This week, the practical realities of what Brexit is going to mean came into central focus for perhaps the first time, with a new government information campaign. Although there have been earlier exercises in ‘no deal’ preparation – when that meant no Withdrawal Agreement – now the public are being told what ending the transition period that followed the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) will mean.
The Border Operating Model
Much of this will apply whether that period ends with a trade deal or not (i.e. ‘no deal 2.0’). Given that, one might ask why it is only now, with less than six months to go, that these preparations are being communicated and in some cases being developed. For example, the £705 million border investment just announced was going to be needed anyway, as was the huge lorry park in Kent for which land has only just been purchased (it will be one of over ten similar sites). Moreover, despite Boris Johnson’s bluster and lies, it has been known for months that new processes, which were announced this week with the Border Operating Model, were going to be needed not just for UK-EU trade but for goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland yet the facilities for this are only now beginning to be developed.
After all, it has been UK policy to leave both the customs union and the single market since January 2017. To have left matters so late is not just incompetence but, very likely, reflects the refusal to understand or accept that the result of that policy was necessarily going to entail increased border friction. That is politically significant because, recalling the circumstances of 2017-2019, it is at least conceivable that had the government admitted this, rather than pretending that a “frictionless” trade deal was possible, the closely-fought battle over a second referendum would have gone the other way.
Not only is it very late in the day, with significant doubts as to whether either the government IT systems or businesses will be ready in time, but also the new Border Operating Model is still very far from providing all the information that businesses will need in order to comply. For small trading businesses, in particular, this is an impossible situation in itself. Worse, as the full complexity and costs (£) become known some, at least, will simply cease to be viable, especially coming during the ongoing pandemic crisis. For those, large and small, that do continue these new costs will have to be absorbed in some way or passed on to customers.
The cost of customs
These costs – just as regards customs declarations, before any other costs are considered – will amount to £7 billion a year (£) to UK businesses trading with the EU, rising to £13 billion (£) when EU businesses trading with the UK are included. It’s worth reflecting on these figures. They compare to the approximately £9 billion net contribution the UK made to the EU in 2018. It’s not a one-off, but a recurring annual cost. And, to repeat, it exists whether or not there is a trade deal – it is nothing to do with any tariffs that may be levied or any other trade barriers that may arise.
The slogan for the information campaign is ‘Let’s Get Going’, which some businesses might reasonably take as a suggestion to relocate abroad while there’s still time. Individuals might take it as cue to go on holiday but if so they, too, need to be quick as they are now having it spelled out in more detail what Brexit will mean for them when they travel to the EU in terms of new border controls, health insurance, and pet passports.
For those who have been paying attention, none of this will be a shock – although seeing the practical details of what it means may still be a surprise. For others, it may be puzzling. For they were told before the Referendum and ever since that such Brexit effects were just Project Fear, then that Brexit had been done on 31 January with no obvious changes, and throughout that a deal would be negotiated which – although the ‘exact same terms’ lie has been long ago dropped – by implication would mean things pretty much carrying on as normal.
In fact, many of the things that remainers have long warned about are set to happen. Perhaps this is why the government resolutely refuse to describe them as being about Brexit (£) but, instead, as “the UK’s new start”, a new start which is said to bring ‘exciting opportunities’. What these are has not been specified and there is a reason for that, too: there are no exciting opportunities. It’s simply a self-inflicted change for the worse. A new start, perhaps, but the start of new barriers to trade and travel, new costs, new regulations and new bureaucracy resulting from leaving both the single market and the customs union. To coin a phrase, “only a madman would actually leave the market”. Britain is that madman.
What new madness is this?
The speaker of those words was, of course, Owen Paterson MP (whose explanation of the ‘madman’ comment is here; apparently ‘leaving the market’ and ‘leaving the single market’ are different things, so now you know) who has cropped up again this week, being listed as one of the contributing authors of a new report by the Centre for Brexit Policy (of which he is also the Chairman). Entitled ‘Replacing the Withdrawal Agreement’, this is being widely publicized, with coverage in the Daily Telegraph (£) and of course The Express, and a write-up by the Centre’s Director-General, John Longworth, on the Politico website. So it has the look of a concerted campaign.
The report itself, as its title suggests, propounds the extraordinary idea that the government should unilaterally create a new ‘Sovereignty Compliant Agreement’ to replace the WA and present it to the EU. If they do not agree, the UK would no longer regard itself as being bound by the WA. The report lists many ways in which the WA is not ‘sovereignty compliant’, including the Northern Ireland Protocol, and within that the role of the ECJ, as well as the ECJ’s role with respect to Citizens’ Rights and other matters, and the size – and by implication even the existence - of the financial settlement. Contained within all this seems to be a bemusement that the terms of the WA hold whether or not there is a trade deal. The authors – and David Davis in a tweet endorsing them – seem to imagine that the withdrawal terms were contingent on the trade deal, reprising the ‘row of the summer’ of 2017 that Davis famously threatened and then lost (or didn’t fight) which has rankled with the Ultras ever since.
It’s important to be clear – and the report is – that this isn’t about questioning this or that detail within the WA, it is that “the entire WA and Protocol are incompatible with UK sovereignty” (p.7). They want to revisit every single part of the Article 50 negotiations. But those negotiations are over. Unsurprisingly, a European Commission spokesperson immediately ruled out a renegotiation. The Longworth article gives full rein to the sentiments underlying this proposal: they are that the entire WA is a “poison pill” deriving from May’s lack of belief in Brexit, and the way her “government worked hand-in-glove with Remain elements of the British establishment and in cahoots with Brussels and foreign powers”. So Britain remains in “Teutonic chains” paying “reparations” and faces (yawn) a “Dunkirk” moment. It is a spectacularly vicious piece of writing.
Re-writing history
There are some very obvious problems with this proposal – even leaving aside the legal issues involved in breaking the WA - which involves a substantial re-writing of history. The UK signed the WA less than six months ago, as an international treaty. It was signed by Boris Johnson, following his much-trumpeted re-negotiation, and was put to the electorate as the ‘oven ready deal’ which was the centre piece of his re-election. At that election, the Brexit Party initially threatened to run a candidate in every seat if Johnson didn’t scrap the WA but then withdrew that demand and did not field candidates in Tory-held seats. John Longworth, then a Brexit Party MEP (he was later expelled from it), welcomed this change of strategy (£) on the grounds that “the Government’s exit agreement is Brexit and, whilst it has drawbacks, could result in a good deal”. No talk of a “poison pill” then. The Brexit Party itself garnered 2% of the vote and did not win any seats.
Thereafter, the WA Act was passed by a large majority in the House of Commons with support from ERG MPs, including Paterson. Did they not want the British Parliament to make its own decisions? It may be that some MPs did not read or understand it: if so, tough. They should have done their job properly. It may be that they believed it was all up for re-negotiation in the future: if so, tough. They were wrong. As for Longworth, as a, by then, Conservative MEP he also voted (in the European Parliament) for the WA and at the time said that as a result we will leave the EU and “become once again an independent, sovereign nation”. Now he says it was drawn up by “fools or knaves” and is incompatible with being “a truly sovereign nation”.
The proposition that Johnson had no time to re-negotiate properly is nonsense both because the time frames were of his choice and because he himself declared it to be “a great new deal” and the Conservative Party manifesto for the 2019 election also described it as such. The Conservative Party website explicitly said that those who criticized it (in context, this presumably meant Farage) were wrong and that the deal did indeed “take back control”. And even – to be far more charitable than is warranted – if none of that were true, it’s simply absurd to think that any country can conduct itself in such a manner as to rip up major international agreements within months of signing them because it hadn’t created an adequate process to consider the commitments it was making.
The Ultras have never accepted the WA
The roots of this latest outburst from the Brexit Ultras go deep, as regular readers of this blog will know. Immediately after the 2019 election I wrote:
“I suspect that many in the ERG will now be thinking that Johnson’s deal was only the bastard offspring of May’s ill-fated premiership and the ‘remainer parliament’, and feel no allegiance to it. They kept quiet during the election campaign, which required them to pledge support for Johnson’s deal, but that won’t necessarily last. For one thing, many of them are rebels by temperament, with a track record going back in some cases to John Major’s premiership, and ruthlessly indifferent to party loyalty or discipline …. With all that said, in the aftermath of his fresh election victory and on a scale that was so unexpected, it is far more likely that the ERG will keep their powder dry. But all that means is that even as Brexit ‘gets done’ they will hold on to the belief that the WA meant that ‘this was not really Brexit’ and will be watching keenly – in both senses of the word – for further ‘betrayals’.”
That suspicion has now proved correct – though how much overt support the current campaign against the WA will have amongst Tory MPs remains to be seen. It might be tempting to dismiss the CBP Report as the work of a fringe minority group of cranks. But that would be a very serious mistake. Over and over again, this group or one of its other incarnations has quickly seen its initially outlandish positions become mainstream, aided by the way that, as new research shows (figure 2), MPs affiliated with groups like the ERG and Leave means Leave (co-founded by John Longworth) get disproportionate media attention. The concerted way in which they are pushing this new message leads me to think it could rapidly gain traction.
Indeed, as I suggested in a more recent post, there have already been ominous signs that the government – and, implicitly, Dominic Cummings – regard the WA as ‘defective’, with the potential to lead Britain down the path to international pariahdom. I thought then, and still think, that even this government would not renege on an international treaty at least unless no trade deal is reached in which case the pressure to do so will intensify perhaps to irresistibility. The proposition in the CBP report, of course, is that whether or not there is a deal the WA should be ditched.
It is, frankly, an insane idea – politically, legally and diplomatically - but it grows from the long-evident way that the Ultras are never satisfied with Brexit, however hard and in whatever form. This is partly because the ideas they have of what is possible are total fantasy, and so as soon as they encounter reality, as they did in the Article 50 negotiations, they are doomed to be ‘betrayed’. But the deeper issue is that there is, actually, a desire to be betrayed, a desire always to be campaigning for something even more extreme, always to be insisting that Brexit is being denied them. In the most recent example, as in the past, this extends to denouncing as betrayal even things that they themselves have supported or voted for in the past. It is a pathology which has totally deformed British politics so that, now, at the moment of their victory, they are still complaining, still unhappy, still spitting out vitriol, still blaming remainers.
The prospect of endless Brexit battles
Clearly, there are significant and dangerous connections between these demands to scrap the WA and what is emerging about the effects of Brexit. For as these effects unfold the Ultras will never admit that all (or anything) that they were warned of was true. Instead, they will insist that the effects are the consequence of Brexit not having been done properly. In this way, they keep their dream and their pathological victimhood intact, whilst blaming remainers for the effects of the policy they themselves advocated. It is a form of politics that is deeply immature but, worse, totally destructive, endlessly revisiting the same battlefields until there is nothing left but dirt and ashes.
Its consequence is likely to be that even as we all suffer the many adverse consequences of the Brexit they forced on us with lies and fantasies we do not even get the consolation prize of an end to their complaints, their taunts, and their vicious slurs. Any kind of hope – as proposed in my recent post – of initiating a new post-Brexit conversation with and about Europe is dashed as a result. Any idea of healing domestic divisions is destroyed, because these Ultras do not want to heal divisions: they thrive upon them. So we get Brexit and we also get endless screeches of Brexit betrayed. They now call the WA a “poison pill” but it is their own poison, one which has now infected the entire body politic.
There’s still the slimmest of chances of an antidote – but unfortunately it rests almost entirely with Boris Johnson, though others may have some influence. Perhaps it could be possible to finally say to these Ultra Brexiters than enough is enough. It is simply insane for a country to keep putting itself through – or being put through – this torture. We’ve had years of it, and the Brexiters have got their Brexit. Every possible thing to accommodate them has been done. We can’t just go on and on revisiting it, lurching endlessly from one crisis to another in order to satisfy the whims of a tiny minority of politicians and commentators. We can’t poison every domestic and international well with their needs, their priorities, their insatiable obsessions.
In his article, John Longworth writes that “the battle to leave the EU is coming to an end. The battle for Britain is just beginning”, and invites Johnson to be (of course) a Churchill not a Halifax. But Britain is being destroyed by this endless desire of the Brexit Ultras to engage in battles. If we really must use these constant war analogies, with Brexit having happened, what we need from Johnson is an Attlee-like rebuilding of a battered, broken, and nearly broke country. It’s unlikely it is in his range, but if he can’t find it, and won’t go, then I fear that Longworth and his ilk will drag us all yet again into a pointless, debilitating, destructive conflict.
If so, there will be no victors, just as there have been none from Brexit. For the most remarkable and the most tragic thing about Brexit is how rare it now is to hear anyone – and certainly the Brexit Ultras - speak of it as something that gives them any pleasure.
Showing posts with label John Longworth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Longworth. Show all posts
Friday, 17 July 2020
Thursday, 24 May 2018
Semi-digested factoids are no substitute for sober judgment
There is
still no more detail on what the UK is proposing as the solutions to the linked
issues of the post-Brexit Irish border, customs arrangements and trade. So far
as I know, no documented proposal has been made public or been supplied to the
EU negotiators. Perhaps that is not surprising. After all, as
pointed out in my previous post, this is not some well-worked out strategic
plan: it’s a tactical response to the woeful inability of the government and of
Brexiters more generally to agree on anything else. Their worst plan except for
all the other plans, perhaps.
It’s worth briefly recalling the roots of this. These lie, in general, with the abject failure of Brexiters to address or even accept the complex practicalities of what they urged people to vote for. As regards the Irish border, in particular, voters were told by Boris Johnson and Theresa Villiers, then the Northern Ireland Secretary that absolutely nothing would change if they chose Brexit. This was based on the claim that the Common Travel Area (CTA) had existed pre-EU, so would just continue afterwards. To the casual listener, this may have sounded plausible and well-informed. But of course it was irrelevant, since the CTA has nothing to do with the movement of goods across borders.
Brexiters continue to deploy such pieces of misinformation (including, in some cases, the CTA line), often based upon garbled or semi-understood versions of much more complex facts. Examples include, amongst many others, claiming or supposing that Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status means something like the best possible trading terms, when in fact it means almost the opposite, and of course the (related) old chestnut that ‘we can just trade on WTO terms as we do with the rest of the world’.
We’ve recently seen an especially egregious example, with Jacob Rees-Mogg claiming that Article 24 of GATT would allow the UK to continue to trade on its present terms with the EU for up to ten years. In a typically acute article this week, this claim was debunked by Ian Dunt. But as Dunt points out, to a normal member of the public it sounds technical and abstruse but as if Rees-Mogg knows what he is talking about. And it lodges in the public mind long before, and with much greater effect than, any subsequent debunking by experts.
I do not think that what is at stake here is necessarily dishonesty by those saying such things, or credulity by those accepting them. It is more, I suspect, that both want it to be true, believe it must be true, and feel certain that all of the complexities and practicalities of Brexit have been made up or exaggerated in order to thwart common sense and decency. So little gobbets of half-digested ‘technical’ information are latched on to, so as to say to the so-called experts: ‘hah, gotcha’!
The Rees-Mogg claim was originally made on the BBC’s Daily Politics show, and this week he was invited back (there is, as always, a chair kept warm at the BBC for our man) to discuss it with Cambridge University expert in WTO law, Dr Lorand Bartels. Bartels stated clearly that the Article in question related to countries entering new trade agreements, rather than to a country leaving, as in this case, the EU (there are other objections to the Rees-Mogg claim as well, as outlined in the Dunt article). In response, Rees-Mogg started scrolling manically through the text of Article 24 on his mobile phone, snatching out words in support of his claim. It resembled nothing so much as man going to his doctor after having googled a couple of medical articles and bullishly insisting on a treatment his doctor knows will kill him.
In a similar vein, last weekend several photos were doing the rounds on social media of roadside checks on red diesel (reduced duty diesel for agriculture, which may not be used by ordinary vehicles) at or near the Northern Ireland border. This, supposedly, ‘proved’ that the Irish border problem was a non-issue, got up by Ireland’s politicians, the EU and remainers. The image was even re-tweeted, apparently approvingly, by Stephen Baker, Minister at DExEU. But Baker must surely (hopefully!) be aware that such checks are made all over the United Kingdom and Ireland, and have no implications whatsoever for the Irish border. In particular, they have no implications for the fact – which Brexiters seem incapable of understanding – that it is not that leaving the EU creates a border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, it is that it creates a hard, visible border because it becomes the external border of the EU (and of the UK). Again, a half-understood ‘fact’ becomes seized on by those desperate to do so to ‘prove’ that all the obstacles and practicalities of Brexit are specious inventions.
Still, at least cases like this show some attempt to minimally engage with the practicalities. The same cannot be said of a truly abysmal piece written this week by John Longworth of Leave means Leave which simply repeated the long-discredited nonsense about ‘trading on WTO terms’, along with the more recent nonsense that the Irish border will only exist if the EU impose it, that being ‘excluded’ from EU projects is punishment or ‘extortion’, and that the EU will come running for a deal if the UK pulls out. And with the obligatory World War Two reference thrown in. This is pure Bourbonism – from Brexiters who have forgotten nothing and learned nothing – so detached from reality that scarcely a word of it was true, and, where true, distorted or misunderstood.
The fact is that if Longworth and those of similar views actually held power, they would within five minutes be forced to accept that as, indeed, has been shown by the government’s misguided attempts to implement the hard Brexiters’ agenda. The moment their ideas attempted, they are found to be impossible (hence, as I’ve argued before, they would have been far happier if they had lost the Referendum). Cries of betrayal are a luxury that only those who have to take no responsibility can indulge in. This mixture of bull-headed jingoism, technical drivel and truculent victimhood was bad enough before the referendum; that it should still be spouted by those who have actually won and should be taking responsibility for the consequences of that victory is utterly dismal.
One of those consequences became clearer this week when Jon Thompson, the boss of HMRC, estimated that the cost of the ‘max fac’ customs plan would be in the order of £17-20bn a year. (Max fac – keep up at the back – is the customs plan that the Brexit Ultras favour but which the cabinet can’t agree on, the EU won’t accept, and no expert thinks is technically deliverable). That sum is about the same as the infamous £350M a week, of course. Predictably, it was dismissed by Brexiters as scaremongering, but somewhat uncomfortably so given that just a few weeks ago they were lauding Thompson for saying (although, again, it was a cherry-picked ‘gotcha’ quote) that there need not be any new physical infrastructure at the Irish border.
Against this backdrop of lies, misunderstandings, semi-truths, quarter-truths and just plain nonsense, came a sober and sensible appraisal of Brexit from Sir Ivan Rogers – formerly the UK’s Ambassador to the EU until he was, effectively, hounded from office for giving such appraisals (a sign, as I remarked at the time, of dangers ahead). In a detailed lecture, which is well worth reading in full, he made amongst many others two of the core points that I – with, of course, much less knowledge and authority – have made repeatedly on this blog.
First, that Brexiters and, now, the Brexit government have constantly failed to understand that being a third country to the EU entails real, practical, legal consequences. It’s not just a kind of theoretical or symbolic change. Second, and relatedly, that the government’s entire approach is based upon trying to imagine that most of the features of being in the EU can be re-created by the UK after Brexit, as if, alongside the categories of member and non-member there is some sort of ‘alumni’ status available.
Rogers' limpid analysis makes many other acute and detailed arguments, and he finishes with the hope, or perhaps the plea, for Britain to realise that “there are no perfect choices” but rather “serious trade-offs” which should be approached through “stone cold sober judgments”. It is wise advice, but on the evidence so far Brexiting Britain remains unwilling to engage seriously with such practicalities and, far from sobriety, is still in the middle of an uncontrolled binge. Indeed, the tone of many Brexiters – oscillating between bellicose aggression and maudlin self-pity – is markedly similar to that of a drunk at the latter stages of inebriation. The hangover is going to be very nasty indeed.
It’s worth briefly recalling the roots of this. These lie, in general, with the abject failure of Brexiters to address or even accept the complex practicalities of what they urged people to vote for. As regards the Irish border, in particular, voters were told by Boris Johnson and Theresa Villiers, then the Northern Ireland Secretary that absolutely nothing would change if they chose Brexit. This was based on the claim that the Common Travel Area (CTA) had existed pre-EU, so would just continue afterwards. To the casual listener, this may have sounded plausible and well-informed. But of course it was irrelevant, since the CTA has nothing to do with the movement of goods across borders.
Brexiters continue to deploy such pieces of misinformation (including, in some cases, the CTA line), often based upon garbled or semi-understood versions of much more complex facts. Examples include, amongst many others, claiming or supposing that Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status means something like the best possible trading terms, when in fact it means almost the opposite, and of course the (related) old chestnut that ‘we can just trade on WTO terms as we do with the rest of the world’.
We’ve recently seen an especially egregious example, with Jacob Rees-Mogg claiming that Article 24 of GATT would allow the UK to continue to trade on its present terms with the EU for up to ten years. In a typically acute article this week, this claim was debunked by Ian Dunt. But as Dunt points out, to a normal member of the public it sounds technical and abstruse but as if Rees-Mogg knows what he is talking about. And it lodges in the public mind long before, and with much greater effect than, any subsequent debunking by experts.
I do not think that what is at stake here is necessarily dishonesty by those saying such things, or credulity by those accepting them. It is more, I suspect, that both want it to be true, believe it must be true, and feel certain that all of the complexities and practicalities of Brexit have been made up or exaggerated in order to thwart common sense and decency. So little gobbets of half-digested ‘technical’ information are latched on to, so as to say to the so-called experts: ‘hah, gotcha’!
The Rees-Mogg claim was originally made on the BBC’s Daily Politics show, and this week he was invited back (there is, as always, a chair kept warm at the BBC for our man) to discuss it with Cambridge University expert in WTO law, Dr Lorand Bartels. Bartels stated clearly that the Article in question related to countries entering new trade agreements, rather than to a country leaving, as in this case, the EU (there are other objections to the Rees-Mogg claim as well, as outlined in the Dunt article). In response, Rees-Mogg started scrolling manically through the text of Article 24 on his mobile phone, snatching out words in support of his claim. It resembled nothing so much as man going to his doctor after having googled a couple of medical articles and bullishly insisting on a treatment his doctor knows will kill him.
In a similar vein, last weekend several photos were doing the rounds on social media of roadside checks on red diesel (reduced duty diesel for agriculture, which may not be used by ordinary vehicles) at or near the Northern Ireland border. This, supposedly, ‘proved’ that the Irish border problem was a non-issue, got up by Ireland’s politicians, the EU and remainers. The image was even re-tweeted, apparently approvingly, by Stephen Baker, Minister at DExEU. But Baker must surely (hopefully!) be aware that such checks are made all over the United Kingdom and Ireland, and have no implications whatsoever for the Irish border. In particular, they have no implications for the fact – which Brexiters seem incapable of understanding – that it is not that leaving the EU creates a border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, it is that it creates a hard, visible border because it becomes the external border of the EU (and of the UK). Again, a half-understood ‘fact’ becomes seized on by those desperate to do so to ‘prove’ that all the obstacles and practicalities of Brexit are specious inventions.
Still, at least cases like this show some attempt to minimally engage with the practicalities. The same cannot be said of a truly abysmal piece written this week by John Longworth of Leave means Leave which simply repeated the long-discredited nonsense about ‘trading on WTO terms’, along with the more recent nonsense that the Irish border will only exist if the EU impose it, that being ‘excluded’ from EU projects is punishment or ‘extortion’, and that the EU will come running for a deal if the UK pulls out. And with the obligatory World War Two reference thrown in. This is pure Bourbonism – from Brexiters who have forgotten nothing and learned nothing – so detached from reality that scarcely a word of it was true, and, where true, distorted or misunderstood.
The fact is that if Longworth and those of similar views actually held power, they would within five minutes be forced to accept that as, indeed, has been shown by the government’s misguided attempts to implement the hard Brexiters’ agenda. The moment their ideas attempted, they are found to be impossible (hence, as I’ve argued before, they would have been far happier if they had lost the Referendum). Cries of betrayal are a luxury that only those who have to take no responsibility can indulge in. This mixture of bull-headed jingoism, technical drivel and truculent victimhood was bad enough before the referendum; that it should still be spouted by those who have actually won and should be taking responsibility for the consequences of that victory is utterly dismal.
One of those consequences became clearer this week when Jon Thompson, the boss of HMRC, estimated that the cost of the ‘max fac’ customs plan would be in the order of £17-20bn a year. (Max fac – keep up at the back – is the customs plan that the Brexit Ultras favour but which the cabinet can’t agree on, the EU won’t accept, and no expert thinks is technically deliverable). That sum is about the same as the infamous £350M a week, of course. Predictably, it was dismissed by Brexiters as scaremongering, but somewhat uncomfortably so given that just a few weeks ago they were lauding Thompson for saying (although, again, it was a cherry-picked ‘gotcha’ quote) that there need not be any new physical infrastructure at the Irish border.
Against this backdrop of lies, misunderstandings, semi-truths, quarter-truths and just plain nonsense, came a sober and sensible appraisal of Brexit from Sir Ivan Rogers – formerly the UK’s Ambassador to the EU until he was, effectively, hounded from office for giving such appraisals (a sign, as I remarked at the time, of dangers ahead). In a detailed lecture, which is well worth reading in full, he made amongst many others two of the core points that I – with, of course, much less knowledge and authority – have made repeatedly on this blog.
First, that Brexiters and, now, the Brexit government have constantly failed to understand that being a third country to the EU entails real, practical, legal consequences. It’s not just a kind of theoretical or symbolic change. Second, and relatedly, that the government’s entire approach is based upon trying to imagine that most of the features of being in the EU can be re-created by the UK after Brexit, as if, alongside the categories of member and non-member there is some sort of ‘alumni’ status available.
Rogers' limpid analysis makes many other acute and detailed arguments, and he finishes with the hope, or perhaps the plea, for Britain to realise that “there are no perfect choices” but rather “serious trade-offs” which should be approached through “stone cold sober judgments”. It is wise advice, but on the evidence so far Brexiting Britain remains unwilling to engage seriously with such practicalities and, far from sobriety, is still in the middle of an uncontrolled binge. Indeed, the tone of many Brexiters – oscillating between bellicose aggression and maudlin self-pity – is markedly similar to that of a drunk at the latter stages of inebriation. The hangover is going to be very nasty indeed.
Sunday, 13 May 2018
Brexiters are running away from the consequences of what they have inflicted on Britain
During the
Referendum, Brexiters offered a political message which took a traditional and
familiar form: if you vote for us then various (supposedly) good consequences
will follow.
It is easy to imagine what they would be saying now if any of these were evident; if companies were announcing new investments because of (not despite) Brexit; if foreign direct investment were booming in anticipation of Brexit, rather than tanking; if countries, especially Commonwealth countries, were champing at the bit to make new trade deals with Britain; if ‘German car companies’ had ‘within minutes of the vote’ to leave demanded a fantastic ‘cake and eat it’ deal and if the EU had rolled over to give it; if the Irish border was unaffected, as Brexiters had claimed it would be; or, even, if the negotiations were proceeding as smoothly and easily as they had promised.
But of course none of those things has happened and so, since winning the Referendum, the Brexiters’ message has changed in a very fundamental way. The new message takes several forms but each has the same dialectical structure: to decouple the vote to leave the EU from the consequences of leaving the EU.
It’s too late now
The first, and simplest, form is that the vote has now been held and so we must just live with the consequences. In that narrative, all debate and discussion ended with the Referendum. Remainers must get over it, leavers must be happy whatever happens. It’s a position exemplified by a recent tweet from the pro-Brexit journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer in response to being sent data about foreign direct investment since Brexit: “Mate, I really don’t care. This question was asked and answered two years ago. Move on with your life”.
Simple as it is, it’s also naïve. Politics doesn’t work like that, as Brexiters should appreciate not least since on the night before the 2016 Referendum Nigel Farage declared otherwise and, on the night after the 1975 Referendum, so did Enoch Powell. In this if in nothing else Enoch, to coin a nasty little phrase, was right.
Not only does politics not work like that in general, but it especially does not work like that in this case because, much as Brexiters dislike it, winning the vote was just the first and easiest part of a process which, in one way or another, will last for years. Hence they make a second claim.
It’s not up to us
The second version is a denial of responsibility, with the central idea being that leave voters and their leaders have done their part simply by delivering the vote to leave. It is up to the politicians and the experts to now make it happen. This, too, is misguided. As I have written elsewhere, their victory was in many ways a disaster for Brexiters in that it meant that they are now responsible for whatever happens. Not just responsible, but uniquely responsible. They were warned over and over again of the consequences and insisted that these warnings were not just wrong but malevolent, self-interested fearmongering. So, now, they and they alone, own the consequences. Remainers have absolutely no responsibility to try to ‘make Brexit work’ or to ‘get behind Brexit’ (whatever those things would mean in practice).
It hasn’t been done properly
That denial of responsibility feeds into the third emerging Brexiter narrative. It is that there was nothing wrong with the decision, but that the way it is being delivered by the government is what is causing the problems. This is evident in, for example, Daniel Hannan’s recent attempt to deflect blame for the policy he advocated for so many decades. It has many variants, from the outright mad (‘we should just have walked away the day after’) to the more sophisticated complaints about specific decisions, such as the timing of the Article 50 notification. It is fair comment that the government have approached Brexit in an inept way, making what the respected (and by no means anti-) Brexit commentator David Allen Green of the Financial Times has called numerous ‘unforced errors’.
Nevertheless, there are two obvious objections. First, that no one – not least the Leave campaigners – has ever specified a way of undertaking Brexit which does not damage the UK, whether economically, politically or strategically. Second, that every mis-step the government have made has been as a result of pressure from, and has been cheered on by, the Brexit Ultras. That includes the dogmatic ‘red lines’ laid down by the government, the premature triggering of Article 50, and, for that matter, the subsequent calling of a General Election to ‘crush the saboteurs’.
This narrative is a familiar one in business, where any and every failed management fad is defended by its advocates on the grounds that all would have been well but for ‘inadequate implementation’. It’s equally familiar in far Left politics, where each failed attempt to implement communism is explained away by saying that it wasn’t ‘proper’ communism.
But in this case it goes further, and links back to the second narrative, in that Brexiters continue to claim victimhood at the hands of the elite, refusing to accept that having won the Referendum and having a government now pursuing what they voted for, they are the elite, and they are the ones implementing Brexit.
It’s the Remainers’ fault
The fourth excuse is that all would have been well but for Remainers who are accused, variously, of sabotage, treachery and of talking Brexit down. Often, it’s a variant of the paranoid idea about the elite – meaning the Civil Service, Judiciary, BBC, CBI, IoD, House of Lords but not, mysteriously, the ex-public schoolboys, millionaires and hedge funds that support Brexit. Sometimes it’s the entire 48% of voters who didn’t back Brexit.
There are daily examples of this claim, but taking just one, that of Leave means Leave co-Chair John Longworth in August 2017, is instructive. The usual suspects are named, in this case for their “pretence” that Britain must pay a “divorce bill” (i.e. settle its outstanding commitments to the EU). But, of course, it wasn’t a Remainer pretence, and four months later the payment was agreed.
The more general issue is that, if Brexit were the self-evidently great idea its proponents claim, it would hardly matter what Remainers did or said. For that matter, within minutes of the vote, before Remainers had had time to engage in any of their nefarious sabotage, Sterling suffered a catastrophic collapse (which in any other circumstances would have led to a political crisis) as the currency markets priced in their prediction of what Brexit would mean.
It’s the EU’s fault
The fifth narrative is possibly the most dominant of the post-Referendum excuses made by Brexiters. It is that the problem was not with the decision to leave, and not solely (or even primarily) with the British government or with Remainers, but with the EU who have decided to ‘punish’ Britain for leaving. Such claims are invariably nonsense since they ascribe to the EU the consequences of having left the EU (and, in this sense, are another denial of responsibility). To take just the most current of numerous examples, Brexiters claim that the border controls, especially in Ireland, are something being threatened by the EU rather than being ineluctable, legal consequences of leaving the single market and any customs union.
There are many things that could be said about this punishment narrative (see here), but the core difficulty with it for Brexiters is that they repeatedly promised that Britain held ‘all the cards’ and that ‘the EU needs us far more than we need them’. If that was right, then no punishment would have been possible. If it was wrong, then the vote did indeed have consequences embedded within it, consequences which were concealed from voters by the Leave campaign.
It’s not about practical consequences, it’s about philosophical principles
Alongside these five narratives – and perhaps in recognition of their paucity – some Brexiters run a sixth. Here, the attempt is to claim that those who voted leave did so on the basis of a commitment to ‘sovereignty’ in the abstract. So consequences don’t matter, since this was a purely philosophical vote. I can (just about) imagine that this might be true for a few leave voters, though I would argue that they are wrong, but it clearly wasn’t what was proposed to the British people by the Leave campaign, which instead made arguments about immigration and NHS funding, and made claims that leaving would be easy precisely because they knew that if voters thought otherwise then would be disadvantageous to their cause. A pure sovereignty argument would not have needed to make such claims.
As the practical consequences of leaving the EU mount up, and can no longer be dismissed as Project Fear, what Brexiters are trying to do is to counter the argument that ‘no one voted to be poorer’. This is the real meaning of the claim that the vote was about the principle of sovereignty and not practical consequences since, of course, if it was about principles it can be claimed that leave voters accepted that it meant they would get poorer. And it’s probably true that some did. But it certainly isn’t true of the majority of leave voters, even as regards immigration. Yet not only do Brexiters deny this, but some even claim that impoverishment and hardship will be desirable, in some way creating a national renewal by returning to the ‘Dunkirk spirit’. But, again, there are good reasons why this was not put on the side of the Leave campaign bus: almost no one would have voted for it.
Why does this matter?
Precisely because the vote to leave the EU was the beginning of a process – the process of Brexit – rather than the end of something, the way that Brexiters are now attempting to decouple the vote from its consequences is crucial.
Brexiters are trying to use the Referendum vote, close as it was, to mandate as the ‘Will of the People’ anything that they say it means. This is most obviously true in terms of the ‘Global Britain’ agenda of free trade deals around the world. There is much that could be said about that (how does exiting the FTAs that the EU has help it? how does leaving the single market help it?) but, those things aside, how does the Referendum mandate it? For, given that in some, perhaps large, part it was a nativist and protectionist vote it mandates the precise opposite.
In this sense, there is a massive political fraud underway at the moment, and, actually, it isn’t remain voters who are primarily its victims but leave voters. They are being told that their concerns about immigration and globalization are going to be ignored. I happen to think that their concerns about immigration were misplaced and their concerns about globalization irrelevant to the Brexit debate. But I am not so dishonest as to pretend that the vote was not about those things, whereas many Brexiters are.
Thus the day after the Referendum Daniel Hannan said that the Leave campaign “never said there was going to be some radical decline” in immigration, and last March David Davis said that immigration might even rise. Both pretend that all that matters to voters is that Britain decides its own immigration policy – that all they care about is ‘sovereignty’ – rather than actual numbers. As for globalization and free trade, it’s notable that just about every Brexiter now talks as if having an independent trade policy were the main rationale of Brexit. That was mentioned during the Referendum, but it certainly wasn’t presented as the central argument for Brexit – whereas immigration was – and it certainly wasn’t explained that such a trade policy will entail the relaxation of immigration controls.
That is only one aspect of the even greater dishonesty of Brexiters. What they are really trying to argue is that the vote mandates them to do anything they want. That is an even bigger, and even more dubious, proposition than that the Referendum vote set in stone the ‘will of the people’ with respect to EU membership. Precisely because leaving the EU has such far-reaching ramifications not just for economics but for geo-politics, it can be claimed that anything done post-Brexit is mandated by the Referendum result.
So this is where Brexiters are now. All the pre-Referendum swagger has gone, all the promises made have evaporated. In their place are a series of absurd and indefensible arguments. But it is important to understand that these arguments, even if they are often run together, contain two fundamentally different claims. One is that whatever happens now is not the fault of Brexiters. The other is that Brexiters have been given a blank cheque to do whatever they now want to do. These claims are linked in that both treat 23 June 2016 as a frozen moment, denoting either the end of their responsibility for the consequences or the beginning of their freedom to define the consequences. Whilst different, they are linked in their boundless dishonesty, since neither claim was entertained, let alone endorsed, by the Referendum.
But they are also linked in another – probably more important – way. They are profoundly unrealistic. For politics did not stop on 23 June 2016. On the contrary, it began a period of political dislocation that will last for many years, perhaps decades, to come. Brexiters seemed to imagine that by winning the vote that would be an end to it. It’s already obvious that this is not so. If Brexit does go ahead, the Brexiters will, rightly, be held responsible for every consequence that flows from it. That is the significance of the narratives they are already putting forward to deny that the vote had consequences: it’s not simply that they don’t want to take the blame, it’s that they don’t want to take the responsibility.
The ultimate truth about Brexit is that through a series of accidents a protest movement with wholly unrealistic and disastrous policies unexpectedly and unwillingly became a government set upon delivering them. The Brexiters are now running away from the consequences as fast as they can. The tragedy for our country is that, in one way or another, we are stuck with having to deal with them.
It is easy to imagine what they would be saying now if any of these were evident; if companies were announcing new investments because of (not despite) Brexit; if foreign direct investment were booming in anticipation of Brexit, rather than tanking; if countries, especially Commonwealth countries, were champing at the bit to make new trade deals with Britain; if ‘German car companies’ had ‘within minutes of the vote’ to leave demanded a fantastic ‘cake and eat it’ deal and if the EU had rolled over to give it; if the Irish border was unaffected, as Brexiters had claimed it would be; or, even, if the negotiations were proceeding as smoothly and easily as they had promised.
But of course none of those things has happened and so, since winning the Referendum, the Brexiters’ message has changed in a very fundamental way. The new message takes several forms but each has the same dialectical structure: to decouple the vote to leave the EU from the consequences of leaving the EU.
It’s too late now
The first, and simplest, form is that the vote has now been held and so we must just live with the consequences. In that narrative, all debate and discussion ended with the Referendum. Remainers must get over it, leavers must be happy whatever happens. It’s a position exemplified by a recent tweet from the pro-Brexit journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer in response to being sent data about foreign direct investment since Brexit: “Mate, I really don’t care. This question was asked and answered two years ago. Move on with your life”.
Simple as it is, it’s also naïve. Politics doesn’t work like that, as Brexiters should appreciate not least since on the night before the 2016 Referendum Nigel Farage declared otherwise and, on the night after the 1975 Referendum, so did Enoch Powell. In this if in nothing else Enoch, to coin a nasty little phrase, was right.
Not only does politics not work like that in general, but it especially does not work like that in this case because, much as Brexiters dislike it, winning the vote was just the first and easiest part of a process which, in one way or another, will last for years. Hence they make a second claim.
It’s not up to us
The second version is a denial of responsibility, with the central idea being that leave voters and their leaders have done their part simply by delivering the vote to leave. It is up to the politicians and the experts to now make it happen. This, too, is misguided. As I have written elsewhere, their victory was in many ways a disaster for Brexiters in that it meant that they are now responsible for whatever happens. Not just responsible, but uniquely responsible. They were warned over and over again of the consequences and insisted that these warnings were not just wrong but malevolent, self-interested fearmongering. So, now, they and they alone, own the consequences. Remainers have absolutely no responsibility to try to ‘make Brexit work’ or to ‘get behind Brexit’ (whatever those things would mean in practice).
It hasn’t been done properly
That denial of responsibility feeds into the third emerging Brexiter narrative. It is that there was nothing wrong with the decision, but that the way it is being delivered by the government is what is causing the problems. This is evident in, for example, Daniel Hannan’s recent attempt to deflect blame for the policy he advocated for so many decades. It has many variants, from the outright mad (‘we should just have walked away the day after’) to the more sophisticated complaints about specific decisions, such as the timing of the Article 50 notification. It is fair comment that the government have approached Brexit in an inept way, making what the respected (and by no means anti-) Brexit commentator David Allen Green of the Financial Times has called numerous ‘unforced errors’.
Nevertheless, there are two obvious objections. First, that no one – not least the Leave campaigners – has ever specified a way of undertaking Brexit which does not damage the UK, whether economically, politically or strategically. Second, that every mis-step the government have made has been as a result of pressure from, and has been cheered on by, the Brexit Ultras. That includes the dogmatic ‘red lines’ laid down by the government, the premature triggering of Article 50, and, for that matter, the subsequent calling of a General Election to ‘crush the saboteurs’.
This narrative is a familiar one in business, where any and every failed management fad is defended by its advocates on the grounds that all would have been well but for ‘inadequate implementation’. It’s equally familiar in far Left politics, where each failed attempt to implement communism is explained away by saying that it wasn’t ‘proper’ communism.
But in this case it goes further, and links back to the second narrative, in that Brexiters continue to claim victimhood at the hands of the elite, refusing to accept that having won the Referendum and having a government now pursuing what they voted for, they are the elite, and they are the ones implementing Brexit.
It’s the Remainers’ fault
The fourth excuse is that all would have been well but for Remainers who are accused, variously, of sabotage, treachery and of talking Brexit down. Often, it’s a variant of the paranoid idea about the elite – meaning the Civil Service, Judiciary, BBC, CBI, IoD, House of Lords but not, mysteriously, the ex-public schoolboys, millionaires and hedge funds that support Brexit. Sometimes it’s the entire 48% of voters who didn’t back Brexit.
There are daily examples of this claim, but taking just one, that of Leave means Leave co-Chair John Longworth in August 2017, is instructive. The usual suspects are named, in this case for their “pretence” that Britain must pay a “divorce bill” (i.e. settle its outstanding commitments to the EU). But, of course, it wasn’t a Remainer pretence, and four months later the payment was agreed.
The more general issue is that, if Brexit were the self-evidently great idea its proponents claim, it would hardly matter what Remainers did or said. For that matter, within minutes of the vote, before Remainers had had time to engage in any of their nefarious sabotage, Sterling suffered a catastrophic collapse (which in any other circumstances would have led to a political crisis) as the currency markets priced in their prediction of what Brexit would mean.
It’s the EU’s fault
The fifth narrative is possibly the most dominant of the post-Referendum excuses made by Brexiters. It is that the problem was not with the decision to leave, and not solely (or even primarily) with the British government or with Remainers, but with the EU who have decided to ‘punish’ Britain for leaving. Such claims are invariably nonsense since they ascribe to the EU the consequences of having left the EU (and, in this sense, are another denial of responsibility). To take just the most current of numerous examples, Brexiters claim that the border controls, especially in Ireland, are something being threatened by the EU rather than being ineluctable, legal consequences of leaving the single market and any customs union.
There are many things that could be said about this punishment narrative (see here), but the core difficulty with it for Brexiters is that they repeatedly promised that Britain held ‘all the cards’ and that ‘the EU needs us far more than we need them’. If that was right, then no punishment would have been possible. If it was wrong, then the vote did indeed have consequences embedded within it, consequences which were concealed from voters by the Leave campaign.
It’s not about practical consequences, it’s about philosophical principles
Alongside these five narratives – and perhaps in recognition of their paucity – some Brexiters run a sixth. Here, the attempt is to claim that those who voted leave did so on the basis of a commitment to ‘sovereignty’ in the abstract. So consequences don’t matter, since this was a purely philosophical vote. I can (just about) imagine that this might be true for a few leave voters, though I would argue that they are wrong, but it clearly wasn’t what was proposed to the British people by the Leave campaign, which instead made arguments about immigration and NHS funding, and made claims that leaving would be easy precisely because they knew that if voters thought otherwise then would be disadvantageous to their cause. A pure sovereignty argument would not have needed to make such claims.
As the practical consequences of leaving the EU mount up, and can no longer be dismissed as Project Fear, what Brexiters are trying to do is to counter the argument that ‘no one voted to be poorer’. This is the real meaning of the claim that the vote was about the principle of sovereignty and not practical consequences since, of course, if it was about principles it can be claimed that leave voters accepted that it meant they would get poorer. And it’s probably true that some did. But it certainly isn’t true of the majority of leave voters, even as regards immigration. Yet not only do Brexiters deny this, but some even claim that impoverishment and hardship will be desirable, in some way creating a national renewal by returning to the ‘Dunkirk spirit’. But, again, there are good reasons why this was not put on the side of the Leave campaign bus: almost no one would have voted for it.
Why does this matter?
Precisely because the vote to leave the EU was the beginning of a process – the process of Brexit – rather than the end of something, the way that Brexiters are now attempting to decouple the vote from its consequences is crucial.
Brexiters are trying to use the Referendum vote, close as it was, to mandate as the ‘Will of the People’ anything that they say it means. This is most obviously true in terms of the ‘Global Britain’ agenda of free trade deals around the world. There is much that could be said about that (how does exiting the FTAs that the EU has help it? how does leaving the single market help it?) but, those things aside, how does the Referendum mandate it? For, given that in some, perhaps large, part it was a nativist and protectionist vote it mandates the precise opposite.
In this sense, there is a massive political fraud underway at the moment, and, actually, it isn’t remain voters who are primarily its victims but leave voters. They are being told that their concerns about immigration and globalization are going to be ignored. I happen to think that their concerns about immigration were misplaced and their concerns about globalization irrelevant to the Brexit debate. But I am not so dishonest as to pretend that the vote was not about those things, whereas many Brexiters are.
Thus the day after the Referendum Daniel Hannan said that the Leave campaign “never said there was going to be some radical decline” in immigration, and last March David Davis said that immigration might even rise. Both pretend that all that matters to voters is that Britain decides its own immigration policy – that all they care about is ‘sovereignty’ – rather than actual numbers. As for globalization and free trade, it’s notable that just about every Brexiter now talks as if having an independent trade policy were the main rationale of Brexit. That was mentioned during the Referendum, but it certainly wasn’t presented as the central argument for Brexit – whereas immigration was – and it certainly wasn’t explained that such a trade policy will entail the relaxation of immigration controls.
That is only one aspect of the even greater dishonesty of Brexiters. What they are really trying to argue is that the vote mandates them to do anything they want. That is an even bigger, and even more dubious, proposition than that the Referendum vote set in stone the ‘will of the people’ with respect to EU membership. Precisely because leaving the EU has such far-reaching ramifications not just for economics but for geo-politics, it can be claimed that anything done post-Brexit is mandated by the Referendum result.
So this is where Brexiters are now. All the pre-Referendum swagger has gone, all the promises made have evaporated. In their place are a series of absurd and indefensible arguments. But it is important to understand that these arguments, even if they are often run together, contain two fundamentally different claims. One is that whatever happens now is not the fault of Brexiters. The other is that Brexiters have been given a blank cheque to do whatever they now want to do. These claims are linked in that both treat 23 June 2016 as a frozen moment, denoting either the end of their responsibility for the consequences or the beginning of their freedom to define the consequences. Whilst different, they are linked in their boundless dishonesty, since neither claim was entertained, let alone endorsed, by the Referendum.
But they are also linked in another – probably more important – way. They are profoundly unrealistic. For politics did not stop on 23 June 2016. On the contrary, it began a period of political dislocation that will last for many years, perhaps decades, to come. Brexiters seemed to imagine that by winning the vote that would be an end to it. It’s already obvious that this is not so. If Brexit does go ahead, the Brexiters will, rightly, be held responsible for every consequence that flows from it. That is the significance of the narratives they are already putting forward to deny that the vote had consequences: it’s not simply that they don’t want to take the blame, it’s that they don’t want to take the responsibility.
The ultimate truth about Brexit is that through a series of accidents a protest movement with wholly unrealistic and disastrous policies unexpectedly and unwillingly became a government set upon delivering them. The Brexiters are now running away from the consequences as fast as they can. The tragedy for our country is that, in one way or another, we are stuck with having to deal with them.
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