coalition of support for Johnson – does not seek to work the Brexit divide, for example by making new threats to invoke Article 16. As I argued last week, that would not be likely to work as a distraction from his difficulties but would add to them. That’s because another part of Johnson’s defence is the endless claim that, whatever his partygate sins, he ‘got Brexit done’, something hard to reconcile with a fresh crisis over the attempt to re-write the Northern Ireland Protocol (of that, the only concrete news is that intense talks are continuing prior to Truss and Sefcovic meeting on Monday, but the respected commentator Mujtaba Rahman detects signs of progress, even if there are doubts of an early resolution).
Partygate obviously doesn’t mean that we’ve seen the end of the populist politics that underpinned and flowed from Brexit, still less of Brexit itself. It may not even mean the end of Johnson, whose fate remains precariously in the balance. If he does go, it will make a difference to the Brexit debate from then on, though. That is partly because so much of the leaving process remains ongoing, and his successor will affect how that is approached – albeit within a limited palette of options, some of which are even worse than Johnson’s and none of them hugely better.
Instead, partygate matters because it exposes the risks and fragilities of populism. A politics that mobilises ‘the people’ against ‘the Establishment’, and which posits rules as elitist meddling, can be an effective weapon for campaigning but is a double-edged one for governing. There is an implication in that for Brexit. As the damage charted by, for example, Yorkshire Bylines' now 500 item-long Davis Downside Dossier, mounts, ‘the people’ may recall that it’s nothing like what they were promised in 2016. They may even conclude that so fraudulent a deception was not ‘playing by the rules’ to a far greater extent than Johnson’s Brexit Establishment lockdown parties, and react with a correspondingly greater wrath.
*Long-term readers of this blog may have noticed that this post is in parts based on the one I wrote about the Cummings scandal at the time, reflecting the way that it was a precursor to partygate.
Showing posts with label Fintan O'Toole. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fintan O'Toole. Show all posts
Friday, 21 January 2022
Friday, 28 May 2021
A normal week in crazy Brexit Britain
It has been a pretty standard week for directly Brexit-related news – I put it that way because in many ways almost everything the government does, from demanding that the BBC project ‘British values', to badging the new rail system as ‘Great British Railways’, to giving British people the borders they ‘deserve' can be seen as framed by Brexiter sensibilities. And, of course, this week’s Dominic Cummings show grows organically out of the politics of Brexit, not least because but for Brexit neither he nor, possibly, Boris Johnson would ever have been in power. It can also be seen as the (final?) implosion of the elevation of the Vote Leave cabal to the centre of government in 2019.
More of Cummings below, but, these wider issues aside, what has been going on with Brexit this week is mainly a continuation of the issues discussed in my previous post, namely the row over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) and the nature of Britain’s post-Brexit trading relationships.
The NIP: the calm before the next storm?
As regards the NIP, RTE’s Tony Connelly provided his usual excellent commentary of the current situation in his blog post last Saturday. It gives a wealth of detail on the issues at stake, which I won’t repeat. Nor will I repeat the points I made last week about the deeper roots of this current situation in Northern Ireland.
However, there is one aspect of those roots which I didn’t mention but which is an important part of what is happening now. From the beginning, it was an article of faith amongst Brexiters that a trade deal with the EU would be easy because the UK was already aligned with EU rules. This was stated by numerous leading Brexiters before the referendum, was the substantive rationale for Liam Fox’s much-mocked ‘easiest deal in history’ claim, and was re-stated in David Davis’s preface to the first Brexit White Paper in 2017:
“We approach these negotiations from a unique position. As things stand, we have the exact same rules, regulations and standards as the rest of the EU. Unlike most negotiations, these talks will not be about bringing together two divergent systems but about managing the continued cooperation of the UK and the EU.”
As I and many others pointed out whenever such claims were made, they were nonsense, precisely because this was a unique situation in which the aim was not to move towards alignment (in which case, of course, existing alignment would make that process effortless) but to move away from it; not to bring two divergent systems together, but to make two aligned systems diverge. This became all the more true under Boris Johnson and David Frost’s approach to Brexit, which made freedom to diverge from EU regulations the acid test of ‘sovereignty’.
The same basic confusion is now being played out in the NIP rows, especially with respect to sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) rules and checks. Frost repeatedly, for example at last week’s Select Committee, makes the point that the EU should operate a lighter, ‘risk-based’ approach for the UK because of “the fact that we both operate the high food standards which are, in most areas, extremely similar”. Yet at the same time he is adamant that dynamic alignment with EU rules is unacceptable. So he wants the benefit of being aligned … without making any commitment to being aligned. It is a specific version of the more general Brexiter proposition, discussed in last week’s post, that the UK has left but shouldn’t be treated as if it has left.
It is this which creates what Connelly describes as the current “dangerous stand-off” between the UK and the EU, and although there is seemingly a lull in hostilities at the moment it seems highly likely that there will be a further outbreak in the next few weeks. The European Commission President, at the EU leaders’ meeting this week, made it clear that the NIP must be fully implemented, whereas the UK continues to seek “common sense” solutions (translation: don’t hold us to what we agreed), and wants these in place in time for the mid-June ‘marching season’ in Northern Ireland.
Some believe that Frost will quietly cave in, via some face-saving formula, and that is quite possible. But my sense remains (for reasons discussed in detail in my post a couple of months ago) that he and the government are convinced that the ‘hardball’ tactics of flouting the NIP pay dividends. If so, then after this period of resumed negotiations there will be another explosion. That diagnosis is given extra weight by calls this week from International Trade Secretary Liz Truss to scrap Irish Sea border controls altogether.
Strange days indeed
In this, Truss is presumably burnishing her credentials with the party membership as a possible successor to Johnson (as, no doubt, with her hardline anti-immigration stance, is Priti Patel), in which she is aided by the Brexit tabloids’ adoration of her for delivering the UK’s new trade deals – or deal, really, since the only substantively new trade deal she has (almost) done is that with Australia. Yet the Brexiters’ reactions to that deal have been mixed. Some are breathlessly enthusiastic, such as Dominic Lawson (in a Sunday Times article demolished almost line-by-line by the NFU’s Director of Trade and Business Strategy). Others, notably the ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott, are appalled that it marks “the death knell of the traditional British farm” (an outburst for which she was roundly mocked).
Certainly there is something strange in the Tory Party choosing to alienate what has always been a central part of its political constituency but, then, as its treatment of the City shows, the Brexit Tory Party is a very different beast to that of bygone years. That said, trade expert Sam Lowe argues that, in practice, the deal with Australia is unlikely to have a huge impact, whether that be on farmers or consumers, to the extent of it being “almost unobservable”. That is because, in brief, tariff abolition is no longer the central issue in terms of trade liberalization, and because nothing will change the fact that the UK and Australia are geographically remote – and, as the Brexiters never seem to understand, distance is a key determinant of trade volumes.
Nevertheless, the strangeness of the situation can be seen by imagining what would have happened if, whilst a member of the EU, the EU had struck a deal with Australia on similar terms (something highly unlikely precisely because of the possible effects on farmers). Almost certainly the Brexit press would be denouncing it as a ‘Brussels Betrayal of British Beef’ and, again almost certainly, the UK government would have vetoed any such deal. Yet when made by Britain, it is hailed as a triumph. (It’s worth noting that this point was raised by Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Trade Secretary this week, a further welcome sign that Labour are now becoming bolder in challenging the government’s post-Brexit policy).
Nor does the strangeness end there. Within the Brexiters’ central argument that what was crucial was the restoration of the sovereignty of the British parliament, a specific sub-theme was that with Britain making its own trade deals, these would be subject to debate and scrutiny by the British people’s elected representatives. Yet, in fact, as the Department for International Trade oxymoronically stated this week “we have always been clear parliament will be able to scrutinise Free Trade Agreements following signature rather than at the stage where agreement in principle is reached”. It need hardly be said that this renders scrutiny totally meaningless and represents, in microcosm, the ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’ doublethink of Brexit as a whole.
An incoherent strategy …
What lies behind all this is, as James Kane of the Institute for Government explains, the lack of a coherent post-Brexit trade strategy. To the extent that there is any strategy at all it seems to simply be that ‘signing trade deals’ is a good thing because, as a member of the EU, Britain was not able to do so. Supposedly, the ‘big prize’ now in sight is accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Barely mentioned, if at all, prior to the Referendum, this emerged under Liam Fox as being a key post-Brexit aspiration. It has become all the more so since the prospects of a UK-US trade deal have receded, and to some extent it is seen as a substitute for such a deal (if the US were to revert to the pre-Trump aspiration of also joining what is now CPTPP, which is not clear).
Thus Truss, and the government, are explicitly claiming that the US-Australia deal paves the way for CPTPP membership. This is not, as they sometimes imply, because it is a pre-requisite of membership but because it arguably smooths the way to it since what would have been Australia’s key ask during CPTPP negotiations (tariff-free access for, especially, agricultural products) will already have been satisfied. The interplay between the UK’s CPTPP accession negotiations and those with Australia (and the same, presumably, applies to New Zealand other CPTPP members) is a fascinating issue, as a discussion last week between trade experts Dmitry Grozoubinski, Sam Lowe and Anna Isaacs showed.
The general takeaway from that discussion might be that international trade negotiations comprise a series of complex interrelated trade-offs between multiple parties. For example, the most important practical consequence of what the UK has agreed with Australia about beef tariffs may be what that leads to in terms of what is demanded of it by the US or Brazil. These complexities require a strategy which goes beyond simply assuming that any deal is a good deal and the more deals the better. Or, at least, it does if the aim is maximizing the UK’s economic interest rather than the performative one of generating good headlines for domestic political reasons.
… derived from an incoherent project …
However, that brings us back to the basic incoherence of Brexit as an economic project. Since distance does matter so much, fiddling around making trade deals with remote countries is fairly pointless. Given that Brexit has happened, it’s worth doing, so far as it goes, but it isn’t a benefit, still less a triumph, for Brexit; it’s just some fairly minor damage limitation.
A new ONS trade report is a sharp reminder of this. To try (although it’s not completely possible) to disentangle Brexit and Covid effects they compare the first quarter of 2021 with the first quarter of 2018, and report that trade with the EU decreased by 23.1% (whereas trade with non-EU countries decreased by just 0.8%, suggesting that the Brexit negotiating process and its outcome, rather than the pandemic, was a key driver). The report also shows that, since the end of the transition, post-Brexit trade arrangements have become a far bigger challenge for businesses than the pandemic. The nature of those challenges, especially for small businesses, was spelt out in minute detail in testimony given to the UK Trade and Business Commission yesterday. It is also clear from a new survey showing that 56% of UK businesses think Brexit has had a negative effect on them and just 5% that it has been positive.
Given that, prior to Brexit, the EU-27 accounted for about 50% of UK trade, it’s obvious that to compensate for such massive decreases in trade with the EU, that with non-EU countries would have to be revolutionised and the constraints of distance make that virtually impossible, no matter how many, or even how good, the trade deals the UK strikes. In short, far from the promise that “Brexit will cement our status as a great trading nation” (£), it is causing Britain to become a less great trading nation. No doubt Brexiters and the government will try to spin these latest figures as showing that the UK is ‘re-balancing’ away from its dependence on the EU for trade to being a ‘truly Global Britain’, because of course it (already) means that trade with the EU is less than 50% of UK trade. But it will be nonsense – it just means that the trade pie as a whole has shrunk.
In a related development, and following from the recent failure of the UK and Norway to reach a deal on fishing, it now seems likely that the UK-Norway trade deal will collapse. This was a temporary rollover deal, agreed last December, to be superseded by a permanent and possibly more extensive agreement. But Norwegian politicians are concerned about the impact on their farmers of tariff-free British beef and cheese imports. Note that although Australia’s economy (USD 1.4 trillion, 2019) is much larger than Norway’s (USD 403 billion, 2019), Norway is a more significant trading partner for the UK (£27,436 million, 2019) than is Australia (£16,041 million, 2019).
It’s instructive to see the reactions of leave voters to the news that the Norway deal may fall through. These included rage that this is punishment for leaving the EU (apparently oblivious to the fact that Norway isn’t in the EU) and suggestions that Norway should realise that, being the smaller economy, it needs a deal more than the UK (a strange inversion of what they used to say about the UK-EU negotiations). As always, bellicose victimhood is the guiding theme.
… rooted in an inherent contradiction
The issue of protecting farmers, whether Norwegian or British, goes to the heart of the trade dilemmas Brexit poses for the UK. Whilst Brexiters deride the EU as a ‘protectionist racket’ (an accusation based more on a bad pun than a serious analysis), the protection of agriculture is, globally, almost invariably the most contentious of trade policy issues. In part, as Brexiters should appreciate, that is because of the complex interactions of national identity, soil, and foodstuffs. As regards Brexit, it is also because of the peculiar contradiction of nationalism and globalism. Many who voted leave believed that it would mean not just good news for farmers but the restoration of the heavy industries which have declined in the years since Britain joined the EEC (though of course that wasn’t the cause).
Those votes were immediately taken by the Brexit global free traders as permission to pursue their own agenda – most notably in Fox’s ‘Manchester speech’, made in September 2016 before the hard Brexit of leaving the single market and customs union had even been announced. And, as the deal with Australia suggests, the UK is going to concede tariff-free access to British markets whilst getting almost nothing in return. The gamble Johnson’s government is making is that leave voters will swallow this on politically nationalistic grounds (‘Britain is a global trading nation once more’) and ignore, or be unaware of, its consequences for economic nationalism.
In this gamble, the government may be assisted by one of the strangest features of the way that Brexiters are framing post-Brexit trade deals, and trade more generally. Rather than thinking of these issues in terms of economic rationality or the economics of competitive advantage, they seem to imagine them in terms of ‘cultural affinity’. That imagination (which is what it is, since it involves a hopelessly outdated and sentimental apprehension) is most obvious in the still thriving CANZUK fantasy, but also applies to an Australia-only deal.
The politics of “gormlessness”
It is a gamble that is quite likely to succeed. And everyone knows why, even though it is deemed unsayable in what in 2017 I called the new political correctness of Brexit: the coalition of voters which chose Brexit and which now supports Johnson’s government is largely ignorant of the realities of contemporary trade, business, and international relations. It’s this which unites the Home Counties golf club bore, pontificating about how he ran his import-export business just fine before the EEC, with the coastal town pensioner lamenting that ‘I just want my country back’. Despite the overlap between leading Brexiters and free speech union libertarians that obvious fact – far more than anything proscribed by ‘woke’ activists – is something that cannot be said because to do so is, supposedly, ‘elitist’.
It is this electoral base which chose to endorse what, as Cummings has so eloquently told us, is the “completely crazy” situation of him and Boris Johnson being in positions of power. Almost all attention has focussed, understandably, on what Cummings’ testimony revealed about the dysfunctional government and woefully inadequate leadership during the coronavirus crisis. But it is crucial to remember that at the same time this same government and this same leadership were engaged in the highly complex trade and cooperation negotiations with the EU.
More specifically, it was in this period that Johnson refused to extend the transition, despite the chaos that was going on. It was in this period that he – apparently with the support of both Cummings and Frost – threatened to break international law with the Internal Market Bill. It was throughout this period that he was constantly threatening to end the transition with no trade deal in place and claiming that the UK was fully prepared to cope with the disruption that would have ensued. And it was from the decisions taken in this period that many of the present consequences of Brexit arise.
Not only that but, whilst Cummings may have gone, Johnson and his Brexit government remain in place. And just as, vaccines notwithstanding, the government continues to bodge the management of the pandemic so too does it continue, as Fintan O’Toole put it this week (£), to “strategise gormlessness” in its approach to Brexit, especially in continuing to ascribe its malign effects to others. It remains to be seen whether the Cummings revelations about coronavirus policy dent Johnson’s support within his electoral base, but it’s unlikely that his ‘gormless’ Brexit strategy will do so. After all, it is a strategy designed precisely to appeal to that base.
More of Cummings below, but, these wider issues aside, what has been going on with Brexit this week is mainly a continuation of the issues discussed in my previous post, namely the row over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) and the nature of Britain’s post-Brexit trading relationships.
The NIP: the calm before the next storm?
As regards the NIP, RTE’s Tony Connelly provided his usual excellent commentary of the current situation in his blog post last Saturday. It gives a wealth of detail on the issues at stake, which I won’t repeat. Nor will I repeat the points I made last week about the deeper roots of this current situation in Northern Ireland.
However, there is one aspect of those roots which I didn’t mention but which is an important part of what is happening now. From the beginning, it was an article of faith amongst Brexiters that a trade deal with the EU would be easy because the UK was already aligned with EU rules. This was stated by numerous leading Brexiters before the referendum, was the substantive rationale for Liam Fox’s much-mocked ‘easiest deal in history’ claim, and was re-stated in David Davis’s preface to the first Brexit White Paper in 2017:
“We approach these negotiations from a unique position. As things stand, we have the exact same rules, regulations and standards as the rest of the EU. Unlike most negotiations, these talks will not be about bringing together two divergent systems but about managing the continued cooperation of the UK and the EU.”
As I and many others pointed out whenever such claims were made, they were nonsense, precisely because this was a unique situation in which the aim was not to move towards alignment (in which case, of course, existing alignment would make that process effortless) but to move away from it; not to bring two divergent systems together, but to make two aligned systems diverge. This became all the more true under Boris Johnson and David Frost’s approach to Brexit, which made freedom to diverge from EU regulations the acid test of ‘sovereignty’.
The same basic confusion is now being played out in the NIP rows, especially with respect to sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) rules and checks. Frost repeatedly, for example at last week’s Select Committee, makes the point that the EU should operate a lighter, ‘risk-based’ approach for the UK because of “the fact that we both operate the high food standards which are, in most areas, extremely similar”. Yet at the same time he is adamant that dynamic alignment with EU rules is unacceptable. So he wants the benefit of being aligned … without making any commitment to being aligned. It is a specific version of the more general Brexiter proposition, discussed in last week’s post, that the UK has left but shouldn’t be treated as if it has left.
It is this which creates what Connelly describes as the current “dangerous stand-off” between the UK and the EU, and although there is seemingly a lull in hostilities at the moment it seems highly likely that there will be a further outbreak in the next few weeks. The European Commission President, at the EU leaders’ meeting this week, made it clear that the NIP must be fully implemented, whereas the UK continues to seek “common sense” solutions (translation: don’t hold us to what we agreed), and wants these in place in time for the mid-June ‘marching season’ in Northern Ireland.
Some believe that Frost will quietly cave in, via some face-saving formula, and that is quite possible. But my sense remains (for reasons discussed in detail in my post a couple of months ago) that he and the government are convinced that the ‘hardball’ tactics of flouting the NIP pay dividends. If so, then after this period of resumed negotiations there will be another explosion. That diagnosis is given extra weight by calls this week from International Trade Secretary Liz Truss to scrap Irish Sea border controls altogether.
Strange days indeed
In this, Truss is presumably burnishing her credentials with the party membership as a possible successor to Johnson (as, no doubt, with her hardline anti-immigration stance, is Priti Patel), in which she is aided by the Brexit tabloids’ adoration of her for delivering the UK’s new trade deals – or deal, really, since the only substantively new trade deal she has (almost) done is that with Australia. Yet the Brexiters’ reactions to that deal have been mixed. Some are breathlessly enthusiastic, such as Dominic Lawson (in a Sunday Times article demolished almost line-by-line by the NFU’s Director of Trade and Business Strategy). Others, notably the ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott, are appalled that it marks “the death knell of the traditional British farm” (an outburst for which she was roundly mocked).
Certainly there is something strange in the Tory Party choosing to alienate what has always been a central part of its political constituency but, then, as its treatment of the City shows, the Brexit Tory Party is a very different beast to that of bygone years. That said, trade expert Sam Lowe argues that, in practice, the deal with Australia is unlikely to have a huge impact, whether that be on farmers or consumers, to the extent of it being “almost unobservable”. That is because, in brief, tariff abolition is no longer the central issue in terms of trade liberalization, and because nothing will change the fact that the UK and Australia are geographically remote – and, as the Brexiters never seem to understand, distance is a key determinant of trade volumes.
Nevertheless, the strangeness of the situation can be seen by imagining what would have happened if, whilst a member of the EU, the EU had struck a deal with Australia on similar terms (something highly unlikely precisely because of the possible effects on farmers). Almost certainly the Brexit press would be denouncing it as a ‘Brussels Betrayal of British Beef’ and, again almost certainly, the UK government would have vetoed any such deal. Yet when made by Britain, it is hailed as a triumph. (It’s worth noting that this point was raised by Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Trade Secretary this week, a further welcome sign that Labour are now becoming bolder in challenging the government’s post-Brexit policy).
Nor does the strangeness end there. Within the Brexiters’ central argument that what was crucial was the restoration of the sovereignty of the British parliament, a specific sub-theme was that with Britain making its own trade deals, these would be subject to debate and scrutiny by the British people’s elected representatives. Yet, in fact, as the Department for International Trade oxymoronically stated this week “we have always been clear parliament will be able to scrutinise Free Trade Agreements following signature rather than at the stage where agreement in principle is reached”. It need hardly be said that this renders scrutiny totally meaningless and represents, in microcosm, the ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’ doublethink of Brexit as a whole.
An incoherent strategy …
What lies behind all this is, as James Kane of the Institute for Government explains, the lack of a coherent post-Brexit trade strategy. To the extent that there is any strategy at all it seems to simply be that ‘signing trade deals’ is a good thing because, as a member of the EU, Britain was not able to do so. Supposedly, the ‘big prize’ now in sight is accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Barely mentioned, if at all, prior to the Referendum, this emerged under Liam Fox as being a key post-Brexit aspiration. It has become all the more so since the prospects of a UK-US trade deal have receded, and to some extent it is seen as a substitute for such a deal (if the US were to revert to the pre-Trump aspiration of also joining what is now CPTPP, which is not clear).
Thus Truss, and the government, are explicitly claiming that the US-Australia deal paves the way for CPTPP membership. This is not, as they sometimes imply, because it is a pre-requisite of membership but because it arguably smooths the way to it since what would have been Australia’s key ask during CPTPP negotiations (tariff-free access for, especially, agricultural products) will already have been satisfied. The interplay between the UK’s CPTPP accession negotiations and those with Australia (and the same, presumably, applies to New Zealand other CPTPP members) is a fascinating issue, as a discussion last week between trade experts Dmitry Grozoubinski, Sam Lowe and Anna Isaacs showed.
The general takeaway from that discussion might be that international trade negotiations comprise a series of complex interrelated trade-offs between multiple parties. For example, the most important practical consequence of what the UK has agreed with Australia about beef tariffs may be what that leads to in terms of what is demanded of it by the US or Brazil. These complexities require a strategy which goes beyond simply assuming that any deal is a good deal and the more deals the better. Or, at least, it does if the aim is maximizing the UK’s economic interest rather than the performative one of generating good headlines for domestic political reasons.
… derived from an incoherent project …
However, that brings us back to the basic incoherence of Brexit as an economic project. Since distance does matter so much, fiddling around making trade deals with remote countries is fairly pointless. Given that Brexit has happened, it’s worth doing, so far as it goes, but it isn’t a benefit, still less a triumph, for Brexit; it’s just some fairly minor damage limitation.
A new ONS trade report is a sharp reminder of this. To try (although it’s not completely possible) to disentangle Brexit and Covid effects they compare the first quarter of 2021 with the first quarter of 2018, and report that trade with the EU decreased by 23.1% (whereas trade with non-EU countries decreased by just 0.8%, suggesting that the Brexit negotiating process and its outcome, rather than the pandemic, was a key driver). The report also shows that, since the end of the transition, post-Brexit trade arrangements have become a far bigger challenge for businesses than the pandemic. The nature of those challenges, especially for small businesses, was spelt out in minute detail in testimony given to the UK Trade and Business Commission yesterday. It is also clear from a new survey showing that 56% of UK businesses think Brexit has had a negative effect on them and just 5% that it has been positive.
Given that, prior to Brexit, the EU-27 accounted for about 50% of UK trade, it’s obvious that to compensate for such massive decreases in trade with the EU, that with non-EU countries would have to be revolutionised and the constraints of distance make that virtually impossible, no matter how many, or even how good, the trade deals the UK strikes. In short, far from the promise that “Brexit will cement our status as a great trading nation” (£), it is causing Britain to become a less great trading nation. No doubt Brexiters and the government will try to spin these latest figures as showing that the UK is ‘re-balancing’ away from its dependence on the EU for trade to being a ‘truly Global Britain’, because of course it (already) means that trade with the EU is less than 50% of UK trade. But it will be nonsense – it just means that the trade pie as a whole has shrunk.
In a related development, and following from the recent failure of the UK and Norway to reach a deal on fishing, it now seems likely that the UK-Norway trade deal will collapse. This was a temporary rollover deal, agreed last December, to be superseded by a permanent and possibly more extensive agreement. But Norwegian politicians are concerned about the impact on their farmers of tariff-free British beef and cheese imports. Note that although Australia’s economy (USD 1.4 trillion, 2019) is much larger than Norway’s (USD 403 billion, 2019), Norway is a more significant trading partner for the UK (£27,436 million, 2019) than is Australia (£16,041 million, 2019).
It’s instructive to see the reactions of leave voters to the news that the Norway deal may fall through. These included rage that this is punishment for leaving the EU (apparently oblivious to the fact that Norway isn’t in the EU) and suggestions that Norway should realise that, being the smaller economy, it needs a deal more than the UK (a strange inversion of what they used to say about the UK-EU negotiations). As always, bellicose victimhood is the guiding theme.
… rooted in an inherent contradiction
The issue of protecting farmers, whether Norwegian or British, goes to the heart of the trade dilemmas Brexit poses for the UK. Whilst Brexiters deride the EU as a ‘protectionist racket’ (an accusation based more on a bad pun than a serious analysis), the protection of agriculture is, globally, almost invariably the most contentious of trade policy issues. In part, as Brexiters should appreciate, that is because of the complex interactions of national identity, soil, and foodstuffs. As regards Brexit, it is also because of the peculiar contradiction of nationalism and globalism. Many who voted leave believed that it would mean not just good news for farmers but the restoration of the heavy industries which have declined in the years since Britain joined the EEC (though of course that wasn’t the cause).
Those votes were immediately taken by the Brexit global free traders as permission to pursue their own agenda – most notably in Fox’s ‘Manchester speech’, made in September 2016 before the hard Brexit of leaving the single market and customs union had even been announced. And, as the deal with Australia suggests, the UK is going to concede tariff-free access to British markets whilst getting almost nothing in return. The gamble Johnson’s government is making is that leave voters will swallow this on politically nationalistic grounds (‘Britain is a global trading nation once more’) and ignore, or be unaware of, its consequences for economic nationalism.
In this gamble, the government may be assisted by one of the strangest features of the way that Brexiters are framing post-Brexit trade deals, and trade more generally. Rather than thinking of these issues in terms of economic rationality or the economics of competitive advantage, they seem to imagine them in terms of ‘cultural affinity’. That imagination (which is what it is, since it involves a hopelessly outdated and sentimental apprehension) is most obvious in the still thriving CANZUK fantasy, but also applies to an Australia-only deal.
The politics of “gormlessness”
It is a gamble that is quite likely to succeed. And everyone knows why, even though it is deemed unsayable in what in 2017 I called the new political correctness of Brexit: the coalition of voters which chose Brexit and which now supports Johnson’s government is largely ignorant of the realities of contemporary trade, business, and international relations. It’s this which unites the Home Counties golf club bore, pontificating about how he ran his import-export business just fine before the EEC, with the coastal town pensioner lamenting that ‘I just want my country back’. Despite the overlap between leading Brexiters and free speech union libertarians that obvious fact – far more than anything proscribed by ‘woke’ activists – is something that cannot be said because to do so is, supposedly, ‘elitist’.
It is this electoral base which chose to endorse what, as Cummings has so eloquently told us, is the “completely crazy” situation of him and Boris Johnson being in positions of power. Almost all attention has focussed, understandably, on what Cummings’ testimony revealed about the dysfunctional government and woefully inadequate leadership during the coronavirus crisis. But it is crucial to remember that at the same time this same government and this same leadership were engaged in the highly complex trade and cooperation negotiations with the EU.
More specifically, it was in this period that Johnson refused to extend the transition, despite the chaos that was going on. It was in this period that he – apparently with the support of both Cummings and Frost – threatened to break international law with the Internal Market Bill. It was throughout this period that he was constantly threatening to end the transition with no trade deal in place and claiming that the UK was fully prepared to cope with the disruption that would have ensued. And it was from the decisions taken in this period that many of the present consequences of Brexit arise.
Not only that but, whilst Cummings may have gone, Johnson and his Brexit government remain in place. And just as, vaccines notwithstanding, the government continues to bodge the management of the pandemic so too does it continue, as Fintan O’Toole put it this week (£), to “strategise gormlessness” in its approach to Brexit, especially in continuing to ascribe its malign effects to others. It remains to be seen whether the Cummings revelations about coronavirus policy dent Johnson’s support within his electoral base, but it’s unlikely that his ‘gormless’ Brexit strategy will do so. After all, it is a strategy designed precisely to appeal to that base.
Friday, 21 August 2020
The political psychology beneath the Brexit talks
Despite another round of negotiations having been held it has been a relatively quiet Brexit week. The main noise emerging from the talks has been about UK fury at the EU’s “intransigence” (£) over road haulage rights. It’s a story with long familiar components, including the attempt to ‘cherry pick’ desired parts of single market membership, and arrogant and probably unrealistic calculations by Brexiters – including the ‘they need us more than we need them’ motif - of where the EU ‘should see’ that its interests lie. As regards the latter, the present case is another version of the tired old argument that the UK’s goods trade deficit with the EU will be in Britain’s favour.
That relative quietness is not surprising because the real action will come in the autumn, with a deal, if there is to be deal, needed by mid-October for ratification to be viable by the end of the transition. It’s also not surprising because the news has been dominated by others important things, principally the fiasco over exam results.
There are some interconnections between the Brexit and non-Brexit news. First, in a general way, and as with the handling of coronavirus, it is increasingly obvious that a government defined solely by ‘getting Brexit done’ is singularly ill-equipped to govern. That arises from the combination of Johnson’s lazy boosterism, Cummings’ arrogant control freakery, and the application of a Brexit loyalty test – rather than competence – as the sole criterion for ministerial office and civil servants’ influence. Together, to labour a point repeatedly made on this blog, this means that we have a Vote Leave campaign in office rather than an administration in the normal sense of the word.
Beyond that, the latest example of incompetence and backtracking has led some commentators to wonder if it will make Johnson more cautious of risking the debacle of no deal and others to anticipate that on Brexit, too, he might perform a U-turn (I suppose that means in terms of softening its form, or perhaps by belatedly finding some way to extend transition).
I don’t think that either of these scenarios is at all plausible. Whilst it’s true that there is now a repeated pattern of this government underestimating or ignoring complexities and having to U-turn as a result, because Brexit is such a central and defining policy it is highly unlikely to carry over into that. Doing so would be certain to rip the Tory Party apart and end Johnson’s premiership. It is the one piece of incompetence (even though others would see it as pragmatism) that his increasingly fractious party will not tolerate. For the same reason, his continual failures in every other area are likely to make him, if anything, even more reckless as regards the EU, and even more likely to seek to curry favour with the Ultras in his party who don’t want a deal.
Deal or no deal?
So the question of whether or not there will be a deal with the EU still lies in the balance – and it shouldn’t be forgotten what an extraordinary state of affairs this is, given the promises made by Brexiters and the fact that the transition ends in just four months’ time. Early reports on this week’s talks suggest very limited progress.
Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform made out a strong case this week for why a deal would be preferable. In brief, he gives five reasons: avoiding tariffs and quotas; making non-trade agreements on regulation more likely; enhancing customs co-operation; facilitating the implementation (which anyway has to occur) of the Northern Ireland Protocol; providing a platform for further agreements in the future.
Other analyses this week make related arguments. Pernille Rudlin, an expert in Japanese business, pointed out that, notwithstanding the possible UK-Japan trade deal, a UK-EU deal remains crucial to the future of Japanese investments in the UK. And Sir Julian King, a former senior diplomat now affiliated to Oxford University and RUSI, discussed the need for a future security relationship (analysis of which has been often eclipsed by the focus on trade). At UK insistence security (like defence and foreign policy) has been treated separately from the current talks, and barely discussed at all*, but as King and Lowe both, in different ways, imply, the fate of the two is interlinked to a degree if only because the animosity that would attend no deal on trade would be likely to spill over into any talks about security.
Somewhat related was a fascinating article by Naomi Smith, Chief Executive of Best for Britain, about EU-China trade talks (actually published last week, but I missed it then). She makes the point that these talks are ambitious in scope, seeking a deep relationship, with the establishment of (yes!) rigorous Level Playing Field conditions the likely requirement and consequence. This, she suggests, offers an obvious template for a comprehensive UK-EU agreement which could be achieved immediately, built on existing alignment and links, rather than over the years that the EU-China deal will take. With Brexit delivered, why not take advantage of such possibilities, be similarly ambitious, and steal a march on a China?
In a way, this is a particular version of the argument I made in a recent post about the need for a whole new Brexit debate, one no longer viewed through the prism of the Referendum and British Euroscepticism, but starting afresh from the fact of Brexit and calculating where British interests lie without the dead weight of the ‘in or out’ question that has dogged relations with the EU for decades.
For we know the stumbling block to what Smith is proposing. It is the Brexit Ultras' refusal to consider the kind of comprehensive agreement she advocates. Even Lowe’s more downbeat suggestion that a trade deal is “better than nothing”, or King’s “dialled down [security] relationship” that is “still worth doing”, goes too far for some of them. Some believe that any such deal would end up being the basis for a gradual, re-integrationist project (£), overlapping with others who prefer the ‘sovereign purity’ of no deal. In other words, they still view the post-Brexit relationship entirely through the lens of the pre-Brexit question of membership.
Should remainers** hope for no deal?
But what of those of us who view Brexit as a terrible mistake? That is not an easy question. There is a strong temptation to welcome no deal at the end of transition so as more fully to expose that folly. Only if the damage done is blindingly obvious – with significant food and drug shortages, price rises, border queues and other disruptions – will the Brexiter chickens finally come home to roost. For as Lowe points out – contrary to the wholly fallacious claims of some Brexiters – there is a significant difference between even a ‘thin’ deal and no deal. But tempting as it may be, such a position has big problems.
First, most obvious, and most important is, precisely, the damage that would be done. This wouldn’t be some academic seminar in which an argument would be satisfyingly won. It would impose real hardship, and possibly worse than hardship, on the entire country, remain and leave voters alike. My own view is that it would be an unconscionable position in itself, and an impolitic one to boot: if ‘no deal 2.0’ comes about let it be because of the intransigence of the Ultras or governmental incompetence, and not accompanied by remainer cheers.
Second, it’s unrealistic anyway. Whatever damage is done by no deal the Brexit Ultras will never admit that they were wrong. They will claim it was not due to Brexit and/or that it was due to Brexit not being done ‘properly’. Some ordinary leave voters will not be convinced by that, of course, but the politicians and commentators who have brought us Brexit are never going to recant, whatever happens. Certainly not a single one of any standing has yet done so, and I can’t see that changing in any circumstances now. So, although the temptations are entirely understandable, wishing for no deal in order to discredit Brexit is all pain and no gain.
The Museum of Brexit
Such temptations are obviously related to the discussion in my recent post of the Brexit culture war, ‘remainer vengefulness’, and the perhaps now permanent divisions that have been created. The main reason why it is so tempting for remainers to imagine a ‘gotcha’ moment is the daily taunts and sneers directed to them by Brexiters. The latest goad came this week with the revival of plans for ‘Museum of Brexit’, reported in various newspapers. It’s clear that the intention is to be a celebration, rather than any kind of even-handed record, of Brexit. However, the reports might almost have been parodic, since it is hard to imagine even the most enthusiastic of Brexiters being much attracted by the – at once underwhelming and slightly distasteful - suggestion that exhibits will include “Wetherspoon beer mats, one of Nigel Farage’s old suits and even pro-Brexit condoms”.
In any case, despite having the support of several Tory MPs, and assorted other high profile Brexiters, it’s by no means clear that this particular chamber of horrors will ever see the light of day. But that’s not really the point. It’s (presumably) more intended to gee up leave voters who may now be wondering what the point of it all was. In that respect, it is interesting and important that the museum is intended “to remember all the little people in pub meetings up and down the country who kept the flame of sovereignty and independence alive during the dark years”.
The fantasy of the Brexiter resistance
It would be easy to sneer at this, but doing so misses the opportunity to gain insight into some aspects of the complex political psychology of Brexit. Because it’s actually quite a fascinating identity to offer, partly because of its strange elitist yet anti-elitist formulation of “the little people” which I think ties in with the ‘Passport to Pimlico’ strand in Brexit and also the way (as I’ve discussed before) this can be consonant with accepting as leaders those who are self-evidently of the elite (Johnson, Rees-Mogg etc.) and yet are seen as ‘authentic’ toffs, rather than the moralising, political correct killjoys of the ‘liberal elite’. So ‘little people’, here, isn’t seen as condescending as it would be if remainers used it. Rather, it codes an ordered world in which each has their proper, but respected, place.
More to the point, the museum’s purpose invokes an image of an underground resistance movement to an occupation. Of course this, with Brexit as liberation, is precisely how some Brexiters imagine the situation, comparing – quite ludicrously and, actually, insultingly – leaving the EU with escaping colonial rule. Similarly, ludicrous and insulting comparisons of the EU with the USSR or the Third Reich are all too common. The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole has written eloquently and persuasively about this mythology of invasion and resistance as being at the heart of the political psychology that lay behind Brexit. Depicting longstanding leave activists as resistance cells – along with the very idea of a museum – suggests that Brexiters are now beginning to develop a kind of historical narrative of themselves above and beyond the immediate one of Brexit being ‘the will of the people’.
That matters because – to the extent that it takes hold – it serves to cement leaver identity well beyond the enactment of Brexit, since one of the key ways that (sub-)cultures are produced is through a narration of their own past. It obviously has the potential to morph into the already familiar victim narrative of ‘a people betrayed’. But it contains something else that is important and possibly less obvious. For unlike, say, the French Resistance after the Liberation, these keepers of the flame have not emerged from the “dark years” to be feted, admired and even envied by their more cautious or compromised compatriots. Still less – again unlike the French Resistance – do we see non-resisters queueing up to pretend that they, too, were amongst the freedom fighters.
Brexiters’ need for validation
I think that this is significant for how events have unfolded since 2016. Committed Brexiters, to the extent they believed that they would win at all, expected that on that glorious day they would be recognized as national saviours. Equally, many of them expected that the EU itself would swiftly collapse, and other countries would follow the trail they had blazed to liberation.
That none of this has happened partly accounts for the way that Brexiters continue to be so embittered and angry, despite having won. That psychology is multi-stranded, and the strands are not necessarily consistent. So it’s partly, as I (and others) have written before, including in a piece this week in Byline Times, about a victimhood both wanted and denied. Associated with that it’s also – as again Fintan O’Toole has repeatedly argued – that liberation from an entirely imagined oppression is bound be unsatisfying. And it’s about the unerasable knowledge that victory was achieved only through lies.
But there’s another strand, which is about recognition denied. For even if the EU really was every bit as oppressive as they claim, what kind of ‘liberation’ can it be when about half of your compatriots didn’t want it in the first place and more than half now think it mistaken? This explains why, even now, day after day in arguments on social media and elsewhere, Brexiters keep trying to get remainers not just to accept the referendum result but to accept that leaving is a good and desirable thing. That’s more than a demand for “losers’ consent”, for what is being demanded is ‘losers’ validation’. That contradicts, of course, the desire for victimhood, creating one of the many paradoxes of this political psychology.
Similarly, this explains why – despite having left the EU – there are still constant attempts to depict it as being in crisis and on the point of implosion, whether over coronavirus, or budget negotiations, or events in Hungary and Poland. Why do they care, now that we have left? But, again, what is being sought is validation through the anticipated domino effect that ‘we were right’. And again, it contains a paradox since were the EU to disappear then so, too, would the entire basis of Brexiter political identity.
Why does it matter?
More hard-headed readers may feel impatient with all this psychological speculation. But it has a specific and immediately practical significance which reaches right inside the negotiating rooms where the future relationship was being discussed again this week, framed by UK insistence on being a ‘sovereign equal’ and EU insistence on ‘conformity to rules’. Because for Brexiters – who now control the government – this framing is precisely that of resistance and invasion, which explains why progress has been so limited. It is the hidden background to every row about EU ‘intransigence’, such as this week’s about road haulage.
More broadly, it is one driver of the constantly antagonistic approach to the exit and, now, future terms negotiations. Rather than striding confidently to national freedom and renewal, the tone from the outset has been one of resentment, hostility and suspicion, wanting and needing to depict the EU as unreasonable and punitive so as to ‘prove we were right to leave’, whilst acting as if Britain were the aggrieved party, almost as if we were being forced to leave. This in turn makes a ‘successful’ Brexit – one that at least minimizes economic damage and which does not trash national reputation – an impossibility. Which in turn makes those who did not vote leave even less likely to recant and validate the idea of Brexit being a good thing.
The even more hard-headed may want to know what the solution to all this is. The answer to that is that, for now at least, there is no answer. How can there be, when a nation is completely re-inventing its place in the world against the wishes of half its population, and with the other half gripped by a political psychology woven of paradoxical and contradictory impulses that have led them to vote for something undefined and that, however defined, is, because of that psychology, offensive to large numbers of those who did so?
*I’m grateful to Professor Simon Usherwood of Surrey University for confirming that this statement is correct. The question arises because there are some complexities as to how ‘security’ is defined and to what extent it can be separated from issues of law enforcement and judicial cooperation in criminal matters, which have been discussed.
**It’s really not satisfactory to keep using the word ‘remainers’ now that remaining in the EU is no longer an option. I just mean people who did not want to leave and still wish we hadn’t. But to constantly use a term like, say, ‘erstwhile remainers’ would be very clumsy.
That relative quietness is not surprising because the real action will come in the autumn, with a deal, if there is to be deal, needed by mid-October for ratification to be viable by the end of the transition. It’s also not surprising because the news has been dominated by others important things, principally the fiasco over exam results.
There are some interconnections between the Brexit and non-Brexit news. First, in a general way, and as with the handling of coronavirus, it is increasingly obvious that a government defined solely by ‘getting Brexit done’ is singularly ill-equipped to govern. That arises from the combination of Johnson’s lazy boosterism, Cummings’ arrogant control freakery, and the application of a Brexit loyalty test – rather than competence – as the sole criterion for ministerial office and civil servants’ influence. Together, to labour a point repeatedly made on this blog, this means that we have a Vote Leave campaign in office rather than an administration in the normal sense of the word.
Beyond that, the latest example of incompetence and backtracking has led some commentators to wonder if it will make Johnson more cautious of risking the debacle of no deal and others to anticipate that on Brexit, too, he might perform a U-turn (I suppose that means in terms of softening its form, or perhaps by belatedly finding some way to extend transition).
I don’t think that either of these scenarios is at all plausible. Whilst it’s true that there is now a repeated pattern of this government underestimating or ignoring complexities and having to U-turn as a result, because Brexit is such a central and defining policy it is highly unlikely to carry over into that. Doing so would be certain to rip the Tory Party apart and end Johnson’s premiership. It is the one piece of incompetence (even though others would see it as pragmatism) that his increasingly fractious party will not tolerate. For the same reason, his continual failures in every other area are likely to make him, if anything, even more reckless as regards the EU, and even more likely to seek to curry favour with the Ultras in his party who don’t want a deal.
Deal or no deal?
So the question of whether or not there will be a deal with the EU still lies in the balance – and it shouldn’t be forgotten what an extraordinary state of affairs this is, given the promises made by Brexiters and the fact that the transition ends in just four months’ time. Early reports on this week’s talks suggest very limited progress.
Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform made out a strong case this week for why a deal would be preferable. In brief, he gives five reasons: avoiding tariffs and quotas; making non-trade agreements on regulation more likely; enhancing customs co-operation; facilitating the implementation (which anyway has to occur) of the Northern Ireland Protocol; providing a platform for further agreements in the future.
Other analyses this week make related arguments. Pernille Rudlin, an expert in Japanese business, pointed out that, notwithstanding the possible UK-Japan trade deal, a UK-EU deal remains crucial to the future of Japanese investments in the UK. And Sir Julian King, a former senior diplomat now affiliated to Oxford University and RUSI, discussed the need for a future security relationship (analysis of which has been often eclipsed by the focus on trade). At UK insistence security (like defence and foreign policy) has been treated separately from the current talks, and barely discussed at all*, but as King and Lowe both, in different ways, imply, the fate of the two is interlinked to a degree if only because the animosity that would attend no deal on trade would be likely to spill over into any talks about security.
Somewhat related was a fascinating article by Naomi Smith, Chief Executive of Best for Britain, about EU-China trade talks (actually published last week, but I missed it then). She makes the point that these talks are ambitious in scope, seeking a deep relationship, with the establishment of (yes!) rigorous Level Playing Field conditions the likely requirement and consequence. This, she suggests, offers an obvious template for a comprehensive UK-EU agreement which could be achieved immediately, built on existing alignment and links, rather than over the years that the EU-China deal will take. With Brexit delivered, why not take advantage of such possibilities, be similarly ambitious, and steal a march on a China?
In a way, this is a particular version of the argument I made in a recent post about the need for a whole new Brexit debate, one no longer viewed through the prism of the Referendum and British Euroscepticism, but starting afresh from the fact of Brexit and calculating where British interests lie without the dead weight of the ‘in or out’ question that has dogged relations with the EU for decades.
For we know the stumbling block to what Smith is proposing. It is the Brexit Ultras' refusal to consider the kind of comprehensive agreement she advocates. Even Lowe’s more downbeat suggestion that a trade deal is “better than nothing”, or King’s “dialled down [security] relationship” that is “still worth doing”, goes too far for some of them. Some believe that any such deal would end up being the basis for a gradual, re-integrationist project (£), overlapping with others who prefer the ‘sovereign purity’ of no deal. In other words, they still view the post-Brexit relationship entirely through the lens of the pre-Brexit question of membership.
Should remainers** hope for no deal?
But what of those of us who view Brexit as a terrible mistake? That is not an easy question. There is a strong temptation to welcome no deal at the end of transition so as more fully to expose that folly. Only if the damage done is blindingly obvious – with significant food and drug shortages, price rises, border queues and other disruptions – will the Brexiter chickens finally come home to roost. For as Lowe points out – contrary to the wholly fallacious claims of some Brexiters – there is a significant difference between even a ‘thin’ deal and no deal. But tempting as it may be, such a position has big problems.
First, most obvious, and most important is, precisely, the damage that would be done. This wouldn’t be some academic seminar in which an argument would be satisfyingly won. It would impose real hardship, and possibly worse than hardship, on the entire country, remain and leave voters alike. My own view is that it would be an unconscionable position in itself, and an impolitic one to boot: if ‘no deal 2.0’ comes about let it be because of the intransigence of the Ultras or governmental incompetence, and not accompanied by remainer cheers.
Second, it’s unrealistic anyway. Whatever damage is done by no deal the Brexit Ultras will never admit that they were wrong. They will claim it was not due to Brexit and/or that it was due to Brexit not being done ‘properly’. Some ordinary leave voters will not be convinced by that, of course, but the politicians and commentators who have brought us Brexit are never going to recant, whatever happens. Certainly not a single one of any standing has yet done so, and I can’t see that changing in any circumstances now. So, although the temptations are entirely understandable, wishing for no deal in order to discredit Brexit is all pain and no gain.
The Museum of Brexit
Such temptations are obviously related to the discussion in my recent post of the Brexit culture war, ‘remainer vengefulness’, and the perhaps now permanent divisions that have been created. The main reason why it is so tempting for remainers to imagine a ‘gotcha’ moment is the daily taunts and sneers directed to them by Brexiters. The latest goad came this week with the revival of plans for ‘Museum of Brexit’, reported in various newspapers. It’s clear that the intention is to be a celebration, rather than any kind of even-handed record, of Brexit. However, the reports might almost have been parodic, since it is hard to imagine even the most enthusiastic of Brexiters being much attracted by the – at once underwhelming and slightly distasteful - suggestion that exhibits will include “Wetherspoon beer mats, one of Nigel Farage’s old suits and even pro-Brexit condoms”.
In any case, despite having the support of several Tory MPs, and assorted other high profile Brexiters, it’s by no means clear that this particular chamber of horrors will ever see the light of day. But that’s not really the point. It’s (presumably) more intended to gee up leave voters who may now be wondering what the point of it all was. In that respect, it is interesting and important that the museum is intended “to remember all the little people in pub meetings up and down the country who kept the flame of sovereignty and independence alive during the dark years”.
The fantasy of the Brexiter resistance
It would be easy to sneer at this, but doing so misses the opportunity to gain insight into some aspects of the complex political psychology of Brexit. Because it’s actually quite a fascinating identity to offer, partly because of its strange elitist yet anti-elitist formulation of “the little people” which I think ties in with the ‘Passport to Pimlico’ strand in Brexit and also the way (as I’ve discussed before) this can be consonant with accepting as leaders those who are self-evidently of the elite (Johnson, Rees-Mogg etc.) and yet are seen as ‘authentic’ toffs, rather than the moralising, political correct killjoys of the ‘liberal elite’. So ‘little people’, here, isn’t seen as condescending as it would be if remainers used it. Rather, it codes an ordered world in which each has their proper, but respected, place.
More to the point, the museum’s purpose invokes an image of an underground resistance movement to an occupation. Of course this, with Brexit as liberation, is precisely how some Brexiters imagine the situation, comparing – quite ludicrously and, actually, insultingly – leaving the EU with escaping colonial rule. Similarly, ludicrous and insulting comparisons of the EU with the USSR or the Third Reich are all too common. The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole has written eloquently and persuasively about this mythology of invasion and resistance as being at the heart of the political psychology that lay behind Brexit. Depicting longstanding leave activists as resistance cells – along with the very idea of a museum – suggests that Brexiters are now beginning to develop a kind of historical narrative of themselves above and beyond the immediate one of Brexit being ‘the will of the people’.
That matters because – to the extent that it takes hold – it serves to cement leaver identity well beyond the enactment of Brexit, since one of the key ways that (sub-)cultures are produced is through a narration of their own past. It obviously has the potential to morph into the already familiar victim narrative of ‘a people betrayed’. But it contains something else that is important and possibly less obvious. For unlike, say, the French Resistance after the Liberation, these keepers of the flame have not emerged from the “dark years” to be feted, admired and even envied by their more cautious or compromised compatriots. Still less – again unlike the French Resistance – do we see non-resisters queueing up to pretend that they, too, were amongst the freedom fighters.
Brexiters’ need for validation
I think that this is significant for how events have unfolded since 2016. Committed Brexiters, to the extent they believed that they would win at all, expected that on that glorious day they would be recognized as national saviours. Equally, many of them expected that the EU itself would swiftly collapse, and other countries would follow the trail they had blazed to liberation.
That none of this has happened partly accounts for the way that Brexiters continue to be so embittered and angry, despite having won. That psychology is multi-stranded, and the strands are not necessarily consistent. So it’s partly, as I (and others) have written before, including in a piece this week in Byline Times, about a victimhood both wanted and denied. Associated with that it’s also – as again Fintan O’Toole has repeatedly argued – that liberation from an entirely imagined oppression is bound be unsatisfying. And it’s about the unerasable knowledge that victory was achieved only through lies.
But there’s another strand, which is about recognition denied. For even if the EU really was every bit as oppressive as they claim, what kind of ‘liberation’ can it be when about half of your compatriots didn’t want it in the first place and more than half now think it mistaken? This explains why, even now, day after day in arguments on social media and elsewhere, Brexiters keep trying to get remainers not just to accept the referendum result but to accept that leaving is a good and desirable thing. That’s more than a demand for “losers’ consent”, for what is being demanded is ‘losers’ validation’. That contradicts, of course, the desire for victimhood, creating one of the many paradoxes of this political psychology.
Similarly, this explains why – despite having left the EU – there are still constant attempts to depict it as being in crisis and on the point of implosion, whether over coronavirus, or budget negotiations, or events in Hungary and Poland. Why do they care, now that we have left? But, again, what is being sought is validation through the anticipated domino effect that ‘we were right’. And again, it contains a paradox since were the EU to disappear then so, too, would the entire basis of Brexiter political identity.
Why does it matter?
More hard-headed readers may feel impatient with all this psychological speculation. But it has a specific and immediately practical significance which reaches right inside the negotiating rooms where the future relationship was being discussed again this week, framed by UK insistence on being a ‘sovereign equal’ and EU insistence on ‘conformity to rules’. Because for Brexiters – who now control the government – this framing is precisely that of resistance and invasion, which explains why progress has been so limited. It is the hidden background to every row about EU ‘intransigence’, such as this week’s about road haulage.
More broadly, it is one driver of the constantly antagonistic approach to the exit and, now, future terms negotiations. Rather than striding confidently to national freedom and renewal, the tone from the outset has been one of resentment, hostility and suspicion, wanting and needing to depict the EU as unreasonable and punitive so as to ‘prove we were right to leave’, whilst acting as if Britain were the aggrieved party, almost as if we were being forced to leave. This in turn makes a ‘successful’ Brexit – one that at least minimizes economic damage and which does not trash national reputation – an impossibility. Which in turn makes those who did not vote leave even less likely to recant and validate the idea of Brexit being a good thing.
The even more hard-headed may want to know what the solution to all this is. The answer to that is that, for now at least, there is no answer. How can there be, when a nation is completely re-inventing its place in the world against the wishes of half its population, and with the other half gripped by a political psychology woven of paradoxical and contradictory impulses that have led them to vote for something undefined and that, however defined, is, because of that psychology, offensive to large numbers of those who did so?
*I’m grateful to Professor Simon Usherwood of Surrey University for confirming that this statement is correct. The question arises because there are some complexities as to how ‘security’ is defined and to what extent it can be separated from issues of law enforcement and judicial cooperation in criminal matters, which have been discussed.
**It’s really not satisfactory to keep using the word ‘remainers’ now that remaining in the EU is no longer an option. I just mean people who did not want to leave and still wish we hadn’t. But to constantly use a term like, say, ‘erstwhile remainers’ would be very clumsy.
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