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 Leave means Leave. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leave means Leave. Show all posts
Friday, 17 July 2020
Friday, 31 January 2020
A day to mourn
So today it will happen. For some, it will be a day of joy and triumph and celebration. Yet, though those celebrations will be occurring, it seems likely that they will be relatively muted and confined to a relatively small number of the most committed leavers, led by a perhaps slightly underwhelming cast of speakers. There will also be some light displays and a new 50 pence coin.
Certainly there is no evidence of a general upsurge of joy, and no mood of national confidence or renewal. The more widespread sense seems to be, at best, one of exhaustion coupled with uncertainty about what has been done and what is to come. For many already realise that today marks only a stage in a very long, painful and uncertain process.
But of course that stage is of fundamental, historic significance because Britain, definitively, leaves the EU with no possibility of revoking that decision. Hence as many, if not more, are mourning as celebrating, and some will even be in despair.
Crucially, there is clear, sustained polling evidence that more people think that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU than think it was right. The current figures, from 26 January 2020, are 47% to 40%. Even more, 56%, think Brexit will be economically damaging compared with just 21% who think it will be beneficial. Two of the four constituent countries of the UK voted against Brexit, and the parliament/assemblies of three of them have rejected the legislation enacting it.
And, yet, today it will happen.
As an Irish Times editorial put it yesterday, “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”.
Anyone waking from a four year sleep to read this would find it truly bizarre. This long post is a partial account* of how we got to this moment and where we might be going now.
Brexit has created a deeply divided country
Never before has a modern democratic country deliberately embarked on such a major change of direction whilst so internally divided about its wisdom, and one so widely seen by observers across the world as seriously damaging to its standing and fundamental interests, including to its viability as a United Kingdom.
There is a reason why countries usually require super-majorities to enact major changes, and why countries which are composed of several national components create safeguards, so each can have its say. It is to ensure that such dangerous divisions are not created.
That no such care was taken was, ostensibly, because legally this was only an ‘advisory referendum’. But, politically, that was meaningless, not only but not least because of the leaflet sent by David Cameron’s government to every household, promising to enact the result. Subsequent arguments that the result should be set aside because of its advisory status were always a non-starter.
That leaflet was just one aspect of Cameron’s grotesquely irresponsible complacency that the referendum would be won, and his use of it as a tool to manage to internal divisions of his party. In the process, those internal divisions spread their poison to the entire country which is now infected for years to come. There is no antidote except, perhaps, the passage of time and the arrival in power of a new generation.
There are much deeper causes, too, which future historians will understand better than we can. The ambivalent history of Britain’s forty year EU membership, the social and regional inequalities embedded by the unplanned and imposed deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the breakdown of political trust whose proximate cause was the lies told to justify the Iraq War, a warped and malign public discourse about immigration, the financial deregulation that led to the financial crisis – and no doubt much else.
I think, in particular, the unprocessed cultural psychology of the Second World War was one of the biggest, yet least recognized, causes. In a strange historical irony, in the long run it proved harder to ‘get over’ victory than to face up to defeat and occupation.
Whatever the reasons for the result, it remains the case that, prior to the Referendum, EU membership was a matter of almost no public interest or disquiet. Leaving the EU was not, and is still not, some huge popular crusade or cause.
Brexiters never expected to win, and would be happier if they had lost
For this reason, just as Cameron assumed he would win the Referendum so, too, Brexiters expected to lose. That freed them both to tell as many lies as they wanted and to avoid specifying what a victory would mean. There’s no point in being mealy-mouthed about this: just about every claim made by Vote Leave was either simply untrue or, at best, a distortion of the truth. I think that there were some principled advocates of Brexit who were appalled by this but, if so, the plain fact is that without the lies there would have been no victory.
I am also convinced, even more now than at the time of the referendum, that many of the most passionate advocates of Brexit would actually have preferred to have lost. For them, protest, complaint and victimhood were the comfort zone that, in winning, they lost. That has fed through into a situation whereby those who most vociferously support Brexit regard any actual form it takes – including that which Johnson is developing – as not being ‘true Brexit’.
Thus, even as it is forced on the country, they remain unsatisfied and remain in that comfort zone of complaint and victimhood. Indeed the grimmest irony of Brexit is that, ever since the Referendum result, it has left not just so many remainers feeling sad, bitter and angry but so many leavers too.
So despite the endlessly repeated mantra of that Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, there’s never been a majority for any defined form of Brexit, and only momentarily for Brexit at all. Even as it happens, the opinion polls show a small majority for remain, whilst those who do want to leave the EU are still divided as to what form of doing so is what Brexit really means.
Brexiters won, but didn’t know how to deliver
This is one of the things that makes Brexit so unusual. It entails a huge national shift which its advocates don’t know how to deliver unlike, say, the Thatcherite revolution which – whilst one could disagree with it – knew what it was doing and how to go about it.
For having refused to specify in the Referendum what leaving meant – knowing that there was no agreement about that – Brexiters both then and ever since have shown they have no idea whatsoever about the practicalities of what it entails. Almost everything they say about, for example, international trade, or law, or customs procedures, or business operations, is either based on half-truths or is just flat wrong. It’s not just a matter of not knowing arcane technical detail but basic facts about what Brexit involves, as many posts on this blog have discussed with explicit, detailed refutations of the many false claims.
That incompetence is an affront not so much to those who voted to remain, but to those millions who voted to leave and might have had a reasonable expectation that the campaign leaders knew what they were doing. In reality, campaigning and protesting were all they knew how to do. Practical realities eluded them, not least because such realities contradicted the lies that they campaigned for and protested against.
For that alone Brexiter politicians deserve to be judged harshly by history. But perhaps even more degenerate are the shady think tanks and psychopathic disruptors behind those politicians, such as Dominic Cummings who, we are told, has now ‘done Brexit’ (£). As if it were a children’s game, they have wreaked havoc and then left the rest of us to live with the consequences. Even so, whatever they may say or do, from now on, and in fact since the triggering Article 50, it is Brexiters who are responsible for whatever happens.
Brexiters have insulted and humiliated half the country
More than anything else, and unlike any political event in Britain that I can recall, Brexit is an expression of contempt and even hatred directed at about half of the population. Perhaps it was the very surprise and bewilderment of winning that led Brexiters, rather than savouring victory, to unleash a culture war against those they had defeated. Even in some of the celebratory comments being made at the moment there seems to be more gloating about remainers’ distress than pleasure in leaving the EU per se.
The constant, sneering, references to ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’, 'saboteurs' and ‘remoaners’ are just the mildest version of this. Politicians, businesspeople, judges, lawyers, civil servants, academics – not to mention EU nationals, who did not even have the right to vote in the Referendum - have all been endlessly attacked, mocked and, at the wilder extremes, subjected to accusations of treachery and to death and rape threats. It’s undoubtedly the case that this climate intimidated some MPs into supporting things, especially the triggering of Article 50, which they knew were wrong.
I don’t discount the fact that those who voted to leave the EU have also been subjected to many insults – ‘Brexshitters’, stupid, racist, old, ‘gammon’ and worse – and, personally, I deplore that and have never indulged in it. The difference, though, is this. To the best of my knowledge, leading figures on the remain side have never sought to stigmatise leave voters but, rather, to try to understand their concerns. Whereas leading figures on the leave side have joined in, or at least not discouraged, the vitriol against remainers and never tried to understand their concerns.
In the aftermath of a close vote, a divisive campaign and with a colossal national task to undertake a big, inclusive, consensus-building approach to Brexit was so obviously needed. It would have been enormously difficult but neither May nor Johnson even tried. Any competent political leader would have seen the vital need to bridge the huge divides Brexit has created or revealed. Yet even at this late stage, with Brexit assured and a large parliamentary majority, Johnson refuses to make even the tiniest gesture of conciliation.
Brexiters have refused to seek consensus
Far from any attempt being made to find a consensual solution, as the years have gone by Brexit has been defined in harder and harder ways. The soft Brexit of single market membership, which many Brexiters had said was what Brexit meant prior to the referendum, and which could have formed the basis of a national consensus, was discounted as not being real Brexit. The hard Brexit of a trade agreement quickly gave way to claims that only ‘no deal’ or ‘clean’ Brexit would do.
As we leave the EU today, there is still no clarity on whether any deal on future terms will be done, or what it will look like, but the direction of travel could well be a complete de-alignment with the EU. Undoubtedly some of the Ultras will push hard for that. However it turns out, it will be very different to what the Leave campaign promised. Always the agenda has been driven by the most fanatical and extreme anti-EU ideologues and their wholly dishonest claim to represent the will of an undivided ‘people’.
Even that might have had a scintilla of legitimacy if a confirmatory referendum had been held. Far from being an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy it would have been a perfectly logical, and entirely democratic, exercise. It would simply have asked voters who had given, as it were, planning permission for Brexit to have the final say on whether, on the basis of what had thus far been agreed, they wanted to proceed beyond today’s point of no return. If they did, the answer would have been yes. If Brexiters truly believed it to be the will of the people they would have been happy to ask, but they knew it was not so.
So remainers – and, for that matter, ‘soft’ leavers – have for more than three years had their faces ground into the dirt, being told to ‘suck it up’ even as Brexiters argue about what ‘it’ actually is. It is as if, had remain won, leavers had been told that the vote was a blank cheque to join the Euro, Schengen, and create an EU army. Or as if, rather than a 52-48 remain victory being, as Nigel Farage put it before the result, ‘unfinished business’, it had been treated as a licence to demand of leavers that they publicly recant their former beliefs and swear fealty to the remain cause.
What can remainers do now?
Having used their victory in this divisive and derogatory way, the Brexiters’ demand now is that remainers ‘get behind Brexit’ or, at least, accept that since it is unavoidable they should do their best to ‘make it work’. But that is impossible, even if there was any clarity as to what it meant and even if Brexiters had shown any whiff of humility. It is like asking someone to ‘get behind’ a self-harming relative because they are determined to hurt themselves. It can’t be done.
This leaves remainers with few options. Those in the easiest position are those who were only ever marginally interested, and only marginally pro-remain. That’s probably quite a big group and it shouldn’t be forgotten because, just as many leave voters were not rabid Brexiters, so many remain voters were far from being ‘remainiacs’. In time, for them as perhaps for others, ‘remainer’ will simply cease to be an identity.
Others – and I sense this amongst some friends – are simply withdrawing from political engagement, to concentrate on personal or perhaps local issues, and in some cases leaving the country. Some others feel vengeful, and anticipate the coming damage to the jobs and communities that most heavily voted leave with something like pleasure.
Others will follow the course outlined by Steve Bullock, fighting to keep alive in Britain the liberal values of the EU in the face not just of Brexit but of what its architects will now try to do. That may have some unpredictable effects on British politics, according to Stephen Bush. Still others will regroup around a campaign to re-join the EU although, realistically, this makes most sense for younger people since even on Ian Dunt’s reckoning it is a decade away, and I think that’s optimistic.
As for me …
As for me, well, although no one reading it can be unaware that I think Brexit is a catastrophe – not least as I stated it in the very first post – I have always avoided writing anything very personal on this blog. Indeed, some readers may have the impression that my primary concerns about Brexit are to do with trade, business, economics, and international political standing. And, it’s true, I do care very much about all of those things. I do not want my compatriots to be poorer and less secure, and everything I know about economics and politics – which, in one form or another, I have spent my entire adult life studying – tells me that Brexit will have this effect, in spades.
But just as I have always thought it nonsense to say that leavers are motivated only by emotion and culture rather than rationality and economics, so too do I think it nonsense to imagine that remainers are not motivated by emotion and culture as well as rationality and politics. There has not been a single night since the Referendum that I have not woken mid-way through with a feeling of despair, nor a morning I have not woken without the dull, heavy ache of doing so to a world gone wrong. It is the only time in my life I have experienced political events as personal trauma, the worse for there being no prospect of their resolution.
I also feel a seething anger about the torrent of lies which have been told by Brexiters and, by being recycled endlessly, have come to be believed. Even as we leave a new one has gained ground, conflating warnings about no-deal Brexit with the actual situation of a Withdrawal Agreement and transition period to crow that Project Fear has been finally discredited. It’s a small but telling example of how incontinently the lies are still flowing.
In particular, I feel a constant shame at the disgusting way EU citizens – including my own friends and colleagues – are being treated. They, like, their UK counterparts in the EU, built their lives on the entirely reasonable expectation that freedom of movement was a permanent right. On that basis, they created plans, families and careers which have now been damaged if not destroyed.
It is no doubt my own psychological peculiarity or professional deformation that my response to all this is to try to provide an analysis of what is happening, using evidence, rationality and argument. And, with Britain now having left the EU I will continue to do so, not least because – I’m pleased to say – there seems to be a (mainly) appreciative audience for this analysis.
As I wrote in more detail in a post after the election, there is a continued case for providing an ongoing analysis since Brexit is still so very far from over in terms of the decisions about what it will mean. Moreover, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country since 2016, if only because what has happened so far is already in the process of being re-written, often inaccurately and sometimes mendaciously.
There may be worse days to come
That record will show how Britain has made an historic strategic error, leaving it poorer and weaker. It is a strategic error without even being a strategic decision. Unlike the day that Britain joined what became the EU, which was the outcome of years of careful planning and statecraft, today has come about by a series of accidents and mistakes, and an epic failure of political leadership. To undertake it in the absence of any clear national consensus is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible.
At best, depending on what happens now, the effects may continue to be a gradual, slow-burn process of damage and decline with no great drama, and the full effects emerging over so many years that their cause will be easily denied.
At worst, if Brexit rapidly creates deep economic hardship – for example if there is no future terms deal and no transition period extension - the biggest danger is who, then, will get the blame? Not, I suspect, those who have brought us to this, but all the usual scapegoats, especially immigrants as always, and also those who continue to refuse to ‘get behind’ Brexit. Social media warriors already regard that as a hanging offence, and at least one mainstream politician has already proposed trying those with “extreme EU loyalties” for treason.
It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine that the Brexit McCarthyism that has been immanent since the beginning will end up becoming a matter of State. We’ve already travelled further down that road than many would have thought possible a few years ago, with civil servants traduced, judges denounced as enemies of the people, a government minister demanding to know what universities are teaching about Brexit, and constant attempts to subvert parliament even to the point of trying to suspend it from sitting.
So I mourn the country we have already lost, and fear for the one to come. For, dark as today is for so many of us, there may well be far darker days ahead.
*For more detail, see the previous 237 posts on the blog ….
Certainly there is no evidence of a general upsurge of joy, and no mood of national confidence or renewal. The more widespread sense seems to be, at best, one of exhaustion coupled with uncertainty about what has been done and what is to come. For many already realise that today marks only a stage in a very long, painful and uncertain process.
But of course that stage is of fundamental, historic significance because Britain, definitively, leaves the EU with no possibility of revoking that decision. Hence as many, if not more, are mourning as celebrating, and some will even be in despair.
Crucially, there is clear, sustained polling evidence that more people think that it was wrong to vote to leave the EU than think it was right. The current figures, from 26 January 2020, are 47% to 40%. Even more, 56%, think Brexit will be economically damaging compared with just 21% who think it will be beneficial. Two of the four constituent countries of the UK voted against Brexit, and the parliament/assemblies of three of them have rejected the legislation enacting it.
And, yet, today it will happen.
As an Irish Times editorial put it yesterday, “no state in the modern era has committed such a senseless act of self-harm”.
Anyone waking from a four year sleep to read this would find it truly bizarre. This long post is a partial account* of how we got to this moment and where we might be going now.
Brexit has created a deeply divided country
Never before has a modern democratic country deliberately embarked on such a major change of direction whilst so internally divided about its wisdom, and one so widely seen by observers across the world as seriously damaging to its standing and fundamental interests, including to its viability as a United Kingdom.
There is a reason why countries usually require super-majorities to enact major changes, and why countries which are composed of several national components create safeguards, so each can have its say. It is to ensure that such dangerous divisions are not created.
That no such care was taken was, ostensibly, because legally this was only an ‘advisory referendum’. But, politically, that was meaningless, not only but not least because of the leaflet sent by David Cameron’s government to every household, promising to enact the result. Subsequent arguments that the result should be set aside because of its advisory status were always a non-starter.
That leaflet was just one aspect of Cameron’s grotesquely irresponsible complacency that the referendum would be won, and his use of it as a tool to manage to internal divisions of his party. In the process, those internal divisions spread their poison to the entire country which is now infected for years to come. There is no antidote except, perhaps, the passage of time and the arrival in power of a new generation.
There are much deeper causes, too, which future historians will understand better than we can. The ambivalent history of Britain’s forty year EU membership, the social and regional inequalities embedded by the unplanned and imposed deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the breakdown of political trust whose proximate cause was the lies told to justify the Iraq War, a warped and malign public discourse about immigration, the financial deregulation that led to the financial crisis – and no doubt much else.
I think, in particular, the unprocessed cultural psychology of the Second World War was one of the biggest, yet least recognized, causes. In a strange historical irony, in the long run it proved harder to ‘get over’ victory than to face up to defeat and occupation.
Whatever the reasons for the result, it remains the case that, prior to the Referendum, EU membership was a matter of almost no public interest or disquiet. Leaving the EU was not, and is still not, some huge popular crusade or cause.
Brexiters never expected to win, and would be happier if they had lost
For this reason, just as Cameron assumed he would win the Referendum so, too, Brexiters expected to lose. That freed them both to tell as many lies as they wanted and to avoid specifying what a victory would mean. There’s no point in being mealy-mouthed about this: just about every claim made by Vote Leave was either simply untrue or, at best, a distortion of the truth. I think that there were some principled advocates of Brexit who were appalled by this but, if so, the plain fact is that without the lies there would have been no victory.
I am also convinced, even more now than at the time of the referendum, that many of the most passionate advocates of Brexit would actually have preferred to have lost. For them, protest, complaint and victimhood were the comfort zone that, in winning, they lost. That has fed through into a situation whereby those who most vociferously support Brexit regard any actual form it takes – including that which Johnson is developing – as not being ‘true Brexit’.
Thus, even as it is forced on the country, they remain unsatisfied and remain in that comfort zone of complaint and victimhood. Indeed the grimmest irony of Brexit is that, ever since the Referendum result, it has left not just so many remainers feeling sad, bitter and angry but so many leavers too.
So despite the endlessly repeated mantra of that Brexit is the ‘will of the people’, there’s never been a majority for any defined form of Brexit, and only momentarily for Brexit at all. Even as it happens, the opinion polls show a small majority for remain, whilst those who do want to leave the EU are still divided as to what form of doing so is what Brexit really means.
Brexiters won, but didn’t know how to deliver
This is one of the things that makes Brexit so unusual. It entails a huge national shift which its advocates don’t know how to deliver unlike, say, the Thatcherite revolution which – whilst one could disagree with it – knew what it was doing and how to go about it.
For having refused to specify in the Referendum what leaving meant – knowing that there was no agreement about that – Brexiters both then and ever since have shown they have no idea whatsoever about the practicalities of what it entails. Almost everything they say about, for example, international trade, or law, or customs procedures, or business operations, is either based on half-truths or is just flat wrong. It’s not just a matter of not knowing arcane technical detail but basic facts about what Brexit involves, as many posts on this blog have discussed with explicit, detailed refutations of the many false claims.
That incompetence is an affront not so much to those who voted to remain, but to those millions who voted to leave and might have had a reasonable expectation that the campaign leaders knew what they were doing. In reality, campaigning and protesting were all they knew how to do. Practical realities eluded them, not least because such realities contradicted the lies that they campaigned for and protested against.
For that alone Brexiter politicians deserve to be judged harshly by history. But perhaps even more degenerate are the shady think tanks and psychopathic disruptors behind those politicians, such as Dominic Cummings who, we are told, has now ‘done Brexit’ (£). As if it were a children’s game, they have wreaked havoc and then left the rest of us to live with the consequences. Even so, whatever they may say or do, from now on, and in fact since the triggering Article 50, it is Brexiters who are responsible for whatever happens.
Brexiters have insulted and humiliated half the country
More than anything else, and unlike any political event in Britain that I can recall, Brexit is an expression of contempt and even hatred directed at about half of the population. Perhaps it was the very surprise and bewilderment of winning that led Brexiters, rather than savouring victory, to unleash a culture war against those they had defeated. Even in some of the celebratory comments being made at the moment there seems to be more gloating about remainers’ distress than pleasure in leaving the EU per se.
The constant, sneering, references to ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’, 'saboteurs' and ‘remoaners’ are just the mildest version of this. Politicians, businesspeople, judges, lawyers, civil servants, academics – not to mention EU nationals, who did not even have the right to vote in the Referendum - have all been endlessly attacked, mocked and, at the wilder extremes, subjected to accusations of treachery and to death and rape threats. It’s undoubtedly the case that this climate intimidated some MPs into supporting things, especially the triggering of Article 50, which they knew were wrong.
I don’t discount the fact that those who voted to leave the EU have also been subjected to many insults – ‘Brexshitters’, stupid, racist, old, ‘gammon’ and worse – and, personally, I deplore that and have never indulged in it. The difference, though, is this. To the best of my knowledge, leading figures on the remain side have never sought to stigmatise leave voters but, rather, to try to understand their concerns. Whereas leading figures on the leave side have joined in, or at least not discouraged, the vitriol against remainers and never tried to understand their concerns.
In the aftermath of a close vote, a divisive campaign and with a colossal national task to undertake a big, inclusive, consensus-building approach to Brexit was so obviously needed. It would have been enormously difficult but neither May nor Johnson even tried. Any competent political leader would have seen the vital need to bridge the huge divides Brexit has created or revealed. Yet even at this late stage, with Brexit assured and a large parliamentary majority, Johnson refuses to make even the tiniest gesture of conciliation.
Brexiters have refused to seek consensus
Far from any attempt being made to find a consensual solution, as the years have gone by Brexit has been defined in harder and harder ways. The soft Brexit of single market membership, which many Brexiters had said was what Brexit meant prior to the referendum, and which could have formed the basis of a national consensus, was discounted as not being real Brexit. The hard Brexit of a trade agreement quickly gave way to claims that only ‘no deal’ or ‘clean’ Brexit would do.
As we leave the EU today, there is still no clarity on whether any deal on future terms will be done, or what it will look like, but the direction of travel could well be a complete de-alignment with the EU. Undoubtedly some of the Ultras will push hard for that. However it turns out, it will be very different to what the Leave campaign promised. Always the agenda has been driven by the most fanatical and extreme anti-EU ideologues and their wholly dishonest claim to represent the will of an undivided ‘people’.
Even that might have had a scintilla of legitimacy if a confirmatory referendum had been held. Far from being an outrageous attempt to subvert democracy it would have been a perfectly logical, and entirely democratic, exercise. It would simply have asked voters who had given, as it were, planning permission for Brexit to have the final say on whether, on the basis of what had thus far been agreed, they wanted to proceed beyond today’s point of no return. If they did, the answer would have been yes. If Brexiters truly believed it to be the will of the people they would have been happy to ask, but they knew it was not so.
So remainers – and, for that matter, ‘soft’ leavers – have for more than three years had their faces ground into the dirt, being told to ‘suck it up’ even as Brexiters argue about what ‘it’ actually is. It is as if, had remain won, leavers had been told that the vote was a blank cheque to join the Euro, Schengen, and create an EU army. Or as if, rather than a 52-48 remain victory being, as Nigel Farage put it before the result, ‘unfinished business’, it had been treated as a licence to demand of leavers that they publicly recant their former beliefs and swear fealty to the remain cause.
What can remainers do now?
Having used their victory in this divisive and derogatory way, the Brexiters’ demand now is that remainers ‘get behind Brexit’ or, at least, accept that since it is unavoidable they should do their best to ‘make it work’. But that is impossible, even if there was any clarity as to what it meant and even if Brexiters had shown any whiff of humility. It is like asking someone to ‘get behind’ a self-harming relative because they are determined to hurt themselves. It can’t be done.
This leaves remainers with few options. Those in the easiest position are those who were only ever marginally interested, and only marginally pro-remain. That’s probably quite a big group and it shouldn’t be forgotten because, just as many leave voters were not rabid Brexiters, so many remain voters were far from being ‘remainiacs’. In time, for them as perhaps for others, ‘remainer’ will simply cease to be an identity.
Others – and I sense this amongst some friends – are simply withdrawing from political engagement, to concentrate on personal or perhaps local issues, and in some cases leaving the country. Some others feel vengeful, and anticipate the coming damage to the jobs and communities that most heavily voted leave with something like pleasure.
Others will follow the course outlined by Steve Bullock, fighting to keep alive in Britain the liberal values of the EU in the face not just of Brexit but of what its architects will now try to do. That may have some unpredictable effects on British politics, according to Stephen Bush. Still others will regroup around a campaign to re-join the EU although, realistically, this makes most sense for younger people since even on Ian Dunt’s reckoning it is a decade away, and I think that’s optimistic.
As for me …
As for me, well, although no one reading it can be unaware that I think Brexit is a catastrophe – not least as I stated it in the very first post – I have always avoided writing anything very personal on this blog. Indeed, some readers may have the impression that my primary concerns about Brexit are to do with trade, business, economics, and international political standing. And, it’s true, I do care very much about all of those things. I do not want my compatriots to be poorer and less secure, and everything I know about economics and politics – which, in one form or another, I have spent my entire adult life studying – tells me that Brexit will have this effect, in spades.
But just as I have always thought it nonsense to say that leavers are motivated only by emotion and culture rather than rationality and economics, so too do I think it nonsense to imagine that remainers are not motivated by emotion and culture as well as rationality and politics. There has not been a single night since the Referendum that I have not woken mid-way through with a feeling of despair, nor a morning I have not woken without the dull, heavy ache of doing so to a world gone wrong. It is the only time in my life I have experienced political events as personal trauma, the worse for there being no prospect of their resolution.
I also feel a seething anger about the torrent of lies which have been told by Brexiters and, by being recycled endlessly, have come to be believed. Even as we leave a new one has gained ground, conflating warnings about no-deal Brexit with the actual situation of a Withdrawal Agreement and transition period to crow that Project Fear has been finally discredited. It’s a small but telling example of how incontinently the lies are still flowing.
In particular, I feel a constant shame at the disgusting way EU citizens – including my own friends and colleagues – are being treated. They, like, their UK counterparts in the EU, built their lives on the entirely reasonable expectation that freedom of movement was a permanent right. On that basis, they created plans, families and careers which have now been damaged if not destroyed.
It is no doubt my own psychological peculiarity or professional deformation that my response to all this is to try to provide an analysis of what is happening, using evidence, rationality and argument. And, with Britain now having left the EU I will continue to do so, not least because – I’m pleased to say – there seems to be a (mainly) appreciative audience for this analysis.
As I wrote in more detail in a post after the election, there is a continued case for providing an ongoing analysis since Brexit is still so very far from over in terms of the decisions about what it will mean. Moreover, there may be some value in creating a more or less continuous record of what Brexit has done to our country since 2016, if only because what has happened so far is already in the process of being re-written, often inaccurately and sometimes mendaciously.
There may be worse days to come
That record will show how Britain has made an historic strategic error, leaving it poorer and weaker. It is a strategic error without even being a strategic decision. Unlike the day that Britain joined what became the EU, which was the outcome of years of careful planning and statecraft, today has come about by a series of accidents and mistakes, and an epic failure of political leadership. To undertake it in the absence of any clear national consensus is profoundly dangerous and irresponsible.
At best, depending on what happens now, the effects may continue to be a gradual, slow-burn process of damage and decline with no great drama, and the full effects emerging over so many years that their cause will be easily denied.
At worst, if Brexit rapidly creates deep economic hardship – for example if there is no future terms deal and no transition period extension - the biggest danger is who, then, will get the blame? Not, I suspect, those who have brought us to this, but all the usual scapegoats, especially immigrants as always, and also those who continue to refuse to ‘get behind’ Brexit. Social media warriors already regard that as a hanging offence, and at least one mainstream politician has already proposed trying those with “extreme EU loyalties” for treason.
It’s not entirely far-fetched to imagine that the Brexit McCarthyism that has been immanent since the beginning will end up becoming a matter of State. We’ve already travelled further down that road than many would have thought possible a few years ago, with civil servants traduced, judges denounced as enemies of the people, a government minister demanding to know what universities are teaching about Brexit, and constant attempts to subvert parliament even to the point of trying to suspend it from sitting.
So I mourn the country we have already lost, and fear for the one to come. For, dark as today is for so many of us, there may well be far darker days ahead.
*For more detail, see the previous 237 posts on the blog ….
Thursday, 12 April 2018
Business gets vocal about Brexit
One of the
many remarkable consequences of the Brexit vote is the extent which it has
fractured the traditional closeness of the Conservative Party and the business
community. For the Ultras, in particular, it has become commonplace to treat bodies
like the CBI and the IoD, and the City in
toto, as being part of the assorted horde of saboteurs and enemies of the people
stretching from universities to the judiciary.
This seems to have spread to the government more widely. Following the Referendum, there were repeated complaints that neither the Prime Minister nor DExEU would engage with businesses unless they express positivity about Brexit. Since few businesses see anything positive in Brexit this inevitably eroded business influence on the Brexit process. That is said to have changed somewhat since the General Election, admittedly, and the government’s acquiescence to a standstill transition period on EU terms is widely understood to reflect this.
But even with a transition period agreement in prospect, at least, the concerns of business are only very temporarily met. Hence there is now a growing public clamour to mitigate the worst effects of Brexit. A high profile example this week came from the CEO of Airbus, which directly employs 15,000 people in the UK and indirectly perhaps another 100,000. Moreover, many of these are highly skilled jobs. For Airbus, the main issues are the customs union and EASA membership (which entails a role for the ECJ). In passing, I once heard Jacob Rees-Mogg loftily opining that since (as is true) there are no tariffs on aerospace parts the industry had nothing to fear from Brexit. A small example of the way that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. At all events, lack of clear and realistic plans on the part of the government, Airbus warned, threatened long-term investment and time is running out fast to develop such plans.
Aerospace was one of multiple sectors covered in a CBI report entitled ‘Smooth Operations’ published this week, setting out the views of its members on regulatory issues post-Brexit. This report deserves high marks for recognizing some things which the Brexit business debate has often missed (although both have been discussed on this blog). First, that very often goods and services cannot be separated out, for example where companies provide repair and customer support services for their products, or where software forms part of the product. Second, that business sectors can’t be neatly and discretely packaged up: they interact, as does their regulation. This did, however, make it puzzling to then identify some sectors where divergence would be desired; a reprise of Theresa May’s ‘three baskets’ approach, with all its attendant problems which I’ve discussed elsewhere.
The overall thrust of the report was that British business should for the most part stay closely or completely aligned with EU regulations (thus, of the three baskets, two are virtually empty). The problem, though, is the clear implication of this is that Britain should remain in the single market. Since the CBI were not willing to argue that (they have done in the past, but presumably now see that political horse as having bolted) it becomes unclear what ‘alignment’ actually means. Presumably it means always adopting EU rules as they arise or change and some body, which can really only be the ECJ (or, perhaps, the EFTA Court), to enforce them. On these matters – which go to the heart of the entire debate about Brexit, soft Brexit and hard Brexit – the report only speaks in vague terms of the need to develop “mechanisms for influence and enforcement that benefit both sides”. It may have been politically astute of the CBI to avoid re-engaging with the debate on single market membership, but it leaves a big hole in their analysis and, more importantly, has the potential for adverse consequences for Britain, and for business, further down the line.
I will come back to what those consequences are, but before doing so it’s worth noting the response to the CBI report from Richard Tice, Vice Chair of Leave means Leave (which may perhaps be taken as representing the views of the Ultras more generally). He bemoaned it “as protecting the vested interests of the global multi-nationals at the expense of the approximately 90% of the British economy that does not export to the EU”. This short sentence embodies a series of misleading implications. Of course it is true that most of the British economy doesn’t export to the EU. Like all countries, most of the economy doesn’t export to anyone. But it makes no sense to have two sets of rules, one for the trading economy and one for the rest, which would be a recipe for red tape and would also permanently freeze the British economy into exactly the shape of its present pattern of trade activity.
However, the bigger implication is the populist one of Brexit as a battle with the “vested interests of global multi-nationals”. That is a nonsense given the kind of trade deals the Brexiters want to sign, anyway. It’s also a nonsense in terms of the way that all advanced economies – Britain’s, for better or worse, especially so – are globally embedded. Unless Britain wants to lose those firms, their jobs and their taxes then that needs to remain so. Brexit was never sold to the British public as a manifesto for economic autarky, and wouldn’t have been bought by them on that basis. And it’s nonsense because the CBI represents, and the issues it raises apply equally to, small and medium-sized businesses not just multi-nationals.
One of the most informative and saddening things I read this week was a blog post by Natalie Milton, the owner of small manufacturing company exporting mainly to the EU. In it, she details how leaving the single market and customs union will destroy the business she and her partner have built up over many years because of additional processes and costs. She explains precisely the nitty-gritty practicalities of Brexit for such a business (something few advocating Brexit seem to understand) and also how she and her family have built it from nothing so that losing it will devastate their whole lives. On her own account, these are ordinary people who don’t come from a privileged background but have created a successful business, earning foreign currency and providing jobs in their local community. It is crazy to think that destroying all this is a blow against “vested interests”. And, coming back to the point at the start of this post, it is striking how this person is almost the embodiment of what the Conservative Party used to claim to be the backbone, even the model, of what Britain was about. No longer, it seems.
How much influence business has on what happens with Brexit now remains to be seen. There are potentially heavy penalties for individual firms speaking out: as long ago as 2014 Brexit Ultra John Redwood threatened punishment for firms which spoke in favour of EU membership, and there are risks of adverse press coverage and lost government contracts. Still, as the government slowly come to appreciate that the fantasies of the Brexit Ultras cannot be put into practice, some degree of sanity may prevail. There is an irony in that, by the way, since what we see happening is the mirror image of that now rarely-heard piece of Brexiter scripture that the ‘German car industry’ would pressure the EU into delivering a cake and eat it Brexit deal.
It may be such business pressure that is leading to rumours that Theresa May will, after all, seek a form of customs union with the EU (something both the CBI and IoD have lobbied for and which recently became Labour Party policy). It may be that something like what the CBI are setting out in ‘Smooth Operations’ comes to pass. And that could, indeed, mitigate a lot of the economic damage of Brexit. However, even if so, there is a real danger ahead if the efforts of the business lobby are successful. The danger is of drifting into a kind of de facto soft Brexit when it has never been clearly articulated or framed as such, and doesn’t sit within a defined framework such as EFTA. I think there are many people in business and beyond who expect something like this drift or fudge to occur, and in a way it would be a rather British, make do and mend, kind of Brexit if it did.
But if that happens it will always be liable to future attack and unstitching by the Brexit Ultras, or for that matter by others. It won’t represent a clear, strategic decision by the UK but will rather be a patchwork of compromises and ad hoc solutions cobbled together in such a way as to slip it past not just the Ultras but everyone else, including the EU and including the British public. That won’t be particularly good for businesses – it means that investment in Britain will always have an additional risk factor – and it certainly won’t be good for Britain as whole. It will mean that far from Britain’s relationship with the EU being settled for a generation, that relationship will continue to be the running sore it has been for the last three decades with the added inflammation, of course, that Brexit has rubbed into that sore.
This seems to have spread to the government more widely. Following the Referendum, there were repeated complaints that neither the Prime Minister nor DExEU would engage with businesses unless they express positivity about Brexit. Since few businesses see anything positive in Brexit this inevitably eroded business influence on the Brexit process. That is said to have changed somewhat since the General Election, admittedly, and the government’s acquiescence to a standstill transition period on EU terms is widely understood to reflect this.
But even with a transition period agreement in prospect, at least, the concerns of business are only very temporarily met. Hence there is now a growing public clamour to mitigate the worst effects of Brexit. A high profile example this week came from the CEO of Airbus, which directly employs 15,000 people in the UK and indirectly perhaps another 100,000. Moreover, many of these are highly skilled jobs. For Airbus, the main issues are the customs union and EASA membership (which entails a role for the ECJ). In passing, I once heard Jacob Rees-Mogg loftily opining that since (as is true) there are no tariffs on aerospace parts the industry had nothing to fear from Brexit. A small example of the way that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. At all events, lack of clear and realistic plans on the part of the government, Airbus warned, threatened long-term investment and time is running out fast to develop such plans.
Aerospace was one of multiple sectors covered in a CBI report entitled ‘Smooth Operations’ published this week, setting out the views of its members on regulatory issues post-Brexit. This report deserves high marks for recognizing some things which the Brexit business debate has often missed (although both have been discussed on this blog). First, that very often goods and services cannot be separated out, for example where companies provide repair and customer support services for their products, or where software forms part of the product. Second, that business sectors can’t be neatly and discretely packaged up: they interact, as does their regulation. This did, however, make it puzzling to then identify some sectors where divergence would be desired; a reprise of Theresa May’s ‘three baskets’ approach, with all its attendant problems which I’ve discussed elsewhere.
The overall thrust of the report was that British business should for the most part stay closely or completely aligned with EU regulations (thus, of the three baskets, two are virtually empty). The problem, though, is the clear implication of this is that Britain should remain in the single market. Since the CBI were not willing to argue that (they have done in the past, but presumably now see that political horse as having bolted) it becomes unclear what ‘alignment’ actually means. Presumably it means always adopting EU rules as they arise or change and some body, which can really only be the ECJ (or, perhaps, the EFTA Court), to enforce them. On these matters – which go to the heart of the entire debate about Brexit, soft Brexit and hard Brexit – the report only speaks in vague terms of the need to develop “mechanisms for influence and enforcement that benefit both sides”. It may have been politically astute of the CBI to avoid re-engaging with the debate on single market membership, but it leaves a big hole in their analysis and, more importantly, has the potential for adverse consequences for Britain, and for business, further down the line.
I will come back to what those consequences are, but before doing so it’s worth noting the response to the CBI report from Richard Tice, Vice Chair of Leave means Leave (which may perhaps be taken as representing the views of the Ultras more generally). He bemoaned it “as protecting the vested interests of the global multi-nationals at the expense of the approximately 90% of the British economy that does not export to the EU”. This short sentence embodies a series of misleading implications. Of course it is true that most of the British economy doesn’t export to the EU. Like all countries, most of the economy doesn’t export to anyone. But it makes no sense to have two sets of rules, one for the trading economy and one for the rest, which would be a recipe for red tape and would also permanently freeze the British economy into exactly the shape of its present pattern of trade activity.
However, the bigger implication is the populist one of Brexit as a battle with the “vested interests of global multi-nationals”. That is a nonsense given the kind of trade deals the Brexiters want to sign, anyway. It’s also a nonsense in terms of the way that all advanced economies – Britain’s, for better or worse, especially so – are globally embedded. Unless Britain wants to lose those firms, their jobs and their taxes then that needs to remain so. Brexit was never sold to the British public as a manifesto for economic autarky, and wouldn’t have been bought by them on that basis. And it’s nonsense because the CBI represents, and the issues it raises apply equally to, small and medium-sized businesses not just multi-nationals.
One of the most informative and saddening things I read this week was a blog post by Natalie Milton, the owner of small manufacturing company exporting mainly to the EU. In it, she details how leaving the single market and customs union will destroy the business she and her partner have built up over many years because of additional processes and costs. She explains precisely the nitty-gritty practicalities of Brexit for such a business (something few advocating Brexit seem to understand) and also how she and her family have built it from nothing so that losing it will devastate their whole lives. On her own account, these are ordinary people who don’t come from a privileged background but have created a successful business, earning foreign currency and providing jobs in their local community. It is crazy to think that destroying all this is a blow against “vested interests”. And, coming back to the point at the start of this post, it is striking how this person is almost the embodiment of what the Conservative Party used to claim to be the backbone, even the model, of what Britain was about. No longer, it seems.
How much influence business has on what happens with Brexit now remains to be seen. There are potentially heavy penalties for individual firms speaking out: as long ago as 2014 Brexit Ultra John Redwood threatened punishment for firms which spoke in favour of EU membership, and there are risks of adverse press coverage and lost government contracts. Still, as the government slowly come to appreciate that the fantasies of the Brexit Ultras cannot be put into practice, some degree of sanity may prevail. There is an irony in that, by the way, since what we see happening is the mirror image of that now rarely-heard piece of Brexiter scripture that the ‘German car industry’ would pressure the EU into delivering a cake and eat it Brexit deal.
It may be such business pressure that is leading to rumours that Theresa May will, after all, seek a form of customs union with the EU (something both the CBI and IoD have lobbied for and which recently became Labour Party policy). It may be that something like what the CBI are setting out in ‘Smooth Operations’ comes to pass. And that could, indeed, mitigate a lot of the economic damage of Brexit. However, even if so, there is a real danger ahead if the efforts of the business lobby are successful. The danger is of drifting into a kind of de facto soft Brexit when it has never been clearly articulated or framed as such, and doesn’t sit within a defined framework such as EFTA. I think there are many people in business and beyond who expect something like this drift or fudge to occur, and in a way it would be a rather British, make do and mend, kind of Brexit if it did.
But if that happens it will always be liable to future attack and unstitching by the Brexit Ultras, or for that matter by others. It won’t represent a clear, strategic decision by the UK but will rather be a patchwork of compromises and ad hoc solutions cobbled together in such a way as to slip it past not just the Ultras but everyone else, including the EU and including the British public. That won’t be particularly good for businesses – it means that investment in Britain will always have an additional risk factor – and it certainly won’t be good for Britain as whole. It will mean that far from Britain’s relationship with the EU being settled for a generation, that relationship will continue to be the running sore it has been for the last three decades with the added inflammation, of course, that Brexit has rubbed into that sore.
Thursday, 29 December 2016
The end of the beginning of Brexit
The holiday
season has meant that there have been few substantive developments, but the successors of
the Leave campaign have made some high profile interventions in favour of hard
Brexit. First, the Leave
means Leave group have written to the Chambers of Commerce in all the other
EU states asking them to put pressure on their governments for a tariff-free
trade agreement for the UK. The initiative is really just a reprise of the
familiar refrain that ‘German car manufacturers’ will ensure that the UK
gets a good deal, and it suffers from the same difficulties. First, trade
policy is not determined by business interests. If it was, there would be no
question of the UK leaving the EU! Second, many EU businesses see great gains
to be made at the UK’s expense if it gets a bad exit deal. And, yet again, the
focus is on tariffs rather than the non-tariff barriers to trade the erosion of
which are the
main characteristic of the single market. It will be interesting to see
what replies they get.
Hard Brexit was also promoted by Lord King, the former Governor of the Bank of England, as bringing “real benefits” but beyond the usual talk of the opportunities of doing new trade deals there was no detail of what these were, and he conceded that no one should think it was going to be “a bed of roses”. Although it was greeted with delight by Brexiters, it seemed to me a fairly cautious, even downbeat, assessment. Detail was provided by another hard Brexit pressure group, Change Britain, which estimated savings of £450M a week as a result. But as usual it was predicated on dodgy assumptions and bogus statistics, with Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) denouncing it as “junk” not least because it confused government revenues with exports. And, yet again, it was predicated upon airy expectations of future trade deals with third parties the terms and timescale of which are unknown.
What was really alarming about this was that Portes – a heavyweight figure, formerly the Chief Economist at the Cabinet Office – was then denounced by Michael Gove of Change Britain as a remainer who should have learned some “humility”. In fact, Portes never publicly endorsed either side of the Brexit campaign, leading Gove to challenge him to declare how he had voted. This seems truly monstrous: are we now required to reveal our vote (to leave) in order to be regarded as a legitimate voice in the debate about what to do now?
This mind set is reflected in another alarming development. The leader of the First Division Association (FDA) – in effect the trade union of senior civil servants – has said that politicians, including the Prime Minister, lack the political courage to acknowledge the complexities of Brexit. As a consequence, whenever civil servants raise these complexities they are attacked as seeking to subvert ‘the will of the people’. There are real dangers in all this, both in terms of effective policy-making and also in terms of an incipient totalitarianism in political culture.
One aspect of this is the growing narrative amongst Brexiters that we all somehow have a patriotic duty the ‘get behind’ Brexit. Thus Tory MP Charlie Elphicke responded to the Change Britain report by saying that “now everyone, Remainer or Leaver, has a duty to get on with the job of delivering a brighter future for our land”. Many similar views have been expressed across internet discussion forums. It is nonsense, for the reasons I set out in a previous post (‘Why remainers shouldn’t move on’) and most fundamentally because there is nothing patriotic about getting behind (whatever that really means) a course of action that will be catastrophic for our country.
This bogus patriotism should be completely rejected, as should the emerging Brexiter meme that all would be well if the EU were not refusing to give us a good deal – by which they mean full membership of the single market without free movement of people, budget contributions or EJ jurisdiction. But such a deal was never in prospect and nor is there any reason whatsoever why it should be on offer. That was abundantly clear before the Referendum, but Brexiters refused to accept it. So for them now to try to whip up ‘patriotic’ fervour about it is ridiculous: what it reveals is the mixture of lies and unrealism of their campaign.
On a perhaps lighter note – or is it? – take a look at this mashup video on Brexit ('Brexit means Brexit and we’re making a mess of it’) by Cassetteboy. Next year, we’re going to begin to see the full extent of the mess. It will see (presumably) the triggering of Article 50 and the revelation of whether the UK is seeking hard or soft Brexit. If, as seems increasingly likely, the former it will very likely mean a catastrophic further fall in the value of sterling and significant disinvestment in the UK. It won’t be the beginning of the end of the Brexit process, but it will be the end of the beginning, as the Phoney War of the hiatus between the referendum and A50 finishes.
Hard Brexit was also promoted by Lord King, the former Governor of the Bank of England, as bringing “real benefits” but beyond the usual talk of the opportunities of doing new trade deals there was no detail of what these were, and he conceded that no one should think it was going to be “a bed of roses”. Although it was greeted with delight by Brexiters, it seemed to me a fairly cautious, even downbeat, assessment. Detail was provided by another hard Brexit pressure group, Change Britain, which estimated savings of £450M a week as a result. But as usual it was predicated on dodgy assumptions and bogus statistics, with Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) denouncing it as “junk” not least because it confused government revenues with exports. And, yet again, it was predicated upon airy expectations of future trade deals with third parties the terms and timescale of which are unknown.
What was really alarming about this was that Portes – a heavyweight figure, formerly the Chief Economist at the Cabinet Office – was then denounced by Michael Gove of Change Britain as a remainer who should have learned some “humility”. In fact, Portes never publicly endorsed either side of the Brexit campaign, leading Gove to challenge him to declare how he had voted. This seems truly monstrous: are we now required to reveal our vote (to leave) in order to be regarded as a legitimate voice in the debate about what to do now?
This mind set is reflected in another alarming development. The leader of the First Division Association (FDA) – in effect the trade union of senior civil servants – has said that politicians, including the Prime Minister, lack the political courage to acknowledge the complexities of Brexit. As a consequence, whenever civil servants raise these complexities they are attacked as seeking to subvert ‘the will of the people’. There are real dangers in all this, both in terms of effective policy-making and also in terms of an incipient totalitarianism in political culture.
One aspect of this is the growing narrative amongst Brexiters that we all somehow have a patriotic duty the ‘get behind’ Brexit. Thus Tory MP Charlie Elphicke responded to the Change Britain report by saying that “now everyone, Remainer or Leaver, has a duty to get on with the job of delivering a brighter future for our land”. Many similar views have been expressed across internet discussion forums. It is nonsense, for the reasons I set out in a previous post (‘Why remainers shouldn’t move on’) and most fundamentally because there is nothing patriotic about getting behind (whatever that really means) a course of action that will be catastrophic for our country.
This bogus patriotism should be completely rejected, as should the emerging Brexiter meme that all would be well if the EU were not refusing to give us a good deal – by which they mean full membership of the single market without free movement of people, budget contributions or EJ jurisdiction. But such a deal was never in prospect and nor is there any reason whatsoever why it should be on offer. That was abundantly clear before the Referendum, but Brexiters refused to accept it. So for them now to try to whip up ‘patriotic’ fervour about it is ridiculous: what it reveals is the mixture of lies and unrealism of their campaign.
On a perhaps lighter note – or is it? – take a look at this mashup video on Brexit ('Brexit means Brexit and we’re making a mess of it’) by Cassetteboy. Next year, we’re going to begin to see the full extent of the mess. It will see (presumably) the triggering of Article 50 and the revelation of whether the UK is seeking hard or soft Brexit. If, as seems increasingly likely, the former it will very likely mean a catastrophic further fall in the value of sterling and significant disinvestment in the UK. It won’t be the beginning of the end of the Brexit process, but it will be the end of the beginning, as the Phoney War of the hiatus between the referendum and A50 finishes.
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