The failure of Brexit is now widely acknowledged and ever-more openly discussed. But there isn’t going to be some quick, neat or easy epochal change. Brexiters aren’t going to give up quietly, and the process of addressing the failure of Brexit is going to be complex and fraught with difficulties.
Still, there is a gradual shift under way. For a long time after the transition period ended, the damage Brexit was causing lurked in the shadows. It’s not that it wasn’t reported, but those reports were often piecemeal in nature, rather than drawn together, and Brexit often featured in the small print as a factor in whatever damage was being discussed rather than as the headlines. That is increasingly changing, with a good example being the two-part series assessing Brexit in this week’s Times newspaper (here and here). There’s far too much in it for me to summarise but, although striving almost painfully at times to be ‘balanced’, the overall picture was undeniably clear, and undeniably negative.
Even without much media prompting, and despite a barrage of pro-Brexit reporting from some parts of the media, as well as much Tory boosterism, the public view has for many months been settling to the view that Brexit was a mistake and has failed. The latest YouGov polling records its lowest-ever level of people thinking Brexit was the right choice (31%) and the joint highest-ever level of those thinking it was a mistake (56%). It also shows 62% think Brexit has been ‘more of a failure’ and just 9% that it has been ‘more of a success’. Inevitably the responses of leave voters and remain voters are rather different, but even amongst leave voters the figures are 37% saying failure and 20% saying success, with a lot who think ‘neither’ (35% of leaver voters compared with just 6% of remain voters).
It's worth pausing to consider just how damning an indictment of Brexit those figures are, so I’ll repeat them. Just 9% of all electors, and only 20% even of those who voted for it, think Brexit is a success. By comparison, a 2019 survey found that 16% of the UK adult population believe that the moon landing was staged.
Brexit betrayed
However, there’s an important difference between those remain voters who think Brexit is a failure, of whom about three-quarters think it was always going to be, and those leave voters who think it is a failure, of whom about three-quarters think that it could have been a success if it had been implemented differently. That isn’t a surprising finding, but it matters because it shows that disillusionment with Brexit ‘as an idea’ is far from universal, and also that there is quite a deep seam of opinion susceptible to a narrative of Brexit ‘betrayal’.
It's a seam which Brexiters were always going to mine assiduously, and a particularly unhinged example was provided by Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn last Friday. It wasn’t just about Brexit, but slurs about ‘salivating remoaners’ with ‘loyalty to the EU’ permeated a wider attack on the “New Establishment” – an apparent nod towards political scientist Matthew Goodwin’s half-baked ‘new Elite’ theory - and its supposed “coup” against the government. But careful readers, if such the Mail has, would notice, even if Littlejohn is too careless a writer to realise it, that this was all rather let down by the observation that “to describe all this as a conspiracy is not entirely accurate [as] it's not co-ordinated.” So not, in fact, a “coup” at all.
This kind of ‘stab in the back’ myth (the on-line version of Littlejohn’s article was actually illustrated with a bloody dagger) has always been the most dangerous potential outcome of Brexit, and Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian recently and rightly warned that what follows from it “may be very dark indeed”. That said, it’s worth remembering that, with or without Brexit, Littlejohn has been squeezing stuff like this out of his anger-tightened sphincter into the eager maw of the Mail’s lavatory bowl for 30 years, on and off. In fact, the kind of aggressive victimhood of a ‘lost country’ his writing exemplifies is a big part of what drove the leave vote. It’s not even the first time he has posited a “coup staged by remainers” – he did so as recently as October 2022 – despite having assured his readers in January 2021 that Brexit was “all over bar the shouting”. You couldn’t make it up, to coin a phrase.
Whilst Littlejohn fulminates, other members of the Brexiter commentariat have adopted a more listless and resigned attitude to how the glorious possibilities of Brexit have been squandered. For example, Fred de Fossard of the Legatum Institute wearily bemoans (£) the government’s failure to pursue a deregulatory agenda, though that was never the automatic consequence even of hard Brexit, and laments the forthcoming introduction of import controls, which was. The “climbdown” on Retained EU Law is also dolefully recounted (“the less said about [it] the better”, de Fossard sighs), but with no recognition of why that, or any of the other foregone ‘opportunities’, have failed to materialize. Indeed, scratch the surface and the explanation offered is a more urbane version of Littlejohn’s, whereby “our entrenched bureaucracy ensures [that voters always] get the same Left-wing, Europhile outcomes”. As a result, “the whole concept of Brexit” is now imperilled, the sometime special adviser to Jacob Rees-Mogg glumly concludes.
Brexit’s last defences
Whether blamed on betrayal, or just lack of political will, these responses at least acknowledge that Brexit hasn’t been a success. But some Brexiters aren’t ready to accept that (and never will be). Instead, individual pieces of economic good news are still trumpeted as evidence that it has been triumph, a recent example being the thuggish Tory MP Lee Anderson's boast that the reported decision by Tata to build a gigafactory in Britain rather than Spain is “another Brexit bonus”. The obvious problem is that something can only be a Brexit benefit if it couldn’t or wouldn’t have happened without Brexit, which isn’t the case in this example. And, of course, even where there are any such benefits, they need to be set against the many costs to justify Brexit as a success overall.
It’s also typical of such claims to invoke a strawman that ‘remainers said there would be no more investment after Brexit’ or ‘remainers said there’d be no more trade with the EU after Brexit’, or the slightly different one that ‘remainers blame all Britain’s economic problems on Brexit’. Needless to say, no serious analyst has ever suggested such things, but even if they had then the most it would mean is that Brexit hasn’t been as bad as some said it would be, or that it may not have been a success, but at least it hasn’t been a failure.
For example, in a Telegraph article (£) the pro-Brexit economist Julian Jessop discusses the impact of Brexit on the services sector. It’s headlined as a “success story”, but the content is less ebullient. “If one thinks back to all the apocalyptic claims made by Remainers, our services industry should be a smoking ruin by now”, he says, conjuring up “doomsday predictions”. But worry not, for “the overall impact has been far less than feared”. It’s hardly an inspiring defence. To be fair, Jessop recognizes this, saying “it is not enough just to say that Brexit has been less damaging than expected. It was supposed to benefit the City. But this is a process.” However, this is just another of the stock defences: the benefits are always just over the horizon.
Still less compelling is the current fashion for comparing UK economic performance with that of Germany (£), or perhaps a wider selection of EU countries (£), selected over this or that timeframe, to argue that the UK’s is no worse, and perhaps slightly better. That fashion seems to have arisen because the IMF, its forecasts suddenly now in favour with the Brexiters who usually disparage them, upgraded its 2023 forecast for the UK from a 0.3% contraction to a 0.4% expansion, whilst forecasting the German economy to shrink by 0.1%.
Even if it made sense to ascribe these (rather negligible) differences to Brexit, it would not be much of an argument because, again, Brexit wasn’t undertaken on the basis that it wouldn’t be a failure but that it would be positively advantageous. But, in any case, it doesn’t make any sense. Whether in the EU or not, the UK’s economy, like any member state, fluctuates at different times and for sometimes different reasons to that of Germany (or any other individual country). In particular, Germany’s current economic difficulties are very obviously connected to its rapid diversification from over-dependence on Russian energy. So, except as a kind of schoolyard ‘what about you?’ taunt, such comparisons tell us nothing one way or the other about Brexit.
The key comparisons are between Brexit UK and how the UK would have performed without Brexit. That inevitably involves a counterfactual model, and the latest version of the best-known such model, the Springford CER ‘doppelgänger’, shows that by June 2022 the UK GDP was 5.5% lower than it would have been without Brexit. That may overestimate the damage or may underestimate it. But (to the best of my knowledge) neither the government nor any of the pro-Brexit economists have ever produced a comparable counterfactual model showing Brexit to have been economically beneficial to the UK. So on this key test there is, at the very least, no evidence of Brexit being an economic success.
What about Labour?
With Brexiters now engaged in the last stages of their attempt to deny Brexit has failed, and the latest stages of developing fantasies about why it has failed, and with the Sunak government in the throes of a protracted death, attention is increasingly turning to the prospects of a Labour administration. Interestingly, Brexiter fears for what that will bring are diametrically opposite to those of many erstwhile remainers. At least some Brexiters are convinced that Labour has “a secret 10-year plan to take Britain back into the EU” (£), whereas some remainers believe that there is no difference at all between Labour and Tory approaches to Brexit. The reality is more complex than either view allows.
Although by definition it’s unprovable either way, it’s absurd to think that Starmer has a ‘secret plan’ to re-join the EU. There’s literally no evidence for it, so Brexiters are wrong and rejoiners are right about that. However, it’s true that the logic of Labour’s position on Brexit – everything it says about the damage of it – points in the direction of eventually re-joining. So, forgetting any idea of a secret plan, the Brexiters are right to suspect that this would be the direction of travel for Labour (though they may be wrong that it will be the point of arrival), and re-joiners are wrong to dismiss the possibility of it going in that direction (though they may be right that it won’t be the point of arrival).
Remainer or re-joiner scepticism about Labour’s intentions was reinforced this week by Keir Starmer’s Express article, in which he again re-iterated Labour’s policy of no return to the EU, single market or customs union, but of wanting to improve the existing UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Most strikingly, and to many remainers most reprehensibly, he referred to the inadequate nature of that deal as meaning that “our European friends and competitors are not just eating our lunch – they’re nicking our dinner money as well”.
The clue to understanding this article is the polling figures I referred to earlier. It was written for the three-quarters of the 37% of Leave voters who believe Brexit has failed because of the way it has been implemented. More particularly, it was written for the erstwhile and potential Labour voters within that group who may be minded to blame that on the Tories. That is an important segment of voters for Labour to speak to, and the Express is a good place to reach it, with the pitch being based on tapping into, but subverting, the narrative of Brexit betrayal. The language may have been ugly and grating, but politics can be a dirty business, or at least it is for those who value winning above high-mindedness.
Of course, there is a tactical dilemma for Labour: in making its appeal to such voters it may lose support elsewhere (£), and there’s some polling evidence that this is happening. But the delicate calculation is presumably that many who respond to things like the Express article by angrily saying ‘I’ll never vote for Labour now’ will, when it comes to it, do so. Or, if not, that the votes lost will be in constituencies where the outcome isn’t affected, whilst those gained prove decisive in other seats. Again, it’s all grubby stuff for the squeamish, but perhaps they should reflect that after fourteen years in opposition squeamishness isn’t something Labour can afford to indulge.
Beneath Labour’s tactics
Tactics aside, what matters is what lies beneath. In his discussion of Starmer’s article, Ian Dunt, who has been consistently acute in his analysis of Brexit from the start, and often very critical of Labour, argues that “in truth, Labour’s Brexit position is far more nuanced, and much more radical, than it first appears. It has been carefully couched in the language of Brexit defence, but the proposals themselves promise a return to a much closer relationship with the Continent. It is the start of a journey back to Europe.”
The key word here is “journey” or, as I’ve put it, ‘direction of travel’. Starmer is cautiously going with the grain of public opinion, with a poll this week suggesting that 53% of voters favour ‘closer ties’ with the EU, and even in strongly vote-leaving areas a plurality doing so. What they mean by it is undoubtedly varied, but a first-term Labour government can be expected to push its possible meanings to the maximum it could without breaking manifesto commitments or suffering too much electoral kickback.
For an important example of what this would mean, in a footnote to my previous post I suggested that the seemingly arcane difference between Swiss-style ‘dynamic alignment’ and New Zealand-style ‘regulatory equivalence’ in Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) standards might become an issue under a Labour government, since Labour’s apparently preferred policy of a New Zealand-style deal had already been rejected by the EU, whilst a Swiss-style deal had been ruled out by Starmer.
I meant that we might hear more about this in years to come, so it was much to my amusement that, just a few hours later, and presumably coincidentally, the Telegraph carried a report (£) ‘revealing’ this EU rejection of a New Zealand-style deal and, with almost heart-stopping irony, quoting David Frost castigating Starmer for “trying to sell unnegotiable fantasy proposals to voters”. In a mirror-image of that critique, some remainers, too, leapt on this report as evidence that Starmer was just reproducing the impossibilities of “cakeism”.
But it is easy to imagine Labour in power, having pledged in their manifesto to negotiate a ‘veterinary agreement with the EU’, agreeing dynamic alignment with the EU. That isn’t cakeism, as it has already been offered by the EU, and the fact that Starmer has previously said he doesn’t want a Swiss-style deal will be irrelevant as he has also said he wants a ‘bespoke deal’ and, almost by definition, any UK-EU deal will be that. Will electors who support ‘closer ties with the EU’ object? Highly unlikely. And if there is a ‘bespoke UK-EU’ SPS dynamic alignment deal then it means the hard Brexit ECJ red line will have been comprehensively breached, allowing it to be breached in all manner of other ways, in relation to trade, security, and participation in various programmes and agencies.
Beneath Labour’s hints
Much of this has already been hinted at by the public statements of Starmer and other senior Labour politicians, including Rachel Reeves and David Lammy. A much more detailed set of proposals for what it could mean in practice was published this week by the UK Trade and Business Commission, an unofficial but highly professional grouping of cross-party MPs, business people and experts. Their report, which is based on extensive evidence-gathering from a huge range of stakeholders and experts, contains 114 recommendations. So far as I can see, all of them are compatible with Labour’s stated position and so the report amounts to a blueprint of how to operationalize that position.
Some, though by no means all, of this entails EU agreement, and there are obviously important questions about whether that would be forthcoming, and a particularly valid question about the extent to which Labour are putting too much reliance on using the scheduled 2026 TCA review as an occasion for a more substantial re-negotiation. It certainly isn’t automatically entailed by the review. However, in his recent evidence to the European Parliament, Anton Spisak, a Brexit expert at the Tony Blair Institute, urges that both the EU and the UK would be wise to use it in that way, so as to “begin a more strategic discussion”.
It is at least possible that this view will prevail and, of course, it will still entail negotiation, but much that could have been negotiated had it not been for the Frost-Johnson ‘sovereignty’ line will become possible. Nor is the TCA review the only game in town. The European Political Community (EPoC), established last year and which had its second meeting yesterday, offers the UK a new vehicle for dialogue and cooperation with the rest of the European continent. How it develops remains to be seen but, with enthusiastic and effective participation, which would be unlike Sunak’s approach to it but consistent with Labour’s stated policies, the UK could at the least repair some of the relational and reputational damage of Brexit. Potentially, there would be more substantive outcomes.
All of this could be done without violating Labour’s red lines on rejoining the EU, the single market or the customs union. Those red lines don’t prematurely box Labour into a corner because there’s just no way that, simply from an EU perspective, the UK re-joining is viable in the timeframe of the next parliament: we’re in that corner anyway. Equally, going as far as possible within those red lines wouldn’t be ‘re-joining by stealth’ since there would be no re-joining unless there was a referendum. It would all be subsumed within the rubric of ‘closer ties’ and ‘co-operation’, potentially leading to such a referendum, perhaps in Labour’s second term, as Dunt suggests.
This is exactly what Brexiters fear, which is also why the hostility of some remainers/ rejoiners to Labour’s approach is misjudged. At the very least, even if it never gets to that point, the ameliorations Labour are likely to enact will be somewhat better than the current situation, and much better than would be the case if the Tories were re-elected and the Brexit Ultras got their way.
The long road ahead
This isn’t to disown what I said In a recent post, where I argued that the strategic problems posed by the failure of Brexit are not “addressed by Labour’s pledge to make Brexit work, since the solutions don’t exist within the modest tinkering with Brexit that Starmer has committed to. Not until the diagnosis that Brexit is a failure is accompanied by realism and honesty about the causes and solutions can it be addressed”. It’s true that even if what I’ve said about Labour’s position today is right it still fails to meet this test, but the issue is the process and timescale for getting to that point. It is clear that this is going to take some time, so the question is whether a Labour government would take use closer to or further from that point.
On this, to quote Ian Dunt again, “if you put aside the tedious and unconvincing hardline rhetoric, a clear picture emerges. Brexit is collapsing. And Britain is, slowly but surely, drifting back to Europe”. It’s also true that the longer this drift takes, the more damage that will accrue in the meantime. That’s undeniable, even if Labour isn’t able to admit it. But it presumably goes without saying, at least to readers of this blog, that Brexit was a seismic event, so the political road to rebuilding from the earthquake is going to be arduous and slow. Opinion polls showing increasing national regret are vital, but they are a long way from being enough. Like it or not, we’re still barely on the first step of that road but, that being so, the worst thing we can do is refuse to take it because it is only a step. Equally, it’s perfectly right to keep pushing for the next steps, and necessary, too, if they are to be taken.
Showing posts with label Ian Dunt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ian Dunt. Show all posts
Friday, 2 June 2023
Friday, 14 February 2020
The sound of silence
We’re in a strange kind of limbo period in which the UK has left the EU, and the Transition Period has started, and yet the crucial talks about future terms have not yet begun and won’t do so until March. That gives the impression that nothing much is happening with Brexit for, as Luke McGee of CNN observes, the government is “eerily quiet on the single most important issue facing the United Kingdom in 2020”. And what little is being said has largely been drowned out by the cabinet reshuffle, HS2 and other stories.
An eloquent silence
Yet that silence, in its own way, gives and is intended to give a message. I wrote in my previous post about Boris Johnson’s childish refusal to use the word Brexit any more, a stance confirmed by the now former Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom in a visit to Sunderland this week. “That was something that happened”, she rather peculiarly said when asked, rather as if, to use a comparison I’ve made before, Brexit had been an embarrassing episode at last year’s office party. It must have been rather deflating for the Sunderland voters, many of whom may have wanted to celebrate that which they are no longer supposed to mention.
But, of course, there is a very serious side to this. Invoking Orwell, both Jonathan Lis and Ian Dunt have recently written articles about how a wholesale revision of language is underway which is expressly designed to prevent scrutiny and accountability. Whatever may or may not happen now is to be decoupled from Brexit. It is hardly a new political technique, but it is being deployed with a rapidity, ruthlessness and shamelessness that is chilling.
And yet this is developing into the latest of the many paradoxes that Brexit has created. For at the same time as attempting to relegate Brexit to distant memory, the government is also claiming all kinds of benefits from “having left the EU”. Thus Health Secretary Matt Hancock explained this week that it would allow Britain to train or re-train many new medical staff (the Daily Express, where his article was published, was rather off-message in its headline by invoking the B-word).
It was not explained how the EU had prevented this, nor whether it would compensate for the exodus of EU staff from the NHS. But the ‘now we’ve left the EU’ formulation doesn’t require any causal link to be claimed. If Brexit is something that ‘has happened’, well, this announcement is something which is ‘now happening’. If readers fill in the blanks and ascribe it to Brexit – or headline writers do it for them - that’s a matter for them.
“Traders’ wines and olive oils …”
More complex was this week’s announcement of a consultation exercise about the establishment of free ports (the policy itself is not new and was announced last August). These are areas, not necessarily on the coast, where normal tax, customs checks and trade tariff rules are suspended so goods can be imported, stored, processed or worked on, and then re-exported or sold in the domestic market (at which point any relevant tariffs would apply).
Free ports have long been claimed by Johnson and many Brexit ideologues on the free market right as one of the great prizes of Brexit. The government’s consultation document suggests as much. It begins with some airy guff about how “in the Ancient World, Greek and Roman ships - piled high with traders’ wines and olive oils – found safe harbour in the Free Port of Delos” (p.5). That language is cringe-making but it is not accidental, being all of a piece with the cod history of so much Brexiter rhetoric, as if cutters bearing spices rather than container ships bearing crankshafts were at stake, and Brexit was a remake of The Onedin Line.
There is more in this woeful vein, but then it gets to the point. Free ports (or freeports, as the document has it) are all about “the opportunities that leaving the EU brings” (p.8). The clear suggestion is that the EU prohibits free ports. That turns out not to be true. They exist in the EU and existed in the UK until 2012, at which point the UK allowed the relevant UK legislation to lapse.
This led to much adverse comment on social media that the government was lying but matters are more complex than that. The language being used is very slippery – including that of the incoming Chancellor Rishi Sunak - which makes it hard to hold on to what exactly is being claimed. But whilst free ports are allowed by the EU, they are circumscribed by EU Law as to how they can operate, including by state aid regulations (because, for example, certain sorts of tax incentives would amount to subsidies) and it was this, arguably, that led to the UK’s decision not to continue with them.
Beneath the rhetoric
So from that point of view the government is being half-truthful in suggesting that post-Brexit British free ports could be different from those within the EU (although they would not be a complete free-for-all in that WTO rules, so loved by Brexiters, create some restrictions). But nested within that are some other issues. The obvious one is that it reveals that what is really at issue here is not free ports per se but whether or not Britain agrees to the Level Playing Field (LPF, including state aid rules) which would prevent this divergence from EU free port regulations.
Since agreeing to LPF is one of the (this week hardening) EU red lines for doing a trade deal, it’s not unduly cynical to think that if the negotiations founder for that reason, one justification the government will give for not making a deal is that it will preclude these supposedly wonderful British free ports, especially as according to the consultation document free ports are to be a “cornerstone” of the government’s national ‘levelling up’ policy and, thus, the delivery of ‘the people’s priorities’.
That’s questionable because according to Sussex University’s highly respected UK Trade Policy Observatory the economic case for free ports is debatable anyway, and numerous criticisms of their role in lowering labour standards and promoting tax evasion and money laundering have been made. And where there are examples of successful free ports they do not really translate to the British context (£). Moreover, the government proposals are actually a hybrid of various kinds of policy, including regional regeneration which is not seen as a rationale for free ports even by their advocates, and enterprise zones which exist anyway.
I’ve focused on the free ports example because it has been current this week, and because it may come to have an importance in its own right, but also because it is illustrative of the tangle of language which has the effect, and probably the intention, of bamboozling people. Hence the half-true implication that this is new freedom for Britain, and the disguised truth that what is new about it is not having to adhere to regulatory restrictions which, if explained, many might prefer to keep, and the tendentious claims for the benefits.
That itself is consonant with the way, as argued in my previous post, that the government remains within Brexit campaign mode. For it is very much like the linguistic chicanery of ‘Turkey is joining the EU’, defended on the grounds that it was true that, in principle, there was an ongoing process for Turkish accession whilst carrying the untrue implication that accession was an accomplished and imminent fact. Likewise, the “let’s spend” £350M a week on the NHS slogan was defended on the basis that this was merely a ‘suggestion’ for what could happen.
Fortunately, the English love a queue
However, in one respect at least the government did start talking about the practical realities of Brexit – though it was not generally reported as the headline story it should have been - and it turns out that these are not so liberating after all.
As with free ports, it was dressed up in bracing terms – the Border Delivery Group, no less – beneath which lay the stark truth that as of next January there will be border checks on goods coming into Great Britain* from the EU, whether or not there is a trade deal, as well as tariffs charged if there is no trade deal. There were promises of ‘smart border’ arrangements by 2025, but that’s a long way off, most experts think them unlikely to be ready that soon and, anyway, they do not mean an end to customs formalities.
At one level, such border controls have been the obvious implication of Brexit ever since it was decided that this meant the hard Brexit of a trade deal or the even harder one of no trade deal at all. Yet that reality had been obscured by all the gaslighting about lack of checks on the Swiss border, the endless promises of ‘frictionless trade’ continuing and fanciful claims of ‘alternative arrangements’ to deliver this (most often with reference to the erstwhile Irish land border but, by extension, to be used at all EU-UK borders).
Everyone who knew anything about it knew that this was nonsense but, extraordinarily, this week was the first time that any high-profile official announcement of the reality of border checks in the UK was made. In the preparation for a no-deal Brexit, the plan had been that, whilst it was accepted that there would be EU tariffs and checks on UK exports to the EU, there would be almost none on goods moving from the EU to the UK.
That was always a strange idea anyway (giving EU exporters a huge advantage over UK exporters), but was intended as a temporary measure, at least in the first instance**, born of a recognition that there was insufficient time to build the necessary customs infrastructure in the UK. For similar reasons, no-deal planning had waived or reduced many of the normal border formalities but with this week’s announcement these, too, will now be put in place by the end of December.
It remains an open question whether the ten months or so until then will be sufficient and, if not, there are likely to be serious queues at the main ports (‘unfree ports’, perhaps). But, more importantly in the long-run, it spells out the very clear fact that Brexit is going to put an end to businesses running EU-UK just-in-time supply chains, as well as adding substantially to the costs of other businesses which trade across the new border.
Conceivably, it is intended as a negotiating ploy designed to make ‘German car makers’ and the like realize the consequences of there being no trade deal (if so, Brexiters have learned nothing). But it looks more like an acceptance that the no trade deal scenario is increasingly likely and, in any case, that there is no trade deal which can re-create the frictionless trade of single market and customs union membership. Zero tariffs does not mean zero checks and zero customs formalities – all of which mean friction and also mean increased business costs.
On the other hand, if there is no trade deal and import tariffs apply, an obvious question to ask is what tariff rates Britain will be applying. Alas, there is no answer to that since it also emerged this week that it has not yet been decided (£). This is a peculiar situation for a nation seeking, and desperately needing, to make trade deals not just with the EU but around the world. After all, how can such negotiation proceed if the other party does not know the terms that would apply without a deal being struck?
That is part of a more general picture of lack of preparedness which is one reason why leading American officials to say that a trade deal with the UK is now a lower priority for the US than one with the EU. We’re no longer ‘first in the queue’ apparently. That may explain why Brexiter MPs like Iain Duncan Smith are spearheading opposition to the government’s use of Huawei – perhaps they have belatedly realised that the realities of international trade talks entail power plays that make a mockery of their windy rhetoric about ‘taking back control’.
Bait and switch
Businesses now have a greater sense of what the government intends to inflict on their trade with the EU and, to some extent, that at least has the benefit of increased clarity. But they have warned, again, what this will mean for product availability and prices. That will have no cut-through with either the government or much of the public, of course, having already been discounted as Project Fear. The calculation appears to be that there is no political price to be paid for having spent years promising sunny uplands and then delivering dank swamps. Such a bait and switch is the oldest technique in the conman’s repertoire, but it does risk the wrath of disgruntled punters.
Much will depend upon exactly what damage occurs and how quickly, and whether enough people make the connections. Will they, for example, remember cases such as the boss of Norton, the British motorbike firm that went into receivership this week citing Brexit as one reason, saying in 2018 that Britain “would thrive outside the EU” and urging the government to get Brexit done? Or, if they face shortages and price increases because of border delays and costs, will they recall the warnings that were dismissed as Project Fear?
More generally, will enough people remember that Michael Gove, who made the announcement of the new border controls this week, was the same person who in 2016 sold them the bogus Vote Leave campaign line that there “is a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey … after we vote to leave we will remain in the zone”?
The depressing thing is that they probably won’t, the more so if the government is successful in persuading people that Brexit was something ‘that happened’, rather than something that is happening, and which both in principle and in form the Prime Minister and other leading ministers made happen.
This is why it is important – especially in the media - to keep challenging the linguistic contortions, and to keep comparing the promises with the outcomes. For although it may seem that both rationality and honesty have now disappeared from our politics that is not inevitable, and will only become so if we all drop the attempt to keep them present.
*The arrangements for Northern Ireland will, of course, be different. How these will work remains unclear and appears to have experts baffled.
**I say ‘in the first instance’ because, whilst the plans were indeed billed as ‘temporary’, on the wilder fringes of Brexit debate there are some influential figures who do propose the unilateral abolition of (all) import tariffs by the UK. Apart from the devastation this would cause British manufacturing and agriculture, such an approach would, of course, make negotiating trade deals with other countries rather difficult. For (whilst trade deals aren’t just about tariffs) why should they remove tariffs on UK goods if the UK has already removed tariffs on theirs?
An eloquent silence
Yet that silence, in its own way, gives and is intended to give a message. I wrote in my previous post about Boris Johnson’s childish refusal to use the word Brexit any more, a stance confirmed by the now former Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom in a visit to Sunderland this week. “That was something that happened”, she rather peculiarly said when asked, rather as if, to use a comparison I’ve made before, Brexit had been an embarrassing episode at last year’s office party. It must have been rather deflating for the Sunderland voters, many of whom may have wanted to celebrate that which they are no longer supposed to mention.
But, of course, there is a very serious side to this. Invoking Orwell, both Jonathan Lis and Ian Dunt have recently written articles about how a wholesale revision of language is underway which is expressly designed to prevent scrutiny and accountability. Whatever may or may not happen now is to be decoupled from Brexit. It is hardly a new political technique, but it is being deployed with a rapidity, ruthlessness and shamelessness that is chilling.
And yet this is developing into the latest of the many paradoxes that Brexit has created. For at the same time as attempting to relegate Brexit to distant memory, the government is also claiming all kinds of benefits from “having left the EU”. Thus Health Secretary Matt Hancock explained this week that it would allow Britain to train or re-train many new medical staff (the Daily Express, where his article was published, was rather off-message in its headline by invoking the B-word).
It was not explained how the EU had prevented this, nor whether it would compensate for the exodus of EU staff from the NHS. But the ‘now we’ve left the EU’ formulation doesn’t require any causal link to be claimed. If Brexit is something that ‘has happened’, well, this announcement is something which is ‘now happening’. If readers fill in the blanks and ascribe it to Brexit – or headline writers do it for them - that’s a matter for them.
“Traders’ wines and olive oils …”
More complex was this week’s announcement of a consultation exercise about the establishment of free ports (the policy itself is not new and was announced last August). These are areas, not necessarily on the coast, where normal tax, customs checks and trade tariff rules are suspended so goods can be imported, stored, processed or worked on, and then re-exported or sold in the domestic market (at which point any relevant tariffs would apply).
Free ports have long been claimed by Johnson and many Brexit ideologues on the free market right as one of the great prizes of Brexit. The government’s consultation document suggests as much. It begins with some airy guff about how “in the Ancient World, Greek and Roman ships - piled high with traders’ wines and olive oils – found safe harbour in the Free Port of Delos” (p.5). That language is cringe-making but it is not accidental, being all of a piece with the cod history of so much Brexiter rhetoric, as if cutters bearing spices rather than container ships bearing crankshafts were at stake, and Brexit was a remake of The Onedin Line.
There is more in this woeful vein, but then it gets to the point. Free ports (or freeports, as the document has it) are all about “the opportunities that leaving the EU brings” (p.8). The clear suggestion is that the EU prohibits free ports. That turns out not to be true. They exist in the EU and existed in the UK until 2012, at which point the UK allowed the relevant UK legislation to lapse.
This led to much adverse comment on social media that the government was lying but matters are more complex than that. The language being used is very slippery – including that of the incoming Chancellor Rishi Sunak - which makes it hard to hold on to what exactly is being claimed. But whilst free ports are allowed by the EU, they are circumscribed by EU Law as to how they can operate, including by state aid regulations (because, for example, certain sorts of tax incentives would amount to subsidies) and it was this, arguably, that led to the UK’s decision not to continue with them.
Beneath the rhetoric
So from that point of view the government is being half-truthful in suggesting that post-Brexit British free ports could be different from those within the EU (although they would not be a complete free-for-all in that WTO rules, so loved by Brexiters, create some restrictions). But nested within that are some other issues. The obvious one is that it reveals that what is really at issue here is not free ports per se but whether or not Britain agrees to the Level Playing Field (LPF, including state aid rules) which would prevent this divergence from EU free port regulations.
Since agreeing to LPF is one of the (this week hardening) EU red lines for doing a trade deal, it’s not unduly cynical to think that if the negotiations founder for that reason, one justification the government will give for not making a deal is that it will preclude these supposedly wonderful British free ports, especially as according to the consultation document free ports are to be a “cornerstone” of the government’s national ‘levelling up’ policy and, thus, the delivery of ‘the people’s priorities’.
That’s questionable because according to Sussex University’s highly respected UK Trade Policy Observatory the economic case for free ports is debatable anyway, and numerous criticisms of their role in lowering labour standards and promoting tax evasion and money laundering have been made. And where there are examples of successful free ports they do not really translate to the British context (£). Moreover, the government proposals are actually a hybrid of various kinds of policy, including regional regeneration which is not seen as a rationale for free ports even by their advocates, and enterprise zones which exist anyway.
I’ve focused on the free ports example because it has been current this week, and because it may come to have an importance in its own right, but also because it is illustrative of the tangle of language which has the effect, and probably the intention, of bamboozling people. Hence the half-true implication that this is new freedom for Britain, and the disguised truth that what is new about it is not having to adhere to regulatory restrictions which, if explained, many might prefer to keep, and the tendentious claims for the benefits.
That itself is consonant with the way, as argued in my previous post, that the government remains within Brexit campaign mode. For it is very much like the linguistic chicanery of ‘Turkey is joining the EU’, defended on the grounds that it was true that, in principle, there was an ongoing process for Turkish accession whilst carrying the untrue implication that accession was an accomplished and imminent fact. Likewise, the “let’s spend” £350M a week on the NHS slogan was defended on the basis that this was merely a ‘suggestion’ for what could happen.
Fortunately, the English love a queue
However, in one respect at least the government did start talking about the practical realities of Brexit – though it was not generally reported as the headline story it should have been - and it turns out that these are not so liberating after all.
As with free ports, it was dressed up in bracing terms – the Border Delivery Group, no less – beneath which lay the stark truth that as of next January there will be border checks on goods coming into Great Britain* from the EU, whether or not there is a trade deal, as well as tariffs charged if there is no trade deal. There were promises of ‘smart border’ arrangements by 2025, but that’s a long way off, most experts think them unlikely to be ready that soon and, anyway, they do not mean an end to customs formalities.
At one level, such border controls have been the obvious implication of Brexit ever since it was decided that this meant the hard Brexit of a trade deal or the even harder one of no trade deal at all. Yet that reality had been obscured by all the gaslighting about lack of checks on the Swiss border, the endless promises of ‘frictionless trade’ continuing and fanciful claims of ‘alternative arrangements’ to deliver this (most often with reference to the erstwhile Irish land border but, by extension, to be used at all EU-UK borders).
Everyone who knew anything about it knew that this was nonsense but, extraordinarily, this week was the first time that any high-profile official announcement of the reality of border checks in the UK was made. In the preparation for a no-deal Brexit, the plan had been that, whilst it was accepted that there would be EU tariffs and checks on UK exports to the EU, there would be almost none on goods moving from the EU to the UK.
That was always a strange idea anyway (giving EU exporters a huge advantage over UK exporters), but was intended as a temporary measure, at least in the first instance**, born of a recognition that there was insufficient time to build the necessary customs infrastructure in the UK. For similar reasons, no-deal planning had waived or reduced many of the normal border formalities but with this week’s announcement these, too, will now be put in place by the end of December.
It remains an open question whether the ten months or so until then will be sufficient and, if not, there are likely to be serious queues at the main ports (‘unfree ports’, perhaps). But, more importantly in the long-run, it spells out the very clear fact that Brexit is going to put an end to businesses running EU-UK just-in-time supply chains, as well as adding substantially to the costs of other businesses which trade across the new border.
Conceivably, it is intended as a negotiating ploy designed to make ‘German car makers’ and the like realize the consequences of there being no trade deal (if so, Brexiters have learned nothing). But it looks more like an acceptance that the no trade deal scenario is increasingly likely and, in any case, that there is no trade deal which can re-create the frictionless trade of single market and customs union membership. Zero tariffs does not mean zero checks and zero customs formalities – all of which mean friction and also mean increased business costs.
On the other hand, if there is no trade deal and import tariffs apply, an obvious question to ask is what tariff rates Britain will be applying. Alas, there is no answer to that since it also emerged this week that it has not yet been decided (£). This is a peculiar situation for a nation seeking, and desperately needing, to make trade deals not just with the EU but around the world. After all, how can such negotiation proceed if the other party does not know the terms that would apply without a deal being struck?
That is part of a more general picture of lack of preparedness which is one reason why leading American officials to say that a trade deal with the UK is now a lower priority for the US than one with the EU. We’re no longer ‘first in the queue’ apparently. That may explain why Brexiter MPs like Iain Duncan Smith are spearheading opposition to the government’s use of Huawei – perhaps they have belatedly realised that the realities of international trade talks entail power plays that make a mockery of their windy rhetoric about ‘taking back control’.
Bait and switch
Businesses now have a greater sense of what the government intends to inflict on their trade with the EU and, to some extent, that at least has the benefit of increased clarity. But they have warned, again, what this will mean for product availability and prices. That will have no cut-through with either the government or much of the public, of course, having already been discounted as Project Fear. The calculation appears to be that there is no political price to be paid for having spent years promising sunny uplands and then delivering dank swamps. Such a bait and switch is the oldest technique in the conman’s repertoire, but it does risk the wrath of disgruntled punters.
Much will depend upon exactly what damage occurs and how quickly, and whether enough people make the connections. Will they, for example, remember cases such as the boss of Norton, the British motorbike firm that went into receivership this week citing Brexit as one reason, saying in 2018 that Britain “would thrive outside the EU” and urging the government to get Brexit done? Or, if they face shortages and price increases because of border delays and costs, will they recall the warnings that were dismissed as Project Fear?
More generally, will enough people remember that Michael Gove, who made the announcement of the new border controls this week, was the same person who in 2016 sold them the bogus Vote Leave campaign line that there “is a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey … after we vote to leave we will remain in the zone”?
The depressing thing is that they probably won’t, the more so if the government is successful in persuading people that Brexit was something ‘that happened’, rather than something that is happening, and which both in principle and in form the Prime Minister and other leading ministers made happen.
This is why it is important – especially in the media - to keep challenging the linguistic contortions, and to keep comparing the promises with the outcomes. For although it may seem that both rationality and honesty have now disappeared from our politics that is not inevitable, and will only become so if we all drop the attempt to keep them present.
*The arrangements for Northern Ireland will, of course, be different. How these will work remains unclear and appears to have experts baffled.
**I say ‘in the first instance’ because, whilst the plans were indeed billed as ‘temporary’, on the wilder fringes of Brexit debate there are some influential figures who do propose the unilateral abolition of (all) import tariffs by the UK. Apart from the devastation this would cause British manufacturing and agriculture, such an approach would, of course, make negotiating trade deals with other countries rather difficult. For (whilst trade deals aren’t just about tariffs) why should they remove tariffs on UK goods if the UK has already removed tariffs on theirs?
Wednesday, 30 October 2019
The coming election
Since my
previous post, the ‘do or die’ deadline of 31 October has
been abandoned without any doing or dying, or any national
‘explosion’, in prospect. The EU have granted an extension until the
end of January. Any further progress with the Withdrawal Agreement Bill has
been ruled out. And MPs have agreed that a General Election will be held on
12 December. These rather bland sentences gloss over the days of anguish, and
acres of speculation and comment, that lie beneath them. But, however arrived
at, we are now entering a new and potentially decisive phase of the Brexit
saga.
As I’ve argued before, an election is currently the only realistic, and very possibly the last, chance of reversing Brexit, though doing so will, in Ian Dunt’s words, be “the most uphill, fraught, emotional, gruelling political battle many remainers will ever have faced”. It is certainly not the most rational route to do so – or, for that matter, to deliver Brexit. That would be a referendum, which unlike an election would focus solely on the question at hand: whether to proceed on the basis of Johnson’s deal or to abandon Brexit, and, unlike a ‘first past the post’ vote, would do so on the basis of a majority of the population.
But it has been clear for a while now that there is simply no majority in parliament for holding such a referendum. Perhaps there could, or should, have been at some point – for example via a Government of National Unity, or a Kyle-Wilson style amendment to a Meaningful Vote – but all attempts to do so have foundered. This means that ever since the Withdrawal Amendment Bill (WAB) passed its second reading the writing has been on the wall for remain. With perseverance, a perhaps amended version of that would have eventually passed into law and Brexit would be a done deal.
Some remainers have been shocked and angered by the LibDem and SNP decision to push for an election, but from a remain perspective this was unquestionably the right tactic. By contrast, Corbyn made a tactical error in having to be dragged, not kicking and screaming so much as umming and aahing, to support it. Handled differently, the election could have been presented as something forced on Johnson rather than, as has happened, achieved by him.
Johnson’s foolish gamble
That, however, will soon be forgotten and is a minor error compared with the much greater one that Johnson – or more likely Cummings - has made. For if the writing was on the wall for remain after the WAB passed second reading it was surely a colossal mistake for him not to push on, agree a revised timetable, get his deal passed and then hold an election having ‘delivered’ Brexit after which he could drop any amendments that had been made.
Perhaps future historians will uncover the reason. I suspect the truth is that it was another example of Cummings’ overweening but counter-productive machismo. The only explanation that has been put forward is that the alliance that got the second reading passed was deemed too fragile to stay the course. It would have been tight, but I doubt that’s true. With nifty footwork Brexit was there for the taking and Johnson dropped it (just as the ERG Spartans did when they refused to back May’s deal).
We’ll never know whether that is true now. And, of course, the verdict of historians will depend on the outcome of this election. If he wins outright, especially if substantially, then Johnson will be feted as a master strategist. History is, as they say, written by the victors. For the time being, as Professor Glen O’Hara of Oxford Brookes University argues, the tactic is a huge gamble. It is already the conventional wisdom that, despite the Conservatives lead in the opinion polls, the result is highly unpredictable.
How single-minded will remainers be?
One key determinant of the outcome will be the extent to which remainers will make remain their sole priority to the extent of voting tactically for whoever is the most conducive candidate in their constituency (this is also likely to make national opinion polls misleading). Even without a formal Remain Alliance, nowadays it is much easier for individuals to do this via various websites. But such committed remainers will have to be determined enough to cast their votes in ways they may find deeply repellent.
In particular, especially in England, some Labour remainers are going to have to vote LibDem despite their memory of the Coalition government’s Austerity policies. Some LibDem and Conservative remainers are going to have to vote Labour, despite its hopeless dithering and ambiguity about Brexit over these last three years, and despite what they may think of Corbyn and Labour in other respects.
For, to be clear, the only realistic route to remain is via a Labour government, cajoled and supported by other parties, holding another referendum which remain might then win (if we get to that point, the remain campaign is going to have to get its act together, and quickly). But this is only scenario one of the six main scenarios for the election result, as sketched by Joe Owen of the Institute for Government, and not by any means the most likely.
What will the Brexit Party do?
The other key determinant is what the Brexit Party do. At the time of writing that is not clear. Johnson’s Achilles Heel is that repeated, high-profile, central pledge to have left the EU come what may on 31 October. If Farage runs a full-on campaign against the Tories for having ‘betrayed Brexit’ then he is going to hurt the Tories, and hurt them badly, losing them seats without gaining many, if any, himself. That will be good for remain, so logic would suggest that Farage does not do so (but logic may play little part, especially given Farage’s egotistical character and the fanatical nature of his supporters).
By contrast, any kind of pact, either nationally or locally, between the Tories and the Brexit Party will therefore make Brexit more likely, and, as for remainers, this may well be the last chance for them to get what they want. Yet even if a pact is made, the Brexit Part’s denunciation of Johnson’s deal as not being ‘clean’ (i.e. no-deal) Brexit must already have had some impact. At all events, some Brexit Party voters just will not come over to the Tories under any circumstances.
In the years I have been writing this blog I’ve spent quite a bit of time lurking on pro-Brexit social media sites and there is a clear hard core who, if there is no Brexit Party candidate to vote for, will abstain (or, maybe, vote UKIP or some other fringe nationalist party) rather than vote Tory. That includes some who ‘lent their vote to Theresa May’ but swear they will never do so again. It is unclear that the number of such diehards is high enough to be really significant, but that number can only have been swelled by the shift in their outlook over the last three years to regarding any Brexit deal as a betrayal.
Johnson’s limitations
There is also the question of how Johnson himself will stand up to the scrutiny of a general election. I am not convinced that he is the campaigning maestro that he, and many Tories, believe him to be. For one thing, to the extent that he will trade on the ‘people versus the Establishment’ motif, polling suggests that he is not that widely regarded as being of the people rather than the Establishment. It’s true that he was an asset to Vote Leave, but that allowed him to campaign in a very loose style – waving Cornish pasties around, and so on. If he made a gaffe, it wasn’t fatal, not least as the campaign didn’t even expect to succeed.
Campaigning to be Prime Minister is a very different matter, including as it may unpredictable encounters with the public, probing interviews with tough inquisitors and, perhaps, a televised leadership debate. Plus, with Johnson, there’s the omnipresent possibility of some gargantuan personal scandal emerging. It is telling that during the Tory leadership campaign his minders were at pains to keep him in the background. There was a reason for that – they knew his capacity to implode. For very different reasons, he may prove no more effective on the stump than did Theresa May.
This Brexit election must finally focus on Brexit
Thinking back to that 2017 election, a danger for the present campaign is – paradoxical as it may seem – that Brexit may not figure as prominently as it should, given how important the result is for it. During the 2017 campaign I discussed how there was actually remarkably little discussion of the details of Brexit itself. That could happen again.
Both main parties will be very keen to push their other policy agendas – quite ludicrously, since Brexit will massively affect the capacity to deliver these. They will be aided in that by much of the media. As Peter Ungphakhorn argues in his recent blog post, the media are often more comfortable with the narrow politics of Brexit rather than its technical detail. Relatedly, Simon Wren-Lewis, on his blog, identifies the media predilection for scoops and insider-briefings at the expense of forensic analysis. An election campaign lends itself to the comfort zone of such reporting rather than, say, detailed scrutiny of what Johnson’s deal would actually mean if it came to pass, as well the many things it will leave unresolved.
If so, that will be deeply unfortunate to the point of being unforgiveable. The coming election could well cement the historic strategic decision which, ultimately, Brexit entails. It would be shameful if, now that there is the concrete version of Brexit that did not exist in either 2016 or 2017, this decision were not exposed to full and detailed examination. We are, finally, at the point we should have been before the whole process started: with a definition of what Brexit means in practice, to be compared with remaining in the EU. It is absolutely incumbent upon every journalist, every politician, every commentator - and even the lowly Brexit Blogger - to focus on that question.
Of course, whether or not that occurs, it is very possible that a similarly hung and hamstrung parliament to that which we have now is returned. On Tuesday, in a reprise of his advice when the last extension was made, Donald Tusk – who, by the way, had been a far better friend to our country through all this than we have deserved - enjoined Britain to “make best use of this time”. Yet it is perfectly conceivable that, just as happened before, we are no further forward. An indecisive election, followed by the Christmas Recess, would leave us with just two or three weeks of the extension period left, and a no-deal Brexit looming yet again.
In short, all outcomes are possible. Which means that the stakes are very high, more so than in any election in my lifetime, certainly. It is going to be horrible, and some will find it unbearable. But it matters: it’s no exaggeration to say that the future of our country - our prosperity, our geo-political standing, perhaps even our survival as a unified country - is at issue.
As I’ve argued before, an election is currently the only realistic, and very possibly the last, chance of reversing Brexit, though doing so will, in Ian Dunt’s words, be “the most uphill, fraught, emotional, gruelling political battle many remainers will ever have faced”. It is certainly not the most rational route to do so – or, for that matter, to deliver Brexit. That would be a referendum, which unlike an election would focus solely on the question at hand: whether to proceed on the basis of Johnson’s deal or to abandon Brexit, and, unlike a ‘first past the post’ vote, would do so on the basis of a majority of the population.
But it has been clear for a while now that there is simply no majority in parliament for holding such a referendum. Perhaps there could, or should, have been at some point – for example via a Government of National Unity, or a Kyle-Wilson style amendment to a Meaningful Vote – but all attempts to do so have foundered. This means that ever since the Withdrawal Amendment Bill (WAB) passed its second reading the writing has been on the wall for remain. With perseverance, a perhaps amended version of that would have eventually passed into law and Brexit would be a done deal.
Some remainers have been shocked and angered by the LibDem and SNP decision to push for an election, but from a remain perspective this was unquestionably the right tactic. By contrast, Corbyn made a tactical error in having to be dragged, not kicking and screaming so much as umming and aahing, to support it. Handled differently, the election could have been presented as something forced on Johnson rather than, as has happened, achieved by him.
Johnson’s foolish gamble
That, however, will soon be forgotten and is a minor error compared with the much greater one that Johnson – or more likely Cummings - has made. For if the writing was on the wall for remain after the WAB passed second reading it was surely a colossal mistake for him not to push on, agree a revised timetable, get his deal passed and then hold an election having ‘delivered’ Brexit after which he could drop any amendments that had been made.
Perhaps future historians will uncover the reason. I suspect the truth is that it was another example of Cummings’ overweening but counter-productive machismo. The only explanation that has been put forward is that the alliance that got the second reading passed was deemed too fragile to stay the course. It would have been tight, but I doubt that’s true. With nifty footwork Brexit was there for the taking and Johnson dropped it (just as the ERG Spartans did when they refused to back May’s deal).
We’ll never know whether that is true now. And, of course, the verdict of historians will depend on the outcome of this election. If he wins outright, especially if substantially, then Johnson will be feted as a master strategist. History is, as they say, written by the victors. For the time being, as Professor Glen O’Hara of Oxford Brookes University argues, the tactic is a huge gamble. It is already the conventional wisdom that, despite the Conservatives lead in the opinion polls, the result is highly unpredictable.
How single-minded will remainers be?
One key determinant of the outcome will be the extent to which remainers will make remain their sole priority to the extent of voting tactically for whoever is the most conducive candidate in their constituency (this is also likely to make national opinion polls misleading). Even without a formal Remain Alliance, nowadays it is much easier for individuals to do this via various websites. But such committed remainers will have to be determined enough to cast their votes in ways they may find deeply repellent.
In particular, especially in England, some Labour remainers are going to have to vote LibDem despite their memory of the Coalition government’s Austerity policies. Some LibDem and Conservative remainers are going to have to vote Labour, despite its hopeless dithering and ambiguity about Brexit over these last three years, and despite what they may think of Corbyn and Labour in other respects.
For, to be clear, the only realistic route to remain is via a Labour government, cajoled and supported by other parties, holding another referendum which remain might then win (if we get to that point, the remain campaign is going to have to get its act together, and quickly). But this is only scenario one of the six main scenarios for the election result, as sketched by Joe Owen of the Institute for Government, and not by any means the most likely.
What will the Brexit Party do?
The other key determinant is what the Brexit Party do. At the time of writing that is not clear. Johnson’s Achilles Heel is that repeated, high-profile, central pledge to have left the EU come what may on 31 October. If Farage runs a full-on campaign against the Tories for having ‘betrayed Brexit’ then he is going to hurt the Tories, and hurt them badly, losing them seats without gaining many, if any, himself. That will be good for remain, so logic would suggest that Farage does not do so (but logic may play little part, especially given Farage’s egotistical character and the fanatical nature of his supporters).
By contrast, any kind of pact, either nationally or locally, between the Tories and the Brexit Party will therefore make Brexit more likely, and, as for remainers, this may well be the last chance for them to get what they want. Yet even if a pact is made, the Brexit Part’s denunciation of Johnson’s deal as not being ‘clean’ (i.e. no-deal) Brexit must already have had some impact. At all events, some Brexit Party voters just will not come over to the Tories under any circumstances.
In the years I have been writing this blog I’ve spent quite a bit of time lurking on pro-Brexit social media sites and there is a clear hard core who, if there is no Brexit Party candidate to vote for, will abstain (or, maybe, vote UKIP or some other fringe nationalist party) rather than vote Tory. That includes some who ‘lent their vote to Theresa May’ but swear they will never do so again. It is unclear that the number of such diehards is high enough to be really significant, but that number can only have been swelled by the shift in their outlook over the last three years to regarding any Brexit deal as a betrayal.
Johnson’s limitations
There is also the question of how Johnson himself will stand up to the scrutiny of a general election. I am not convinced that he is the campaigning maestro that he, and many Tories, believe him to be. For one thing, to the extent that he will trade on the ‘people versus the Establishment’ motif, polling suggests that he is not that widely regarded as being of the people rather than the Establishment. It’s true that he was an asset to Vote Leave, but that allowed him to campaign in a very loose style – waving Cornish pasties around, and so on. If he made a gaffe, it wasn’t fatal, not least as the campaign didn’t even expect to succeed.
Campaigning to be Prime Minister is a very different matter, including as it may unpredictable encounters with the public, probing interviews with tough inquisitors and, perhaps, a televised leadership debate. Plus, with Johnson, there’s the omnipresent possibility of some gargantuan personal scandal emerging. It is telling that during the Tory leadership campaign his minders were at pains to keep him in the background. There was a reason for that – they knew his capacity to implode. For very different reasons, he may prove no more effective on the stump than did Theresa May.
This Brexit election must finally focus on Brexit
Thinking back to that 2017 election, a danger for the present campaign is – paradoxical as it may seem – that Brexit may not figure as prominently as it should, given how important the result is for it. During the 2017 campaign I discussed how there was actually remarkably little discussion of the details of Brexit itself. That could happen again.
Both main parties will be very keen to push their other policy agendas – quite ludicrously, since Brexit will massively affect the capacity to deliver these. They will be aided in that by much of the media. As Peter Ungphakhorn argues in his recent blog post, the media are often more comfortable with the narrow politics of Brexit rather than its technical detail. Relatedly, Simon Wren-Lewis, on his blog, identifies the media predilection for scoops and insider-briefings at the expense of forensic analysis. An election campaign lends itself to the comfort zone of such reporting rather than, say, detailed scrutiny of what Johnson’s deal would actually mean if it came to pass, as well the many things it will leave unresolved.
If so, that will be deeply unfortunate to the point of being unforgiveable. The coming election could well cement the historic strategic decision which, ultimately, Brexit entails. It would be shameful if, now that there is the concrete version of Brexit that did not exist in either 2016 or 2017, this decision were not exposed to full and detailed examination. We are, finally, at the point we should have been before the whole process started: with a definition of what Brexit means in practice, to be compared with remaining in the EU. It is absolutely incumbent upon every journalist, every politician, every commentator - and even the lowly Brexit Blogger - to focus on that question.
Of course, whether or not that occurs, it is very possible that a similarly hung and hamstrung parliament to that which we have now is returned. On Tuesday, in a reprise of his advice when the last extension was made, Donald Tusk – who, by the way, had been a far better friend to our country through all this than we have deserved - enjoined Britain to “make best use of this time”. Yet it is perfectly conceivable that, just as happened before, we are no further forward. An indecisive election, followed by the Christmas Recess, would leave us with just two or three weeks of the extension period left, and a no-deal Brexit looming yet again.
In short, all outcomes are possible. Which means that the stakes are very high, more so than in any election in my lifetime, certainly. It is going to be horrible, and some will find it unbearable. But it matters: it’s no exaggeration to say that the future of our country - our prosperity, our geo-political standing, perhaps even our survival as a unified country - is at issue.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)