Blockades, mythical and metaphorical

The Internal Market Bill (IMB) and its repercussions have been the predominant theme of this week’s developments. Almost as soon as I wrote my previous post, Brexiter MPs started justifying that Bill in terms of the supposed EU threat to ‘blockade’ food supplies travelling from Great Britain (GB) to Northern Ireland (NI). In particular, it was this threat which was used to justify the incendiary step of including the clauses in this legislation which would break international law. This justification has now been widely repeated, including by the Prime Minister.

This was a dishonest linkage to make, because there is nothing in the IMB which would prevent this mythical ‘blockade’ (though there are rumours that the forthcoming Finance Bill will do so). The two areas in which the Bill proposes powers to defy international law are – as detailed in the previous post – goods flows from NI to GB and  the state aid rules in the NI Protocol (NIP). This point was made in a very effective parliamentary performance from Ed Miliband during the IMB second reading debate this week, in which he challenged Boris Johnson to explain his claim – which, unsurprisingly, as it would have been impossible, the Prime Minister refused to do.

The myth of the ‘blockade’ threat

As so often in the Brexit saga, disentangling the different strands of what is being said and why is complex. The first time a linkage between the IMB and the ‘blockade’ threat was suggested seems to have been in a report in The Sun on Tuesday of last week, where it was said that Michel Barnier had made “veiled threats” about GB to NI food flows during the trade negotiations and that it was these which had provoked the government to its move against the NIP (quite how the timings of this would have worked is unclear, by the way).

The story was given legs by a reference in Barnier’s statement at the end of last week’s talks when he said that “more clarity is needed [about GB’s proposed future sanitary and phytosanitary regime] for the EU to do the assessment for the third-country listing of the UK”. Such listing will be needed for GB agricultural produce to enter NI at the end of the transition. The UK position – as articulated by David Frost - is that this is a non-issue as GB will continue to follow EU standards, and if it proposes to change these will give the EU and the WTO plenty of notice.

Whether this issue is being used as negotiating leverage in the trade talks or not I don’t know. But it certainly doesn’t amount to the threat of a ‘blockade’ with its connotations of naval interdiction. Rather, it is a reminder of the procedural, rules-based nature of the EU as an institution and, for that matter, of international trade. It is not enough for the UK just to say it will follow the EU’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) standards and, as Boris Johnson asserted at this week’s liaison committee, that the EU should automatically list the UK with its failure to do so meaning it is not acting in good faith. Rather, like any third country, which is what the UK has chosen to be, it needs to submit the relevant documentation for assessment.

If it is compliant, then the EU would have no grounds to refuse third country listing, and there is no suggestion that it would do so. Even if it did, the UK’s correct response would be to seek redress through the WA dispute system (and, perhaps - I am not sure - through the WTO) and in the meantime to make use of the existing provision within the NIP whereby “serious economic … difficulties” can be addressed by unilateral action, thus avoiding any ‘blockade’.

In short, there’s no reason to think that the EU is minded to punish the UK in this way, even if it was it couldn’t, even if it could the UK has no need to break international law to respond to it, and even if it did need to the IMB doesn’t provide the means.

My guess is that the UK has not wanted to submit its SPS plans because of the likely contradictions between following EU SPS rules and making trade deals with other countries, especially the US (although it is reported that the government now says it will do so by the end of October). For the EU’s part, there is presumably a reluctance just to take it on trust that the UK will comply and will give adequate notice of any changes. Similarly, it is reluctant to take on trust that the UK’s post-Brexit State Aid regime will be robust and wants to see the precise detail before agreeing a trade deal.

Such a lack of trust is the inevitable consequence of the bellicose, negative and sometimes duplicitous way that the UK has approached the Brexit negotiations over the last four years. Doing so has consequences, and those consequences have caught up with Britain. They can only be compounded by the current threat to break international law, so if that threat was indeed meant as a counter to Barnier’s position about third country listing then it is counter-productive anyway.

The wider attack line

However, the initial reporting was not the same as what came to be said, in that it only suggested the IMB clauses were being used to ‘talk tough’ in reply to the EU’s ‘threats’. It was not until a few days later that it began to be falsely claimed that the Bill was actually a way of neutering those threats.

The obvious reason is that the ‘blockade’ line offers, to Brexit supporters in the population and the media, something that sounds sufficiently serious to justify the breaking of international law. Perhaps it was developed in part because of the backlash against that plan. However, it is only one strand within a wider and much more dangerous narrative that the Brexiters are developing. For the ‘blockade’ allegation is part of a thoroughgoing attempt to claim that the EU are not negotiating in ‘good faith’. As noted above, the Prime Minister himself explicitly linked third country SPS listing with good faith this week.  But the wider attack is that not just for this reason but more generally it is the EU and not the UK which is in breach of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and, therefore, of international law.

It takes quite some brass neck – actually, it takes a sociopathic lack of self-awareness and pathological dishonesty - to make such a claim, but none of these qualities are alien to the Brexit Ultras. As usual (cf. GATT Article XXIV) they seize like barrack-room lawyers everywhere on some half-understood (if that) legal text to give themselves a veneer of authority with which to impress the gullible. Currently, it is Article 184 of the WA (see p.287 of link) according to a semi-literate briefing produced by the ERG (described by law Professor Steve Peers as “perhaps the worst legal analysis I have ever seen, and I am including students who leave their exam booklet blank”).

This article requires both sides to negotiate in good faith and to use their best endeavours to secure agreements on the future relationship. Risibly, the Brexiters interpret this to mean that if the EU doesn’t give the UK a deal that it wants then that violates the article and means the EU is not acting in good faith. They also conveniently ignore that Article 184 refers to the agreements to be sought as those referred to in the Political Declaration – the very document which, with its references to level playing field conditions, they and the Brexit government have disowned. Even in its own terms it’s nonsense since if, as claimed, the EU is in breach of the WA then, as with the ‘blockade’ non-issue, the remedy is to use the dispute resolution procedure within the WA rather than unilaterally to break its terms.

Never mind. Like so many other bogus Brexiter claims this one – along with other equally footling ideas such as that the NI Protocol was only designed to be temporary – are now being pumped out by any and every Brexiter MP and their social media foot soldiers. So too is the Brexiters’ idea that since the Miller case (which forced the parliamentary vote on triggering Article 50) confirmed the primacy of parliamentary sovereignty over the Executive then ‘therefore’ this means parliament doesn’t have to obey international law. It’s hard to be too scathing of the woeful intellectual inadequacy and dishonesty of such gibberish.

The motivation here is obvious. Even in these post-truth times it strains public credulity that a government that signed a deal six months ago can now claim it is deeply flawed. Admittedly Bernard Jenkin now openly says that “the UK made a mistake in signing the WA” – something he and the rest of the ERG voted to do - but if that becomes the Brexiter message then it suggests that the entire basis on which the Tories campaigned and won the General Election was also a mistake. It might even invite the heretical thought that if MPs can change their minds about what they voted for then so too could the electorate that voted for Brexit.

So, instead, the blame is being ascribed to the EU for bad faith and for making ‘extreme’ interpretations of the WA. This, rather than Brexiter delusion or duplicity, is then used to justify reneging on parts of it or in due course – as I have been suggesting for some time is the Ultras’ hope – on its entirety.

The IMB at home and abroad

For the time being that only extends to the provisions of the IMB, assuming it passes. This is now likely because it seems the government has conceded to its ‘rebels’ that the provisions which would break international law can only be activated with a further parliamentary vote (and with some other new caveats). It is only a fig leaf, with little substantive meaning, although it does show that there are still lines – even if only shakily drawn in the sand – that Johnson isn’t quite able to cross.

But as so often in the Brexit process – the Chequers Proposal and the ‘Malthouse Compromise’ come to mind – attempts to broker domestic agreement, even if successful, myopically ignore international consequences. In particular, the existence of this legislation even in very slightly softened form is anathema to the EU.

There seems to be some dispute as to whether simply passing (or even just proposing) such a law would, in itself, be grounds for the EU to take legal action, or whether that would require the powers granted to be exercised. It is also a political question as to whether the EU would do so even if legally able, to which the answer seems to be ‘not yet’. Either way, assuming the relevant clauses pass in any form the damage will have been done to the last residue of the EU’s trust. The EU won’t walk away from the trade talks, and a deal is still possible, but the inviolability of the WA as a condition for such a deal has been forcibly reaffirmed. And it will taint the UK’s international reputation as Ursula von der Leyen has warned (£), with potential effects going far beyond Brexit.

Already this week we have seen signs of that, with robust statements from Joe Biden and other US politicians re-confirming that a UK-US trade deal is unthinkable if the Good Friday Agreement is compromised. Breaching the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) in the ways proposed by the IMB doesn’t in itself necessarily do that, but it could be a move in that direction.

Indeed Dominic Raab’s visit to the US, which occasioned these statements, showed how this could be. For in defending the IMB he made the extraordinary comment that it was only necessary because the EU was trying to erect a regulatory border down the Irish Sea. Yet that it is precisely what the UK has agreed to. So if Raab actually understood and meant what he said – an open question, since he appears to be totally out of his depth - then the entire basis of the provisions in the NIP which prevent a land border with Ireland, and therefore the GFA, would be compromised.

Brexiter MPs reacted with fury to Biden’s intervention but, like it or not, as a consequence of Brexit Britain has, as it were, blockaded itself into isolation, and can be booted around by the big players whether that be the US, EU or China. Arch-Brexiter John Redwood may blithely opine that “trade deals are nice to have but not essential … Getting back full control of our money, our laws and our borders is essential”, but that always hollow slogan now sounds increasingly like the last desperate cry of a country sinking into oblivion. Not waving, but drowning.

Domestically, the IMB may initially have looked smart. The Tories could depict Labour’s opposition to the Bill as “siding with the EU”, and many voters will surely take the view that breaking international law isn’t ‘really’ breaking the law. And as one said on a vox pop on Radio 4 this week ‘it’s not as if we’ll be torturing people’. Plus for many Tory core voters almost anything that seems to further the Brexit cause, or even just sticks fingers up at the EU, or even just enrages the liberal metropolitan elite, will be greeted with rapture.

Yet those voters – and more importantly the Brexit Ultras – may be infuriated at having been marched up the hill of flouting the WA only to be marched half-way back down again when Johnson encountered some opposition. There are also rumours that the legislation may now be delayed, despite the initial claim that it was so urgent it had to be rammed through quickly, which would be a further climbdown.

So the IMB is beginning to look like yet another Johnson fiasco. He has raised the Ultras’ hopes of ditching the WA – or at least of ‘sticking one’ on the EU - then backtracked. Yet the damage to relations with the EU and to the UK’s wider reputation is done anyway, and won’t be forgotten for a very long time. In this respect, too, he seems to have blockaded himself into a corner.

The underlying problem: trying to turn lies into policy

Aside from their immediate motivations and effects, these latest events re-emphasise something more fundamental about Brexit. It has always been based upon a denial of, or at best a naivety about, reality. In particular, as Tom McTague wrote in The Atlantic this week, a denial of the reality of the meaning of Brexit for Northern Ireland (or of Northern Ireland for Brexit). Consider the absurd dismissal of this reality by Boris Johnson and others in 2016, insisting that Brexit would have no impact on the Irish border because of – again, invoking a bit of legal-sounding mumbo-jumbo – the longstanding existence of a Common Travel Area. But there has to be a border somewhere. Having for reasons of expedience accepted that it would be across the Irish Sea, Johnson is now trying yet again to deny the need for a border.

Brexit wasn’t just a denial of the reality of Northern Ireland but also of the nature of the single market, the nature of the EU, and much else besides. Looking at the Vote Leave campaign documents now, there is scarcely a sentence in them that anyone could now seriously defend. The line in the final page summary about “having better relations with our European friends” has a particularly hollow ring to it this week, whilst the core economic claim that “there is a free trade zone from Iceland to Turkey to the Russian border and we will be part of it”, always a lie, now looks like the ravings of a lunatic.

As I wrote in March 2019, you can lie but you can’t turn lies into policy. The attempt to do so is the reason the UK is being driven to more and more extreme positions. It is that which has given the events of the last few years their strangely repetitive quality as, like moths dashing themselves against a window pane, the Brexiters keep trying to buck reality. A small example of that came this week when Geoffrey Cox refused to support the IMB on the basis that it broke international law by unilaterally over-riding the WA. Cox – himself a Brexiter, demonstrating that they are not all Ultras – had also as the then Attorney-General refused in the face great pressure to advise that the government could legally unilaterally exit what was then the backstop in May’s WA. That was eighteen months ago, but the Ultras are still convinced there is a way around having to honour what you agree to.

What we see in the government’s present contortions over the IMB is, as Rafael Behr wrote with customary insight this week, “the dawning, desperate realisation that there is no way to reconcile responsible statecraft with the fulfilment of Eurosceptic fantasy”. But the realisation, if that is what it is, has come too late. The UK government and Eurosceptic (or Brexiter) fantasy are now inseparable and – in their aims to reshape the civil service and judiciary – they threaten also to capture the institutions of the state.

Of course, for those who have the true faith, it is neither fantasy nor lies, and no event or experience can shake them into accepting reality. Some, at least, still genuinely believe that there is some kind of trade agreement that can largely replicate single market membership without any of the obligations. They still believe that either now or after a few months without a deal the EU will make such an agreement, no doubt at the behest of German car makers. They still believe that it doesn’t matter much anyway, as ‘WTO terms’ will be just fine. They still believe that the Irish border issue is one confected by Brussels and perhaps Dublin. The real blockade is of their brains: fanatical Brexiter ideology prevents the entry of reality.

What now?

Their fantasy will, as it always has done, seek to drive Brexit policy in a harder and harder direction. It is the only way of outflanking encroaching reality – if we push harder our dreams will come true, and if they don’t come true it is because we aren’t pushing hard enough - and is also the only way of sustaining the populist culture war that secures them the votes they need. Derogation from the European Convention of Human Rights is the already emerging next step, perhaps after a no (trade) deal Brexit and, if so, the subsequent ripping up of the WA in its entirety. For there is surely no way that either the financial settlement or the NI provisions would survive Brexiter pressure in the absence of a trade deal (though one must pray that those for citizens’ rights would).

That seems a perfectly feasible short-term scenario, and at the beginning of this week might have seemed the most likely. Certainly Sir Ivan Rogers, who has been right about most things to do with Brexit, believes that that there will be no deal.  But in this febrile atmosphere, and with a Prime Minister so lacking in consistency, principle, or even basic competence, Brexit predictions are more difficult than ever. So as the week ends it still looks possible that after all the chaos of this autumn (of which there is much more to come) clears away, some kind of fairly limited deal will be done. At least, there are a few straws in the wind – as regards both fisheries and even state aid – that this might be so.

If so, the economic consequences will be bad but not dramatic and not very visible, just a gradual decline of prosperity. Relations with the EU will be sour but not totally destroyed. Resentfully the UK will comply with the Irish Sea border, and the complex, rickety mechanisms for doing so may just about work. There will be years of ongoing negotiations on a piecemeal basis, and constant attempts by the UK to push to the limit and beyond what it had agreed. The Brexiters will be sulphurous and constantly urging more antagonistic stances, and still convinced that their fantasy would have been possible had it not been betrayed.

It’s hardly an inspiring vision, yet, limited though it is, an optimistic one which in another week may seem hopelessly unrealistic. For there are many obstacles to reaching even this very modest destination. Brexit has blockaded Britain from any more convivial one.

Brexit is going feral

In the very first post on this blog, in September 2016, I noted that the complexity of delivering Brexit and the lack of realism of Brexiters meant that in the coming months and years we would hear much more about civil service ‘obstructionism’. It had already begun, only a few weeks after the Referendum, and in the years that have followed it has intensified, sometimes aimed at the civil service in general, other times at particular individuals.

Of these, the most high-profile targets have been Sir Ivan Rogers and Sir Kim Darroch, both of whom were effectively forced to resign. There has also been a swathe of resignations other senior civil servants including Sir Jon Thompson, the head of HMRC, who received death threats after giving evidence about the costs of Brexit to a Select Committee.

Whilst Brexit has increased the overall size of the civil service, there is some evidence of unusually high turnover amongst staff. It is a reasonable speculation, given comments such as those of Sir Martin Donnelly, former Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Trade, that in at least some cases fundamental differences over Brexit have played a part in this.

At the time of Rogers’ resignation, in January 2017, I wrote that a string of resignations and early retirements from the civil service was very likely, and that the wholesale politicization of the civil service in favour of true believers in Brexit was a danger. The first has proved true and the second seems more of a risk than ever. I mention these earlier blog posts not to ‘boast’ about my prescience – and, anyway, many others said similar things - but to show that what has happened, and is happening, is not accidental, unexpected or just to do with Johnson’s premiership, but is embedded in the entire process of Brexit itself.

The latest attack on the civil service

This week  has seen the intensification of this, with reports of a ‘hit list’ of senior civil servants (£) who the government want to replace because they are not on board with Brexit and related policies. There are numerous reports of more or less open warfare between Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, and her senior civil servants. Meanwhile, former Chancellor Sajid Javid’s resignation speech implicitly criticised the way that political advisors, most obviously Dominic Cummings, are sidelining the civil service as well as undermining ministers.

At one level, there’s nothing new about this. The Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s were highly suspicious of the perceived ideological conservatism of the civil service. The Thatcher governments saw corporatism, and capture by special interests, amongst civil servants as a block to their reforms. And New Labour often regarded civil servants as resistant to the managerialization of public services that were Blair’s hallmark.

It may have been less visible, but undoubtedly some senior civil servants were sidelined and eased out, and more congenial ones promoted, within all of these administrations. Moreover, as Geoff Mulgan, who was involved in some of them, them has recently written there are many past parallels for some of the civil service reforms that are currently being discussed. And bust-ups between Chancellors and Number Ten advisers aren’t new, either – recall the resignations of Nigel Lawson and Alan Walters in 1989.

However, there are very important differences between all that and what is happening now. In the past, it was about the perceived ideological and policy preferences of civil servants, either en masse or as individuals. And despite the much-vaunted neutrality of the British Civil Service it would be naïve to deny that such preferences did not exist, that there was an ‘official view’, or, even, that the social background of the traditional civil service predisposed it towards a certain conservatism. Even so, civil servants did and still do pride themselves on carrying out policies that they do not personally believe in. And strong ministers have usually been able to over-ride reluctant officials if they have coherent ideas.

What is happening with Brexit is something different. As I, along with many others with much greater authority and larger audiences, have recorded on this blog, most of the things that Brexiters want are simply impossible to deliver – possibly all of them, when taken in combination - and are often based upon deliberate or accidental falsehoods. This generates a faith-based politics in which what matters is loyalty to the cause and purity of belief. Possessed of such belief, the impossible becomes possible and inconvenient facts disappear.

A government purged of dissent

We’ve now reached the stage where the government has purged from office all those who do not display this loyalty and do not have (or are not willing to simulate) this purity of belief. At the same time, it is a government which must finally deliver on Brexit, not as a matter of promises, slogans and theory but in the cold, hard world of political, legal and economic reality. This is the task with which they have charged the civil service.

This puts civil servants in an impossible position. An individual civil servant might disagree with privatization or nationalization, say, but these are deliverable policies and such an individual can, and should be able to, swallow personal views and deliver them. But no individual can, say, deliver a policy of frictionless trade (£) with the EU once the UK leaves the institutions – the single market and the customs union – that make such trade possible. Nor can a civil servant advise, or undertake, a policy which is illegal.

In the face of this, the government – along with its many Brexit-supporting allies in the media – is rapidly moving to a position where it wants the civil service, like itself, to be purged of non-believers and, in this way, supposedly to ensure the delivery of Brexit. On the basis of recent reports, the particular fault line at the moment is an attempt to find ways around the checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as entailed by the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Withdrawal Agreement (for more on this issue, see my previous post).

This agreement, don’t forget, is a legally binding international treaty. Hence it is also reported that the new Attorney-General, Suella Braverman (a former Chair of the ERG) was appointed partly as being more likely to advise that this would be legal than would her predecessor Geoffrey Cox (who voted leave in the Referendum but is unpopular with Brexiters, going back to his refusal to advise that the UK could legally unilaterally exit the Irish backstop provisions in May’s deal). The legal issues entailed were the agreement to be broken are discussed in detail by Professor Steve Peers on his EU Law blog.

The role of the Attorney-General is a complex one, with a long and convoluted history, being both a government ministerial office and also the government’s chief legal adviser. It is not, of course, a civil service role. But, as reported, the situation parallels what seems to be being asked of civil servants in that the hope is that the new Attorney-General will give advice more conducive to Brexiters’ ears. Yet, even if so, the provision of such advice will not mean that the UK evades any legal consequences of following it (it is legal advice, not a legal judgment) and, perhaps more importantly, the political consequences in terms of the reputation of, and trust, in the UK. That could have important practical implications not just for relations with the EU (£) but also with other countries, including the US.

Closed ears and closed minds

Such consequences point to the crucial issue. There is little merit – in politics, as in private life – of seeking only the advice which you want to hear. And whilst legal advice may often be subject to a legitimate range of interpretations, in many Brexit matters what is at stake are facts or at least best-estimate predictions.

Thus Brexiters may, and do, dismiss almost all economic forecasts of Brexit, including those of the civil service, preferring to rely on those of the small group that used to be called Economists for Brexit. Yet doing so does not make those forecasts reliable, and does not negate the fact that, thus far, they have proven inaccurate nor the repeated, detailed and devastating critiques of that group.  Other things – such as the impact of Brexit on business supply chains, or the tariffs associated with ‘trading on WTO terms’, are even less amenable to alternative interpretations.

All of this has been in play since the beginning. But it is now taking a far more dangerous form because of the nature of Johnson’s government since winning its majority. That could have been an opportunity to ‘stop campaigning and start governing’. Instead, there is a very strong sense that he and his government now want to blank out any advice or viewpoints that contradict those not just of Brexiters but of the most hardcore Brexiters.

This explains why, preposterously, the government is going to consult on the economic and business implications of its Brexit plans – but only after having made them. It also partly explains the current prominence that special advisers have, which is most unusual. Even leaving aside the well-known example of Cummings, consider the fact that David Frost’s lecture last week, treated almost as an official policy statement, was given by someone who is neither a politician nor even a civil servant, but a special advisor.

The report that Johnson wants civil service briefings to be short and simple is not so remarkable – many politicians share that desire – but the suspicion must be that he also wants them to pander to, rather than to challenge, his pre-existing beliefs. It is consistent with the story that, when Foreign Secretary, he reacted to unwelcome advice from civil servants by sticking his fingers in his ears and humming Rule Britannia*. Most significantly, it is consistent with the fact that, both as Foreign Secretary and as Prime Minister he has agreed to things which he later disowned, suggesting that he either did not read or did not understand them.

That goes to the heart of why not taking, or not even receiving, advice you do not like is an untenable basis for political decision making. For reality does not change just by ignoring it. The government could replace the entire civil service with Brexit flag wavers but, still, the economic, political and legal realities of Brexit will remain unchanged. It won’t change the negotiations with the EU (except to make them more difficult), it won’t change the consequences of not reaching a deal with the EU, it won’t change what businesses will do in response, and it won’t change the consequences of that for investment, employment, the tax base, or the value of sterling.

Closing down ‘dissident’ voices

All of this is a recipe for poor political decision making and substantial economic damage (and do read this link to a blog by Matt Bishop of Sheffield University – it’s one of the best things on Brexit I’ve seen). But what is currently happening carries dangers which go even beyond that. For there is now every sign that the government is not just determined to shut out what it perceives as dissident voices, but to close them down. Not just to ignore reality but to seek to redefine it.

This is evident in the latest attacks on the BBC, including the refusal of government ministers even to appear on some of its programmes, and wider attempts to boycott or marginalize journalists perceived to be unsympathetic. Again, this hasn’t come from nowhere. Apart from the longstanding Tory hostility to the BBC, as early as October 2016 Boris Johnson and other Brexiters were calling for an investigation into its alleged ‘anti-Brexit bias’.

It is most worryingly evident in the government’s attitude to the law. That overlaps in part with the issue of civil service advice – as with Home Secretary Priti Patel’s alleged attempts to encourage “behavior outside the rule of law” (£) – as well as with the suggestion, discussed above, that, under cover of legal advice from a fanatical Brexiter, the government might renege on an international treaty. But beyond that it is apparent in the forthcoming constitutional review, to examine amongst other things the role of the judiciary in politically contentious decisions.

With political oversight from the prominent Vote Leave campaigner Michael Gove, the obvious impetus behind this is the Supreme Court judgments that Parliament should have a vote on whether to trigger Article 50, and that Johnson’s attempted prorogation of Parliament was illegal. In that sense, it is the lineal descendent of the infamous ‘Enemies of the People’ headline, although it is important to remember that, in both cases, the judgment was about the rights of the Legislative versus the Executive rather than the rights of ‘the people’ versus the politicians.

Brexit as a gateway to ‘disruption’

As such, it’s partly pure spite – Johnson is notoriously vindictive towards those he perceived to have opposed him, one of the many ways in which his ‘jocular’ persona is a fraud – but it goes much deeper than that. On the one hand, it’s about a fairly traditional political idea, that there are votes to be had by mobilizing resentment against elite institutions. People sometimes talk as if populism is a new thing in British politics, but it has a long lineage and, in recent history, both Thatcher and Blair showed versions of it. It’s no coincidence that both got into major fights with the BBC and the judiciary. It’s also no coincidence that then, as now, such fights occur when the official opposition party is utterly feeble and demoralized.

On the other hand, it’s about something new, or at least distinctive in form. It grows out of the ideology of ‘disruption’ that has swept through business and politics over the last few decades. That was incipient in both Thatcherite and Blairite politics but is now far more potent, partly because of social media. Nor is the connection to business accidental. There’s a reason why this government seems like every bad boss you’ve ever had and it’s that it has taken on, wholesale, the mix of bullying and hubris that has infected much of the corporate world. Dominic Cummings may seem like a novelty in the political realm, but he’s a version of just about every big-league MBA School graduate who has mistaken reading airport lounge books about Silicon Valley and quantum physics for wisdom.

All this should be as alarming to leave voters as to remainers. Brexit is being used as a cover for things that no one ever voted for. That is obvious in relation to the way that Brexit is being done, with all the promises about being part of a “Free Trade Zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey” having been ripped up. It is obvious in the way that Johnson is now seeking to shrug off the ‘oven ready deal’ upon which he was only recently elected (more on this in next week’s blog, once the noise around the publication of the UK and EU negotiating documents has died down).

But, now, it is going even beyond that. Joining in the government’s attack on civil servants, Brexiter journalist Allister Heath announces that “Brexit is not enough” and that “our arrogant overrated civil service must now face a political reckoning”. Joining in the wider attack on the judiciary he, like other Conservative Brexiters, bemoans (and totally misunderstands) the role of the courts in ruling on Heathrow expansion. Presumably he wants, like “Dom … to get the judges sorted” (£), a phrase which shows both dismaying contempt and misplaced arrogance. Meanwhile, the government’s latest statement of its Brexit approach pointedly shifts away from the previous commitment to the European Convention/Court of Human Rights. In these and other ways a powerful alliance is using Brexit as a springboard for a multi-pronged assault on the central institutions of democratic society.

The dangers of hubris

There are deep and genuine grounds for alarm in all of this, ably articulated by Sean Danaher in a recent post on his excellent Progressive Pulse blog. At the same time, it would be wrong to think – and the government should be wary of assuming – that we are set on an inevitable course.

For example, there are already signs of the civil service fighting back against the latest criticisms that are being made of it and against the power that Dominic Cummings and other special advisers are wielding. Journalists have shown that they will walk out of Number Ten briefings that exclude their colleagues from unfavoured news organizations. Businesses and other interest groups are going to get more vocal, as, for example, the opening session of this week’s NFU Conference showed. Hobbling the judiciary will not be easy. And it may well be that the Labour opposition regroups once it has a new leader.

In particular, the government should be wary of hubris. It has a large parliamentary majority, but it is pursuing in Brexit a policy that the majority of the population do not now support – and which is especially unpopular in Scotland and Northern Ireland - and of which those that do support it have very varied expectations. Nor should it assume that its disdain for the BBC, judiciary, civil servants and business is shared beyond a vocal minority. Picking fights with so many groups simultaneously could quickly see the government become very beleaguered.

In riding the tiger of populist sentiment Johnson has set himself up to be bitten back, badly, if things go wrong. For whilst the government’s expectation is undoubtedly that blame will attach to the EU, or remainers, or judges, or civil servants, or immigrants – or all of these - that can’t be guaranteed. Indeed, the existence of a government with a strong majority, full control of the Brexit process and closing down all advice and warnings about that process runs the considerable risk that – if those warnings prove true – it and it alone will be left to take the blame.



*I am sure that there is a reliable source for this story – in my mind, an article in the FT - but all I have been able to find is a passing reference in a Facebook post by Billy Bragg. I’ll make a (modest) donation to the Journalists’ Charity if anyone gives me the source.

What would 'getting Brexit done' mean?

Whilst the outcome of the election remains unpredictable, there is a clear dividing line between the scenario in which there is a Tory majority and all other scenarios. If there is a Tory majority then, in the words of their endlessly repeated slogan, Britain will “get Brexit done”. More expansively, this week Boris Johnson invited us to “imagine the relief the whole nation will feel if we get Brexit done. Uncertainty ended, investment unlocked, a nation moving forward once again”.

It’s worth taking up that invitation by, indeed, imagining how the nation might feel if Brexit gets done. As a prelude to doing so, it should be clarified that by ‘getting Brexit done’ Johnson means passing the Withdrawal Agreement through parliament, perhaps starting the process before Christmas, and leaving the EU on 31 January 2020. Britain would then enter a transition period lasting, in the absence of its being extended, until the end of 2020.

What would have been ‘done’?

This would mark a very important moment, which remain-inclined voters should take full note of. It will be the point at which reversing Brexit becomes impossible. That perhaps goes without saying, but I mention it because I have seen it suggested, usually by remainers, that revocation would still be an option during the transition period. Unequivocally, it won’t. Thus for those for whom remaining in the EU is their main priority it’s important to understand that this will not happen if the Tories win a majority in the election, and that this is literally the only and last chance they have to prevent Brexit which they can only do by voting in a way that prevents a Tory victory.

For leave voters, they would have got what they wanted. Yet the hard core of them have already been told by Nigel Farage that what Johnson has agreed to isn’t really Brexit. Moreover, throughout the Referendum campaign, for many months afterwards, and even sometimes now, they were given the impression that the negotiations about leaving and about future terms were one and the same thing, and that both would be concluded on the same ‘Brexit day’. Unequivocally, that is not (and was never going to be) true.

Hence, as has been very widely discussed, including in many posts on this blog, if Britain leaves the EU at the end of January 2020 it will not really mean that Brexit has been ‘done’. It will begin a new phase, in which future terms, including future trade terms, are under negotiation and there will be a new kind of potential cliff edge at the end of 2020.

This has been most recently and most cogently explained by Sir Ivan Rogers – who has called just about every aspect of the Brexit saga right – and it is still worth making these points because, although those following Brexit closely already know them, they have not really percolated into the wider public and electoral debate.

What would it mean for those who are sick of hearing about Brexit?

If the Tories win, this is lack of understanding is going to lead to some nasty surprises for many voters, most obviously those who, as we are constantly told on media vox pops, just want to hear no more of Brexit. I’m not sure, though, that we should give this sentiment as much respect as many politicians and commentators suggest, at least when it comes, as it often does, from leave voters.

After all, we are also constantly told that they knew what they were voting for in 2016. If they did, then they must have known it meant years of Brexit-talk and no respect is due to their complaints now. If they didn’t, then no respect on grounds of knowledge of what it meant is due to their vote then.

At all events, there is going to be plenty more Brexit-talk to come as the internal war within the Tory Party about what Brexit should mean would immediately resume. We know already what the dividing lines are going to be. Some ‘pragmatists’ will be arguing for a Canada Plus Free Trade Agreement (FTA) which will mean a degree of services coverage and regulatory alignment; others, the ‘purists’, will argue for a Canada Minus FTA, which will mean basic tariff and quota provisions on goods trade. Additionally and almost immediately – because a decision will be needed by July - there will be a battle between those urging an extension to the transition period and those against, even if this means a WTO Brexit at the end of 2020.

This is turn means that, despite Johnson’s claim, uncertainty will not be over and investment will not be unlocked. Businesses will continue to await the development of the negotiations and even if these travel quickly and in a clear direction, thus reducing or even ending uncertainty, it does not follow that the economic consequences will be positive. As the certainty grows that the terms of trade are going to be inferior, perhaps very substantially inferior, to single market membership then investment will continue to stall and more individuals and businesses will relocate or make their new investments elsewhere. Certainty isn’t in itself a good thing, if what is certain is that the situation is going to be damaging, and so the transition period for many businesses will mean the period in which they can make the transition out of the UK.

What would it mean for leavers?

Amongst leave voters there is going to be a mixed reaction to getting Brexit done, in Johnson’s meaning. Some will say, triumphantly, that all the Project Fear doom mongers have been proved wrong. The sky has not fallen in. For, of course, in the transition period nothing much actually changes in terms of day-to-day experiences. Beneath the surface, as has been the case since 2016, the costs will be slowly mounting but not in very obvious ways, at least unless we get towards the cliff edge of 31 December 2020 with, if Johnson keeps his ill-judged manifesto promise, no extension having been sought.

Other leave voters will react in the opposite way, feeling cheated and wondering what has happened to all the great things they were promised. Being out of the EU will not feel any different to being in it. That disillusionment will be exacerbated the first time Britain has to comply with some new EU rule or ECJ ruling into which it no longer has any input. It will be even more intense if Johnson ends up breaking the pledge not to extend the transition period. Yet, if he doesn’t, the damaging effects of not doing so will re-enforce the sense of having been cheated and, no doubt, the belief that all would have been well if only Brexit had been ‘done properly’.

All in all, it’s unlikely that there will be any of the great ‘independence day’ street parties that leavers dreamt of, with the Brexit process dragging on and nothing positive to show for it. And that even as the calls for Scottish independence and Irish unification intensify.

What would it mean for remainers?

The latter points to the really mendacious and myopic part of Johnson’s formulation: the idea that getting Brexit done, even in the limited sense that he means it, will result in “the whole nation” experiencing it in the same way. A huge number of people will experience 31 January as a day of disappointment, regret and anxiety. For some, it will be far worse - a day of total, unmitigated despair, the end point of all their hopes, and a disaster and tragedy for their country.

Johnson is not even trying to reach out to such people.  Yet the reality of Brexit – for all the talk of honouring democracy – is that it will be, perhaps uniquely in modern democratic politics, a complete re-set of national policy undertaken against what, according to the opinion polls for a long time now, the majority of the country actually now wants.

From this perspective, it really is not clear what kind of country Johnson and his party think they will be governing or even if they much care. Yes, they will have won the election but, as the Referendum itself should have showed them, just winning a vote on a particular day is only the beginning. Dragging the whole country to a future most of the population now think ill-advised at best and catastrophic at worst, is not a recipe for a ‘feeling for relief’ nor for creating ‘a nation moving forward’.

This is all the more true in the very peculiar circumstances of Brexit because, as the demographics of the Referendum vote and the statements of various representative bodies show, leaving the EU was generally not the choice of the economically active, of business people, of professionals, of the scientists and the entrepreneurs, of the TUC, of civil society bodies, and so on. Of course these can all be derided as “the elite” and, of course, in a democracy no one’s vote should count more than anyone else’s. But in the situation of trying to forge a post-Brexit future it might be considered prudent to try to bring such people with you. In any case, the majority of Scotland and Northern Ireland Referendum voters can hardly be dismissed as the elite, and no accommodation has been sought with those, either.

What would the post-Brexit plan be?

I still believe that this could – with skilled leadership - have been possible, post-referendum, with a soft Brexit policy, but it is now too late for that and Johnson shows no interest in even attempting it. One consequence of that has been the hardening of remainer and leaver positions, and the growing sense of a country divided in new, or newly visible, ways (as one shouldn’t indulge the fantasy that, pre-referendum, all was harmony). Brexit has never been a strategic project, but the consequences of pursuing it have thrown up strategic problems, not just of economy and geo-politics but of culture and identity.

I’ve posted before about how the most remarkable thing about the Brexit election is how little is being said about Brexit. More specifically, it’s remarkable how little is being said about life after Brexit if, indeed, the Tories are about to ‘get it done’ (Labour’s push this week on what a US trade deal might mean for the NHS attempted to open up one strand of this, but it did not lead the Tories to give any details of their plans, just to the denial that they would involve the NHS). Their manifesto, as many have observed, is bland and almost content-free, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies stated that “as a blueprint for five years in government the lack of significant policy action is remarkable”.

Not only that, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a party conduct a general election campaign in such a low-key way. As during the party leadership contest, Johnson is scarcely visible - despite his much-vaunted campaigning skills – and has pulled out of several events, including the Channel 4 climate debate and even his own constituency hustings. At the time of writing it is unclear whether he will agree to be interviewed by Andrew Neil – widely seen as the most challenging set piece political interview for the party leaders.

With the partial exception of Michael Gove, the Tory front bench are virtually absent. Often news programmes announce that no Conservative spokesperson is available to appear. Last Monday morning, the day after the Tory manifesto launch, Nicky Morgan was fronting the media coverage – not with great success it has to be said – and she isn’t even a candidate in the election. And where is Jacob Rees-Mogg, for the last three years so ubiquitous in the TV studios that it sometimes seemed he had his own chair? Perhaps he is judged too toxic, especially following his Grenfell remarks, but it a strange kind of politician who does not come out in public when up for election.

So in the absence of both a substantive manifesto and campaign providing a compelling and inclusive plan to do so, Johnson’s talk of “a nation moving forward” post-Brexit might better be described in Tacitus’s line ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. Johnson and Rees-Mogg, possessed of the classical education that they and sycophantic cap-doffers like Andrew Bridgen mistake for intellectual accomplishment, would have no difficulty in translating: they make a desert and they call it peace.

What are the alternatives?

It’s reasonable to ask, given that it’s an election, what the alternatives are. The situation for the other parties - apart from the Brexit Party, which has faded into near irrelevance – is, of course, different in that they, unlike the Tories, are not making the ‘get Brexit done’ on 31 January promise. Of these, the SNP have a clear Brexit policy which is consistent with the way Scotland voted in the Referendum, but of course do not contest seats across the whole of the UK. Those parties that do have a national presence have their own problems in terms of what would come after enacting their Brexit policies.

LibDems

The LibDem policy to revoke Article 50 – let’s call it ‘get Brexit undone’ - were they to win a majority suffers the obverse problem to that of the Tories. I argued in an earlier post (which attracted much criticism from LibDem readers) that this is a misguided policy, in part just for the tactical reason that being questioned about it gets in the way of getting their message across. At the same time, it bestows no real benefit because the LibDems hardly have to prove their remainer credentials and everyone knows they won’t have the majority under which the policy would be operationalised anyway.

Because of its problems, this week there have been signs of moving this policy backstage (£) but, formally, it remains in place. And, just as Tories have nothing to say to remainers, the revoke policy says nothing about what stake leave voters are supposed to have in the post-revocation settlement.

I don’t mean by that to invoke the spectre of a nation ‘exploding’ (as suggested by the ludicrous Mark Francois), with riots on the streets and Nigel Farage donning khaki and taking up arms. I just mean that, like it or not, over half of our fellow-citizens voted in 2016 to leave the EU. What are they supposed to do if it is cancelled by fiat? Just ‘suck it up’, as remainers were so insultingly told to do after the Referendum? Some kind of legitimate process is needed to stay in the EU, and some kind of accommodation or reconciliation process needed to make that durable.

An irritated tweet in response to my previous post suggested that nothing of this sort was needed since not leaving the EU is simply to continue with the status quo. That is, at best, a naïve sentiment. It’s true that had the Referendum been won by remain then that would have been very different to leave having won because it would just have continued the status quo - and that’s important in relation to the (also naïve) argument from Brexiters that they would have accepted a remain victory, so remainers should accept a leave victory. But, since leave won, annulling Brexit now with no further referendum would not revert to the status quo of 2016, it would simply ignore that which had unsettled the status quo. I think that it’s a morally indefensible position but, even if I’m wrong about that, it’s a politically indefensible one, as Jo Swinson is finding.

Labour

As for Labour, having made a total hash of their positioning ever since the referendum – and, had they not, both they and the country would be in better situation now – they have lighted on a policy which in the current context makes a degree of sense. It is certainly the only one which offers any possibility of the “nation moving forward”. It offers the possibility of the kind of consensual Brexit that the Tories could have created, along with the referendum that might legitimately put a stop to Brexit altogether.

Clearly another referendum won’t, in itself, repair the divisions caused by the first one. It’s just the least-worst way of beginning to do so. But, equally clearly, there are no good options now for how to resolve this, only various shades of bad.

Similarly, in my previous post I advocated that Corbyn, himself, would be wise to adopt the ‘neutral’ stance in any such referendum which, a few hours later, he did (I claim no causal link between these things!). And although he has taken a beating for that stance, remember that he was already taking a beating for his previous refusal to say, either way, what he would support and that would have intensified if he had stuck to it.

In general terms, given that he would get flak anyway, it’s better to do so for holding a better position and, if he were to become Prime Minister, he would at least avoid Cameron’s fate in the event of a future referendum. The reality is that he has left it far too late, and faffed around far too much, for any position he takes to be truly credible. But, as the political cliché has it, we are where we are.

What's the choice?

Which brings us full-circle to the election choice, a choice in which it’s important to remember that, as Brendan Donnelly of The Federal Trust has written this week, “not all outcomes are equally bad”. Because this blog is solely concerned with Brexit I make no comment at all on the political parties or their policies with respect to anything other than Brexit. But with respect to Brexit, the choices are clear for voters whose main priority is to remain in the EU.

In whatever constituency they live, they need to vote for whoever is most likely to beat the Tory candidate. There are multiple tactical voting websites, but a very useful new resource is Jon Worth’s blog which overviews all of them. If they do this, even if it means gulping hard – and there are sound moral reasons for doing so - and voting for a party they detest, they will wake up on 13 December with the possibility of remaining in the EU. If they don’t, perhaps because they couldn’t make that gulp, they’ll wake up on 13 December with no hope at all of remaining in the EU.

For leavers, the choice, strangely enough, is in a certain way more difficult. However they vote, they won’t get what they were promised in 2016. It was all lies, unfortunately. Including the latest and biggest lie – and it’s hardly the first time in history it’s been told – that it will all be over by Christmas. Whatever happens, it won’t be.