Ignorance and irresponsibility continue into the final days of the Brexit negotiations

The revelation that Dominic Raab had not until now “quite understood” the UK’s reliance on the Dover-Calais crossing for goods trade between the UK and the EU has attracted widespread criticism and understandable mockery. It is indeed shocking that the Cabinet Minister in charge of Brexit should only now grasp something so basic to his brief. Yet it is not surprising. It is part of a pattern of ignorance for which there is plenty of evidence – including Raab’s own bemusement (prior to his current role, but after years of campaigning for hard Brexit) that leaving the customs union would increase bureaucracy.

It would be wrong to single out Raab. Scratch the surface of just about any prominent Brexiter and the same kinds of ignorance are revealed. It’s perfectly understandable and reasonable that no one, on any side of the debate, has anything like a comprehensive knowledge of Brexit and its effects – it is just too huge and hydra-headed a phenomenon for that to be possible. But it’s not at all unreasonable to expect politicians – who, after all, have access to numerous resources, including the excellent House of Commons Library briefings – to understand the core, basic issues of what they argue for. Especially when that is so fundamental and total a shift in national history as Brexit.

That they do not have such an understanding has been revealed time and time again. Sometimes it is ludicrous, as with the revelation that convinced Brexiter MP Nadine Dorries was asking as recently as last January what a Customs Union was and, when it was explained, opined that as it sounded complicated that confirmed that Britain should leave. Or the belief of another Ultra, Andrew Bridgen, that English people are entitled to Irish passports. Or the mistaken claim, made by just about every pro-Brexit MP, but let’s take John Redwood as an example, that the UK currently conducts its non-EU trade on WTO terms. It would be possible to fill a book – and no doubt, one day, someone will – of such nonsenses.

At least Dorries, Bridgen and Redwood have never had any responsibility for delivery (though that isn’t to say they don’t influence it). Unlike David Davis who believed that post-Brexit the UK could negotiate trade deals with individual EU member states. That was a particularly egregious error given that one of the Brexiters’ most fervent complaints is that membership of the EU Common Commercial Policy precludes Britain, as a member state, from doing such deals.

Almost worse than outright ignorance is the lofty deployment – Rees-Mogg is a particular specialist - of supposedly technical arguments, almost invariably on the basis of semi-digested factoids, or half-truths, or selective quotations, or just plain errors. Examples include periodically recurring claims that ‘an EU Report’ has shown how there can be a soft border in Ireland (it’s not an EU Report and it doesn’t show that), or that there is a frictionless border between the USA and Canada, or Switzerland and France (there isn’t, in either case). Again, there's a book to be filled of similar examples.

To repeat, the fault here is not making errors – we all do that, myself certainly included – it is regurgitating them endlessly even when the errors are corrected. It should also be said that there are plenty on the Remain side who are guilty of the same thing, and that it is not confined to Tory politicians (Labour’s repeated claim that a Customs Union with the EU would solve the Irish border issue is an especially gross example, as is Jeremy Corbyn’s mistaken claim that it is impossible to be in the single market if not a member of the EU but that it is possible to ‘retain the benefits’). The difference, though, at least as regards remainers, is that the policy the UK is pursuing is that of the Brexit, so the onus is on Brexiters to get their facts right.

Of course there is nothing new in any of this – many of these points have been made before on this blog, and also by many other people apart from me. But they are worth repeating because we are now hurtling towards what is very possibly going to be the point of no return. It seems increasingly likely that there will be a Withdrawal Agreement within the next few days, and it is going to be put forward by politicians, some or most of whom are ignorant of basic facts, to be voted on by other politicians who are similarly ignorant. Even in these dog days of the negotiations, Brexiter Cabinet ministers – Raab, again, and Liam Fox – are talking of the Northern Ireland backstop as being something which could be time-limited or unilaterally revocable by the UK, neither of which can, by definition of a backstop, be true.

What is also important – and perhaps crucial to what has unfolded - is that the entire impetus for the Brexit project is predicated not just upon ignorance of, but an absolute refusal to engage with, the complex practicalities of Brexit. After all, it might have been expected that those who have schemed, dreamed and campaigned – sometimes for decades – for Brexit would be falling over themselves in a rapture to have the chance to put it into practice.

Not a bit of it. Those who support Brexit most strongly are far happier standing outside the delivery process rather than taking responsibility for it. That is clear in the way that Boris Johnson prefers to act as if he is still campaigning for Brexit rather than stay in the government delivering it, and why several other Brexiters – perhaps more principled than Johnson, although that is not to put them in a vanishingly small minority – such as Steve Baker prefer the pleasures of purity to the dull compromises of governing. It is most bizarrely evident in David Davis’ criticism today of the Government’s Brexit negotiating strategy: he was responsible for it until last summer.

So we have a strange and, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented situation. A group of people who are passionate and uncompromising advocates of a fundamental economic and geo-political shift for a nation don’t actually know much about what it means in practice, and have very little interest in delivering it. It is political irresponsibility on a wanton, scandalous scale.

Ironically, though, it is just this ignorance and irresponsibility that is one of the things Theresa May will gamble on in what I suspect* we will see next week: an attempt to play on the fact that her MPs don’t really grasp or care enough about the detail to get her deal through. If that’s right – and, if so, I’ll write about it next week – that will be an even greater irresponsibility, as it will set the stage for years of political infighting, strategic drift and economic decline as the meaning and implications of her deal unfold and unwind.

*Update (9/11/18) With the resignation today of Jo Johnson and the growing sense of opposition to May's plan from all sides, this suspicion looks less well-founded than it did yesterday. Or, at least, that if the attempt is made it is less likely to succeed.

Rules mean rules: we reject them at our peril

In a recent post, I suggested that the latest Brexit White Paper should, like an injured horse, be put out of its misery. Yesterday, Michel Barnier went some way to doing so when, in a single sentence, he rejected a central part of one of its central planks saying: “The EU cannot – and the EU will not – delegate its customs policy and rules, VAT and excise duty collections to a non-member who would not be subject to the EU’s governance structures”.

There’s no surprise in this. It was always an impossible idea that the EU could agree to it even if such a “fantastical Heath Robinson” arrangement (as Boris Johnson called it) could have been made to work in a basic, practical sense. It seems unlikely that the government thinks it could have flown, either, rather than being a staging post to something that would. But, if so, it is boxed into a corner with Brexit Ultras – not just on the backbenches but in the cabinet – saying that the White Paper is a final offer, rather than an (extremely belated) opening negotiating pitch. If that view holds sway then, indeed, we are in ‘no deal’ territory.

It seems likely that over the summer nothing much will happen in terms of the negotiations, and that the government will act as if the White Paper proposals are still afloat, even though they have been holed below the waterline. But we can expect the discussion within Britain to polarise even further as the temperature, literal and metaphorical, gets higher.

The rising temperature of Brexit debates

One indication of that came this week with a call from David Bannerman, a Conservative MEP, comparing people with “extreme EU loyalty” to jihadis who should have the Treason Act applied to them (he later deleted the tweet and replaced it with one referring to those “working undemocratically against UK through extreme EU loyalty”*). It’s easy to dismiss this as crankish raving, but we shouldn’t be too blasé. After all, it comes from an elected politician in a mainstream political party and, so far as I know, no senior member of that party has seen fit to disown it.

Perhaps more insidious, several Conservative MPs, including at least one former cabinet member, have publicly committed to funding the appeal of Darren Grimes against the decision by the Electoral Commission to fine him for breaking electoral law during the Referendum. One such, Nadine Dorries, did so in terms of the “need to expose institutional bias”. This (presumably) is a reference to repeated claims by Brexiters that the Electoral Commission is a partisan body, opposed to Brexit, and its judgments tainted as a result. As with similar claims about judges during the Gina Miller case this is very dangerous territory because it seeks to undermine rules and institutions by positioning them within a kind of cultural civil war for the political soul of the country.

Decisions have consequences

This kind of rhetoric is growing in intensity precisely because the real choices and meanings of Brexit are now becoming unavoidable, with the ‘no deal’ discussions pointing them up in their starkest form. Ian Dunt has today written an excellent detailed account of what such a scenario would look like for the availability of food. At its heart is the point – which I’ve also made on this blog from time to time – that the systems we take for granted are not there by some act of nature but by virtue of specific organizational and institutional arrangements. If we choose exit them, then we cease to benefit from them. If we exit them abruptly and with no alternatives in place (which is what ‘no deal’ means) then we suffer the consequences immediately. Yet Patrick O’Flynn, the UKIP MEP, writes of these consequences in terms of the EU trying “to starve the UK into submission”.

The core proposition of this punishment narrative is that Britain could leave the EU and yet there would be no damaging consequences of doing so. Voters were told that claims to the contrary were Project Fear and, now, that they are punishment. The same proposition has been the guiding theme of the government’s approach to Brexit, as I argued in an article in Prospect this week.

A different and much more subtle inflection of the same idea can be found in calls for the EU to be more flexible, as, for example, in an article today by the highly respected and pro-EU journalist Timothy Garton Ash, warning of the dangers of a Treaty of Versailles style humiliation. Similarly, also in today’s Guardian, Henry Newman, Director of Open Europe, argues for the EU to “see sense” about what no deal would mean for the EU, especially in terms of security and international relations.

I’m certainly not and never have been of the view that the EU can do no wrong (for that matter, I’m not sure that anyone is). It is an imperfect institution like all others. But I find it difficult to see what flexibility the EU could reasonably be expected to show in the face of the red lines put forward by the British government (nor is it very clear what this flexibility would consist of). The EU, like any multi-lateral organization, is and has to be rules-based or it will fall apart. That is so not least because, despite what some Brexiters claim, it is not and cannot act like a State.

Britain, prior to Brexit, understood that very well, and one way to understand the present situation is to imagine if it were not Britain but another country leaving. I do not think that in those circumstances many in Britain, and certainly not those of a Eurosceptic persuasion, would then be calling for special arrangements whereby that country could continue to have many membership benefits without accepting those rules it disliked. Which has been exactly the EU’s position, and signalled as such since long before the referendum.

The rejection of rules

What links the various developments discussed in this post is a lack of understanding, or simply a rejection, of a rules-based order. Whether in relation to the EU itself, or specific aspects such as the customs union, or the regulatory systems governing food standards, or the operation of judicial and quasi-judicial institutions such as the Electoral Commission, that rules-based order is treated as irrelevant or politicised as being at odds with the ‘will of the people’. This, which is one of the commonalities between Brexit and Trumpism, is one of the defining features of populism as well as one of its greatest dangers. It is also fantastical, as is clear in the call from Brexiters that the way to escape EU rules is to embrace … WTO rules.

It is strange that Britain – a country whose attachment to rules, captured in the stereotype of our propensity to form orderly queues – should be in the grip of such a mood. It’s worth recalling the lines in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, set in another period when such a mood held sway, and dissent was deemed treason. Will Roper, the prospective son-in-law of Sir Thomas More, declares that he would cut down every law in England to get to the Devil. More replies:

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat. This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

On 6 July 1535 More was executed, having been found guilty of High Treason under the law which David Bannerman MEP, would like to see updated to cover those with “extreme EU loyalty”.

 

*We might wonder what this means. I’m not aware of anyone working undemocratically against Brexit. The main call from those opposed to it is for another referendum, which is plainly a democratic way of working, whatever the other arguments – made cogently by Anand Menon this week - against it might be. Yet Brexiters insist that such calls do not respect democracy which might, were Bannerman’s proposals accepted, imply that to call for a vote would be treasonous.

May and the ERG Ultras are manacled together

There are perhaps 50 - I have seen estimates varying between 40 and 80 - Tory MPs in the so-called European Research Group (ERG; ‘so-called’ as this is not some anodyne bunch of researchers, but a group of fanatical, extremist ideologues). They include several Ministers, perhaps nine Cabinet members, and many of the media’s darlings for Brexit commentary including, of course, the ERG’s current chairman Jacob Rees-Mogg. Even before becoming its leader he seemed to appear on the BBC quite as often as any of the Corporation’s most senior journalists. Now, he might as well have his own dedicated studio. It is this group of, for the most part, middle-aged white men who are holding the government, and hence our country, to ransom. They speak – they speak splenetically - for themselves and no doubt some, possibly many, leave voters, but they purport to speak for all leave voters and hence, of course, for ‘the People’.

May made a fatal miscalculation in thinking that the Ultras would be appeased by hard Brexit. As Major and Cameron had found before her, every concession made to them only produced a new and even more extreme demand. Thus whereas before the Referendum many of them said that a soft Brexit (i.e. staying in the single market and having a comprehensive customs treaty) would be enough, immediately afterwards they insisted that only hard Brexit would do. But when that became the government’s policy, they started agitating for a no deal Brexit. Some of them, such as Nadine Dorries, seem to have no idea what they are advocating or why. It might be thought that Dorries is an outlier and that all the other members are well-apprised of the practical meanings of hard Brexit, but a glance at the list of their names suggests that this might be excessively charitable.

By promising hard Brexit at the point that she was politically strongest, May created an impossible situation which has become clear now that she is so weak. What she accepted was that the lies of the Leave campaign could be made true. That is, that it would be possible to have all of the economic benefits of being in the EU without any of the politically unpalatable consequences in terms of, in particular, free movement of people and ECJ jurisdiction. This could never be delivered, not because the EU would never agree to it, but because they couldn’t agree to it since it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the single market is: an entity which by definition entails free movement and which by definition requires a supra-national regulator.

Trapped by her own choices into delivering an undeliverable policy, May is now stuck. She can’t easily retreat from hard Brexit having promised it, and she can’t follow the ERG punks to a no deal Brexit without comprehensively wrecking the British economy – meaning not just mass unemployment but the end of air travel and the introduction of food rationing that would occur as a consequence of a ‘no deal’ Brexit. The Ultras don’t care about that – some of them probably believe it would be a good way of toughening us up – but for anyone with any remote sense of public duty, let alone any political nous, it’s a complete non-starter. In recent weeks it seems as if business leaders and civil servants have convinced May of this.

It’s against this background that the various storms and spats of the last week are to be understood. As predicted in my previous post, the quiet period of recent weeks has come to an abrupt end. The leak of the government’s economic forecasts produced no real surprises. They are in line with what most previous forecasts have suggested in showing that all forms of Brexit are economically damaging, and the harder the Brexit, the greater the damage. But the response underscored just how rabid the Ultras have become, denouncing not just the forecasts themselves but impugning the motives of the civil servants who prepared them. Such criticism of the civil service was always inevitable, as I have said since the first post on the blog, and has been bubbling away for a while. But as the realities bite they are becoming more vociferous, and although Steve Baker (former ERG Chair, now DExEU Minister) had to apologise for having voiced them in the House of Commons there can surely be little doubt that many Brexit Ultras are convinced that the civil service is part of a great remainer elite conspiracy.

But the more vociferous the Ultras become the greater the sense that events are moving away from them. The response to the leaked economic forecasts as a new instalment of ‘Project Fear’ is not just predictable, it’s shop-soiled; whilst the Will of the People in which they have so successfully cloaked themselves now looks distinctly moth-eaten. Time has taken its toll on the Ultras mainly because just as having agitated for a Referendum for years they were unable to produce a plan for how Brexit should be done, so too have they failed to come up with anything workable since the Referendum. On the contrary, what has been exposed is that a government that has adopted their hard Brexit position has been unable to craft it into something deliverable. That’s the real significance of Baker’s apology: when in government posts the Ultras are forced to take responsibility in a way that they are free from outside of government.

It’s for this reason that the Ultras hold off deposing May, which they surely have the numbers to do, as Rafael Behr argues in a superb essay in Prospect this week. They don’t want to take responsibility for delivering something which has already been shown to be undeliverable, and prefer to complain of betrayal. Victimhood, as I have argued several times on this blog, is their comfort zone. That can, as we have seen in abundance over Brexit, make for effective politics; it doesn’t make for effective policy. The moment for the Ultras to strike, if they were going to, passed with the phase 1 deal. If they strike now they are as likely to see Brexit slip through their fingers as get anything close to what they want than they will get from May’s government. Hence Liam Fox this week telling the Ultras they must learn to live with disappointment.

Yet if the Ultras are not able to bring down May, she is also not able to stand up to them. So she continues to grind out her mantras of ‘deep and special partnership’, the ‘Brexit the British people want’ and refusing to commit one way or another on the current question about a UK-EU customs treaty. Maybe she doesn’t want to stand up to them, and believes this tosh she comes out with – but if so, what’s clear is that at every stage she ends up conceding on things the Ultras hold dear. They know that she’s done it, they know that she will continue to do it, but there’s nothing they can do to stop her. But she can’t tell them that that is what she will continue to do, and maybe doesn’t even realise that this is what she will continue to do.

And so, for the time being anyway – for it surely can’t continue forever – Brexit Britain limps along with a terrified, mauled zoo keeper chained to a snarling, feral beast; each reliant on the other, but each loathing the other. At one moment the keeper lashes the beast spitefully with her whip; the next moment the beast lacerates the keeper savagely with its claws. Each time, a little blood is drawn but they remain manacled together because they have manacled themselves to each other. Meanwhile the rest of us, and the rest of the world, look on in horror, dismay and disgust at this revolting spectacle.