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 Institute of Government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Institute of Government. Show all posts
Friday, 24 April 2020
Thursday, 9 April 2020
Brexit stasis
The delusion that the Brexit negotiations are ongoing, as discussed in my previous post, continues and in doing so becomes ever more surreal. Last Friday, spokespeople for both the UK and EU stated that each side was analysing and clarifying the other’s draft texts. David Frost apparently talked to Michel Barnier’s deputy this week, and Michael Gove wrote of ‘recognising the importance of negotiations’ (within the Joint Committee framework) over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Meanwhile, a still convalescing Michel Barnier said he’d be talking to David Frost next week to organise future negotiating rounds. In short, nothing of significance is happening.
This is entirely unsurprising and has been evident for weeks: the coronavirus crisis is, rightly and necessarily, all-encompassing. So there are thin pickings for any analysis of Brexit, although of note is the launch of LSE’s new weekly Brexit news round up. Such analysis remains warranted, despite the gravity of other events precisely since, despite those events, Brexit continues to tick away in the background.
The extension debate
In substance, though, all that matters is the debate about if, whether, when, and how the transition period might be extended. In that regard, Professor Simon Usherwood of Surrey University has written a smart ‘devil’s advocate’ argument as to why it should not be, whilst Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government has provided an analysis of the EU perspective on extension.
From within the EU come reports that the idea of completing a deal before the end of the year are “fantasy”, although no official statement of this sort has been made. The UK government remains unequivocally committed to the existing timetable and the doctrinaire Brexiter position (£) is that any extension is unthinkable. A tiny sign that this position may be cracking came this week when Nick de Bois (described as a “leading Brexiter” although I must confess that, despite probably following Brexit more closely than most, I had never heard of him before) called for its abandonment (£). Leading figure or not, he is a former aide to Dominic Raab who most certainly is. De Bois’ argument, quite logically, is that the public would not forgive any diversion from dealing with the pandemic.
The key issue, picked up on by Peter Foster, now Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times, is that pushing ahead on the existing timetable would not just be a diversion, but a self-inflicted one. I think this is insufficiently understood by those who anticipate the government using coronavirus as a cover for leaving with no deal (or some very limited deal), pretending that the adverse effects of the latter were just part of the fall out of the former. That’s a possibility, of course, but it would be a monumental political gamble to assume that, outside of a hard core of leave voters, the public would swallow it.
Imagine the situation if after – perhaps, for none of us know how coronavirus will play out – a series of intermittent lockdowns throughout 2020 the UK finally emerges from the casualties, sufferings, fears and privations of these to suddenly encounter new disruptions and a new crisis at the beginning of January. Reputable current forecasts suggest that GDP will have fallen by over 5%, the biggest recession in UK post-war history. And people are unlikely to be using the ‘that’s your bloody GDP, not ours’ line of the Referendum, given the likely impact on employment (though there are other views on this) quite apart from all the other thing they will have had to endure. Tell them then that to keep the true flame of Brexit alive another few per cent must be lopped off and I suspect the backlash would be huge.
Coronavirus and Brexit entwined
In that scenario, coronavirus and Brexit would have been decoupled, in that people would see their effects as separate. But, of course, for now the political reality (and in many ways the practical reality as well) is that the two are completely intertwined, as I have been arguing since the beginning of March. Paul Mason has suggested that Brexit calculations framed the government’s initial, flawed, coronavirus strategy. I am not sure that is quite true (it relies on a particular reading of both, and puts heavy weight on a couple of sentence in Johnson’s Greenwich speech) but as recorded on this blog some weeks ago and more recently confirmed in detail by a Reuters report it is clear that Brexit lay behind the government’s failure to participate in EU-wide ventilator procurement systems.
In any case it is certainly true, as Luke McGee of CNN writes, that coronavirus and Brexit are currently inseparable because of the transition period question. And that was written at the point when Johnson had been diagnosed with, but before he was hospitalised by, the virus.
This, by far the biggest development of the week, adds another very obvious layer of problems to the looming decision on extension, which needs to be made by the end of June. Hopefully, Boris Johnson will be fully recovered by then and his health, at least, won’t be a factor in the decision. But even if so, the issues of time and governmental bandwidth, and the possible illness of other politicians and officials on both UK and EU sides will remain. For example, Michael Gove, a key figure in the negotiations, is currently self-isolating, whilst of Dominic Cummings, the power behind the Johnson throne, who has the virus, nothing has been heard for days.
In the meantime, the Prime Minister’s hospitalisation in an intensive care unit has drawn attention to another of the connections between Brexit and coronavirus, in addition to those discussed in my recent post on the subject. There, I pointed out that one connection was that someone elected as a ‘Brexit Prime Minister’ had, perforce, to become a ‘coronavirus crisis Prime Minister’. With his illness, what has come into stark relief is how the entire cabinet – and indeed the entire parliamentary Conservative Party – has been remade for one purpose and with one, overweening test of political loyalty: enthusiastic embrace of Brexit and monocular determination to complete the process by the end of the year.
This means, on the one hand, that questions of competence are a very distant second to those of ideological conformity. Few looking at the current cabinet would regard it as self-evidently well-equipped with the skills needed to manage a major national crisis, or see in the Tory backbenches a reservoir of such talent. Nor does Dominic Raab, the stand in Prime Minister, necessarily impress as having many leadership credentials beyond his no doubt exemplary record as a Brexit Ultra, a record not undermined but cemented by his admitted ignorance of even the most basic facts about the project he so assiduously supports.
On the other hand, the New Model Tory Party makes it very hard for Johnson to backtrack on the extension. For him to do so would entail a major conflict with the ERG, whose numbers are more than enough to defeat him in the Commons. Yet, still, he might be able to bring it off given his long track record of about-turns and his freedom from the inconvenient shackles of principle or consistency. That would be much less true for Raab (or any other deputy), for whom extending would mean not just ‘betraying Brexit’ but betraying Johnson (whose principles would, in these circumstances, be seen as less plastic than if he, himself, were at the helm).
Either way, the decision on extension won’t go away, and it will have to be taken whilst the coronavirus crisis is ongoing and, possibly, whilst the Prime Minister is still unwell.
An adult in the room
I mentioned earlier the likely backlash if the government doesn’t extend, and 2021 begins with ‘No deal 2.0’, to which can be added the political pressure, as the end of June 2020 approaches, to avert this. Both the pressure and the backlash are all the more likely given the other major political event of the week, the election of Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader. As Tom McTague argues in The Atlantic, this represents a moment of “deep importance”. It offers the potential for a far more effective official Opposition than in recent years, including an opportunity to improve on Jeremy Corbyn’s woeful inadequacy with respect to Brexit – admittedly, a decidedly low bar to set - about which I have written many times on this blog.
Of course, the situation is different now in that Brexit as such is an accomplished fact. Starmer is clearly not going to make re-joining the EU Labour’s position and he is not going to make reliving the Brexit battles a priority. That is wise, since the former would be premature and the latter worse than pointless. I do not even expect him to make extending the transition period the centre piece of his first months as leader, not least since by definition those months are going to be dominated by coronavirus.
What can be expected is that he will stake out his obvious claim – and his most obvious political appeal – for responsibility, diligence and competence. Those are not only his natural political calling cards, they are also the way in which he can most effectively be seen as a foil to Johnson’s very different persona. And, especially in the context of crisis, that could well be extremely appealing in saying, in effect: at last, there is an adult in the room. Within that – not as the headline but as a sub-clause or at very least a footnote – the case for transition extension will sit comfortably. It’s not a stretch. His persona is one of being sensible; extension, self-evidently, is just that.
Time marches on
For all that we are living through strange and unprecedented events, as regards Brexit there has been at least one continuous theme since the “bleak and bitter day” when Article 50 was triggered just over three years ago. Time. Since then, everything that has happened has happened under time pressure. That needn’t have been so, since nothing in the Referendum vote specified a date by which it should be done. But the Brexiters’ impatience and paranoid fear of betrayal - and their accurate diagnosis that Brexit was only fleetingly and, then, only marginally the ‘will of the people’ - made it so.
The same is true now, as the clock ticks down to the government’s supposedly immutable deadline of 31 December 2020 via the procedural one of 30 June. In that respect, my comment in the opening paragraph that nothing of significance is happening with Brexit is wrong. With every day that passes we get closer to the point of decision on extension and, depending on that decision, closer to the point at which leaving with no future terms deal could happen.
We are about eleven weeks away from the extension decision. For comparison, it is now about eleven weeks since the first reported cases of coronavirus in the UK. The conclusion to be drawn is that there is almost no time left but that, within such a time, a great deal can change.
This is entirely unsurprising and has been evident for weeks: the coronavirus crisis is, rightly and necessarily, all-encompassing. So there are thin pickings for any analysis of Brexit, although of note is the launch of LSE’s new weekly Brexit news round up. Such analysis remains warranted, despite the gravity of other events precisely since, despite those events, Brexit continues to tick away in the background.
The extension debate
In substance, though, all that matters is the debate about if, whether, when, and how the transition period might be extended. In that regard, Professor Simon Usherwood of Surrey University has written a smart ‘devil’s advocate’ argument as to why it should not be, whilst Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government has provided an analysis of the EU perspective on extension.
From within the EU come reports that the idea of completing a deal before the end of the year are “fantasy”, although no official statement of this sort has been made. The UK government remains unequivocally committed to the existing timetable and the doctrinaire Brexiter position (£) is that any extension is unthinkable. A tiny sign that this position may be cracking came this week when Nick de Bois (described as a “leading Brexiter” although I must confess that, despite probably following Brexit more closely than most, I had never heard of him before) called for its abandonment (£). Leading figure or not, he is a former aide to Dominic Raab who most certainly is. De Bois’ argument, quite logically, is that the public would not forgive any diversion from dealing with the pandemic.
The key issue, picked up on by Peter Foster, now Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times, is that pushing ahead on the existing timetable would not just be a diversion, but a self-inflicted one. I think this is insufficiently understood by those who anticipate the government using coronavirus as a cover for leaving with no deal (or some very limited deal), pretending that the adverse effects of the latter were just part of the fall out of the former. That’s a possibility, of course, but it would be a monumental political gamble to assume that, outside of a hard core of leave voters, the public would swallow it.
Imagine the situation if after – perhaps, for none of us know how coronavirus will play out – a series of intermittent lockdowns throughout 2020 the UK finally emerges from the casualties, sufferings, fears and privations of these to suddenly encounter new disruptions and a new crisis at the beginning of January. Reputable current forecasts suggest that GDP will have fallen by over 5%, the biggest recession in UK post-war history. And people are unlikely to be using the ‘that’s your bloody GDP, not ours’ line of the Referendum, given the likely impact on employment (though there are other views on this) quite apart from all the other thing they will have had to endure. Tell them then that to keep the true flame of Brexit alive another few per cent must be lopped off and I suspect the backlash would be huge.
Coronavirus and Brexit entwined
In that scenario, coronavirus and Brexit would have been decoupled, in that people would see their effects as separate. But, of course, for now the political reality (and in many ways the practical reality as well) is that the two are completely intertwined, as I have been arguing since the beginning of March. Paul Mason has suggested that Brexit calculations framed the government’s initial, flawed, coronavirus strategy. I am not sure that is quite true (it relies on a particular reading of both, and puts heavy weight on a couple of sentence in Johnson’s Greenwich speech) but as recorded on this blog some weeks ago and more recently confirmed in detail by a Reuters report it is clear that Brexit lay behind the government’s failure to participate in EU-wide ventilator procurement systems.
In any case it is certainly true, as Luke McGee of CNN writes, that coronavirus and Brexit are currently inseparable because of the transition period question. And that was written at the point when Johnson had been diagnosed with, but before he was hospitalised by, the virus.
This, by far the biggest development of the week, adds another very obvious layer of problems to the looming decision on extension, which needs to be made by the end of June. Hopefully, Boris Johnson will be fully recovered by then and his health, at least, won’t be a factor in the decision. But even if so, the issues of time and governmental bandwidth, and the possible illness of other politicians and officials on both UK and EU sides will remain. For example, Michael Gove, a key figure in the negotiations, is currently self-isolating, whilst of Dominic Cummings, the power behind the Johnson throne, who has the virus, nothing has been heard for days.
In the meantime, the Prime Minister’s hospitalisation in an intensive care unit has drawn attention to another of the connections between Brexit and coronavirus, in addition to those discussed in my recent post on the subject. There, I pointed out that one connection was that someone elected as a ‘Brexit Prime Minister’ had, perforce, to become a ‘coronavirus crisis Prime Minister’. With his illness, what has come into stark relief is how the entire cabinet – and indeed the entire parliamentary Conservative Party – has been remade for one purpose and with one, overweening test of political loyalty: enthusiastic embrace of Brexit and monocular determination to complete the process by the end of the year.
This means, on the one hand, that questions of competence are a very distant second to those of ideological conformity. Few looking at the current cabinet would regard it as self-evidently well-equipped with the skills needed to manage a major national crisis, or see in the Tory backbenches a reservoir of such talent. Nor does Dominic Raab, the stand in Prime Minister, necessarily impress as having many leadership credentials beyond his no doubt exemplary record as a Brexit Ultra, a record not undermined but cemented by his admitted ignorance of even the most basic facts about the project he so assiduously supports.
On the other hand, the New Model Tory Party makes it very hard for Johnson to backtrack on the extension. For him to do so would entail a major conflict with the ERG, whose numbers are more than enough to defeat him in the Commons. Yet, still, he might be able to bring it off given his long track record of about-turns and his freedom from the inconvenient shackles of principle or consistency. That would be much less true for Raab (or any other deputy), for whom extending would mean not just ‘betraying Brexit’ but betraying Johnson (whose principles would, in these circumstances, be seen as less plastic than if he, himself, were at the helm).
Either way, the decision on extension won’t go away, and it will have to be taken whilst the coronavirus crisis is ongoing and, possibly, whilst the Prime Minister is still unwell.
An adult in the room
I mentioned earlier the likely backlash if the government doesn’t extend, and 2021 begins with ‘No deal 2.0’, to which can be added the political pressure, as the end of June 2020 approaches, to avert this. Both the pressure and the backlash are all the more likely given the other major political event of the week, the election of Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader. As Tom McTague argues in The Atlantic, this represents a moment of “deep importance”. It offers the potential for a far more effective official Opposition than in recent years, including an opportunity to improve on Jeremy Corbyn’s woeful inadequacy with respect to Brexit – admittedly, a decidedly low bar to set - about which I have written many times on this blog.
Of course, the situation is different now in that Brexit as such is an accomplished fact. Starmer is clearly not going to make re-joining the EU Labour’s position and he is not going to make reliving the Brexit battles a priority. That is wise, since the former would be premature and the latter worse than pointless. I do not even expect him to make extending the transition period the centre piece of his first months as leader, not least since by definition those months are going to be dominated by coronavirus.
What can be expected is that he will stake out his obvious claim – and his most obvious political appeal – for responsibility, diligence and competence. Those are not only his natural political calling cards, they are also the way in which he can most effectively be seen as a foil to Johnson’s very different persona. And, especially in the context of crisis, that could well be extremely appealing in saying, in effect: at last, there is an adult in the room. Within that – not as the headline but as a sub-clause or at very least a footnote – the case for transition extension will sit comfortably. It’s not a stretch. His persona is one of being sensible; extension, self-evidently, is just that.
Time marches on
For all that we are living through strange and unprecedented events, as regards Brexit there has been at least one continuous theme since the “bleak and bitter day” when Article 50 was triggered just over three years ago. Time. Since then, everything that has happened has happened under time pressure. That needn’t have been so, since nothing in the Referendum vote specified a date by which it should be done. But the Brexiters’ impatience and paranoid fear of betrayal - and their accurate diagnosis that Brexit was only fleetingly and, then, only marginally the ‘will of the people’ - made it so.
The same is true now, as the clock ticks down to the government’s supposedly immutable deadline of 31 December 2020 via the procedural one of 30 June. In that respect, my comment in the opening paragraph that nothing of significance is happening with Brexit is wrong. With every day that passes we get closer to the point of decision on extension and, depending on that decision, closer to the point at which leaving with no future terms deal could happen.
We are about eleven weeks away from the extension decision. For comparison, it is now about eleven weeks since the first reported cases of coronavirus in the UK. The conclusion to be drawn is that there is almost no time left but that, within such a time, a great deal can change.
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.
Friday, 3 January 2020
The battle between remembering and forgetting
It’s difficult to know whether to regard Boris Johnson’s reported ban on Ministers and officials using the word Brexit after 31 January as sinister or silly – or perhaps both. But it is a helpful reminder of the dishonesty and chicanery that the Brexit process is going to continue to embody in the coming months. More profoundly, it symbolises how those months are going to entail a battle between remembering and forgetting.
New lies for old
At the most obvious level, the idea of not mentioning Brexit after 31 January is part of the more general smokescreen to pretend that, on this date, it will be “done”. In the same way, and according to the same reports, there are to be no further official references to negotiating a deal with the EU. For, according to the new scripture, the ‘deal’ has already been done – it is the Withdrawal Agreement – and so the negotiation of future terms cannot be referred to in this way.
It’s a transparent ploy, in itself, but it is also the offspring of some older lies. For Brexiters, including at one time Johnson, used to believe, or pretend to believe, that both exit terms and future terms could be wrapped up within the Article 50 period. Indeed, many Brexiters, including at one time Johnson, used to say that exit terms – and especially the financial settlement - should not and need not be agreed until future trade terms had been. All of these claims were always untrue. So now the inconvenience of these old lies is to be covered over with a new one: that there is only one deal to do, and it has been done.
The announcement that DExEu is to close on the same date is presumably intended to communicate the same message. However here, at least, there is a more charitable interpretation which is that, as a piece of government machinery, it was always misconceived and, in particular, created crossed chains of command with Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. Notably, the Institute for Government has argued since 2016 that it should not have been created. More recently IfG’s Joe Owen has made the case for closing it now but notes that, of course, this does not mean – as the announcement might be taken to imply - that the amount of civil service effort needed to deliver Brexit has reduced.
A policy with no purpose
But banning the Brexit word has a deeper significance, too, and one which I think historians will find both interesting and perplexing. For it is an extension of something which has been underway almost since the Referendum result itself. Few, if any, of the original advocates of Brexit any longer make any case for it being a good thing in its own terms, or, in any specific way, as having any beneficial outcomes.
Under Theresa May, there was a palpable sense that she was enacting a policy she knew to be damaging and that her task was to achieve what damage limitation she could – the scope for which she almost entirely closed down by virtue of her Lancaster House speech. Brexiters chalked this miserabilism up to her remainer negativity, but they, too, have ceased to claim any great benefits for Brexit.
During the election campaign, and now, Johnson has talked only of ‘getting it done’ in order to be able to focus on the people’s priorities. That very formulation at least implies that getting Brexit done is not one of those priorities, and the policies of NHS and infrastructure spending and so on that he claims to be the priorities could all be done, and be more easily done, without Brexit happening at all.
So, for many months now, the only argument made for Brexit is that it must be done because that was the outcome of the Referendum vote. For some, perhaps, that argument does over-ride all others, to the extent of thinking that even if it is a bad thing in itself it must be done for reasons of trust or democratic legitimacy. Yet – even if those were good arguments - it is strange that its most prominent campaigners no longer make any other case, and that this case is only one of avoiding the negative consequences of not proceeding rather than identifying the positive consequences of doing so. Why on earth would we not mention it, indeed why would we not take every opportunity to trumpet it, if it is such a wonderful thing?
Johnson’s New Year message
In this sense, the edict not to mention Brexit, despite it only being halfway to completion, links to Johnson’s New Year message calling for everyone to unite together and move forward from the divisions of the Referendum. Both are suggesting that we all simply shrug our shoulders and forget the promises that were made for Brexit, the damage it has already done, the damage it has still to do, and, indeed, all the decisions that have still to be made.
It’s as if it were an embarrassing episode at the Christmas office party that it would be bad taste to remind anyone of in the new year. That would be absurd enough, but when the message comes from the person who – metaphorically speaking – was caught photocopying his buttocks and who – literally speaking – is the boss it is at best self-serving and at worst an abuse of power.
The important question is how realistic is this strategy? People – and it is probably most people – may be heartily sick of the divisions and problems that Brexit has caused, but they aren’t all going to simply forget about them. Johnson has conducted his whole career, and, it seems, much of his personal life, on the basis of creating a colossal mess and then avoiding all responsibility for it. But Brexit is far, far bigger than any of his previous messes and he’s not easily going to be able to shrug it off and walk away, which both the B-word edict and the New Year’s message suggest he is going to attempt to do.
The bigger part of that strategy is, presumably, going to be to try to keep the forthcoming trade negotiations with the EU as secretive as possible and, also, to make them seem entirely boring and technical, and hope that no one pays too much attention. That means the electorate, of course, but also the more extreme of his backbenchers. That may have some hope of success – some electors in any case believe that Britain left the EU in 2016, others will be happy enough to think that it was done on 31 January. And no doubt there will be many in the pro-Brexit press who will acclaim any trade deal, even a minimal one, as a great triumph.
Meanwhile, ongoing news of company relocations or disinvestments will be explained away as ‘nothing to do’ with the thing we no longer mention. In any case, since little will change in the transition period it will be easy to claim that Brexit has been ‘done’ without the adverse effects predicted by the ‘doomsters’. Subsequent to that, such effects will be dismissed as due to other causes since they came so long after Brexit was ‘done’.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the coming period is that whilst declaiming a future in which Britain’s potential will be “unleashed” – by implication because of ‘casting off the shackles’ of EU membership – behind the scenes what will probably be going will be a slow drip-feed of measures to re-attach the UK to EU systems and processes. An early precedent and template for such an approach can be found in data protection legislation. These measures may not have a high profile and are likely to lie outside of anything specifically identified as trade deal – or, more likely, be about non-trade matters - but will either seek to reproduce, or be inferior or more expensive versions of, existing relationships. To the extent that they are noticed at all, people will wonder what the point is; more likely, Johnson is gambling on them being too arcane to attract much interest.
Confronting realities
Even so, in important ways, the coming year is going to see Johnson forced to confront many of the realities which he has either denied or been ignorant of, and that will be true no matter how many of the officials and politicians involved are ‘true believers’. To an extent that has already started in that, mercifully, we no longer hear anything of the ‘alternative arrangements’ for the Irish border nor the GATT Article XXIV nonsense. But there is much more reality to come.
In particular, the underlying confusions which gave rise to all the ‘easiest deal in history’ claims are going to be ruthlessly exposed. Such claims – made at various times by Liam Fox, David Davis, Peter Lilley, and Johnson himself – are based, when they are based on anything other than windy chauvinism, on the idea that the UK is already completely aligned with the EU, and therefore a trade deal will be easy.
That is a proposition which resolutely refuses to accept that as a consequence of Brexit, the UK, even in the transition period, will be a third country with respect to the EU. So it is not that the current membership terms are the baseline for negotiation, to be subtracted from. Rather – as regards trade – WTO terms are the baseline to which things might be added by negotiation. There is not a special ‘alumni club’ for ex-members of the EU.
It’s true, as EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan said the other day, that the fact of current convergence and integration could make a close relationship easy. But that is only so if the desired outcome is convergence and integration. Since, as Hogan went on to say, the UK desire is apparently for divergence then current convergence is not helpful at all. In reality, this just amounts to a reprise of the Barnier staircase: for as long as UK red lines over, in particular, the ECJ and freedom of movement continue, then that circumscribes what kind of deal can be done. If the UK adds, as it has under Johnson, new red lines over level playing field commitments, that makes any deal more minimal still.
It is here that Johnson will confront the biggest difficulties in his ‘don’t mention Brexit’ strategy. If he holds firm to seeking only a very minimal trade deal, there is going to be a lot of economic fallout. If he does not, then there will be a lot of political fallout. If either of those things happen, then Brexit will certainly continue to be at the forefront of public debate, and the claim that it has ‘been done’ will ring hollow.
Brexit talks to continue …
In this sense, as noted in a recent post on this blog, the underlying dynamics of Brexit will not change after 31 January as regards the contradictions and conundrums of what it means for the UK. Yet, in another sense, there will be a change as regards the dynamics between the UK and the EU. During the Article 50 negotiations, Brexiters repeatedly spoke of how ‘EU negotiations’ always go to the last minute of the last hour. In this, they failed to see the difference between, for example, treaty negotiations amongst the existing, ongoing member states – with last minute horse-trading to facilitate an agreement - and those between the EU-27 and the one, departing, state. The late breakthrough which did happen was simply based on the UK accepting the Irish Sea border that it had previously rejected.
And just as the Article 50 negotiations differed from normal intra-EU negotiations, so too will future terms talks, which will occur under Article 218 which governs EU negotiating rules with third countries, differ from the Article 50 talks*. Amongst other things, depending on the scope of the future terms agreement this will have implications for whether unanimity or qualified majority within the European Council is needed to conclude any agreement reached.
Alongside this difference in legal process, there is a sense that the political priority which Brexit has for the EU – which, except perhaps in the very immediate post-Referendum period was never as all-encompassing as it was for the UK – will diminish further. It will be one amongst many issues which the new EU leadership team face and, necessarily, the UK-EU trade relationship matters far more for the UK, for whom the EU is its largest trade partner, than it does for the EU. If Johnson continues down the track that makes a distant relationship inevitable then, by the same token, it becomes even less salient for the EU. If he changes track, then the compromises the EU will require will loom large. Either way, the realpolitik of the power difference between the EU and the UK will become ever clearer.
And Brexit talk to continue …
For all that the government may not wish the public to notice this, judging by what happened with the Article 50 negotiations there will be plenty of press releases and statements from the EU about how talks are progressing. There is also likely to be plenty of noise from business lobbies in the UK, if a minimal deal is in prospect, and from irate Brexiters if an extensive deal is in prospect. There will be plenty of talk of preparations if no deal 2.0 is in prospect. And there will certainly be ongoing and intensifying discussions of the future of Scotland and Northern Ireland within the UK.
For all of these reasons, I think it is unlikely that Johnson will achieve his aim of getting the nation to move on from and forget the Brexit that he did so much to cause and is going to spend at least the next year enacting. Apart from anything else, for all his talk of respect and friendship, Johnson is offering no compromise towards remainers in the form that Brexit is to take. And whilst some – even some who once cared passionately – will no doubt cease to be engaged by or interested in Brexit it remains the case that it is a policy which only ever had a bare majority in support, and that for only a fleeting period of time.
So the idea that it can all be brushed over and forgotten like an ill-advised newspaper column is, surely, naïve? Or, perhaps, to think otherwise is naïve? For Johnson’s hope is presumably that the electorate are ignorant, lazy and forgetful – like all populists he has a low opinion of the people he purports to speak for – and that the post-truth politics that have got him so far will protect him from being held accountable.
At all events, the tight rope that Johnson will walk this coming year will be defined by whether people remember what was promised and how false those promises were or whether, as he hopes, they forget and, indeed, ‘move on’, accepting what happens as ‘just the way things are’. He has already set down the first chips in that cynical gamble. In the coming year, we’ll see whether he is right.
*There is a fiddly complexity here in that Article 50 utilises Article 218 (3) but, for the future terms talks, the entirety of Article 218 applies. There has also been some discussion within legal circles about whether, in fact, future terms negotiations could be conducted under Article 50 rather than under Article 218 – however, the consensus seems to be against this.
New lies for old
At the most obvious level, the idea of not mentioning Brexit after 31 January is part of the more general smokescreen to pretend that, on this date, it will be “done”. In the same way, and according to the same reports, there are to be no further official references to negotiating a deal with the EU. For, according to the new scripture, the ‘deal’ has already been done – it is the Withdrawal Agreement – and so the negotiation of future terms cannot be referred to in this way.
It’s a transparent ploy, in itself, but it is also the offspring of some older lies. For Brexiters, including at one time Johnson, used to believe, or pretend to believe, that both exit terms and future terms could be wrapped up within the Article 50 period. Indeed, many Brexiters, including at one time Johnson, used to say that exit terms – and especially the financial settlement - should not and need not be agreed until future trade terms had been. All of these claims were always untrue. So now the inconvenience of these old lies is to be covered over with a new one: that there is only one deal to do, and it has been done.
The announcement that DExEu is to close on the same date is presumably intended to communicate the same message. However here, at least, there is a more charitable interpretation which is that, as a piece of government machinery, it was always misconceived and, in particular, created crossed chains of command with Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. Notably, the Institute for Government has argued since 2016 that it should not have been created. More recently IfG’s Joe Owen has made the case for closing it now but notes that, of course, this does not mean – as the announcement might be taken to imply - that the amount of civil service effort needed to deliver Brexit has reduced.
A policy with no purpose
But banning the Brexit word has a deeper significance, too, and one which I think historians will find both interesting and perplexing. For it is an extension of something which has been underway almost since the Referendum result itself. Few, if any, of the original advocates of Brexit any longer make any case for it being a good thing in its own terms, or, in any specific way, as having any beneficial outcomes.
Under Theresa May, there was a palpable sense that she was enacting a policy she knew to be damaging and that her task was to achieve what damage limitation she could – the scope for which she almost entirely closed down by virtue of her Lancaster House speech. Brexiters chalked this miserabilism up to her remainer negativity, but they, too, have ceased to claim any great benefits for Brexit.
During the election campaign, and now, Johnson has talked only of ‘getting it done’ in order to be able to focus on the people’s priorities. That very formulation at least implies that getting Brexit done is not one of those priorities, and the policies of NHS and infrastructure spending and so on that he claims to be the priorities could all be done, and be more easily done, without Brexit happening at all.
So, for many months now, the only argument made for Brexit is that it must be done because that was the outcome of the Referendum vote. For some, perhaps, that argument does over-ride all others, to the extent of thinking that even if it is a bad thing in itself it must be done for reasons of trust or democratic legitimacy. Yet – even if those were good arguments - it is strange that its most prominent campaigners no longer make any other case, and that this case is only one of avoiding the negative consequences of not proceeding rather than identifying the positive consequences of doing so. Why on earth would we not mention it, indeed why would we not take every opportunity to trumpet it, if it is such a wonderful thing?
Johnson’s New Year message
In this sense, the edict not to mention Brexit, despite it only being halfway to completion, links to Johnson’s New Year message calling for everyone to unite together and move forward from the divisions of the Referendum. Both are suggesting that we all simply shrug our shoulders and forget the promises that were made for Brexit, the damage it has already done, the damage it has still to do, and, indeed, all the decisions that have still to be made.
It’s as if it were an embarrassing episode at the Christmas office party that it would be bad taste to remind anyone of in the new year. That would be absurd enough, but when the message comes from the person who – metaphorically speaking – was caught photocopying his buttocks and who – literally speaking – is the boss it is at best self-serving and at worst an abuse of power.
The important question is how realistic is this strategy? People – and it is probably most people – may be heartily sick of the divisions and problems that Brexit has caused, but they aren’t all going to simply forget about them. Johnson has conducted his whole career, and, it seems, much of his personal life, on the basis of creating a colossal mess and then avoiding all responsibility for it. But Brexit is far, far bigger than any of his previous messes and he’s not easily going to be able to shrug it off and walk away, which both the B-word edict and the New Year’s message suggest he is going to attempt to do.
The bigger part of that strategy is, presumably, going to be to try to keep the forthcoming trade negotiations with the EU as secretive as possible and, also, to make them seem entirely boring and technical, and hope that no one pays too much attention. That means the electorate, of course, but also the more extreme of his backbenchers. That may have some hope of success – some electors in any case believe that Britain left the EU in 2016, others will be happy enough to think that it was done on 31 January. And no doubt there will be many in the pro-Brexit press who will acclaim any trade deal, even a minimal one, as a great triumph.
Meanwhile, ongoing news of company relocations or disinvestments will be explained away as ‘nothing to do’ with the thing we no longer mention. In any case, since little will change in the transition period it will be easy to claim that Brexit has been ‘done’ without the adverse effects predicted by the ‘doomsters’. Subsequent to that, such effects will be dismissed as due to other causes since they came so long after Brexit was ‘done’.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the coming period is that whilst declaiming a future in which Britain’s potential will be “unleashed” – by implication because of ‘casting off the shackles’ of EU membership – behind the scenes what will probably be going will be a slow drip-feed of measures to re-attach the UK to EU systems and processes. An early precedent and template for such an approach can be found in data protection legislation. These measures may not have a high profile and are likely to lie outside of anything specifically identified as trade deal – or, more likely, be about non-trade matters - but will either seek to reproduce, or be inferior or more expensive versions of, existing relationships. To the extent that they are noticed at all, people will wonder what the point is; more likely, Johnson is gambling on them being too arcane to attract much interest.
Confronting realities
Even so, in important ways, the coming year is going to see Johnson forced to confront many of the realities which he has either denied or been ignorant of, and that will be true no matter how many of the officials and politicians involved are ‘true believers’. To an extent that has already started in that, mercifully, we no longer hear anything of the ‘alternative arrangements’ for the Irish border nor the GATT Article XXIV nonsense. But there is much more reality to come.
In particular, the underlying confusions which gave rise to all the ‘easiest deal in history’ claims are going to be ruthlessly exposed. Such claims – made at various times by Liam Fox, David Davis, Peter Lilley, and Johnson himself – are based, when they are based on anything other than windy chauvinism, on the idea that the UK is already completely aligned with the EU, and therefore a trade deal will be easy.
That is a proposition which resolutely refuses to accept that as a consequence of Brexit, the UK, even in the transition period, will be a third country with respect to the EU. So it is not that the current membership terms are the baseline for negotiation, to be subtracted from. Rather – as regards trade – WTO terms are the baseline to which things might be added by negotiation. There is not a special ‘alumni club’ for ex-members of the EU.
It’s true, as EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan said the other day, that the fact of current convergence and integration could make a close relationship easy. But that is only so if the desired outcome is convergence and integration. Since, as Hogan went on to say, the UK desire is apparently for divergence then current convergence is not helpful at all. In reality, this just amounts to a reprise of the Barnier staircase: for as long as UK red lines over, in particular, the ECJ and freedom of movement continue, then that circumscribes what kind of deal can be done. If the UK adds, as it has under Johnson, new red lines over level playing field commitments, that makes any deal more minimal still.
It is here that Johnson will confront the biggest difficulties in his ‘don’t mention Brexit’ strategy. If he holds firm to seeking only a very minimal trade deal, there is going to be a lot of economic fallout. If he does not, then there will be a lot of political fallout. If either of those things happen, then Brexit will certainly continue to be at the forefront of public debate, and the claim that it has ‘been done’ will ring hollow.
Brexit talks to continue …
In this sense, as noted in a recent post on this blog, the underlying dynamics of Brexit will not change after 31 January as regards the contradictions and conundrums of what it means for the UK. Yet, in another sense, there will be a change as regards the dynamics between the UK and the EU. During the Article 50 negotiations, Brexiters repeatedly spoke of how ‘EU negotiations’ always go to the last minute of the last hour. In this, they failed to see the difference between, for example, treaty negotiations amongst the existing, ongoing member states – with last minute horse-trading to facilitate an agreement - and those between the EU-27 and the one, departing, state. The late breakthrough which did happen was simply based on the UK accepting the Irish Sea border that it had previously rejected.
And just as the Article 50 negotiations differed from normal intra-EU negotiations, so too will future terms talks, which will occur under Article 218 which governs EU negotiating rules with third countries, differ from the Article 50 talks*. Amongst other things, depending on the scope of the future terms agreement this will have implications for whether unanimity or qualified majority within the European Council is needed to conclude any agreement reached.
Alongside this difference in legal process, there is a sense that the political priority which Brexit has for the EU – which, except perhaps in the very immediate post-Referendum period was never as all-encompassing as it was for the UK – will diminish further. It will be one amongst many issues which the new EU leadership team face and, necessarily, the UK-EU trade relationship matters far more for the UK, for whom the EU is its largest trade partner, than it does for the EU. If Johnson continues down the track that makes a distant relationship inevitable then, by the same token, it becomes even less salient for the EU. If he changes track, then the compromises the EU will require will loom large. Either way, the realpolitik of the power difference between the EU and the UK will become ever clearer.
And Brexit talk to continue …
For all that the government may not wish the public to notice this, judging by what happened with the Article 50 negotiations there will be plenty of press releases and statements from the EU about how talks are progressing. There is also likely to be plenty of noise from business lobbies in the UK, if a minimal deal is in prospect, and from irate Brexiters if an extensive deal is in prospect. There will be plenty of talk of preparations if no deal 2.0 is in prospect. And there will certainly be ongoing and intensifying discussions of the future of Scotland and Northern Ireland within the UK.
For all of these reasons, I think it is unlikely that Johnson will achieve his aim of getting the nation to move on from and forget the Brexit that he did so much to cause and is going to spend at least the next year enacting. Apart from anything else, for all his talk of respect and friendship, Johnson is offering no compromise towards remainers in the form that Brexit is to take. And whilst some – even some who once cared passionately – will no doubt cease to be engaged by or interested in Brexit it remains the case that it is a policy which only ever had a bare majority in support, and that for only a fleeting period of time.
So the idea that it can all be brushed over and forgotten like an ill-advised newspaper column is, surely, naïve? Or, perhaps, to think otherwise is naïve? For Johnson’s hope is presumably that the electorate are ignorant, lazy and forgetful – like all populists he has a low opinion of the people he purports to speak for – and that the post-truth politics that have got him so far will protect him from being held accountable.
At all events, the tight rope that Johnson will walk this coming year will be defined by whether people remember what was promised and how false those promises were or whether, as he hopes, they forget and, indeed, ‘move on’, accepting what happens as ‘just the way things are’. He has already set down the first chips in that cynical gamble. In the coming year, we’ll see whether he is right.
*There is a fiddly complexity here in that Article 50 utilises Article 218 (3) but, for the future terms talks, the entirety of Article 218 applies. There has also been some discussion within legal circles about whether, in fact, future terms negotiations could be conducted under Article 50 rather than under Article 218 – however, the consensus seems to be against this.
Saturday, 15 December 2018
As Brexit realities bite, Brexiter fantasies grow
I’m not sure
if they still exist – I haven’t noticed any recently – but many butchers and
greengrocers used to have large electrical insect killers on the walls of their
shops. Every so often there would be a slightly gruesome crackling buzz as some
hapless fly or wasp was zapped.
In a similar way, throughout the last couple of years there has periodically been the crunching sound of this or that Brexit fantasy encountering the lethal force of reality. Examples include the realisation that the EU wasn’t going to ‘go whistle’ for the financial settlement, that sequencing wasn’t going to be ‘row of the summer’ of 2017, and the (apparent) acceptance of an Irish border backstop as part of the phase 1 agreement – and of course there are many others.
Reality bites
We are hearing the sound more frequently now, as the Article 50 timeframe inexorably shrinks. It happened on Monday, when Theresa May was forced to accept that she had no hope of getting her deal through the House of Commons, and on Wednesday when the ERG were forced to accept they did not have the strength to oust her. Since then, it has happened again when the Prime Minister went to Brussels to seek ‘concessions’ on the backstop provision.
That trip was bound to end in failure because what was being sought was not a concession but something that by definition couldn’t happen: to make the backstop in some way (for example through a time limit) conditional. But the only way a backstop can function as a backstop is to be unconditional in the sense that it is the solution to keeping the Irish border fully open if no other way of doing so is found.
Tony Connelly, RTE’s Europe Editor, and consistently one of the shrewdest and best-informed writers on Brexit, has provided a detailed explanation of the twists and turns of what happened in Brussels, from which one conclusion might be that May mishandled the discussions. But even had she been the most consummate of diplomats the end result would have been much the same. Aside from the fact that she was seeking the impossible, nested inside this latest misstep are two persistent misapprehensions.
Persistent misapprehensions
The first is that since the outset the government has approached the negotiations as if it is for the EU to come up with ways of delivering what the UK wants. The long months in which Britain failed to table proposals is evidence of this, and of something even more problematic: that the UK couldn’t, and still cannot, agree what it wants. Instead, all Britain has really done is stated the things it doesn’t want and left it to the EU to fashion a deal consistent with that – May’s deal - which is now being rejected as it is not what Britain wants!
At this week’s summit, Jean-Claude Juncker complained that “there is an impression in the UK that it is for the EU to propose solutions. But it is the UK leaving the EU”. It is a complaint that echoes reports from last January that in private meetings with Angela Merkel the Prime Minister repeatedly asked to be “made an offer”, to which Merkel replied “but you’re leaving, we don’t have to make you an offer. Come on, what do you want?” with May responding by simply saying again “make me an offer”.
The same approach was evident at the Salzburg summit, when the PM called on the EU to come up with a form of Brexit acceptable to Britain. This is not just, or even primarily, about Theresa May. Rather, it grows out of the underlying way that Brexiters continually talk and act as if Britain is being forced to leave the EU rather than choosing to do so.
The second misapprehension is that the Brexit negotiations are akin to those over, for example, the various treaties which the UK has taken part in as a continuing member state. Thus, it is often said, negotiations will go the wire with last minute concessions made and deals done and so it will be with Brexit. But the dynamics of the Brexit talks are nothing like this at all. They are not a horse trade amongst 28 countries, with the possibility of alliances between different groupings, and with some flexibility on one issue being traded for acceptance of another, in order to get an overall settlement that all want.
Instead, they are a fairly brutal power play between one very large bloc of 27 countries with a fairly united stance on this issue, and a single country with relatively little (not none, but not that much) leverage because it will suffer economically far more than most of the 27 (with, perhaps, the exception of Ireland and to an extent Holland) if no deal is done. If Brexiters think that this means the EU is ‘being nasty’, all that can be said is: welcome to the real world, and get ready for those ‘independent trade policy’ talks with the US, China and India, as well as fighting your corner in the WTO. This is what taking back control looks like. As Ireland has found, there is, to coin a phrase, power in a union.
New fantasies for old
It might be expected that as reality bites in these and other ways, Brexiters would gradually modify or abandon their fantasies. Indeed, to an extent, this is what Theresa May – having initially embraced those fantasies – has done. But, of course, they do not. Instead, we are now seeing a doubling down on ever more absurd positions. This can be seen in the spate of interventions over the last few days from advocates of ‘a better deal’ or of a ‘managed no deal’.
The fatuity of these ideas cannot be over-stated. Although they appear in different versions, they all circle around the same basic proposition, which is that the Irish backstop is unnecessary and that the £39 billion financial settlement should be reduced and/or made conditional upon completing a future trade deal. They also persistently assume that even with no deal there would be deals on, for example, aviation and customs arrangements – the gaping logical hole in which hardly needs to be spelt out – and of course invariably rest on the canard that ‘trading on WTO terms’ is fine, and the norm for how countries trade (for a comprehensive demolition of this persistent falsity, see Richard Barfield’s magisterial briefing).
Regarding the backstop, the proposals have been comprehensively dismantled by Dr Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, a leading expert on the Irish border. At their core is that hardy perennial of ‘technological solutions’ but this makes no sense. If those solutions exist, or come to exist, then even within the present Withdrawal Agreement they can obviate the use of the backstop. It is because they do not currently exist, and in case they never materialise, that the backstop exists.
Equally nonsensical is the argument in the ‘better deal’ proposal that there is no need for a backstop because “London, Dublin and Brussels have all ruled out a hard border in any circumstances”. The whole point is: what are the institutional arrangements to make sure this desire is realised once Britain has left the institutions that currently allow it? And even more absurd is the implicit claim being wheeled out by various ERG members that when Iain Duncan Smith and others met with Michel Barnier last October he somehow accepted that a backstop wasn’t needed.
As for the idea of withholding payment of the financial settlement as a condition for a future trade deal, this repeats the failure of Brexiters from the outset to understand the basic fact that it’s a payment to settle past obligations, not a booking fee for future benefits. It really is just going round and round in circles, imagining that, eventually, the circle will turn into a square. Related, and equally unrealistic, is that a managed no deal would see the EU agree to a transition period and/or continued unfettered membership of the single market. In brief, as Tim Durrant of the Institute for Government puts it, there is no such thing as a managed no deal.
Effectively all of these ideas are variants of the claim that there could be a deal (which isn’t a deal) allowing the UK to have the benefits of being an EU member (without being an EU member). It is almost invariably put forward by people who a couple of years ago were saying that a good, quick deal would be easily achieved and now - with no apparent shame - say that no deal will be that good, quick easy deal. It is, unequivocally, pure hokum and, unequivocally, will never and could never be put into practice.
Why bother with this nonsense?
All this is so ridiculous that it would not be worth discussing, but for three reasons. One is that it is still conceivable that the British government will end up trying to adopt such a policy – apparently, it is to be proposed by Penny Mordaunt, the International Development Secretary, in the coming days, and finds favour with Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid. In the febrile atmosphere of UK politics, it is just possible that this crazy idea will be attempted and if it is it will unquestionably lead to disaster. It is a one-way street to no deal, packaged up as a way of avoiding no deal. However, it is unlikely to happen given that Parliament would surely not endorse so reckless a policy.
But that brings us to the second reason for giving any attention to these ideas. Given that they are unlikely to be adopted then, whatever happens instead, they will be invoked for years as ‘proof’ that there was a perfectly viable way of doing Brexit if only it had not been betrayed. This will feed a potentially very dangerous ‘stab in the back’ myth.
And thirdly, if there were to be another referendum, and if by some act of supreme folly the ballot paper were to include, as some have suggested, a ‘no deal’ option, we would see all these lies and misunderstandings presented as if they were well-founded. That, allied with the fact that some polls show that many people interpret ‘no deal’ to mean ‘no change’ could lead to the catastrophe of a vote endorsing a no deal Brexit without knowing the truth of what it means.
So it really is vital to keep exposing these ludicrous fantasies to the ‘insect zapper’ of reality. It is a never ending task, because as each one crashes and burns it is resurrected in identical or slightly revised form. An excellent resource for doing so – and if only every MP were to read it – is the most recent of Sir Ivan Rogers’ devastating evaluations. Had he been listened to, rather than hounded from office, by Brexiters then it is conceivable that they might have fashioned a workable Brexit.
Indeed, it is a rich irony that the stubborn refusal of Brexiters to engage seriously with the realities of Brexit may just end up with its being reversed.
In a similar way, throughout the last couple of years there has periodically been the crunching sound of this or that Brexit fantasy encountering the lethal force of reality. Examples include the realisation that the EU wasn’t going to ‘go whistle’ for the financial settlement, that sequencing wasn’t going to be ‘row of the summer’ of 2017, and the (apparent) acceptance of an Irish border backstop as part of the phase 1 agreement – and of course there are many others.
Reality bites
We are hearing the sound more frequently now, as the Article 50 timeframe inexorably shrinks. It happened on Monday, when Theresa May was forced to accept that she had no hope of getting her deal through the House of Commons, and on Wednesday when the ERG were forced to accept they did not have the strength to oust her. Since then, it has happened again when the Prime Minister went to Brussels to seek ‘concessions’ on the backstop provision.
That trip was bound to end in failure because what was being sought was not a concession but something that by definition couldn’t happen: to make the backstop in some way (for example through a time limit) conditional. But the only way a backstop can function as a backstop is to be unconditional in the sense that it is the solution to keeping the Irish border fully open if no other way of doing so is found.
Tony Connelly, RTE’s Europe Editor, and consistently one of the shrewdest and best-informed writers on Brexit, has provided a detailed explanation of the twists and turns of what happened in Brussels, from which one conclusion might be that May mishandled the discussions. But even had she been the most consummate of diplomats the end result would have been much the same. Aside from the fact that she was seeking the impossible, nested inside this latest misstep are two persistent misapprehensions.
Persistent misapprehensions
The first is that since the outset the government has approached the negotiations as if it is for the EU to come up with ways of delivering what the UK wants. The long months in which Britain failed to table proposals is evidence of this, and of something even more problematic: that the UK couldn’t, and still cannot, agree what it wants. Instead, all Britain has really done is stated the things it doesn’t want and left it to the EU to fashion a deal consistent with that – May’s deal - which is now being rejected as it is not what Britain wants!
At this week’s summit, Jean-Claude Juncker complained that “there is an impression in the UK that it is for the EU to propose solutions. But it is the UK leaving the EU”. It is a complaint that echoes reports from last January that in private meetings with Angela Merkel the Prime Minister repeatedly asked to be “made an offer”, to which Merkel replied “but you’re leaving, we don’t have to make you an offer. Come on, what do you want?” with May responding by simply saying again “make me an offer”.
The same approach was evident at the Salzburg summit, when the PM called on the EU to come up with a form of Brexit acceptable to Britain. This is not just, or even primarily, about Theresa May. Rather, it grows out of the underlying way that Brexiters continually talk and act as if Britain is being forced to leave the EU rather than choosing to do so.
The second misapprehension is that the Brexit negotiations are akin to those over, for example, the various treaties which the UK has taken part in as a continuing member state. Thus, it is often said, negotiations will go the wire with last minute concessions made and deals done and so it will be with Brexit. But the dynamics of the Brexit talks are nothing like this at all. They are not a horse trade amongst 28 countries, with the possibility of alliances between different groupings, and with some flexibility on one issue being traded for acceptance of another, in order to get an overall settlement that all want.
Instead, they are a fairly brutal power play between one very large bloc of 27 countries with a fairly united stance on this issue, and a single country with relatively little (not none, but not that much) leverage because it will suffer economically far more than most of the 27 (with, perhaps, the exception of Ireland and to an extent Holland) if no deal is done. If Brexiters think that this means the EU is ‘being nasty’, all that can be said is: welcome to the real world, and get ready for those ‘independent trade policy’ talks with the US, China and India, as well as fighting your corner in the WTO. This is what taking back control looks like. As Ireland has found, there is, to coin a phrase, power in a union.
New fantasies for old
It might be expected that as reality bites in these and other ways, Brexiters would gradually modify or abandon their fantasies. Indeed, to an extent, this is what Theresa May – having initially embraced those fantasies – has done. But, of course, they do not. Instead, we are now seeing a doubling down on ever more absurd positions. This can be seen in the spate of interventions over the last few days from advocates of ‘a better deal’ or of a ‘managed no deal’.
The fatuity of these ideas cannot be over-stated. Although they appear in different versions, they all circle around the same basic proposition, which is that the Irish backstop is unnecessary and that the £39 billion financial settlement should be reduced and/or made conditional upon completing a future trade deal. They also persistently assume that even with no deal there would be deals on, for example, aviation and customs arrangements – the gaping logical hole in which hardly needs to be spelt out – and of course invariably rest on the canard that ‘trading on WTO terms’ is fine, and the norm for how countries trade (for a comprehensive demolition of this persistent falsity, see Richard Barfield’s magisterial briefing).
Regarding the backstop, the proposals have been comprehensively dismantled by Dr Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, a leading expert on the Irish border. At their core is that hardy perennial of ‘technological solutions’ but this makes no sense. If those solutions exist, or come to exist, then even within the present Withdrawal Agreement they can obviate the use of the backstop. It is because they do not currently exist, and in case they never materialise, that the backstop exists.
Equally nonsensical is the argument in the ‘better deal’ proposal that there is no need for a backstop because “London, Dublin and Brussels have all ruled out a hard border in any circumstances”. The whole point is: what are the institutional arrangements to make sure this desire is realised once Britain has left the institutions that currently allow it? And even more absurd is the implicit claim being wheeled out by various ERG members that when Iain Duncan Smith and others met with Michel Barnier last October he somehow accepted that a backstop wasn’t needed.
As for the idea of withholding payment of the financial settlement as a condition for a future trade deal, this repeats the failure of Brexiters from the outset to understand the basic fact that it’s a payment to settle past obligations, not a booking fee for future benefits. It really is just going round and round in circles, imagining that, eventually, the circle will turn into a square. Related, and equally unrealistic, is that a managed no deal would see the EU agree to a transition period and/or continued unfettered membership of the single market. In brief, as Tim Durrant of the Institute for Government puts it, there is no such thing as a managed no deal.
Effectively all of these ideas are variants of the claim that there could be a deal (which isn’t a deal) allowing the UK to have the benefits of being an EU member (without being an EU member). It is almost invariably put forward by people who a couple of years ago were saying that a good, quick deal would be easily achieved and now - with no apparent shame - say that no deal will be that good, quick easy deal. It is, unequivocally, pure hokum and, unequivocally, will never and could never be put into practice.
Why bother with this nonsense?
All this is so ridiculous that it would not be worth discussing, but for three reasons. One is that it is still conceivable that the British government will end up trying to adopt such a policy – apparently, it is to be proposed by Penny Mordaunt, the International Development Secretary, in the coming days, and finds favour with Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid. In the febrile atmosphere of UK politics, it is just possible that this crazy idea will be attempted and if it is it will unquestionably lead to disaster. It is a one-way street to no deal, packaged up as a way of avoiding no deal. However, it is unlikely to happen given that Parliament would surely not endorse so reckless a policy.
But that brings us to the second reason for giving any attention to these ideas. Given that they are unlikely to be adopted then, whatever happens instead, they will be invoked for years as ‘proof’ that there was a perfectly viable way of doing Brexit if only it had not been betrayed. This will feed a potentially very dangerous ‘stab in the back’ myth.
And thirdly, if there were to be another referendum, and if by some act of supreme folly the ballot paper were to include, as some have suggested, a ‘no deal’ option, we would see all these lies and misunderstandings presented as if they were well-founded. That, allied with the fact that some polls show that many people interpret ‘no deal’ to mean ‘no change’ could lead to the catastrophe of a vote endorsing a no deal Brexit without knowing the truth of what it means.
So it really is vital to keep exposing these ludicrous fantasies to the ‘insect zapper’ of reality. It is a never ending task, because as each one crashes and burns it is resurrected in identical or slightly revised form. An excellent resource for doing so – and if only every MP were to read it – is the most recent of Sir Ivan Rogers’ devastating evaluations. Had he been listened to, rather than hounded from office, by Brexiters then it is conceivable that they might have fashioned a workable Brexit.
Indeed, it is a rich irony that the stubborn refusal of Brexiters to engage seriously with the realities of Brexit may just end up with its being reversed.
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