Could post-Brexit Britain lead global AI regulation?

It’s been a relatively quiet Brexit news week, with just the usual drip-drip of news about its negative impact on everything from the availability of au pairs to the production of strawberries to Brittany Ferries’ cross-channel freight volumes. As I remarked in a recent post, each individual piece of damage may be fairly small and easily dismissed, but the cumulative impact is ever-more alarming.

So in this post I’m going to focus primarily on Rishi Sunak’s ambition for the UK to lead international regulation in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI), an ambition for which he sought to gain US support during his visit to meet President Biden this week. It was also announced that the government proposes to host a 'global summit' on AI in London this autumn.

Were this ambition to be met it would not, of course, be a benefit of Brexit – the UK could just as easily have proposed itself for this role as an EU member, and for reasons discussed below would have been in a better position to do so – but it is clearly part of an attempt to define Britain’s global role after Brexit.

The UK as an AI regulator

AI and its regulation are very rapidly emerging as huge economic and political issues and, as initially reported in the Financial Times (£), Sunak’s proposals might involve the UK hosting both a CERN-style AI research centre and an international regulatory authority based on that for nuclear energy. These are not terrible ideas. The UK has a relatively strong research base in AI and AI ethics – and the latter ought to serve as a reminder that despite the typical right-wing refrain that only STEM subjects are useful, and everything else is ‘woke’ or ‘mickey mouse’, the reality is very different. Philosophy and many other humanities and social science disciplines are quite as important in many business and regulatory fields. That’s long been almost a truism in Silicon Valley, the government’s favourite template for a post-Brexit innovative economy.  

The idea of the UK as an AI regulatory centre is also more realistic than previous ideas about how, after Brexit, the UK might create regulatory regimes in all kinds of areas in the expectation of attracting businesses to the UK because of its regulatory regime and, in due course, that regulatory regime emerging as the global regulatory standard. That approach was set out in the government’s January 2022 paper ‘The Benefits of Brexit’ (see, especially, pp. 24-29), as indicated by sub-headings such as ‘a sovereign approach’, ‘leading from the front’ and ‘setting high standards at home and globally’.

That is very much a relic of the now barely mentioned ‘Global Britain’ strategy, yet, as regards AI specifically, as recently as March of this year, in its policy paper introducing a consultation exercise that has still not been concluded, the government was talking hubristically of how “having exited the European Union we are free to establish a regulatory approach that enables us to establish the UK as an AI superpower.” Sunak’s latest ideas at least recognize that international regulation entails international agreement, rather than regulatory competition between unequal players.

In fact, they seem to owe something to, or at least are consistent with, the proposals in the June 2021 report by the Tony Blair Institute on the future of UK regulatory policy. These included that “the UK could strive to play a role as a regulatory convenor between the US and the EU … but only with the right focus and regulatory diplomacy strategy.”

The ironies of Brexit

Nevertheless, there is something deeply ironic about the UK, having not just left the EU but done so in a way that prioritizes national sovereignty in regulation, now proposing itself as being in the vanguard of international cooperation and regulation. Moreover, it serves to underscore the importance of hosting international regulatory organizations, and thus how much has been lost by Brexit leading to the departure from the UK of the European Medicines Agency and the European Banking Authority. Hosting such bodies can have a value way beyond themselves, as it tends to establish a whole eco-system of basic research and commercial application. It is very much to his shame that David Davis, when Brexit Secretary, fantasized that (£), somehow, the UK could continue to host those EU regulatory agencies post-Brexit. Never mind artificial intelligence, as so often Davis lacked the genuine sort.

That irony goes even deeper, given that for many Tory Brexiters the guiding thread of Brexit was not just national independence in regulation, but hostility to regulation in principle. As regards AI, that is also reflected in the proposals in the government’s consultation exercise, which are firmly tilted away from having a dedicated AI regulator even for the UK and towards a “light touch” regulatory model. In fairness, it could be said that developments in AI, and understanding of their implications, has moved very fast even in the three months since the exercise was launched, and everyone is scrambling to keep up. However, the Tories’ pre-disposition against regulation, both generally and in its current AI proposals, does damage the government’s credibility in now pushing to lead global AI regulation.

Moreover, Brexit has already exacted a price. As a Politico report this week explains, Sunak is making a pitch directly to the US because the UK doesn’t participate in EU-US forums like the Technology and Trade Council, where AI regulation is already being discussed, and the EU and the US, along with Canada, have already developed proposals for AI regulation, to be presented to the G7 this autumn. The UK’s supposed post-Brexit ‘nimbleness’ isn’t quite as nimble as all that, and, as in so many other areas, it suffers from not being ‘in the room’.

Mr. Sunak goes to Washington

Perhaps, as the Politico report suggests, the UK can have a role as leading the smaller players, outside the EU and the US. There’s quite a lot of evidence that Japan, in particular, and despite its initial anger about Brexit, which was seen as a breach of faith as regards Japanese investors in the UK, is keen to support and enable post-Brexit UK’s geo-political heft generally (not in relation to AI regulation, particularly), not least because of relations with China.

However, Sunak is clearly pitching for more than being just ‘the leader of the others’ as regards AI and its regulation. He will undoubtedly have been pleased with Biden’s words in the post-meeting press conference, saying “we are looking to Great Britain to help lead a way through this  … there is no country we have greater faith in to help negotiate our way through this”, but what this means in practice remains to be seen (‘to help’ is not quite a ringing endorsement).

Of course, no one expected the issue to be settled in this single meeting, and the real question is whether the UK is well-placed to deliver. Although the US-UK relationship still matters to both countries, at the most general level, as Rafael Behr put it in his discussion of Sunak’s Washington visit, “it is a bald strategic fact that Brexit makes a British Prime Minister less useful to Washington. Without leverage in Brussels, Sunak is not in a position to broker deals with Biden.” Unusually, this prompted David Frost to engage with critics of Brexit, ‘taking to Twitter’, as they say, to denounce Behr’s “declinist worldview” (‘declinism’ being the standard Brexiter way of recasting the observable damage caused by Brexit as the negativity of those who observe it).

Inevitably Frost’s complaint was, implicitly, based on his persistently simplistic understanding of sovereignty. First, he asserted that “the purpose of British policy is not to be ‘useful to Washington’ … it’s to pursue our own interests.” It apparently doesn’t occur to him that the UK might judge it to be in its own interests to be useful to Washington and, for better or worse, has often tended to do so, the Iraq War being an obvious example.

Frost then continued that he doesn’t “agree that those interests are best pursued [via EU membership, because] it is better to define and then pursue them ourselves, through alliances and partnerships of various kinds.” It apparently doesn’t occur to him that, as an EU member, the UK always defined and pursued its own interests, including the development of the single market and eastwards expansion, and that one means of pursuing them was through the ‘alliance and partnership’ of EU membership. And if Frost means that EU membership precluded the UK pursuing its perceived interests then, once again, Iraq gives the lie to that. There is hardly a more profound expression of sovereignty than the decision to go to war.

What Frost doesn’t comment on, though Behr mentions it, is the way that what used to be seen as the totemic Brexit gain of a US-UK Free Trade Agreement is not on the agenda of Sunak’s visit. That is not a news item, and was clear even before Liz Truss publicly acknowledged last September that there is no prospect of such a deal. Still, it is striking how quiet the Brexiters have gone considering that, in July 2017 Digby Jones was crowing that “remoaners” must be hating the fact that a US trade deal was “in the bag”. Even those who did not make such transparently false claims, but did hold out a deal as a key prize of Brexit, have never admitted that they simply got that wrong.

Pointing this out isn’t petulant point-scoring. It matters because it is becoming increasingly common for Brexiters like Frost, and some more neutral commentators, to talk as if various piecemeal deals on trade or security or other kinds of cooperation, including this AI role if it comes off, somehow justify leaving the EU. But, even leaving aside that some of the examples commonly given (e.g. AUKUS) didn’t require Brexit, and others (e.g. CPTPP) at best do no more than slightly mitigate the damage it causes, Brexit should be judged not on these things but against all the promises that Brexiters made for it. It’s one thing to make the best of a bad job, quite another to forget that it wasn’t sold in such dismal terms.

Can the UK be trusted?

All that aside, and quite apart from the way that Brexit inevitably reduced the UK’s influence with the EU and the US, the idea of the UK leading global regulation is undermined because the way Brexit was undertaken damaged Britain’s reputation for political stability and even for commitment to the rule of law. It is, to say the least, unfortunate that a country aspiring to a global regulatory role should not only have indicated its willingness to break international law but on more than one occasion asserted that, by definition, national sovereignty trumps such law. There’s a reputational price to be paid for Brexit Jacobinism.

Sunak may have introduced some stability and pragmatism, especially with the Windsor Framework, but his own words at the post-meeting news conference, about knowing that “some people have wondered what kind of partner Britain would be after leaving the EU”, show an awareness that the memories of the last seven years have yet to fade. Biden may have expressed “faith” in the UK but he won’t have forgotten the shenanigans over the Northern Ireland Protocol, and will still be watching to see how the Windsor Framework is implemented.

In any case, for all Sunak’s reassuring noises, he has only weak control over a party of which some sections are still in denial about why Liz Truss crashed and burned, and are openly flirting with ‘National Conservatism’. So the world is well aware that lurking behind Sunak’s gloss is a party seething with antagonism not just towards the EU and to Biden’s US, but towards the ECHR, IMF, OECD and even the WHO. Whilst such sentiments can be found in other countries, the fact of Brexit and of those voices being influential in the governing party certainly don’t help to make the UK seem a stable or attractive site for international regulatory leadership. You can hardly dismiss existing international institutions as the ‘Globalist Establishment’ whilst credibly proposing to establish a new one.

In any case, even leaving aside post-Brexit Britain’s trustworthiness, there are also questions about its operational capacity to undertake big projects like that of AI regulation. Although of a very different nature, nowhere is that more obvious than in the much-delayed introduction of import controls on goods from the EU. I discussed this most recently a couple of weeks ago, but at that time I missed something little-reported outside the specialist trade press, namely that earlier last month, apparently in response to industry lobbying of the government, the requirements for most fruit and vegetable imports have been relaxed, so that they will be treated as “low” rather than “medium” risk, with corresponding reductions in paperwork and physical inspections.

That’s good news so far as it goes, as it should reduce disruption to supplies (though it shouldn’t be forgotten that by doing so, it also increases the risks of a plant disease being imported). However, it also adds to the problems relating to ‘groupage’, which also proved to be so difficult when the EU introduced post-Brexit controls on imports from the UK. In practice, this means that mixed-loads of low-risk and medium-risk products are liable to be stopped for inspection, so even if someone is importing low-risk vegetables it won’t help them much if they are shipped in the same consignment as a medium-risk product. This will hit small businesses and specialist product lines especially hard as, again, happened when EU import controls were introduced.

The fact that the import control regime is still being worked out, years after the decision that Brexit meant ‘hard Brexit’ made import controls inevitable, shows how inept the Tory Brexit governments have been. Even now, less than four months before the next tranche of controls come in, those who have to operate them at ports don’t know what is going to be involved, to the extent of not knowing whether 1% or 30% of food imports from the EU will need to be checked.

All this is a big Brexit story in itself, as it is likely to lead to shortages of some products and higher food prices in the UK. But, amidst the general sense that ‘nothing works in the UK anymore’, it will surely also contribute to international scepticism about the idea of the UK leading AI regulation. After all, if post-Brexit Britain can’t even cope with the most basic consequences for the most basic goods of the regulatory border created by its new-found ‘independence’ from the EU, can it really be relied upon to take the lead in the most complex, advanced and fast-moving of global regulatory challenges?

Labouring a point

This brings me back to Labour’s Brexit policy, my discussion of which in last week’s post got a distinctly mixed reaction on social media. I’ll come back briefly to that, but as regards something like the UK pitching to lead AI regulation a Labour government would have an advantage over a Tory one simply because it would not be contaminated with the deregulatory madness and hostility to global institutions of the Brexit Ultras. That still doesn’t mean it would happen, but it would be a more favourable political environment within which to try it, though, by then, events will probably have overtaken us as regards AI. But the general point holds: in the eyes of many foreign capitals, a Labour government would be a return to normality.

Normality, here, means rationality and trustworthiness, but it would be unrealistic to think that, simply by electing a Labour government, the UK’s international reputation is going to be instantly restored. That will take a long time, which is partly why any prospect of (re)joining the EU is a long time away. Those insisting that this should be Labour’s policy for the next parliament need to ask themselves what value there would be in proposing something that would whip up huge controversy in the UK, to the point that there might not even be a Labour government, but if there was such a government with such a policy then the EU would be bound to turn the idea down unless or until it ceased to be controversial in the UK.

That observation isn’t negated by Michel Barnier’s widely-quoted comment this week that “the door is open” for the UK to join. Apart from the fact that it isn’t up to him (though he’s clearly a well-informed and credible voice), it would be absurd to interpret that to mean that an application for membership would be accepted unconditionally and without question. It’s not just the issue of negotiating the terms of membership, it’s whether there was a stable, sustained and unambiguous commitment in the UK to membership. Someone might say to an alcoholic spouse who has walked out of the family home that the door is always open for their return. It doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have to dry out before they were welcomed back.

Of course, I may well be proved wrong. Who, after the last seven years of politics, would be rash enough to make unequivocal predictions? But, having seen what became of the Brexiters’ pursuit of unicorns over those years, I’m not immediately persuaded of the merits of chasing what, at least for now, seem to be rejoiner hippocampi.

Book reviews

Russell, Meg and James, Lisa (2023). The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-284971-7 (Hardback). 416 pages. £25

De Rynck, Stefaan (2023). Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78821-568-8 (Hardback). 288 pages. £25

As time passes since the Brexit referendum and the process of leaving the EU that followed, there is a growing literature describing and explaining what happened. The two excellent books reviewed here are amongst the most recent and, whilst very different in focus and approach, each fills in a crucial piece of the jigsaw of what will become the history of Brexit. Moreover, they are pieces that fit together so that they can profitably be read as a pair which, together, reveal two very significant chunks of the Brexit picture. In fact, it would be illuminating to chart the precise points they fit together by mapping specific moments in the UK-EU negotiations with specific events in the UK parliament, although I won’t attempt that here.

Russell & James: The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit

Meg Russell and Lisa James’ book is an academic text, whose authors work at University College London’s Constitution Unit and thus bring a very high degree of academic credibility and expertise, and it is based on a major research study of ‘Brexit, Parliament and the Constitution’. As such, it draws on the Hansard record of parliamentary proceedings and a whole swathe of other official documents, secondary sources including other studies of Brexit and media reports, and a wide variety of interviews with participants in the events conducted by the authors (and others). These are all assiduously cited and there is an extensive bibliography, a compendious index, as well as a useful glossary of parliamentary terms. In short, it is a scholarly account but, for all that, a readable one and certainly accessible for general readers.

One problem with writing about Brexit is where to begin the story and where to end it. For the start, some authors (e.g. O’Rourke, 2018) go back as far as the Nineteenth century, but here, apart from a short preamble, the narrative begins with the steps that led to the 2016 referendum. The bulk of the book is a chronological account of parliamentary events, including their constitutional and legal aspects, from the referendum onwards. That chronology ends when the UK left the EU in 2020, apart from some fairly brief comments in the concluding chapter, which also serves to bring together some of the main themes in a non-chronological way.

This framing does mean that neither the negotiation of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement nor the Transition Period are covered, and nor are the subsequent arguments and negotiations about the Northern Ireland Protocol. However, that is perfectly reasonable since these did not give rise to a great deal, or certainly not to the same degree, as regards the specifically parliamentary focus of this book.

So far as that parliamentary focus is concerned, I doubt whether anyone will ever improve on Russell & James’s account. It is highly detailed, lucid, and painstakingly accurate. I suppose there may be future PhDs or other treatises which delve even more deeply into this or that aspect, but, if so, they will probably not be of huge interest to more general readers and, by definition, won’t be accounts of the parliamentary story as a whole. The authors effortlessly unpick the often extremely abstruse history of, amongst others things, Meaningful Votes, Indicative Votes, complex amendments and unusual procedures. This is all sure-footed and faultless.

For people who followed that story closely at the time, there probably won’t be any huge surprises in this book, although, even for them, there will certainly be many details which have since been forgotten. Moreover, as the authors rightly observe, “[e]ven those closely involved sometimes struggled to follow the intense and fast-moving developments” (p.6), so it is invaluable to have this meticulous record of events both as a reminder and also as a way of understanding, retrospectively, things which at the time were ignored or misunderstood or which have since been misrepresented.

Russell & James are assiduous in not offering a ‘point of view’ on Brexit itself, and I think that readers, regardless of their own views, will find this a fair and objective account. Where they do have a point of view is on the desirability and necessity of “respect[ing] parliament as the central democratic institution … upon which UK democracy depends” (p.6). Analytically, this is the main guiding theme of the book, and it leads to some acute observations, in particular about the problematic lack of clarity of the place of referendums in the UK constitution, and the risk of them creating a conflict between parliamentarians and the ‘will of the people’ (p.61).

This certainly happened in the case of the Brexit referendum, and was compounded by the fact that the campaign to leave the EU did not specify any kind of plan or model for how it was to be done. The authors show clearly throughout (but especially pp. 321-324) how different actors mobilised, sometimes inconsistently, contradictory views about popular, parliamentary and executive sovereignty, and they argue that there are significant lessons to be learned for the conduct of any future referendums, whatever the topic may be.

Closely allied with this, Russell & James make some acute points about the conduct of Theresa May. One is about her failure to involve a wide variety of stakeholders (in fact, to involve anyone, much) in the immediate post-referendum process of shaping Brexit. Others have made this point, but the authors’ distinctive insight is that this failure served to exacerbate the incipient gap between popular and parliamentary sovereignty: the ‘people had spoken’ but they only got to speak once, and it fell to parliament to give concrete form to what they had said. Secondly, they argue that May constantly talked as if ‘parliament’ were thwarting her Brexit plans, whereas, in fact, her staunchest opponents were the ‘Brexiteers’ within her own party (one minor criticism of the book is the consistent use of the term ‘Brexiteers’, their own self-preferred label, with its connotations of buccaneering freedom, rather than the more neutral ‘Brexiters’).

These points relate to what Brexiters wrongly claim, and many members of the public have come to believe, about this period, namely that it was one in which the 'remainer parliament’ tried to ‘thwart’ Brexit. So it is worth quoting Russell & James at some length:

“[The] central disagreement about what Brexit should mean was facilitated by the original lack of clarity in the referendum. But it took place between May’s government and Johnson’s supporters – not between the institution of government and the institution of parliament. The Conservative MPs who blocked May’s deal, including Johnson himself, believed that they were defending Brexit, rather than undermining it. This made it wholly misleading to blame parliament for ‘thwarting’ Brexit, when those involved had in fact used parliament to pursue an argument with May’s government.” (p. 313, emphases in original)

I agree with this analysis, but would add that it reveals something which is not so much about Brexit as about what is increasingly being called ‘Brexitism’. For whilst, as I suggested earlier, most readers would agree that Russell & James’ descriptions of the parliamentary events are fair and accurate, it is surely the case that at least some Brexiters will never accept their analysis of those events, including especially that just quoted. And that is because for a certain – perhaps small, but very influential – group of Brexiters none of the constitutional niceties or conventions really matter or, worse, they see them as the devices of ‘the elite’ and regard those who insist that they do matter as apologists for, if not indeed members of, that elite.

In that sense, for all that the book is neutral on Brexit itself, it cannot help but be partisan in relation to ‘Brexitism’. Indeed, the last sentences of the book imply as much:

[The] “restoration of constitutional norms is not an easy task, or a challenge in which they UK is alone. It is part of an international struggle, to defend democracy and institutions.” (p. 335)

This is not a criticism of the book, so much as to point to the way that Brexit, in its wider sense, does not admit of neutrality. For that reason, Russell & James do quite as great a public service in their concern to emphasise the importance of parliamentary democracy and constitutional propriety as they do in their forensic account of the events, sometimes arcane and often dramatic, that took place in the British parliament between 2016 and 2020.

De Rynck: Inside the Deal. How the EU Got Brexit Done

For most British readers, at least, Russell & James’ parliamentary focus will be relatively familiar, as will the sense it brings of the negotiations with the EU being part of the background context of the political battles that were taking place in the UK. For such readers, including most of those who followed Brexit closely, the complete shift in the centring of the story provided by Stefaan De Rynck’s book is therefore fascinating and informative. Here, what he at one point calls “the shenanigans of British politics” (p. 246) are very much the background context to the EU’s negotiating process with the UK which is his focus.

De Rynck, an experienced EU civil servant who was a senior aide to Michel Barnier throughout the negotiations, provides an insider account of that process. In that sense, unlike Russell & James, he was an actor in, rather than an analyst of, the events described and, although he also has high academic credentials, this is not written as an academic book. It is nevertheless highly detailed and, in places, replete with technical detail, whilst retaining readability – to a greater extent, in my view, than Barnier’s (2022) own, diary-based, book about the negotiations.

Like Russell & James, the approach is chronological, in this case running essentially from the referendum in 2016 to the finalization of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement at the end of 2020. It is based on official papers and media reports, as well as discussions held by the author with other participants and, of course, his own personal experience. It does not provide citations or a bibliography, which is a shame, but there is a good index and also a useful chronology of events listed at the beginning.

Although the focus and the centring of this version of the Brexit story is different to that provided by most, if not all, British analysts, including Russell & James, it is, indeed, recognizably the same story, and, in any case, De Rynck is deeply knowledgeable about UK politics. In particular, the consequences of there having been no defined UK plan for how to leave also runs through it. However, whereas the EU was as shocked as the UK by the referendum result, it much more quickly came to a settled view on what Brexit could and could not mean, something which didn’t exist in the UK polity and, arguably, still doesn’t.

That the EU was able to come to such a position, and stick to it pretty much unchanged throughout, was partly, on De Rynck’s account (and that of others), because of the very considerable efforts of Barnier and others to construct and maintain a consensus view amongst member states and other key actors. That was the exact opposite of May’s failure to even attempt to create such a consensus within the UK, and also the exact opposite of what Brexiters, at least, expected the EU to achieve. It enabled what De Rynck plausibly, and I would think accurately, depicts as a largely technocratic, highly transparent, and certainly patient approach to the negotiations.

I wonder, though, whether it doesn’t also reflect the fact that – notwithstanding the initial shock and, no doubt, in many quarters upset and even anger – Brexit simply didn’t have the emotional and political-psychological charge in the EU that it had in Britain. For sure, it was a matter of deep concern, perhaps most especially in Ireland, and De Rynck explains at several points how important it was to the EU to maintain solidarity with Dublin, contrary to UK beliefs that it would be “thrown under a bus” (p. 118). But Brexit never had the political toxicity in any EU country, or within the EU collectively, that it had in the UK.

The idea that the EU would be divided, including the idea that it would sacrifice Ireland’s interests, is one of numerous examples that permeate the book of how the UK never really understood or cared sufficiently about EU perspectives on Brexit. That doesn’t just apply to Brexiters, but remainers, too. De Rynck points out a number of fallacies, including that of those “remainers who thought Barnier was on their side” (p.2). However, the more consequential fallacies were those taken over from Brexiters by the UK government, because these significantly inflected the negotiations.

These fallacies, which re-appear over-and-over again in various forms in the book, include all the different versions of ‘cherry-picking’. It is instructive to have it confirmed that, as many have speculated, Theresa May did indeed initially approach Brexit as she had done her negotiations within the EU as Home Secretary, which was to “first opt-out of all membership obligations and [then] back in to those elements in the UK’s interest” (p.12). But that was just an instance of the wider inability of the UK government to understand the difference between negotiating as, effectively, a third country (or a third country in waiting) rather than as a member. That also explains what De Rynck calls the fallacy of the belief that ‘the EU always budges at the last minute’, as if Brexit were like a summit of member states.

Indeed, although his tone is scrupulously polite throughout, it is impossible to read De Rynck’s book without detecting a degree of bemusement at how UK diplomacy became so crass following Brexit, especially in the automatic, and in his assessment counter-productive, adoption of an adversarial approach to the negotiations, and the persistent belief that threats of ‘no deal’ (whether over the Withdrawal Agreement or the Trade and Cooperation Agreement) would produce meaningful concessions from the EU. As he pithily puts it, “the UK government played a game of chicken, by itself” (p. 247). Many of us in the UK made similar observations, but it is interesting to learn that this was, indeed, how it appeared to the EU negotiators.

Interesting, though, is perhaps too weak a word. It is also, at least for a British reader, embarrassing or worse to see just how unrealistic, if not downright ignorant, the UK government’s conduct was. Again, De Rynck is diplomatic about this, but reading between the lines, David Frost comes out particularly badly. For example, following Frost’s new threat “to walk away” from the talks in September 2020, he coolly writes that “Barnier debriefed his officials that the UK’s negotiator barely seemed to believe his own threat” (p231).

There is also an implication, for example in his discussion of the photo taken at the start of the Article 50 negotiations of David Davis, with no papers, grinning across the table at the Barnier team with their bulging files, that De Rynck felt a degree of perhaps professional sympathy with the UK civil servants. As he notes, “in the UK, the political bickering deprived the civil service of a direction to use its knowledge productively. Preparatory work by a civil service cannot make up for political indecisiveness” (p.40).

However, ultimately, even greater political decisiveness from the UK could not have compensated for the lack of realism of its demands in the face of the power asymmetry of the negotiating partners, which is effectively the story of the book. Although pro-Brexit readers probably won’t like it much, it will be hard for them to disagree with its central contention that the outcome for the EU was “close to the best-case scenario imagined in October 2016” (p. 245), if only because they, themselves, so frequently bemoan that they have not had ‘the Brexit we were promised’.

Final thoughts

That outcome is hardly surprising. There is a quote, mentioned almost in passing by Russell & James, from a Conservative MP saying that “right up until the indicative votes themselves [in 2019], a very large number of my colleagues had actually no idea at all what the Single Market or the Customs Union was [sic]” (p. 241). That is all too believable and yet also astounding, all the more so given that some of those same MPs were insisting that leave voters had ‘known exactly what they were voting for’ in 2016.

It is also hardly surprising that my reading of both these books reflects the interpretation in my own book about Brexit (Grey, 2021), although I should make it clear that Russell & James’ book is far more detailed, and far more authoritative, on the parliamentary events than mine, and that I barely touch on the EU negotiating stance at all, and certainly not with any of the knowledge of De Rynck. Overall, from my perspective, Russell & James demonstrate that the referendum anointed as ‘the will of the people’ a series of promises that could never be delivered by parliament nor, as De Rynck shows, by the negotiations with the EU.

That was because the promises were contradictory, made on the basis of ignorance, if not downright lies, and could never be turned into reality. These two excellent books illuminate much of how and why this was so. No doubt we will see many more books about Brexit in the years to come that do the same. But perhaps the one we should wait and hope for will be written by one of the leading Brexiters, finally acknowledging these truths.

References

Barnier, Michel (2022). My Secret Brexit Diary. A Glorious Illusion. Cambridge: Polity (English translation).

Grey, Chris (2021). Brexit Unfolded. How No One Got What They Wanted (and Why They Were Never Going to). London: Biteback Publishing.

O’Rourke, Kevin (2018). A Short History of Brexit. From Brentry to Backstop. London: Pelican.

A depressing anniversary

It’s now exactly five years since I started this blog and, as it enters its sixth year, with a pleasing symmetry, it will today have its six millionth visit. I must admit that I didn’t really anticipate when I started that I'd still be writing it now, over 300 posts and about a million words later, or that it would settle into a kind of weekly newsletter. I most certainly hadn’t imagined that it would become so widely read. I’m enormously grateful to everyone who has read it or in some way shared or recommended it to others.

Looking back at the very first post there are several things in it which I’d express slightly differently (unlike a certain more famous blogger, I don’t retrospectively change old posts) but, on the whole, it has held up fairly well, and these lines, in particular, now seem almost prophetic:

“Over a whole swathe of issues (the leaving process, the nature of the single market, the way that the WTO and trade deals work etc.) the Brexit position is composed of, at best, half-truths or just outright fantasies. It is therefore inevitable that the coming months and years will see a series of collisions between these fantasies and the realities (and equally inevitable that Brexiters will blame this on others).”

Here we are, five years later, and exactly this dynamic continues to play out though, given that Britain has now left the EU, in ever more bizarre ways.

The concrete impacts of being outside the single market and customs union in terms of damage to trade, supply chain disruption and labour shortages are, as discussed in last week’s post, becoming harder to ignore. But as also noted in that post, though only in passing, this is provoking contradictory responses from Brexiters.

Initially, they argued that these impacts were just a remainer invention. That has become untenable as the shortages continue to grow, affecting everything from school meals to the profound and deepening social care crisis, threatening the ‘cancellation’ of Christmas and even, to the amusement of some, shortages of some beers in arch-Brexiter Tim Martin’s Wetherspoon’s pubs. Meanwhile, the latest trade figures show what the Food and Drink Federation call a “disastrous” decline of food and drink exports to the EU since the end of the transition, with meat and dairy products especially hard hit.

In the face of this, there is now a split between those arguing that the shortages and/or trade declines are essentially nothing to do with Brexit, and that to say otherwise is remainer propaganda, and those admitting they are very much to do with Brexit, but claiming that this is the fault of the EU.

It’s not Brexit!

The first of these is a continuation of the tired old Project Fear line that has served Brexiters so well both before and since the referendum. It is achieved by the familiar sleight of hand of exaggerating warnings (or, now, reports) of Brexit damage so as to create an absurd and easily-demolished straw man. The current straw man is that the shortages are entirely caused by Brexit.

Thus former Brexit Party MEP Ann Widdecombe scoffs that “you cannot put the absence of food on the shelves solely down to Brexit” and thus, supposedly, “clinically crushes attempts to blame Brexit for the UK supply chain crisis”. At the more intellectual end of the spectrum, the pro-Brexit former Chief Economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Julian Jessop, points, rightly, to global issues, including the pandemic, as a major cause of the supply shortages with Brexit as “an additional factor”. Thus remainers are wrong “to have seized on the ongoing disruptions to supply chains as proof that ‘Project Fear’ was right all along”.

The first difficulty with such arguments is that, so far as I am aware, there are no serious or reputable claims that all the shortages are “solely” or even mainly caused by Brexit. There may well be people posting on social media saying it, just as such postings can be found making just about any claim, but basing counter-arguments on that is, precisely, to erect a straw man.  ‘Mainstream media’ reporting invariably says Brexit is only one cause and, if anything, tends to downplay its role. I said the same thing last week, whilst making the point that it is also the factor which is unique to Britain and, uniquely, chosen by Britain.

The other difficulty, most evident in Widdecombe’s case, is the slippage from correctly saying the shortages are not solely or mainly due to Brexit to at least implying that they are nothing to do with Brexit. That is both incorrect in itself, but also misses the way that, even without being the main factor overall, Brexit inflects the shortages in the UK in particular ways for particular products. Thus whilst Brexit is almost certainly not a factor in shortages of, for example, semiconductors, and only one of the factors in, for example, the shortage of timber – both of which can be seen globally, and affect the UK in a way similar to other countries – it is almost certainly the major factor in shortages of fresh produce.

This is because of the nature of UK supply chains which are heavily reliant on EU produce, and the specific way Brexit impacts on cabotage rules (where and how often a haulier can load/ unload goods). For these and other Brexit-related reasons (e.g. shortage of labour to pick UK produce) we see widespread shortages of fresh produce in UK shops but not in EU shops. Again it’s not an all or nothing explanation – there are some produce shortages in the US, for example – but the point is that whereas Brexit is low to non-existent on the list of causes in the case of semiconductors it is high on the list for fruit and vegetables.

Of course such shortages have a particular significance in that they impinge directly on the general public. So the ‘denialists’ have important reasons to discredit or downplay Brexit as a cause of such shortages. One is simply a psychological investment in Brexit as an unalloyed good. That presumably explains the contradiction that at the same time as disowning the shortages, some Brexiters are hailing rising wages as a Brexit benefit – a dubious claim in itself, but bizarre when, for it to be true, the shortages would have to be caused by Brexit. But more importantly it is political. There is a battle underway to control the narrative of what the shortages mean because if they come to be associated in the public mind with Brexit then that will do much to discredit the entire project.

The stakes in that battle are likely to increase because the shortages are likely to intensify assuming UK import controls are introduced over the coming months, and will do so in any case to the extent that UK demand for EU fruit and vegetables always peaks in the winter. It is also likely that food prices will rise (£). This battle to control the narrative has been underway since the end of the transition period, and so far it has been fairly easy to blame disruptions on the pandemic. As that wanes in credibility, and to the extent that simple denial is implausible, so too do Brexiters switch the emphasis to blaming others for Brexit damage.

It is Brexit (but it’s not our fault)!

Hence last weekend’s Mail on Sunday carried an editorial with a striking headline: “Let’s unite with the EU to crush the curse of border bureaucracy”. This attracted much ribald comment since, at first blush, it sounded like a call to re-join the EU. Needless to say it was no such thing. Instead, acknowledging the reality of border checks and delays, it was a roll out of almost all the fantasies the Brexiters have nurtured for so long. In particular, it revived the idea (without using the word) that there could be still be something close to frictionless trade despite having left the single market and customs union. The familiar suggestion is that this could be achieved by a mixture of new border technology and accepting UK product standards as ‘equivalent’ to the EU’s because they haven’t, in fact or as yet, changed very much from those of the EU.

At heart, this represents a complete refusal to accept the consequences of hard Brexit, embodying the persistent ideas that none of the things Brexiters like need to change as a result and/or that the UK should have a special status different to other third countries. In some discussions of the article it was suggested that this should indeed be possible because not all third country-EU relationships are identical. But whilst that is true (recall, for example, the Barnier staircase), it is only true within a restricted range of possibilities. It certainly doesn’t mean that the EU could simply grant the UK the benefits of a regulatory union (i.e. the single market) and a customs union without the UK being bound by their conditions and constraints.

Fundamentally, the article shows a continuing and total misunderstanding that it is the single market and customs union which abolished the red tape which, with Brexit, the UK has re-instated for itself. The complaints about that, in turn, reprise the peculiar way that Brexiters talk as if Brexit had been done to the UK, in this case by the EU raising trade barriers, rather than chosen by the UK. Existing regulatory alignment is irrelevant to this because the UK refuses to relinquish the right to diverge, or to accept external enforcement, on grounds of sovereignty. That is its choice, but it brings consequences. Similarly, whilst the MoS bemoans that “we are supposed to impose our own tiresome and self-harming restrictions on goods coming into the UK from the EU” (i.e. import controls) it refuses to understand that ‘tiresome and self-harming restrictions” are what the UK chose for itself in enacting hard Brexit.

Rather than accept these basic facts, the article and its defenders ascribe Brexit’s failure to the EU’s inflexibility and its supposedly ‘political’ approach to the Brexit negotiations. This recycles all the ideas which have been endlessly debunked since 2016, both by commentators and by events. Embedded within them is the implication that the EU has not just punished the UK unnecessarily but miscalculated its own interests (a revived version of the ‘German car makers’ argument), and that as an ex-member the UK should have some sort of ‘alumni’ status or could be ‘out and yet in’.

Mentioned in passing within the MoS article is the role of Michel Barnier, with the suggestion that he pursued a particular, political, agenda that was both punitive to the UK and, by implication, damaging to the EU. This is becoming the received Brexiter wisdom and is a thesis elaborated by Matthew Lynn in the Spectator recently. Its fatuity has been pulled apart by Tom Hayes of the Brussels European Employee Relations Group (who has also provided a separate analysis of Barnier’s negotiating approach), and I won’t add to that.

However, there is one particular aspect I want to highlight: Lynn writes as if the terms of Brexit, both as regards the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) including the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), were the creation of Barnier. That is in line with the habitual refusal of Brexiters to take any responsibility whatsoever for Brexit. But the fact is that both deals were negotiated with and agreed by the UK.

Stuck in the past

This has two implications. One is that the agreements were framed and limited by the UK’s own red lines about Brexit – especially exiting the single market and customs union, but also, under Johnson and Frost, of prioritising sovereignty above all else in the TCA and of removing May’s backstop in the case of the NIP. It was these choices rather than the EU’s (still less Barnier’s) ‘inflexibility’ which meant Brexit took the form it did. The other is that both the agreements were trumpeted by Boris Johnson as triumphs. In the case of WA/NIP it was lauded as the ‘oven-ready deal’ upon which he was subsequently elected. In the case of TCA he said he had confounded his critics by delivering the ‘cakeist’ deal they had said was impossible. Nowhere in any of this was it said that these were sub-optimal deals forced on the UK government against its wishes and priorities.

These facts make current Brexiter narratives both wearyingly the same as they have been since 2016 and yet newly idiotic. For they are talking as if it were still 2016 (or 2017 or 2018) and these deals were still to be made. For that matter, they talk as if the approach they currently advocate hadn’t already been tried and failed in the first half of the May administration. In a sense it doesn’t even matter if all their beliefs about what the EU could, would or should do were correct. As a matter of empirical fact the deals have been done and they are not in line with what Brexiters claimed and promised they would deliver. There is scope for the TCA to be reviewed, but it can be stated with categorical certainty that there is no way that the EU would ever agree, or would even be able to agree, to revise it in the way that the Brexiters envisage.

With almost as much certainty it can be said that the EU will not agree to change the core provisions of the NIP, and in part for similar reasons. For whilst the DUP have yet again stated their opposition to the NIP, an opposition shared by many Brexiters and, to a large degree, the British government, none of them has come up with a plausible alternative. In this sense, again, it’s as if we were still in the pre-agreement period and, moreover, it’s based on the fundamental refusal of many Brexiters to even accept that the Irish border issue is a real one, rather than the concoction of Brussels and Dublin.

It is beyond ridiculous that the Brexiters still don’t understand these obvious facts, which they could if only by imagining what the UK’s stance would have been as a member of the EU had it been another country that was leaving, including to the Irish border if that country had been Ireland. Or, if that involves too much of an intellectual stretch for them, then they might simply consider the matter in their own terms: having spent decades denouncing the EU as an inflexible, bureaucratic, legalistic, lumbering, self-serving ‘protectionist racket’ – decades, indeed, giving these as reasons the UK should leave – why is their entire strategy for how to do Brexit ‘properly’ predicated on the EU being flexible, creative, nimble, accommodating and non-protectionist?

Nothing new, except deepening depression

Very little in this post is new, but that is unavoidable whilst the Brexiters remain stuck on the same Mobius Strip in which the same failed solutions are proposed to the same problems. It also means that, as per last week’s post, we are still in a situation where there is a certain amount of realism developing (e.g. in recognizing the reality of things like supply shortages and trade barriers), but absolutely no truthfulness from Brexiters about the reasons for these realities. With that comes their pathological inability to take responsibility for the choices they made – and urged upon voters – and, always, the sickening insistence, at once treacly with self-pity and sodden with aggression, that it is all someone else’s fault.

There’s something extraordinarily depressing about the fact that all this is going to be played out yet again in the next few weeks as the NIP grace periods some to an end (I suspect they will be extended again by agreement with the EU), and David Frost resumes his attempt to renege on what he and the government agreed in 2019-20. That this is in prospect is shown by this week’s announcement that the government is to postpone implementing the rules on which goods qualify for “unfettered access” when travelling from Northern Ireland to Great Britain (and because this issue interacts with the wider one of introducing import controls, and because the necessary port facilities aren’t in place, it seems quite likely that they, too, will slip again).

Crucially, the reason given was the government’s intention to negotiate major changes to the NIP, which means the pre-summer collision with the EU will resume and intensify. That isn’t to deny there may be some scope for revising parts of it, perhaps including the Article 10 provisions on state aid (£). But it has been clear from the time it was agreed that (despite having agreed it) Johnson’s government don’t accept the basic premise of the Irish Sea border and all that comes with it.

It’s even more depressing to think that, if I am still writing this blog in five years’ time, I will probably be able to refer to that very first post five years ago as containing a still relevant truth. For what it is worth, I think I will still be writing it, at least if there are still readers for it. After all, there may be some value in having kept a continuous record of the folly and failure, the dishonesty and dimwittedness, of what has been done to all of us by the worst of us. There would seem to be no prospect of that, if nothing else, being in short supply.

 

My book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) recounting and analysing what happened from the referendum result to the end of the transition period was published by Biteback on 23 June 2021. It can be ordered from Biteback, or via other online platforms, as a paperback or e-book. For reviews, podcasts etc. see this page.

Zeno's Brexit

The Ancient Greek philosopher Zeno articulated a series of paradoxes, one of the most famous being the ‘dichotomy’ or ‘race course’ paradox. In order to reach a destination, a runner must first reach the half-way point, but to reach that point must first get a quarter of the way there, and to do that must get an eighth of the way there, and so on. Since this generates an infinite sequence that never quite adds up to the full distance, it is impossible for the runner ever to reach the destination point.

Brexit has often felt like being stuck on such a never-ending journey, and never more so than over the last two months. Recall that the last of the scheduled rounds of the transition period talks finished at the beginning of October. Then Boris Johnson set 15 October as the absolute deadline, after which he would walk away, which he sort-of did but actually didn’t once Michel Barnier had placated him by using the ‘right words’ about the negotiations. Then it was reported that 19 November was regarded by the EU as the absolute deadline, but here we still are.

Endless rumours

Throughout, there have been leaks of progress and of the opposite, and speculations at the end of each week that ‘early next week’ will see the breakthrough of a deal, or the abandonment of the search for a deal. This week has been no different.

Early in the week it was rumoured that the EU was about to ‘cave in’ to British demands but by Thursday there were reports that the EU might pull out of the talks today (Friday). There were reports that Michel Barnier had called an ‘urgent’ meeting of fisheries ministers for Friday, with speculations this might betoken an imminent deal … or an imminent collapse of talks … but within hours it became clear that that it was not urgent, and probably betokens nothing. At the time of writing, it has just been reported that contrary to previous reports Barnier will be coming to London after all and there will be talks over the weekend. Some reports suggest a deal may be done – yes – early next week. Others are now talking of the EU summit of 10 and 11 December as being the crucial date.

So we remain in the hall of smoke and mirrors. We do know, so familiar have they become, that the stumbling blocks are level playing field, fisheries, and governance. One possibility that has been touted (£) as regards one or both of the former two is to use review clauses so as to, in effect, create interim agreements allowing a deal to be done in time (although even so it will take very nimble footwork in both the UK and the EU to ratify such a deal).

This is both a plausible and a depressing prospect. Plausible because it offers both sides a way of ‘kicking the can’ down the road in the way that has often characterized the Brexit process. Depressing because it would mean that, come 1 January, the answer to the question ‘is there a deal or not?’ would be a less than resounding ‘yes and no’. Actually, this will be the answer anyway because there will be a myriad of things left in the air even if there is a deal. These include financial services regulation (of which more below) and carbon trading. Still, it would be particularly anticlimactic if the very areas so long held up as preventing a deal were to be left hanging ambiguously.

Lack of trust

Even if this, or something like it, is what happens it seems (to me) that the issue of governance cannot be fudged in this way. An imprecise or 'gentleman’s' agreement to settle fine details later, on the basis of trust, might once have been possible. But it is no longer so because of the manner in which the UK has conducted itself.

It’s actually possible to identify a very precise moment when trust was broken: it was Sunday 10 December 2017 when the then Brexit Secretary David Davis said on the Andrew Marr show that the phase 1 agreement of the Article 50 talks was merely “a statement of intent” and not binding. It was this which led the EU to put that agreement into legal text (which Theresa May then rejected as unacceptable because of the Northern Ireland-only backstop, but to which Johnson later signed up).

Davis’s 'gaffe' was pivotal in undermining trust and was compounded by several other episodes including the way that Boris Johnson treated the Political Declaration in a similarly cavalier way. Both cases showed that in the absence of a legally binding text, Brexit Britain could not be trusted to keep to its agreements. Even worse, and the final nail in the coffin of trust in the UK, was the Internal Market Bill (IMB) with its clauses which even reneged on what had been the legally binding treaty.

It is such considerations, but especially the IMB, which surely lay behind Ursula von der Leyen saying this week that “'we want to know what remedies are available in case one side will deviate in the future, because trust is good but law is better. And crucially in the light of recent experience a strong governance system is essential to ensure what has been agreed is actually done”. It should be said that whilst many of the costs of Brexit are inherent to it, this squandering of goodwill and of international reputation by the UK is one of the costs that have arisen not because of Brexit itself but from the incompetent, antagonistic and dishonest way in which it has been executed.

Nowhere near ready

On the subject of incompetence, it is becoming ever clearer just how woefully unprepared the UK is for the end of the transition, even with a deal. Northern Ireland businesses, in particular, face “a very, very difficult time” in January. In England, a trial run of France’s new border procedures this week saw massive lorry queues build up in Kent. This was not, as leading customs expert Dr Anna Jerzewska explained, because the French operation wasn’t working correctly. It was because it was working correctly but the UK systems are not yet operational.

The scale of these problems was indicated in a leaked letter from the Road Haulage Association, describing the process of working with the government on border issues as “a complete shambles”, whilst many of the detailed practical complexities are explained by international freight forwarder John Shirley on the UCL European Institute website. None of this is news to those experts who work in this area, nor to those who have listened to them over the last few years (hence readers of this far from expert blog would have been well aware of it). But their concerns were dismissed as Project Fear and swept aside by unkeepable promises of ‘frictionless trade’.  

It is almost beyond belief, though also entirely predictable, that Michael Gove is blaming the now inevitable disruption on the EU for its ‘rules are rules’ approach to border controls. Nothing more clearly illustrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Brexit than for one of its leading architects to eschew responsibility for the inevitable adverse consequences of what he advocated.

Whilst much attention is being (belatedly) given to the mechanics of goods trade, it shouldn’t be forgotten that built in to the government’s preference for hard Brexit are other consequences, including the still unresolved issue of data protection adequacy. This is hugely significant for both trade and for security cooperation, but does not form part of the negotiations being instead reliant on a decision by the European Commission. So no one yet knows what the situation will be on 1 January and probably will not know for a while afterwards.

Then there is the inevitability of a major worsening of market access for services trade of all sorts. That goes well beyond financial services, of course, but these – whatever their public unpopularity – are a major part of the UK economy and they generate significant employment and tax revenues. How they will be regulated is also not part of the future terms negotiations. It has long been known that they will lose ‘passporting’ rights and the remaining best hope is an ‘equivalence regime’. But as Vicki Pryce, former Joint Head of the Government Economic Service, has explained we know for a fact that this will not be in place for January. Within this general picture, there are also particular issues emerging for European derivatives trading in London (£), a market where many trillions of assets are traded under the regulation of the European Securities and Markets Authority.

Follow the money? (A short detour into political theory, which some may want to skip)

The chilling effect of Brexit on financial services leads to some interesting questions. I am regularly told (sometimes in rather lofty tones, as if such a thought had never occurred to me) that my discussions of Brexit would be improved if only I were to ‘follow the money’ which, apparently, explains all. What this usually implies is some version of the argument outlined by George Monbiot this week that Brexit is the creature of one kind of capitalism – which he calls “warlord capitalism” – that has captured the Tory Party and is at war with another kind of capitalism which he calls “housetrained” and is horrified by Brexit. That’s an important observation, and as he says relates to the extraordinary shift in the modern Conservative Party away from its traditional business base, including the City, which has in turn had a big impact on how Brexit has developed.

But an observation is all it is – it doesn’t explain why it is the ‘warlord’ money rather than the ‘housetrained’ money which is being followed by the Tory Party (or anyone else). Following the money is sometimes a good dictum, but it doesn’t take you very far when it points in quite contradictory directions. To understand why the Tory Party has taken the path it has would require a detailed study of its recent history and its funding, taking in why it incubated such extreme Euroscepticism (as it was then called) long before its funding base shifted, and considering the role of its mainly elderly and nationalist membership.

Beyond that, this type of analysis rests, at least implicitly, on a version of Marxist theory whereby the (economic) base is primary and to a greater or lesser extent determining of the (cultural) superstructure. Culture then becomes little more than the dancing puppet of economic paymasters and their interests. When it comes to political explanation, that almost inevitably leads proponents of such analysis to some form of ‘false consciousness’ argument in order to explain why so many people support and vote for things which are against their economic interests.

And, indeed, this is precisely where Monbiot ends up, when he writes that he sees “Nigel Farage and similar blowhards as little more than smoke bombs, creating a camouflage of xenophobia and culture wars. The persistent trick of modern politics – and it seems to fool us repeatedly – is to disguise economic and political interests as cultural movements” (my emphases added).

The limitations of such an analysis have long been identified. In particular, it’s instructive to recall how in the 1980s writers on the left, especially the sociologist Professor Stuart Hall, started to explain that Thatcher kept winning elections because contrary to the assumption of economic primacy, in Hall's words, “material interests … are not escalators which automatically deliver people to their appointed destinations, ‘in place’, within the political ideological spectrum”. It’s an important insight that remains true.

Coming to Brexit specifically, viewing leave voters as the unwitting dupes of ‘warlord capitalism’ and funded by Robert Mercer doesn’t take us anywhere. For whilst (some) remainers may believe that to be so, it has a precise mirror-image in the repeated claim made by (some) leavers that remainers are the mouthpieces of the ‘global elite’ and funded by George Soros. Of course remain voters no more accept that to be true of themselves than leave voters accept the mirror-image accusation aimed at them. Neither claim has any analytical value, or explains anything. Rather, they are tactics to discredit or demonize opponents.

Ultimately, the injunction to follow the money is not just reductive but is also a circular and unfalsifiable argument. For just as some now say that the fact of Brexit is explained by capitalist manipulation of leave voters so too, had remain won, some would have said that that was explained by the capitalist manipulation of remain voters. All you have to do, they’d say then as they do now, is to ‘follow the money’. In fact, it would very likely be the same people saying it, since Monbiot virtually does so when pointing to how the remain campaign was funded by the likes of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Trying to explain Brexit by ‘following the money’ takes you into an analytical cul-de-sac.

So whilst the debate about the relationship between economics and culture is a perennial one, and discussing it is well beyond the scope of this blog, in general I think of them as inextricably bound threads, not base and superstructure. I prefer both/and explanations to either/or explanations, prefer contingency to determinism, and see as much cock-up as conspiracy.

In any case, what this blog does cover is the weekly goings on and how they fit into the wider Brexit process. It would be absurd to think that each twist and turn ‘is exactly what the hedge funds wanted all along’ but if one did hold so reductive a view it would be as tedious to keep writing it as it would to keep reading it.

Back to the same old stuff

Coming back now to the main line of discussion, namely preparedness for the end of the transition, overall, a government report leaked this week identifies “notable risks” of “systemic economic crisis” potentially leading to public unrest in the new year due to a combination of Brexit, Covid and other factors (flu, flooding). Again it is fair to say that such a scenario was not inherent in Brexit but arises from the way it has been done. In particular, it was blindingly obvious in June that Covid meant that ending the Transition Period in the middle of the following winter was utterly reckless. That it was not extended can be blamed primarily upon the influence of a relatively small group of Tory MPs – and the larger but still small section of the population who share their views - whose obsessional hatred of the EU has made them immune to all reason. That an entire country should have its fate decided by such people is both a tragedy and an indictment of the political system.

Even now they are proposing as tests for the acceptability of any deal that may be done criteria which, as Professor Anand Menon of King’s College London points out, are effectively impossible for a deal to meet and which have already been failed by the Withdrawal Agreement which has been signed. And even now, as Brendan Donnelly, Director of Federal Trust, writes it is the “specific dysfunctions of the Conservative Party” which will frame whether Johnson agrees to a deal or not. It is already reported (£) that the ERG will oppose a deal if it doesn’t respect their peculiar view of ‘sovereignty’.

Donnelly also mentions that Labour’s stance on backing any deal will also play a part. What that part will be is unclear, not least because the nature of any parliamentary vote that may be held is unclear. There will be no straightforward ‘meaningful vote’ to accept or reject a deal, and there are various different, including some quite complex, mechanisms the government could use for ratification. Depending which is chosen, parliament would have various more or less effective ways of delaying, and possibly even derailing, ratification, posing different choices and options for those wishing to do so.

It is clear that Labour are split on how to approach this (whatever ‘this’ turns out to be), and although the rumours suggest that Keir Starmer will want his MPs to support a deal whatever it contains others are arguing for abstention. I’ve been critical of Labour’s stance on Brexit for years, and of Starmer’s near silence on it since becoming leader, but I can see that this is a genuinely difficult dilemma. The reason for that is that whilst no deal would be worse than a deal – not least for Labour voters – they are both bad outcomes to different degrees. The Tories may have put themselves in the position of having to pick from them, but why should Labour allow itself to be complicit? Yet to the extent that supporting, opposing or abstaining might all affect the outcome (assuming a sizeable Tory revolt) then that complicity is unavoidable.

There will also be significant parliamentary issues in the event of no deal. Of course there would be no vote on that, but there would be votes on the Internal Market Bill and, with the possibility of a substantial Tory revolt on that, it is questionable whether the UK would have a functioning internal market of its own, at the very moment it left the single market of the EU. This would be a profound crisis in its own right.

Back to Zeno

All this remains up in the air, with – really, this is astonishing - barely more than a month to go. For now we continue on the journey that apparently never ends. But Zeno’s paradox may not be an apt reference after all because, as well as suggesting that the race course can never be completed (the ‘progressive’ version of this paradox), it equally means that it can never be started (the ‘regressive’ version of the paradox). And, alas, we know that it did start, over four years ago.

So perhaps we need to look instead to Classical mythology to describe our situation, maybe to Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up the hill or, as seems more appropriate to the painfulness of it all, poor old Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle day after day.

Prometheus of course was being punished for having stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, and Sisyphus was an all-round bad egg (murdering, cheating and generally getting above himself).

It is not clear what crime we have committed to have to endure the endless torture of Brexit.

Blockades, mythical and metaphorical

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

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

The myth of the ‘blockade’ threat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wider attack line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The IMB at home and abroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The underlying problem: trying to turn lies into policy

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

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

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

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

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

What now?

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

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

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

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