Last week, if anyone can remember that far back, the fifth anniversary of the UK leaving the EU provoked a welter of comment and detailed analysis from which it is hard to escape the conclusion that what I’ve sometimes called ‘the battle for the post-Brexit narrative’ is over. The public view that it was wrong to leave and that leaving has not been a success is entrenched and growing. The bulk of sensible and serious commentary, both in the UK (£) and abroad, endorses that.
Meanwhile, Brexit’s remaining defenders, such as Boris Johnson (£) and Nigel Farage, can only wail about the need to “believe” in Brexit, and the benefits they claim for it range from trivialities to demonstrable lies, the most frequent and most egregious being that it enabled an early Covid vaccine rollout. The very weakness of that defence, combined with the notable absence of celebration of the anniversary, show the abject failure of Brexit to deliver the promises made for it by its advocates.
The core problem in current British politics is that the Brexiters are too shameless to admit this failure, and utterly resistant to even the most modest attempts to address the consequences. Since, public opinion notwithstanding, this stance is baked in to both the Reform and Tory parties, and large and noisy section of the media, Brexit Britain is, as I wrote in my previous post, stuck. Like squatters, having trashed the house, they will neither get out nor allow the owners to repair it.
Thus a reversal of Brexit is politically unrealistic in any immediate timescale, and the government’s promised ‘reset’ is the only game in town. Yet even that has been pursued with frustrating timidity and slowness, not least because of the opposition of the Brexit wreckers.
However, in what has been a tumultuous two weeks, there are at least signs of the reset being pursued with more urgency and a little more resolve. Perhaps more importantly, the tumult, which derives from Donald Trump’s return to power, depressing and disorientating as it is, could present an opportunity to finally break out of the stale circles of the Brexit debate.
Reset: a new urgency?
It’s hard to deny that, even though these events were already planned, Trump’s explosive arrival in the White House put new meaning upon Starmer’s attendance at a meeting of EU leaders, to discuss defence and security issues, and the meeting next day of the EU-UK Forum, where EU Relations Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds delivered a major speech. At all events, although it was scarcely the first time that Starmer has talked about wanting an “ambitious” security partnership and reset with the EU, it was the first time that he and Thomas-Symonds set out a desire to agree a reset deal within the next three months.
It’s not clear how realistic this is, since the related announcement of a UK-EU summit to be held in May would imply that negotiations be completed in advance of this. Nevertheless, both the summit itself, which will be hosted by the UK, and the identification of a timetable, can be read as recognizing the need to deliver, and deliver quickly, on a reset which, so far, has mainly consisted of warm words.
Thomas-Symonds also spoke of the need to approach the reset with “ruthless pragmatism” in place of “ideologically-driven division”. Quite what this means is also unclear. Hopefully, it is a signal to British Brexiters (£) that the government is willing to take on their backlash against the reset, which I discussed in a recent post and which has been much on display in utterly ludicrous attacks on this week’s meetings in the pro-Brexit press*. If that is so, then it would be helpful for Thomas-Symonds, or Starmer himself, to give a big, uncompromising, and full-throated speech demolishing those attacks and advocating, with enthusiasm, a detailed agenda for the government’s still far too vague ‘ambition’. If not now, when?
Less optimistically, it might have been (or have also been) a signal to the EU that the government still clings to the familiar Brexiter line that Brussels should be more ‘flexible’ and less ‘ideological’ in its application of rules for third countries. That line is still, at least implicitly, what Farage believes would “improve” the existing deal, as if post-Brexit ‘red tape’ were an EU imposition rather than an inevitable consequence of decisions taken by UK and urged by Farage himself. I’m only guessing, but it seems to me at least possible that there are still people in the civil service and the cabinet who have the same view, if only because, even after all these years, there is still so much ignorance about how the EU works and what Brexit means.
But even the most optimistic reading of these developments (i.e. that Starmer intends to stand up to the Brexiters and to work realistically and rapidly to agree the most maximalist version of the reset), for all that it would mark a shift in gear compared with the last eight months, already seems inadequate to the scale and pace of events. For, based even on the short period since Trump returned to office, there is a good case for thinking that the fundamental recalibration of global politics, which I foreshadowed in a post in November, is now unfolding in plain view.
Trump’s global coup
That recalibration isn’t only, or even primarily, about Trump’s trade tariffs, which I’ll come back to. There is already a long list of other developments, including the pardoning of the J6 rioters; the forced deportations (with the associated bullying of Colombia and the planned re-opening and re-purposing of Guantanamo Bay); the quite extraordinary handing of access to government finance systems to Musk; the hounding of Federal agencies including the FBI; the attempts to suborn the CIA; the freezing of foreign aid; the purge of all forms of diversity initiatives; the bullying territorial claims made on Panama, Greenland and Canada; the grotesque and yet absurd proposal to “take over” Palestine and create a “Riviera of the Middle East”; the withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the World Health Organization.
That is only a partial list of what has happened so far, and there will undoubtedly be more to come, probably even as I am writing. But it is enough to eviscerate any lingering idea that Trump will show even the restraints of his first presidency. It may be chaotic, but is also a coup of sorts, and arguably an assault on the constitution. Under Trump, the US has launched a global attack on liberalism in its most general meaning, and on many of its specific attributes at home and abroad.
Even acknowledging that many of Trump’s announcements and executive orders are merely performative, that much of what he does will be heavily resisted, that his administration is likely to be characterized by incompetence and infighting, will not last forever, and may become domestically unpopular, it seems certain that the US will be permanently changed and, as a result, so will the rest of the world. Apart from anything else, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Trump is, in fact, doing what he promised he would do, and was given a clear endorsement for it by US voters. So, even if some of those who did so turn against him, it really can’t be denied that there is a deep groundswell of desire for the US to be a very different kind of country to that which, at least, the UK has known, or believed it has known, since, say, 1941. (I realise there is a lot that can be debated in and around that claim.)
Trump’s tariff weapon
When it comes to Trump’s new tariffs, these can be seen as an attack on economic liberalism, and to an extent they are motivated by economic protectionism. But they are not really, or at least not simply, about waging trade wars (although trade wars with China and the EU may be the result). More fundamentally, Trump is using trade as a weapon to intimidate other countries into doing his bidding in both economic and non-economic matters. The non-economic motive was most evident in the threat to Colombia, but was also present in those made to Mexico and Canada, and carried through against China.
The fact that Mexico and Canada struck last-minute deals on border protection to avoid the tariff attacks is in part an illustration of this, but it is also an irrelevance. For one thing, they are only temporary deals, and there is every reason to believe that, like a blackmailer, Trump will come back for more (and, even if he doesn’t, this episode will have done long-term damage to, for example, US-Canada relations). For another, the very rapidity of the reprieves is all of a piece with Trump’s almost cliched desire to ‘do the unexpected’ as a weapon designed to de-stabilize his perceived enemies. Indeed, as legal commentator David Allen Green has pointed out this week, although Trump is often described as ‘transactional’, his approach to deal-making is actually “anti-transactional”, so that “an agreement offers an opportunity to gain leverage, for a new negotiation, for a new exertion of power.”
However, whilst what is happening may be inflected through Trump’s baroque psychology (£), it is not reducible to that. He is both an expression of, and a vehicle for, a deep seam of sentiment in the US which sees the country as the put-upon victim of the international order (despite that order being largely the creation of the US). In that sense, Trump’s tariff attacks are part of the wider picture of a regime determined to use force to dismantle the constraints of law and convention abroad quite as much as those within the domestic sphere. That he has even spoken of the use of military force, extending to the sequestration of territory, against some of the US’s own allies means that, at the most basic level, the US can no longer be trusted by any of its allies.
Trump’s words and actions have therefore already fractured global society. It’s tempting to reach for historical analogies, which might range from Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to the America First Committee, to the endless debates about whether Trump is a fascist. But they really aren’t necessary. It’s enough to observe that he is what he is, now; doing what he is doing, now. Perhaps in the future it may seem an overblown claim but, just at the moment, it is plausible to say that we are seeing the beginning of a new global divide between rules and brute force. It is also not necessary to romanticize ‘the rules-based international order’, or to sanitize the history of US foreign policy, to see this as a momentous and highly dangerous development, with the potential to shatter previous alliances and enforce more-or-less binary choices on almost every country in the world.
What of Brexit Britain?
If this analysis, or anything like it, is correct, then the issues it poses for the UK, specifically, go well beyond those of UK-EU relations, although they encompass those relations, and beyond those of tariffs. Thus most current discussions, which focus on Britain having to navigate a careful path in the event of a US-EU trade war, don’t fully address what is at stake. It is not even as simple as picking a side between the US and the EU. It is about picking a side between liberalism and illiberalism (or worse).
This would have created profound problems for the UK even without Brexit, given the role it had roughly established for itself as a ‘transatlantic bridge’. But EU membership would have half-addressed those problems, anchoring one end of the bridge even as the other imploded. As it is, the combination of Brexit and Trump 2.0 has burnt both ends. This poses questions about UK-EU relations, of course, but Trump hasn’t simply turned on the EU. In some ways, the bigger issue his presidency has raised for the UK is illustrated by his assault on Canada, not just with tariffs but with the extraordinary suggestion that it might “cease to exist” as an independent country and could become “America’s 51st State”.
This, then, is an attack on one of Britain’s closest and most longstanding allies, and, indeed, a country of which the British monarch is still the Head of State. The UK-Canada relationship is also, let us not forget, a prime example of the kind of ‘old friendship’ which the Brexiters claimed would be rekindled by leaving the EU. Some even continue to fantasise about ‘CANZUK’ and ‘the Anglosphere’. Moreover, Canada’s relationship with the EU was constantly held up as the template for what Britain’s should become.
In this sense, Trump’s hostility to Canada, quite as much as his hostility to the EU, presents a moment of choice. What, now, should Britain do? Keep quiet? Seek to ‘navigate’ a path to spare itself Trump’s disfavour whilst its ‘old friend’ takes its chances? Indeed one might ask what Farage, the man who always claims to stick to his principles, to care deeply about national sovereignty, and to have a hot-line to Trump, had to say about Canada this last week or so. The answer, so far as I can find, is nothing.
Similar questions apply not just to the UK’s relations with the EU, generally, but to those with Denmark, in particular, and with Greenland. They also apply, in a different way, to its relations with China, which Starmer’s government has recently tried to reset. And they also apply, again in different ways, to its relations with global institutions. To put all this a different way, the vision of, at least, the global Brexiters was of being ‘freed from the shackles of the EU’ in order to participate fully in a global order, including but not limited to a global trade order, an order to which the US now is wholly opposed and bent on destroying. Even the Brexiters’ more limited notion of the Anglosphere was predicated on the US as a bulwark of the ‘rules-based’ order. Equally, they looked to NATO as the sole international basis of UK defence and security, an approach which now looks increasingly precarious. So even if there had ever been a geo-political logic to Brexit, which there wasn’t, the entire basis of that logic is now rapidly disappearing.
A UK-US deal?
To the extent that the Brexiters have any response to this situation, it is the idea of the UK creating a Free Trade Agreement with the US (and/or an exemption from new punishment tariffs). Indeed, some clearly imagine that this, finally, will be a concrete demonstration of the benefits of Brexit.
However, it is an utterly inadequate response. Although there is no doubt that Trump will dangle this possibility in front of Starmer, that doesn’t mean he will do such a deal. In fact, as is already beginning to happen, he is likely to alternately hint that he is going to spare Britain or that he is going to punish us, just as a way of demonstrating his power. But even if he does a deal, his protectionism and nationalism, not to mention his own concept of deal-making, will mean that it will not be a good deal for the UK, and will come with numerous conditions. In any case, as Mexico and Canada are finding as regards USCMA, a deal with Trump is not worth the paper it is written on. His “anti-transactionalism” means he is always liable to make some new demands for obedience from the UK.
Most importantly of all, were a US-UK trade deal to happen in the new context Trump has created it would, for what at best would be only a small economic benefit, engender not just dismay but disgust from most of Britain’s friends and allies. Brexit Britain would cease to be regarded by them, as it has been since 2016, with bewilderment and even sympathy, but instead with loathing and revulsion, a Quisling in Trump’s global war.
The very idea that Brexiters like David Frost should think that their project is justified by the ‘freedom’ to act in such a cowardly and contemptible way shows the depths and desperation they have reached. Certainly their advocacy of dancing a humiliating jig to the tune of a capricious bully removes any vestigial illusion that they are in any way patriotic.
Starmer’s opportunity
The temptation for Starmer, partly as a matter of temperament, but partly because Brexit has left Britain in such an enfeebled position, will be to go on doing nothing and saying little other than platitudes. But inaction and quietude will amount to taking sides or, even worse, will be seen by each side as taking that of the other. Likewise, it will not silence the Brexiter call for doing a deal with the US, with Farage and his acolytes acting as Trump’s Fifth Column in British politics.
Conversely, Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies. Doing so would go with the grain of public opinion. Trump and his side-kick Musk are not popular in the UK. Equally, there is public support for closer relations with the EU rather than with the US, and probably (though I haven’t found polling data) for siding with Canada, Greenland/ Denmark, and perhaps even Panama, against Trump’s aggression.
In this way, all the talk still coming from Badenoch, amongst others, of ‘honouring the will of the British people’ and ‘retaining our hard-won Brexit freedoms’ as a reason to oppose the reset could at a stroke be derided as the tired repetition of long-outdated slogans, wrenching political discourse free of the detritus of 2016 and its aftermath. That wouldn’t imply re-opening the Brexit question, or crossing Labour’s ‘red lines’, but it would imply pursuing a maximalist reset with the EU, at speed, and with open enthusiasm rather than coyness and reluctance. Doing so would not just reset UK-EU relations, it would also reset UK international relations generally and, perhaps most importantly, reset the terms of domestic political debate.
Starmer may never have a better chance than now, and, if he is to take it, then the sooner the better if he is to get kudos for being at the forefront of this new global divide. Standing up to Trump in this way would not be easy or cost-free for Britain. Doing so would have significant security and economic ramifications. But the same is true of not doing so. And it’s even possible, given Trump’s bullying temperament, that standing up to him might earn Starmer a degree of grudging respect.
In some ways, Starmer is ideally placed to take this kind of stance. As I wrote recently, his persona and politics are very clearly aligned with the principles of ‘rational-legal authority’ in both the domestic and international spheres, placing him in direct contrast to Trump’s ‘anti-ruleism’. However, at the same time, and relatedly, he is almost preternaturally cautious, lacking vision and perhaps distrustful of the very concept of vision, and as a result inclined to ‘wait and see’ and to dodge hard choices. Hence his current rejection of the bare idea that there is a choice to be made between the US and the EU. That is misguided even if the choice is framed in that way. It is even more misguided when the choice is framed, as it should be, between accepting or rejecting Trump’s new barbarism.
*Of these attacks, probably none was more ludicrous than that of Kate Hoey. It isn’t only that she sees betrayal in the UK Prime Minister meeting EU leaders, it is that having campaigned for years against membership of the EU because of its supra-national powers she now proposes that the UK need not deal with the EU at all, but simply with its individual members. And this is only one aspect of the idiocy on display in just this short clip.
Showing posts with label Foreign policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foreign policy. Show all posts
Friday, 7 February 2025
Friday, 22 November 2024
Post-Brexit Britain’s Trump problem goes much deeper than trade tariffs
Brexit is back in the news again. That is partly the aftermath of the budget, discussed in my previous post, which was followed by speeches at the Mansion House by Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey. The latter highlighted the economic damage of Brexit and called for a re-building of relations with the EU “while respecting the decision of the British people”.
It's true that, as economics commentator Simon Nixon observed, this marked a notable break with official Brexit omerta. Still, it was not exactly dynamite stuff. The economics are well-known and the political message was identical to the government’s own stated policy. Indeed, Reeves’ own Mansion House speech said the same thing. In that sense, Bailey’s comments showed the limitations of government policy in that, as he must know, closer relations with the EU will only marginally reduce the ongoing costs of Brexit. So, despite being accused by Matthew Lynn in The Spectator of “reopening the Brexit debate”, Bailey hardly did that, unless even the barest mention of Brexit is now to be described that way.
If his comments attracted attention, it was mainly because of the wider context of now intense discussion about what the coming Trump presidency is going to mean for post-Brexit Britain. In my previous post I suggested that ‘hot takes’ on this were not wise, and to an extent I think that is still the case. Apart from the fact that he isn’t yet in office, he is by any standards a capricious politician. What he may actually do when he comes back to power is highly unpredictable.
Trump’s psychodrama
I don’t mean, of course, that it isn’t already abundantly obvious that it is going to be dire. The choices he is already making for key appointments demonstrate he is going to oversee a depraved, intellectually and morally bankrupt, regime. About the only thing which may save us from the worst is that it may well also be too incompetent and too prone to infighting to deliver what it threatens.
However, within that broad picture, it remains to be seen exactly what he does in terms of the two issues most obviously of concern the UK: defence posture as regards NATO generally and Ukraine specifically, and a blanket hike in trade tariffs. I’ll discuss the latter shortly, and whilst I won’t discuss the former in this post there is a good analysis by Benjamin Martell of Edinburgh University in The New European, building on his and others’ report for the Independent Commission on UK-EU Relations earlier this year.
Beyond the difficulty of predicting what he will do, I think there is an undesirability in doing so. One of the ways in which narcissistic bullies like Trump exert power – and it’s the same in playgrounds, prisons, and some businesses as it is in politics – is precisely to generate a psychodrama of fearful uncertainty around themselves: ‘what will he do? What will we do if he does that? What will he do then if we do that?’
In this way, those around the narcissist become unwittingly complicit in his way of exercising power. It is very difficult to find a way of resisting that kind of power, but one possibility might be to stand back a little from the frenzy. To play it long and cool, rather than short and hot. Admittedly, that is not a luxury open to the heroic defenders of Ukraine, but it might be good advice to the UK. However, as a matter of fact, political actors and commentators here are currently engaged in trying to work out what Trump means. So the frenzy can’t be ignored.
Trump’s tariff threats
In the UK, and very directly connected with Brexit, much of that frenzy has been to do with trade. Specifically, if Trump does impose a blanket 10% or even 20% on imports to the US it would mean, at the upper end of that range, an estimated 0.8% fall in annual UK economic output. That it is not even worse is because the bulk of UK exports to the US are services (which do not attract tariffs) rather than goods. But, in the context of already anaemic growth forecasts, and the very urgent political and economic need for improved growth, that would be quite bad enough. That seems to be the baseline assumption in most commentary, but of course if it turned out to be 10%, or if the uplift was only applied to certain sectors (and depending what these were) the impact would be less. But it still wouldn’t be good.
If any of these scenarios happens, then one response, and it may well be the EU’s response, could be to impose retaliatory tariffs on imports from the US. A trade war, in other words. The UK could do that on its own account, but it is far too small to be able to win a trade war with the US. So this exposes the weakness of post-Brexit Britain. For many of those opposed to Brexit, it re-presents a choice between the EU and the US, to which the answer must be the EU. According to Brexiters, though, the opposite is true (£), and being outside the EU means that the UK could strike a deal with the US on its own account.
Others, by no means confined to Brexiters, see a less stark choice. Peter Mandelson, tipped as the possible next Ambassador to the US, sees a third way, with the unfortunately worded suggestion (£) that the UK could “have its cake and eat it”. It’s a possibility endorsed (£) by the generally acute Financial Times commentator Robert Shrimsley. Similarly, Andrew Haldane, the former Chief Economist at the Bank of England, believes a deal is possible without prejudicing relations with the EU. One reason for making such a claim is that not only are most UK exports to the US made up of services, but it is services trade where the UK has a trade surplus. Given that Trump’s tariffs are aimed at those countries with surpluses in goods trade, the UK isn’t so much his target as potential collateral damage.
What does a ‘deal’ mean?
However, the discussion of all this has already become mired in confusion. That is principally because it has conflated two potentially very different things. One is the old Brexiter dream of a UK-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), meaning, at its most basic, an across-the-board removal or reduction of all or most tariffs, but potentially including the removal of some non-tariff barriers to trade. The other is a specific deal to be exempted from the blanket imposition of Trump’s new tariffs. An FTA would improve the current terms of trade. An ‘exemption deal’ would simply return terms of trade to the status quo ante.
They are also different in that FTAs typically take a long time to negotiate, whereas an exemption deal, at least in principle, need not. And that reflects the fact that the things required of the UK for an FTA would be likely to involve substantial concessions on regulatory issues (‘chlorinated chicken’ being the symbolic one), especially as regards agriculture and pharmaceuticals. What would be needed for an exemption deal is less easy to predict, but could be things like voluntary export quotas, restrictions on Chinese imports, or agreement to import large quantities of US military equipment – but not, necessarily, regulatory concessions. [1]
These two scenarios therefore have different implications for the other side of the coin, UK-EU relations. An FTA, to the extent it entailed regulatory change, would move the UK further from the EU regulatory orbit. That would derail the current direction of Labour’s ‘reset’ policy, which is primarily based on continuing alignment with the EU. It would certainly derail the centrepiece of that policy, a UK-EU SPS deal (which would entail regulatory alignment on agricultural standards, especially). It would also have implications for Northern Ireland, which would remain bound by EU goods regulations, and thus would ‘thicken’ the Irish Sea Border. A more limited exemption deal might well avoid these things, but would certainly do political damage to the reset in terms of trust, assuming that it left the EU fighting a trade war with the US which the UK had managed to slide out of.
A trade deal with Trump?
Some Brexiters would undoubtedly argue that the distinction I’ve drawn is irrelevant, in that an FTA would also be an exemption deal (even though an exemption deal wouldn’t be an FTA). That’s true, but it doesn’t affect the point that an FTA would take longer to agree, and in the meantime there would be no exemption from the blanket new tariffs. Nor does it recognize the profound political difficulties any UK government would face if it met likely US demands on regulations.
But there is a more fundamental issue. Brexiters, both in the Tory and Reform parties, are now talking as if a UK-US FTA was there for the taking under Trump’s first presidency, and will now be available again. Kemi Badenoch is even claiming (£) that there is an “oven ready agreement negotiated by the last Tory government”. This is nonsense. There was no such agreement [2]. In fact, Trump blew hot and cold about a deal first time round. That’s actually a specific example of my earlier point about how narcissistic bullies use uncertainty to exert power. And even if he ever did offer such a deal, it would be on one-sided terms (that would probably be true under any US administration, but certainly under Trump’s ‘winner takes all’ version of deal-making).
In any case, this latest upsurge of talk about trade talks is exhibiting some of the same deficiencies as the earlier version. One concerns the relative importance to the UK of trade with the US and the EU. Brexiters, including Badenoch, are already wheeling out the misleading claim that the US is the UK’s largest trade partner. That’s misleading because it treats each member of the EU as a separate trade partner. They aren’t, to the extent that all are part of a single market and customs union. Brexiters really can’t have it both ways, saying that EU membership prevented the UK from being independent, especially in trade policy, but then talking as if each EU member is a separate trading entity. Secondly, it resurrects the misleading idea that a UK-US FTA would be much of an economic prize anyway. The previous government’s figures suggest it would provide an additional 0.07% to 0.16% per annum to GDP over 15 years.
Nevertheless, what we are going to see, and are already beginning to see, is Brexiters pretending that there is an easy, perfect solution to the Trump tariffs, but one that the Labour government is refusing to take because it is anti-Trump and pro-EU. We will see, as is also already beginning, Nigel Farage claiming with smirking self-importance that he has his own special relationship with Trump, giving him a unique influence and insight, just as he did first time round. Along with that will be noises from Trump supporters, and again they are already beginning, suggesting a deal is possible if only the UK abandons ‘EU socialism’. Trump will undoubtedly throw fuel on to that fire (‘I offered them a great deal, it was a beautiful deal, but they didn’t want it. I d’know why, I hear they preferred the EU, I d’know, but it was a beautiful deal’).
Beneath this, there is a still more fundamental issue. Trade policy is never wholly about economics, or economic rationality. But this is unusually so for Trump. If it wasn’t he would hardly even be contemplating the blanket tariff, which will increase prices in the US (though, despite what some think, that probably won’t bother his supporters). Instead, trade policy for Trump is about beating his enemies, in this context meaning the EU and China (which may face 60% tariffs). So there’s no point in thumbing through Ricardian theory on comparative advantage to try to understand Trump’s policy. But the corollary is that there’s no point in trying to frame responses in these terms.
In concrete terms, this means that the UK government should not weigh its (distinctly limited) options simply in terms of economic effects. An exemption deal might reduce the immediate economic damage, but its longer-term costs to the UK, both economic and geo-political, would be considerable in terms of the EU and, very possibly, China. The potential Chinese dimension is worth stressing, because at issue for the UK is not a just a two-way tug between the EU and the US, but being stuck between all three blocs. That was brought into focus by Keir Starmer’s attempts this week to improve relations with China, which might well be jeopardized by any form of deal with the US. To put all this another way, the only deals Trump does are those that favour him.
The cleavage in 21st century politics
This brings us to the final, and deepest, level of what is at stake here, and it is far more important than tariffs on this or that, or small percentages of GDP. It is that what Trump represents, as Brexit does, is what I’ve elsewhere discussed as ‘anti-ruleism’. In the most basic way, his anticipated blanket tariff policy makes a mockery of WTO rules. But his entire approach to politics is one which rejects the rule of law, scientific rationality, and, ultimately, the concept of ‘rational-legal authority’. I try to avoid social science jargon on this blog, but I think it may be useful here.
The sociologist Max Weber developed the idea that modern, industrial societies were increasingly characterised by systemic, codified rules and laws, objectively formulated and applied. So we obey X because s/he is the legitimate holder of the office (of President, or CEO, or whatever), not because of the person holding it. Weber contrasted that with authority that was ‘traditional’ (e.g. monarchy, church) or ‘charismatic’ (derived from the persona of the leader).
Trump fairly obviously seeks to elevate charisma over rules, but more to the point he embodies a hostility to ‘rules’ as a concept of social organization and politics. In this, he shares a common ideology with the ‘disruptor’ tech bosses, like Elon Musk, who now support him, and, in the UK, with their fanboy Dominic Cummings (£). He also shares it with Vladimir Putin, who relies on a peculiar admixture of charismatic and traditional authority, fused with nationalism, and is equally disdainful of the rules-based international order.
It is also shared by Boris Johnson, exhibited by the way that he (for perhaps idiosyncratic reasons) and the Brexit Jacobins (for reasons of fanaticism) believed it was acceptable to dispose of all conventions and institutions, including parliament itself, in order to ‘get Brexit done’. It is shared by Liz Truss, who still insists those institutions caused her downfall. Emblematic of this is the hostility of both Trump and the Brexiters to bureaucracy and, especially, the civil service, which, not coincidentally, was emblematic, for Weber, of rational-legal authority. That hostility is shared by Kemi Badenoch, in her aggressive diatribes against ‘the bureaucratic class’. Such anti-ruleism is obviously connected with populism, but it isn’t identical to it (there’s a book to be written there). The disjuncture is what did for Boris Johnson, when his disdain for the Covid rules fell foul of the populist idea that ‘rules should apply to all of us’.
There are many different ways of understanding these developments. One way might be to see them in terms of the latest phase in the unwinding of the politics of the Cold War (that would need another book). Another, even more epochal, would be to see them as a kind of Counter-Enlightenment, in which the eighteenth-century battles over rationality are being re-fought but in the other direction (that’s a third book). Of course, the Trump presidency will not last forever. But there is a sense that deep and profound changes are now established in the US and elsewhere. And why not? Despite the brief moment when some claimed ‘the end of history’, history never ends.
However they are framed, the key point is that these developments are about far more than international trade. That is not surprising, because Brexit itself was about far more than trade with the EU; more, even, than membership of the EU. Needless to say, these are not the terms in which most people are framing the current situation, although Rafael Behr of the Guardian comes close to doing so. If it were framed that way then, indeed, the whole question of Brexit would be re-litigated. It is clear that the government have no intention of doing that.
Will Starmer’s government rise to the challenge?
Nevertheless, in terms of the division I have presented here, Keir Starmer is very much on one side, being almost the epitome of rational-legal authority or, so to speak, ‘ruleism’. That is something to be grateful for, yet even framed in the narrower terms of trade and tariffs his government’s response so far is rather wishy-washy. Reeves has spoken of seeking to do a deal with the US “whether that's through a free trade agreement or through further improvements in our trade and investment flows”. But in the same interview she pledged that “we’re not going to allow British farmers to be undercut by different rules and regulations”, effectively ruling out an FTA. As for some exemption deal on new tariffs, she just says that “we'll make the case for free and open trade”. What does that mean in practice? Who knows.
Perhaps, when Trump’s intentions become clearer then so will those of the British government. But my hunch is that they won’t. I don’t think that the government is, as I put it earlier, playing it long and cool. I think it will simply try to muddle through, dodging or fudging the choices in the hope that they become irrelevant, if only through the decisions made by other countries. Arguably, in a situation in which the UK has so little leverage and so few good choices available, that has a certain pragmatism. But as a response to the bigger framing of those choices gestured towards in this post it is wholly inadequate.
Why are Labour in this situation? In some ways it is because, faced with Trump, any British government, like the governments of many other countries, has an almost impossible problem. But, just as, for Britain, Brexit adds to all the economic problems that other countries face, so too does it add to the Trump problem. For this government, in particular, that is compounded by its commitment to a Brexit policy which it does not believe in but is unwilling, and perhaps unable, to repudiate.
Notes
[1] This is my amateurish take on the question. For more detailed analysis (though I think it is pretty much compatible with mine) from trade experts, see Sam Lowe’s Substack newsletter, David Henig on the UK Trade Policy Observatory blog, and Dmitry Grozoubinski’s guest post on Ian Dunt’s Substack newsletter.
[2] It may be that Badenoch was referring to the previous government’s statement of the case for such an agreement (2020) Even if so, that was, emphatically, not an agreement with the US, still less one which is now ‘oven ready’ to be signed with Trump.
It's true that, as economics commentator Simon Nixon observed, this marked a notable break with official Brexit omerta. Still, it was not exactly dynamite stuff. The economics are well-known and the political message was identical to the government’s own stated policy. Indeed, Reeves’ own Mansion House speech said the same thing. In that sense, Bailey’s comments showed the limitations of government policy in that, as he must know, closer relations with the EU will only marginally reduce the ongoing costs of Brexit. So, despite being accused by Matthew Lynn in The Spectator of “reopening the Brexit debate”, Bailey hardly did that, unless even the barest mention of Brexit is now to be described that way.
If his comments attracted attention, it was mainly because of the wider context of now intense discussion about what the coming Trump presidency is going to mean for post-Brexit Britain. In my previous post I suggested that ‘hot takes’ on this were not wise, and to an extent I think that is still the case. Apart from the fact that he isn’t yet in office, he is by any standards a capricious politician. What he may actually do when he comes back to power is highly unpredictable.
Trump’s psychodrama
I don’t mean, of course, that it isn’t already abundantly obvious that it is going to be dire. The choices he is already making for key appointments demonstrate he is going to oversee a depraved, intellectually and morally bankrupt, regime. About the only thing which may save us from the worst is that it may well also be too incompetent and too prone to infighting to deliver what it threatens.
However, within that broad picture, it remains to be seen exactly what he does in terms of the two issues most obviously of concern the UK: defence posture as regards NATO generally and Ukraine specifically, and a blanket hike in trade tariffs. I’ll discuss the latter shortly, and whilst I won’t discuss the former in this post there is a good analysis by Benjamin Martell of Edinburgh University in The New European, building on his and others’ report for the Independent Commission on UK-EU Relations earlier this year.
Beyond the difficulty of predicting what he will do, I think there is an undesirability in doing so. One of the ways in which narcissistic bullies like Trump exert power – and it’s the same in playgrounds, prisons, and some businesses as it is in politics – is precisely to generate a psychodrama of fearful uncertainty around themselves: ‘what will he do? What will we do if he does that? What will he do then if we do that?’
In this way, those around the narcissist become unwittingly complicit in his way of exercising power. It is very difficult to find a way of resisting that kind of power, but one possibility might be to stand back a little from the frenzy. To play it long and cool, rather than short and hot. Admittedly, that is not a luxury open to the heroic defenders of Ukraine, but it might be good advice to the UK. However, as a matter of fact, political actors and commentators here are currently engaged in trying to work out what Trump means. So the frenzy can’t be ignored.
Trump’s tariff threats
In the UK, and very directly connected with Brexit, much of that frenzy has been to do with trade. Specifically, if Trump does impose a blanket 10% or even 20% on imports to the US it would mean, at the upper end of that range, an estimated 0.8% fall in annual UK economic output. That it is not even worse is because the bulk of UK exports to the US are services (which do not attract tariffs) rather than goods. But, in the context of already anaemic growth forecasts, and the very urgent political and economic need for improved growth, that would be quite bad enough. That seems to be the baseline assumption in most commentary, but of course if it turned out to be 10%, or if the uplift was only applied to certain sectors (and depending what these were) the impact would be less. But it still wouldn’t be good.
If any of these scenarios happens, then one response, and it may well be the EU’s response, could be to impose retaliatory tariffs on imports from the US. A trade war, in other words. The UK could do that on its own account, but it is far too small to be able to win a trade war with the US. So this exposes the weakness of post-Brexit Britain. For many of those opposed to Brexit, it re-presents a choice between the EU and the US, to which the answer must be the EU. According to Brexiters, though, the opposite is true (£), and being outside the EU means that the UK could strike a deal with the US on its own account.
Others, by no means confined to Brexiters, see a less stark choice. Peter Mandelson, tipped as the possible next Ambassador to the US, sees a third way, with the unfortunately worded suggestion (£) that the UK could “have its cake and eat it”. It’s a possibility endorsed (£) by the generally acute Financial Times commentator Robert Shrimsley. Similarly, Andrew Haldane, the former Chief Economist at the Bank of England, believes a deal is possible without prejudicing relations with the EU. One reason for making such a claim is that not only are most UK exports to the US made up of services, but it is services trade where the UK has a trade surplus. Given that Trump’s tariffs are aimed at those countries with surpluses in goods trade, the UK isn’t so much his target as potential collateral damage.
What does a ‘deal’ mean?
However, the discussion of all this has already become mired in confusion. That is principally because it has conflated two potentially very different things. One is the old Brexiter dream of a UK-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), meaning, at its most basic, an across-the-board removal or reduction of all or most tariffs, but potentially including the removal of some non-tariff barriers to trade. The other is a specific deal to be exempted from the blanket imposition of Trump’s new tariffs. An FTA would improve the current terms of trade. An ‘exemption deal’ would simply return terms of trade to the status quo ante.
They are also different in that FTAs typically take a long time to negotiate, whereas an exemption deal, at least in principle, need not. And that reflects the fact that the things required of the UK for an FTA would be likely to involve substantial concessions on regulatory issues (‘chlorinated chicken’ being the symbolic one), especially as regards agriculture and pharmaceuticals. What would be needed for an exemption deal is less easy to predict, but could be things like voluntary export quotas, restrictions on Chinese imports, or agreement to import large quantities of US military equipment – but not, necessarily, regulatory concessions. [1]
These two scenarios therefore have different implications for the other side of the coin, UK-EU relations. An FTA, to the extent it entailed regulatory change, would move the UK further from the EU regulatory orbit. That would derail the current direction of Labour’s ‘reset’ policy, which is primarily based on continuing alignment with the EU. It would certainly derail the centrepiece of that policy, a UK-EU SPS deal (which would entail regulatory alignment on agricultural standards, especially). It would also have implications for Northern Ireland, which would remain bound by EU goods regulations, and thus would ‘thicken’ the Irish Sea Border. A more limited exemption deal might well avoid these things, but would certainly do political damage to the reset in terms of trust, assuming that it left the EU fighting a trade war with the US which the UK had managed to slide out of.
A trade deal with Trump?
Some Brexiters would undoubtedly argue that the distinction I’ve drawn is irrelevant, in that an FTA would also be an exemption deal (even though an exemption deal wouldn’t be an FTA). That’s true, but it doesn’t affect the point that an FTA would take longer to agree, and in the meantime there would be no exemption from the blanket new tariffs. Nor does it recognize the profound political difficulties any UK government would face if it met likely US demands on regulations.
But there is a more fundamental issue. Brexiters, both in the Tory and Reform parties, are now talking as if a UK-US FTA was there for the taking under Trump’s first presidency, and will now be available again. Kemi Badenoch is even claiming (£) that there is an “oven ready agreement negotiated by the last Tory government”. This is nonsense. There was no such agreement [2]. In fact, Trump blew hot and cold about a deal first time round. That’s actually a specific example of my earlier point about how narcissistic bullies use uncertainty to exert power. And even if he ever did offer such a deal, it would be on one-sided terms (that would probably be true under any US administration, but certainly under Trump’s ‘winner takes all’ version of deal-making).
In any case, this latest upsurge of talk about trade talks is exhibiting some of the same deficiencies as the earlier version. One concerns the relative importance to the UK of trade with the US and the EU. Brexiters, including Badenoch, are already wheeling out the misleading claim that the US is the UK’s largest trade partner. That’s misleading because it treats each member of the EU as a separate trade partner. They aren’t, to the extent that all are part of a single market and customs union. Brexiters really can’t have it both ways, saying that EU membership prevented the UK from being independent, especially in trade policy, but then talking as if each EU member is a separate trading entity. Secondly, it resurrects the misleading idea that a UK-US FTA would be much of an economic prize anyway. The previous government’s figures suggest it would provide an additional 0.07% to 0.16% per annum to GDP over 15 years.
Nevertheless, what we are going to see, and are already beginning to see, is Brexiters pretending that there is an easy, perfect solution to the Trump tariffs, but one that the Labour government is refusing to take because it is anti-Trump and pro-EU. We will see, as is also already beginning, Nigel Farage claiming with smirking self-importance that he has his own special relationship with Trump, giving him a unique influence and insight, just as he did first time round. Along with that will be noises from Trump supporters, and again they are already beginning, suggesting a deal is possible if only the UK abandons ‘EU socialism’. Trump will undoubtedly throw fuel on to that fire (‘I offered them a great deal, it was a beautiful deal, but they didn’t want it. I d’know why, I hear they preferred the EU, I d’know, but it was a beautiful deal’).
Beneath this, there is a still more fundamental issue. Trade policy is never wholly about economics, or economic rationality. But this is unusually so for Trump. If it wasn’t he would hardly even be contemplating the blanket tariff, which will increase prices in the US (though, despite what some think, that probably won’t bother his supporters). Instead, trade policy for Trump is about beating his enemies, in this context meaning the EU and China (which may face 60% tariffs). So there’s no point in thumbing through Ricardian theory on comparative advantage to try to understand Trump’s policy. But the corollary is that there’s no point in trying to frame responses in these terms.
In concrete terms, this means that the UK government should not weigh its (distinctly limited) options simply in terms of economic effects. An exemption deal might reduce the immediate economic damage, but its longer-term costs to the UK, both economic and geo-political, would be considerable in terms of the EU and, very possibly, China. The potential Chinese dimension is worth stressing, because at issue for the UK is not a just a two-way tug between the EU and the US, but being stuck between all three blocs. That was brought into focus by Keir Starmer’s attempts this week to improve relations with China, which might well be jeopardized by any form of deal with the US. To put all this another way, the only deals Trump does are those that favour him.
The cleavage in 21st century politics
This brings us to the final, and deepest, level of what is at stake here, and it is far more important than tariffs on this or that, or small percentages of GDP. It is that what Trump represents, as Brexit does, is what I’ve elsewhere discussed as ‘anti-ruleism’. In the most basic way, his anticipated blanket tariff policy makes a mockery of WTO rules. But his entire approach to politics is one which rejects the rule of law, scientific rationality, and, ultimately, the concept of ‘rational-legal authority’. I try to avoid social science jargon on this blog, but I think it may be useful here.
The sociologist Max Weber developed the idea that modern, industrial societies were increasingly characterised by systemic, codified rules and laws, objectively formulated and applied. So we obey X because s/he is the legitimate holder of the office (of President, or CEO, or whatever), not because of the person holding it. Weber contrasted that with authority that was ‘traditional’ (e.g. monarchy, church) or ‘charismatic’ (derived from the persona of the leader).
Trump fairly obviously seeks to elevate charisma over rules, but more to the point he embodies a hostility to ‘rules’ as a concept of social organization and politics. In this, he shares a common ideology with the ‘disruptor’ tech bosses, like Elon Musk, who now support him, and, in the UK, with their fanboy Dominic Cummings (£). He also shares it with Vladimir Putin, who relies on a peculiar admixture of charismatic and traditional authority, fused with nationalism, and is equally disdainful of the rules-based international order.
It is also shared by Boris Johnson, exhibited by the way that he (for perhaps idiosyncratic reasons) and the Brexit Jacobins (for reasons of fanaticism) believed it was acceptable to dispose of all conventions and institutions, including parliament itself, in order to ‘get Brexit done’. It is shared by Liz Truss, who still insists those institutions caused her downfall. Emblematic of this is the hostility of both Trump and the Brexiters to bureaucracy and, especially, the civil service, which, not coincidentally, was emblematic, for Weber, of rational-legal authority. That hostility is shared by Kemi Badenoch, in her aggressive diatribes against ‘the bureaucratic class’. Such anti-ruleism is obviously connected with populism, but it isn’t identical to it (there’s a book to be written there). The disjuncture is what did for Boris Johnson, when his disdain for the Covid rules fell foul of the populist idea that ‘rules should apply to all of us’.
There are many different ways of understanding these developments. One way might be to see them in terms of the latest phase in the unwinding of the politics of the Cold War (that would need another book). Another, even more epochal, would be to see them as a kind of Counter-Enlightenment, in which the eighteenth-century battles over rationality are being re-fought but in the other direction (that’s a third book). Of course, the Trump presidency will not last forever. But there is a sense that deep and profound changes are now established in the US and elsewhere. And why not? Despite the brief moment when some claimed ‘the end of history’, history never ends.
However they are framed, the key point is that these developments are about far more than international trade. That is not surprising, because Brexit itself was about far more than trade with the EU; more, even, than membership of the EU. Needless to say, these are not the terms in which most people are framing the current situation, although Rafael Behr of the Guardian comes close to doing so. If it were framed that way then, indeed, the whole question of Brexit would be re-litigated. It is clear that the government have no intention of doing that.
Will Starmer’s government rise to the challenge?
Nevertheless, in terms of the division I have presented here, Keir Starmer is very much on one side, being almost the epitome of rational-legal authority or, so to speak, ‘ruleism’. That is something to be grateful for, yet even framed in the narrower terms of trade and tariffs his government’s response so far is rather wishy-washy. Reeves has spoken of seeking to do a deal with the US “whether that's through a free trade agreement or through further improvements in our trade and investment flows”. But in the same interview she pledged that “we’re not going to allow British farmers to be undercut by different rules and regulations”, effectively ruling out an FTA. As for some exemption deal on new tariffs, she just says that “we'll make the case for free and open trade”. What does that mean in practice? Who knows.
Perhaps, when Trump’s intentions become clearer then so will those of the British government. But my hunch is that they won’t. I don’t think that the government is, as I put it earlier, playing it long and cool. I think it will simply try to muddle through, dodging or fudging the choices in the hope that they become irrelevant, if only through the decisions made by other countries. Arguably, in a situation in which the UK has so little leverage and so few good choices available, that has a certain pragmatism. But as a response to the bigger framing of those choices gestured towards in this post it is wholly inadequate.
Why are Labour in this situation? In some ways it is because, faced with Trump, any British government, like the governments of many other countries, has an almost impossible problem. But, just as, for Britain, Brexit adds to all the economic problems that other countries face, so too does it add to the Trump problem. For this government, in particular, that is compounded by its commitment to a Brexit policy which it does not believe in but is unwilling, and perhaps unable, to repudiate.
Notes
[1] This is my amateurish take on the question. For more detailed analysis (though I think it is pretty much compatible with mine) from trade experts, see Sam Lowe’s Substack newsletter, David Henig on the UK Trade Policy Observatory blog, and Dmitry Grozoubinski’s guest post on Ian Dunt’s Substack newsletter.
[2] It may be that Badenoch was referring to the previous government’s statement of the case for such an agreement (2020) Even if so, that was, emphatically, not an agreement with the US, still less one which is now ‘oven ready’ to be signed with Trump.
Friday, 27 January 2023
Untying Brexit's toxic knots
This week David Lammy, the Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary, gave a major and important speech at Chatham House. It wasn’t by any means all about Brexit, but, even where it was not, it could be read as the outlines of a serious post-Brexit foreign policy. That is something which, along with many others, I’ve been arguing has been needed for quite some time.
Some of the direct references to Brexit included the need for pragmatism rather than “the ideological purity of the ERG” and the need to find “a new, settled place in Europe”, with practical, though still rather vague, steps being in the improvement of trading relationship and a new security pact with the EU. It also recognized the damage the Brexit process has done to Britain’s reputation especially for respecting the rule of law, making implicit and sometimes explicit reference to what has happened over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Like any such speech, there was a lot of aspirational rhetoric and, for sure, the proposals for closer ties with the EU will be far too limited for many erstwhile remainers. But, without claiming more for it than was there, it would be quite absurd to suggest that there is no difference between Tories and Labour on post-Brexit policy.
In particular, the speech contained, if nothing else, a clear commitment to re-normalise UK-EU relations, and also a recognition that these relations are about more than being trading partners. That matters, both as a counter to the quite unwarranted antagonism that Brexit Britain has shown the EU and to the too often transactional terms in which, even when a member, the UK approached the EU.
The significance of Lammy’s speech
However, I think its larger significance was in articulating, under the general theme of ‘Reconnecting Britain’, two core principles. One is the necessity and desirability of the interdependence of nations, and the other the inextricable linkage of, and therefore need for coherence between, foreign and domestic policy and politics.
Whilst these are both quite abstract, high-level notions, they do go the heart of the collateral or contingent damage that Brexit has done. What I mean by that is that whilst the central damage of Brexit is Brexit itself, in the literal sense of leaving the EU, and can’t be significantly fixed without reversing Brexit, or at least hard Brexit, there are additional damages which came from the way Brexit was sold and enacted. Not only can these potentially be undone even without reversing (hard) Brexit but doing so is likely to be a necessary step if (hard) Brexit is ever to be reversed.
Those additional damages relate most obviously to the Brexiter incomprehension and, worse, outright denial of the complex realities of international interdependence. But they are also, albeit in quite convoluted ways, to do with the incoherent relationship between domestic and foreign politics that Brexit initiated. And, in the final and most toxic twist, the worst damage has been to treat domestic attempts to recognize the reality of international interdependence as anti-democratic and treacherous.
In this post I’ll try to tease out the different strands of this, and show how they relate to the whole Brexit process including some of the most recent developments, in order to show why I think Lammy’s speech is an important and positive step.
The parochialism of Brexit
Many Brexiters react with outrage if it is suggested that their project is one of inward-looking ‘little Englandism’. On the contrary, they will insist, it is about recognizing horizons way beyond Europe, no longer being ‘shackled to the corpse’ of the EU, re-establishing Britain as a ‘sovereign equal’ amongst nations, ‘re-gaining our seat’ at the WTO, and reviving ‘Global Britain’. Their preferred self-description as ‘Brexiteers’, with its echoes of buccaneering exploration, is a testament to this supposedly outward-looking stance. Yet one of the most remarkable features of Brexit is how myopic, parochial, and domestically focussed it has been, and continues to be. That’s partly characterised by ignoring the outside world but even more by assuming, and even insisting, that the outside world conforms to the falsities and fantasies of Brexit.
Thus throughout the Article 50 process far more time and energy were expended on internal negotiations than on those with the EU, and these internal negotiations weren’t even amongst the huge variety of interested parties within the UK, but only the factions of the Tory Party. In particular, they were primarily about what the ERG wing of the party would accept. At the same time, whenever the EU made clear that, as was always obvious to anyone who knew anything about it, the Brexiters’ demands were unrealistic, this was denounced as ‘punishment’ for Brexit, as if ideas fermented within the Brexiter bubble about what the EU ‘ought’ to do (for example in the supposed interests of ‘German car makers’) had some kind of validity outside that bubble.
I mentioned in my last post the new book about the Brexit negotiations, written by Stefaan de Rynck, one of Michel Barnier’s senior aides. I haven’t read the book yet, but its pre-released preface, by Peter Foster – now Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times but the Telegraph’s Europe Editor during the negotiations, and one of the finest journalists covering Brexit – is revealing in itself. It notes the British government’s failure “to level with the electorate on the realities of life” outside the EU, and indicates how, associated with that, there was a pervasive lack of realism on the part of the government itself shown, for example, by the presentation of absurd and unworkable proposals to the EU negotiating team. It was very much a break with the previous, pragmatic and often effective way that the UK foreign policy machine had operated. But “in the grip of Brexit fever, all that savvy and know-how [of British statecraft] somehow went out of the window”, Foster writes.
The ’somehow’ is fairly easily explained. Politicians who believed in Brexit, or believed they had to act as if they did, had persuaded themselves of a series of fantasies, and dragooned civil servants into acting as if they could be made realities. Those civil servants who would not embrace the fantasies were side-lined or, effectively, forced out. The resignation, early on in the Brexit process, of Sir Ivan Rogers was both a key example and, as I suggested at the time, a harbinger of what was to come.
Those fantasies were multiple, but the principal ones were that it was possible to replicate or closely replicate the trading benefits of single market and customs union membership without being members of either, and that hard Brexit could be enacted without creating a border on one side or the other of Northern Ireland. From those were spawned multiple sub-fantasies about ‘technological solutions’ for the Irish border, the possibilities of GATT Article XXIV and numerous others.
Most damaging of all, having been sold to the leave-voting electorate, these fantasies became enshrined as the ‘will of the people’, as if, even if impossible in reality, anything ‘the people’ voted for must be turned into reality and, if it were not, democracy would have been betrayed. We are still living with the consequences of this. For our entire politics is still hamstrung by the implacable theology of a relatively small number of Brexit fanatics in politics and the media, and the diminishing but still very large section of the population that believes their fantasies and lies.
Thus, even now, entirely unsurprisingly, the ERG are sharpening their knives to attack the mooted “compromise” (£) which Sunak may do over the Northern Ireland Protocol as a ‘betrayal of Brexit’, with Boris Johnson lurking opportunistically in the background, ready to condemn it in pursuit of his own insatiable self-interest. At the same time, David Frost chunters malevolently (£) from the side-lines about ‘no deal being better than a bad deal’ in the Protocol negotiations. Apparently he is unaware that if no deal is done there will still be a deal in place – which is surprising, since it is the one he negotiated.
An indifferent world
Meanwhile, the outside world, far from being impressed, oscillates between being indifferent, bewildered and bemused, not just by Brexit itself but the political chaos and instability it has unleashed in Britain. Far from blazing a trail for ‘freedom’, support for leaving the EU amongst other member states has dropped significantly since, and surely as a result of, the UK’s decision to do so.
But the UK is not just alone in wanting to leave the EU, it is isolated as a result of doing so. As a British business leader at Davos last week is reported as saying (£) “there was a real sense of a new reality dawning. We are not invited to the top table”. More generally, as former Foreign Secretary David Miliband put it in his own Chatham House speech last December, “our global influence and capability, not just reputation, has been seriously undermined by political chaos and economic weakness since 2016”.
Many leave voters will simply be unaware of this, and are gulled by endless paeans to the ‘world-leading’ status of Brexit Britain. But leading Brexiters, who are not so unaware, dismiss it as the chatter of the ‘global Establishment’ and, in so doing, reveal the myopia beneath their ‘Global Britain’ sloganizing since, if it means anything, and actually even if it doesn’t, Global Britain can’t avoid engaging with the ‘global Establishment’ in some way.
Saying this isn’t to imply uncritical support for economic globalization and its institutions, which are in any case under multiple strains. It’s to point to the strategic inadequacy of ignoring economic regionalization and the complex geo-politics that go with it, something recognized in Lammy’s speech, and the danger of viewing those developments through the parochial lens of Brexit populism, as if they were invented by ‘global elites’ abroad and ‘the metropolitan elite’ at home to thwart the simple yeoman honesty of ‘the people’. It’s an inadequacy illustrated just this week by David Frost’s latest foray into political philosophy (£) where he propounds an idea of “nationhood” that, never mind being outdated, has never existed.
A cause and consequence of this parochialism is the way that the endless proliferation of pro-Brexit think tanks and lobby groups invariably involve the same couple of dozen politicians, academics and commentators, a cult-like hall of echo chambers that is either oblivious to, or dismissive of, external realities. They have certainly wielded great influence, domestically, but, again, it is dangerous and ultimately doomed, because the world beyond is not just indifferent to Brexiter fantasies but, when at risk of being affected by them, bites back.
The realities of sovereignty
That was most starkly illustrated by the fiasco of the Brexit ‘mini-budget’, with Brexiters like Patrick Minford simply unable to understand why traders in international financial markets didn’t endorse the ‘new reality’ of Brexit economics, a reality defined by the crackpot theories Minford and his small group of maverick economists have cooked up. A very small but hugely telling illustration of the thinking, at once naïve and grandiose, underpinning this Brexit hubris came from Telegraph columnist and Brexiter Tim Stanley. Bemoaning the power of ‘the markets’ to make or break government policy he plaintively tweeted that this ran counter to what Brexit was all about, namely “Sovereignty. Democracy. Whatever the people want they get”.
This inability to understand that ‘sovereignty’ doesn’t bestow untrammelled freedom is creating multiple problems for Brexit Britain. It is one thing to talk about sovereignty in this naïve way for domestic political purposes, but quite another to operationalise it internationally. For example, as Gerhard Schnyder astutely observes in his latest Brexit Impact Tracker blog, “while the US and EU may not care how much damage the Brits decide to inflict on themselves, the situation is different regarding NI [Northern Ireland]. NI is thus at least partially protected from the full blow of Westminster madness”.
That is a reminder that, as happened so often during the original Brexit negotiations, the delusions of the ERG and their allies, whilst shaping so much of domestic politics, were never able to trump the realities of Brexit. Hence their enduring fantasy that there is no need for any form of Irish border couldn’t, and will never, prevail over the fact that it was the inevitable consequence of hard Brexit. Hence, too, that for all their bombast of ‘holding all the cards’ and for all their fantasies about a trade deal that would effectively replicate single market membership, the reality in the end was the thin ‘zero tariffs’ trade deal.
That arose partly because removing non-tariff barriers would entail the kinds of regulatory interdependence that was incompatible with Brexiters’ notion of national sovereignty, partly because many of them, such as David Frost, simply denied the significance of non-tariff barriers, especially for services trade where they are the only barriers, and partly because they also don’t understand international supply chains. Taken together, this created the delusion that trade occurs in the form of finished goods moving once between countries, inhibited only by tariffs, or at least acting as if that were the case.
Beneath all that lay the negotiating reality that the EU was utterly indifferent to Brexiters’ beliefs about what it should or would do. The world didn’t work the way they believed it to do, and no amount of belief or bluster could change that. So, far from the great deal which Brexiters promised was there for the taking, and which Johnson pretended to have delivered, what was created was the bare bones deal we actually have.
In a somewhat similar way, Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch is currently playing to the domestic Brexiter gallery by insisting that there can be no significant liberalisation of immigration visas as part of a UK-India trade deal, falsely linking this with delivering Brexit by equating any liberalisation that might happen with freedom of movement. But the reality is that either she will backtrack on this or there will most likely be no trade deal, or a much more limited one. Either way, it is a further illustration of Brexiter myopia that trade policy, supposedly emblematic of Global Britain’s new Brexit freedoms, should be subordinated to the domestic politics of anti-immigration sentiment (it also, of course, illustrates the pervasive tensions of globalism and localism in the entire Brexit prospectus). Those same tensions are in evidence in the UK’s plan to join CPTPP.
It may seem as if, and as she claims it to be, Badenoch’s approach to trade deals marks a departure from that of doing quick deals on any terms, as happened with the Australia and New Zealand Free Trade Agreements that Liz Truss negotiated when Trade Secretary. But it is actually a variant of the same thing. Both are ways of using international trade policy not for international trade but for the domestic purpose of showing that Brexit is delivering ‘what the people voted for’ and, in the process, ignoring what has to be conceded, whether in terms of market access, product standards or immigration liberalisation, to obtain them.
In other words, they both maintain the Brexiter fantasy of sovereign independence by ignoring the realities of the limits and constraints to it. But the world doesn’t bend to Brexit, and can’t be monstered, as British politics has been, by the battering ram of ‘will of the people’ rhetoric. Hence, in trade policy as more generally, Brexit Britain exhibits the disconnect between domestic and international policy that Lammy identifies as needing rectification.
When truth becomes treachery
The last six years have been littered with examples of the same basic issue, but its ongoing salience can be illustrated by two news stories this week, both from Bloomberg. One discusses the recent collapse of Britishvolt, pointing to the way it illustrates the lack of realism of the Brexit “dream of independence in an interdependent world”. The other concerns the way that the UK is trapped between the two economic blocs of the EU and the US in their growing trade dispute over environmental subsidies. An outsider to both, all the British government can do is make representations that are unlikely to be heeded. Alone, and as in its Brexit negotiations with the EU, Britain is just too small to have much voice in what happens, for all that it may be deeply affected.
Again what is so dangerous for Britain is the internally-focused, cult-like quality that Brexiters have brought from their campaign to leave the EU and have now installed in government and political discourse. It’s not just that this has enfeebled Britain. It’s also that, reading the previous paragraph, they would undoubtedly sneer that these are just stories from Bloomberg, which ‘has always been part of the remain establishment’ (just as they would say of almost every media outlet save the Telegraph and GB News). No doubt, too, they would depict mentioning such stories as ‘talking the country down’. In other words, not only does Brexit do harm to Britain, it also renders discussion of that harm impossible. So whatever problems Brexit creates can’t be treated as problems to be solved, because even to identify them as problems is illegitimate.
In a similar way, the CBI, which this week pleaded with the government not to proceed with the “legislative chaos” of the widely criticised Retained EU Law Bill, is routinely dismissed by Brexiters as the remainer voice of the ‘big business elite’ (one peculiar byway of the Brexiter mindset is the ingrained fantasy that Brexit favours small businesses – in fact, they have been hardest hit by it). Iain Duncan Smith even linked the CBI to appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s. The same kind of treatment is meted out to businesses, thinks tanks, academics, civil servants or anyone else who raises concerns about the impact of Brexit, let alone about the wisdom of the entire project.
So this is the nasty little knot that Brexiters have created. It consists of the linkage of a denial of the reality of international interdependencies in foreign policy with a narrative of treachery and betrayal about domestic voices who insist on this reality. The consequence of that linkage is not just to make domestic politics toxic, and international relations both fractious and ineffective, but to make any viable domestic economic or industrial strategy impossible. For no such strategy can be built on lies and fantasies about national independence, or about how trade, regulation, science, agriculture, fishing, climate change mitigation, migration, education etc. actually work in reality.
A first step in the right direction
It’s because Lammy’s speech can be read as an attempt – perhaps the first high-profile attempt from an active politician there has been since Brexit – to untie that knot that I think it is an important speech, and is a cause for a degree of optimism. It is also consistent with the gradually emerging public view that Brexit has been a mistake and consequent growing support for closer relationships with the EU. Of course it still operates within the political constraints, both genuine and self-imposed, on Labour’s capacity to critique, let alone undo, Brexit. But, at the very least, it shows that within the Labour Party there is some serious thinking going on about post-Brexit Britain.
It's a Gordian knot that has been tied so tightly and comprehensively around the throat of the body politic that it can’t be slashed at a stroke. As I’m probably becoming quite boring in repeatedly saying, undoing the damage of Brexit is going to be a very long haul, a marathon not a sprint. But, by the same token, I don’t suppose many would accuse me of being prone to undue optimism. And I do think that the Lammy speech is a hopeful development. If it is still relatively timid in its critique of Brexit, that only shows how comprehensively Brexit has poisoned political discourse, making even timidity difficult, at least for those who aspire to govern. It’s certainly not the last step in the right direction but it may well be the first and, as the saying goes, the longest journey starts with a single step.
Some of the direct references to Brexit included the need for pragmatism rather than “the ideological purity of the ERG” and the need to find “a new, settled place in Europe”, with practical, though still rather vague, steps being in the improvement of trading relationship and a new security pact with the EU. It also recognized the damage the Brexit process has done to Britain’s reputation especially for respecting the rule of law, making implicit and sometimes explicit reference to what has happened over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Like any such speech, there was a lot of aspirational rhetoric and, for sure, the proposals for closer ties with the EU will be far too limited for many erstwhile remainers. But, without claiming more for it than was there, it would be quite absurd to suggest that there is no difference between Tories and Labour on post-Brexit policy.
In particular, the speech contained, if nothing else, a clear commitment to re-normalise UK-EU relations, and also a recognition that these relations are about more than being trading partners. That matters, both as a counter to the quite unwarranted antagonism that Brexit Britain has shown the EU and to the too often transactional terms in which, even when a member, the UK approached the EU.
The significance of Lammy’s speech
However, I think its larger significance was in articulating, under the general theme of ‘Reconnecting Britain’, two core principles. One is the necessity and desirability of the interdependence of nations, and the other the inextricable linkage of, and therefore need for coherence between, foreign and domestic policy and politics.
Whilst these are both quite abstract, high-level notions, they do go the heart of the collateral or contingent damage that Brexit has done. What I mean by that is that whilst the central damage of Brexit is Brexit itself, in the literal sense of leaving the EU, and can’t be significantly fixed without reversing Brexit, or at least hard Brexit, there are additional damages which came from the way Brexit was sold and enacted. Not only can these potentially be undone even without reversing (hard) Brexit but doing so is likely to be a necessary step if (hard) Brexit is ever to be reversed.
Those additional damages relate most obviously to the Brexiter incomprehension and, worse, outright denial of the complex realities of international interdependence. But they are also, albeit in quite convoluted ways, to do with the incoherent relationship between domestic and foreign politics that Brexit initiated. And, in the final and most toxic twist, the worst damage has been to treat domestic attempts to recognize the reality of international interdependence as anti-democratic and treacherous.
In this post I’ll try to tease out the different strands of this, and show how they relate to the whole Brexit process including some of the most recent developments, in order to show why I think Lammy’s speech is an important and positive step.
The parochialism of Brexit
Many Brexiters react with outrage if it is suggested that their project is one of inward-looking ‘little Englandism’. On the contrary, they will insist, it is about recognizing horizons way beyond Europe, no longer being ‘shackled to the corpse’ of the EU, re-establishing Britain as a ‘sovereign equal’ amongst nations, ‘re-gaining our seat’ at the WTO, and reviving ‘Global Britain’. Their preferred self-description as ‘Brexiteers’, with its echoes of buccaneering exploration, is a testament to this supposedly outward-looking stance. Yet one of the most remarkable features of Brexit is how myopic, parochial, and domestically focussed it has been, and continues to be. That’s partly characterised by ignoring the outside world but even more by assuming, and even insisting, that the outside world conforms to the falsities and fantasies of Brexit.
Thus throughout the Article 50 process far more time and energy were expended on internal negotiations than on those with the EU, and these internal negotiations weren’t even amongst the huge variety of interested parties within the UK, but only the factions of the Tory Party. In particular, they were primarily about what the ERG wing of the party would accept. At the same time, whenever the EU made clear that, as was always obvious to anyone who knew anything about it, the Brexiters’ demands were unrealistic, this was denounced as ‘punishment’ for Brexit, as if ideas fermented within the Brexiter bubble about what the EU ‘ought’ to do (for example in the supposed interests of ‘German car makers’) had some kind of validity outside that bubble.
I mentioned in my last post the new book about the Brexit negotiations, written by Stefaan de Rynck, one of Michel Barnier’s senior aides. I haven’t read the book yet, but its pre-released preface, by Peter Foster – now Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times but the Telegraph’s Europe Editor during the negotiations, and one of the finest journalists covering Brexit – is revealing in itself. It notes the British government’s failure “to level with the electorate on the realities of life” outside the EU, and indicates how, associated with that, there was a pervasive lack of realism on the part of the government itself shown, for example, by the presentation of absurd and unworkable proposals to the EU negotiating team. It was very much a break with the previous, pragmatic and often effective way that the UK foreign policy machine had operated. But “in the grip of Brexit fever, all that savvy and know-how [of British statecraft] somehow went out of the window”, Foster writes.
The ’somehow’ is fairly easily explained. Politicians who believed in Brexit, or believed they had to act as if they did, had persuaded themselves of a series of fantasies, and dragooned civil servants into acting as if they could be made realities. Those civil servants who would not embrace the fantasies were side-lined or, effectively, forced out. The resignation, early on in the Brexit process, of Sir Ivan Rogers was both a key example and, as I suggested at the time, a harbinger of what was to come.
Those fantasies were multiple, but the principal ones were that it was possible to replicate or closely replicate the trading benefits of single market and customs union membership without being members of either, and that hard Brexit could be enacted without creating a border on one side or the other of Northern Ireland. From those were spawned multiple sub-fantasies about ‘technological solutions’ for the Irish border, the possibilities of GATT Article XXIV and numerous others.
Most damaging of all, having been sold to the leave-voting electorate, these fantasies became enshrined as the ‘will of the people’, as if, even if impossible in reality, anything ‘the people’ voted for must be turned into reality and, if it were not, democracy would have been betrayed. We are still living with the consequences of this. For our entire politics is still hamstrung by the implacable theology of a relatively small number of Brexit fanatics in politics and the media, and the diminishing but still very large section of the population that believes their fantasies and lies.
Thus, even now, entirely unsurprisingly, the ERG are sharpening their knives to attack the mooted “compromise” (£) which Sunak may do over the Northern Ireland Protocol as a ‘betrayal of Brexit’, with Boris Johnson lurking opportunistically in the background, ready to condemn it in pursuit of his own insatiable self-interest. At the same time, David Frost chunters malevolently (£) from the side-lines about ‘no deal being better than a bad deal’ in the Protocol negotiations. Apparently he is unaware that if no deal is done there will still be a deal in place – which is surprising, since it is the one he negotiated.
An indifferent world
Meanwhile, the outside world, far from being impressed, oscillates between being indifferent, bewildered and bemused, not just by Brexit itself but the political chaos and instability it has unleashed in Britain. Far from blazing a trail for ‘freedom’, support for leaving the EU amongst other member states has dropped significantly since, and surely as a result of, the UK’s decision to do so.
But the UK is not just alone in wanting to leave the EU, it is isolated as a result of doing so. As a British business leader at Davos last week is reported as saying (£) “there was a real sense of a new reality dawning. We are not invited to the top table”. More generally, as former Foreign Secretary David Miliband put it in his own Chatham House speech last December, “our global influence and capability, not just reputation, has been seriously undermined by political chaos and economic weakness since 2016”.
Many leave voters will simply be unaware of this, and are gulled by endless paeans to the ‘world-leading’ status of Brexit Britain. But leading Brexiters, who are not so unaware, dismiss it as the chatter of the ‘global Establishment’ and, in so doing, reveal the myopia beneath their ‘Global Britain’ sloganizing since, if it means anything, and actually even if it doesn’t, Global Britain can’t avoid engaging with the ‘global Establishment’ in some way.
Saying this isn’t to imply uncritical support for economic globalization and its institutions, which are in any case under multiple strains. It’s to point to the strategic inadequacy of ignoring economic regionalization and the complex geo-politics that go with it, something recognized in Lammy’s speech, and the danger of viewing those developments through the parochial lens of Brexit populism, as if they were invented by ‘global elites’ abroad and ‘the metropolitan elite’ at home to thwart the simple yeoman honesty of ‘the people’. It’s an inadequacy illustrated just this week by David Frost’s latest foray into political philosophy (£) where he propounds an idea of “nationhood” that, never mind being outdated, has never existed.
A cause and consequence of this parochialism is the way that the endless proliferation of pro-Brexit think tanks and lobby groups invariably involve the same couple of dozen politicians, academics and commentators, a cult-like hall of echo chambers that is either oblivious to, or dismissive of, external realities. They have certainly wielded great influence, domestically, but, again, it is dangerous and ultimately doomed, because the world beyond is not just indifferent to Brexiter fantasies but, when at risk of being affected by them, bites back.
The realities of sovereignty
That was most starkly illustrated by the fiasco of the Brexit ‘mini-budget’, with Brexiters like Patrick Minford simply unable to understand why traders in international financial markets didn’t endorse the ‘new reality’ of Brexit economics, a reality defined by the crackpot theories Minford and his small group of maverick economists have cooked up. A very small but hugely telling illustration of the thinking, at once naïve and grandiose, underpinning this Brexit hubris came from Telegraph columnist and Brexiter Tim Stanley. Bemoaning the power of ‘the markets’ to make or break government policy he plaintively tweeted that this ran counter to what Brexit was all about, namely “Sovereignty. Democracy. Whatever the people want they get”.
This inability to understand that ‘sovereignty’ doesn’t bestow untrammelled freedom is creating multiple problems for Brexit Britain. It is one thing to talk about sovereignty in this naïve way for domestic political purposes, but quite another to operationalise it internationally. For example, as Gerhard Schnyder astutely observes in his latest Brexit Impact Tracker blog, “while the US and EU may not care how much damage the Brits decide to inflict on themselves, the situation is different regarding NI [Northern Ireland]. NI is thus at least partially protected from the full blow of Westminster madness”.
That is a reminder that, as happened so often during the original Brexit negotiations, the delusions of the ERG and their allies, whilst shaping so much of domestic politics, were never able to trump the realities of Brexit. Hence their enduring fantasy that there is no need for any form of Irish border couldn’t, and will never, prevail over the fact that it was the inevitable consequence of hard Brexit. Hence, too, that for all their bombast of ‘holding all the cards’ and for all their fantasies about a trade deal that would effectively replicate single market membership, the reality in the end was the thin ‘zero tariffs’ trade deal.
That arose partly because removing non-tariff barriers would entail the kinds of regulatory interdependence that was incompatible with Brexiters’ notion of national sovereignty, partly because many of them, such as David Frost, simply denied the significance of non-tariff barriers, especially for services trade where they are the only barriers, and partly because they also don’t understand international supply chains. Taken together, this created the delusion that trade occurs in the form of finished goods moving once between countries, inhibited only by tariffs, or at least acting as if that were the case.
Beneath all that lay the negotiating reality that the EU was utterly indifferent to Brexiters’ beliefs about what it should or would do. The world didn’t work the way they believed it to do, and no amount of belief or bluster could change that. So, far from the great deal which Brexiters promised was there for the taking, and which Johnson pretended to have delivered, what was created was the bare bones deal we actually have.
In a somewhat similar way, Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch is currently playing to the domestic Brexiter gallery by insisting that there can be no significant liberalisation of immigration visas as part of a UK-India trade deal, falsely linking this with delivering Brexit by equating any liberalisation that might happen with freedom of movement. But the reality is that either she will backtrack on this or there will most likely be no trade deal, or a much more limited one. Either way, it is a further illustration of Brexiter myopia that trade policy, supposedly emblematic of Global Britain’s new Brexit freedoms, should be subordinated to the domestic politics of anti-immigration sentiment (it also, of course, illustrates the pervasive tensions of globalism and localism in the entire Brexit prospectus). Those same tensions are in evidence in the UK’s plan to join CPTPP.
It may seem as if, and as she claims it to be, Badenoch’s approach to trade deals marks a departure from that of doing quick deals on any terms, as happened with the Australia and New Zealand Free Trade Agreements that Liz Truss negotiated when Trade Secretary. But it is actually a variant of the same thing. Both are ways of using international trade policy not for international trade but for the domestic purpose of showing that Brexit is delivering ‘what the people voted for’ and, in the process, ignoring what has to be conceded, whether in terms of market access, product standards or immigration liberalisation, to obtain them.
In other words, they both maintain the Brexiter fantasy of sovereign independence by ignoring the realities of the limits and constraints to it. But the world doesn’t bend to Brexit, and can’t be monstered, as British politics has been, by the battering ram of ‘will of the people’ rhetoric. Hence, in trade policy as more generally, Brexit Britain exhibits the disconnect between domestic and international policy that Lammy identifies as needing rectification.
When truth becomes treachery
The last six years have been littered with examples of the same basic issue, but its ongoing salience can be illustrated by two news stories this week, both from Bloomberg. One discusses the recent collapse of Britishvolt, pointing to the way it illustrates the lack of realism of the Brexit “dream of independence in an interdependent world”. The other concerns the way that the UK is trapped between the two economic blocs of the EU and the US in their growing trade dispute over environmental subsidies. An outsider to both, all the British government can do is make representations that are unlikely to be heeded. Alone, and as in its Brexit negotiations with the EU, Britain is just too small to have much voice in what happens, for all that it may be deeply affected.
Again what is so dangerous for Britain is the internally-focused, cult-like quality that Brexiters have brought from their campaign to leave the EU and have now installed in government and political discourse. It’s not just that this has enfeebled Britain. It’s also that, reading the previous paragraph, they would undoubtedly sneer that these are just stories from Bloomberg, which ‘has always been part of the remain establishment’ (just as they would say of almost every media outlet save the Telegraph and GB News). No doubt, too, they would depict mentioning such stories as ‘talking the country down’. In other words, not only does Brexit do harm to Britain, it also renders discussion of that harm impossible. So whatever problems Brexit creates can’t be treated as problems to be solved, because even to identify them as problems is illegitimate.
In a similar way, the CBI, which this week pleaded with the government not to proceed with the “legislative chaos” of the widely criticised Retained EU Law Bill, is routinely dismissed by Brexiters as the remainer voice of the ‘big business elite’ (one peculiar byway of the Brexiter mindset is the ingrained fantasy that Brexit favours small businesses – in fact, they have been hardest hit by it). Iain Duncan Smith even linked the CBI to appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s. The same kind of treatment is meted out to businesses, thinks tanks, academics, civil servants or anyone else who raises concerns about the impact of Brexit, let alone about the wisdom of the entire project.
So this is the nasty little knot that Brexiters have created. It consists of the linkage of a denial of the reality of international interdependencies in foreign policy with a narrative of treachery and betrayal about domestic voices who insist on this reality. The consequence of that linkage is not just to make domestic politics toxic, and international relations both fractious and ineffective, but to make any viable domestic economic or industrial strategy impossible. For no such strategy can be built on lies and fantasies about national independence, or about how trade, regulation, science, agriculture, fishing, climate change mitigation, migration, education etc. actually work in reality.
A first step in the right direction
It’s because Lammy’s speech can be read as an attempt – perhaps the first high-profile attempt from an active politician there has been since Brexit – to untie that knot that I think it is an important speech, and is a cause for a degree of optimism. It is also consistent with the gradually emerging public view that Brexit has been a mistake and consequent growing support for closer relationships with the EU. Of course it still operates within the political constraints, both genuine and self-imposed, on Labour’s capacity to critique, let alone undo, Brexit. But, at the very least, it shows that within the Labour Party there is some serious thinking going on about post-Brexit Britain.
It's a Gordian knot that has been tied so tightly and comprehensively around the throat of the body politic that it can’t be slashed at a stroke. As I’m probably becoming quite boring in repeatedly saying, undoing the damage of Brexit is going to be a very long haul, a marathon not a sprint. But, by the same token, I don’t suppose many would accuse me of being prone to undue optimism. And I do think that the Lammy speech is a hopeful development. If it is still relatively timid in its critique of Brexit, that only shows how comprehensively Brexit has poisoned political discourse, making even timidity difficult, at least for those who aspire to govern. It’s certainly not the last step in the right direction but it may well be the first and, as the saying goes, the longest journey starts with a single step.
Friday, 16 December 2022
Post-Brexit Britain: a country broken by lies
It seems almost a lifetime ago, but in fact is only two years, that we were heading towards Christmas still not knowing whether there would be a UK-EU trade deal of any sort, but with the end of the transition period unnecessarily set unmovably for the last day of 2020.
A deal, of sorts, was done and we are now approaching the second anniversary of being fully out of the EU. Even that statement needs some qualifying, though. Many parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol remain unimplemented, and the Protocol itself is still being re-negotiated with no outcome expected until the New Year. The UK as a whole has continually delayed implementing import controls on goods from the EU and it is not clear when or whether it will do so. The introduction of the UKCA marking and registration system was recently postponed until the end of 2024. It may well be postponed again given that just this week it has been extended for construction products to the end of June 2025. And there are numerous other hanging threads, including participation in the Horizon Europe science programme.
A crisis-ridden country ruled by vandals
That the looming end of the transition period feels so long ago is because of the multiple crises that have come hard and fast since then, and the swirling chaos of post-Brexit politics that is in part the cause and in part the consequence of those crises. Few of these are entirely due to Brexit, but almost all of them have a Brexit aspect to them, including the extent of inflation and the wave of strikes it has engendered, and the now endemic labour and supply shortages. Brexit is inseparable from an emergent food supply crisis and from risks of an energy crisis. These are not ephemeral things, or luxuries, but fundamental to a functioning society.
As a result, there is now not just a clear and sustained public view that Brexit has been a mistake, but a more diffuse, yet palpable, sense that post-Brexit Britain is broken. It is a sense which has been growing since, at least, last summer, even before the mini-budget fiasco and its aftermath. Hence it’s common now to hear people on all parts of the political spectrum saying the same thing: ‘nothing works properly anymore’.
It would be fair to say that versions of the ‘Broken Britain’ theme have been around for years, maybe decades. But what is different currently is that there is no sign of the political leadership which might be able to fix things. That’s partly because of the continuing refusal of the Tory and Labour Parties to discuss, or even to properly acknowledge, the damage of Brexit itself. But that in turn is part of the legacy of Brexit in denuding politics of honesty and realism. It’s not, of course, that there was some prelapsarian Eden of political virtue. Politics has always been a dirty, messy, compromised business and, arguably, that is inherent to it. But Brexit has brought a new taint, at once subtly pervasive and dramatically grotesque, where it is not just that truth can’t be told, but that truth hardly seems to matter.
In recent posts I’ve written a lot about Labour and Brexit, simply because a new Labour or Labour-led government still seems the only, or best, hope of a break with some of the worst features of post-Brexit politics. That matters, because if we get a Labour government after the next election which doesn’t do so then there is no telling where people will turn to for hope, a point I’ll return to. In the meantime, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Conservative Party and Conservative governments are the prime architects of all this, the vandals who broke the country, and it is they who are still in power. Sunak’s government has arguably avoided Johnson’s sly degeneracy and Truss’s outright madness, but it remains a willing prisoner of Brexit and of the mendacity inherent in Brexit. Even in this relatively quiet week for Brexit news that has been on display.
Financial services regulation: nonsensical claims and flawed motivations
Jeremy Hunt’s ‘Edinburgh reforms’ to financial services regulation were announced as if they were a Brexit benefit, which would “seize on our Brexit freedoms to deliver an agile and home-grown regulatory regime”. It’s nonsense. About two-thirds of the proposals, including the most dramatic and risky one of relaxing the ringfencing of investment banking from retail banking, don’t require Brexit at all (£). Others, of which reforming Solvency II (discussed in detail in a previous post) is the most significant, are also under discussion in the EU and, anyway, are regulations very largely drawn up by the UK when a member of the EU.
There is a mixture of obvious reasons for pretending otherwise. One is just to sustain the public pretence that Brexit has benefits. Another is to placate the baying Brexit Ultras that ‘Brexit freedoms’ are being used, especially given their distrust of ‘remainer’ Hunt and ‘socialist’ Sunak, though their response, as it always is and always will be, was to call for more (£). It’s a big problem in itself for British politics that, both within and outside the Tory Party, there is a significant and vocal group who will never be satisfied by any attempt to satisfy them. Or, perhaps, the problem is with those, by no means all in the Tory Party, who still imagine that they can be appeased if given enough red meat.
There is also a narrower problem that flows from making decisions for these reasons which is that, just as post-Brexit trade deals have been done for the symbolic value of demonstrating Brexit freedom, the regulatory changes may be seen in the same way. That matters, because regulation always entails a judgement of the balance of risks, and if there is a suspicion that what drives these changes is simply some bogus Brexit boasting, rather than a rational assessment of those risks, international and institutional trust and confidence in the robustness of the UK’s regulatory regime will be diminished.
That possibility is unlikely to weigh heavily with the government because one of the deformations of political culture that Brexit has created is to ignore, or dismiss as unimportant or even as having an anti-Brexit motivation, the declining international reputation of the UK that has come with Brexit. Indeed it is inherent in the Brexit project, given that it is predicated upon a fantasy of Britain’s importance in the world which is bound to invite the mockery of others, and yet requires that that mockery be ignored to sustain the fantasy. The absurd eagerness of the UK to sign trade deals that disadvantage its own economic interests, and are solely for domestic Brexit boasting, enhances that mockery. And, not inherently, but in the way Brexit Britain has conducted itself, especially over the Northern Ireland Protocol, to mockery has been added international disdain and distrust.
Conversely, none of this matters much to the Brexiters because, with any lingering fantasy of other EU countries following Britain’s path now surely being dead, their project is entirely one of domestic politics, and most voters, and perhaps leave voters especially, are almost entirely unaware of how Brexit Britain is viewed abroad or discussed in the foreign media. The Brexiters themselves know, and frequently denounce the New York Times, in particular, for its coverage. But they also know that it is the domestic media that really matters, which is why they lash out most ferociously at even the mildest implication that Brexit has failed, especially from the BBC (which they loathe quite apart from Brexit) although the most extreme of them are convinced that the entire ‘mainstream media’ is the tool of a ‘remainer’ counter-revolution.
Foreign policy for domestic consumption
One consequence of this parochialism is that even the foreign policy of post-Brexit Britain is essentially for domestic consumption. This week, the new Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, made his first major speech setting out his foreign policy “vision”, which turns out to be myopic enough to warrant a drive to Barnard Castle.
There was plenty of denunciation of Putin for “debasing international conduct” but no mention that Brexit had substantially furthered his goals. There was plenty of rhetoric about the importance of international rules and the international order, but no mention of the UK’s threats to break international law over the Northern Ireland Protocol, or its existing violations of the Protocol. And, presumably, Cleverly imagines that no one has noticed the constant rumblings from within his own party about derogating from the ECHR. On the other hand, there was no mention of the EU, as opposed to some of its members, as a key UK ally; barely mention of it at all, in fact, except in reference to “making full use of the powers” of Brexit to – yes, of course – make new trade deals.
Even more underwhelming, if possible, was the report of Liam Fox’s Global Britain Commission (£) which, whilst predictably castigating the civil service for not having adapted to “the post-Brexit world” and for being too UK-focussed, proposes as the remedy to this inward-facing culture – you really couldn’t make this up – a series of re-organizations of Whitehall departments, the creation of a new select committee, and a quango to be called the ‘Global Britain Advisory Council’. Aside from an assortment of cliches and bromides, the only other point of interest is the deeply ironic observation that post-Brexit Britain should emulate France and Germany in the assiduity with which they tout for new global export markets.
None of this is a remotely serious post-Brexit foreign policy. For that, see, by contrast, the recent Chatham House speech on the UK’s international role given by former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband. In it, amongst other things, Miliband points to the need to begin with honesty about the way that “our global influence and capability, not just reputation, has been seriously undermined by political chaos and economic weakness since 2016”. He then charts a path to renewal which includes, though is by no means limited to, healing the “gaping sore” of relationships with the EU, recognizing that the ineluctable facts of geography make this mandatory. But neither Cleverly nor any currently conceivable Foreign Secretary, whether Tory or Labour, can say anything like this, not least because its starting premise is unsayable in the dishonest politics of post-Brexit Britain.
A dishonest trade policy
That dishonesty is endemic in trade policy, too. Just this week the UK Statistics Authority has reprimanded the Conservatives for their wholly untrue claims that the UK’s post-Brexit trade deals are worth over “£800 billion of new trade” (discussed in more detail in Nick Tyrone’s latest ‘Week in Brexitland’ blog). These claims are false partly because they reference rollover deals and the UK-EU trade deal itself, which made the terms of trade worse, but especially for treating all trade with the relevant countries as being attributable to the trade deals. It’s an especially gross lie given how many Brexiters insisted that ‘trade on WTO terms’ (i.e. without any free trade agreement) would be a perfectly adequate basis for trade with the EU, and how often they falsely claimed that most of Britain’s non-EU trade was conducted ‘on WTO terms’.
At the same time, the bigger picture of how Brexit leaves the UK trapped between the trade blocs of the EU, the US and China, affected by all three whilst belonging to and influencing none, is becoming increasingly obvious because of the growing substantive trade conflicts between those blocs. Even before Brexit, it was clear that the world was settling into regional trade blocs, partly because of the failure of the WTO to make much progress in recent times. Now, with at least a degree of ‘de-globalization’ arguably taking hold, for many reasons, the Brexiter idea of going it alone on the basis of the shrill vainglory of ‘regaining our seat at the WTO’ looks more than ever – I was going to say misguided, but fatuous is a better word.
Incapable of admitting this fatuity, the Conservative government continues with the dishonest pretence that CPTPP accession is the great prize ahead for Brexit Britain and, meanwhile, pretending that non-binding and very limited Memorandums of Understanding with individual US States, most recently South Carolina, which anyway didn’t require Brexit, are some kind of prize. Once again, Brexit consists of lies, served up for consumption to a domestic audience, presumed to be gullible, though increasingly seeing through the lies.
It is also presumably for domestic reasons that Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch insisted this week that she will not even discuss including increased access to student visas as part of the negotiations for a free trade agreement with India. It certainly wasn’t for good economic reasons, either as regards the trade talks or the interests of UK higher education.
The dangers of a politics built on lies
If there is a single thread which connects these latest Brexit stories and the situation we faced two years ago as the transition period was coming to an end, then it is that of lies. In my post at that time I wrote about “the lies that bind us” and recorded that “we are no longer just in the territory of lies, but of lies about lies”. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the word ‘lie’ and its cognates is amongst the most used words across the 390 posts I have written on this blog since September 2016.
The entire Brexit project is so saturated with lies that it’s impossible to list them all. But one particularly obscene example, given its current state of near-collapse, is the way Vote Leave lied about what voting for Brexit would mean for the NHS. Yes, unexpected things, most obviously the pandemic, have happened since, but the promises made by the Brexiters were not qualified or conditional and, even without the pandemic, had no chance whatsoever of being delivered by Brexit. Even now, I find it impossible not be disgusted by the manipulative dishonesty of those promises, and the malign skilfulness with which they were made.
More generally, a recurring theme of this blog has been the impossibility of building a viable national economic and geo-political strategy based on lies. That has proved to be the case, and what is now also becoming ever-clearer is that lies, or their close relative of silence about the truth, are preventing us from undoing the damage done. That has important consequences. It is making us economically poorer and internationally weaker. But, worse than that, it is creating real political dangers. A broken country, or even just a country that feels itself to be broken, with a political leadership that can neither acknowledge nor fix the central cause of its problems, is bound to become increasingly vulnerable to extremism.
It’s a vulnerability already being exploited by Nigel Farage, indifferent to his own significant role in having broken the country. Notable in his diatribe against the current wave of strikes is that he drops his usual pretence of talking for ‘ordinary working people’. Indeed, a notable characteristic of the alt-right in general is that, whilst crying crocodile tears for how it used to respect the left when it stood up for ordinary workers rather being pre-occupied with ‘woke identity politics’, the moment unions do stand up for workers they are castigated. Nor is there any talk now of Brexit delivering real wage increases (£).
For of course the “political insurgency” Farage has in mind has as its central target not those who control the wages and employment conditions of ‘ordinary workers’ but the invented demon of an ‘invasion’ of asylum seekers. No mention, needless to say, of how leaving the EU’s Dublin III regulation compounded the problem, nor of how international cooperation is needed to address it. It’s easy to dismiss his pub-bore droning, but, just as with Brexit, it is Farage more than anyone whose obsessive campaigning has made the ‘small boats’ into a major political issue, pressurising and enabling (£) his many willing accomplices amongst Tory MPs. Invariably, the odious Jonathan Gullis being a prime example, these try to claim their vicious crusade is mandated by the vote for Brexit and, equally invariably, they identify ‘foreign’ judges, lawyers, and the liberal elite as frustrating what ‘the people’ want.
The next scenes are well-known, because this play has been staged many times before. The need for a ‘strong man’ who will put an end to division and disorder. Who will ‘make the trains run on time’, literally and metaphorically. Who will punish dissenters at home and defy critics abroad. It’s unlikely that Farage will be that strong man – he appears to be suffering from a permanent hangover, and more likely to vomit in a jackboot than to wear it – but there will always be others like him, and far more sinister than him. At first, their lies can seem like a joke, perhaps a cheeky-chappy comedy routine or at most the ravings of a lunatic, but as the play goes on, the laughter goes silent. The final act reveals that it was a tragedy from the start.
For all that, we are not in a pre-scripted play. There are still choices that can be made by political leaders that will make a difference to the outcome. That’s why it matters so much that Labour, in particular, get things right, and soon. For the longer our political leaders refuse to make the choices that still exist, or even accept that they need to be made, the smaller the space for a better outcome, and the more inexorably the path to tragedy becomes the only one left.
This is the last post for this year (barring some major Brexit development, which seems unlikely). I will take a break from blogging and intend the next post to be on Friday 6 January. Recently, this blog site had its eight millionth visit. I’m very grateful to all those who visit and read, as well as to the many thousands who read (or at least receive) the posts each week as emails, and to those who publicise the posts in various ways. I never anticipated when I started this blog, a little over six years ago, that it would gain such a readership, or even that it would still be going. I also know that there are any number of other sites and sources competing for the limited amount of reading time people have and I really appreciate the continued interest in this one. So, despite the slightly dark tone of this post, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. CG
A deal, of sorts, was done and we are now approaching the second anniversary of being fully out of the EU. Even that statement needs some qualifying, though. Many parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol remain unimplemented, and the Protocol itself is still being re-negotiated with no outcome expected until the New Year. The UK as a whole has continually delayed implementing import controls on goods from the EU and it is not clear when or whether it will do so. The introduction of the UKCA marking and registration system was recently postponed until the end of 2024. It may well be postponed again given that just this week it has been extended for construction products to the end of June 2025. And there are numerous other hanging threads, including participation in the Horizon Europe science programme.
A crisis-ridden country ruled by vandals
That the looming end of the transition period feels so long ago is because of the multiple crises that have come hard and fast since then, and the swirling chaos of post-Brexit politics that is in part the cause and in part the consequence of those crises. Few of these are entirely due to Brexit, but almost all of them have a Brexit aspect to them, including the extent of inflation and the wave of strikes it has engendered, and the now endemic labour and supply shortages. Brexit is inseparable from an emergent food supply crisis and from risks of an energy crisis. These are not ephemeral things, or luxuries, but fundamental to a functioning society.
As a result, there is now not just a clear and sustained public view that Brexit has been a mistake, but a more diffuse, yet palpable, sense that post-Brexit Britain is broken. It is a sense which has been growing since, at least, last summer, even before the mini-budget fiasco and its aftermath. Hence it’s common now to hear people on all parts of the political spectrum saying the same thing: ‘nothing works properly anymore’.
It would be fair to say that versions of the ‘Broken Britain’ theme have been around for years, maybe decades. But what is different currently is that there is no sign of the political leadership which might be able to fix things. That’s partly because of the continuing refusal of the Tory and Labour Parties to discuss, or even to properly acknowledge, the damage of Brexit itself. But that in turn is part of the legacy of Brexit in denuding politics of honesty and realism. It’s not, of course, that there was some prelapsarian Eden of political virtue. Politics has always been a dirty, messy, compromised business and, arguably, that is inherent to it. But Brexit has brought a new taint, at once subtly pervasive and dramatically grotesque, where it is not just that truth can’t be told, but that truth hardly seems to matter.
In recent posts I’ve written a lot about Labour and Brexit, simply because a new Labour or Labour-led government still seems the only, or best, hope of a break with some of the worst features of post-Brexit politics. That matters, because if we get a Labour government after the next election which doesn’t do so then there is no telling where people will turn to for hope, a point I’ll return to. In the meantime, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Conservative Party and Conservative governments are the prime architects of all this, the vandals who broke the country, and it is they who are still in power. Sunak’s government has arguably avoided Johnson’s sly degeneracy and Truss’s outright madness, but it remains a willing prisoner of Brexit and of the mendacity inherent in Brexit. Even in this relatively quiet week for Brexit news that has been on display.
Financial services regulation: nonsensical claims and flawed motivations
Jeremy Hunt’s ‘Edinburgh reforms’ to financial services regulation were announced as if they were a Brexit benefit, which would “seize on our Brexit freedoms to deliver an agile and home-grown regulatory regime”. It’s nonsense. About two-thirds of the proposals, including the most dramatic and risky one of relaxing the ringfencing of investment banking from retail banking, don’t require Brexit at all (£). Others, of which reforming Solvency II (discussed in detail in a previous post) is the most significant, are also under discussion in the EU and, anyway, are regulations very largely drawn up by the UK when a member of the EU.
There is a mixture of obvious reasons for pretending otherwise. One is just to sustain the public pretence that Brexit has benefits. Another is to placate the baying Brexit Ultras that ‘Brexit freedoms’ are being used, especially given their distrust of ‘remainer’ Hunt and ‘socialist’ Sunak, though their response, as it always is and always will be, was to call for more (£). It’s a big problem in itself for British politics that, both within and outside the Tory Party, there is a significant and vocal group who will never be satisfied by any attempt to satisfy them. Or, perhaps, the problem is with those, by no means all in the Tory Party, who still imagine that they can be appeased if given enough red meat.
There is also a narrower problem that flows from making decisions for these reasons which is that, just as post-Brexit trade deals have been done for the symbolic value of demonstrating Brexit freedom, the regulatory changes may be seen in the same way. That matters, because regulation always entails a judgement of the balance of risks, and if there is a suspicion that what drives these changes is simply some bogus Brexit boasting, rather than a rational assessment of those risks, international and institutional trust and confidence in the robustness of the UK’s regulatory regime will be diminished.
That possibility is unlikely to weigh heavily with the government because one of the deformations of political culture that Brexit has created is to ignore, or dismiss as unimportant or even as having an anti-Brexit motivation, the declining international reputation of the UK that has come with Brexit. Indeed it is inherent in the Brexit project, given that it is predicated upon a fantasy of Britain’s importance in the world which is bound to invite the mockery of others, and yet requires that that mockery be ignored to sustain the fantasy. The absurd eagerness of the UK to sign trade deals that disadvantage its own economic interests, and are solely for domestic Brexit boasting, enhances that mockery. And, not inherently, but in the way Brexit Britain has conducted itself, especially over the Northern Ireland Protocol, to mockery has been added international disdain and distrust.
Conversely, none of this matters much to the Brexiters because, with any lingering fantasy of other EU countries following Britain’s path now surely being dead, their project is entirely one of domestic politics, and most voters, and perhaps leave voters especially, are almost entirely unaware of how Brexit Britain is viewed abroad or discussed in the foreign media. The Brexiters themselves know, and frequently denounce the New York Times, in particular, for its coverage. But they also know that it is the domestic media that really matters, which is why they lash out most ferociously at even the mildest implication that Brexit has failed, especially from the BBC (which they loathe quite apart from Brexit) although the most extreme of them are convinced that the entire ‘mainstream media’ is the tool of a ‘remainer’ counter-revolution.
Foreign policy for domestic consumption
One consequence of this parochialism is that even the foreign policy of post-Brexit Britain is essentially for domestic consumption. This week, the new Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, made his first major speech setting out his foreign policy “vision”, which turns out to be myopic enough to warrant a drive to Barnard Castle.
There was plenty of denunciation of Putin for “debasing international conduct” but no mention that Brexit had substantially furthered his goals. There was plenty of rhetoric about the importance of international rules and the international order, but no mention of the UK’s threats to break international law over the Northern Ireland Protocol, or its existing violations of the Protocol. And, presumably, Cleverly imagines that no one has noticed the constant rumblings from within his own party about derogating from the ECHR. On the other hand, there was no mention of the EU, as opposed to some of its members, as a key UK ally; barely mention of it at all, in fact, except in reference to “making full use of the powers” of Brexit to – yes, of course – make new trade deals.
Even more underwhelming, if possible, was the report of Liam Fox’s Global Britain Commission (£) which, whilst predictably castigating the civil service for not having adapted to “the post-Brexit world” and for being too UK-focussed, proposes as the remedy to this inward-facing culture – you really couldn’t make this up – a series of re-organizations of Whitehall departments, the creation of a new select committee, and a quango to be called the ‘Global Britain Advisory Council’. Aside from an assortment of cliches and bromides, the only other point of interest is the deeply ironic observation that post-Brexit Britain should emulate France and Germany in the assiduity with which they tout for new global export markets.
None of this is a remotely serious post-Brexit foreign policy. For that, see, by contrast, the recent Chatham House speech on the UK’s international role given by former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband. In it, amongst other things, Miliband points to the need to begin with honesty about the way that “our global influence and capability, not just reputation, has been seriously undermined by political chaos and economic weakness since 2016”. He then charts a path to renewal which includes, though is by no means limited to, healing the “gaping sore” of relationships with the EU, recognizing that the ineluctable facts of geography make this mandatory. But neither Cleverly nor any currently conceivable Foreign Secretary, whether Tory or Labour, can say anything like this, not least because its starting premise is unsayable in the dishonest politics of post-Brexit Britain.
A dishonest trade policy
That dishonesty is endemic in trade policy, too. Just this week the UK Statistics Authority has reprimanded the Conservatives for their wholly untrue claims that the UK’s post-Brexit trade deals are worth over “£800 billion of new trade” (discussed in more detail in Nick Tyrone’s latest ‘Week in Brexitland’ blog). These claims are false partly because they reference rollover deals and the UK-EU trade deal itself, which made the terms of trade worse, but especially for treating all trade with the relevant countries as being attributable to the trade deals. It’s an especially gross lie given how many Brexiters insisted that ‘trade on WTO terms’ (i.e. without any free trade agreement) would be a perfectly adequate basis for trade with the EU, and how often they falsely claimed that most of Britain’s non-EU trade was conducted ‘on WTO terms’.
At the same time, the bigger picture of how Brexit leaves the UK trapped between the trade blocs of the EU, the US and China, affected by all three whilst belonging to and influencing none, is becoming increasingly obvious because of the growing substantive trade conflicts between those blocs. Even before Brexit, it was clear that the world was settling into regional trade blocs, partly because of the failure of the WTO to make much progress in recent times. Now, with at least a degree of ‘de-globalization’ arguably taking hold, for many reasons, the Brexiter idea of going it alone on the basis of the shrill vainglory of ‘regaining our seat at the WTO’ looks more than ever – I was going to say misguided, but fatuous is a better word.
Incapable of admitting this fatuity, the Conservative government continues with the dishonest pretence that CPTPP accession is the great prize ahead for Brexit Britain and, meanwhile, pretending that non-binding and very limited Memorandums of Understanding with individual US States, most recently South Carolina, which anyway didn’t require Brexit, are some kind of prize. Once again, Brexit consists of lies, served up for consumption to a domestic audience, presumed to be gullible, though increasingly seeing through the lies.
It is also presumably for domestic reasons that Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch insisted this week that she will not even discuss including increased access to student visas as part of the negotiations for a free trade agreement with India. It certainly wasn’t for good economic reasons, either as regards the trade talks or the interests of UK higher education.
The dangers of a politics built on lies
If there is a single thread which connects these latest Brexit stories and the situation we faced two years ago as the transition period was coming to an end, then it is that of lies. In my post at that time I wrote about “the lies that bind us” and recorded that “we are no longer just in the territory of lies, but of lies about lies”. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the word ‘lie’ and its cognates is amongst the most used words across the 390 posts I have written on this blog since September 2016.
The entire Brexit project is so saturated with lies that it’s impossible to list them all. But one particularly obscene example, given its current state of near-collapse, is the way Vote Leave lied about what voting for Brexit would mean for the NHS. Yes, unexpected things, most obviously the pandemic, have happened since, but the promises made by the Brexiters were not qualified or conditional and, even without the pandemic, had no chance whatsoever of being delivered by Brexit. Even now, I find it impossible not be disgusted by the manipulative dishonesty of those promises, and the malign skilfulness with which they were made.
More generally, a recurring theme of this blog has been the impossibility of building a viable national economic and geo-political strategy based on lies. That has proved to be the case, and what is now also becoming ever-clearer is that lies, or their close relative of silence about the truth, are preventing us from undoing the damage done. That has important consequences. It is making us economically poorer and internationally weaker. But, worse than that, it is creating real political dangers. A broken country, or even just a country that feels itself to be broken, with a political leadership that can neither acknowledge nor fix the central cause of its problems, is bound to become increasingly vulnerable to extremism.
It’s a vulnerability already being exploited by Nigel Farage, indifferent to his own significant role in having broken the country. Notable in his diatribe against the current wave of strikes is that he drops his usual pretence of talking for ‘ordinary working people’. Indeed, a notable characteristic of the alt-right in general is that, whilst crying crocodile tears for how it used to respect the left when it stood up for ordinary workers rather being pre-occupied with ‘woke identity politics’, the moment unions do stand up for workers they are castigated. Nor is there any talk now of Brexit delivering real wage increases (£).
For of course the “political insurgency” Farage has in mind has as its central target not those who control the wages and employment conditions of ‘ordinary workers’ but the invented demon of an ‘invasion’ of asylum seekers. No mention, needless to say, of how leaving the EU’s Dublin III regulation compounded the problem, nor of how international cooperation is needed to address it. It’s easy to dismiss his pub-bore droning, but, just as with Brexit, it is Farage more than anyone whose obsessive campaigning has made the ‘small boats’ into a major political issue, pressurising and enabling (£) his many willing accomplices amongst Tory MPs. Invariably, the odious Jonathan Gullis being a prime example, these try to claim their vicious crusade is mandated by the vote for Brexit and, equally invariably, they identify ‘foreign’ judges, lawyers, and the liberal elite as frustrating what ‘the people’ want.
The next scenes are well-known, because this play has been staged many times before. The need for a ‘strong man’ who will put an end to division and disorder. Who will ‘make the trains run on time’, literally and metaphorically. Who will punish dissenters at home and defy critics abroad. It’s unlikely that Farage will be that strong man – he appears to be suffering from a permanent hangover, and more likely to vomit in a jackboot than to wear it – but there will always be others like him, and far more sinister than him. At first, their lies can seem like a joke, perhaps a cheeky-chappy comedy routine or at most the ravings of a lunatic, but as the play goes on, the laughter goes silent. The final act reveals that it was a tragedy from the start.
For all that, we are not in a pre-scripted play. There are still choices that can be made by political leaders that will make a difference to the outcome. That’s why it matters so much that Labour, in particular, get things right, and soon. For the longer our political leaders refuse to make the choices that still exist, or even accept that they need to be made, the smaller the space for a better outcome, and the more inexorably the path to tragedy becomes the only one left.
This is the last post for this year (barring some major Brexit development, which seems unlikely). I will take a break from blogging and intend the next post to be on Friday 6 January. Recently, this blog site had its eight millionth visit. I’m very grateful to all those who visit and read, as well as to the many thousands who read (or at least receive) the posts each week as emails, and to those who publicise the posts in various ways. I never anticipated when I started this blog, a little over six years ago, that it would gain such a readership, or even that it would still be going. I also know that there are any number of other sites and sources competing for the limited amount of reading time people have and I really appreciate the continued interest in this one. So, despite the slightly dark tone of this post, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. CG
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