This period will shape the post-Brexit narrative

The stories of Brexit disruption catalogued in my last few posts continue apace, not least because firms which had built up stockpiles in anticipation of the end of the transition period are now starting to replenish them. However, remaining stockpiles and the new* trade barriers, plus the pandemic, mean that freight movements between the UK and the EU are still 38% down on this time last year. Some 65% of trucks returning to Calais/Dunkirk are empty, over twice what is normal, and there are daily reports of companies struggling, or failing, to deal with export processes (£).

The UK is not yet imposing full import controls, but even without that there are numerous reports of customers astounded to find that they have to pay customs duties, import VAT and handling charges on goods delivered to them from the EU. This links with reports of uncollected incoming freight piling up at ports (£).

There are now the very beginnings of hard data about the aggregate effects, including indications of a harp drop in services exports. Obviously Covid is playing a big part, but the fact that the UK figures are worse than the US, France and Germany amongst others is suggestive of a Brexit effect, and the IMF has reduced its forecast for UK output growth for the first quarter of 2021 by 1% as a result of Brexit disruption.

The long-term effects of Brexit on trade have yet to be seen but the fundamental reality remains, not as a matter of doctrine but as matter of plain definition: Brexit creates new barriers to trade with the EU and so suppresses trade with the EU. As I argued in a piece in Byline Times this week these barriers are in the process of becoming structurally embedded, and small firms are the biggest losers (£). Of course it may, now, be creating new opportunities – for customs agents, say, as when the government said Brexit was ‘growing the customs sector’, or for staff at Kent lorry parks – but it would be perverse to call these, in any substantive sense, ‘benefits’.

That is not to deny that there are numerous business benefits of Brexit. It’s just that they don’t accrue to British businesses and people. EU countries are the happy beneficiaries of financial services leaving London (£). Irish ferry companies are mopping up business by creating new routes to bypass Brexit Britain to the detriment of Welsh ports (activity through Holyhead has dropped by 50% and through Fishguard by a whopping 75% since the end of the transition period). Dutch, and no doubt other, warehousing and logistics firms are experiencing a boom as UK firms seeks bases in the EU.

The latter connects with the most extraordinary Brexit story of the week, with it being reported that government officials are advising British firms to set up EU subsidiaries (and, hence, to shift employment) to avoid the problems of Brexit. The reason this is extraordinary is not in the idea of firms doing so – that is simply the economic logic of the situation Brexit has created – but in the fact that a government extolling the virtues of Brexit is providing such advice. That said, it’s a story that needs to be treated with a little caution in that it’s not clear how widespread this advice is, nor whether it is official advice as opposed to informal suggestion.

Brexiters’ reactions

It is interesting, and politically important, to see how leading Brexiters are reacting to what is happening, not least because this may set the tone for how leavers, especially, in the general public respond. It’s a mixed bag, but mainly depressing. Some are simply boneheaded refusals to understand it, as with John Redwood calling for the government to intervene to ensure the free flow of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But of course the end to such a free flow was integral to the Withdrawal Agreement. Since Redwood stood on a manifesto to which that agreement was central, voted for it in parliament, and the government signed it his comment is either stupid or dishonest.

Others resort to sophistry, to put it more charitably than is probably warranted, such as former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib. He claimed this week that the plight of the fishing industry was not down to Brexit but caused by the pandemic suppressing demand as restaurants in the UK and EU were closed, by the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) having given EU fishing boats unfettered access to UK waters so that EU fishermen could supply EU restaurants (even though Habib says these are closed), and by the bureaucracy created by the TCA for UK fish exporters to the EU.

Where to begin? The pandemic has been going on for a year, but the rotting fish piles only began when the transition period ended, so they plainly are very much to do with Brexit. It can’t be because EU fishermen have taken all the fish, or these fish piles would not exist, and these fish piles are there not because there are no customers for them but because they can’t be shipped to those customers. That is, indeed, because of the bureaucracy that now attaches to UK exports, including fish, to the EU. Which is, precisely, down to Brexit because it was created by leaving the single market and customs union, as advocated by Habib.

A different account was given this week by another Brexit Party ex-MEP Lance Forman, who himself works in the fish industry (he owns and manages a smoked salmon business). He offered a more coherent argument, yet one which still denies that what is happening is a problem of Brexit. Rather, he suggested it is a problem of lack of preparedness for the bureaucracy entailed by Brexit. It’s a fine distinction, in that the bureaucracy is, itself, a problem of Brexit which adds new costs to trade with the EU. But it’s true that some of the export delays might well have been avoided with better preparation. However, a big reason for that lack of preparation was that, until far too late, Brexiters refused to admit that there would be new bureaucracy – denouncing warnings as Project Fear – and because they regarded any extension to the transition period, which might have aided preparation, as unconscionable.

Forman also bemoaned the fact that the EU is applying import controls when the UK is not doing so. But that arises simply because the UK government is not ready to do so, again an argument for extending transition, but not some unreasonable disparity of treatment. Thus, whilst the tone is more urbane, it is all of a piece with reports, such as the Daily Mail’s, which speak of the “dirty tricks” of “pernickety jobsworths” in enforcing the rules which the 17.4 million – who, don’t forget, knew exactly what they were voting for, and it is remainer elitism to suggest otherwise – voted for.

Whatever the tone, the meaning is the same: a refusal to accept that the damage that is being done to British business, well beyond fishing, is the direct consequence of Brexit and the unavoidable responsibility of those who advocated it. This isn’t surprising, because it has long been the hallmark of Brexiters that they abjure responsibility – it’s always someone else’s fault or because, as its apologists are wont to say of Communism, Brexit inevitably hasn’t been done ‘properly’. In May 2018 I compiled a list of six excuses that Brexiters make for why the consequences of Brexit are nothing to do with them. They continue to be rolled out.

Brexit really does mean Brexit

But I think there are some other features of Brexit mentality lurking in all this as well. One is the frequent implication that the EU is some kind of cuddly uncle who will or ought to be ‘nice’ to Britain. That’s sometimes found amongst remainers, too, but it is far more bizarre from Brexiters who, having spent decades denouncing the EU for every evil under the sun, now seem to expect that it will just benignly waive the rules in order to help the UK out of a mess of its own making. Linked to that is the phenomenon, which I have also noted in the past on this blog, whereby some Brexiters seem to think that leaving the EU was a kind of symbolic act, rather than one with concrete legal effects. So it seems to come as a surprise and, somehow, ‘not fair’ when the EU applies the rules to Britain that apply to other third countries.

It is neither surprising nor is it ‘petty’ or ‘vindictive’ to do so, as was said during the recent row (£) about the confiscation of a ham sandwich. This rule exists and is enforced because of the very real dangers of African swine fever, which can devastate pig farming, or even of foot and mouth disease. Indeed this is why, back in 2019, the British government launched a campaign warning tourists not to bring such items back home with them. So what, exactly, do Brexiters expect EU border officials to do? Just shrug and say that because you’re coming from Britain the rules don’t apply? Or let you off because you didn’t realize these rules existed and that Brexit would mean they applied to Britain?

What of the future?

There is an obvious linkage between this lack of realism and the idea that the adverse effects of Brexit are the fault of the EU, or ‘punishment’ from the EU. To the extent that this narrative takes hold there is little chance of any honest appraisal of Brexit. Equally, it contributes to the continuing antagonism with which the Brexiters seem determined to conduct relations with the EU post-Brexit.

The ongoing row over the diplomatic status of the EU’s Ambassador is a good example of this. It’s not just that this is – indeed – petty, it’s also, as Georgina Wright argues on the Institut Montaigne blog, misguided in terms of the UK’s interests and global standing. Britain’s stance on this is causing serious anger across the EU’s member states (£) and it is intensifying, with the EU now cancelling a meeting with the UK’s Ambassador (£).

That matters, because apart from growing the economic costs of Brexit, the geo-political ones have also been profound. As Dr Rudolf Adam, of the University of the Federal Armed Forces Neubiberg (Munich), writes “the enduring legacy of Brexit is a massive loss of respect and sympathy for a country that for centuries was admired as a bastion of pragmatism and liberal values. The UK is losing soft power faster than hard power.”

Amongst other things, that implies the UK needs to work constructively with the EU through the TCA partnership apparatus and also, especially, to make the Northern Ireland Protocol work via the Joint Committee. Moreover, there are and will be a huge range of security and foreign policy issues – Hong Kong, Russia – where the UK will need the support and friendship of the EU and, no doubt, vice versa. And any idea that the UK can take a leading role in international responses to climate change, or anything else, whilst maintaining a ‘dog in the manger’ attitude to the EU is absurd.

From that point of view, there’s no conceivable benefit to Britain in taking this position of the EU Ambassador. It would seem to be explained partly by the visceral hatred that Brexiters have for the EU. It may also be a prelude to far more substantive conflicts over the TCA and may have the effect, if not the intention, of providing a ready-made narrative to justify pulling out of it.

Equally, again in effect if not intention, continued and growing antagonism towards the EU serves to divert attention from the Brexiters being held to account for what they have done, because it enables them to present the consequences of Brexit as being the fault of the EU and to deflect anger onto the EU. In this way, Brexiters can continue to re-fight the battles of the referendum.

It’s hard to resist the conclusion that this lies behind current attempts to justify Brexit by reference to the failures of the vaccination programme in the EU or the row over vaccine delivery (£), which needless to say is more complicated than the tabloids allow (see also, for the wider context of the issue, this report in Politico). Tellingly, as Maria Tadeo, Bloomberg TV’s Europe reporter, says, within EU countries, the narrative of this row is not generally framed in terms of Brexit at all. It certainly has little to do, or should have little to do, with the case for a long-term strategic partnership between the EU and the UK.

Shaping the narrative

The coming few months will therefore be very significant for two reasons. Firstly, because this is the period during which the effects of Brexit will be most visible and, therefore, during which the possibility of holding Brexiters to account is the greatest. This is why it is important to keep highlighting those effects and challenging attempts to deny them. If they manage to implant a narrative that these effects are nothing to do with Brexit, or are down to the EU being unreasonable, that may well become established and much more difficult to challenge later. For, by then, the visible effects will have declined (though the underlying damage will continue) and, of course, the longer-term effects will be difficult to definitively disentangle from those of Covid, in particular.

That cuts both ways, of course, in that it makes highly dubious the current attempts to claim that, had Brexit not happened, the UK’s vaccine programme would have suffered compared with how it actually is. That may or may not be true – any such claim requires a long string of counterfactuals about what would and would not have been done by multiple actors in that alternative universe. Clearly that isn’t so for straightforward cases such as that leaving the customs union creates new processes and costs for exporters.

Secondly, and even more importantly, although the damage of Brexit itself is now unavoidable regardless of who is held to be responsible for it, it is not inevitable that post-Brexit UK-EU relations have to be added to the list of that damage. As I have been arguing for months, the mandate of the 2016 referendum has now been fully discharged. Nowhere in that vote was there a mandate for Brexiters to permanently sour UK-EU relations post-Brexit, nor should those relations continue to be seen through the prism of the now dead question of whether the UK should remain a member of the EU.

So the current period is potentially crucial for changing the tone of those relations and shifting them from the virulently hostile ones the Brexiters are seeking to embed. It’s clear, as with the vaccine row, that they will weaponize whatever comes to hand in that attempt. The chances of such a change of tone are, in any case, negligible given that we have a government which is Brexiter to the core. But they are not non-existent because no government has complete control of the narrative. Other politicians, journalists, grass roots organizations, and civil society generally also have a role. And then, as the old cliché has it, there are ‘events, dear boy, events’.

 
 
*Some people dislike the term ‘new’ in this context, because what is happening is, rather, the re-imposition of barriers which had been removed by the customs union or single market. However, I think it is a reasonable usage for two reasons. First because, obviously, it is intended to mean ‘new as compared with when the UK was an EU member’. Second, because in a certain sense we are not simply facing a return to pre-customs union, pre-single market days as these rules are now being applied in the context of a very different economy to when the UK joined the EEC in 1973, in particular as regards the realities of international supply chains.

Brexit, beached

With Joe Biden’s victory now assured, millions of words have now been written – in the UK, if nowhere else – as to what it means for the US-UK relationship and for Brexit in particular. Of these, I’ve found the analyses of CNN’s Luke McGee, James Kane of the Institute for Government, and Lisa O’Carroll, the Guardian’s Brexit correspondent, especially insightful. There are also some intriguing thoughts about the wider consequences of a Biden presidency, so far as I know only in the form of a twitter thread, from Charles Grant, Director of the Centre for European Reform.

2016 recedes into history

My own take is that it’s worth taking a step back from Trump’s defeat to recall what his victory in 2016 meant for Brexiters, namely to validate their project as being not an anomaly but as having caught the tide of history. With the self-proclaimed ‘Mr Brexit’ in the White House, and plucky Brexit Britain at his side, the EU would shortly collapse and a new era would begin. And it’s important to clarify what the Brexiters and Trump shared in their imagination of that new era – it was one of separate nations, unhampered by the constraints of international organizations or multi-lateral agreements, but making bilateral agreements if and when it was in their interests. A US-UK trade deal would be emblematic of how that new world would be, as well as a symbolic affirmation of Brexit itself.

It’s true that Trump’s hostility to NATO, the WTO, the UN, the WHO and so on was never matched, or even shared, by the UK government or by most Brexiters. Indeed, the latter seem to find the prospect of obeying ‘WTO rules’ positively exciting. But they very much shared his vision of the nation state. Ironically, Brexiters failed to appreciate that, by definition, that meant that for all his talk Trump was never going to grant the UK a trade deal on any terms other than his own, and actually he blew hot and cold on the whole idea. In any case, despite his delusions of grandeur he operated within his own constraints. In particular, it has been plain since at least August 2019 that Congress would not ratify any trade deal if Brexit posed a threat to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA).

Much attention is now focused on the prospects of such a trade deal with Biden’s America, and his own very strong and stated commitment to the GFA. But the more important point is that his election strips away the last vestige of Trump’s 2016 boost for Brexit. The EU has manifestly not collapsed and is not going to, there is no sign of any other member wanting to follow the sorry path of Brexit, and the populist wave has not triumphed. And of course all the predictions of how as ‘the fifth largest economy’ the UK ‘held all the cards’ in delivering Brexit have long ago been discredited.

Now, there will be a US administration strongly committed to the EU and more generally to multi-lateralism and international co-operation. It’s only necessary to read Nigel Farage’s snivelly lament for the hours he spent in Trump Tower to see how fatally isolated the Brexit project now is. That sense is compounded by the emerging news of the imminent departure of Dominic Cummings and the rest of the Vote Leave team from Downing Street. Far from having caught the tide of history it is now beached on the mudflats of a failed international putsch, the ghastly remnants of an experiment that has gone so horribly wrong that government ministers are supposed to no longer refer to it by name.

Can the government recognize what’s changed?

So the question now is whether the UK government recognizes all this or whether it is so captured by Brexiter ideology as to be incapable of doing so. As it happens, there is a very precise litmus test immediately available to answer that question in the form of the Internal Market Bill (IMB) or more specifically those clauses relating to Northern Ireland which, on the government’s own admission, would be in violation of international law. If the government persists this will make not just a trade deal but harmonious relations with the US generally impossible, as it will with the EU.

It is increasingly clear that this is not simply because of what the effects on the GFA might be but also, more broadly, because of the disdain of the EU and, now, the US for Johnson’s brazen disregard for international law even if the GFA isn’t damaged. In that sense it is irrelevant whether the IMB clauses do or – as can certainly be argued - don’t in themselves threaten the GFA, or even whether or not they are ever invoked. What matters is simply their existence if they are passed into law. Comments this week from both Simon Coveney, the Irish Foreign Affairs Minister, and US Congressman Brendan Boyle underline this. For both, the key issue is the betrayal of trust over an agreement so recently signed by the UK government.

Sovereignty and independence in an interdependent world

This in turn goes to the heart of the inadequacy of the Brexiter understanding of what ‘independence’ and ‘sovereignty’ mean, which seems to be one of untrammeled freedom of action. On the one hand, this is what led them to believe, as no other EU member does, that being in the EU meant not being an independent and sovereign state (a lie nailed by the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017, which stated that “Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU”). On the other hand, it led them to think that as an ‘independent’ country the UK can operate without constraints.

This was the gist of Suella Braverman’s advice that the IMB was legal: “Parliamentary supremacy means it is entirely constitutional and proper for Parliament to enact legislation, even if it breaches international treaty obligations”. It also permeates Johnson’s negotiating position with the EU within which the idea of being ‘sovereign equals’ translates into the accusation of ‘bad faith’ if the EU doesn’t give the UK exactly what it wants (£). It even drizzles right down the food chain to the boorish antics of the Brexit Party in the European Parliament, as if ‘independence’ is a licence to ridicule and insult others.

The way the Brexit Ultras think about independence was well-illustrated this week by Iain Duncan Smith’s insistence that Brexit has nothing to do with the US because “we are a sovereign nation” as if this precluded the US – also a sovereign nation, after all – from taking its own view of Brexit. In a similar vein was John Redwood’s letter to Joe Biden (draft text here), which can be read as “a warning” to the President-elect to recognize the significance of the UK “becoming a truly independent nation again”.

Despite insisting that the UK will uphold the GFA (and, following the bizarre new line of Brexiters, that it is the EU that threatens it), it is clear that Redwood does not understand the Biden concerns about the IMB and, from his tweets, that he doesn’t accept that it breaks international law. Instead, he waves the size of the 2016 leave vote as if it had any significance now that Britain has left the EU, and as if it provided an alibi for Britain to conduct itself however it wants. That vote is all they now have, since they are incapable of identifying what benefits this ‘independence’ has, what they actually want to do with it, or how it can possibly justify the mounting damage it is causing (for which, see the latest updates to Yorkshire Bylines’ Digby Jones Index)

‘So what?’ would be an obvious reaction and, presumably, that of the third assistant letter-opener to the Biden junior staffer who is most likely the closest person to him to read it (although, that said, it is unlikely, along with the Foreign Secretary’s equivocation, the Prime Minister’s terse – and botched - congratulations and the putrid tweet of some previously obscure peer that got reported in the US, to have done anything to endear the UK to the incoming President). But, unfortunately, we in this country are obliged to take notice of Redwood, Duncan Smith and their fellow ERG backwoodsmen since they continue to exert a grip upon our politics. Indeed, to read Redwood’s letter one could be forgiven for thinking that he spoke for the British government, rather than being a mildly eccentric backbencher who has not held ministerial office for 25 years. So their understanding of what ‘independence’ means matters.

And it is an understanding based on fantasy. The real world is an interdependent one, in which nations face constraints, their actions have consequences and, indeed, they must reckon with the sovereignty of others. Even if the formal enforcement mechanisms of international law and of international agreements are relatively weak, the realpolitik is that other countries, especially those with which you want to do deals, have ways of showing their displeasure. At the other end of the scale, behaving insultingly to other countries does not make them admire your independence of action but reduces their respect for, and goodwill towards, you.

Same old issue: purism vs pragmatism

So in the coming days, even hours, Johnson’s government is going to have to decide whether to prioritise the purism of this ersatz independence above pragmatic reality and, in a way, that is just the latest version of the choices Brexit Britain has faced all along. And, as has also always been the case, the answer lies in the internal battles of the Tory Party. In general, these have always pushed the government towards purism – the main, almost the sole, exception having been when Johnson agreed his deal which, awful as it was, was more pragmatic than no (withdrawal) deal at all.

But the political circumstances are very different now. Johnson was far more popular and powerful within his own party, and the Brexiters had glimpsed the possibility of losing Brexit altogether. So they supported a deal they hated and which they have since sought to repudiate. Now, he is beleaguered on every front, especially because of Covid-19, his inner team is in disarray, and his backbenchers are in a febrile and rebellious mood. The Brexiters have got Brexit – there is no going back on that – and no longer have the fear of losing it, and many would be happy with a no (trade) deal outcome. So if Johnson moves to do a deal with the EU they are likely to strike. It’s true that their parliamentary scope to derail it is fairly limited, but they have other weapons, most potently that of challenging his leadership, something which is already rumoured in any case.

Yet pragmatism suggests that if Johnson wants to avoid quite serious international isolation he will need to do a deal with the EU – it will be a thin deal, though potentially could develop into something more extensive in the future – both for its own value and as a way of aligning with Biden’s wider agenda. To do so will entail not only U-turning on IMB but also offering substantive concessions to the EU on one or all three of fisheries, subsidies and governance. And it can’t be assumed that the concessions EU will seek will be unchanged by events. After all, just as the Biden presidency leaves the UK isolated so too does it strengthen the EU.

Some regard it as inevitable that he will now do a deal, although the apparent insistence on retaining the offending clauses of the IMB, even though their rejection by the House of Lords provided a ready get out, suggests otherwise. As Peter Foster, writing in the FT (£), suggests it would be wrong to “underestimate the emotional attachment of Mr Johnson and his inner Brexit circle” to the clauses as “a vital assertion of British sovereignty”. But with that inner Brexit circle now dissolving, as Cummings and Cain depart at the end of the year, does that mark a shift away from their purism making a deal more likely – or even, as some rumours suggest, does it arise from that shift having happened - or will no deal be the last hurrah of their final weeks in power? What, if anything, is the significance of the rumours that David Frost was about to resign but that he has now decided not to?

The deep roots of Brexit’s failure

My own view is still that even now it is impossible to predict which way Johnson will go, and pointless to try not least given the chaos of his administration. But clearly the IMB issue is going to come to a head very soon – the negotiations as a whole are going to the wire but 19 November seems to be the absolute deadline – and when it does then, whatever the outcome, it will represent the latest episode in one of the deepest flaws in the Brexiters’ entire project. For as Jon Worth outlines in detail in an excellent blog this week the IMB mess arises from the Brexit Ultras’ refusal to accept or even to understand the ‘trilemma’ posed for (hard) Brexit by Northern Ireland (see also this explanation from law Professor Phil Syrpis).

At root, that comes from an even deeper failure, as outlined in my post of March 2017, to understand the nature of borders – both why they exist and what is needed to make them disappear. Brexit has been constantly caught on the ‘cakeist’ hook that Brexiters want both to leave all the institutions that make borders disappear whilst refusing to accept that this means that borders must re-appear.

It is, as ever, worth recalling what Boris Johnson, like other Brexiters, had to say about the Irish border when they were selling Brexit to the British people: “the situation would be absolutely unchanged”. Even in September 2018 he described the border problem as “a gnat”. He rejected the initial idea of a sea border, rejected May’s backstop arrangements, then signed up to a sea border and has ever since sought to deny the consequences of having done so, with the IMB being the result. As to what he does now, with no pain-free choices left then as Rafael Behr argues it will simply be a matter of how he calculates he can best avoid blame.

Johnson is Johnson, and bears a heavy responsibility for Brexit. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that he was one of many leading Brexiters who, orchestrated by Dominic Cummings, cajoled voters into leaving the EU without knowing or caring about what happened to Northern Ireland, to the GFA, and certainly to Ireland. For that matter, they didn’t know or care what Brexit meant for everything from creating customs arrangements to disrupting medical supplies to road haulage (£) to musicians’ tours to financial services (£) to data transfer, police and judicial cooperation to the millions of lives left in limbo, and so much else besides. They didn’t know or care at the time of the Referendum and, for the most part, they haven’t bothered to find out since. Worse, throughout all these years they have vilified and belittled those who did know and care.

So as Brexit limps on, the unloved orphan of a failing populism, to some kind of resolution of at least what the end of the transition period will mean, we shouldn’t forget the lies shamelessly told, the promises blithely made, and the fears viciously propagated which have brought us to this shambolic point.

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.

The Cummings affair

There are numerous obvious connections between Brexit and the Dominic Cummings lockdown affair that has dominated the last few days. For one thing, the very existence of the present government is down to Brexit, its composition is based on the central test of Brexit loyalty, and its advisers, from Cummings downwards, came from the old Vote Leave campaign team.

But in any case both Cummings and his supporters have repeatedly tried to tie the story back to the Brexit divide in order to reframe it in the culture war terms that are their comfort zone. The reason, though, why his behaviour has become so huge an event is because it reveals so many of the paradoxes and flaws within that culture war to the extent that, for perhaps the first time since 2016, the Brexiter vs Remainer battle lines have been transcended.

The paradox of populism

At the core of this is the central paradox of populism. Brexit was presented as the triumph of ‘the people’ over ‘the elite’, and the years since the Referendum have repeatedly cast all the conflicts it has given rise to in those terms (hence, ‘will of the people’, ‘enemies of the people’, and the equation of remainers with the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’). Yet this is a precarious construct, given the fact that the country was and is more or less evenly split – making ‘the people’ an unconvincingly small proportion and ‘the elite’ a preposterously large one – and the self-evidently elite nature of its leaders.

The idea that the largely male, public school and/or Oxford educated Brexit leaders – a category that takes in Johnson, Gove, Farage, Cummings, Carswell, Lawson, Rees-Mogg, Hannan, Redwood and many more – are anything other than a privileged elite is plainly ludicrous. It is a fiction which is constantly vulnerable to obvious inconsistencies, but although they are often pointed out (Rees-Mogg’s investment fund company, Lawson’s French Chateau, Redwood’s advice to investors) this has no cut through with their supporters.

Why? It is not, I think, that those supporters fail to spot the privilege of their leaders. It is that this isn’t the kind of privilege to which they object. Such figures – Johnson, most obviously, Farage, certainly, even Rees-Mogg, surprisingly – are seen as being, despite that privilege, still in some way ‘ordinary’ and, perhaps, more important, as ‘authentic’. More than anything, they may be privileged but they are not what their supporters mean by ‘the elite’ which, instead, is associated with the supposedly finger-wagging, won’t let us say what really think, prissy, moralistic, do-gooders. The Human Rights Brigade. The PC Brigade. The girly swots. The bleeding-heart liberals.

It’s an amorphous group which, together, constitutes a ‘them’ to which the ‘us’ – ordinary, common sense people and their perhaps not ordinary in the ordinary sense but still common sense and authentic leaders – are opposed. For years we suffered as the ‘silent majority’, but with Brexit we found our voice. Within this is another, and crucial, dividing line. As brilliantly depicted in Jonathan Coe’s ‘Brexit novel’, Middle England, the elite in this meaning are ‘constantly telling us what to do and say’. They are interfering. They are authoritarian. They force us to be other than ourselves, and so to be inauthentic, unlike the flamboyant leaders who we revere for having kept their authenticity. They make us follow their rules.

Taking back control

In this cultural universe, ‘taking back control’ was a doubly potent slogan. It was about freedom from EU control, but also freedom from the control of them – who, not coincidentally, were opposed to Brexit – freedom to ‘talk about immigration’, freedom to celebrate Christmas not ‘Winterval’, freedom to fly the St George Flag without being sneered at. In this way it was, of course, partly about nationalism – about ‘us’ as a nation – but also about internal divisions – about ‘us’ versus ‘them’, those who for so long had ruled over us but were now exposed as traitors and saboteurs.

So Brexit provided an umbrella that could link the hard-core libertarianism of a very small ideological minority with the resentments, victimhood and perceived humiliations of a much larger group. And the spines of that umbrella were ‘freedom from the rules’.

Almost all the high-profile fights of the post-Referendum period were framed by this. Domestically, these ranged from the Miller Case on Parliamentary approval for triggering Article 50 through to the row (and court cases) over Prorogation. They were battles over whether ‘the rules’ (laws, conventions) had to be followed or whether ‘the will of the people’ trumped such niceties. In relation to Brexit itself, the distinction between rule-taking and rule-making is what shifted its meaning from ‘single market membership’ to the present stance whereby any and every trace of ECJ involvement must be expunged.

This is also one of many reasons why Brexit has proved so impossible to deliver. For its simple foundational fantasy of national freedom from the rules has constantly been exposed by the complex intricacies of reality. That reality includes the need for transnational regulations if trade is to be done smoothly – free trade in the modern world is not so much about freedom from tariffs as shared rules to eliminate the non-tariff barriers of national regulations.

Sticking a finger in the eye of the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ was easy enough, but doing so to hard-nosed trade negotiators – whether of the EU, US, or anywhere else - something much more difficult. Hence, in the end, Brexiters have been reduced to claiming that they never promised it would be easy, or even economically desirable, but all about some ill-defined sense of sovereignty. The ultimate paradox of this aspect of Brexit is that the last-ditch defence of freedom from the rules is championship of adherence to WTO rules.

Enter coronavirus

Into this culture war, the coronavirus pandemic arrived. By this time, the Brexiters were firmly in control of government and those such as Johnson and Cummings, ideologically and psychologically invested in rule-breaking, were suddenly confronted by a situation which required the imposition of new and unprecedently draconian rules and restrictions on everyday life. Small wonder that they did so belatedly, reluctantly and, in Johnson’s case, with a nod and a wink that rules were there to be broken. As Bobby McDonagh observes in The Irish Times, there is “a striking correlation between Brexit indoctrination and virus insouciance”.

As I and others have remarked several times before, Brexiters are far more comfortable with campaigning than governing. As they have found over and over again, it is far easier to stand on the side lines denouncing government ‘betrayal’ of Brexit than delivering it. This is not coincidental, since the promises of Brexit are undeliverable, partly for the reasons given above. But coronavirus revealed a deeper paradox, which is the impossibility of ruling when your politics are defined by rule-breaking. Forced to confront it, Johnson and Cummings opted, however reluctantly, for the rules of lockdown.

But here the culture war took an unexpected turn. Because what was revealed were two diametrically different responses from Brexit supporters. Some of the most high-profile of them became, as discussed in a recent post on this blog – lockdown sceptics. Yet amongst plenty of rank and file leavers a different version of cultural identity held sway, and one they shared with plenty of remainers.

This was the traditional image of the British – and for once it was the British, not just the English - as a ‘naturally’ law-abiding people of orderly queues, fair play, pulling together for the common good, and ‘all in it together’. A people who, in fact, did not disdain but played by the rules. Indeed Johnson himself, with his constant invocations of Second World War unity, mobilised exactly this cultural theme, and it proved to be remarkably powerful. Most people have followed the rules, despite the hardship, and in some cases tragedy, that entailed.

The Cummings row

So, finally, the incipient distinction between ‘the people’ and their anti-elitist yet self-evidently elite leadership was exposed in a way which had cut through. The ‘freedom from rules’ umbrella of Brexit was blown inside-out by the wind of coronavirus. And the trigger for this was Cummings’ exposure as a lockdown rule-breaker and, with it, of what Fintan O’Toole this week called “the unpardonable snigger of elite condescension”.

It’s this charge of elitism and double standards which has been the central theme of the criticism of Johnson’s defence of Cummings, in outlets as diverse as The Spectator and The Guardian. The biter has been well and truly bit.

Cummings’ response to this deployed two of his favourite techniques.

One was ‘to do the unexpected’. In this case, that meant the unprecedented event of a Special Advisor holding a Press Conference. But, here, he had fallen into the trap he accuses his opponents of, that of not understanding how politics looks to ‘ordinary people’. For, outside the despised political bubble, few will know or care that this was an unusual event.

The other was to engage in gaslighting, using a swirl of detailed information and disinformation to make opponents doubt their own grasp or memory of events. In the end, at the very least, all the debate – as with the dishonest Referendum claims about NHS money or Turkey’s accession – serves to create an impression that there are two sides to the story, no one really knows the facts, so who can say what the truth is? At most, the core detail is what sticks in people’s minds.

This time, it didn’t work – or it worked in ways he did not intend. For the most part, people have responded by ignoring, or mocking, all the extraneous detail and holding on to the central fact that, unlike millions of others in similar situations, Cummings broke the spirit and letter of the rules. Referring to some supposed (and in fact questionable) exemptions in the detail of the regulations cut no ice with those who simply referred to the letter Johnson had written to each household. In fact, it has ironic parallels with the way that Brexiters treated Cameron’s pre-referendum letter promising to implement the result as trumping the legal wording for the Referendum Act itself.

A turning point?

It’s always easy to imagine that current events betoken a major watershed when, in reality, it is only retrospectively possible to see such patterns. But the Cummings debacle does at least illustrate the fragility of populist politics, and the way that riding the tiger of such politics always carries the danger that ‘the people’ mobilised against one kind of elite will turn upon that which led them – as Jennie Russell pointed out in an article in The Times last year (£).

It certainly illustrates the stark differences between campaigning and governing, and the incoherence of a campaign based on rule-breaking becoming a government which must, in all events but especially those of crisis, create and enforce rules.

Both of these points will remain salient whether or not Cummings survives in post. His fate may, though, have an impact on how easy or difficult it becomes for the government to secure compliance with current and future coronavirus regulations, with all the consequences for human lives that will have. For with every ministerial announcement that he was within his rights to make his own interpretation of the rules comes the erosion of the possibility of the population at large adhering to them.

As costs mount, Brexit goes round the same old circles

A report from Bloomberg Economics this week estimates the cost of Brexit since the Referendum result to be £130 billion, with a further £70 billion predicted by the scheduled end of the transition period. £200 billion is a colossal sum and in any other political context you’d expect it receive far more attention than it has. Of course it is only one estimate, but it comes from a credible source (and it is consistent with others) and, again of course, it is a cost compared with what would have happened and, in that sense, one which does not present a bill to be paid nor something directly felt in people’s pockets. Still, it does make the raging debates over who should pay for the cost of the Sussex’s security seem rather trivial.

Perhaps there’s a sense, now, that we all know Brexit is going to be hugely expensive and so it’s not worth discussing it anymore. Not that committed Brexiters necessarily accept this. Just as the predictions of economic costs were dismissed on the grounds that ‘you can’t predict what is going to happen in the future, anything might happen’, so, now the costs are racking up, they are dismissed on the grounds that ‘you can’t know what caused past events to occur, they might have occurred anyway’.

It is a hermetically sealed logic that cannot be reasoned with. And even to try provokes the second, though contradictory, line of defence, where we are invited to believe that Brexit was chosen as the result of an earnest political science seminar about theories of sovereignty, and was nothing to do with economics at all (this, presumably, is why the slogan chosen for the bus was a claim about … the supposed economic benefits of Brexit).

As for what the economic costs of Brexit will eventually end up being, that will to some degree depend on what kind of trade deal gets done and here confusion continues to reign. The EU have produced two detailed briefing packs (here and here) which, so far as I know, have no counterpart on the UK side, at least in the public domain. There is a sense that we are heading towards a re-run of what was symbolised by the famous picture of the opening of the withdrawal talks, where the EU side sat with bulging files whilst the UK relied upon David Davis’s vacuous grin.

The recurrent dynamics of Brexit

If so, there are good reasons for that and they go back to the three unchanged underlying dynamics of Brexit which I outlined after the election result. In brief, these are lack of realistic definition of what Brexit means or how to do it; the insatiable demands of the Brexit Ultras; and the general political imperative of all governments to avoid economic and social breakdown. These are contextualised by a fourth factor, namely (largely self-inflicted) time pressure.

As regards the first of these, the UK government is still to a degree in thrall to the Brexiter fantasies of a quick and easy deal in which the complexities and trade-offs are seen as just a ploy by the EU that will be overcome by determined negotiation by a ‘true Brexit’ administration. So, at times, the government is still talking as if a comprehensive, deep trade agreement, perhaps with a substantial services element (£), can be achieved by the end of the year whilst at other times the implication is that it will be much more limited, but that that is fine. As from the outset, the Brexiters – who are now firmly in control of the government – have no agreed, realistic idea of what they want.

In consequence, there are other ways in which the start of the trade negotiations is likely to be analogous to that of the Article 50 talks. It is already written into the Political Declaration that the highly technically complex and politically contentious issue of fisheries will be amongst the first matters to be discussed. It may well play the part of the financial settlement, which the UK first tried to deny the EU had any right to. But with EU briefings suggesting that they will insist (£) on a more or less status quo deal on fishing as a prerequisite for any progress on other issues, it may also be the subject for a re-run of the 2017 ‘row of the summer’ over sequencing.

This brings into play the second of the recurrent dynamics. There are clear signs that Brexit Ultras like John Redwood and Owen Paterson are squaring up to make fisheries, which have always been totemic to Brexiters despite being a tiny part of the UK economy, a defining issue. With some suggesting that the UK might accept that EU proposal in return for a better deal on financial services there is a good chance that this will prove to be an early flashpoint between the government and its hard line MPs. Their position will be not just that the UK should not accept the EU proposal, but should not make any agreement on fisheries until the entire deal is done or, simply, walk away from the talks without a trade deal at all.

If so, that will add impetus to the established pattern in which the Brexit Ultras always push for a harder or ‘purer’ form of Brexit. That saw the shift from their advocacy of soft (single market/ Norway) to hard (FTA/ Canada) Brexit. It has reappeared now in the demand that the UK should, in parallel with or even as a priority over negotiating an EU trade deal do so with the US, as argued by ERG leader Steve Baker this week (£).

As with the fisheries issue, there is no economic logic to this at all. The geographic closeness of the EU and the volume of UK trade that results from that, as well as from decades of EU membership, makes a EU trade deal massively more important than any Free Trade Agreement with the US could ever be. Moreover, to some extent, the two deals are mutually exclusive in that they entail alignment with different regulatory orbits.

But the issue here is not economic logic, even though its advocates present it as if it were by, for example, their irrelevant talk of the size of the US economy. Rather, having belatedly understood that the trade deal they for so long championed will entail some regulatory alignment with the EU – and the deeper the deal, the greater that alignment – the Ultras find even that hard Brexit to be unbearable.

For some that may be informed by an ideological belief in low regulation, small state politics – the Singapore-on-Thames delusion – and, to that extent, there’s an obvious reason why it will preclude a deal with the EU. However, I believe that the more fundamental reason is a pathological loathing of the EU in every manifestation, and indeed of non-EU European institutions such as the European Court/ Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). They want to expunge every last trace of the EU’s presence in the UK. It is much closer to a religious mania than an ideological axiom, and, as for economic cost, that is irrelevant. No cost is too high to pay. If they were to gain the next concession, and get a US trade deal ahead or instead of an EU deal then they would certainly then make leaving the ECHR their next demand.

It is that ‘Brexit at any cost’ fixation which comes into conflict with the third dynamic that for any government, even one fixated by Brexit, the basic political pressure to avoid economic meltdown means that reality sometimes has to intrude. That could include recognizing the economic case for sacrificing fishing for financial services. More generally, to the extent that it is understood that there is only time for a minimal deal, if that, it may also be understood by government that, for many sectors of British business, such a deal would be little or no different to there being no deal at all [£]. It may also be sinking in that, trade deal aside, there is little prospect of the new arrangements for Northern Ireland being ready in time.

That, presumably, is what lies behind Boris Johnson implicitly recognizing, for the first time, that it may not be possible to do a deal in time (£). This may be the precursor to accepting that there will be an extension to the transition period. Time will tell on that, but as was shown by the ease with which he dropped his ‘die in a ditch’ pledge, such a volte face is well within his range.

Businesses and Brexit

Whether or not he extends (though especially if he does not) what is in prospect is the gradual leaching away of business from the UK, ratcheting up the costs of Brexit. This may well attract as little attention as the Bloomberg report and of course – as with all the examples so far – Brexiters will deny the cause. In this, they will be aided by the fact that few companies which relocate or (which is even more below the radar) decide to make new investments elsewhere will publicly attribute this to Brexit.

For it is important to understand that now that Brexit is unavoidable the relationship between business and the remain cause has fundamentally changed. Before, business lobbying against Brexit was consistent with, and part of, the remain campaign. But businesses rarely lobby on the basis of political principle rather than their own self-interest. With the remain cause lost, they will now make decisions based on that self-interest but will have no motivation to denounce Brexit policy as they do so.

On the contrary, especially to the extent that many will want to go on doing some business in the UK they will have no interest in alienating many customers and the government. An individual remainer might – for example – seek to publicise their decision to emigrate and to take their skills and taxes elsewhere in order make the political point that this is what Brexit has done. Few if any businesses will do anything like that. So it will be a slow and quiet economic puncture, not a noisy blow-out.

This scenario is made all the more likely because whatever economic realism derives from the third dynamic, it is in conflict with the lack of realism of the first and second. This can be seen in the report this week that Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom has substantially reduced contact with business groups (£) such as the CBI because she is irritated by them raising concerns about Brexit.

Here, again, there is a recurrent pattern in which those – in business, or the civil service, or elsewhere – who know the realities and complexities are sidelined for their lack of ‘true belief’. In ways that would have been astonishing to the traditional Tory Party, the CBI have long been regarded with scorn by Brexiters and, more generally, there were many reports during May’s administration of businesses being excluded by DExEU if they voiced scepticism about Brexit.

The paradox of Brexit

It is one of the biggest paradoxes of Brexit, because most of those who understand what it entails at a practical level do not support it, whilst most of those who support it strongly do not understand what it entails at a practical level. That is evident in microcosm even in the current row about Big Ben chiming on ‘Brexit Day’, with those who know the costs and technicalities involved advising against it, whilst the Brexit ‘bongers’ insist this is just remainer negativity and that a can-do attitude will overcome any obstacles if, indeed, they really exist.

At the wider level, this paradox presents any Brexit government with a massive problem. Either it ignores those with the knowledge and flounders around trying to square the impossible circle of ‘true Brexit’ with no adverse consequences, or it listens to those with knowledge and has to compromise on at least aspects of ‘true Brexit’.

Whilst that has been true throughout the Brexit process, it is now an acute issue with the trade negotiations starting and the timescale tightening. A key part of any trade negotiation process – and one reason they take a long time – is that governments need to engage and consult with the business and other groups which will be affected by whatever is agreed. If government as a whole persists with the Leadsom line then the incentives for businesses to stay and invest in Britain sharply diminish, as they see that the government does not have – and, worse, does not want to have - a serious grasp of the issues involved. With time running out, the business decisions will need to be taken before realism intrudes, if, indeed, it ever does. And businesses will make those decisions.

However, if the government does start to engage seriously with business (and other experts and stakeholders) then the paradox asserts itself in a new way, with this realism conflicting with the first two dynamics. This is exactly what we saw with the May government. Having delighted the Ultras by embracing hard Brexit, and accepted the lack of realism of the Brexit promise by imagining that, even so, there could be ‘frictionless trade’ for goods and services, there came a point in 2018 when May understood how damaging this would be. That was what led to the Chequers Proposal which – flawed as it was – began to recognize some of the complexities and trade-offs. Cue Johnson and Davis resigning and the government falling into the disarray from which it never recovered.

It is true that Johnson’s majority makes him far more secure than May. On the other hand, the time pressures Johnson has created for himself are all the greater, and his negotiating position with the EU is also much weaker than May’s at the time of Chequers. May had the possibility of extending Article 50, as she did, and, until the Withdrawal Agreement was completed, the core EU concerns around the financial settlement, Irish Border, and Citizens’ Rights remained unresolved. Now, Johnson could only extend the transition period with difficulty, both because of domestic politics and because, on the EU side, transition extension is less assured than it was for Article 50 extension. Meanwhile, the EU’s core withdrawal demands have been met. And, in any case, the votes of the ERG are more than enough to defeat Johnson, despite his majority.

Thus the conflict between economic realism and political exigency continues to be unresolved and resolution is unlikely to occur via a single decision taken at a single moment. Rather, we can expect an ongoing process of tacking this way and that as the negotiations with the EU progress and the internal fights of the Tory Party continue. The consequence is that neither economic realism nor political exigency will definitively win out. Instead, so many concessions will be made to the Ultras as to ensure considerable economic damage, whilst so many concessions will be demanded of them that they will always regard Brexit as having been betrayed.

Thus, as has been clear for a long time, we will end up a country made much poorer in order to please the Brexiters whilst having to endure their perpetual displeasure with what has been done. It is as perfect a lose-lose scenario as can be envisaged, and the Bloomberg report has put a figure on just the first instalment of just the economic aspect of that loss. There is much, much more to come.