It’s fair to say that Brexit has ceased to provide much in the way of drama. To use a cricketing analogy (and they are always the best ones), it is as if Brexit’s Bazball days have given way to the cricket of an earlier era, so that what we are now seeing is akin to Geoff Boycott (who, it’s relevant to say in this context, is both a keen Brexiter and Theresa May’s childhood hero) grinding out a painfully slow innings on a dead wicket. Such play as there is gets constantly interrupted by rain. The crowd got bored long ago, and are huddled down under macs and umbrellas. The captain, though as keen an enthusiast for cricket as for Brexit, has no strategy, no leadership skills, is despised by half the team, and will surely be replaced when the inevitable defeat arrives. Meanwhile, dreary, be-blazered bores chunter on about Lord’s being the home of a game that long since found its centre on the other side of the world.
And so we drift on.
Import controls and the common user charge
Probably the biggest piece of Brexit-related news over the Easter holiday was the government’s announcement of the ‘common user charge’ to be levied on imports of animal and plant products from the EU. This is the latest aspect of the much-delayed introduction of post-Brexit import controls, the next phase of which become operational at the end of this month. These in turn are part of the economic border with the EU which Brexiters swore would not be necessary because there would be some miraculous deal which ensured ‘frictionless trade’ without participating in the institutions which ensure frictionless trade.
The common use charge will add £29 to a consignment of an individual product line, so where a consignment contains more than one product line the charge will be multiplied by that number, up to a cap of five, making the maximum charge £145. This maximum is likely to be reached on many consignments because the kinds of products involved, many of which have short lives, are typically shipped in small quantities within a bulk assignment. However, it shouldn’t be thought that these are the only costs Brexit has added to importing from the EU. In some cases there may be health certificates to be paid for, in others duty or VAT to be paid. In all cases there will be the administrative costs of ensuring compliance.
The impact of all these costs will be very similar to what happened when the EU introduced controls in the other direction (i.e. British exports to the EU), on time, when the transition period ended. That is, small firms (£), trading smaller volumes of goods, with tighter margins, and perhaps no experience of international trade other than with the EU, will struggle the most and many will cease to trade at all. A study by Allianz Trade released this week suggests that the first year of these latest changes will add 10% to the costs of importing the products affected. Larger firms will be more able to ‘absorb’ these costs, but doing so doesn’t make them disappear, it just means they manifest themselves in other ways, including higher prices. It is one of the many ironies of Brexit that, before the referendum, we were told that it was decadent, globalist ‘big Business’ that opposed leaving the EU but that plucky British entrepreneurs couldn’t wait to be rid of ‘Brussels’ red tape’.
The common user charge only applies to goods coming through the Port of Dover or the Eurotunnel at Folkestone, and will be used, according to the government’s obtuse rhetoric, “to recover the costs of operating our world-class border facilities where essential biosecurity checks will protect our food supply, farmers and environment against costly disease outbreaks entering the UK through the short straits.” At least this statement clarifies one thing, which is that these checks do actually serve a purpose. It’s a point I’ve made repeatedly on this blog, but one which Brexiters like Jacob Rees-Mogg never understood, and fails to understand even now.
Food security and farming
At the same time, by confirming the purpose of checks, the government has tacitly admitted that its failure over the last three-plus years to operate full import controls has put the public at risk, which ought to be a scandal. And that scandal will not be ended once the controls are in place. The decision to use Sevington, 22 miles from Dover, as the main site for sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) checks, means that, far from being ‘world-class’, the border will have a “gaping hole”, according to the head of the Port of Dover Health Authority, risking “illegal, unfit, dangerous, and diseased” products entering the country. Meanwhile, the Chief Executive of the Cold Chain Federation has said that it is becoming evident that the new Border Target Operating Model (to give the new “world-class border” its official name) is “broken” before it has even been fully implemented.
The lack, or inadequacy, of import controls is one of several Brexit-related complaints from British farmers which have led to recent protests, including a tractor go-slow outside parliament. Other complaints include the impact of the one-sided trade deals the UK made with Australia and New Zealand, and the ongoing failure to create a viable replacement for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). As with other instances of Brexit damage, Brexiters are keen to point to what is happening in other countries, in this case meaning farmers’ protests in the EU and elsewhere. And, as usual, this misses the point which is that whilst all sorts of countries, including this one, have such problems, it is only this country which has added Brexit to them.
In fact, agriculture, and the replacement for CAP in particular, serves as a case study not just of the damage of Brexit but of how Brexit has overloaded what in my last post I called Britain’s ailing state. Despite CAP having been a cause celebre for Brexiters for decades, policy since leaving the EU has been characterised by endless changes of direction and no coherent or consistent strategy, in part because of ministerial churn. The consequence, as Jill Rutter of the UK in a Changing Europe puts it in her review of this saga, is that “the people whose livelihoods depend on Defra decision-making are crying out for some stability in its ministerial team to allow them to plan long-term.”
The "death" of the London stock market
There was a time when farmers, like fishermen, another of the Brexiters’ supposed causes, believed that they would be ‘sold out’ by the government in its trade negotiations with the EU in order to protect access for financial services. In fact, although both groups do indeed feel they were sold out by Brexit, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) had little coverage of financial services. Instead, there have been several one-sided equivalence agreements, where the UK has granted EU firms access to UK markets, and one major EU-granted equivalence agreement for UK-based derivatives clearing houses. A Memorandum of Understanding regarding financial services regulatory cooperation was signed last year, reflecting the thaw in UK-EU relations following agreement of the Windsor Framework, but there is little chance of it yielding any substantive changes, at least until after the next election.
In any case, Britain’s post-Brexit financial services policy is hardly any more clearly defined than its agricultural policy and, in both cases, the political instability and incompetence unleashed by Brexit have taken their toll. A particular casualty has been the decline of the London stock market. As always, there are many factors in play, but even the Telegraph has identified (£) Brexit as the “prime suspect in the death of the stock market” and the referendum as a decisive moment in the City’s “brutal losing streak”. That losing streak saw a record fall last year in the number of companies listed on the London market, and it has been reported this week that Shell may move its listing to New York. If it does so, it will be following several others, although it would be the most high-profile and damaging case.
In his latest Substack newsletter, the respected economics commentator Simon Nixon pulls no punches in describing what is happening to the London stock market as “one of the biggest issues facing Britain today”, and a “national disaster that is unfolding”, having ripple effects into numerous professions and, hence, into the businesses that service them. And whilst many may care little for the fate of City fat cats, the impact on tax revenues and public services affects all of us. Nixon is equally clear about why it is happening. Rather as with the failures Rutter identifies around CAP, Nixon says that “this is above all a verdict on the political chaos and uncertainty that has arisen in Britain since Brexit.”
It is an important diagnosis because it points to the complexity of what is going on (and which is also important for other sectors). One aspect is purely economic. Brexiters, Nixon says “failed to recognise the extent to which [the stock market’s] pre-eminence had ceased to hinge on British exceptionalism but on the anchoring of the British economy in a deep single market of 450 million people.” The other is the elusive but undeniable factor of ‘investor sentiment’ and, although Nixon doesn’t say this, or not in these terms, that cannot really be separated from international perceptions of post-Brexit Britain in a more general sense than that of particular policies; or, rather, that Brexit is the ‘meta-policy’ which defines those perceptions.
Brexit: structural change with no strategy
One acute, albeit almost unbearably depressing, account of that was provided recently by Sam Knight in a long essay in The New Yorker. One of its key sentences notes that “overnight, and against the will of its leaders, the country abandoned its economic model—as the Anglo-Saxon gateway to the world’s largest trading bloc—and replaced it with nothing at all.” It’s a damning but entirely accurate verdict, which doesn’t just apply to the economy, and even arch-Brexiters like Sherelle Jacobs are beginning to recognize it (£). True, she ascribes this to Britain being too cowardly to use its Brexit freedoms, rather than accepting these are illusory, but her conclusion, that we might as well re-join the EU as be effectively within its orbit but outside the security it provides, is an interesting straw in the wind as to how Brexiters may come to regard their project.
However, even if so, it is far too little and is already too late. Ever since the first post on this blog, I’ve been wary about trying to discern the deep impact of Brexit from individual events or, at least, to try to be careful to separate the two. In that post, I suggested that the referendum “vote was akin to dropping an economic depth charge: a huge splash, followed by an eery silence … that does not however mean that beneath the surface important things are and are not happening.” Admittedly, an ‘eery silence’ was perhaps not quite the right description, but the fundamental point was correct, and I made it again when the transition period ended, and I wrote about the need to “get ready for ‘Long Brexit’”. There, I used a better metaphor in saying that “what is underway is a fundamental shift in the ‘tectonic plates’ of the UK trading economy and its supply chains.”
It's still too early to identify all of what that shift is going to mean, but we can see how, beneath all the noise, there have already been structural changes in the British economy or sectors within it. To take examples from today’s post, that is evident in the differential impact of trade frictions on small and large businesses, the changes happening in agriculture, and the decline of the stock market. It may be that some of these don’t feed through into big changes in aggregate measures such as GDP growth – if, say, small importers of artisanal foods go to the wall that will barely register in such measures, but it will impinge horribly on those people’s lives, whilst making the lives of their erstwhile customers a little worse as well. Other structural changes are leaving a bigger mark on the aggregate data, as the many estimates of foregone growth attest.
Crucially, there is nothing positive to set against them. There are no, or almost no, ‘winners’ from Brexit, and certainly no benefits which, when set against costs, would show an aggregate positive. Nor is there any underlying strategy behind the structural changes that are occurring. Knight is right that there was no new economic model in 2016, and there is no such model now. The vague notion of ‘Global Britain’ never made any sense in a regionalized world, the deregulatory ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ agenda (leaving aside all its other problems) never had sufficient political support to be viable, and the idea of the UK as a kind of regulatory superpower in emergent technologies like AI was a fantasy. Even less persuasive is the idea that all three could be pursued simultaneously. What is left is a muddled confusion, which no one can articulate, let alone defend.
So, Labour?
No one expects the present government to develop such a strategy, as it slowly rots away into oblivion. Instead, all eyes rest upon what a Labour government might do, with that attention given new focus by Rachel Reeves’ recent Mais Lecture. About the most positive of the assessments of it came from Will Hutton in the Observer, who, despite finding Labour’s recent repeated retreats “disheartening”, saw the lecture as “an important moment” leaving him “upbeat and encouraged” that Starmer and Reeves might trigger an investment revolution, lower inequality and revive the green agenda when in government. However, rather more common were reactions such as those of the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf, whose reading of the lecture was that Labour’s “plans should not make things worse”, but questioned whether they can make things better.
The issue here isn’t just Brexit, in the narrow sense of the UK’s trading relationship with the EU, but it is inseparable from Brexit in terms of whether under Labour the UK can develop a viable post-Brexit national strategy. Doing so certainly entails normalizing the tone and deepening the content of UK-EU relations, and there’s every reason to think that will happen. That in itself, especially if in the context of a huge electoral victory, would help to establish a sense internationally that the country has returned to the kind of normality that has eluded recent Tory governments, and not just in terms of Brexit. Whether that is enough without a more profound change in the trading relationship than Labour has committed to is the big question.
Infuriating as it may be, this question is not going to be answered this side of the election, and the reason is very obvious simply from reading the front-page banner headline of a recent edition of the Express. Originally titled “Tory MPs warn voting for Reform UK will kill Brexit”, the article is a desperate plea to would-be Reform voters to back the Tories, including a warning from the Party's new Deputy Chairman Jonathan Gullis not to be “seduced” by Reform as that “will let Labour in through the back door”.
This is not a new message, and it is one which will be deployed ever-more vociferously as the election approaches, but at the moment it has little cut-through. For one thing, it can hardly be lost on its target audience that Gullis’s predecessor, Lee Anderson, used to say the same things - and then proceeded to join Reform. Indeed, to the extent that Gullis appears to see his “mate” Anderson as a role model – an astonishing possibility given Anderson’s thuggish mediocrity, and made plausible only by Gullis’s own – it would not be altogether surprising if he followed suit.
And this points to a more fundamental problem. For years now, MPs on the Tory Right like Gullis have been pushing views that are indistinguishable from those of Reform, whilst denouncing their own party for not being ‘real’ Conservatives. So asking voters now to back the Tories is hardly convincing, and even less so now, given the extraordinary intra-party cooperation between Anderson and some of his other Tory MP ‘mates’. Likewise, so often have such Tories denounced the Brexit delivered by their own government to be ‘Brexit in Name Only’ that it is hardly going to make much difference to leave voters if Starmer plans to continue in the same vein. Even the suggestion that Labour will “kill Brexit” may not mean much to voters who have already been told ad nauseam that it died long ago at the hands of the remainer Establishment.
In fact, one of the many reasons why the Brexiters have so comprehensively lost the battle for the post-Brexit narrative is their attempt to defend Brexit whilst simultaneously insisting that it hasn’t been done properly. Although what they mean by it is something different, that insistence has gifted Labour the line ‘make Brexit work’ (irritating and silly as it is) and, with that, a degree of cover for what could otherwise be depicted as undoing the success of ‘proper’ Brexit. However, that would change in an instant if Labour were to make a proposal for any kind of re-joining, including a customs union, rumours of which have been discussed and denied this week. Suddenly, the Tories would be given the best possible chance of capturing the Reform vote and of avoiding a heavy electoral defeat, if not even avoiding defeat entirely.
The flip-side is that Labour will have little or no mandate for seeking substantive changes in the EU trading relationship after the election. That might be less of a problem than some think if such changes were wrapped up in technical jargon, and agreed with the EU quickly, whilst the opposition was in disarray. It’s not exactly an appealing idea to anyone fastidious about democracy, but nor does it require an inordinate amount of cynicism to imagine. At all events, we are not going to know until the time comes, and if that is a fresh sign of the dishonesty that Brexit has brought to British politics, then it must be chalked up as yet another item on the seemingly endless list of Brexit damages.
And so we drift on – no, I haven’t forgotten where I started this post – in the apparently Timeless Test that is Brexit.
Showing posts with label International reactions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label International reactions. Show all posts
Friday, 12 April 2024
Friday, 10 July 2020
Brexit Britain's place in the world
As the talks between the UK and the EU limp on – this week, again, they finished early with little sign of progress - and coronavirus and its consequences continue to dominate the news, the Brexit process has fallen into one of its periodic quiet phases. There are reports of UK lack of preparedness for the end of transition, and an EU statement about the many things which, deal or no deal, will change at that point. However, the first isn’t at all surprising and the second isn’t, for the most part, news though it may shock those who haven't been paying attention. On a more amusing note, Michel Barnier’s reply to Mark Francois’ letter (discussed in last week’s post) drily pointed out that it had been complaining about things which Boris Johnson had agreed to and which he, Francois, had voted for.
Most likely the quiet phase will continue over the summer. But it was clear from the beginning that Brexit was never going to be simply about a redefinition of the UK-EU relationship and we are starting to see in greater detail just how profound and complex a geo-political shift is underway (£). Trade is only one issue to be navigated and trade itself cannot readily be separated from international relations more generally.
For example, as Philip Hammond, the former Chancellor, remarked in an interview this week, with the UK introducing new trade barriers with the EU it becomes increasingly important to improve trade relations with China. Yet these relations cannot be taken in isolation from political disputes over, currently, Hong Kong and Huawei. And the UK’s stance on the latter, in particular, impacts in turn upon relations with the US. Britain is caught in a world of economic and political power blocs, but without belonging to any, in which any course of action regarding one of them has adverse consequences with respect to another.
Britain found a role – and threw it away
The bigger picture, of course, relates to Britain’s place in the world. Having famously lost an empire but failed to find a role in the first two post-war decades, membership of what became the EU led to its finding a role of sorts. With Brexit, it has been observed that “Britain has lost a role and failed to find an empire”. That role, primarily of being a transatlantic bridge, was not always a comfortable one – the Iraq War being an obvious example – but, in any event, it is a bridge that was burned with Brexit.
It’s important to focus on both ends of that bridge. The impression given by some Brexit Ultras is that after the end of December the EU will simply disappear from view (perhaps one subtext of the current misnomer of an ‘Australia-style deal’ is that they imagine being on the other side of the world from Europe). Global Britain will then focus on its relations with the wider world and cement that with the US in particular. But whether or not there is a UK-EU deal there will still be relationships between the two, and between the UK and individual member states.
Dr Helene von Bismarck, an historian specialising in British international relations, has written this week about how Anglo-German relations, despite the genuine commitment from both countries to a good future partnership, will face the problem of how to put that commitment into practice. How, she pointedly asks, “can joint interests between a Britain that seeks to be ‘global’ but shies away from any form of institutionalised cooperation with the EU, and a Germany committed firmly to Europe be organized and managed in the future”?
Similar questions will arise for Anglo-French relations, and others. Repairing relations with Ireland, which have been horribly mangled by Brexit, will pose particularly profound challenges. Managing relations with Spain, especially as regards Gibraltar will be another complexity. At the core of all this is the strategic incoherence of Brexit in the context of a regionalised and multi-polar world.
A Biden Presidency?
Coming back to the other end of the bridge, the implications of that incoherence are coming into sharper focus as the possibility grows that Trump will lose the Presidential elections. His much-vaunted support for Brexit has never translated into anything concrete anyway, and if Joe Biden wins then UK-US relations will be transformed. Not so much in terms of any trade deal – it’s likely that any US administration would make similar demands and make use of similar leverage – but because, like Obama, Biden and his team are well-known to regard Brexit as a serious mistake. A mistake for Britain, no doubt, but more particularly a mistake in terms of American interests.
A very thorough discussion of this was provided by Henry Zeffman in The Times this week (£). Biden is significantly more pro-EU than Trump (not a high bar, admittedly), and has strong links with Ireland. On the other hand, hardly less than Trump, he is likely to regard China with suspicion. More generally, a Biden presidency would represent some return to the US’s ‘normal’ advocacy of the rules-based multilateral order and to that extent might regard Brexit as one of the things which has put that in peril.
But, more importantly, US-UK relations would be governed by unsentimental calculation of interests. And as a foreign policy expert quoted in Zeffman’s article summarises those, “London has become a less valuable geo-political partner as a result of Brexit, which has eroded Britain’s traditional role as a transatlantic bridge”. That isn’t to say that there would not be particular issues where the two countries may find common ground, but it is more likely to be ad hoc rather than amounting to a coherent – still less a ‘special’ - relationship.
Why seek a ‘global role’ anyway?
Of course, there will be many in the UK who think ‘so much the better’. The problem, though, is what should replace it to re-define Britain’s global role. But one might put that a different way. Why should Britain seek a ‘global role’ anyway? Why not accept being a medium-sized power whose global sway is largely in the past, and which has plenty of domestic problems to address rather than seeking to project itself on the world stage?
Here, the nationalism of the Brexit project, and its carry forward in Johnson’s endless rhetoric about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ or even ‘world-beating’ status in this that and the other is a major barrier to rational thinking. For of course any such national self-appraisal would probably have meant that Brexit would never have happened anyway – plenty of other former colonial powers of various vintages have found EU membership perfectly congenial. Plenty of them, too, don’t experience any conflict between such membership and being a ‘global trading nation’. And France manages to operate as a nuclear power and permanent member of the UN Security Council whilst being a central player in the EU. But the continuing appeal of British exceptionalism mitigated against that, which reflects the fact the present conundrum of post-Brexit Britain’s role has roots which long pre-date 2016.
The Suez Crisis, no matter how it may have appeared at the time, does not in retrospect seem to have occasioned a profound shift in public (as opposed to official) realization that world powerdom was over; the Falklands War gave fresh impetus to the idea that Britain could project global military power at will even though, arguably, it could no longer be repeated (£). In particular, whilst from the 1970s Britain seemed to have found its post-imperial role via Europe, that was never anchored in a wider public debate about its past, either in terms of Empire or in terms of the ever-present mythologization of the Second World War. If anything, acting as the ‘transatlantic bridge’ served to prolong a certain delusion of grandeur, and enabled the historical amnesia I have written about in a previous post.
Sham patriotism
Having failed to have such a reckoning with the past when it might, perhaps, have been possible, it’s very difficult to see how it can occur in the present, highly partisan, times when it is most needed. The clear power imbalance in the Brexit negotiations – underscored by Angela Merkel’s recent comments – which has played out since 2017 cannot, in such times, serve as an education. It is invariably dismissed as punishment or bullying. Nor can the obvious implications of the way that Ireland has been able to exert such influence because of its EU membership. Consider reactions such as that “the Irish should really know their place” and the hostility of the Brexit press to Leo Varadkar. Even Hammond’s straightforwardly factual statements about the realpolitik of Brexit and China brought a furious denunciation from Brexiters.
So what should be lessons in political, economic and diplomatic reality simply entrench the division between those who understood it all along and those who deny it. That is especially so when news is refracted through a media which is not just partisan but parochial. The way that Brexit Britain is regarded by the wider world – take India, for example - scarcely registers, even as fantasies about ‘Global Britain’ and the Commonwealth are indulged in, often with more than a sense of being “the last gasp of empire” as Sally Tomlinson and Danny Dorling argue.
Unable to learn such lessons, this week Brexiters hailed Britain’s new independent post-Brexit sanctions policy as a great “victory”. Yet if the aim of sanctions is to be effective, they will be far more so if undertaken in concert with others. As with Britain’s ‘independent trade policy’, which has little to commend itself economically, the emphasis is entirely on the ‘independence’ – on the symbolism rather than the substance.
Why independence matters, what it achieves, or what it even consists of remain stubbornly ignored. It’s just better to have a ‘British’ policy than a policy, or that policy becomes good policy by virtue of being British. That looks like patriotism but it’s a sham, not because it makes use of symbols but precisely because it lacks any accompanying substance. The failure of the British rival to the Galileo Project is one obvious example, indicating how hollow a slogan ‘taking back control’ is in a world where interdependence is vital.
Fiddling while home burns
The bitter irony is that just at the moment that Britain is least well-equipped but most in need of a serious re-appraisal of its place in the world, this sham patriotism neglects the ways in which, domestically, it is falling apart. A favourite Brexiter line is that Britain is “the fifth largest economy in the world”, yet it is bedevilled by a longstanding productivity growth problem, dramatic levels of inequality and crumbling public services. A report from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) last year showed how, on a range of measures, Britain is actually ‘undeveloping’.
The current coronavirus has exposed many of these problems to a greater degree, and exacerbated some of them, but it has also, as Fintan O’Toole argued recently, shown the delusions of Johnson’s Brexity world-beating rhetoric. The issue, again, is symbolism over substance. There is no patriotism in endlessly declaring national superiority whilst daily delivering outcomes that are, as in this case, so much worse than most other countries.
The break-up of Britain?
The strangest irony of all in this is that Britain, largely as a result of Brexit, although again exacerbated by coronavirus, looks ever more likely to, literally, fall apart. I’m not going to express any opinion on the merits of the case for Scottish independence or Irish unification (any such opinion would be ill-informed and presumptuous on my part, and whatever opinion I might express would probably invite more of a backlash than, even having written about Brexit for years, I could cope with). But it’s been obvious since the Referendum that Brexit would make Scottish independence more likely, and the hard form and non-consensual way it has been undertaken since has made that even more true. It’s now quite widely seen as inevitable that there will be another vote, and the latest polls suggest that, if so, the outcome would be independence.
Equally, Northern Ireland, which also did not vote for Brexit, was always going to be dramatically affected by it. As hard Brexit developed, and given the measures agreed in the Northern Ireland Protocol to accommodate it, what is about to be created is a significant continuation of economic integration and unification within the island of Ireland along with a significant economic barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. That clearly makes the prospect of political unification much greater and at the very least puts it on the agenda in a way which wasn’t true prior to Brexit. Even Wales – where a majority voted for Brexit – may be seeing increased support for independence.
Rethinking Britain?
So questions about Britain’s post-Brexit ‘place in the world’ (rather than ‘global role’ per se) need also to be thought about in terms of what Britain itself is. And with no apparent appetite from the Conservative and, cough, Unionist Party to give serious consideration to either issue, there’s a real possibility that they will still be chuntering on about Global Britain when Britain has simply ceased to exist.
I don’t think that all the blame for this lies with the Conservatives, or even simply with politicians. It’s also the case that the, specifically, English public don’t really want to have the kind of debate that is needed. How often do countries ever really do so? Context is crucial. I would suggest the answer is usually only after some sort of cataclysmic event – most obviously war, occupation or the fall of dictatorships. Often, that is only partial and takes a very long time, as in the very different cases of Austria’s post-war history or Spain’s post-Franco period. Invariably, it is painful.
Moreover, ‘debate’ is perhaps a misnomer if it implies a formal, organized conversation. That sometimes happens, as with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and similar initiatives in other countries. But I suppose – I don’t have any expertise in this area - the reality is that countries more usually re-orientate themselves via multiple, connected but not entirely formalised processes. Perhaps the gradual social liberalisation of Ireland is an instructive example of that.
At all events, there needs to be an impetus and a willingness to do it. Could Brexit provide these? That’s an especially difficult question because Brexit both potentially occasions such a debate but, also, represents an absolute refusal to engage in one: it has only been about what Britain did not want to be, not, in any practical sense, about what it could or should become, still less about what it has been. On the other hand, any such national debate would, if multi-stranded, be not just about Brexit but other aspects of Britain’s past and future. The current increased awareness of the role slavery played in that past could be the beginnings of one example. Discussions of how an ageing society will shape the future of Britain might be another.
So, yes, perhaps - but perhaps not yet. Awful as it is, Brexit isn’t on a par with war, occupation or dictatorship, and its effects will emerge gradually and be difficult to disentangle from other events. Unless or until those effects become very clear there’s insufficient impetus. And it will probably need the coming to power and the coming of age of a new generation to supply the willingness.
What the UK will look like by then, and whether it even still exists, remains to be seen.
Most likely the quiet phase will continue over the summer. But it was clear from the beginning that Brexit was never going to be simply about a redefinition of the UK-EU relationship and we are starting to see in greater detail just how profound and complex a geo-political shift is underway (£). Trade is only one issue to be navigated and trade itself cannot readily be separated from international relations more generally.
For example, as Philip Hammond, the former Chancellor, remarked in an interview this week, with the UK introducing new trade barriers with the EU it becomes increasingly important to improve trade relations with China. Yet these relations cannot be taken in isolation from political disputes over, currently, Hong Kong and Huawei. And the UK’s stance on the latter, in particular, impacts in turn upon relations with the US. Britain is caught in a world of economic and political power blocs, but without belonging to any, in which any course of action regarding one of them has adverse consequences with respect to another.
Britain found a role – and threw it away
The bigger picture, of course, relates to Britain’s place in the world. Having famously lost an empire but failed to find a role in the first two post-war decades, membership of what became the EU led to its finding a role of sorts. With Brexit, it has been observed that “Britain has lost a role and failed to find an empire”. That role, primarily of being a transatlantic bridge, was not always a comfortable one – the Iraq War being an obvious example – but, in any event, it is a bridge that was burned with Brexit.
It’s important to focus on both ends of that bridge. The impression given by some Brexit Ultras is that after the end of December the EU will simply disappear from view (perhaps one subtext of the current misnomer of an ‘Australia-style deal’ is that they imagine being on the other side of the world from Europe). Global Britain will then focus on its relations with the wider world and cement that with the US in particular. But whether or not there is a UK-EU deal there will still be relationships between the two, and between the UK and individual member states.
Dr Helene von Bismarck, an historian specialising in British international relations, has written this week about how Anglo-German relations, despite the genuine commitment from both countries to a good future partnership, will face the problem of how to put that commitment into practice. How, she pointedly asks, “can joint interests between a Britain that seeks to be ‘global’ but shies away from any form of institutionalised cooperation with the EU, and a Germany committed firmly to Europe be organized and managed in the future”?
Similar questions will arise for Anglo-French relations, and others. Repairing relations with Ireland, which have been horribly mangled by Brexit, will pose particularly profound challenges. Managing relations with Spain, especially as regards Gibraltar will be another complexity. At the core of all this is the strategic incoherence of Brexit in the context of a regionalised and multi-polar world.
A Biden Presidency?
Coming back to the other end of the bridge, the implications of that incoherence are coming into sharper focus as the possibility grows that Trump will lose the Presidential elections. His much-vaunted support for Brexit has never translated into anything concrete anyway, and if Joe Biden wins then UK-US relations will be transformed. Not so much in terms of any trade deal – it’s likely that any US administration would make similar demands and make use of similar leverage – but because, like Obama, Biden and his team are well-known to regard Brexit as a serious mistake. A mistake for Britain, no doubt, but more particularly a mistake in terms of American interests.
A very thorough discussion of this was provided by Henry Zeffman in The Times this week (£). Biden is significantly more pro-EU than Trump (not a high bar, admittedly), and has strong links with Ireland. On the other hand, hardly less than Trump, he is likely to regard China with suspicion. More generally, a Biden presidency would represent some return to the US’s ‘normal’ advocacy of the rules-based multilateral order and to that extent might regard Brexit as one of the things which has put that in peril.
But, more importantly, US-UK relations would be governed by unsentimental calculation of interests. And as a foreign policy expert quoted in Zeffman’s article summarises those, “London has become a less valuable geo-political partner as a result of Brexit, which has eroded Britain’s traditional role as a transatlantic bridge”. That isn’t to say that there would not be particular issues where the two countries may find common ground, but it is more likely to be ad hoc rather than amounting to a coherent – still less a ‘special’ - relationship.
Why seek a ‘global role’ anyway?
Of course, there will be many in the UK who think ‘so much the better’. The problem, though, is what should replace it to re-define Britain’s global role. But one might put that a different way. Why should Britain seek a ‘global role’ anyway? Why not accept being a medium-sized power whose global sway is largely in the past, and which has plenty of domestic problems to address rather than seeking to project itself on the world stage?
Here, the nationalism of the Brexit project, and its carry forward in Johnson’s endless rhetoric about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ or even ‘world-beating’ status in this that and the other is a major barrier to rational thinking. For of course any such national self-appraisal would probably have meant that Brexit would never have happened anyway – plenty of other former colonial powers of various vintages have found EU membership perfectly congenial. Plenty of them, too, don’t experience any conflict between such membership and being a ‘global trading nation’. And France manages to operate as a nuclear power and permanent member of the UN Security Council whilst being a central player in the EU. But the continuing appeal of British exceptionalism mitigated against that, which reflects the fact the present conundrum of post-Brexit Britain’s role has roots which long pre-date 2016.
The Suez Crisis, no matter how it may have appeared at the time, does not in retrospect seem to have occasioned a profound shift in public (as opposed to official) realization that world powerdom was over; the Falklands War gave fresh impetus to the idea that Britain could project global military power at will even though, arguably, it could no longer be repeated (£). In particular, whilst from the 1970s Britain seemed to have found its post-imperial role via Europe, that was never anchored in a wider public debate about its past, either in terms of Empire or in terms of the ever-present mythologization of the Second World War. If anything, acting as the ‘transatlantic bridge’ served to prolong a certain delusion of grandeur, and enabled the historical amnesia I have written about in a previous post.
Sham patriotism
Having failed to have such a reckoning with the past when it might, perhaps, have been possible, it’s very difficult to see how it can occur in the present, highly partisan, times when it is most needed. The clear power imbalance in the Brexit negotiations – underscored by Angela Merkel’s recent comments – which has played out since 2017 cannot, in such times, serve as an education. It is invariably dismissed as punishment or bullying. Nor can the obvious implications of the way that Ireland has been able to exert such influence because of its EU membership. Consider reactions such as that “the Irish should really know their place” and the hostility of the Brexit press to Leo Varadkar. Even Hammond’s straightforwardly factual statements about the realpolitik of Brexit and China brought a furious denunciation from Brexiters.
So what should be lessons in political, economic and diplomatic reality simply entrench the division between those who understood it all along and those who deny it. That is especially so when news is refracted through a media which is not just partisan but parochial. The way that Brexit Britain is regarded by the wider world – take India, for example - scarcely registers, even as fantasies about ‘Global Britain’ and the Commonwealth are indulged in, often with more than a sense of being “the last gasp of empire” as Sally Tomlinson and Danny Dorling argue.
Unable to learn such lessons, this week Brexiters hailed Britain’s new independent post-Brexit sanctions policy as a great “victory”. Yet if the aim of sanctions is to be effective, they will be far more so if undertaken in concert with others. As with Britain’s ‘independent trade policy’, which has little to commend itself economically, the emphasis is entirely on the ‘independence’ – on the symbolism rather than the substance.
Why independence matters, what it achieves, or what it even consists of remain stubbornly ignored. It’s just better to have a ‘British’ policy than a policy, or that policy becomes good policy by virtue of being British. That looks like patriotism but it’s a sham, not because it makes use of symbols but precisely because it lacks any accompanying substance. The failure of the British rival to the Galileo Project is one obvious example, indicating how hollow a slogan ‘taking back control’ is in a world where interdependence is vital.
Fiddling while home burns
The bitter irony is that just at the moment that Britain is least well-equipped but most in need of a serious re-appraisal of its place in the world, this sham patriotism neglects the ways in which, domestically, it is falling apart. A favourite Brexiter line is that Britain is “the fifth largest economy in the world”, yet it is bedevilled by a longstanding productivity growth problem, dramatic levels of inequality and crumbling public services. A report from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) last year showed how, on a range of measures, Britain is actually ‘undeveloping’.
The current coronavirus has exposed many of these problems to a greater degree, and exacerbated some of them, but it has also, as Fintan O’Toole argued recently, shown the delusions of Johnson’s Brexity world-beating rhetoric. The issue, again, is symbolism over substance. There is no patriotism in endlessly declaring national superiority whilst daily delivering outcomes that are, as in this case, so much worse than most other countries.
The break-up of Britain?
The strangest irony of all in this is that Britain, largely as a result of Brexit, although again exacerbated by coronavirus, looks ever more likely to, literally, fall apart. I’m not going to express any opinion on the merits of the case for Scottish independence or Irish unification (any such opinion would be ill-informed and presumptuous on my part, and whatever opinion I might express would probably invite more of a backlash than, even having written about Brexit for years, I could cope with). But it’s been obvious since the Referendum that Brexit would make Scottish independence more likely, and the hard form and non-consensual way it has been undertaken since has made that even more true. It’s now quite widely seen as inevitable that there will be another vote, and the latest polls suggest that, if so, the outcome would be independence.
Equally, Northern Ireland, which also did not vote for Brexit, was always going to be dramatically affected by it. As hard Brexit developed, and given the measures agreed in the Northern Ireland Protocol to accommodate it, what is about to be created is a significant continuation of economic integration and unification within the island of Ireland along with a significant economic barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. That clearly makes the prospect of political unification much greater and at the very least puts it on the agenda in a way which wasn’t true prior to Brexit. Even Wales – where a majority voted for Brexit – may be seeing increased support for independence.
Rethinking Britain?
So questions about Britain’s post-Brexit ‘place in the world’ (rather than ‘global role’ per se) need also to be thought about in terms of what Britain itself is. And with no apparent appetite from the Conservative and, cough, Unionist Party to give serious consideration to either issue, there’s a real possibility that they will still be chuntering on about Global Britain when Britain has simply ceased to exist.
I don’t think that all the blame for this lies with the Conservatives, or even simply with politicians. It’s also the case that the, specifically, English public don’t really want to have the kind of debate that is needed. How often do countries ever really do so? Context is crucial. I would suggest the answer is usually only after some sort of cataclysmic event – most obviously war, occupation or the fall of dictatorships. Often, that is only partial and takes a very long time, as in the very different cases of Austria’s post-war history or Spain’s post-Franco period. Invariably, it is painful.
Moreover, ‘debate’ is perhaps a misnomer if it implies a formal, organized conversation. That sometimes happens, as with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and similar initiatives in other countries. But I suppose – I don’t have any expertise in this area - the reality is that countries more usually re-orientate themselves via multiple, connected but not entirely formalised processes. Perhaps the gradual social liberalisation of Ireland is an instructive example of that.
At all events, there needs to be an impetus and a willingness to do it. Could Brexit provide these? That’s an especially difficult question because Brexit both potentially occasions such a debate but, also, represents an absolute refusal to engage in one: it has only been about what Britain did not want to be, not, in any practical sense, about what it could or should become, still less about what it has been. On the other hand, any such national debate would, if multi-stranded, be not just about Brexit but other aspects of Britain’s past and future. The current increased awareness of the role slavery played in that past could be the beginnings of one example. Discussions of how an ageing society will shape the future of Britain might be another.
So, yes, perhaps - but perhaps not yet. Awful as it is, Brexit isn’t on a par with war, occupation or dictatorship, and its effects will emerge gradually and be difficult to disentangle from other events. Unless or until those effects become very clear there’s insufficient impetus. And it will probably need the coming to power and the coming of age of a new generation to supply the willingness.
What the UK will look like by then, and whether it even still exists, remains to be seen.
Friday, 31 January 2020
A day to mourn
So today it will happen. For some, it will be a day of joy and triumph and celebration. Yet, though those celebrations will be occurring, it seems likely that they will be relatively muted and confined to a relatively small number of the most committed leavers, led by a perhaps slightly underwhelming cast of speakers. There will also be some light displays and a new 50 pence coin.
Certainly there is no evidence of a general upsurge of joy, and no mood of national confidence or renewal. The more widespread sense seems to be, at best, one of exhaustion coupled with uncertainty about what has been done and what is to come. For many already realise that today marks only a stage in a very long, painful and uncertain process.
But of course that stage is of fundamental, historic significance because Britain, definitively, leaves the EU with no possibility of revoking that decision. Hence as many, if not more, are mourning as celebrating, and some will even be in despair.
Crucially, there is clear, sustained polling evidence that more people think that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU than think it was right. The current figures, from 26 January 2020, are 47% to 40%. Even more, 56%, think Brexit will be economically damaging compared with just 21% who think it will be beneficial. Two of the four constituent countries of the UK voted against Brexit, and the parliament/assemblies of three of them have rejected the legislation enacting it.
And, yet, today it will happen.
As an Irish Times editorial put it yesterday, “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”.
Anyone waking from a four year sleep to read this would find it truly bizarre. This long post is a partial account* of how we got to this moment and where we might be going now.
Brexit has created a deeply divided country
Never before has a modern democratic country deliberately embarked on such a major change of direction whilst so internally divided about its wisdom, and one so widely seen by observers across the world as seriously damaging to its standing and fundamental interests, including to its viability as a United Kingdom.
There is a reason why countries usually require super-majorities to enact major changes, and why countries which are composed of several national components create safeguards, so each can have its say. It is to ensure that such dangerous divisions are not created.
That no such care was taken was, ostensibly, because legally this was only an ‘advisory referendum’. But, politically, that was meaningless, not only but not least because of the leaflet sent by David Cameron’s government to every household, promising to enact the result. Subsequent arguments that the result should be set aside because of its advisory status were always a non-starter.
That leaflet was just one aspect of Cameron’s grotesquely irresponsible complacency that the referendum would be won, and his use of it as a tool to manage to internal divisions of his party. In the process, those internal divisions spread their poison to the entire country which is now infected for years to come. There is no antidote except, perhaps, the passage of time and the arrival in power of a new generation.
There are much deeper causes, too, which future historians will understand better than we can. The ambivalent history of Britain’s forty year EU membership, the social and regional inequalities embedded by the unplanned and imposed deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the breakdown of political trust whose proximate cause was the lies told to justify the Iraq War, a warped and malign public discourse about immigration, the financial deregulation that led to the financial crisis – and no doubt much else.
I think, in particular, the unprocessed cultural psychology of the Second World War was one of the biggest, yet least recognized, causes. In a strange historical irony, in the long run it proved harder to ‘get over’ victory than to face up to defeat and occupation.
Whatever the reasons for the result, it remains the case that, prior to the Referendum, EU membership was a matter of almost no public interest or disquiet. Leaving the EU was not, and is still not, some huge popular crusade or cause.
Brexiters never expected to win, and would be happier if they had lost
For this reason, just as Cameron assumed he would win the Referendum so, too, Brexiters expected to lose. That freed them both to tell as many lies as they wanted and to avoid specifying what a victory would mean. There’s no point in being mealy-mouthed about this: just about every claim made by Vote Leave was either simply untrue or, at best, a distortion of the truth. I think that there were some principled advocates of Brexit who were appalled by this but, if so, the plain fact is that without the lies there would have been no victory.
I am also convinced, even more now than at the time of the referendum, that many of the most passionate advocates of Brexit would actually have preferred to have lost. For them, protest, complaint and victimhood were the comfort zone that, in winning, they lost. That has fed through into a situation whereby those who most vociferously support Brexit regard any actual form it takes – including that which Johnson is developing – as not being ‘true Brexit’.
Thus, even as it is forced on the country, they remain unsatisfied and remain in that comfort zone of complaint and victimhood. Indeed the grimmest irony of Brexit is that, ever since the Referendum result, it has left not just so many remainers feeling sad, bitter and angry but so many leavers too.
So despite the endlessly repeated mantra of that Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, there’s never been a majority for any defined form of Brexit, and only momentarily for Brexit at all. Even as it happens, the opinion polls show a small majority for remain, whilst those who do want to leave the EU are still divided as to what form of doing so is what Brexit really means.
Brexiters won, but didn’t know how to deliver
This is one of the things that makes Brexit so unusual. It entails a huge national shift which its advocates don’t know how to deliver unlike, say, the Thatcherite revolution which – whilst one could disagree with it – knew what it was doing and how to go about it.
For having refused to specify in the Referendum what leaving meant – knowing that there was no agreement about that – Brexiters both then and ever since have shown they have no idea whatsoever about the practicalities of what it entails. Almost everything they say about, for example, international trade, or law, or customs procedures, or business operations, is either based on half-truths or is just flat wrong. It’s not just a matter of not knowing arcane technical detail but basic facts about what Brexit involves, as many posts on this blog have discussed with explicit, detailed refutations of the many false claims.
That incompetence is an affront not so much to those who voted to remain, but to those millions who voted to leave and might have had a reasonable expectation that the campaign leaders knew what they were doing. In reality, campaigning and protesting were all they knew how to do. Practical realities eluded them, not least because such realities contradicted the lies that they campaigned for and protested against.
For that alone Brexiter politicians deserve to be judged harshly by history. But perhaps even more degenerate are the shady think tanks and psychopathic disruptors behind those politicians, such as Dominic Cummings who, we are told, has now ‘done Brexit’ (£). As if it were a children’s game, they have wreaked havoc and then left the rest of us to live with the consequences. Even so, whatever they may say or do, from now on, and in fact since the triggering Article 50, it is Brexiters who are responsible for whatever happens.
Brexiters have insulted and humiliated half the country
More than anything else, and unlike any political event in Britain that I can recall, Brexit is an expression of contempt and even hatred directed at about half of the population. Perhaps it was the very surprise and bewilderment of winning that led Brexiters, rather than savouring victory, to unleash a culture war against those they had defeated. Even in some of the celebratory comments being made at the moment there seems to be more gloating about remainers’ distress than pleasure in leaving the EU per se.
The constant, sneering, references to ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’, 'saboteurs' and ‘remoaners’ are just the mildest version of this. Politicians, businesspeople, judges, lawyers, civil servants, academics – not to mention EU nationals, who did not even have the right to vote in the Referendum - have all been endlessly attacked, mocked and, at the wilder extremes, subjected to accusations of treachery and to death and rape threats. It’s undoubtedly the case that this climate intimidated some MPs into supporting things, especially the triggering of Article 50, which they knew were wrong.
I don’t discount the fact that those who voted to leave the EU have also been subjected to many insults – ‘Brexshitters’, stupid, racist, old, ‘gammon’ and worse – and, personally, I deplore that and have never indulged in it. The difference, though, is this. To the best of my knowledge, leading figures on the remain side have never sought to stigmatise leave voters but, rather, to try to understand their concerns. Whereas leading figures on the leave side have joined in, or at least not discouraged, the vitriol against remainers and never tried to understand their concerns.
In the aftermath of a close vote, a divisive campaign and with a colossal national task to undertake a big, inclusive, consensus-building approach to Brexit was so obviously needed. It would have been enormously difficult but neither May nor Johnson even tried. Any competent political leader would have seen the vital need to bridge the huge divides Brexit has created or revealed. Yet even at this late stage, with Brexit assured and a large parliamentary majority, Johnson refuses to make even the tiniest gesture of conciliation.
Brexiters have refused to seek consensus
Far from any attempt being made to find a consensual solution, as the years have gone by Brexit has been defined in harder and harder ways. The soft Brexit of single market membership, which many Brexiters had said was what Brexit meant prior to the referendum, and which could have formed the basis of a national consensus, was discounted as not being real Brexit. The hard Brexit of a trade agreement quickly gave way to claims that only ‘no deal’ or ‘clean’ Brexit would do.
As we leave the EU today, there is still no clarity on whether any deal on future terms will be done, or what it will look like, but the direction of travel could well be a complete de-alignment with the EU. Undoubtedly some of the Ultras will push hard for that. However it turns out, it will be very different to what the Leave campaign promised. Always the agenda has been driven by the most fanatical and extreme anti-EU ideologues and their wholly dishonest claim to represent the will of an undivided ‘people’.
Even that might have had a scintilla of legitimacy if a confirmatory referendum had been held. Far from being an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy it would have been a perfectly logical, and entirely democratic, exercise. It would simply have asked voters who had given, as it were, planning permission for Brexit to have the final say on whether, on the basis of what had thus far been agreed, they wanted to proceed beyond today’s point of no return. If they did, the answer would have been yes. If Brexiters truly believed it to be the will of the people they would have been happy to ask, but they knew it was not so.
So remainers – and, for that matter, ‘soft’ leavers – have for more than three years had their faces ground into the dirt, being told to ‘suck it up’ even as Brexiters argue about what ‘it’ actually is. It is as if, had remain won, leavers had been told that the vote was a blank cheque to join the Euro, Schengen, and create an EU army. Or as if, rather than a 52-48 remain victory being, as Nigel Farage put it before the result, ‘unfinished business’, it had been treated as a licence to demand of leavers that they publicly recant their former beliefs and swear fealty to the remain cause.
What can remainers do now?
Having used their victory in this divisive and derogatory way, the Brexiters’ demand now is that remainers ‘get behind Brexit’ or, at least, accept that since it is unavoidable they should do their best to ‘make it work’. But that is impossible, even if there was any clarity as to what it meant and even if Brexiters had shown any whiff of humility. It is like asking someone to ‘get behind’ a self-harming relative because they are determined to hurt themselves. It can’t be done.
This leaves remainers with few options. Those in the easiest position are those who were only ever marginally interested, and only marginally pro-remain. That’s probably quite a big group and it shouldn’t be forgotten because, just as many leave voters were not rabid Brexiters, so many remain voters were far from being ‘remainiacs’. In time, for them as perhaps for others, ‘remainer’ will simply cease to be an identity.
Others – and I sense this amongst some friends – are simply withdrawing from political engagement, to concentrate on personal or perhaps local issues, and in some cases leaving the country. Some others feel vengeful, and anticipate the coming damage to the jobs and communities that most heavily voted leave with something like pleasure.
Others will follow the course outlined by Steve Bullock, fighting to keep alive in Britain the liberal values of the EU in the face not just of Brexit but of what its architects will now try to do. That may have some unpredictable effects on British politics, according to Stephen Bush. Still others will regroup around a campaign to re-join the EU although, realistically, this makes most sense for younger people since even on Ian Dunt’s reckoning it is a decade away, and I think that’s optimistic.
As for me …
As for me, well, although no one reading it can be unaware that I think Brexit is a catastrophe – not least as I stated it in the very first post – I have always avoided writing anything very personal on this blog. Indeed, some readers may have the impression that my primary concerns about Brexit are to do with trade, business, economics, and international political standing. And, it’s true, I do care very much about all of those things. I do not want my compatriots to be poorer and less secure, and everything I know about economics and politics – which, in one form or another, I have spent my entire adult life studying – tells me that Brexit will have this effect, in spades.
But just as I have always thought it nonsense to say that leavers are motivated only by emotion and culture rather than rationality and economics, so too do I think it nonsense to imagine that remainers are not motivated by emotion and culture as well as rationality and politics. There has not been a single night since the Referendum that I have not woken mid-way through with a feeling of despair, nor a morning I have not woken without the dull, heavy ache of doing so to a world gone wrong. It is the only time in my life I have experienced political events as personal trauma, the worse for there being no prospect of their resolution.
I also feel a seething anger about the torrent of lies which have been told by Brexiters and, by being recycled endlessly, have come to be believed. Even as we leave a new one has gained ground, conflating warnings about no-deal Brexit with the actual situation of a Withdrawal Agreement and transition period to crow that Project Fear has been finally discredited. It’s a small but telling example of how incontinently the lies are still flowing.
In particular, I feel a constant shame at the disgusting way EU citizens – including my own friends and colleagues – are being treated. They, like, their UK counterparts in the EU, built their lives on the entirely reasonable expectation that freedom of movement was a permanent right. On that basis, they created plans, families and careers which have now been damaged if not destroyed.
It is no doubt my own psychological peculiarity or professional deformation that my response to all this is to try to provide an analysis of what is happening, using evidence, rationality and argument. And, with Britain now having left the EU I will continue to do so, not least because – I’m pleased to say – there seems to be a (mainly) appreciative audience for this analysis.
As I wrote in more detail in a post after the election, there is a continued case for providing an ongoing analysis since Brexit is still so very far from over in terms of the decisions about what it will mean. Moreover, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country since 2016, if only because what has happened so far is already in the process of being re-written, often inaccurately and sometimes mendaciously.
There may be worse days to come
That record will show how Britain has made an historic strategic error, leaving it poorer and weaker. It is a strategic error without even being a strategic decision. Unlike the day that Britain joined what became the EU, which was the outcome of years of careful planning and statecraft, today has come about by a series of accidents and mistakes, and an epic failure of political leadership. To undertake it in the absence of any clear national consensus is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible.
At best, depending on what happens now, the effects may continue to be a gradual, slow-burn process of damage and decline with no great drama, and the full effects emerging over so many years that their cause will be easily denied.
At worst, if Brexit rapidly creates deep economic hardship – for example if there is no future terms deal and no transition period extension - the biggest danger is who, then, will get the blame? Not, I suspect, those who have brought us to this, but all the usual scapegoats, especially immigrants as always, and also those who continue to refuse to ‘get behind’ Brexit. Social media warriors already regard that as a hanging offence, and at least one mainstream politician has already proposed trying those with “extreme EU loyalties” for treason.
It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine that the Brexit McCarthyism that has been immanent since the beginning will end up becoming a matter of State. We’ve already travelled further down that road than many would have thought possible a few years ago, with civil servants traduced, judges denounced as enemies of the people, a government minister demanding to know what universities are teaching about Brexit, and constant attempts to subvert parliament even to the point of trying to suspend it from sitting.
So I mourn the country we have already lost, and fear for the one to come. For, dark as today is for so many of us, there may well be far darker days ahead.
*For more detail, see the previous 237 posts on the blog ….
Certainly there is no evidence of a general upsurge of joy, and no mood of national confidence or renewal. The more widespread sense seems to be, at best, one of exhaustion coupled with uncertainty about what has been done and what is to come. For many already realise that today marks only a stage in a very long, painful and uncertain process.
But of course that stage is of fundamental, historic significance because Britain, definitively, leaves the EU with no possibility of revoking that decision. Hence as many, if not more, are mourning as celebrating, and some will even be in despair.
Crucially, there is clear, sustained polling evidence that more people think that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU than think it was right. The current figures, from 26 January 2020, are 47% to 40%. Even more, 56%, think Brexit will be economically damaging compared with just 21% who think it will be beneficial. Two of the four constituent countries of the UK voted against Brexit, and the parliament/assemblies of three of them have rejected the legislation enacting it.
And, yet, today it will happen.
As an Irish Times editorial put it yesterday, “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”.
Anyone waking from a four year sleep to read this would find it truly bizarre. This long post is a partial account* of how we got to this moment and where we might be going now.
Brexit has created a deeply divided country
Never before has a modern democratic country deliberately embarked on such a major change of direction whilst so internally divided about its wisdom, and one so widely seen by observers across the world as seriously damaging to its standing and fundamental interests, including to its viability as a United Kingdom.
There is a reason why countries usually require super-majorities to enact major changes, and why countries which are composed of several national components create safeguards, so each can have its say. It is to ensure that such dangerous divisions are not created.
That no such care was taken was, ostensibly, because legally this was only an ‘advisory referendum’. But, politically, that was meaningless, not only but not least because of the leaflet sent by David Cameron’s government to every household, promising to enact the result. Subsequent arguments that the result should be set aside because of its advisory status were always a non-starter.
That leaflet was just one aspect of Cameron’s grotesquely irresponsible complacency that the referendum would be won, and his use of it as a tool to manage to internal divisions of his party. In the process, those internal divisions spread their poison to the entire country which is now infected for years to come. There is no antidote except, perhaps, the passage of time and the arrival in power of a new generation.
There are much deeper causes, too, which future historians will understand better than we can. The ambivalent history of Britain’s forty year EU membership, the social and regional inequalities embedded by the unplanned and imposed deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the breakdown of political trust whose proximate cause was the lies told to justify the Iraq War, a warped and malign public discourse about immigration, the financial deregulation that led to the financial crisis – and no doubt much else.
I think, in particular, the unprocessed cultural psychology of the Second World War was one of the biggest, yet least recognized, causes. In a strange historical irony, in the long run it proved harder to ‘get over’ victory than to face up to defeat and occupation.
Whatever the reasons for the result, it remains the case that, prior to the Referendum, EU membership was a matter of almost no public interest or disquiet. Leaving the EU was not, and is still not, some huge popular crusade or cause.
Brexiters never expected to win, and would be happier if they had lost
For this reason, just as Cameron assumed he would win the Referendum so, too, Brexiters expected to lose. That freed them both to tell as many lies as they wanted and to avoid specifying what a victory would mean. There’s no point in being mealy-mouthed about this: just about every claim made by Vote Leave was either simply untrue or, at best, a distortion of the truth. I think that there were some principled advocates of Brexit who were appalled by this but, if so, the plain fact is that without the lies there would have been no victory.
I am also convinced, even more now than at the time of the referendum, that many of the most passionate advocates of Brexit would actually have preferred to have lost. For them, protest, complaint and victimhood were the comfort zone that, in winning, they lost. That has fed through into a situation whereby those who most vociferously support Brexit regard any actual form it takes – including that which Johnson is developing – as not being ‘true Brexit’.
Thus, even as it is forced on the country, they remain unsatisfied and remain in that comfort zone of complaint and victimhood. Indeed the grimmest irony of Brexit is that, ever since the Referendum result, it has left not just so many remainers feeling sad, bitter and angry but so many leavers too.
So despite the endlessly repeated mantra of that Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, there’s never been a majority for any defined form of Brexit, and only momentarily for Brexit at all. Even as it happens, the opinion polls show a small majority for remain, whilst those who do want to leave the EU are still divided as to what form of doing so is what Brexit really means.
Brexiters won, but didn’t know how to deliver
This is one of the things that makes Brexit so unusual. It entails a huge national shift which its advocates don’t know how to deliver unlike, say, the Thatcherite revolution which – whilst one could disagree with it – knew what it was doing and how to go about it.
For having refused to specify in the Referendum what leaving meant – knowing that there was no agreement about that – Brexiters both then and ever since have shown they have no idea whatsoever about the practicalities of what it entails. Almost everything they say about, for example, international trade, or law, or customs procedures, or business operations, is either based on half-truths or is just flat wrong. It’s not just a matter of not knowing arcane technical detail but basic facts about what Brexit involves, as many posts on this blog have discussed with explicit, detailed refutations of the many false claims.
That incompetence is an affront not so much to those who voted to remain, but to those millions who voted to leave and might have had a reasonable expectation that the campaign leaders knew what they were doing. In reality, campaigning and protesting were all they knew how to do. Practical realities eluded them, not least because such realities contradicted the lies that they campaigned for and protested against.
For that alone Brexiter politicians deserve to be judged harshly by history. But perhaps even more degenerate are the shady think tanks and psychopathic disruptors behind those politicians, such as Dominic Cummings who, we are told, has now ‘done Brexit’ (£). As if it were a children’s game, they have wreaked havoc and then left the rest of us to live with the consequences. Even so, whatever they may say or do, from now on, and in fact since the triggering Article 50, it is Brexiters who are responsible for whatever happens.
Brexiters have insulted and humiliated half the country
More than anything else, and unlike any political event in Britain that I can recall, Brexit is an expression of contempt and even hatred directed at about half of the population. Perhaps it was the very surprise and bewilderment of winning that led Brexiters, rather than savouring victory, to unleash a culture war against those they had defeated. Even in some of the celebratory comments being made at the moment there seems to be more gloating about remainers’ distress than pleasure in leaving the EU per se.
The constant, sneering, references to ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’, 'saboteurs' and ‘remoaners’ are just the mildest version of this. Politicians, businesspeople, judges, lawyers, civil servants, academics – not to mention EU nationals, who did not even have the right to vote in the Referendum - have all been endlessly attacked, mocked and, at the wilder extremes, subjected to accusations of treachery and to death and rape threats. It’s undoubtedly the case that this climate intimidated some MPs into supporting things, especially the triggering of Article 50, which they knew were wrong.
I don’t discount the fact that those who voted to leave the EU have also been subjected to many insults – ‘Brexshitters’, stupid, racist, old, ‘gammon’ and worse – and, personally, I deplore that and have never indulged in it. The difference, though, is this. To the best of my knowledge, leading figures on the remain side have never sought to stigmatise leave voters but, rather, to try to understand their concerns. Whereas leading figures on the leave side have joined in, or at least not discouraged, the vitriol against remainers and never tried to understand their concerns.
In the aftermath of a close vote, a divisive campaign and with a colossal national task to undertake a big, inclusive, consensus-building approach to Brexit was so obviously needed. It would have been enormously difficult but neither May nor Johnson even tried. Any competent political leader would have seen the vital need to bridge the huge divides Brexit has created or revealed. Yet even at this late stage, with Brexit assured and a large parliamentary majority, Johnson refuses to make even the tiniest gesture of conciliation.
Brexiters have refused to seek consensus
Far from any attempt being made to find a consensual solution, as the years have gone by Brexit has been defined in harder and harder ways. The soft Brexit of single market membership, which many Brexiters had said was what Brexit meant prior to the referendum, and which could have formed the basis of a national consensus, was discounted as not being real Brexit. The hard Brexit of a trade agreement quickly gave way to claims that only ‘no deal’ or ‘clean’ Brexit would do.
As we leave the EU today, there is still no clarity on whether any deal on future terms will be done, or what it will look like, but the direction of travel could well be a complete de-alignment with the EU. Undoubtedly some of the Ultras will push hard for that. However it turns out, it will be very different to what the Leave campaign promised. Always the agenda has been driven by the most fanatical and extreme anti-EU ideologues and their wholly dishonest claim to represent the will of an undivided ‘people’.
Even that might have had a scintilla of legitimacy if a confirmatory referendum had been held. Far from being an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy it would have been a perfectly logical, and entirely democratic, exercise. It would simply have asked voters who had given, as it were, planning permission for Brexit to have the final say on whether, on the basis of what had thus far been agreed, they wanted to proceed beyond today’s point of no return. If they did, the answer would have been yes. If Brexiters truly believed it to be the will of the people they would have been happy to ask, but they knew it was not so.
So remainers – and, for that matter, ‘soft’ leavers – have for more than three years had their faces ground into the dirt, being told to ‘suck it up’ even as Brexiters argue about what ‘it’ actually is. It is as if, had remain won, leavers had been told that the vote was a blank cheque to join the Euro, Schengen, and create an EU army. Or as if, rather than a 52-48 remain victory being, as Nigel Farage put it before the result, ‘unfinished business’, it had been treated as a licence to demand of leavers that they publicly recant their former beliefs and swear fealty to the remain cause.
What can remainers do now?
Having used their victory in this divisive and derogatory way, the Brexiters’ demand now is that remainers ‘get behind Brexit’ or, at least, accept that since it is unavoidable they should do their best to ‘make it work’. But that is impossible, even if there was any clarity as to what it meant and even if Brexiters had shown any whiff of humility. It is like asking someone to ‘get behind’ a self-harming relative because they are determined to hurt themselves. It can’t be done.
This leaves remainers with few options. Those in the easiest position are those who were only ever marginally interested, and only marginally pro-remain. That’s probably quite a big group and it shouldn’t be forgotten because, just as many leave voters were not rabid Brexiters, so many remain voters were far from being ‘remainiacs’. In time, for them as perhaps for others, ‘remainer’ will simply cease to be an identity.
Others – and I sense this amongst some friends – are simply withdrawing from political engagement, to concentrate on personal or perhaps local issues, and in some cases leaving the country. Some others feel vengeful, and anticipate the coming damage to the jobs and communities that most heavily voted leave with something like pleasure.
Others will follow the course outlined by Steve Bullock, fighting to keep alive in Britain the liberal values of the EU in the face not just of Brexit but of what its architects will now try to do. That may have some unpredictable effects on British politics, according to Stephen Bush. Still others will regroup around a campaign to re-join the EU although, realistically, this makes most sense for younger people since even on Ian Dunt’s reckoning it is a decade away, and I think that’s optimistic.
As for me …
As for me, well, although no one reading it can be unaware that I think Brexit is a catastrophe – not least as I stated it in the very first post – I have always avoided writing anything very personal on this blog. Indeed, some readers may have the impression that my primary concerns about Brexit are to do with trade, business, economics, and international political standing. And, it’s true, I do care very much about all of those things. I do not want my compatriots to be poorer and less secure, and everything I know about economics and politics – which, in one form or another, I have spent my entire adult life studying – tells me that Brexit will have this effect, in spades.
But just as I have always thought it nonsense to say that leavers are motivated only by emotion and culture rather than rationality and economics, so too do I think it nonsense to imagine that remainers are not motivated by emotion and culture as well as rationality and politics. There has not been a single night since the Referendum that I have not woken mid-way through with a feeling of despair, nor a morning I have not woken without the dull, heavy ache of doing so to a world gone wrong. It is the only time in my life I have experienced political events as personal trauma, the worse for there being no prospect of their resolution.
I also feel a seething anger about the torrent of lies which have been told by Brexiters and, by being recycled endlessly, have come to be believed. Even as we leave a new one has gained ground, conflating warnings about no-deal Brexit with the actual situation of a Withdrawal Agreement and transition period to crow that Project Fear has been finally discredited. It’s a small but telling example of how incontinently the lies are still flowing.
In particular, I feel a constant shame at the disgusting way EU citizens – including my own friends and colleagues – are being treated. They, like, their UK counterparts in the EU, built their lives on the entirely reasonable expectation that freedom of movement was a permanent right. On that basis, they created plans, families and careers which have now been damaged if not destroyed.
It is no doubt my own psychological peculiarity or professional deformation that my response to all this is to try to provide an analysis of what is happening, using evidence, rationality and argument. And, with Britain now having left the EU I will continue to do so, not least because – I’m pleased to say – there seems to be a (mainly) appreciative audience for this analysis.
As I wrote in more detail in a post after the election, there is a continued case for providing an ongoing analysis since Brexit is still so very far from over in terms of the decisions about what it will mean. Moreover, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country since 2016, if only because what has happened so far is already in the process of being re-written, often inaccurately and sometimes mendaciously.
There may be worse days to come
That record will show how Britain has made an historic strategic error, leaving it poorer and weaker. It is a strategic error without even being a strategic decision. Unlike the day that Britain joined what became the EU, which was the outcome of years of careful planning and statecraft, today has come about by a series of accidents and mistakes, and an epic failure of political leadership. To undertake it in the absence of any clear national consensus is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible.
At best, depending on what happens now, the effects may continue to be a gradual, slow-burn process of damage and decline with no great drama, and the full effects emerging over so many years that their cause will be easily denied.
At worst, if Brexit rapidly creates deep economic hardship – for example if there is no future terms deal and no transition period extension - the biggest danger is who, then, will get the blame? Not, I suspect, those who have brought us to this, but all the usual scapegoats, especially immigrants as always, and also those who continue to refuse to ‘get behind’ Brexit. Social media warriors already regard that as a hanging offence, and at least one mainstream politician has already proposed trying those with “extreme EU loyalties” for treason.
It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine that the Brexit McCarthyism that has been immanent since the beginning will end up becoming a matter of State. We’ve already travelled further down that road than many would have thought possible a few years ago, with civil servants traduced, judges denounced as enemies of the people, a government minister demanding to know what universities are teaching about Brexit, and constant attempts to subvert parliament even to the point of trying to suspend it from sitting.
So I mourn the country we have already lost, and fear for the one to come. For, dark as today is for so many of us, there may well be far darker days ahead.
*For more detail, see the previous 237 posts on the blog ….
Thursday, 11 July 2019
The Darroch leak and what it betokens
The leak of
Sir Kim Darroch’s assessment of Trump and his administration and his
resignation in its aftermath dramatically underline some of the key features
and dangers of Brexit. These are far greater in scope than the immediate issue
of what these events tell us about Boris
Johnson’s fitness for Prime Ministerial office, although that is one aspect
of them.
Whilst the source of the leaks is not yet known (and if it gets discovered, that will be a big moment) it seems widely accepted that they were motivated by pro-Brexit sentiment (£). That much seems clear both from the affiliations of Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who broke the story, and from the reactions of Brexiter politicians, including Bill Cash and Nigel Farage. Notably, although the leaks relate to Darroch’s assessment of the Trump administration rather than to Brexit, it is his supposed pro-EU and ‘remainer’ sympathies that they object to.
Of course there’s nothing new in the fact that Brexit and Trump are deeply intertwined, both ideologically and in terms of the dense network of personal connections between the two. What is new and quite extraordinary – and I hope that putting it in this way emphasises how extraordinary - is that a pincer movement by the leader of a foreign power and a faction within British politics have succeeded in toppling the most senior British diplomat.
I’m not implying collusion or a concerted effort between the two. No such collusion was necessary. Once the leak had occurred it was all but inevitable what Trump’s reaction would be, not least given Darroch’s own assessment of his character in the documents.
Trump and Brexit
The relationship between Trump’s election and Brexit is complex and contradictory. Obviously it didn’t occur until after the Brexit vote, and in this respect radically changed the context in which Brexit is occurring. The consequences of this are to enhance the geo-political instability and isolation which Brexit would in any case have involved. Trump’s hostility to multi-lateral organizations and the global rules-based order makes Brexit even riskier than it was at the time of the Referendum.
Yet, paradoxically, within the Brexiter narrative one strand is that the EU is unimportant because for security the UK can rely on NATO and for trade on the WTO. Both those propositions are flawed in and of themselves, but they have become more so given Trump’s ambivalence about NATO and outright disdain for the WTO. Moreover, under Trump, even the most substantial (as opposed to sentimental) sense of a special relationship, namely intelligence co-operation, has become strained by, for example, the leak of the Manchester bombing suspect’s name in 2017 and, more recently, the Huawei 5G row.
Similarly, it has become an article of faith amongst hard Brexiters that a trade deal with the US is a great prize, that can both compensate for loss of EU trade and symbolise independence from EU trade policy. Indeed the Brexiters’ case against Darroch is partly framed in these terms, with Farage tweeting that he should be replaced by "a non-remainer who wants a trade deal with America” (ludicrous, anyway, since there’s no reason to think Darroch would be opposed to such a deal post-Brexit and in any case Ambassadors don’t make trade deals).
In fact, the practical prospects for such a deal are highly questionable (£), and the economic benefits close to zero (see p.14 of link) and, certainly, nowhere near enough to compensate for new barriers to EU trade. Crucially, both rely on a President whose capacity to make a deal is constrained by Congress, whose stated policy of ‘America First’ would frame any such deal, and whose personal capriciousness makes him an unreliable negotiating partner.
Within that context, it might be expected that Brexiters would have an interest in the UK maintaining good relations with Trump, rather than the car crash we have seen this week which has probably brought UK-US relations to their lowest point in modern times. Notably, the US has now put trade talks on hold following the leaks.
It may be that the Brexiters believe that ultimately a hardline Brexit administration will be in concord with Trump, and that he will applaud and reward them. That presupposes, of course, that Trump gets a second term and also that he is minded to repay their loyalty in kind. This is likely to be naïve both in terms of Trump’s character and, in any case, about the disparity in power between the US and the UK – a lesson that should have been learned as long ago as the Suez Crisis.
The Brexiters’ war with civil society
Much more likely, any such calculations are subordinate to the wholesale war which the Brexiters are now waging with what they regard as ‘the remainer establishment’ and particularly the civil service. What has been done to Darroch follows a pattern of their assaults on Sir Ivan Rogers, Olly Robbins and, indeed, the civil service in general. It is underscored by Farage’s comments this week that all anti-Brexit civil servants should be removed (and even, by implication at least, military personnel).
This is neither accidental nor surprising. Indeed I flagged up the fact that it would happen in the very first post on the blog in September 2016, and in several subsequent ones as events have unfolded. At one level, it grows inevitably from a basic reality: most of those with the technical expertise to deliver Brexit think it is a terrible idea and, conversely, most of those who think it is a great idea don’t have the technical expertise to deliver it.
But there is much more to it than that. Taken together with the demonization of the judiciary, the Speaker of the Commons, the Governor of the Bank of England, the BBC, universities and others what is underway is a concerted attack not upon what Brexiters call the Establishment (of which many of them, by any reckoning, are members), but upon all the institutions of civil society which, collectively, create the patchwork that sustains democracy and the rule of law. In this sense, as I suggested in a different way in my previous post, Brexit is – or has become – about far more than simply leaving the EU.
Dark echoes
I am always extremely wary about making comparisons with fascism, and have never done so on this blog. There are real dangers in doing so, both in terms of over-reacting to current events and also downgrading the historical atrocities of fascism. The casual over-use of the term devalues it.
But it is difficult to avoid the echoes at least of some of the defining early moves of fascism in what is currently happening in the UK. The first is the invocation of ‘the people’ (treated as an abstract, unified and morally unimpeachable entity) as being separate from and in conflict with the entirety of their political and civic institutions. We have also already seen the second, related, move which is to link this with a poisonous narrative of internal betrayal and treachery, and the beginnings of a third, namely the evocation of an external, punitive enemy in the form of the EU.
It is not alarmist, but prudent, to say that given what we know lies at the end of that road we should refuse to take the initial steps upon it. That becomes especially true considering that if the Brexiters get the no-deal that they are now pushing for as the only true Brexit we will see considerable economic dislocation which will provide further, and highly fertile, soil for extremism. If this sounds Cassandra-like, then recall that Cassandra’s curse was not that her prophecies were false but that they were not believed.
Straws in the wind?
In any case, this is not so much a prophecy as a warning. Nothing in politics is inevitable, even if once things happen they seem so. I am not sure, but I have a half-sense that what is underway at the moment is a growing split amongst even the hard Brexiters.
It is notable - given he is not only pro-Brexit but also fiercely Atlanticist - that Liam Fox has recently become critical of no-deal Brexit, and has also this week been highly supportive of Darroch. He has thus been the target of considerable criticism from the hardliners such as Steve Baker. I also notice that Michael Gove seems rather silent since dropping out of the leadership contest during which he was slated for not being a real Brexiter – despite his leading role in the Leave campaign.
These are only straws in the wind – and no high profile Brexiter has yet recanted – but it occurs to me that some, at least, are beginning to see the dangers of reaping the whirlwind of the wind they have sown. That aside, there are surely plenty of sane voices left. For all that the Brexit Ultras and their alt-Right allies are set on destabilising and undermining political institutions, these may well prove more robust than they expect. Moreover, if they are putting their faith in Boris Johnson they may be as disappointed as others who have done so, in various contexts, in the past.
Avoiding no-deal Brexit: the necessary first step
Avoiding no-deal Brexit is not, in itself, sufficient of course. Indeed the danger is that doing so will seem a ‘relief’ since the worst outcome will have been avoided. But it is a necessary first step, not least because it is in a no-deal scenario that a US trade deal, on any terms offered and as quickly as possible, will move right to the top of the agenda (and, because there would be no transition period, could do so immediately).
There are signs this week that this first step could be achieved, including the hardened (though still ambiguous) Labour position, the passing of at least one of the Grieve amendments that could hamper prorogation, the threat of legal action to do so by John Major, and Philip Hammond’s potential endorsement of this. It is notable that Simon Fraser, former head of the Foreign Office, has recently argued against the conventional wisdom that no deal is getting more likely and that his view was endorsed by Charles Grant, the astute Director of the Centre for European Reform. Ultimately, though, as Brendan Donnelly has written this week, it may be that Tory rebels will have to toughen their resolve to really put paid to no-deal Brexit.
All that remains to be seen, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. Avoiding no-deal will only be the first step. Moreover, it is one which in the short-term, at least, will intensify rather than defuse the Brexiters’ attacks on civil society. Even the damage already caused – including that done by the Darroch leak - will take much longer to repair than it took to do.
Whilst the source of the leaks is not yet known (and if it gets discovered, that will be a big moment) it seems widely accepted that they were motivated by pro-Brexit sentiment (£). That much seems clear both from the affiliations of Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who broke the story, and from the reactions of Brexiter politicians, including Bill Cash and Nigel Farage. Notably, although the leaks relate to Darroch’s assessment of the Trump administration rather than to Brexit, it is his supposed pro-EU and ‘remainer’ sympathies that they object to.
Of course there’s nothing new in the fact that Brexit and Trump are deeply intertwined, both ideologically and in terms of the dense network of personal connections between the two. What is new and quite extraordinary – and I hope that putting it in this way emphasises how extraordinary - is that a pincer movement by the leader of a foreign power and a faction within British politics have succeeded in toppling the most senior British diplomat.
I’m not implying collusion or a concerted effort between the two. No such collusion was necessary. Once the leak had occurred it was all but inevitable what Trump’s reaction would be, not least given Darroch’s own assessment of his character in the documents.
Trump and Brexit
The relationship between Trump’s election and Brexit is complex and contradictory. Obviously it didn’t occur until after the Brexit vote, and in this respect radically changed the context in which Brexit is occurring. The consequences of this are to enhance the geo-political instability and isolation which Brexit would in any case have involved. Trump’s hostility to multi-lateral organizations and the global rules-based order makes Brexit even riskier than it was at the time of the Referendum.
Yet, paradoxically, within the Brexiter narrative one strand is that the EU is unimportant because for security the UK can rely on NATO and for trade on the WTO. Both those propositions are flawed in and of themselves, but they have become more so given Trump’s ambivalence about NATO and outright disdain for the WTO. Moreover, under Trump, even the most substantial (as opposed to sentimental) sense of a special relationship, namely intelligence co-operation, has become strained by, for example, the leak of the Manchester bombing suspect’s name in 2017 and, more recently, the Huawei 5G row.
Similarly, it has become an article of faith amongst hard Brexiters that a trade deal with the US is a great prize, that can both compensate for loss of EU trade and symbolise independence from EU trade policy. Indeed the Brexiters’ case against Darroch is partly framed in these terms, with Farage tweeting that he should be replaced by "a non-remainer who wants a trade deal with America” (ludicrous, anyway, since there’s no reason to think Darroch would be opposed to such a deal post-Brexit and in any case Ambassadors don’t make trade deals).
In fact, the practical prospects for such a deal are highly questionable (£), and the economic benefits close to zero (see p.14 of link) and, certainly, nowhere near enough to compensate for new barriers to EU trade. Crucially, both rely on a President whose capacity to make a deal is constrained by Congress, whose stated policy of ‘America First’ would frame any such deal, and whose personal capriciousness makes him an unreliable negotiating partner.
Within that context, it might be expected that Brexiters would have an interest in the UK maintaining good relations with Trump, rather than the car crash we have seen this week which has probably brought UK-US relations to their lowest point in modern times. Notably, the US has now put trade talks on hold following the leaks.
It may be that the Brexiters believe that ultimately a hardline Brexit administration will be in concord with Trump, and that he will applaud and reward them. That presupposes, of course, that Trump gets a second term and also that he is minded to repay their loyalty in kind. This is likely to be naïve both in terms of Trump’s character and, in any case, about the disparity in power between the US and the UK – a lesson that should have been learned as long ago as the Suez Crisis.
The Brexiters’ war with civil society
Much more likely, any such calculations are subordinate to the wholesale war which the Brexiters are now waging with what they regard as ‘the remainer establishment’ and particularly the civil service. What has been done to Darroch follows a pattern of their assaults on Sir Ivan Rogers, Olly Robbins and, indeed, the civil service in general. It is underscored by Farage’s comments this week that all anti-Brexit civil servants should be removed (and even, by implication at least, military personnel).
This is neither accidental nor surprising. Indeed I flagged up the fact that it would happen in the very first post on the blog in September 2016, and in several subsequent ones as events have unfolded. At one level, it grows inevitably from a basic reality: most of those with the technical expertise to deliver Brexit think it is a terrible idea and, conversely, most of those who think it is a great idea don’t have the technical expertise to deliver it.
But there is much more to it than that. Taken together with the demonization of the judiciary, the Speaker of the Commons, the Governor of the Bank of England, the BBC, universities and others what is underway is a concerted attack not upon what Brexiters call the Establishment (of which many of them, by any reckoning, are members), but upon all the institutions of civil society which, collectively, create the patchwork that sustains democracy and the rule of law. In this sense, as I suggested in a different way in my previous post, Brexit is – or has become – about far more than simply leaving the EU.
Dark echoes
I am always extremely wary about making comparisons with fascism, and have never done so on this blog. There are real dangers in doing so, both in terms of over-reacting to current events and also downgrading the historical atrocities of fascism. The casual over-use of the term devalues it.
But it is difficult to avoid the echoes at least of some of the defining early moves of fascism in what is currently happening in the UK. The first is the invocation of ‘the people’ (treated as an abstract, unified and morally unimpeachable entity) as being separate from and in conflict with the entirety of their political and civic institutions. We have also already seen the second, related, move which is to link this with a poisonous narrative of internal betrayal and treachery, and the beginnings of a third, namely the evocation of an external, punitive enemy in the form of the EU.
It is not alarmist, but prudent, to say that given what we know lies at the end of that road we should refuse to take the initial steps upon it. That becomes especially true considering that if the Brexiters get the no-deal that they are now pushing for as the only true Brexit we will see considerable economic dislocation which will provide further, and highly fertile, soil for extremism. If this sounds Cassandra-like, then recall that Cassandra’s curse was not that her prophecies were false but that they were not believed.
Straws in the wind?
In any case, this is not so much a prophecy as a warning. Nothing in politics is inevitable, even if once things happen they seem so. I am not sure, but I have a half-sense that what is underway at the moment is a growing split amongst even the hard Brexiters.
It is notable - given he is not only pro-Brexit but also fiercely Atlanticist - that Liam Fox has recently become critical of no-deal Brexit, and has also this week been highly supportive of Darroch. He has thus been the target of considerable criticism from the hardliners such as Steve Baker. I also notice that Michael Gove seems rather silent since dropping out of the leadership contest during which he was slated for not being a real Brexiter – despite his leading role in the Leave campaign.
These are only straws in the wind – and no high profile Brexiter has yet recanted – but it occurs to me that some, at least, are beginning to see the dangers of reaping the whirlwind of the wind they have sown. That aside, there are surely plenty of sane voices left. For all that the Brexit Ultras and their alt-Right allies are set on destabilising and undermining political institutions, these may well prove more robust than they expect. Moreover, if they are putting their faith in Boris Johnson they may be as disappointed as others who have done so, in various contexts, in the past.
Avoiding no-deal Brexit: the necessary first step
Avoiding no-deal Brexit is not, in itself, sufficient of course. Indeed the danger is that doing so will seem a ‘relief’ since the worst outcome will have been avoided. But it is a necessary first step, not least because it is in a no-deal scenario that a US trade deal, on any terms offered and as quickly as possible, will move right to the top of the agenda (and, because there would be no transition period, could do so immediately).
There are signs this week that this first step could be achieved, including the hardened (though still ambiguous) Labour position, the passing of at least one of the Grieve amendments that could hamper prorogation, the threat of legal action to do so by John Major, and Philip Hammond’s potential endorsement of this. It is notable that Simon Fraser, former head of the Foreign Office, has recently argued against the conventional wisdom that no deal is getting more likely and that his view was endorsed by Charles Grant, the astute Director of the Centre for European Reform. Ultimately, though, as Brendan Donnelly has written this week, it may be that Tory rebels will have to toughen their resolve to really put paid to no-deal Brexit.
All that remains to be seen, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. Avoiding no-deal will only be the first step. Moreover, it is one which in the short-term, at least, will intensify rather than defuse the Brexiters’ attacks on civil society. Even the damage already caused – including that done by the Darroch leak - will take much longer to repair than it took to do.
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