Count to one hundred

It’s indicative of the Trumpian world, as well as the hyper-frenetic nature of the contemporary media, that the ‘Greenland crisis’ which dominated the news when I wrote my previous post has all but disappeared from view. Its replacement this week by the Epstein files scandal is, in one very particular way, an illustration of how the two are linked in that the disclosures, which have convulsed British politics, only arose because of the persistent questions in the US about the Trump-Epstein relationship. That freneticism is disorientating, intentionally so in Trump's case, so it's worth slowing down and 'counting to one hundred' rather than responding to each twist and turn. In any case, a fortnightly blog imposes that discipline. 

In fact, even before the latest Epstein story broke the Greenland crisis had become old news and the standard analysis of this seems to be that ‘Trump always chickens out’ (TACO) or, alternatively, that, like a market stall haggler, Trump starts with maximalist demands, always intending to settle for less. I’m not so sure. As Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland points out, Trump’s more common pattern is to briefly retreat then return for more. Thus on Greenland, within a few days of his apparent climbdown, Trump’s envoy was once again demanding (£) “total, unfettered access” to the territory.

The truth is, we don’t know what Trump was offered by NATO’s Mark Rutte that led to the sudden withdrawal of the ‘Greenland tariffs’ threat, and we don’t know what will happen next. And that is just one example of the bigger truth about Trump: no one knows what he will do next across the board. Another example is his sudden turnaround yesterday on his previous turnaround on the ‘Chagos deal’, which, incidentally, leaves those like Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage who used Trump’s previous statement as a stick with which to beat the government looking rather stupid (it’s also a good example of why ‘counting to a hundred’ in the current political climate is sensible).

It’s this unpredictability, as much as anything else, which presents the UK, like every other country, with so many dilemmas. It is also what is gradually draining away US power and prestige. Far from ’making America great again’ Trump is actually diminishing his country, burning away its ‘soft power’ and, increasingly, making it an undesirable trade and defence partner (£).

The Carney Doctrine in practice

So it’s not just that the Greenland crisis, when the US made both military and economic threats against its closest allies, won’t be forgotten. It’s that many countries, including the UK, are following the ‘Carney doctrine’ discussed in my previous post, finding new ways to navigate around the malevolent and unpredictable superpower that America has become. Examples from the last fortnight include Keir Starmer’s visit to China, to promote economic ties and to smooth diplomatic relations (just as have Mark Carney and President Orsi of Uruguay), followed by a slightly less high-profile stop in Japan to discuss economic and defence links. Another example is the completion of an EU-India Free Trade Agreement, which also included significant steps towards security cooperation [1].

Obviously, these events were in train before the Greenland Crisis and before Carney’s Davos speech. That speech was merely a sharp articulation of an existing trend, and the Carney Doctrine has now become a useful way of framing the continuation of that trend. The point is that these, and similar, events have to be understood in relation to Trump. Thus Reuters reported Starmer’s China visit as the latest example of countries “seeking an economic and geopolitical hedge against Trump's unpredictability” whilst Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College London, argued that it “reflects the realities of a new global order that has upended traditional alliances”.

Similarly, the EU-India deal, which has been long-delayed, was undoubtedly accelerated by Trump’s erratic and punitive tariff policies, and was described in very Carney-like terms by trade expert Amitendu Palit, of the National University of Singapore, as being “a strong signal for global middle powers committed to rules-based trade”. Another analyst spelled out that “this is not simply a trade deal. It is an act of geopolitical statecraft; one that reveals how major democratic economies are adapting to a more fractured and volatile global order.”

The rapprochement between the UK and China is not without risks. Just as Carney’s visit to Beijing attracted Trump’s ire, so too, though in slightly milder terms, did Starmer’s. Meanwhile, domestically, the potential security problems as well as the human rights implications, of closer relations with China attracted criticism. But this just underlines that there are no good options, and that, whatever else China may be, it, unlike the US, is at least relatively predictable and if Trump doesn’t like that then he has only himself to blame. This also means that, for the foreseeable future, there is going to be no easy way of describing the UK’s international relations posture in the way that, at least to some extent, was possible during the Cold War. It’s going to be a hodge-podge of uncomfortable accommodations.

Brexit: a hodge-podge of its own

Of course, those accommodations are made all the more uncomfortable by Brexit. Indeed, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to the US, and the very profound discomfort it has caused the government this week, arose at least in part because, as the Financial Times trade commentator Alan Beattie has pointed out, it was believed that he would be able to deliver the supposed prize of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US (or non-deal, as it has so far largely turned out to be). It also seems pretty obvious that he was appointed because of rather than despite his friendship with Epstein, in the sense that it was such connections that made Mandelson the kind of credible Trump-whisperer that post-Brexit Britain needed: all three men swam in the same fetid cesspool of wealth and depravity.

That aside, the more general point is that, given the situation Trump has created, what the UK most needs is a close, predictable relationship with a major geo-political entity with which it is closely aligned in terms of trade, interests, and values. Thus it is more obvious than ever that Brexit was supremely stupid. EU membership would not remove the challenges of navigating relations with the US and China, but it would provide a stable anchor-point for that navigation (I’m aware that this metaphor is mangled). Now, given that Brexit has happened, the obvious logic of the global situation for the UK is to move closer to the EU.

In fact, what we see in that respect is also a hodge-podge. Last week, Starmer stated that the UK should look to “go further” at the next summit with the EU. This is to be held in May, with what was in effect a pre-meeting having taken place this week, resulting in a rather bland joint statement. One implication of that statement, at least on my reading (the wording is slightly ambiguous), is that the once eagerly anticipated 2026 review of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement is now redundant, with everything folded into the ongoing process of the summits. Yet, despite the talk of ‘going further’, the reality is that almost none of the things agreed in principle at last year’s summit have been finalised, and this week’s statement gives only vague aspirations for when they will be [2]. And one of last year’s proposals, UK participation in the EU SAFE fund for defence procurement, has actually already failed, although, partly because of the Greenland crisis, it seems that there could be a new attempt at an agreement.

There is also a very mixed picture in the regulatory sphere. The latest iteration of the invaluable UKICE regulatory divergence tracker shows a variety of passive and active divergences between the UK and the EU, alongside some cases of active alignment. In his analysis of the overall position, Joël Reland, the compiler of the tracker, argues that there has been greater divergence under the Labour government than under its Conservative predecessor. This is because, whilst broadly pursuing ‘alignment’ in relation to trade in goods, there has been targeted divergence in relation to some (not all) services, especially financial services, and technology regulation. In this respect, Reland suggests, the Labour approach is more precise than that of the last government in identifying priorities and, in a certain sense, more effective in actually making concrete changes within those priority areas.

There’s a lot to unpack in that analysis. A preliminary point is just a reiteration of what I’ve already said: the decisions the UK is taking do not point in a single direction. Secondly, as Reland points out, the actual economic impact of these regulatory divergences is likely to be very slim. In other words, they show one of the many basic flaws in the entire Brexit prospectus: it is simply wrong to claim that freedom to diverge from EU regulations constitutes an economic benefit (and, certainly, to claim that it could remotely compensate for the costs of having that freedom). Indeed, the reason why the Tories did not greatly diverge from EU regulations when they were in power was not through any lack of zeal. For example, no one could accuse Jacob Rees-Mogg as deficient in such zeal yet, when he was Minister for Brexit Opportunities, he was notably reduced to asking Sun readers to identify what these benefits might be.

Perhaps the more important point is a political one, and it is one replete with ironies. For whilst the government may be diverging more from some EU regulations than its predecessor and is certainly disappointing many of its anti-Brexit supporters in doing so, its opponents are insisting that it is doing the opposite. Indeed, there has been a rash of anniversary commentary (marking six years since the UK formally left the EU and, more imprecisely, ten years since the referendum) bemoaning Labour’s – yes, of course – ‘betrayal’ of Brexit. I’m not sure, by the way, when it was first claimed that Brexit had been betrayed, but I suspect that it is approximately the tenth anniversary of that, too.

A necessary betrayal

More specifically, the Express has launched a “crusade” to “Give us a Proper Brexit”, a campaign backed, inevitably, by Nigel Farage and, even more shamelessly, by Boris Johnson and Kemi Badenoch. Since Johnson actually negotiated the terms of Brexit and Badenoch had key ministerial roles associated with delivering post-Brexit ‘opportunities’ it's questionable exactly what their credentials as ‘crusaders’ for ‘a proper Brexit’ might be. The obvious conclusion should be that ‘proper Brexit’ is a mirage, but it is one which eludes arch-Brexiters such as serial idiot Daniel Hannan (£),  for whom the “cowardice” of Britain’s leaders explains why Brexit is “not more popular” (even that formulation is slyly dishonest, as if it is ‘popular’, but could be more so).

All of this is dismally familiar, since the claim that Brexit would all have been wonderful if only it had been done ‘properly’ has, like the claim that it has been betrayed, been endlessly repeated since 2016. Equally dismal is that, even after all these years, Brexiters either can’t describe what this ‘proper Brexit’ would consist of or, if they can, are unable to agree with each other’s descriptions. Even more dismal is that what most of them do now agree about is that true Brexit means leaving the ECHR, which was never entailed by Brexit.

However, the ‘proper Brexit’ theme has a new and particular salience in the current political context. That context is, of course, the rise of Reform UK, and the increasingly urgent need for its opponents to expose its vulnerabilities. These are multiple, including the many failures and scandals which have attended even the short time it has controlled local councils, and several of them centre on Farage, on whom Reform is almost totally reliant. His vulnerabilities include his close relationship with Trump, his admiration for Putin, his financial dealings, and, at least potentially, Brexit. After all, this is the defining policy of his political career.

If it was remotely possible to make the case that Brexit had been a success, then Farage would certainly be taking credit for it. The fact that he does not, and has even called it a failure, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence why there is simply no plausible basis for the continuing attempts of some Brexiters to claim otherwise. Unlike those diehards, Farage, who if nothing else is an accomplished political operator, knows that that argument has been lost. Yet he can hardly disavow Brexit as an ‘idea’ given both his own support for it and the deep emotional commitment to it amongst his core voters. Thus the narrative of Brexit betrayal is absolutely central to his political credibility and prospects, and, in turn, to those of Reform [3].

This is one reason why the steady stream of Tory defections to Reform, Suella Braverman being the latest, is potentially damaging to his party. Along with the general point that this makes it harder to sustain Reform’s image as an insurgent alternative to ‘the Establishment’, and the Conservative Party in particular, it prompts the specific question: who betrayed Brexit, if not these former Tory MPs and government ministers? Naturally, they would have their own answers (the civil service, the judges, the metropolitan elite etc.), but, for many committed or potential Reform voters, the answer will be Tory politicians, especially senior Cabinet ministers like Braverman.

The angry man

The next test for Reform’s prospects will be the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. It will be an unusually complex contest, for the reasons set out with great clarity by the political scientist Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University. Some of that complexity is specific to the seat, and to this particular point in the electoral cycle (and now, very likely, the impact of the Epstein scandal), but some of it is a harbinger of what probably awaits us at the next general election when the splintering of party loyalties combined with the first-past-the-post electoral system will produce unpredictable and possibly bizarre results.

One thing which is specific to this by-election is Reform’s choice of Matt Goodwin as its candidate. Much has been written about Goodwin’s journey from being a reasonably successful academic specialising in the study of right-wing populism to a strident populist ideologue (the profile by James Ball in The New World last year and Ian Dunt’s assessment a couple of weeks’ ago will tell those who aren’t familiar with this story most of what they need to know). In some ways, he is just an identikit of such ideologues, notable, if at all, for a degree of pomposity and a whiff of megalomania (at one stage, he sought to found his own party and adopted a vaguely sinister avatar, now alas deleted, depicting himself in black and white, with jutting jaw, rather like a latter-day Roderick Spode). However, he also, far more than Farage, has become a more-or-less open champion for English ethno-nationalism, reflected in the fact that his candidature has now been endorsed by Tommy Robinson. Reform has repudiated that endorsement but, so far as I am aware, Goodwin has not.

If he is elected, then, it will betoken more than a win for Farage. Farage, whatever his true beliefs may be, has always been very careful, and fairly adept, at distancing himself from overt extremism, including repeatedly distancing himself from Robinson. He projects, fairly successfully, the image of a jovial, common-sense fellow, superficial as that image may be. Goodwin cuts a very different figure, and if he wins it will be an electoral endorsement of ideas which had been confined to the extreme fringes of the far right for decades, especially the idea that being born in Britain doesn’t make people British. His prolific, even hyperactive, social media postings have for some time now obsessively documented the actual or alleged crimes of immigrants, especially refugees, and predicted civilizational collapse. And, unlike Farage, who occasionally displays flashes of humour, Goodwin is relentlessly, splenetically, angry.

The angry brigade

In that respect, whatever the outcome of this by-election, Goodwin is representative of a group of voters who are highly active online, expressing their anger and in the process inciting their own and others' increasingly radical positions. Whereas much attention has been given to the online radicalization of the young and, especially, of young Muslims, this group are old (usually meaning the ‘baby boomers’ born before 1965) or middle-aged (usually meaning ‘Gen-X’ born between 1965 and 1980). They are also predominantly white, and generally but not always male. Apart from being slightly younger, having been born in 1981, Goodwin and his escalating online anger and growing radicalism perfectly fits the profile as, no doubt, do many of his followers.

Crucially, these people’s activities are not confined to the online world (the online and real-world distinction anyway being increasingly blurred). For one thing, as with older people generally, they are more likely to vote than younger cohorts. But they also take part in street politics, including the violent unrest and rioting associated with the asylum hotels ‘protests’. Recently, a few extreme cases have gone even further. One example is the ‘Ulez bomber’ convicted last week, who had not only apparently been radicalised by online far-right discussion forums but, in those forums, is regarded as a hero. In his case, he was arrested before he hurt anyone, unlike the far worse case of the ex-soldier who, in a fit of uncontrollable anger, rammed his car through a crowd of Liverpool fans, injuring 134 people. The background to his crimes is complex, but includes following a small number of social media accounts of whom most were associated with the far-right.

I’m obviously not suggesting that the online anger of right-wing populists necessarily causes people to commit crimes, or that most of those who post or are exposed to that anger engage in violence, or that crimes such as those mentioned would not occur anyway. But it is not unreasonable to assume that the online expression of anger amongst older people informs their political decisions (indeed, it is hard to imagine that it would not), and that it matches the age and gender profiles of electoral support for Reform. The same is probably true of support for the various small far-right parties such as Advance UK (which last week recruited two Devon County councillors who were originally elected as Reform candidates). And although this anger isn’t unique to Britain, it is hardly outlandish to say that in the British context it is connected to the anger which drove at least some of the vote for Brexit, and which continues to inform the anger about Brexit having been betrayed.

Political anger has been stoked this week by the Epstein scandal, and of course anger about that is by no means confined to the populist right. However, for the populist right specifically, it adds new ballast to its familiar critique of the ‘corrupt globalist elite’ and its general rejection of ‘mainstream politicians’ as all being as bad as each other. It does bear saying, though, that the scandal could backfire on them because it is already clear that there are multiple connections between Epstein and the British and American populist right, and that Epstein, like others in his circle of anarchistic oligarchs, was an enthusiast for Brexit. For that matter, it is revealing Farage’s brazen opportunism and hypocrisy, as he castigates Starmer for appointing Mandelson whilst praising the appointment at the time.

Nursery politics

But, in a sense, it’s all irrelevant. There will always be some new story or scandal to feed the anger, and the details get forgotten immediately, because, fundamentally, it’s not about this or that event, it’s about anger as a permanent political condition. I’m not sure that this condition of anger can be assuaged, not least because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, much of it stems from an impossible desire to reclaim an imaginary past or, more profoundly, not from a desire for grievances to be redressed but to luxuriate in the feeling of aggrievement. On either account, this explains why, for such voters, having been given Brexit, they are now even angrier because it isn’t the right sort of Brexit.

Strangely, whilst this anger is most evident amongst older voters, there is something childish about it. One of my earliest memories (and one my family reminded me of for years) is of a day when I was, perhaps, five years old and for some reason I pestered and pleaded for my mother to buy some honey. She eventually gave in, but when I saw it, I fell into a raging, uncontrollable tantrum because, I shrieked, she had bought the wrong sort of honey.

And this brings us back to the beginning of this post. For all that he has far more power than them, Donald Trump is not so different to the on-line army of angry old white British men radicalizing themselves and each other. There is at least a rhyme between the two. Trump’s rapacious and capricious ego, driving his unpredictable demands and vindictive assaults on anyone who crosses or slights him, is also child-like in its nature. Perhaps that is also why living through the current political period is so neuralgically wearisome, like being trapped in a nursery not just full of, but run by, angry screaming toddlers. It also brings us back to 'counting to a hundred' which, apart from being a useful antidote to the frenetic news cycle, was what a wiser American President, Thomas Jefferson, advised the very angry to do before speaking.
 

Notes

[1] The EU-India trade agreement underscores the fragility of claims about Brexit benefits, of which the UK-India trade deal is supposedly an example. The slight difference in timing hardly warrants that supposition (there are also some signs of closer EU-CPTPP integration). The same potentially applies to the regulatory choices exercised by the UK (e.g. in relation to gene-editing or financial services).

[2} For a detailed update on the reset and its future prospects, see this week’s policy briefing from Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform.

[3] This means that Starmer’s attempts to attack Farage on Brexit aren’t very effective, and might even serve to endorse Farage’s own position, because in doing so Starmer insists on referring to “botched Brexit”. The reason, of course, is that he wants to imply to Labour leave voters that he is not opposed to Brexit and isn’t going to reverse it but ‘improve’ it. But even if that line made some kind of sense as an attack on the Tories, it effectively validates Farage’s claim that Brexit wasn’t done ‘properly’, even if he has a different view on how it should have been done.

Making sense of the madness

The press of events in the fortnight since my last post has been dizzying and disorientating. Even at the height of the ‘Brexit battles’ it was not so difficult to keep abreast of what is happening, let alone to acquire some degree of analytic distance so as to make sense of it. Indeed, it is perfectly possible that within minutes of publishing today’s post it will be made obsolete or irrelevant by some new shock.

I’m obviously referring to what can be called the ‘Greenland Crisis’, and its scale means that it will be the subject of the whole of this post. So I won’t be able to discuss the latest rash of Tory defections to Reform, important as they are to the politics of Brexitism, except to say that they show the growing difficulty of Reform’s attempts to depict themselves as outsiders and insurgents. Nor will I discuss the reports that the EU is seeking a ‘Farage Clause’ in any ‘reset’ agreement with the UK as insurance against a future government reneging on any such agreement. However, I have done so in a recent article in Byline Times.

In my previous post I argued that Trump’s demand to take over Greenland, rather than his attack on Venezuela, was going to be the crucial tipping point for relations between the US, the EU, and the UK. In particular, I suggested that it gave new urgency to the need to massively deepen UK-EU defence and security cooperation. Subsequently, a slew of articles by rather more heavyweight political commentators made versions of the same point (examples include Gideon Rachman (£), Martin Sandbu (£), and Philip Stephens). It also featured within the much wider tour d’horizon of the current geo-political scene provided by Bronwen Maddox in her annual lecture as Director of the Chatham House think-tank. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that anyone expected the Greenland Crisis to escalate as rapidly as it did, or to at least apparently subside with equal rapidity.

The Greenland crisis

The first key event was last week’s decision by several European NATO countries, including the UK, to send military forces to Greenland to undertake or prepare for training exercises. The numbers were very limited, in the UK’s case reportedly only a single soldier, but the deployment was highly symbolic. One important aspect of that symbolism was that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK aligned with those EU countries taking part.

However, the wider symbolic meaning of the deployment had a degree of ambiguity. Some declared it to be a warning to the US that any attempt to take Greenland by force would be resisted, and it is worth re-iterating that the very possibility of this being its meaning shows the extraordinary situation we are now in. Others presented it as a sign that, just as Trump had demanded, Europeans were stepping up to contribute to NATO’s security rather than just leaving it to America.

The next key event showed that Trump, at least, interpreted it as having the first meaning and took it as an affront, prompting him last weekend to threaten to levy tariffs on goods from the UK and the EU, or at least those EU countries which had sent forces [1]. Yet this response was itself open to two interpretations. One was that Trump was showing he would attack those who defied him, and in that sense was a show of strength. The other was that, by making it an economic rather than a military attack, it showed the limits to his strength because he was signalling that he did not intend to take control of Greenland militarily in the face of the resolve shown by Europeans (if only because he would not have domestic political support for doing so). That he does not now intend to do so was stated explicitly in his subsequent, rambling Davos speech on Wednesday, during which he repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the fear that he would do so arose from his own previous statements. He created the crisis.

Then, abruptly, later on Wednesday, Trump announced that he had struck the “framework of a deal” with Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, and that the threat of ‘Greenland tariffs’ had been withdrawn. The nature of this framework remains unclear, and its details have not been finalized, but it seems sure to fall short of what had been the demand for Greenland to become unequivocally part of the United States. It may even be scarcely different to the existing situation. Many analysts attribute Trump’s about-turn to the stock market falls his tariff threats had caused earlier in the week, just as bond market reaction led him to retreat from many of his ‘liberation day’ tariff threats last year.

Of course, trying to explain or make sense of Trump’s words and actions is difficult since he has always been capricious and now appears to be going senile. It is certainly impossible to predict what he may do in the future. He may decide ‘the deal’ he has done with Rutte is not good enough. He may change his mind about the Greenland tariffs again. Or he may revert to his threats to take Greenland by force. What is clear is that his motivations are bound up with his monstrously rapacious ego, as shown by the insane letter he sent to the Norwegian Prime Minister in which he linked his designs on Greenland to his pique at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Even so, it would be a mistake to ignore that, Trump’s baroque psychology and mafia boss persona aside, Washington’s conduct is also driven by the hard-eyed men who have re-drawn the entire shape of US foreign policy. For them, US ‘hemispheric hegemony’ is not about placating ‘a King gone mad’ but a deadly serious ideological project which, amongst other things, dispenses with the idea of NATO as a vehicle for collective security. Trump may like that idea for egotistical reasons, but his henchmen have their own motivations and, even if the attempt to annex Greenland founders, those motivations remain intact. At all events, as Bronwen Maddox argues, it cannot be assumed that the US is going to “snap back” to its traditional post-WW2 posture, even once Trump has gone. Nor has the apparent resolution of the immediate crisis over Greenland ended the wider crisis faced by NATO and multi-lateral institutions more generally.

The unavoidability of choice

For the UK, this means that Keir Starmer’s continuing insistence that there is no choice to be made between its relations with the US and the EU is becoming ever-more implausible. The decision to be included in both statements and military deployments with Denmark, France, Germany etc. was a decision to side with Europe against the US, if only because that is how Trump interpreted it. And Starmer’s insistence on Greenland’s sovereignty and criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, an insistence which has always been unambiguous and became more robust as the week went on, is also a choice to side with the EU and against the US, and has also been interpreted by Trump in that way. On the other hand, his implication during this week that, unlike the EU, he was not prepared to retaliate against the tariff threats could be interpreted, if not as siding with the US, then at least as not showing solidarity with the EU.

I don’t mean by this that there’s any real prospect that Starmer will ever openly acknowledge that there is a choice to be made, nor that he needs to. I mean that, acknowledged or not, there is no decision the UK can take, and no statement it can make, including taking no decisions or making no statements, which avoids that choice. The choice, or at least the sub-choices within it, have to be made because they cannot not be made.

This situation would pose acute problems for the UK even if it were still a member of the EU (just as it does for the EU, itself, its individual members, and for other countries around the world), but Brexit undoubtedly makes it far worse. To take the most obvious example, were there to be a trade war with the US, over Greenland or anything else, then the UK would be far better placed if it were an EU member, both in terms of its offensive capacity (against the US) and its defensive capacity (integrated trade within the single market).

However, it is the wider, strategic issues which are even more important. The Brexiter insistence that the EU was irrelevant to UK security, which they claimed was entirely catered for by a US-led NATO, which was always ill-informed, is now exposed as the greatest strategic miscalculation in modern British history. And, not coincidentally, those who still support that miscalculation are the very same people – Farage, Hannan, Johnson, Rees-Mogg etc. – who hailed Trump as the great ally of Britain. In this sense Britain faces a double problem in addressing the US-EU choice: first, the damage of Brexit itself and, second, the continuing influence of Brexitism.

A second chance for Starmer

This being so, Keir Starmer has the possibility both to address the strategic failure of Brexit and to gain domestic political advantage over Reform and marginalize Brexitism, as I've been arguing for at least a year when I wrote that:

“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies.”

That opportunity has not, to date, been taken, although, recently, Starmer has been slightly more willing to mention at least the economic damage of Brexit and to draw attention to Farage’s pro-Russian affinities. The opportunity re-presents itself, now, because the way in which Trump has bullied and belittled the UK this week, including his dismissive remarks about NATO, and therefore British troops, in Afghanistan, will have been offensive to the majority of British voters. This makes it a good time to remind them of Farage’s adoration of the American President and, more generally, to justify the case for recalibrating towards the EU.

Farage is evidently well aware of his vulnerability on this score, hence his criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, and he also stated his support for Greenland’s right to self-determination, but he cannot completely protect himself from it since – perhaps from his own fear of Trump publicly attacking him – in the same breath he argued that it would be desirable if the US owned Greenland. Whilst Starmer did not say the latter, he is unable fully to capitalise on Farage’s vulnerability because his own response had a degree of similarity in that both men criticised the Greenland tariff threat, but both highlighted the UK’s ability to negotiate with the US over trade terms as being advantageous.

For Farage, that is taken to be a vindication of Brexit, for Starmer it is taken to be a vindication of his attempts to manage Trump. But, on either account, it is a specious argument: the reality is that the so-called US-UK trade deal, supposedly agreed last year, was limited in scope, has still not been fully implemented, and seems to be subject to ongoing negotiation. In any case, it is always liable to fall victim to Trump’s caprice since, for him, ‘the art of the deal’ is that a deal is never done and can always be reneged upon or made subject to new demands (the same may well apply to the supposed ‘deal’ over Greenland).

Indeed, the latest reports are that the US is still pushing hard to get the UK to adopt US standards in various areas, including food and agriculture, and, more complex but also important, for the UK to recognize US conformity assessment bodies [2]. If that were to happen, then even the modest reset with the EU would become impossible, especially as regards an SPS agreement. So here, again, the UK faces a choice between the US and the EU.

Fine lines and hot takes

One thing which the last week’s events have made abundantly clear is just how difficult it is to navigate that choice. Having been fairly robust in his support for Greenland’s sovereignty and in his criticism of the tariff threat in a speech on Monday morning, the following night Starmer was subjected to Trump’s vicious verbal assault on the “stupidity” of the UK’s Chagos Islands deal, citing it as one of the reasons for his claims on Greenland. He had never made that linkage before, and it is significant that over the day or two prior to that, numerous figures on the British right, including Farage, had been doing so, though in a different way to Trump, by claiming that there was an inconsistency between Starmer’s defence of Greenland’s sovereignty with his supposed betrayal of Britain’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. It’s a ridiculous argument, on multiple levels (not least because the Chagos deal has a legal basis), as is Trump’s argument that the Chagos deal, which he previously supported, damages US security interests (since the UK-US base there is protected).

I can’t be bothered to unpick all that, but my point is that it seems clear that it only occurred to Trump to link Chagos and Greenland because his ideological soulmates in Britain were doing so. Indeed, it has since emerged that it may have come about because of remarks made by Kemi Badenoch to the US Speaker on Monday evening. At all events, whereas there was a brief moment early on Monday when all UK political parties, including Reform, were united in objecting to Trump’s Greenland tariffs, by Tuesday both Reform and the Tories were attacking Labour over Chagos and saying that about that, at least, Trump was right. Tellingly, that great patriot Farage was delighted at the prospect of ‘sovereign Britain’ being told what to do by a foreign leader (equally tellingly, it looks as if he was wrong). Thus, whether by accident or design, Trump’s outburst had the effect of splintering the nascent consensus against him within the UK polity and, as Starmer rightly said during Prime Minister’s Questions, by endorsing Trump’s criticism of the Chagos deal Kemi Badenoch (and others) were supporting his attempt to punish the UK for standing up to his demands for Greenland.

Moreover, many news outlets, including the BBC, started to report Trump’s attack on the UK as demonstrating that Starmer’s approach to handling Trump through flattery and sycophancy had failed. That reporting was deeply wrong-headed. In fact, Trump’s attack showed two things. One is just the sheer impossibility of dealing with a President who is unpredictable, dishonest, and very possibly mentally ill. The other, which those criticising Starmer for not being bolder should ponder, is that by departing only slightly from the ‘flattery and sycophancy’ approach, with a politely-worded criticism of the Greenland policy and tariff threat, Starmer immediately faced a thuggish response from Trump and, with it, accusations from the Conservatives that he was failing to maintain ‘the special relationship’. In any case, these events also showed that it is unwise to provide ‘hot takes’, especially in relation to Trump, because by the end of the week the BBC and others were at least implying that Starmer had handled the crisis effectively.

The Carney doctrine

Whatever now happens with respect to Greenland, which is very far from clear, there can be little doubt that the events of the last fortnight have crystallised the situation which has been developing since at least the re-election of Trump. The UK’s choice between the US and the EU is only one manifestation of the wider choices this situation poses. For, as the Bronwen Maddox lecture I linked to earlier suggests, the Greenland crisis is only one instance of a much bigger transformation in the global order, a point also made this week by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Previously, I’ve written about this transformation in terms of a ‘new global divide’, as profound as that of the Cold War, between a broadly, if imperfectly, liberal, rational-legal framework for international relations, and an international order based solely on power-plays and gangsterism (and, as the use of increasingly unconstrained paramilitary violence and the erosion of the rule of law by Trump’s regime shows, this applies to the domestic order as well). A naked illustration of this gangsterism is Trump’s latest plan to create a ‘Board of Peace’ to oversee Gaza and, potentially, other conflict zones. This body will be chaired by Trump during his lifetime, with power to hire and fire its members and to name his successor, and with permanent members reportedly required to pay $1 billion into a fund personally controlled by Trump.

The nature and implications of this new global divide were articulated with great cogency in a widely-admired speech given by the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos this week. It was a speech which may well come to be seen as being as epoch-defining as Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech in Missouri almost exactly eighty years ago. Carney spoke of the concept of “values-based realism”, a combination of principle and pragmatism, whereby “middle powers” could and should respond to a world in which multilateral institutions have been diminished and “great powers” seek to act as regional or even global hegemons. Note that this does not imply ‘having nothing to do’ with those hegemons, or publicly vilifying them. Certainly as regards the US, that is a luxury that Canada, like the UK and most other countries, does not have. The issue is how to navigate relations with them.

It was an optimistic speech in suggesting such navigation was possible, but by no means an idealistic one. Pragmatism demands some unpalatable choices such as, implicitly, Canada’s recent trade deal with China. It was also realistic in insisting that – as, in Britain, Brexit should have taught us – “nostalgia is not a strategy”, meaning that the old order, effectively that established since the time of Churchill’s Missouri speech, is not coming back. However, that does not mean that the future order must necessarily be dictated by hegemons and characterised by gangsterism.

Above all, Carney’s speech stressed the centrality of cooperation amongst middle powers:

“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”

It is at least possible to interpret Trump’s apparent climbdown over Greenland as a vindication of this, in that it came when faced with the concerted opposition of numerous countries and other actors, including market actors (the two are linked, since a big reason for the stock market falls was the possibility of EU retaliation). But, even if so, the Carney doctrine calls for more than co-ordinated diplomacy; it requires the development of substantive co-operation amongst middle powers over defence, security, and trade.

Thus, although speaking primarily about Canada, Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism. Taking those two readings together, the Carney Doctrine could offer the UK a chance of moving forward from Brexit. It’s no longer a matter of revisiting the decision made in 2016. The Greenland crisis has been a stark reminder that, in 2026, the brutal realities of global politics impose their own imperatives on national strategy, and mandate a new and better decision about its direction.

Whether domestic politics will allow such a decision to be made is an open question. It is doubtful whether the present government is capable of rising to the challenge. But it is beyond doubt that a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government, still entirely committed to the logic of Brexit and Brexitism, would be totally incapable of doing so.

 

Notes

[1] Many commentators wondered if it is possible for the US to levy tariffs on individual EU members, given that the EU trades as a single tariff entity (i.e. the customs union). The trade expert Sam Lowe has explained that the short answer is that it is. However, because it is a single tariff entity, any retaliation against the US would have to be made by the EU and not its individual members.

[2] I don’t have space to discuss it here, but conformity assessment is, as an anonymous source in the Politico report aptly describes it, the “invisible infrastructure that no one really knows about but which keeps everyone safe”. It also has much salience to Brexit, including to the ‘reset’, because it is at the heart of why regulatory alignment does not in itself give market access, and amongst other things explains the strange situation whereby foodstuffs may meet EU standards but are nevertheless marked ‘Not for the EU’ when sold in British shops. And of course conformity assessment marking lies behind one of the most abject farces of the Brexit saga, namely the abandoned attempt to replace CE marks with UKCA marks.

How Trump has reset the Brexit reset

This week saw, according to respected economics commentator Simon Nixon, “the end of the economic world as we knew it”, and he is not alone in that view in the aftermath of Trump’s tariff announcement. But this is a blog about Brexit and actually, from that perspective, much of what I wrote in the first section of last fortnight’s post about the framing of current events still applies [1]. So, too, do many of the questions posed within that framing.

This in turn reflects the fact that what has effectively happened in the last couple of months is that the Brexit ‘reset’ policy with which the Labour government came to power, and which in some rather ill-defined sense it has been pursuing since then, has become inextricably entangled with the changed geo-political and economic landscape created with such speed by the new Trump administration.

So whereas what used to be called ‘the reset’ denoted simply a UK-EU process, framed by what had happened since 2016, it now has a new meaning as both the UK and the EU, and the UK-EU relationship, seek recalibrations framed by what has been happening in the US since January, including the latest dramatic, but not unexpected, developments (which I will return to). As a result, it has become far more complicated.

The changed meaning of ‘the reset’

To see the significance of that change, consider the idea of creating a deeper UK-EU defence and security pact. This was always central to Labour’s original reset plans, going back well before the last election. And it was not an especially radical idea, since it was effectively a revival of the non-binding Political Declaration signed, though subsequently ignored, by Boris Johnson in 2019. As such, it was actually a good example of what Labour could legitimately call ‘the Tories’ botched Brexit’, in that the absence of such a pact wasn’t inherent even in Johnson and May’s Brexit and, again as such, was a prime candidate for the reset in its original meaning.

However, there is now much more at stake in that such a pact is not only more urgent but has become bound up with massive changes in defence posture and policy under way within the EU and many of its member states, especially Germany. At their most basic level, these changes are about Europe, as a continent, taking responsibility for its own collective security now that the US can no longer be relied upon. In parallel, that is now conceptually bound up with, even though it is formally distinct from, Anglo-French attempts to mobilize a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ to support a ‘reassurance force’ for Ukraine in the event of any kind of peace deal.

There are already quite a few moving parts within that, even before adding in the potential economic and regulatory aspects of any reset. And the nature of that addition has also changed. In the original reset, these aspects might have been seen as relatively discrete from that of defence. Now, with possibilities for integrated defence manufacturing and procurement having come to the fore, they are much more closely connected.  

From this, some of the political questions which already arose have become more complicated. In particular, to what extent do, or will, EU and/or UK negotiators treat all the different components as being inter-related and therefore, potentially, susceptible to being traded against each other? To give one important example of what that means in practice, to what extent might a defence and security pact be contingent on a deal on fishing rights, or on the still unresolved matter of Gibraltar? There is also a swathe of issues which are due to come up within the next year under the existing Trade and Cooperation Agreement, for example energy security, to add to the mix.

All of this brings new meaning and importance to the UK-EU Summit to be hosted in Britain on 19 May. If it doesn’t lead to the announcement of a substantive agreement, it will, given the wider context of crisis, mark a major failure of, and for, both the UK and the EU. A wise article by former EU Commissioner for Security Sir Julian King makes the point that the best way of averting such a failure is to avoid seeking to create a single ‘grand package’. That is, it is vital to reach agreement on the most pressing issues, whilst creating future processes to address those which cannot be resolved.

On my reading, King’s deeper message is that, primarily because of Trump, the nature of the UK-EU relationship needs to be thought of in different ways from those which have obtained since 2016 or even 2020. In other words, to repeat the point with which I began, a global reset is already under way, and the reset of post-Brexit UK-EU relations is now bound up with adapting to that new reality.

More accurately, it is bound up with adapting to a new reality which is still in the process of emerging. Because as well as all the moving parts within the UK-EU relationship, those within the US’s relationships with the UK, the EU, and the wider world also continue to be in flux. This flux has two broad aspects but, in terms of how they impact on resetting the UK-EU relationship, they point in potentially different directions.

The moral collapse of the United States

The first aspect is the rapidity of the US’s ongoing descent into authoritarianism and, which makes it hard to document and make sense of, the chaotic manner in which this is happening. Much is being written about this, by people much better-qualified than me, so this is just a brief summary.

There is now a multi-fronted war against universities, with overseas students being pulled off the streets by masked agents, detained in legal limbo, and deported. Entire universities are being battered into submitting to government demands, extending to what can be taught and how. What may in the long run become most damaging are attempts to censor or outlaw scientific research which is deemed ideologically unacceptable.

Some of this overlaps with a ferocious onslaught on alleged illegal immigrants, including deportations to a hellish prison in El Salvador in defiance of court orders. It also overlaps with the attempt to erase all traces of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) in public and private organizations and even amongst foreign firms supplying the US government. Lest anyone think that is no more than a re-balancing of some of the wilder shores of ‘wokery’, it has extended to removing the names of black, Hispanic and female military veterans from the Arlington National Cemetery website, the list of those names including General Colin Powell, Secretary of State to George W. Bush. This isn’t a corrective to ‘political correctness gone mad’, it is simply mad.

The intimidation of universities is accompanied by growing intimidation of journalists, authors, lawyers, judges (£). The latter, in particular, but all of these developments, in general, are bound up with what is now widely acknowledged to be a wholesale undermining of the rule of law. This of course extends to the rule of international law, including renewed threats against Greenland made, in the stock manner of every aggressor since time immemorial, in the name of the intended victim’s security’. Indeed all the developments I have mentioned are sickeningly familiar from all the other cases of countries sliding into authoritarianism or even totalitarianism.

Hovering above all of this is the spectre of radical violations of the US Constitution, with the most egregious threat being Trump’s recent talk of finding a way to serve a third term in office. And lurking underneath all this is something which is perhaps the least consequential but, to me, somehow seems the most revealing: the throat-clenched anger revealed by the savage rudeness, casual cruelty (the ‘fun videos’ referred to in the link include those of shackled deportees being frog-marched to detention camps), and sheer depravity of so many of the regime’s functionaries and cheerleaders. What we are seeing is not just a maverick government but something far more profound and far more dangerous. Hatred has been unleashed and made legitimate.

So far as this first aspect of what is happening in the US is concerned, its potential impact on UK-EU relations is to make them closer and deeper. It underscores the point I made in a recent post that, in this new global divide Trump has initiated, both the UK and the EU are on ‘the same side’. Both have shared values in being broadly committed to liberalism and the rule of domestic and international law. In this sense, as I suggested in that post, Brexit is an anomaly and an incongruity.

The United States’ declaration of economic war

The second aspect of what is happening in the US and its relations to the wider world is the economic warfare it has unleashed with ‘Trump Tariffs’. As flagged at the start of this post, this has been the big story of this week, with the long-trailed announcement on Wednesday of the details of a blanket 10% tariff on all goods imported to the US, including from the UK, with effect from tomorrow. The EU faces a 20% blanket tariff, and several countries an even higher levy, up to the 54% imposed on China. Moreover, there was confirmation that imports to the US of steel, aluminium and motor vehicles from all countries, including the UK, have had a new 25% tariff imposed.

By any standard, this marks the beginning of an enormous economic shock. The full effects are difficult to predict partly because, as was seen earlier this year, Trump’s capriciousness means the policy might be altered in any direction, at any time. That capriciousness is itself partly because it isn’t simply an economic policy, as was underscored by the rambling speech about supposed American victimhood with which the new tariffs were announced, and the bizarre nature of the way they were calculated (£). As I noted shortly after his election, “trade policy for Trump is about beating his enemies … so there’s no point in thumbing through Ricardian theory on comparative advantage to try to understand [it]. But the corollary is that there’s no point in trying to frame responses in these terms.”

In particular, much of Trump’s trade policy apparently aims, and certainly has the potential, to provoke division, including between the UK and the EU. That is because of the different ways different countries have been treated, and also because of the possibility, and therefore the temptation, for individual countries to cut their own deals or make their own responses in the face of US aggression. So whilst those threatened may have shared values, they do not necessarily have (or perceive themselves to have) shared economic interests. Thus this second aspect of what is happening in the US could work against UK-EU relations becoming closer and deeper.

Back to Brexit

Specifically, the UK government, mired as it is in economic difficulties, may believe that Brexit is a lifeline rather than ‘an anomaly and incongruity’. Certainly the Brexiters are already crowing that Trump imposing a lower rate on the UK than on the EU represents a vindication of Brexit (they would do better to reflect on the mockery it makes of their former faith in ‘WTO rules’). They also believe that there is an even bigger potential ‘prize’ in the form of an exemption deal with the US.

Plainly the government does so too, having been seeking exactly that in recent weeks and, although it has not been successful, it claims that the effort is continuing, even hinting that a deal may be near to completion. Meanwhile, Starmer is insistent that there will be no immediate retaliatory action but that “all options remain on the table”, implying retaliatory tariffs if there is no deal, and has launched a consultation exercise with businesses about what these might consist of.

It’s worth saying that there is nothing inherently shameful about trying to negotiate a deal with the US, despite what some commentators and politicians seem to believe [1]. After all, the UK is not the only country which has tried and is continuing to try to do so, with examples including Canada, Mexico, India, and Japan. The EU, too, “would prefer to negotiate”.

The issue is, more, what happens if those attempts continue to fail. Does the UK then pursue a policy of being a non-combatant in the trade war? If it did so then, again, it would not be alone. It seems that this will be how Australia and New Zealand, both of which have ‘only’ suffered the 10% baseline tariff, will respond. The UK’s situation is different to those countries, though, in terms of its economic enmeshment with the EU. On the other hand, what happened if the UK’s attempts succeed? That would make it not so much a non-combatant as a defector.

The economic temptations for the UK to continue to seek an exemption deal, or to eschew retaliation without one are obvious. The political risks are equally obvious. Domestically, it is out of line with opinion polls, which would prefer closer links with the EU (but public opinion might be fickle if and when Trump Tariffs bite on UK jobs). Internationally, it may undermine or even destroy the developing unity with the EU and other countries, including those of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ to support Ukraine (an illustration of the complexity of the moving parts in the new reset).

Bluntly, why would other countries want to get closer to, let alone ‘stand shoulder to shoulder with’, a Britain making weaselly deals with Trump even as Trump punishes their economies and even threatens their territory? In the process, any political kudos Starmer has garnered, both domestically and internationally, for his post-Trump leadership on defending Ukraine from Russian military warfare may quickly be lost if he is unwilling to defend the UK and its allies from US economic warfare.

Perhaps some would understand and accept it as a matter of UK realpolitik. For example, it is reported that “João Vale de Almeida, former EU ambassador to the US and the UK, said he did not expect the UK to retaliate in the way the EU was bound to”, although he added that “it was important that Starmer hit back in some way by criticising the way the US president used tariffs as a tool of policy.” But perhaps (and perhaps more likely) other countries will see it as one more example of Perfidious Albion and one more example of the British preference, come what may, to cosy up to the Americans. An interesting sub-question is whether, if the UK continues to fail to make a deal with the US until eventually and belatedly joining the EU and others in retaliations, that would be seen as scarcely any less perfidious.

Starmer’s choices

These considerations, amongst others, lead Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland to make the case that Starmer should publicly admit and denounce the threat that Trump poses, rather in the manner that Mark Carney, the new Canadian Prime Minister, has done. Former UK Ambassador to the US Sir Kim Darroch has made a similar argument. Freedland suggests that, apart from anything else, doing so might also enable Starmer to escape some of the economic policy constraints the government faces, by presenting this situation as a national emergency. Another kind of reset, so to speak.

Of course Freedland and, undoubtedly, Darroch are well aware that the extensiveness of the UK’s defence, intelligence and economic ties with the US makes such a course highly risky [2]. That is also true of Canada, but Carney is in a rather different situation, firstly because he is about to fight an election, and secondly because the US attacks on Canada have been so extreme and so public that they can hardly be finessed away. So even if Freedland is right that, sooner or later, open confrontation will become unavoidable, there is every reason to think that Starmer will opt for it to be left until later rather than done sooner, and, meanwhile, try to walk the tightrope so as to avoid alienating anyone.

But that, too, has its risks, above and beyond those to relations with the EU, Canada etc. For, whilst failing to unequivocally oppose him in the manner of Carney, it is not clear that Starmer’s stance is enough to satisfy Trump anyway. For example, whilst it seemed as if the invitation for another State visit temporarily appealed to Trump’s grotesque ego, it was reported that the subsequent sight of King Charles meeting President Zelensky negated that appeal and fed a new resentment. The wider point is that Trump’s character isn’t such as to appreciate a tightrope act, he wants unequivocal fealty. In other words, it’s perfectly possible that Starmer, and therefore the UK, will end up alienating everyone.

I don’t think anyone, or at least anyone with an iota of political insight, imagines that Starmer’s choices are easy, or that any of the options are good. But choices have to be made, if only by default, and time is not on his side. In the absence of the quick completion of a deal with the US, the policy of not responding to Trump’s tariffs will soon come under pressure from industry and voters, as well as from opposition parties and some Labour MPS and ministers. Equally, depending on what is given away in return, a deal with Trump is likely to be controversial. Moreover, depending on exactly how things play out, there will potentially be some complex, and specifically Brexit-created, problems for Northern Ireland.

Most urgently of all, the reset with the EU cannot be allowed to drift, now that it has taken on its new meaning, and it is going to have to be substantively advanced by the Summit, which is just six weeks away. If it’s not now or never, then it’s very close to it. And although it would be naïve to expect moral outrage to play much part in realpolitik and statecraft, the immoral spectacle unfolding in the United States can surely not be ignored for much longer. Or, to put it differently, and perhaps better, realpolitik and statecraft ought to alert us to the fact that the immorality of what is unfolding in the United States, quite as much as the imposition of tariffs, represents a clear and present danger to our national interests and our way of life.

 

Notes

[1] As I explained in detail in a previous post, a ‘deal’ in this context means some kind of agreement for the UK to be exempted from these new US tariffs, not a comprehensive UK-US Free Trade Agreement (this is presumably why Starmer always uses the term ‘an economic deal’ rather than ‘trade deal’). It’s worth stressing, because I was struck that when this was discussed in parliament yesterday some MPs, including some Tories urging a deal and some LibDems urging caution about a deal, appeared to be utterly confused about the difference.

[2] This isn’t negated by growing concerns about the security risks of sharing intelligence with the US, which were brought into sharp relief by the SIGNAL Yemen raid scandal, because that doesn’t affect UK reliance on receiving intelligence from the US.

Making sense of the Article XXIV smokescreen

In my previous post I made reference to the recent upsurge of Brexiter interest in GATT Article XXIV. As noted there, it was mentioned as a way of avoiding the damage of no-deal Brexit by Boris Johnson in one of the leadership debates. Shortly afterwards, his claim was debunked by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England (£) but he has continued to push it in interviews this week.

Indeed, it has been debunked many, many times before – in a briefing by the trade policy specialist of the House of Commons Library, by former WTO official Peter Ungphakorn writing for the UK Trade Forum and, more recently, on his own blog, as well as, more succinctly, by Chris Morris’s BBC Reality Check, amongst many other examples. Even Liam Fox has junked it.

But however often it is debunked, and whoever does so, it shows no sign of subsiding and Brexit ideologues continue to pump out technical sounding briefings and to provide ersatz ballast for Johnson’s airy claims.

The Article XXIV claim

In a sense, strip away the roman numerals and all the claim amounts to is the proposal that the UK should seek a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU. There’s nothing new in that. What is distinctive is the idea that Article XXIV could allow this to happen even if there were no Withdrawal Agreement (WA) i.e. a no-deal Brexit.

I have the impression that some Brexiters may originally have had the idea that Article XXIV could be ‘invoked’ unilaterally by the UK. If so, that has now been dropped and, thus, the core problem revealed:  Article XXIV could only be used in the way envisaged if there was an agreement between the EU and the UK to do so. Far from being a way of ‘getting round’ no-deal Brexit, it requires a (different) deal.

Impossible is a big word in politics, but it is close to impossible that the EU would do this, and claims by some Brexiters to have been told otherwise in private are highly implausible. Thus Jean-Claude Juncker has said that the EU would not open trade talks with the UK after a no-deal Brexit unless the UK signed up to the main elements of the WA.

Michel Barnier has said the same thing in unequivocal terms: “if … the UK were to leave without a deal, let me be very, very clear. We would not discuss anything with the UK until there is an agreement for Ireland, for Northern Ireland, as well as for citizens’ rights and the financial settlement” (£). So has EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom who, speaking specifically of the Article XXIV claim said “it is completely wrong” - the report of which was emphatically endorsed by Sabine Weyand, formerly the Deputy Chief Brexit negotiator and now the Director-General for Trade.

Going round the same old loop

There should be no surprise about this. It has been the EU position all along, and Brexiter claims that it could be ignored have always been falsified by events – most obviously by the non-materialisation of the ‘row of the summer’ about Article 50 sequencing (i.e. that the first phase of the negotiations about the terms of leaving had to precede talks about the future). The same will undoubtedly happen this time, if we get to the point of testing it.

Indeed, it’s worth saying that the Article XXIV ‘solution’ is only being proposed now to the extent that the Brexiters have accepted what in the past they always refused to, namely that the EU is highly unlikely to re-negotiate the WA. Yet having accepted this they now expect to rip up all that has been agreed in the negotiations, ignore all the reasons why there was that agreement and those negotiations, and then to whip out their Article XXIV deal and say to the EU ‘but you won’t mind signing here will you’? It is beyond naïve.

Against this, what do the Brexiters say? They just take us right back to the pre-Referendum arguments: that ‘they need us more than we need them’, that the UK economy is (was?) the fifth largest in world, has a trade in goods deficit with the EU and, yes, that hardy perennial the German car industry.

And this is the nub of why Article XXIV is now the subject of such intense attention. It certainly wasn’t mentioned in the Referendum. It’s just a new, ‘technical-sounding’ way of resurrecting all the same false promises and naïve assumptions of their campaign – ignoring everything that has happened since – and imagining that there is a cost-free way of doing Brexit, including no-deal Brexit. It is at once their ‘return to go’ card and their ‘get out of jail free’ card.

What if the Brexiters are right?

But suppose that against every indication the EU accept what Brexiters say they will, then all that will be in place is a bare bones agreement on trade in goods (assuming they are serious in treating the one-page template that provides the legal minimum for such an agreement as the model they actually propose using). That would be an improvement on no deal, but there would still be an immediate and devastating cliff edge for services trade (let alone non-trade matters), in which the UK has a surplus with the EU.

For, remember, in this scenario there is no WA and therefore no transition period: the claim by Brexiters (for example in a recent widely reported letter to the Daily Telegraph) that their plan removes the need for any such transition and avoids any cliff edge at all is total nonsense. At best, as so often, they are treating tariff-free goods trade as the only issue that matters (i.e. to the neglect of non-tariff barriers and of services trade). At worst, they have persuaded themselves that Article XXIV allows a ‘standstill’ of every aspect of single market membership without the WA (as implied by the claim of some of them that “this [Article XXIV] is essentially a WTO form of transition”).

The Brexiters, of course, hope that such a bare bones agreement could be developed into a Canada +++ (or ‘Super Canada’) FTA. But even leaving aside the impact of the economic shock in the meantime, and even if such an FTA was eventually developed, it could never be a substitute for single market membership (indeed, this is a confusion that permeates the entire hard Brexit economic position).

But, for the avoidance of any doubt, all talk of Canada +++ is well beyond what the Brexiters are claiming for what Article XXIV would do the day after a no-deal Brexit and even that is based on a totally non-credible assumption of EU agreement to it.

Alternative Arrangements

In tandem with the GATT XXIV smokescreen is that of ‘alternative arrangements’ for the Irish border. Indeed, the two are very intimately linked. The issue of a hard border arises from leaving the single market (and, to an extent, the customs union). Brexiters have never understood or accepted that this is so, and Johnson this week has again rehearsed the idea that Irish border arrangements are something that properly belong in the negotiations about future trade terms, rather than needing to be settled as part of the WA. In this sense, he is reprising the ‘row of the summer’ mentioned above (one might say that Brexit has been going round in circles ever since the phase 1 agreement in December 2017 even though Johnson himself, at the time, applauded it).

In a certain way, it is true that the two are inter-linked (which isn’t so of the related Brexiter canard that the financial settlement is in some way a down payment for a trade deal). But as soon as the UK made leaving the single market and any customs union red lines, it meant that the border could not simply be left to be sorted out in the future. Even if there were eventually to be a Canada +++ FTA it could not prevent the need for a border somewhere.

This remains the case now. This week the Alternative Arrangements Commission presented its interim report (described by Boris Johnson as “brilliant”) on possible solutions. It is highly debatable how feasible they are (£), not least because although many of the technologies and administrative solutions may exist in isolation, the viability of bringing them together, in what time frame, and in ways consistent with the very specific political and historical complexities of the Irish border is simply unproven.

So the issue remains, as it always has, that whilst these alternatives can be explored – and doing so is written into the WA – they cannot substitute for the backstop (i.e. for what happens if nothing else that works can be found).

Making sense of all this

With all that’s being said at the moment it can be difficult to see the fundamentals of what it means, but there is some sense to be made of it.

First, it shows that for all the bravado of the Brexiters’ “do or die” no deal talk, and their claim that the case for Brexit is nothing to do with economics and everything to do with freedom and sovereignty, they know that no deal would be very damaging and – which was always the reason for the ‘Project Fear’ attack line - that for a lot of voters economics still matters. Indeed, this rush of claims about Article XXIV is highly significant because it marks a clear retreat from their previous insistence that trading on WTO (Article I) Most Favoured Nation terms alone would be perfectly fine for the UK.

Second, it shows the incoherence of the Brexiter claim about sovereignty – in the meaning of the UK being subject only to the rules and laws it makes for itself. For if that’s the central reason for Brexit, why is being subject to WTO rules and law so desirable? Why, indeed, is ‘Article XXIV’ greeted as a saviour (even if it were) because of the rights and obligations it creates for the UK and the EU, when following EU rules is such an affront?

Third, it shows that the criticism of the Brexiters for having no plan has hit home. Even Johnson is not able to rely solely on bluster about ‘believing in Brexit’ any more. The pressure to produce a viable approach has mounted. Hence the promulgation of all this technical-sounding guff about Article XXIV and solutions for the Irish border. This means that, for all the frustration of doing so, and for all that many voters won’t be listening, it is still important to keep providing technical rebuttals of the sort linked to throughout this post.

Fourth, although the current context is the leadership contest, what is going on is also (and maybe more) about what happens afterwards. This has two aspects.

The first aspect is that, potentially, it is providing a ladder for the ERG rebels against May’s deal to climb down. If some form of words can be found that re-emphasises the existing provisions to seek alternative arrangements for the border, and Canada +++ as the ultimate destination, that could allow Johnson to get a deal through Parliament (maybe accepting some rebellion from the ‘Spartans’ and the Grieve wing, but garnering Labour leaver MPs). I could just about see that happening, although it doesn’t currently look very likely and, to be clear, it would set up years of political problems and economic decline.

The second aspect for the future is rather more likely. Deliberately or not, an alibi is being prepared for the catastrophe of no-deal and, indeed, it is one that Brexiters are already rehearsing. For if that happens, Johnson and the Brexiters will continue to claim that ‘Article XXIV’ and ‘alternative arrangements’ for the border were perfectly possible. Only EU intransigence prevented it, and all the hardship of no-deal Brexit will be down to them. It will be a deeply dishonest claim. But that will hardly be a novelty. The big political question will be whether voters buy this lie or whether they turn on those whose every promise proved to be false.
 

Note about recent problems (for those who may have been affected): My apologies for some recent problems with this blog and its email notifications. Last Saturday I wrote a post entirely about Article XXIV and the false claims being made about it. Several hundred people read it, and many tweeted it, but on Sunday morning I took it down to make some corrections and additions. My initial plan was to re-post a revised version but in the end I decided to incorporate some of what was in it into this post. This led to some confusions on Twitter and also with the email alert service – people signed up for that will have received the post as an email text after the post itself disappeared. Meanwhile, because of a glitch in the way the alert service works, an alert for a post from a few weeks back was also sent. So it was all a shambles, for which, again, apologies.