It is now increasingly clear that there is a complex web of interconnections between Brexit and responses to the coronavirus crisis. I have been writing about that on this blog since the beginning of March (and especially here and here) which I mention not as a boast for any perspicacity on my part but just to avoid repeating too much of what was said in those posts.
There are two ways of thinking about those interconnections. One might be called ‘ideational’, meaning things arising from an overlapping mind-set (it would be to ascribe too much coherence to it to call it an ideology). The other might be called ‘institutional’, meaning those things arising from governmental or administrative overlaps. And, of course, there is an interplay between the two.
Ideational connections
Here, the main issue is the very clear overlap (£) between those who think that the coronavirus restrictions are overdone, should never have happened or should be lifted quickly, and that the whole thing is essentially a fuss about nothing – the self-styled ‘lockdown sceptics’ - and those who support Brexit, think it is easy and simple, and should have been done by now.
There is a small but very influential group of politicians and commentators who approach a nexus of issues in the same way be it Brexit, coronavirus, climate change, immigration, sexual harassment or any number of other things. It’s always the same people, and always the same blokey, angry, resentful, constantly triggered but can’t-you-take-a-joke-snowflake, sneeringly superior yet self-pitying victimhood schtick.
And it’s always the same argumentative tricks – cherry-picked statistics (£350M/ comparative death rates), semi-understood factoids (WTO rules/ herd immunity), bogus past comparisons (we managed fine before/ flu), overblown rhetoric (dictatorship/ house arrest), and drastic exaggerations of their opponents’ claims so as to erect absurd strawmen for demolition (so it means WW3/ we’re all going to die? Really?).
In a previous post I gave Tim Martin, the Wetherspoon’s boss, as an exemplar in discussing this overlap, at least as regards Brexit and coronavirus. Martin, of course, is a passionate advocate of Brexit and ferocious critic of social distancing measures. Since then, fascinating work has been done by Professor Ben Ansell, a political scientist at Oxford University, showing correlations between Brexit-voting areas and lower levels compliance with social distancing instructions.
The data are open to different interpretations – especially the possibility that those in leave voting areas might be more likely to have jobs that cannot be done from home – but a plausible one is that the correlation partly reflects the overlap in mind-set I alluded to (just as there is an overlap in the US between Trump’s core vote and those objecting to coronavirus restrictions).
Another set of interconnections was identified this week by Professor David Edgerton, a historian of science and technology at King’s College London. He argues that both Brexit and the government response to coronavirus reveal shared “fantasies about British scientific and inventive genius”. He also links this to pervasive myths about the Second World War which, of course, have been central to Brexit and are almost unavoidable in relation to the pandemic. As the historian Robert Saunders, of Queen Mary, University of London, remarked, it is as if British politicians only have one historical reference point and it’s one they don’t understand anyway.
Institutional connections
Edgerton’s analysis centres on the government’s attempts to boost ventilator production, the story of which was devastatingly laid bare by Peter Foster in the Financial Times this week (£), provoking an angry response from the government. And here the ideational and institutional connections begin to merge. For as Foster records, the link is not just idiotic comparisons with the Blitz or Spitfire production, but a constant boneheaded refusal of politicians to engage seriously with experts. In other words, governmental failures over coronavirus are inseparable from Brexit ‘simplism’ in general and the Second World War myths in particular.
The institutional interconnections were thrown into even sharper relief by a truly devastating report in The Sunday Times about the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis (which also provoked a furious reaction from the government or perhaps, as is widely rumoured, from Dominic Cummings). They were at least two-fold. One was, simply, political exhaustion from all the Brexit battles of the previous months. A second was the way that planning for a future pandemic had been entirely sidelined by planning for no-deal Brexit, not just in general but in relation to specific recommendations about pandemic planning.
The latter is just another way of saying that it’s impossible to deal simultaneously with coronavirus and the Brexit negotiations, a point I’ve made repeatedly on this blog. It’s also been made, with more authority, by Georgina Wright and by Joe Owen, both of the Institute for Government, and innumerable others.
Why does this matter?
Most obviously, it matters in terms of the concrete question of whether the transition period will be extended. Without repeating the arguments for that, an important development this week was the Scottish government calling for it. It’s also been called for in a punchy editorial, again in The Sunday Times, and by a group of senior ex-civil servants. And a new opinion poll shows that 64% of the public support extension with even 45% of Brexit Party voters doing so. What is also coming into focus in this debate is, as I wrote this week, not just the question of whether to extend but by how much given that only one extension is possible. Yet we still don’t know that it will happen, as Tony Connelly of RTE explains.
But I think there is a deeper importance to all this. What both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way we are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister, a dud stand in, and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing.
They are the legacy of Brexit. They were brought into power by Brexit. But all the things which secured the vote for Brexit – the clever-but-dumb messaging, the leadership-by-slogan, the appeal to nostalgic sentiment, the disdain for facts and evidence, the valorisation of anger and divisiveness, the bluff ‘commonsense’ and the ‘bluffers’ book’ knowledge – are without exception precisely the opposite of what is needed for effective governance in general, and crisis management in particular.
This can be seen in the increasingly bizarre and convoluted stories about (non-)participation in EU procurement schemes, and the Turkish PPE flight. Both bear the hallmarks of the Brexity ideology, dishonesty, bullying, spin and incompetence that are the stock-in-trade of these people.
The realities of delivering Brexit had already found them out, but in the face of the pandemic their entire approach has been comprehensively discredited. If we must use Second World War analogies then, as Peter Oborne writes, Johnson is a Chamberlain not a Churchill. Oborne also notes what is being increasingly widely recognized about Johnson, and which I wrote about when he was still Foreign Secretary, namely that he is always in campaign mode and has no facility for, or much interest in, governing. The same is true of Cummings and, for that matter, the entire Brexit high command which has always been characterised by protest and victimhood not competence and responsibility. That is a disaster in terms of Brexit, but it is – literally – fatal in terms of coronavirus.
But – and this is the worst part of the legacy – despite all this some opinion polls show public approval for their approach continues to grow (and though the picture on growth is mixed, still, it shows continuing majority approval). They have no incentive to change their ways – even if they were capable of doing so - when the rewards for not doing so are so ample. That may change, though, and quickly. I have just a sense that the narrative may be shifting at the moment and one index of that is, actually, the furious responses to adverse news stories, which smack of desperation. It shouldn’t be forgotten how easily public opinion can turn, as it did, for example, over the Iraq War.
A final thought
From those thoughts flows another. In this post, as in many others on this blog, I have referenced academics, journalists and think-tankers who do such extraordinary work in analysing and communicating what is going on. So much for having enough of experts. Indeed, as has been widely remarked upon, it is noteworthy how, in the coronavirus crisis, the UK government has turned not just to medical experts but to academic scientists and to businesses to cope with that crisis.
What is less widely pointed out is that, on the basis of the education profile of the vote to leave the EU, the majority of these are likely to have been against Brexit and are very much the kind of people who for the last four years have been reviled as the ‘liberal elite’. Equally, the heaviest burden in dealing with the sharp end of the crisis has fallen on NHS workers of all sorts, care workers, delivery drivers, supermarket staff and so on. Many of these, at all levels of skill, are immigrants, including many from the EU-27 who did not even have a vote in the Referendum.
Yet it is all these people, rather than the archetypical coastal town pensioner or home counties golf club bore, who are now expected to deal with the coronavirus crisis (just as civil servants are expected to deliver Brexit whilst being traduced as remainer traitors). In this sense, the deepest connection between the coronavirus and Brexit is the way that the former has comprehensively discredited some of the central myths and lies of the latter. It turns out that when the chips are down educated professionals, immigrants, and indeed educated professional immigrants are rather important after all. More so, at least, than contrarian newspaper columnists raging against restrictions on their inalienable right to go around infecting people.
Showing posts with label Georgina Wright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Georgina Wright. Show all posts
Friday, 24 April 2020
Friday, 27 March 2020
Brexit in lockdown
Unsurprisingly, there is little Brexit news since – rightly – most attention is elsewhere. Yet, as argued in my previous post, for as long as it remains ongoing it remains legitimate and important to discuss it notwithstanding the coronavirus crisis. That is the more so when that crisis is being used to justify Brexit – as with the gleeful repetition of the essentially inaccurate story that EU State Aid rules would preclude the UK’s coronavirus business support package – or to claim that it will somehow bestow a negotiating advantage on Britain (£). And when Brexit is still being falsely used as reason for not taking advantage of EU procurement systems for desperately needed ventilators – although subsequently the line changed, with the government risibly claiming it was because the emails about it hadn’t been received.
That said, there is not much to add to my previous post in that nothing much is actually happening with Brexit which, in itself, underscores that the only substantive question now is whether, and more likely when, the transition period will be extended. The government remains silent on this beyond previously issued denials, but that’s unlikely to last.
Since that previous post David Frost has gone into self-isolation with suspected coronavirus, and with Michel Barnier already having tested positive that in itself is indicative of the difficulty of continuing with business as usual with both chief negotiators quarantined. It’s reliably reported that the Brexit Cabinet sub-committee has been suspended and won’t meet again ‘until further notice’. The Freight Trade Association have become perhaps the first major trade association to publicly call for an extension. The only real obstacle from the UK side to an extension is the obduracy of what Tony Barber in the Financial Times calls the ‘Brexit millenarians’ (£).
So for now Brexit is in limbo, although several thinktanks continue to produce informative reports. These include, this week, Georgina Wright and Joe Owen’s Institute for Government analysis of the role of the Joint Committee, and the UK in a Changing Europe’s multi-authored study of Parliament and Brexit. It’s worth mentioning just how well-served the public have been by these two organizations – and others, such as the Centre for European Reform – in providing freely available expert analysis throughout the Brexit saga.
Excellent as that ongoing work is, most of us, including the most Brexit-obsessed, are inevitably more preoccupied with the current crisis, which in some ways is erasing the remainer-Brexiter distinctions and conflicts of the last three years. Yet it would be intellectually dishonest not to record that there are some carry overs. For one, important, thing we have a Prime Minister who is, more than anything, a Brexit Prime Minister but who has been forced by events to become the coronavirus crisis Prime Minister, something calling for very different qualities than those that come naturally to him.
Connections between Brexit and coronavirus
More broadly, there is a set of intellectual and cultural connections between some of the most hardcore Brexiters and those who are dismissive of the dangers of and/or responses to coronavirus. I don’t want this to be misunderstood: this is not an ‘all Brexiters are thick’ comment (and I have never made such comments). Nor is it denying that plenty of Brexit supporters are making huge contributions to dealing effectively with coronavirus whilst, no doubt, plenty of remainers are responding foolishly to the crisis.
One connection is the resonance between what is reported to have been Dominic Cummings’ initial response to coronavirus and his (and others’) ‘disruptor’ view of Brexit. They both seem to grow out of an idea that any shock to ‘the system’ is to be regarded as desirable simply for being a shock. Adverse consequences are just so much collateral damage to be ignored if not, indeed, welcomed. That’s not quite the same as the ‘disaster capitalism’ idea, in which massive shocks such as this pandemic represent an opportunity for economic and political exploitation. It’s more a kind of adolescent infatuation with instability as ‘exciting’ and it links to the wearisomely predictable ‘contrarianism’ of the peculiar, yet peculiarly influential, leftist-libertarian Spiked Online sect who have lashed out against the coronavirus restrictions and who, of course, tend to be ardent Brexiters. One might speculate on the affinities between such an infatuation and the psychology of the “misfits and weirdos” who are Cummings’ preferred hires.
Another connection is the overlap with the bluff ‘commonsense’ of a certain strand of Brexiter thinking. There’s more to it than the infamous ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ line, although it links with that. Rather, it’s to do with the way that, starting with the campaign ‘take back control’ strapline, through the claims about ‘German car makers’, the naïve beliefs about ‘alternative arrangements’ and the imaginary possibilities of ‘GATT Article XXIV’, Brexit has been presented as a simple choice with a simple process. Arguably, the Leave campaign’s Referendum success was largely attributable to this ‘simplism’, whereas remainers’ arguments have relied on often impenetrable complexities.
It’s surely no coincidence, therefore, that Tim Martin, the Wetherspoons boss and one of the relatively small number of leading business people to vocally support Brexit, who for years propounded the simplicities of Brexit has made similar pronouncements about the coronavirus crisis. It links no doubt with the deep-rooted English aversion to intellectuals, who make things complex when they need not be, and also to a perhaps related machismo so that Martin is “happy to take his chances” with catching the virus.
The same attitude is evident in the comments of Paul Bullen, former UKIP leader on Cambridgeshire County Council and Brexit Party candidate. He thinks “the majority don’t care” about coronavirus and wants to just “get back to normal”. It might be called a ‘hand washing is for sissies’ mentality (which could have important consequences for coronavirus spread (£) given the higher infection and mortality rates amongst men). Another variant on the same theme is, like Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, to condemn alarm about the virus as “scaremongering” just as she (and countless others) dismissed warnings about Brexit as ‘Project Fear’ (£).
The lure of nostalgia
But simplism isn’t just about anti-intellectualism and macho bravado. It’s also a big impetus behind nostalgia and the imagination that ‘life was simpler back then’. Nostalgia has been an incredibly important feature of recent British politics – even before the Referendum it was evident in what at the time I called the “grotesque historical spoonerism” of Austerity nostalgia – and the role that World War Two nostalgia has played in Brexit is well-known.
We see, again, the overlaps with responses to coronavirus. The most bathetic, perhaps, is Godfrey Bloom’s crotchety puzzlement at pubs being closed now, when they weren’t during the Blitz (hint: bombs dropping from planes and viruses being transmitted between people aren’t the same thing). Bloom, a former UKIP MEP who lost his party’s whip, is, admittedly, an outlier even to the wilder fringes of Brexiteer thinking. The fruitcakes’ fruitcake, so to speak. But that idea that the coronavirus crisis is, somehow, like the Blitz has a much wider and more mainstream currency. It very much resonates with the sentiment, commonly expressed but summed up perfectly by former England cricketer Geoff Boycott, that (no-deal) Brexit will be fine “because we fought two world wars and came out on top”.
I suppose, to be charitable, that given the unprecedented nature of the coronavirus it’s understandable that people reach for analogies and to the extent that the war is the only comparable moblization of State economic and social control in (just about) living memory it makes a sort of sense. And, in passing, it bears saying that wartime administration, especially in the early months, was marked by multiple inefficiencies and – as Mass Observation diaries show – plenty of civilian scepticism about the wisdom of the authorities. So there may be analogies to be found beyond the mythologization of the Blitz (or Dunkirk).
Why it matters
But the key point is that, as in relation to Brexit I’ve tried to chronicle throughout the posts on this blog, simplism in all its forms is inadequate. Like Brexit, coronavirus presents multiple and complex challenges for public policy and for individuals. Defiantly invoking the Blitz to say that we should not ‘give in’ to the virus by abandoning our normal ways of living is useless because dealing with the virus is best done precisely by abandoning those normal ways of living. The cultural and intellectual attitudes that delivered the Brexit vote have proved totally unsuited to delivering Brexit itself, and are totally unsuited to responding to coronavirus.
Understanding those attitudes is not about point-scoring or finger-pointing at the expense of Brexiters. These attitudes exist, and understanding them matters. It matters, in the present crisis, because they impact on how some sections of the public view and respond to the restrictions needed to deal with it. It matters, in relation to Brexit, because at every step of the way over the last four year those attitudes have both been proved wrong and yet remained dominant. And it matters in relation to the only currently important Brexit issue. For it is precisely the prevalence of those attitudes amongst the ‘Brexit Millenarians’ which constitutes the sole block to the transparently obvious fact that the transition period has to be extended.
It perhaps also matters in the longer-term. The linked themes of irresponsible disruption, contrarian drivel, common sense simplism, and nostalgia have proved remarkably resilient even in the face of the last few years of Brexit turmoil. The coronavirus crisis may well serve to discredit them, if the population wearies of turmoil, sees contrarianism as tedious frivolity, recognizes the importance of expertise in dealing with complexity and, perhaps, comes to see the crisis as its own rather than a re-run of those of decades ago. The world – Brexit included – already looks rather different to how it did just a couple of weeks ago. By the time this crisis is over, it may be unrecognizable.
Note: I am not sure that I will continue to post every week on this blog given the lack of substantial Brexit news, but will certainly do so as and when there is such news.
That said, there is not much to add to my previous post in that nothing much is actually happening with Brexit which, in itself, underscores that the only substantive question now is whether, and more likely when, the transition period will be extended. The government remains silent on this beyond previously issued denials, but that’s unlikely to last.
Since that previous post David Frost has gone into self-isolation with suspected coronavirus, and with Michel Barnier already having tested positive that in itself is indicative of the difficulty of continuing with business as usual with both chief negotiators quarantined. It’s reliably reported that the Brexit Cabinet sub-committee has been suspended and won’t meet again ‘until further notice’. The Freight Trade Association have become perhaps the first major trade association to publicly call for an extension. The only real obstacle from the UK side to an extension is the obduracy of what Tony Barber in the Financial Times calls the ‘Brexit millenarians’ (£).
So for now Brexit is in limbo, although several thinktanks continue to produce informative reports. These include, this week, Georgina Wright and Joe Owen’s Institute for Government analysis of the role of the Joint Committee, and the UK in a Changing Europe’s multi-authored study of Parliament and Brexit. It’s worth mentioning just how well-served the public have been by these two organizations – and others, such as the Centre for European Reform – in providing freely available expert analysis throughout the Brexit saga.
Excellent as that ongoing work is, most of us, including the most Brexit-obsessed, are inevitably more preoccupied with the current crisis, which in some ways is erasing the remainer-Brexiter distinctions and conflicts of the last three years. Yet it would be intellectually dishonest not to record that there are some carry overs. For one, important, thing we have a Prime Minister who is, more than anything, a Brexit Prime Minister but who has been forced by events to become the coronavirus crisis Prime Minister, something calling for very different qualities than those that come naturally to him.
Connections between Brexit and coronavirus
More broadly, there is a set of intellectual and cultural connections between some of the most hardcore Brexiters and those who are dismissive of the dangers of and/or responses to coronavirus. I don’t want this to be misunderstood: this is not an ‘all Brexiters are thick’ comment (and I have never made such comments). Nor is it denying that plenty of Brexit supporters are making huge contributions to dealing effectively with coronavirus whilst, no doubt, plenty of remainers are responding foolishly to the crisis.
One connection is the resonance between what is reported to have been Dominic Cummings’ initial response to coronavirus and his (and others’) ‘disruptor’ view of Brexit. They both seem to grow out of an idea that any shock to ‘the system’ is to be regarded as desirable simply for being a shock. Adverse consequences are just so much collateral damage to be ignored if not, indeed, welcomed. That’s not quite the same as the ‘disaster capitalism’ idea, in which massive shocks such as this pandemic represent an opportunity for economic and political exploitation. It’s more a kind of adolescent infatuation with instability as ‘exciting’ and it links to the wearisomely predictable ‘contrarianism’ of the peculiar, yet peculiarly influential, leftist-libertarian Spiked Online sect who have lashed out against the coronavirus restrictions and who, of course, tend to be ardent Brexiters. One might speculate on the affinities between such an infatuation and the psychology of the “misfits and weirdos” who are Cummings’ preferred hires.
Another connection is the overlap with the bluff ‘commonsense’ of a certain strand of Brexiter thinking. There’s more to it than the infamous ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ line, although it links with that. Rather, it’s to do with the way that, starting with the campaign ‘take back control’ strapline, through the claims about ‘German car makers’, the naïve beliefs about ‘alternative arrangements’ and the imaginary possibilities of ‘GATT Article XXIV’, Brexit has been presented as a simple choice with a simple process. Arguably, the Leave campaign’s Referendum success was largely attributable to this ‘simplism’, whereas remainers’ arguments have relied on often impenetrable complexities.
It’s surely no coincidence, therefore, that Tim Martin, the Wetherspoons boss and one of the relatively small number of leading business people to vocally support Brexit, who for years propounded the simplicities of Brexit has made similar pronouncements about the coronavirus crisis. It links no doubt with the deep-rooted English aversion to intellectuals, who make things complex when they need not be, and also to a perhaps related machismo so that Martin is “happy to take his chances” with catching the virus.
The same attitude is evident in the comments of Paul Bullen, former UKIP leader on Cambridgeshire County Council and Brexit Party candidate. He thinks “the majority don’t care” about coronavirus and wants to just “get back to normal”. It might be called a ‘hand washing is for sissies’ mentality (which could have important consequences for coronavirus spread (£) given the higher infection and mortality rates amongst men). Another variant on the same theme is, like Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, to condemn alarm about the virus as “scaremongering” just as she (and countless others) dismissed warnings about Brexit as ‘Project Fear’ (£).
The lure of nostalgia
But simplism isn’t just about anti-intellectualism and macho bravado. It’s also a big impetus behind nostalgia and the imagination that ‘life was simpler back then’. Nostalgia has been an incredibly important feature of recent British politics – even before the Referendum it was evident in what at the time I called the “grotesque historical spoonerism” of Austerity nostalgia – and the role that World War Two nostalgia has played in Brexit is well-known.
We see, again, the overlaps with responses to coronavirus. The most bathetic, perhaps, is Godfrey Bloom’s crotchety puzzlement at pubs being closed now, when they weren’t during the Blitz (hint: bombs dropping from planes and viruses being transmitted between people aren’t the same thing). Bloom, a former UKIP MEP who lost his party’s whip, is, admittedly, an outlier even to the wilder fringes of Brexiteer thinking. The fruitcakes’ fruitcake, so to speak. But that idea that the coronavirus crisis is, somehow, like the Blitz has a much wider and more mainstream currency. It very much resonates with the sentiment, commonly expressed but summed up perfectly by former England cricketer Geoff Boycott, that (no-deal) Brexit will be fine “because we fought two world wars and came out on top”.
I suppose, to be charitable, that given the unprecedented nature of the coronavirus it’s understandable that people reach for analogies and to the extent that the war is the only comparable moblization of State economic and social control in (just about) living memory it makes a sort of sense. And, in passing, it bears saying that wartime administration, especially in the early months, was marked by multiple inefficiencies and – as Mass Observation diaries show – plenty of civilian scepticism about the wisdom of the authorities. So there may be analogies to be found beyond the mythologization of the Blitz (or Dunkirk).
Why it matters
But the key point is that, as in relation to Brexit I’ve tried to chronicle throughout the posts on this blog, simplism in all its forms is inadequate. Like Brexit, coronavirus presents multiple and complex challenges for public policy and for individuals. Defiantly invoking the Blitz to say that we should not ‘give in’ to the virus by abandoning our normal ways of living is useless because dealing with the virus is best done precisely by abandoning those normal ways of living. The cultural and intellectual attitudes that delivered the Brexit vote have proved totally unsuited to delivering Brexit itself, and are totally unsuited to responding to coronavirus.
Understanding those attitudes is not about point-scoring or finger-pointing at the expense of Brexiters. These attitudes exist, and understanding them matters. It matters, in the present crisis, because they impact on how some sections of the public view and respond to the restrictions needed to deal with it. It matters, in relation to Brexit, because at every step of the way over the last four year those attitudes have both been proved wrong and yet remained dominant. And it matters in relation to the only currently important Brexit issue. For it is precisely the prevalence of those attitudes amongst the ‘Brexit Millenarians’ which constitutes the sole block to the transparently obvious fact that the transition period has to be extended.
It perhaps also matters in the longer-term. The linked themes of irresponsible disruption, contrarian drivel, common sense simplism, and nostalgia have proved remarkably resilient even in the face of the last few years of Brexit turmoil. The coronavirus crisis may well serve to discredit them, if the population wearies of turmoil, sees contrarianism as tedious frivolity, recognizes the importance of expertise in dealing with complexity and, perhaps, comes to see the crisis as its own rather than a re-run of those of decades ago. The world – Brexit included – already looks rather different to how it did just a couple of weeks ago. By the time this crisis is over, it may be unrecognizable.
Note: I am not sure that I will continue to post every week on this blog given the lack of substantial Brexit news, but will certainly do so as and when there is such news.
Thursday, 11 April 2019
The EU is protecting itself from Brexiter dishonesty and delusion - and throwing Britain a lifeline
We now know
the conditions under which, for the second time in a fortnight, the EU-27 are
willing to allow us to avoid, for now, the catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit. The
British Prime Minister was sent out of the room whilst the other countries,
each of whom had a veto, argued for hours over our fate and now they have decided.
Brexiters often talk of EU discussions ‘going to the wire’, imagining this to mean that at the last minute Britain will be given its unicorn cake. But these early morning talks were about whether to give the thin gruel of a short extension or the humble pie of a long extension with onerous conditions attached. In the event, the outcome was somewhere in the middle. Thus Britain has been granted an extension until the end of October, with a progress review in June. The offer comes with a pointed reminder that, as a departing member, the UK must not behave in an obstructive manner, and that the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened.
There is much talk of the humiliation of the UK having to ‘go cap in hand’ to the EU in search of an extension. This captures a certain truth – and one which I first wrote about on this blog in October 2017 – although it’s important to understand that it is a self-inflicted humiliation, visited on the UK by Brexiters rather than the EU.
But it also conceals a deeper and more shaming truth which is revealed by the conversations around the decision, and in particular concerns over how a lingering British membership might, intentionally or not, damage the EU. As Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government put it, the “EU gave up pressing UK for a ‘plan’ and focussed instead on making sure Brexit does not hamper EU work elsewhere”.
There are at least four dimensions to this, and as well as informing the EU’s decision making on the extension they also explain why an extension is needed at all.
Dishonesty
The most obvious is dishonesty. The entire Brexiter prospectus was a dishonest one, as becomes clearer each day, both about Britain’s membership of the EU and about what would await it afterwards. That dishonesty has spread from a small coterie of fanatics to infect the entire body politic of the UK. Thus even those who know it to be nonsense must ritualistically incant their ‘respect for the will of the people’. So in a general way there’s an understandable desire for the EU to place a kind of fire break between itself and this outbreak of pathological, incontinent lying.
This general sense of the danger of Brexiter dishonesty is personified in Boris Johnson. Perhaps more than anyone else he is rightly seen in the EU as the figure who, for years before the referendum, deliberately promulgated lies. Thus there is a specific sense in which the EU is concerned to protect itself from the possibility of a Johnson premiership (£) during the extension and (if it comes to that) transition periods. There is probably no politician in modern times who has done such comprehensive damage to British national reputation.
Untrustworthiness
But even if it were not Boris Johnson who became the next Prime Minister, many of the other likely candidates present a similarly distasteful prospect precisely because of the spread of the Brexit toxin within British politics. Even those ERG-ers who have belatedly come round to May’s deal are open in saying that they expect it to be ripped up once she is gone.
As regards the extension, comments from prominent Brexiter politicians – even those with few leadership credentials – compound the sense that the EU needs to protect itself. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s call for the extension to be used to wreck EU decision making might be seen as the worst example were it not for the onanistic Mark Francois making even more bellicose remarks. Apparently, we in the UK have to accept these ludicrous mediocrities playing a part in our public life. It’s not hard to understand why the EU are not enthusiastic about doing the same.
These people probably neither know nor care what terrible damage they are doing to the reputation of the UK as a trustworthy partner. And, in fairness, they only play a bit part in that. Far more damage was done, in a single sentence, when the then Brexit Secretary David Davis opined, after the conclusion of phase 1 of the Brexit talks, that what had been agreed was not binding. Perhaps more than anything else that poisoned trust in the negotiations.
It was compounded by Theresa May who, for all that she may appear more ‘reasonable’, followed Davis in disowning what had been agreed about the backstop at that time, saying that no British Prime Minister could agree to … what she had just agreed to. Indeed, the Article 50 talks never really progressed to phase 2 as a result, because the Conservative Party fell into a bitter internal battle about the backstop that ended up with the repeated rejection of May’s deal.
Incompetence
That was not the only reason why there was no substantive phase 2 (and, as a result, such an anaemic Political Declaration). It was also because the government couldn’t agree what it wanted from phase 2, and at the first attempt to do so, the Chequers’ Proposal, fell apart and has never recovered. This is the third strand which underlies how the EU have approached the extension. Britain is now seen, almost universally, as having descended into political chaos and incompetence.
At first, the EU thought that Britain had some ‘cunning plan’ about Brexit but this quickly evaporated. It was visually symbolised by the photo, at the beginning of the Article 50 negotiations, of the EU side having folders full of documents and the UK side nothing but David Davis’ inane grin. Symbolism aside, the substance told the same story. Throughout the process, the repeated EU call to the UK has been to ‘tell us what you want’ and to put forward a coherent plan. But, as the leaked conversation of her talks with Angela Merkel revealed, May’s approach has been to ‘ask for an offer’ which was revealing of a bigger truth: that the UK expected the EU to provide the answers to Brexit.
The incompetence inherent in Brexit was starkly illustrated this week by the comments of Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney-General and a committed Brexiter: “I feel we have under-estimated its complexity. We are unpicking 45 years of in-depth integration. This needed to be done with very great care, in a phased and graduated way. It needs a hard-headed understanding of realities”. True enough – but, to say the least, it’s a bit late in the day to be realising that.
Incompetence is not the same as dishonesty, but in this case it arises from it. For the biggest lie of the Leave campaign was precisely that it would be quick and easy, and that the UK held all the cards. That the EU now see a longer than requested extension as necessary is, in effect, saying that the UK needs to have time to deal with its internal political chaos, recognize the complexity of Brexit, and develop a competent approach to it. The diagnosis is right, but thinking that six months is enough to reach that state calls for a degree of optimism that not only cynics might think misplaced.
Delusionary thinking
Alongside dishonesty and incompetence, and closely related to them, is something slightly different: persistent delusionary thinking. The ‘quick, easy deal’ fantasy is a part of that (remember when Boris Johnson said that eighteen months were more than enough to get the entire deal, including future terms, agreed, and David Davis said that the UK was “not really interested” in a transition period but might agree one to “be kind” the EU), but it runs much deeper.
It would take far too much space to catalogue the delusions – many posts on this blog have done just that – but in recent times an obvious example is the repeated nonsense of the Malthouse Compromise and (relatedly) ‘managed no deal’. The minimal version is that the EU would agree to rip the backstop out of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and substitute it with acceptance of non-existent ‘alternative arrangements’. The maximal version is that the UK could ditch the WA altogether, but still have a transitional period and also proceed to negotiating a future terms deal without any WA.
None of this is realistic at the most basic level of understanding. It’s not just that the EU will not agree to it, but that they could not agree to it. But – reflecting the general point about how Brexiter poison has infected British politics – this idea is persistently floated not just by maverick figures but by leading politicians. In the last week or so ‘Malthouse’ was put forward yet again, whilst Andrea Leadsom combined the non-starter of taking the backstop out of the WA with the longstanding myth that Angela Merkel alone could and would set the terms of Brexit in Britain’s favour.
A slender lifeline for the UK
So the humiliation for Britain is not, primarily, in having had to ask the EU for an extension. It is that both the need for the extension and the way the EU approached the decision to grant it reflect the fact that Brexiters have made Britain dishonest, untrustworthy, chaotic, incompetent, and delusional.
But it’s actually even more humiliating than that. The ultimate truth of what the EU have decided is that – far from needing to ‘punish’ us – they are willing to be kind to us. We have been given the chance – carefully managed, in case we abuse it – to get our act together and to drop all the lies and fantasies.
It remains to be seen whether we are able to take that chance. Even today, the morning after the extension was agreed with the reaffirmation that the WA is closed, David Davis was on Radio 4 fantasising that with the right leader Britain could simply go back to the EU and renegotiate the WA and if not that no-deal is just fine. There will undoubtedly be plenty of other Tory MPs who will think that pursuing this fantasy will be the best use of the next six months.
Nevertheless, this new, longer delay presents remainers with a real opportunity and they should plan for the possibilities created. Assuming the European Parliament elections go ahead, there is a chance for anti-Brexit candidates to flourish on higher than usual turnout. The campaign for another referendum or for revocation will surely intensify, the more so precisely if the Tory Party decides to waste the time by intensifying its civil war. And, despite everything, there are still many in the EU who hope for and would welcome Britain deciding to reject (£) the course Brexiters have set for us and so conspicuously failed to deliver to deliver upon.
Brexiters often talk of EU discussions ‘going to the wire’, imagining this to mean that at the last minute Britain will be given its unicorn cake. But these early morning talks were about whether to give the thin gruel of a short extension or the humble pie of a long extension with onerous conditions attached. In the event, the outcome was somewhere in the middle. Thus Britain has been granted an extension until the end of October, with a progress review in June. The offer comes with a pointed reminder that, as a departing member, the UK must not behave in an obstructive manner, and that the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened.
There is much talk of the humiliation of the UK having to ‘go cap in hand’ to the EU in search of an extension. This captures a certain truth – and one which I first wrote about on this blog in October 2017 – although it’s important to understand that it is a self-inflicted humiliation, visited on the UK by Brexiters rather than the EU.
But it also conceals a deeper and more shaming truth which is revealed by the conversations around the decision, and in particular concerns over how a lingering British membership might, intentionally or not, damage the EU. As Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government put it, the “EU gave up pressing UK for a ‘plan’ and focussed instead on making sure Brexit does not hamper EU work elsewhere”.
There are at least four dimensions to this, and as well as informing the EU’s decision making on the extension they also explain why an extension is needed at all.
Dishonesty
The most obvious is dishonesty. The entire Brexiter prospectus was a dishonest one, as becomes clearer each day, both about Britain’s membership of the EU and about what would await it afterwards. That dishonesty has spread from a small coterie of fanatics to infect the entire body politic of the UK. Thus even those who know it to be nonsense must ritualistically incant their ‘respect for the will of the people’. So in a general way there’s an understandable desire for the EU to place a kind of fire break between itself and this outbreak of pathological, incontinent lying.
This general sense of the danger of Brexiter dishonesty is personified in Boris Johnson. Perhaps more than anyone else he is rightly seen in the EU as the figure who, for years before the referendum, deliberately promulgated lies. Thus there is a specific sense in which the EU is concerned to protect itself from the possibility of a Johnson premiership (£) during the extension and (if it comes to that) transition periods. There is probably no politician in modern times who has done such comprehensive damage to British national reputation.
Untrustworthiness
But even if it were not Boris Johnson who became the next Prime Minister, many of the other likely candidates present a similarly distasteful prospect precisely because of the spread of the Brexit toxin within British politics. Even those ERG-ers who have belatedly come round to May’s deal are open in saying that they expect it to be ripped up once she is gone.
As regards the extension, comments from prominent Brexiter politicians – even those with few leadership credentials – compound the sense that the EU needs to protect itself. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s call for the extension to be used to wreck EU decision making might be seen as the worst example were it not for the onanistic Mark Francois making even more bellicose remarks. Apparently, we in the UK have to accept these ludicrous mediocrities playing a part in our public life. It’s not hard to understand why the EU are not enthusiastic about doing the same.
These people probably neither know nor care what terrible damage they are doing to the reputation of the UK as a trustworthy partner. And, in fairness, they only play a bit part in that. Far more damage was done, in a single sentence, when the then Brexit Secretary David Davis opined, after the conclusion of phase 1 of the Brexit talks, that what had been agreed was not binding. Perhaps more than anything else that poisoned trust in the negotiations.
It was compounded by Theresa May who, for all that she may appear more ‘reasonable’, followed Davis in disowning what had been agreed about the backstop at that time, saying that no British Prime Minister could agree to … what she had just agreed to. Indeed, the Article 50 talks never really progressed to phase 2 as a result, because the Conservative Party fell into a bitter internal battle about the backstop that ended up with the repeated rejection of May’s deal.
Incompetence
That was not the only reason why there was no substantive phase 2 (and, as a result, such an anaemic Political Declaration). It was also because the government couldn’t agree what it wanted from phase 2, and at the first attempt to do so, the Chequers’ Proposal, fell apart and has never recovered. This is the third strand which underlies how the EU have approached the extension. Britain is now seen, almost universally, as having descended into political chaos and incompetence.
At first, the EU thought that Britain had some ‘cunning plan’ about Brexit but this quickly evaporated. It was visually symbolised by the photo, at the beginning of the Article 50 negotiations, of the EU side having folders full of documents and the UK side nothing but David Davis’ inane grin. Symbolism aside, the substance told the same story. Throughout the process, the repeated EU call to the UK has been to ‘tell us what you want’ and to put forward a coherent plan. But, as the leaked conversation of her talks with Angela Merkel revealed, May’s approach has been to ‘ask for an offer’ which was revealing of a bigger truth: that the UK expected the EU to provide the answers to Brexit.
The incompetence inherent in Brexit was starkly illustrated this week by the comments of Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney-General and a committed Brexiter: “I feel we have under-estimated its complexity. We are unpicking 45 years of in-depth integration. This needed to be done with very great care, in a phased and graduated way. It needs a hard-headed understanding of realities”. True enough – but, to say the least, it’s a bit late in the day to be realising that.
Incompetence is not the same as dishonesty, but in this case it arises from it. For the biggest lie of the Leave campaign was precisely that it would be quick and easy, and that the UK held all the cards. That the EU now see a longer than requested extension as necessary is, in effect, saying that the UK needs to have time to deal with its internal political chaos, recognize the complexity of Brexit, and develop a competent approach to it. The diagnosis is right, but thinking that six months is enough to reach that state calls for a degree of optimism that not only cynics might think misplaced.
Delusionary thinking
Alongside dishonesty and incompetence, and closely related to them, is something slightly different: persistent delusionary thinking. The ‘quick, easy deal’ fantasy is a part of that (remember when Boris Johnson said that eighteen months were more than enough to get the entire deal, including future terms, agreed, and David Davis said that the UK was “not really interested” in a transition period but might agree one to “be kind” the EU), but it runs much deeper.
It would take far too much space to catalogue the delusions – many posts on this blog have done just that – but in recent times an obvious example is the repeated nonsense of the Malthouse Compromise and (relatedly) ‘managed no deal’. The minimal version is that the EU would agree to rip the backstop out of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and substitute it with acceptance of non-existent ‘alternative arrangements’. The maximal version is that the UK could ditch the WA altogether, but still have a transitional period and also proceed to negotiating a future terms deal without any WA.
None of this is realistic at the most basic level of understanding. It’s not just that the EU will not agree to it, but that they could not agree to it. But – reflecting the general point about how Brexiter poison has infected British politics – this idea is persistently floated not just by maverick figures but by leading politicians. In the last week or so ‘Malthouse’ was put forward yet again, whilst Andrea Leadsom combined the non-starter of taking the backstop out of the WA with the longstanding myth that Angela Merkel alone could and would set the terms of Brexit in Britain’s favour.
A slender lifeline for the UK
So the humiliation for Britain is not, primarily, in having had to ask the EU for an extension. It is that both the need for the extension and the way the EU approached the decision to grant it reflect the fact that Brexiters have made Britain dishonest, untrustworthy, chaotic, incompetent, and delusional.
But it’s actually even more humiliating than that. The ultimate truth of what the EU have decided is that – far from needing to ‘punish’ us – they are willing to be kind to us. We have been given the chance – carefully managed, in case we abuse it – to get our act together and to drop all the lies and fantasies.
It remains to be seen whether we are able to take that chance. Even today, the morning after the extension was agreed with the reaffirmation that the WA is closed, David Davis was on Radio 4 fantasising that with the right leader Britain could simply go back to the EU and renegotiate the WA and if not that no-deal is just fine. There will undoubtedly be plenty of other Tory MPs who will think that pursuing this fantasy will be the best use of the next six months.
Nevertheless, this new, longer delay presents remainers with a real opportunity and they should plan for the possibilities created. Assuming the European Parliament elections go ahead, there is a chance for anti-Brexit candidates to flourish on higher than usual turnout. The campaign for another referendum or for revocation will surely intensify, the more so precisely if the Tory Party decides to waste the time by intensifying its civil war. And, despite everything, there are still many in the EU who hope for and would welcome Britain deciding to reject (£) the course Brexiters have set for us and so conspicuously failed to deliver to deliver upon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)