Brexit border bewilderment

I don’t suppose that there is much political interest today in anything but the local election results, about which I’ll say nothing here except that anything now happening to the Tory Party is inextricably, even when indirectly, bound up with Brexit.  And, as the length of today’s post testifies, it’s not as if there is any lack of other Brexit news to discuss. Much of that news concerns, in different ways, the issue which both defines and bedevils Brexit: borders.

Early in the Brexit process, I wrote a post on ‘why Brexiters don’t understand borders’, which touched on some of the topics which will feature in today’s post, and it concluded as follows:

“I referred earlier to a very good article in the Daily Telegraph [by Peter Foster] on the implications of Brexit for Ireland and Northern Ireland and, within it, there is a revealing sentence from an unnamed British civil servant working on Brexit: ‘It seems as if every day something new we hadn’t thought of comes up’. That could almost be the strapline (and perhaps will be the epitaph) for Brexit. At every stage in the debate, Brexiters insist that it will be easy and that those who say otherwise are doom mongers; but every time those claims meet reality there turns out to be far more complexity than Brexiters believed (or at least than they told the electorate). Borders and what they mean are perhaps central to the Brexiter mindset: it is to say the least unfortunate that they don’t understand them. It is doubly unfortunate that we are all going to have to pay a very high price for their enlightenment.”

That was written in March 2017, but it is a suitable introduction to this week’s main Brexit developments.

Bordering on the ridiculous

The ongoing saga of the introduction of import controls reached a key moment on Tuesday, when the latest phase of controls came into force – except for those which didn’t, and for those hauliers who were waived through even when they had non-compliant paperwork, and for those consignments requiring the attention of inspectors who clock off between 7pm and 7am – further adding to the uncertainty and confusion surrounding the process. I’ve discussed this exhaustively, or at least exhaustingly, for years now, most recently in last week’s post, but it is still a notable moment not least because it has brought an upsurge in media attention, including reports in the Mail, on the BBC, and a particularly hard-hitting item on ITV News, as well as questions from MPs.

Amongst these media reports, an especially informative one came from Ellen Milligan of Bloomberg because it focused on the impact of the controls upon EU exporters, taking the important example of Danish bacon exports to Britain, tracing them from pig farm to arrival at the port of Immingham on the east coast of England. This was proper, detailed reporting getting, almost literally, out into the field, and it exposed the sheer bureaucratic complexity and cost Brexit has imposed on EU firms exporting to Britain (which, of course, has a mirror image for British firms exporting to the EU). In the process, it illustrated why smaller firms simply cease to engage in such trade. A report covering similar themes, but considering the case of Polish exporters appeared in The Times (£).

Counting costs

Apart from being informative in their own right, these articles were a useful addition to the bulk of the reporting, which was more focused on the UK importers, who also bear some of the new burdens, such as having to pre-notify and declare imports. Quite what all these costs amount to is a matter of dispute. The ITV report commissioned expert analysis suggesting a figure of £2.9 billion per annum, whereas the government claims it is only £330 million. A discrepancy of that magnitude suggests that totally different methodologies are being used, but since neither figure has any published details of how it was arrived at it is impossible to judge. However, Dr Anna Jerzewska, a leading international expert on trade and customs, was asked to provide an independent evaluation of the analysis underlying ITV’s figure, and stated it to be “robust”.

One yardstick by which to judge the government’s figure is that the Times report quoted the extra costs to just one Polish haulier of fresh poultry to the UK as being in the region of £1 million to £1.5 million per year. If correct, that makes the figure of £330 million a year for the total cost inherently implausible and, whilst of course I cannot prove this, I suspect that it is based only on the direct costs to UK importers. And whilst it is impossible to know without seeing the government’s – specifically DEFRA’s – calculations, it would not be unduly cynical to think that it has chosen a methodology to downplay the costs. Apart from anything else, if the costs really are so small, then what is the justification for the repeated delays in implementing the controls?

Mounting risks

It's true that there may be other answers to that question, in addition to cost, with one possibility being a desire to avoid the bad publicity for Brexit of border queues. But whatever the answers are, the delays demonstrate irresponsibility, given that the Department for Environment, Food and the Rural Affairs (DEFRA)  itself is saying (accurately) that “a robust and proportionate border regime is vital to ensure we can protect our food system against biosecurity threats” and that “these border checks are fundamental to protecting the UK’s food supply chain, farmers and natural environment against costly diseases reaching our shores.” What, then, of the continuing elevation of the risk of those threats from the ongoing delays in implementing the border regime?

Indeed, there is much disingenuity in the entire way the government is presenting this issue (just as there is in the way that Kemi Badenoch presented the latest trade figures this week). The DEFRA announcement just referred to includes another example, suggesting that the new regime represents a “saving” because it is (supposedly) cheaper than the original plan for the post-Brexit regime. Perhaps so, but it still represents a cost of Brexit. That fact is also continually smudged when the government (and some media reports) imply that all this is not so much about Brexit as about the government’s decision to develop an entirely new Border Target Operating Model (BTOM) for imported goods, for reasons of bio-security policy.

This misleading implication is possible because it is true that the BTOM is designed to cover imports from the whole of the world, not just from the EU, and in that sense has elements which are not directly to do with Brexit. However, it would not need to include EU imports (or not to anything remotely like the same extent) had it not been for Brexit, and it is highly unlikely that, but for Brexit, the BTOM would have been introduced for rest of world imports. For, despite much misunderstanding, some of it apparently wilful, along the lines that there is no reason why imports from the EU should be any riskier now than when Britain was a member of the single market, this is not so. The government is introducing controls on EU imports, albeit far too slowly, not for the fun of it but because they are now necessary for such imports, just as they have always been for non-EU imports.

What happens now?

This story still has some way to run. Not only is this phase of controls not yet fully operational, but there are new phases coming in October, and still more next year, including the introduction of import controls on goods from Ireland. Equally, there is a time lag between controls at the borders and the knock-on effects on the viability of businesses, prices, and product availability on the shelves. More in future posts, no doubt.

Border bafflement

Meanwhile, borders also feature in another of this week’s big news stories, the row between the UK and Ireland over asylum seekers. I don’t think that in all the years I have been writing about Brexit, I’ve ever come across an issue so convoluted and difficult to unpick, especially as the story was still unfolding whilst I wrote this post. As a result, I’m still not sure if I have got the details right, and (as always, in fact) I’m more than open to correction.

Initial reports suggested that the Irish government intended to pass a law so as to be able to return asylum seekers who are entering Ireland via Northern Ireland (NI), to the extent of accounting for 80% of “recent arrivals” of such asylum seekers (ASs) in Ireland, although this figure has subsequently been questioned. Moreover, it was held that the reason this was happening was the British government’s ‘Rwanda policy’. The political context of Ireland’s announcement is the increasingly violent far right anti-immigration and anti-asylum seeker protest movement, so it can be read an attempt to appease this, rather as Britain’s Rwanda policy is an attempt to appease similar movements and political pressures in the UK.

It has been questioned whether the Rwanda policy is what is driving any increase there may be of ASs moving to Ireland via NI. Clarity is not aided by the British government’s contradictory response, with, on the one hand, a Downing Street spokesperson saying “it is too early to jump to conclusions” about whether the Rwanda policy was having this effect whilst, on the other hand, Rishi Sunak implicitly endorsed the claim that it was by saying that it shows the policy is already “working as a deterrent”. Those things can’t both be true. Moreover, if there is such an increase, whatever the cause, then unless, I’ve missed them, there is no reporting on how this is happening. Presumably it would entail ASs arriving in Great Britain and making their way to Cairnryan in Scotland and thence by ferry to Larne (which, as I understand it, requires passengers to provide photo ID). But, if so, there would surely be reports of large numbers of them doing this?

An additional complexity is understanding just what it is that the proposed Irish legislation would do. The early reports seemed to suggest it would mean legislating to deport the relevant ASs to the UK, However, it quickly emerged that Ireland’s plan was actually to legislate that Britain is a “safe third country” to which ASs can be returned in the face of a recent Irish High Court ruling to the contrary (this ruling was not, however, because of the UK’s Rwanda policy).

Whatever form any eventual Irish legislation takes, it is not obvious what would follow. On the face of it, deporting ASs who had arrived via the UK back into the UK would be no more feasible or legal than the idiotic claims by hard line Brexiters that ASs arriving in Britain from France could simply be returned en masse to France. One such is Richard Tice of Reform UK, who – like a schoolboy boasting to his friends that he has a wonderful girlfriend, but they wouldn’t know her ‘as she goes to a different school’ – insisted this week that he has ‘advice from his own lawyers’ saying this would be legal. It is an irony, though, given those claims, that the Brexiters have been so outraged by suggestions that Ireland might apply the same approach to Britain that they want to apply to France.

Agreement, what Agreement?

At all events, Sunak has unequivocally rejected the idea of any agreement to take ASs back from Ireland, at least unless the EU agreed that the UK could return ASs to France. However, this is where things get particularly opaque, because politicians, not least the Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris, and many media reports have spoken of an already existing post-Brexit bi-lateral agreement under which such returns are possible, and Sunak seems to accept there are ‘operational arrangements’, albeit no legal obligation (£), to effect returns. The agreement referred to appears to be related to the operation of the Common Travel Area (CTA), the system, going back to 1923, although with some intermissions, whereby there is freedom of movement for British and Irish citizens across and throughout both jurisdictions.

However, despite all the references to it, no one seems to be clear about what this asylum deal actually is. The continuation of the CTA after Brexit was affirmed by a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the British and Irish governments, created in May 2019 and it seems possible that this is the agreement in question, although it says nothing specific about asylum seekers [1]. It also doesn’t tally with the 2020 date given in media reports for the MoU, and although there was a CTA MoU in that year it related specifically to healthcare. The 2020 Withdrawal Agreement also makes reference, in the Northern Ireland Protocol, to the maintenance of the CTA, but again does not seem to suggest any specific agreement on asylum returns, and anyway anything that was in this Agreement would, unlike a MoU, be legally binding on the UK.

On social media, attention has also been drawn to an unsourced fragment of text which refers to the two countries facilitating the return of individuals to “their country of origin” if they have entered the CTA unlawfully. A lot of digging reveals that the source of this is a still operative, but pre-Brexit, 2011 Joint Statement by the two governments about securing the CTA’s external border, which relates in turn to the somewhat secretive and still ongoing joint Operation Gull programme which serves that purpose [2]. However, this doesn’t mean returning such individuals to the country within the CTA from which they came, it means (potentially) the country from which they originated, and it certainly isn’t the post-Brexit agreement Harris and others appear to have in mind.

Nevertheless, to the extent that there is CTA dimension to this, which is to say a specifically UK-Ireland agreement, and even more if there has been a specific post-Brexit agreement relating to asylum returns, then the parallels between UK-France or UK-EU arrangements do not hold.

Brexit aspects

So here Brexit begins to enter the story more explicitly, albeit in complicated ways. One aspect is that, pre-Brexit, the Dublin III regulations enabled, in some though by no means all cases, Ireland to return ASs to the UK (and vice versa) if that was where they had made their first application for asylum. And this indeed happened. According to Bernard Ryan, Professor of Migration Law at Leicester University, in the period 2008-2014, the UK made 1334 such requests to Ireland, resulting in 753 transfers of persons, and Ireland made 815 requests to the UK, resulting in 357 transfers. However, post-Brexit, the UK is no longer a part of the Dublin regulations (a side-issue here is that these regulations are themselves in the process of change).

Amid much confusion in media reports and social media discussions this week, Law professors Colin Murray and Steve Peers produced an excellent detailed briefing on the current legal situation. What it revealed is a complex hodge-podge of EU law, Irish law, UK law, the particular post-Brexit provisions for NI, and, indeed, the provisions, both legal and customary, of the CTA. It is well worth reading in full, but on my interpretation (which I stress again is highly tentative) there is nothing here which, in any ordinary meaning of the term, constitutes an agreement, whether relating to the CTA or not, whereby ASs arriving in Ireland from the UK can simply be returned.

Instead, as Murray and Peers put it: “Amid the tangle [of] post-Brexit arrangements, both countries appear to be talking at cross purposes”, a situation not helped by the “low trust context” which militates against them “engaging with each other in the close collaborative relationship that the CTA requires”. They don’t say it explicitly, but I assume they mean by that the context created by Brexit and the manner it was undertaken.

A second aspect is that several Brexiters have responded to the current row (£) by suggesting that it somehow means that Ireland and the EU are reaping the results of having insisted during the Brexit negotiations that there could be no land border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and specifically no checks on people moving between the two jurisdictions by virtue of the CTA. They are also suggesting that Ireland is about to install such a border, though this is based on what would seem to be a misunderstanding of a report that the Irish government has deployed extra police on “frontline” duties of prevention and deportation.

Undoubtedly those now claiming a ‘gotcha’ moment (£) are those who have never understood or accepted that the Good Friday Agreement effectively precludes such a border. In any case, they are now missing the rather crucial fact that it was British Brexiters, more than anyone else, who had been adamant that the CTA would continue and, moreover, that this was their supposedly definitive rebuttal of the ‘Project Fear’ warnings issued by Tony Blair, John Major, and others, about what Brexit would mean for the Irish border.

How did we get here?

Most notably, this was the position of Boris Johnson and of the then Northern Ireland Secretary (and keen Brexiter) Theresa Villiers. It was a position founded on ignorance, to the extent that, as the Brexiters (or, at least, the ones who had to take responsibility for enacting Brexit) gradually came to grasp, the issue about the border was not just about the movement of people but also the movement of goods and livestock, and the various processes and checks needed (the same, indeed, as with the GB-EU border controls discussed above). Hence, by a long and slow route, we ended up with the Irish Sea border, with all that that has meant, including the Windsor Framework.

Along the way, discussion of the free movement of people across the island of Ireland became curiously muted. Amongst the pre-referendum warnings of the remain campaign, Major and Blair had highlighted not just the matter of customs controls but that of immigration from the EU. For example, Blair said that if there were no immigration controls between Ireland and Northern Ireland then: “It would make a nonsense of their entire argument for leaving which is all to do with the free movement of people in the European Union.”

At stake was that if there were no border checks then what would stop someone coming to Ireland quite legally from any EU country, under freedom of movement rights, then entering the UK via Northern Ireland and living or working illegally? I was not alone in thinking, in the early days of the Brexit process, that this was going to be a major question. Indeed, at that time, the government itself mooted the idea of moving frontline UK immigration controls to Ireland’s ports and airports (no one seemed to give any consideration at all to the possibility of movement in the other direction, from the UK to Ireland, whether that be of ASs or non-EU nationals residing legally in the UK).

In the event, whereas customs and other controls on goods were located across the Irish Sea, the issue of illegal immigrants from the EU was left to detection when in situ by landlords, employers, banks etc., and surprisingly little has been heard of it since. The only time it has become a matter of much public debate was not in relation to EU nationals or to asylum seekers but when it was raised in 2022, by the then British Home Secretary Priti Patel, in relation to Ukrainian refugees accepted by Ireland potentially entering the UK through ‘the back door’, under cover of the CTA. However, I’m not aware of any evidence that this actually happened, or if it did then to any great extent, nor of there being any talk at that time of a ‘returns agreement’. And so things rested until the last week or so.

What happens now?

How this current row will play out remains to be seen. Some reports have suggested that the two governments are keen to dial-down a dispute which has been “escalated out of all proportion”. I am not so sure. It arises out of what, in both countries (as in many others), is an extremely toxic politics around immigration in general, and asylum in particular, which many politicians are all too ready to exploit and exacerbate, especially with both countries facing general elections in the next twelve months.

Not the least of that toxicity is the wholly repellent dehumanization of ASs as some sort of malign parcel to be passed from country to country to ‘deal with’ or worse, according to the depraved comments of Reform’s Deputy Chair Ben Habib, left to drown. Habib later tetchily claimed to have been misrepresented, but his comments, which seemed to shock even the Talk TV shock-jock Julia Hartley-Brewer who conducted the interview, are on the public record for people to judge for themselves.

Whatever the challenges they may pose, these are people, including people broken and traumatized by suffering. And if it should be that some are ‘economic migrants’, whose asylum claims are not valid, well, they are still people and, very likely, people who have become economic migrants as a result of great hardship. Either way, they should have their claims processed quickly and fairly. Doing so does, indeed, pose challenges, as does the successful support and integration of those whose claims are found to be valid. The way to deal with those challenges can only be through concerted global action, both as regards the organization of asylum claims and destinations and as regards the multiple root causes of the need for asylum-seeking. That isn’t easy, to say the least, but it is emphatically made more difficult by nationalism and xenophobia.

This is clearly a bigger issue than the EU and Brexit, and it can hardly be said that the EU or its member states are paragons of virtue (one of the silliest of Brexiter ideas is that those who oppose Brexit see the EU, in this or any respect, as some kind of nirvana or, conversely, that its failure to be perfect in every respect is a good reason not to belong to it). But it is at least an attempt to address asylum collectively in at least one segment of the globe. One of the follies of Brexit is that it has absented the UK from this attempt, whilst another is the antagonism and mistrust it has brought to Anglo-Irish relations. By no means all the costs of Brexit, and perhaps not even the greatest costs of Brexit, are economic.

 

Notes

[1] The 2019 MoU was drawn up at a time when a ‘no-deal Brexit’ (i.e. no Withdrawal Agreement) was possible, and I wonder if the references to 2020 are because, in effect, its provisions became duplicated by the Withdrawal Agreement/ Protocol. If it should emerge that there was a MoU about asylum returns, separate to the Withdrawal Agreement, then Sunak would be right to say that it was not binding in international law, but to renege on such a MoU, relating as it would to NI, would surely have very severe reputational consequences and damage relations with Ireland, the EU, and the US.

[2] The secrecy about this arises, I assume, not because of the asylum issue but because of the still existent NI terrorism threat.

There will be no post next Friday

Britain - the neighbour from hell

As predicted in recent posts, including last week’s, there is no sign that the government’s confrontational approach to the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) is going to change. Neither the Biden intervention nor the EU’s agreement to extend the chilled meats grace period, plus other recent flexibilities, is going to make any difference. What may just be beginning to change is the willingness of Labour to challenge it, with Keir Starmer making some unusually critical comments about Johnson's and Frost’s failings over Brexit.

The Frost-Lewis article

The continuing antagonism of this approach was sharply intensified by an article co-authored by David Frost and Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in the Irish Times last weekend, which has had reverberations throughout the week. It articulates what has emerged as the standard Brexiter case against the NIP, including the familiar dishonesty about the significance of the EU’s aborted proposal to invoke Article 16, but a few features are worth flagging up. In particular, it is important in its formulation of the central problem as being “the inflexible requirement to treat the movement of goods into Northern Ireland as if they were crossing an external EU frontier” (my emphasis added). This is noteworthy because it effectively rejects the core meaning of the NIP, and the reason why it exists. For it is not a matter of ‘as if’: the NIP is, precisely, an agreement about where the external EU frontier will be.

The refusal – repeated by Frost at an event this week - to accept this basic fact actually gives the lie to the recurrent motif in the article that the issue is that UK did not “expect” the border to be enforced as it is required to be, or had “assumed” that it would not be. Even taken in its own terms, this suggests rank incompetence on the part of Frost and the government. But that is actually far too generous, because they must have known at the time and were certainly advised of it by civil servants. Frost and Lewis write as if the NIP was just a general document, with all the details left to be filled in later, but whilst it’s true that there is scope for it to evolve over time, it also contains detailed provisions in the annexes for how it will work.

So whilst Frost and Lewis claim that EU insistence on implementing these provisions is to take a “theological approach”, as if to imply that all they seek is a little flexibility, their rejection of the central tenet of the NIP shows that this is not the case at all. Nor is their implication that their objections have only arisen as a result of trying to implement the NIP true. In fact Lewis, like Johnson and other ministers, denied from the outset that a sea border had been agreed at all. Moreover, as Professor Ronan McCrea points out, what Frost is proposing about the sea border neglects the wider context of compromises and trade-offs of which it is only one element. Meanwhile, lurking behind Frost, Lewis and Johnson is the DUP’s new leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, pushing for sea border controls to be removed “within weeks” (£).*

Irish reactions to Frost-Lewis

The placing of this article in the Irish media is both significant and deliberate. It signals that the UK stance is not just for domestic consumption, but is one the government is intent on pursuing. That this is so is underlined by the fact the that the UK Ambassador to Ireland approached RTE shortly before the article was published, knowing its content, and proposing that this meant it would be a “good time” to give an interview. This duly went ahead on Saturday and consisted of an uncompromising defence of the article.

So Frost-Lewis had not committed some accidental diplomatic gaffe: there appears to be a concerted British strategy in play which can’t be dismissed as playing to the Brexiter gallery (since neither the Irish Times nor RTE is the right theatre for this). It may be part of an attempt to garner support in Ireland for the UK case, perhaps with the idea that the Irish government might act as the UK advocate within the EU. If so, the reaction to it suggests it will fail and, indeed, that the article is seen as an unnecessarily provocative gesture.

Thus Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign minister, was highly (though diplomatically) critical of it, remarking that it seemed to amount to an attempt to “dismantle elements of the protocol piece by piece”. Media reports in Ireland quote senior officials saying the Irish government will not act as a go-between for the UK, and also that “there was a growing feeling on the EU side that the UK were ‘banking’ concessions offered by the EU”.

Subsequently, there was a much more robust response, the more striking given his traditionally pro-British stance, from the former Taoiseach John Bruton, lacerating Frost-Lewis for refusing to take responsibility for what the UK had signed, and for behaving in a “menacing” manner towards Ireland. It is well worth reading as a comprehensive dismantling of the UK position, including the abundantly clear fact that Frost has no intention of using the chilled meats grace period extension for the purpose of reorganizing supply chains, which was why it was granted (and why it existed in the first place).

Wider implications for UK-EU relations

The article caused ripples well beyond Ireland, as such ‘megaphone diplomacy’ was bound, and presumably intended, to do. Later in the week Maros Sefcovic spoke of a lack of trust, deepened by the Frost-Lewis article, and others of a growing feeling that Frost-Johnson never intended to honour the NIP. Meanwhile the EU Ambassador to the UK suggested that the UK was not interested in finding solutions to the NIP’s operations (implying, I assume, that it wants to ditch it altogether).

In short, all of the things I’ve been saying on this blog for weeks are now increasingly appearing in public statements (I don’t mean to imply any special insight on my part, it’s just that, obviously, I’m not subject to any of the diplomatic constraints that politicians and officials have on what they can say). The question of how the EU responds remains difficult to answer, and probably won’t be clear until the autumn, at the earliest. Sefcovic is talking about stepping up legal action over the unilateral extension of grace periods, but the real issue isn’t this or that disputed issue but the overarching refusal of the UK government to accept the basic tenets of the agreement it signed, and the antagonistic manner with which it conducts itself.

Some in the EU may still think, as some British commentators do, that the UK will quietly become more reasonable whilst continuing to bluster for domestic purposes. I think that is unlikely and, as mentioned, the placing of the Frost-Lewis article in the Irish Times is one indication of that. It also underestimates the extent to which post-Brexit British politics has become detached from rational calculation or, perhaps, operates according a rationality of its own. Thus, as I’ve remarked before, it seems clear that Frost-Johnson believe that their approach works, has no domestic downsides and will have few international repercussions.

The problem for the EU is how to react to a country which behaves in a hostile way, but hasn’t quite gone rogue; a country which alternates sabre-rattling about breaking international law with passive-aggressive talk of ‘our European friends and partners’.  My sense is that the default EU position is to keep talking and to try to dampen down or postpone outright conflict, but for how long is that sustainable?

Increasingly, the situation for the EU seems like that of a law-abiding citizen stuck with the neighbour from hell. At first, you try polite, rational argument – surely, if you just calmly explain your point of view the noisy all-night parties, drunken rows and revving engines will stop? But they just swear at you and turn the music up louder. So you explore legal sanctions, but these are weak and treated by the neighbour as an affront, even a justification for behaving even more badly. The aggravation worsens, but never quite to the point where you can take decisive action. All the time there are more-or-less implicit threats which you, used to reasonable conduct, don’t really know how to deal with. You keep trying to talk, but the more you do the more your neighbour senses your weakness. Perhaps one day, goaded beyond endurance, you lash out – only to have your neighbour report you for harassment. Or perhaps you give up trying, and put up with your nerves being shredded by broken nights and endless rows. It’s an intolerable, yet insoluble, situation – the more so as in this case moving house is impossible.

Brexit bites hard at home

So much for UK-EU relations. Meanwhile, the domestic damage of Brexit is racking up. Six months on from the end of the transition period, there is ever-more detail emerging about the damage to a wide variety of sectors where exporting has become more difficult and more expensive, with 17% of companies that used to trade with the EU having stopped doing so (£). Inevitably it will have been smaller traders who are most likely to have given up, but firms which have incorporated the new costs will also suffer in terms of reduced competitiveness.

All this has downstream consequences for employment and tax revenues, but the immediate looming crisis is the supply disruptions caused by a lack of HGV drivers. This is substantially, though by no means entirely, linked to Brexit and although there have been warnings for months it is only now feeding through into tangible gaps on supermarket shelves (as well as shortages of, for example, construction materials), even as food rots unpicked in fields. Astonishingly, the government response is to temporarily allow even longer working hours for HGV drivers, something greeted with dismay by the haulage industry as being neither a safe nor a sustainable solution.

The wider issue is that of skills gaps caused by the end of freedom of movement of people (£). One easy, and not unreasonable, response is to say that firms should pay more and/or offer better conditions of employment and/or invest more in training. However, apart from the fact that this also implies consumers paying higher prices (which, again, may not be unreasonable), the underlying problem is not shortages in this or that sector but across the board, and it derives mainly from the ageing demographics of UK society (although there are debates about what these look like and what they imply).

Not for the first time in recent history the UK economy needs more immigration for economic reasons. The tragedy, however, is not that ending of freedom of movement ended an easy answer to this need, it is that freedom of movement meant so much more than economic migration – it enabled lives and families to be created and enriched in non-economic ways, as well. Skills shortages may be the most obvious, but are only the most superficial, sign of what has been lost.

The unending culture war

The intangible losses implied by that go wider than freedom of movement. Whilst it would be ridiculous to blame Brexit for any and every intolerance or nastiness in British society, there is a palpable sense that Britain – or England, anyway - has become meaner and coarser as a result, or at least that it has enabled the more open expression of mean and coarse sentiments. That can’t be proved but, if nothing else, the fact that Johnson’s government extended what worked in campaigning for Brexit into the wider, now daily fought, culture war has pushed things in that direction. After all, you can’t have a culture war in which there are no cultural casualties. Perhaps worse than that, in a culture war neither victory nor defeat can ever be declared: it must always feed on some new outrage.

That is one, and arguably one of the most severe, legacies of Brexit. Not just because of a general coarsening but because ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ are now conflated with the wider culture war battles. Empirical evidence doesn’t really support it, but pro-Brexit commentators like Matthew Lynn (£) explicitly link ‘pro and anti-maskers’ with remainers and leavers. Others make the same linkage with ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ opinions, and this in turn gets linked with all the stuff about ‘cancel culture’ and so on. To see how these and other things get mashed up together by the culture warriors, a good place to look is the recent interview on GBNews – itself a medium and outcome of the culture war – with Douglas Murray. Even the football tournament which some readers may be aware is currently underway is being linked to Brexit in a wide variety of ways (there’s a whole post that could be written just about that).

Brexit is crucial to this culture war, not just as having been a gateway to it but because there was a vote on Brexit. It was this victory – narrow and tainted as it was – which gave a new inflection to what had always been rhetorically claimed as ‘the silent majority’ by putting a number on it. With that came the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and the positioning of its opponents as not only wrongheaded but anti-democratic.

The paradox of Brexit

At the risk of labouring the earlier analogy, imagine yourself, now, an unwilling occupant of the house of the neighbour from hell. Your home has been taken over by anti-social hooligans and you are stuck with it as they rampage from room to room, smashing things up. This is effectively the situation of half the British people. Of course you might decide to leave if you can and, unbelievably, Brexiters are now denouncing an “EU plot” to attract British citizens to take up citizenship in EU countries because, as Bernard Jenkin explains, “their career opportunities are so limited [compared] with what they were”. The specific loss being raised was that of their freedom of movement, and the refusal of the government to have a mobility agreement with the EU. Only a dolt like Jenkin could fail to understand it is a consequence of the Brexit he advocated.

The two components of the analogy are linked. Inherent in any populist politics, and one of the ways in which ‘populist’ is not the same as ‘popular’, is that it claims to speak for a people always under attack (thus Lynn, again, writes of an “EU plot to destroy the City” [£]). That is why it is so belligerent in its use of symbols, such as the flag, in a way that a truly popular politics would be too self-confident to need to be. The perceived attack is both from external enemies who would dominate the people and internal traitors who would undermine and weaken them. Waving the flag is meant to scarify the external enemy, whilst exposing the traitors who do not fly it or of whom it can be claimed, no matter how absurdly, that they mock it.

Yet the two elements often come into sharp conflict, as can be seen in the current situation regarding asylum seekers. On the one hand, the government is developing an ever-more spiteful and mean-spirited policy with its Nationality and Borders Bill published this week, in clear pursuit of its domestic culture war. On the other hand, it has discovered that Brexit makes it harder, not easier, to pursue such a policy and that it needs the agreement of other countries to replace the UK’s previous membership of the EU’s ‘Dublin regulations’.

As the BBC’s Home editor Mark Easton put it, it is “the paradox of Brexit that taking control of your borders requires more international co-operation, not less”. That doesn’t just apply to control of borders, of course. It exposes the entire fantasy of a sovereignty that can be exercised without regard for that of others, and the lie inherent in the ‘take back control’ slogan. It really is time that David Frost and Boris Johnson understood this, but there’s absolutely no sign that they will.

 

*For an assessment of Donaldson, the DUP and the NIP see Dr Lisa Claire Whitten’s analysis on the UK in a Changing Europe website

Parallel universes

To anyone who has followed, even cursorily, reports about the effects of Brexit since the vote to leave, and especially since the end of the transition period, or even just in the last week or so, this week’s Queen’s Speech, with its disconnected rag-bag of policies, will suggest that the government inhabits a strangely parallel universe.

Nothing in it began to address the realities of the damage that Brexit has already caused, such as that shown, misleading claims by David Frost to the contrary, by the latest UK-EU goods trade figures which suggest that by March 2021 trade was 11% lower than it would have been without Brexit, on top of a 10% fall between the referendum and the end of the transition period. Moreover, despite Panglossian claims from the usual suspects (£) about how companies are now adapting to the new trade arrangements, what that ignores is that where adaptation does not mean stopping trading altogether it means incorporating new costs, with impacts on prices and competitiveness. As ever it is amusing to see erstwhile cheerleaders for free trade tying themselves in knots to explain that introducing barriers to trade doesn’t suppress it. And of course all this is before the UK has started introducing import controls on goods coming from the EU.

Nothing, either, on the emergent damage to the services sector (£), the looming threat of supply disruptions due to shortages of truck drivers(£), the scandal in the making in the settled status scheme for EU citizens or the actual scandal about detention of EU nationals at the UK border. There are also now warning noises that the UK could run out of construction materials. This arises from the shift from CE to UKCA conformity assessment which has to be completed by the end of this year and, as I have been warning for a while, is a ticking time bomb in terms of business preparedness.

However, there are at least now signs that Labour is willing to start challenging the government on the effects of Brexit. Rachel Reeves, when shadowing Michael Gove, had already done so and her elevation this week to Shadow Chancellor is therefore significant. Immediately, in the Queen’s Speech debate, she has raised the problems being caused by Brexit to businesses and the damage to exports.

This matters not as a way of continuing the debate on the merits of Brexit but because it’s not possible to discuss the realities of the British economy without mentioning the effects of Brexit. To put it another way, just because there is a Brexit culture war, it doesn’t mean that the economics of Brexit should be a no-go area. Indeed were it to be so it would be one sign that the Brexiters had won the culture war.

Benefitting from Brexit (sic)

Equally, anyone still expecting Brexit to herald some exciting new world of opportunity will have been disappointed by the Queen’s Speech. It scarcely lived up to the Brexiters’ billing of this as a moment of national liberation (£) from the supposed colonial yoke of the EUSSR (also known as the Nazi EU and the neo-liberal EU, which might suggest that Brexiters’ grasp of political philosophy is a little shaky). Rather, ‘taking back control’ turns out to be something of a damp squib. For which there is a simple explanation: it was an illusion.

Thus, tucked away in a few pages (starting p.48) within the briefing notes that accompanied the speech, under the heading ‘Benefitting from Brexit’ were various all but meaningless, or simply dishonest proposals. These included: promises about unspecified better regulation for business, a reprise of the old ‘Brexit will slash red tape’ line, which will provoke a hollow laugh amongst businesses mired in the red tape Brexit has (re)created; new policies on state subsidies, procurement, and planning which to some extent consolidate what existed under the EU, and make no reference to the level playing field constraints of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement or for that matter the WTO’s procurement constraints; freeports (of course), which didn’t require Brexit and are anyway pretty pointless; a bill to recognize international professional qualifications which didn't require Brexit; an animal welfare bill which may include provisions to end live animal exports, which wouldn't have been possible without Brexit*; and the introduction of the Turing Scheme, which will be less good than the Erasmus scheme it replaces.

Pursuing the Brexit culture war

But if there was little here that required, or was a benefit of, Brexit, there was plenty more which was distinctly ‘Brexity’, in the sense of pursuing the culture war of which Brexit was the biggest battle and which Boris Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ continue to prosecute through endless skimble-skamble raids. Thus there were long-trailed provisions to hobble judicial review, to clamp down on public protest, to bring ‘woke’ universities to heel, and to discourage voting amongst the unwashed. No doubt it was designed to appeal to the kind of ‘red wall’ Tory voters that Labour sentimentalists still persist in regarding as their ‘heartlands’. It was also (or therefore), as David Allen Green observes, “a multi-pronged attack on our liberties” growing from the ‘authoritarian populism’ expressed in Brexiter notions of the ‘will of the people’.

The first two of these measures can be seen to grow at least in part from Brexit. Resentment of the role of the judiciary via the Article 50 case and the prorogation case still smoulders. Rather more ludicrously, at least one part of the planned legislation on protests seems to derive from the way that Steve Bray’s one-man ‘stop Brexit’ demonstration so infuriated Brexiter MPs. But the wider and more sinister purpose is to remove both checks on and challenges to government power, again a hallmark of the Brexit process but now to be made a general principle.

Whilst more obviously an elite power grab than anything to do with the popular will, it is the hallmark of authoritarian populism to present the powerful as the incarnation of ‘the people’ and, thus, any checks upon the powerful as thwarting the people. This is the “grotesque political spoonerism” of populism that emerged with such force with Brexit.  

The third item, on ‘free speech’ in universities, relates to the pervasive hostility to ‘liberal intellectuals’, and perhaps to (university) education itself, that characterizes Brexit and post-Brexit politics. In part, as with the proposed judicial review and protest bills, it is about trying to close down those parts of civil society that might challenge government. It also reflects the sense amongst Brexiters that universities in general are wellsprings of the social liberalism which they abjure, and in particular that the graduates produced tend to reject the politics of authoritarian populism.

This proposal is already revealing a mass of contradictions, including the possibility that the new law will protect the rights of holocaust deniers to speak on campus and yet also require universities to prevent anti-Semitism on campus. This is only one of the many problems which ensue when in the name of ‘free speech’ it is proposed to create a state directorate to oversee it. As with the free traders now justifying trade barriers, the free speech libertarians are in the contradictory position of advocating state policing of this freedom.

This contradiction flows less from intellectual confusion than from dishonesty. For the fundamental problem is that the ‘free speech warriors’ want to prevent political correctness ‘stopping us saying what we think’ whilst also putting a brake on ‘woke intellectuals’ banging on about slavery. Free speech ‘for us but not them’ isn’t quite the principled position they seem to think, and despite the preferred self-description of many such warriors being that of ‘Classical Liberal’, one can only imagine that they haven’t read much John Stuart Mill. (For more on this proposed legislation, which seems in equal measure both pernicious and silly, see Professor Steve Peers’ twitter thread).

The fourth of the authoritarian populist provisions is the plan to require photo-ID of voters. It’s ostensible purpose, to combat electoral fraud, is so paper thin that even the naked rambler could wear it on his walks without compromising his principles. There are virtually no cases of in-person electoral fraud in the UK. Its purpose is, almost flagrantly, to prevent voters from ethnic minorities and marginalised groups, who are less likely to have such ID, from voting because they don’t tend to vote Tory. Yet it is possible that this will backfire given Johnson’s new-found reliance on older voters in ‘red wall’ seats who may also be relatively less likely to have photo-ID. Either way, it is a shabby little trick.

The rot beneath the pomp

There was another way in which the Queen’s Speech bespoke of a parallel universe. On the surface, here was the pomp and ceremony of centuries of tradition in the ‘mother of all parliaments’. And media coverage was awash with the breathless commentary which, apparently, is now required of broadcasters, especially the BBC, to show that they are of the people and not the liberal metropolitan elite when covering any vaguely royal ritual (we might, perhaps, call this doctrine ‘Witchellism’).

But ‘surface’ is all it was. Like a rotten piece of fruit with its skin intact, underneath was a slimy, suppurating flesh. Not just because it announced measures that were so transparently anti-democratic but because it concealed how the Union itself is falling apart because of Brexit, most obviously as regards Scotland for reasons spelt out sharply by the eminent psephologist Professor Sir John Curtice this week.

So even as it proposed measures to ‘strengthen the union’ the Queen’s Speech left resolutely unaddressed how profoundly Brexit has weakened it. Whilst hardly a new observation, it bears saying that not only was Brexit primarily a project of the English regions, but it was pursued in a form to cause maximum distress to those parts of the UK that had not voted for it. The Brexiters were able to do it, and they called it the will of the people, but there will be a huge reckoning.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in relation to Northern Ireland where, in his hurry to ‘ditch the hated backstop’ that Theresa May had agreed, Johnson, apparently without understanding or caring, effectively segmented the UK single market. Although the British media has recently gone rather quiet about this, intensive discussions continue between the UK and the EU over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

It is hard to be sure, but there is little obvious sign of progress. The EU has rejected UK proposals for a light-touch ‘risk-based’ approach to border checks, and David Frost is now speaking of the NIP being “unsustainable” and hinting at further unilateral breaches by the UK. It hardly needs saying that it was Frost, himself, who negotiated it and Johnson who signed it, nor that any additional breaches will be profoundly damaging to both UK-EU and UK-US relations. Meanwhile, unionist opposition to the NIP is hardening ominously and the marching season is not far off.

Johnson will meet the Irish Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, today to discuss a variety of UK-Ireland matters, and reports suggest that he will use it to try to enlist Martin’s support for the UK’s preferred ‘equivalence regime’ (see last week's post for explanation). That seems to be implied by the fact that David Frost will also attend. If so, Martin is unlikely to engage in such a discussion, since it is a UK-EU matter, and it would suggest that even after all these years the UK government still hasn’t grasped that the EU negotiates as a bloc, and in this case through the structures established by the NIP.

The culture war of attrition

This is just the most high-profile way in which Brexit continues to develop and be negotiated – other examples include the now-linked issues of fishing and financial services, with the prospects for a financial services equivalence agreement now looking remote. It is this, along with the still emerging economic realities of Brexit, which makes calls, such as those of Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, to “draw a line under Brexit” and to “embrace it” so fatuous. For whilst it’s right to say that rejoining the EU is simply not in prospect, you can’t draw a line under, or embrace, something which is a still unfolding process. Nor, as Burnham wants, can the focus now be on the Union without recognizing what Brexit is doing to it.

As Anthony Robinson discusses in his wide-ranging Yorkshire Bylines piece this week, Brexit is neither stable, nor sustainable, nor settled. At least one reason for that, long-evident but underscored by this week’s Queen’s Speech, is that Brexit has now morphed into a much wider domestic political and cultural battle. Brexiters seemed to think that winning the referendum was enough, a view falsified by the protracted Brexit process it engendered, and that it would take us to the ‘sunny uplands’, which the Brexit process has failed to reveal.

That process is still continuing so that, rather as happened with the confident predictions that the First World War would be over by Christmas, we are now stuck in a long, gloomy and vicious culture war of attrition. In those trenches, even the dimmest, most chinless, subaltern no longer talks blithely of sunny uplands to come. Only in a parallel universe, far from the mud and rot, are those old lies still told with such high zest.

*Updated 16/05/21 to correct my original, incorrect, claim that nothing in this Bill would require Brexit. Thanks to Professor Anthony Glees for the correction. 

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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 ….