What the Covid Inquiry tells us about Brexit

The Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic still has a long way to go, but the evidence it is taking is already revealing an extraordinary picture of the British government at the time and, in the process, much about Brexit. It is tempting to say that it is not revealing much that many of us did not guess, but, apart from the fact that there’s much in the detail that is fresh, there is an important difference between ‘guessing’ and seeing hard evidence laid out in documents or given by witnesses under oath. And, actually, what is emerging is even more dire than could have been guessed.

What we could guess

Of course, it is not an inquiry into the handling of Brexit but it has long been clear that there were multiple intersections and interactions between that and the handling of Covid. I discussed many of them during the pandemic period, including in what is still the most-read post on the blog, from April 2020, which also gives links to some of the other places they are discussed by me and others. 

Some of those posts contain details which are now irrelevant, but the overall picture that is emerging confirms what is perhaps the central point made in that April 2020 post:

“What both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way we are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister, a dud stand in [i.e. Dominic Raab], and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing.

They are the legacy of Brexit. They were brought into power by Brexit. But all the things which secured the vote for Brexit – the clever-but-dumb messaging, the leadership-by-slogan, the appeal to nostalgic sentiment, the disdain for facts and evidence, the valorisation of anger and divisiveness, the bluff ‘commonsense’ and the ‘bluffers’ book’ knowledge – are without exception precisely the opposite of what is needed for effective governance in general, and crisis management in particular.”  

What ‘the people in the room’ are telling us

I’ve quoted that at length not to say ‘I told you so’ (and, in any case, I was hardly the only person saying similar things at the time), but because it serves as a fair summary of what we have been hearing recently at the Hallett Inquiry. As Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Political Commentator of The Observer, wrote in his column last Sunday, “the testimony from the people in the room” has shown that Johnson was “comprehensively incapable of doing the job”. But, Rawnsley continues, it wasn’t just Johnson who failed, it was the cabinet and senior civil servants, and the blame for that lies in part with Dominic Cummings and his Vote Leave team.

Cummings’ own self-serving and obscenity-strewn testimony to the Inquiry, in both its written and, especially, its oral form, showed his utter contempt for ministers and civil servants, whilst in itself giving a glimpse of the bullying and misogynistic culture which, as confirmed by Helen MacNamara’s evidence, permeated the inner workings of the administration. MacNamara, the most senior female civil servant at the time, makes it clear that this culture was not just morally grotesque, but substantively and substantially impaired the quality of decision-making.

Moreover, although it may appear unconnected, or at least less malign, I think the “unbelievably bullish approach that everything is going to be great”, which MacNamara says characterised the early days of the Covid crisis, is inseparable from the vicious machismo she describes. The blokey boosterism, which is also instantly recognizable as being identical to Johnson’s approach to Brexit as well, is the affable face that quickly contorts to hate-filled thuggishness, at least behind closed doors, when it encounters any challenge. Unsurprisingly, this culture was not just misogynistic but semi-racist, “laughing at the Italians” and in doing so being not just laddishly unpleasant but, again, substantively damaging the Covid response by jeering at what could have been useful lessons.

It must be beyond question that Johnson and Cummings were jointly responsible for this culture and all that came with it, though no doubt others played a part, and they had presumably transferred it over from the Vote Leave campaign operation. More generally, for all their well-attested differences, Johnson and Cummings were conjoined, enablers of each other and enabled by each other. Cummings is quite explicit about this in his evidence, as well as showing a shameless contempt for democracy, declaring that “we” (by which he seems to mean the Vote Leave cabal) had the right to pick and choose who would be Prime Minister, and that “we” installed Johnson despite knowing how unfit for office he was. [1]

Meanwhile, it was, of course, Johnson who appointed Cummings as his Chief Adviser and gave him such latitude of powers, a latitude which amongst other things, led to the resignation of the then Chancellor Sajid Javid, just as the pandemic was starting. And it was Johnson who expended so much political capital to keep him in post after the ‘Barnard Castle’ scandal. They were two cheeks - one flabby and purpled, the other scrawny and pockmarked - of the same backside, and what lay between them, connecting them, defining them, was Brexit.

Brexit, too, explains the uselessness of the Cabinet which, as Rawnsley says, the Inquiry is showing to have “failed to act as a collective decision-making body and a restraint on a dangerously dysfunctional Prime Minister”. How could it have been otherwise given that, as Martin Kettle wrote when Johnson appointed his first Cabinet, it consisted of “mostly second-rate ideologues, many of them with negligible records of ministerial achievement and several of them with very dubious political ethics. All the positions of power are held by Brexit extremists. The rest are political hostages to the hard Brexiters.”  

The undermining of the civil service

As for the role of the civil service, part of what is at stake here was, as MacNamara’s evidence disclosed, changes that Brexit had wrought on the processes and machinery of government. But there is certainly more to it than that. Rawnsley points out that the Hallett Inquiry shows Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, to cut an “abject figure”, but his appointment to that role, in the middle of the Covid crisis, was partly because his predecessor, Sir Mark Sedwill, was seen by Johnson as “too much of a Europhile” (£) whilst Case was described as a “Boris Johnson ally”. It has also been reported that he had originally been brought into Number 10 as Permanent Secretary at Cummings’ behest. [2]

The wasn’t just a matter of a Prime Minster smoothly, if ruthlessly, appointing a more congenial or compliant Cabinet Secretary. On the one hand, Cummings’ written testimony (p.59, para. 276) reveals the utterly chaotic manner in which Sedwill’s ejection began. On the other hand, other evidence to the Inquiry shows that, Johnson ‘ally’ or not, Case, prior to taking over that role, had confided to Sedwill that he had “never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country”, referring, apparently, to Johnson and his special advisers. [3]

Crucially, this particular episode was itself part of a wider picture in which many senior civil servants had already left, or were leaving or being sidelined, because of a perceived lack of commitment to Brexit. Indeed, in my post of 28 February 2020 – the date is important as it is just as the Covid pandemic was developing, and shortly before the first lockdown – I recorded in detail how the civil service was under attack for supposedly being anti-Brexit, with reports of a ‘hit list’ of senior civil servants the government wanted to expunge. It was not long afterwards, in June, that Cummings made his threat of a “hard rain coming” for the civil service (£). That was, of course, only the latest instalment in a process which had been going on since the referendum, and, in Cummings’ case, stretching back to his days as a special adviser to Michael Gove in the Department for Education, when ‘the Blob’ first emerged as a term of abuse in British politics. The title of my February post is also worth noting – ‘Brexit is going feral’ – given that evidence to Hallett this week shows that, just four months later, ‘feral’ was exactly the term applied to Johnson’s government by Case, and apparently endorsed by Sedwill.

It's vital to recall this vitriolic attack on the civil service from Johnson and Cummings, and Brexiters generally, because it is quite as important as, if not more important than, the related issue, which is getting far more attention, of how Hallett is showing that Brexit was prioritized over tackling Covid. It wasn’t just that Brexit overloaded the bandwidth of the civil service, Brexiters also undermined the civil service as an institution. Even now, Cummings presumably includes the civil service amongst the “insiders” who “refus[ed] to accept the referendum result” who he blames for the lockdown having been necessary at all. For, on Cummings account, it was this alleged “refusal” that meant that Brexit created the “constitutional and political crisis that consumed a vast amount of the focus of the core of the state 2016-2019”.  Unsurprisingly, as Anthony Robinson observes, this account conveniently ignores the role of the Vote Leave campaign in creating this crisis.

Frost (as always) muddies the waters

In a similar way, like Billy Bunter to Cummings’ Flashman, David Frost responded to MacNamara’s evidence that the government focused on Brexit to the exclusion of everything else from July 2019 with the justificatory bleat that “we were in the biggest constitutional crisis for a hundred years”. He also asserted that the claim that ‘no-deal Brexit’ planning got in the way of pandemic planning does not accord with the facts because the Brexit deal was completed in October 2019 (i.e. before Covid), and the Transition Period meant that “there was no economic shock and no new arrangements to prepare for during the height of the Covid crisis”.

As so often with Brexiters’ claims it is complicated to unpick them, and Frost is particularly prone to tendentiousness. The only constitutional crisis between 2016 and 2019, and certainly between July and October 2019, was the unlawful Prorogation of Parliament, for which Johnson and Cummings were entirely responsible. Frost makes it sound as if this crisis was something the government heroically struggled against when, in fact, it was something the government created. It’s true that there had been a rolling political crisis since at least the 2017 election but, stripped of all its great complexity, that was not a constitutional crisis but a simple reflection of there being no parliamentary majority for any particular form of Brexit, just as was the case in the country. [4]

It’s also true that this political crisis still existed until the December 2019 election, and the Inquiry has already heard evidence that the work streams implementing provisions from the 2016 Exercise Cygnus on pandemic planning had been largely halted by no-deal Brexit planning. However, it is not true the completion of the Brexit deal, in the sense of the agreement with the EU of the text of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) in October 2019, ended no-deal planning. Firstly, that WA was not agreed by parliament until after the election. Secondly, even when it had been agreed, it initiated a new phase of no-deal planning – this time concerned with the possibility of there being no future terms, or trade, agreement.

This also means that it is either completely dishonest or totally ignorant for Frost to say that there were “no new arrangements” to prepare for during the Covid crisis of 2020. There were. Whether or not there was to be a trade deal, it would mean completely different trading (and other) arrangements compared with being in the single market, customs union, and other EU entities, once the Transition Period was over. Which of these two outcomes would prevail was not known until Christmas Eve of 2020 and so, throughout the year, there was the prospect of at least major change, and possibly of major disruption, to be prepared for. That was as true for businesses and other organizations affected as it was for the government.

The (non-) extension of the Transition Period

Moreover, Frost fails to mention that, until July 2020, the UK had the possibility of seeking to extend the Transition Period, something which the EU would almost certainly have agreed. Doing so would have helped the UK to deal with Covid, by taking away the urgency of the negotiations and the imminency of the changes that the end of the transition would bring. It would also have helped the UK to deal with Brexit, by deferring completion of the trade deal until the exigencies of the Covid emergency were over. For although the focus of attention arising from the Hallett hearings is how Brexit got in the way of dealing with Covid, it is equally the case that Covid got in the way of dealing with Brexit. For Frost to use the Transition Period as a defence against there having been such mutual impacts whilst ignoring his government’s refusal to extend the period, which would have reduced or contained them, is absurd.

As I wrote in June 2020, the decision on whether to extend the Transition Period wasn’t the last gasp of the battle over whether Brexit would happen, it was the Brexiters’ first challenge to show that they could govern Britain after leaving the EU, rather than just campaign for Britain to leave the EU. It is a challenge they comprehensively failed, because they were (as they still are) locked into the idea of defending Brexit against ‘betrayal’. Never mind that, by that time, Britain had actually left the EU, and that could no longer be prevented: they just ploughed on.

In doing so, they not only pulled time and attention away from dealing with Covid, they also ensured that Covid-battered businesses had no time to prepare for the end of the Transition Period. Even if Brexit were not intrinsically a huge folly, they ensured that it came into effect in the most unpropitious of circumstances, and they did so with absolutely no justification beyond the stiff-necked false pride that the period could not be extended even in the extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic.

The Covid government was also the Brexit government

The Hallett Inquiry is beginning to uncover the deep dysfunctions in the way that the government handled the pandemic and, almost as a side-issue, showing some things about Brexit. But the real significance of the Inquiry for Brexit is that the government it is exposing to view is exactly the same government that before, during, and after the pandemic was handling Brexit. So, although it is not an Inquiry into the handling of Brexit, it is surely inconceivable that the way it handled Covid does not also apply to Brexit to some degree.

For, self-evidently, these dysfunctions did not arrive with the pandemic but pre-dated it, at least as far back as Johnson and Cummings coming to power (though, as noted, some features, especially the denigration of the civil service, go back further). It is inconceivable that the factionalism and infighting, the misogyny and the vapid boosterism, were not all occurring in the period when, after Johnson came to office, the Withdrawal Agreement and, especially, the Northern Ireland Protocol, were still being negotiated. It is certainly true, by definition, that the government dealing with the Covid crisis in 2020 was the same as that which was undertaking the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) negotiations during 2020. And, although Cummings departed in November 2020, it was still the Johnson government, with all the flaws Hallett is revealing, which, throughout 2021 and until he resigned in June 2022, was embroiled in the ongoing row with the EU over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

There are already plenty of reports that show how little Johnson understood about the practicalities of Brexit. To take just one example, he reportedly “slumped in his chair” when “the penny dropped”, during a meeting with Jean-Claude Juncker in September 2019, that his ideas about the Irish border were totally unworkable. But we now know that this same Johnson, during Covid, seriously suggested being injected with the virus on live TV to show its harmlessness, and seriously asked whether the virus could be destroyed by blowing a “special hairdryer” up the nostrils, actually circulating a You Tube video of someone demonstrating this ‘cure’. Patently someone so dull-witted, or, more accurately, so lazy-minded, as to do these things would be equally incapable of grasping even quite basic things about Brexit, let alone its more complex details.

Similarly, the Inquiry is revealing how during Covid Johnson was flip-flopping daily, or even hourly, on both the overall strategy and the detailed measures for dealing with the pandemic. So it is surely reasonable to assume that he behaved in the same way on detailed issues in relation to the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, and also on the big questions about them, most especially whether to allow there to be one or both versions of no-deal Brexit.

It is also surely reasonable to assume that he flip-flopped in the same way during the long period when it was rumoured that he would, or would not, invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol and, subsequently, whether he would pass and make use of the Northern Ireland Bill to pull out of the Protocol in its entirety. Relatedly, we already knew that during the Withdrawal Agreement negotiations at least one senior Tory thought that “the Irish really should know their place”. So, learning now about how the Johnson administration jeered at the Italian response to the pandemic, it hardly strains credulity to suppose that it was similarly contemptuous of the Irish position on Brexit and the Protocol. 

Whilst Johnson is the most obvious culprit here, the same applies to his entire administration, including his feeble and mediocre Cabinet and his team of arrogant and bumptious Vote Leave Special Advisors, both during and after the Cummings’ period. If, as the Hallett evidence so far suggests, the entirety of this administration suffered from multiple deficiencies in handling Covid, then it is inconceivable that it became super-competent when dealing with Brexit. And whilst it might be said that the pandemic was a wholly unusual and complex problem, the same is true of Brexit. If they differ, it is not in that but in the fact that Covid was a crisis imposed on the UK, as it was on other countries, whereas Brexit was imposed by, indeed created by, the Brexiters, many of whom were by this time running the country. So they were incapable of dealing with either, but with Brexit they had the added culpability of having caused it.

We may never have a Public Inquiry into Brexit, and if we do it will have to encompass different issues and cover a longer period than Hallett. Yet, even without that, Hallett is providing a glimpse of just how rotten the Johnson period of Brexit was – the period, don’t forget that ‘got Brexit done’. If, as Covid data expert Professor Christina Pagel argues, Hallett has already “laid bare the government’s dereliction of duty” we can hardly imagine that the very same government at the very same time was the epitome of care and competence in its handling of Brexit. But the cases are different. We didn’t have this government because of Covid, but because of Brexit. In this sense, Brexit was the ‘original sin’ for which we paid twice-over. Once by having an utterly useless government when Covid hit, twice by having an utterly useless government to deliver Brexit. And that is before even considering the price inherent in Brexit itself. [5]

 
Notes

[1] This is not to say that Johnson could not have become Prime Minister without Brexit (and Cummings). Simon Wren-Lewis’s blog this week has an interesting discussion of this.

[2] Because for the purposes of this post I am splicing together different parts of testimony to Hallett it may be confusing as to what jobs Simon Case was doing at different times. In May 2020 he was appointed as Downing Street Permanent Secretary, a role that had been unfilled since being vacated by Sir Jeremy Heywood in 2012 (it had in any case only been created in 2010), who became Cabinet Secretary until his retirement in 2018, when he was succeeded by Mark Sedwill. Then, in September 2020, Case was appointed Cabinet Secretary, replacing Sedwill.

[3] The Cummings’ evidence referred to in this paragraph is confusing in that it suggests that Sedwill was initially sacked in May 2020, and subsequently refers to Case as having been Cabinet Secretary in July. This doesn’t square with the public record of posts held, but it seems to be that the outcome of the botched sacking was Sedwill’s resignation and that, by July, it had been decided that Case would be his successor even though he wasn’t formally in post. There is much more detail on all this in Beckie Smith’s report in Civil Service World. Another confusing issue is why, if Case was indeed a Johnson ‘ally’ and Cummings had supported his appointment in May 2020, did he speak about them in the disparaging terms quoted here? A possible answer is that it is because that quote comes from July 2020, by which time he had come to witness the chaotic nature of the administration.

[4] Frost, especially, has been vociferous in insisting that this political crisis was also a constitutional crisis, because it enabled, on occasion and most notably with the 'Benn Act' of October 2019, the House of Commons to take control of its business from the Executive. But this was absolutely consistent with the Constitution: Parliament is sovereign, and the Executive only has power to the extent that it commands a parliamentary majority. As regards ‘no-deal Brexit’ in the sense of no WA (the subject of the Benn Act), it did not.

[5] Part of that price is the damage to trade, and another Brexit story this week is the publication of a woeful IEA report denying that damage. Fortunately, Professor Gerhard Schnyder has done an excellent, painstaking job in exposing its numerous and profound flaws. I know from experience that undertaking that kind of detailed debunk is a hard, time-consuming business, because such reports contain nested layers of falsity or misunderstanding. But it really matters, not least because such reports gain so much traction including, in this case, endorsement by Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch.

Brexit debilitation

So yet another supposedly final deadline has come and gone, and the ludicrous ‘will they, won’t they’ theatre of the last few months continues. Ludicrous, but debilitating, too, in a host of ways.

Debilitating, certainly, for those desperately anxious to know just how much their lives and livelihoods are going to be damaged, with literally only days to go. Debilitating for those businesses and others who are expected to be prepared for changes as yet unknown or, where known, lacking in the necessary operational detail, as the head of the British Chambers of Commerce has outlined. Debilitating, too, for the reputation of the UK - already so battered by Brexit - with bellicose talk of deploying the Royal Navy to police ‘no deal’ fishing rights and the ramping up of jingoism and xenophobia in this weekend’s newspaper headlines.

If this is all supposed to be part of a ‘tough’ negotiating strategy, it is one which makes for deeply irresponsible government and which is having deeply destabilizing effects. Huge sectors of the economy don’t know what they are facing, and business leaders are reported to be in despair. We’re in the extraordinary situation of planning for a military airlift of vaccines to the UK (and, equally extraordinary, of not knowing whether there will be adequate supplies of general medicines). Already supermarkets and others are stockpiling goods, with consequent massive lorry queues. Nor should the uncertainty about non-economic issues, such as those of security co-operation, be forgotten.

Perhaps the greatest uncertainty is faced by the people of Northern Ireland. Whilst the Northern Ireland Protocol was designed as an insurance against every eventuality, including no deal, it has already come under strain. Last week, some agreements on how it would operate were reached and – whether as cause or consequence – the government agreed to remove the illegal clauses from the Internal Market Bill and other legislation. However, as a leading expert on this topic, Professor Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, explained this does not mean that Northern Ireland is ‘sorted’ and all the more so if there were to be no wider trade deal.

We don’t even know whether, if there is no deal, the UK will agree to the EU’s temporary mitigations which were announced last week. Under these, “basic” air and road connectivity will be assured for six months, subject to UK reciprocation, and there would be a one-year standstill on fisheries. If the UK didn’t agree, it would make the crisis of no deal even greater than it would otherwise be. So across the entirety of national life we are only a few working days from a completely unknown situation. Yet MPs asking questions about preparedness for no deal this week were berated by Paymaster-General Penny Mordaunt for not acting “in the interests of the country”. The very basics of democratic accountability, even of rational debate, are now deemed unpatriotic, debilitating our political culture.

The lies that bind us

As always, in the background are all the lies stretching back to 2016 about a quick and easy deal. But even without rehearsing those again it’s enough to recall how during the 2019 General Election Boris Johnson was pretending (though not quite saying) that he had already done the final Brexit deal. He covered himself verbally but the meaning of his continual slogans about ‘an oven ready deal’ that would ‘get Brexit done’ was designed to deceive and it did deceive. Now, of course, he and his apologists are pointing to the verbal tricks to deny that any such pretence occurred. We are no longer just in the territory of lies, but of lies about lies. Even now Johnson is incapable of telling the truth, with his smirking pretence that if there is no deal it will, in fact, be an ‘Australia-style’ deal.

And, as always, we are in this situation because a small but ruthlessly extremist group of politicians, journalists and ‘thinktankers’ have pushed to ever more extreme positions. The proposition just a few years ago that ‘it wouldn’t be so bad to be like Norway’ – a debatable but perfectly sane and practically deliverable proposition – has gradually morphed into one where, for the Brexit Ultras, any kind of deal with the EU would be a betrayal of a wholly absurd theocratic doctrine of sovereignty (£). It is the adherents to this doctrine to whom Johnson is in thrall if, indeed, he is not one of them himself.

It is a doctrine which makes no sense even in its own terms, because at the same time as it is deployed as an inviolable principle that may preclude any deal with the EU, it is necessarily compromised in the trade deals the government is agreeing with Japan or Canada, and in potentially embracing WTO terms for trade with the EU. On these grounds, simultaneously meaningless and hypocritical, the government is apparently still considering something which, from its own impact assessments, carries the dangers of creating “a systemic economic crisis” with food and medicine shortages, power cuts, and civil disorder.

Perhaps this won’t happen. Perhaps, as some rumours have it, a series of fudges and compromises are in the offing which will get some sort of a deal over the line – although, even if so, there would seem to barely be enough time to ratify such a deal in time for the end of the year. But why are we even in this situation of debilitating uncertainty?

Why are we in this situation?

It is important to be clear that the reasons the Brexiters are giving for why a deal has not been made and is proving so difficult to make are also lies. Their key claim is that the EU has made unreasonable and unprecedented demands upon the UK, many sprung on the UK at the last moment. Even taken at face value this is an odd claim. The Brexiters have spent decades saying that the EU is akin to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, totalitarian and dictatorial, and a ‘protectionist racket’. Yet they seem to have predicated Brexit on the starry-eyed belief that it would be cuddly and nice, and a pushover in the negotiations.

But, of course, the claim shouldn’t be taken at face value. In one way, it is true by definition that the terms of a Brexit deal would be unprecedented – never before has such an exit occurred – although the extent to which the EU is making unprecedented demands compared with those on other third countries is over-stated. The situation of the EU making a deal with a geographically close and economically completely intertwined third country is similarly unique. The UK idea, since Johnson came to power, of the negotiation being one of ‘sovereign equals’ with there being some set of rights of what is due to the UK as a third country is at best naïve and at worst disingenuous. Indeed, as the Spanish Foreign Minister acutely pointed out today, trade negotiations are a vehicle for managing interdependence between sovereign nations; using them simply to assert independence is to doom them to failure.

Equally disingenuous is the idea that the UK is only asking for the same as Canada (it has been asking for more, not improperly but it is dishonest to say otherwise). Indeed repeated claims from Brexiters that their plan was for a ‘Canada +’ or even ‘Canada +++’ or ‘Super-Canada’ deal give the lie to this idea. And also disingenuous is the idea that the long-standing EU offer of a ‘Canada-style’ deal meant ‘exactly the same as CETA’, as opposed to ‘in the category of free trade agreements’ (rather than single market membership). Let’s knock on the head once and for all the myth that Michel Barnier (with his staircase) and Donald Tusk promised a cut-and-paste of CETA. They didn’t – they said that UK red lines left a free trade agreement, of the type but not of the same content as CETA, which would be definitionally worse that single market membership. Moreover, at the time, Brexiters greeted this not as a promise but as a ‘threat’ of punishment. 

As regards the issues that have proved to be the main barriers to doing a deal, the unique circumstances of Brexit were always going to make disentangling fishing arrangements complex, even leaving aside anything else, just as they had been prior to EEC membership. That the EU would seek Level Playing Field commitments as a condition of a free trade deal was made clear as early as April 2017, and was in the Political Declaration that Johnson signed – and promptly dismissed as irrelevant. And there was always going to need to be a governance mechanism – if the EU has become more insistent in recent weeks that this be tightly specified that is because the UK has already shown it is willing to break both what had been signed up to legally in the Withdrawal Agreement and informally in the Political Declaration, thus destroying all trust.

It’s also worth noting something about these three sticking points. A key and utterly flawed claim of the Brexiters has been that a trade deal would be easy because the UK was starting from a point of total convergence with the EU, and it is agreeing convergence which makes making free trade deals so difficult and slow. This was the basis of, for example, Liam Fox’s now notorious claim that it should be “one of the easiest deals in history’. It was always nonsense (as pointed out in my post of July 2017) because the aim of this trade deal, uniquely, is divergence, and so it was the management of divergence which was bound to be problematic. And so it has proved – for all three of the potentially deal-breaking issues are about the terms of divergence.

Beneath all of this is a more basic issue. Questions of whether or not the EU is being ‘reasonable’ in its demands are entirely beside the point. Trade negotiations aren’t ‘nice’. They involve the parties pursuing what they see as their self-interest. The ‘what they see as’ bit is crucial – Brexiters have long sought to define for the EU what its self-interest ‘should be’, with their claim about the significance of the UK trade deficit being central. They were wrong, as they were told they would be. It doesn’t even matter if the EU has miscalculated (though there are good arguments against that being so) because the brutal reality is that this is its calculation.

And not only were the Brexiters wrong about the EU’s interests, so too are they wrong about the UK’s. For, as we are seeing, they have led us to paying a terrible price – exactly how high will depend on whether there is a deal - for the purely imaginary benefit of sovereignty. And, despite what is now claimed, that benefit was never presented simply as a matter of principle to be achieved at any cost, but as something which would also bring economic benefits, with the £350 million a week for the NHS being the headline example. They were wrong about that, too.

In short, we haven’t ended up in the present mess by accident. It has happened because when they were not lying the Brexiters were simply ignorant. They either fooled themselves or were fooling others. Every single step of the way, every single claim they have made has been discredited. And, of course, there is much more in the way of consequences of that still to come.

So what now?

In the immediate term, it’s impossible to know what will happen. The swirl of rumours, counter-rumours, predictions, counter-predictions, and rune-reading that has characterised the last few months is intensifying and will continue to do so. All of the rumours can be made to equally well fit a narrative of Johnson proclaiming a last-minute triumph, despite EU perfidy, as they can one of a last-minute failure, because of EU perfidy.

The stories after the Johnson-von der Leyen dinner last week seemed to point firmly to there being no deal (£). Today’s joint statement is being widely interpreted to suggest a deal is now more likely, perhaps the more so because it was a joint statement. Almost everyone thought that this weekend there would be a definitive announcement. There wasn’t. Perhaps it will come in the next few days, or perhaps things really will drag on until the very end of the month – it may be telling that today’s statement did not mention any new deadline. Perhaps even at this late moment some kind of fudged deal-but-not-a-deal will be created with implementation periods that mimic an extended transition. Perhaps there will be a very short no deal interim.

It’s easy to make out a convincing case for why both deal and no deal are likely because it is the same old issue as there’s been from the outset: the rationality of reducing the economic damage points in one direction, the rationality of reducing the political damage of offending the Brexit Ultras points in the other. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that nothing can be said with certainty (apart from this), and those who do so should be taken with a pinch of salt.

In the meantime, it serves little analytical purpose, as well as being psychologically debilitating, to try to follow each twist and turn at the moment. It may very well be that, as before his decision to campaign for Brexit, Johnson is even now drawing up two announcements, one for deal and one for no deal. There’s not much any of us can do except, perhaps, to refuse to play out bit parts in this theatre of horror. Better to simply switch off for a while and focus on Christmas.

 

I am going to try to take my own advice, so this will (probably!) be the last post until after Christmas.

Back to school

There’s a distinct ‘back to school’ feeling in the air – and never has the beginning of the school year been the news story that it is in these Covid times – with that slightly chilly tang in the mornings that presages the end of summer. Nowhere is that more so than for Brexit, with next week’s talks marking the beginning of the final phase of the Transition Period, and the likelihood of considerable political drama. Many people who have, very likely, switched off from Brexit in recent months will see it return with a vengeance. Even leaving aside the UK-EU negotiations there will be a substantial programme of domestic legislation necessary in advance of the transition ending.

Yet for all that feeling of newness, we will be returning to a very familiar landscape. For the more time goes on the clearer it is that Brexit consists of a series of recurring themes. So before we get back to the grind of the detail of state aid, fisheries (£), conformity assessments, equivalence regimes, geographical indicators (£), border queues and all the rest of it (links are to some of the latest reports/ discussions of each issue), this last post of the summer will consider some of these themes and what they mean for the coming period.

Brexit: more about Britain than exit

Little of substance has happened in the negotiations over the summer, which is not a surprise. Boris Johnson talked of putting a ‘tiger in the tank’, but as usual it was just boosterish phrase-making with no substance. As noted in my previous post, the process is in limbo awaiting political decisions that Johnson hasn’t made, or hasn’t communicated. But looking back over the entire Brexit process so far it is striking how many of these long periods of relative inactivity there have been. Despite the loudly-ticking clock of, first, the Article 50 period and, now, the transition period there’s somehow been a remarkable lack of focus on the actual task of exiting the EU. Indeed it Is only very recently that basic practical preparations for, for example, border management have begun to be made.

Some of those quiet periods have, of course, been caused by the inevitable hiatuses of the political seasons in both London and Brussels. But that aside, instead of what should have been focussed and intensive negotiations with the EU, most of the last four years has been taken up with UK domestic politics. The most obvious example is how, almost immediately she had triggered Article 50 and despite repeated promises that it would not be in the national interest, Theresa May launched her ill-fated General Election, wiping two months out of the original twenty-four month schedule. Then, when the first main extension from April 2019 to October 2019 was agreed, and Donald Tusk pointedly advised the UK “not to waste this time”, it was mainly taken up with the Tory leadership contest.

That domestic and, especially, Tory Party politics have been so central is not accidental. It has arisen because the UK tried to undertake Brexit at the same time as trying to define what it meant and how it could or should be done, something which continues to be true right up to the present moment. That obviously flows from the lack of definition by the Leave campaign, but was very much compounded by the secretive and non-consensual way that May came to define Brexit (i.e. no single market, no customs union, virtually no ECJ role), and especially the unnecessary rapidity with which Article 50 was invoked, on the back of fighting a deeply divisive and also entirely unnecessary legal battle to prevent a parliamentary vote on doing so. It was not as if there had been a time frame promised to the electorate but, as with so much of the Brexit story, keeping the ever-angry, ever-suspicious, Brexit Ultras temporarily mollified trumped every other consideration.

Perhaps even worse than that, the ongoing battle to define Brexit whilst simultaneously enacting it has been characterised by repeated refusals to accept quite obvious facts. The consequence is not just that the debate has moved more slowly than the formal process required, but that it has gone round in endless circles. There are several examples that could be given but I’ll highlight a couple of the most important.

Going round in circles

One is the wilful refusal to accept that the terms of leaving would have to be agreed in advance of the terms of the future relationship, including the future trading relationship. That was built into Article 50, which only specified that the exit terms would be agreed “taking account of” the future relationship between the departing member and the EU.

Yet from the outset many Brexiters refused to accept that this was so and in particular to accept that a financial settlement would need to be made in advance of, and separately to, any trade deal (some, indeed, have never accepted that there is any need for a financial settlement at all and some, even, that the negotiations required Article 50 to be invoked at all). May herself did not seem to grasp the issue of there being two separate deals to be done until April 2017, and even in 2019 government ministers were still saying that a trade deal would be in place the day after exit.

One could actually argue that the EU showed flexibility in agreeing to create two phases for the Article 50 talks, one on the exit terms and, if sufficient progress was made, a second phase on future terms, even though that could not yield a signed trade deal in the period. But that, itself, was resented by the Brexiters who, as David Davis, the then Brexit Secretary, put it, threatened the ‘row of the summer’ (of 2017) over this sequencing.

That row never happened, but the sentiment underlying it continues to this very day, with its lineal descendent being the growing clamour from some Ultras to repudiate the Withdrawal Agreement even if there is a trade deal, and certainly if there is not. Even more bizarrely, despite having wanted to get going with trade talks from the outset, when phase 2 was entered, the UK collapsed into internal dissent about what future terms it was seeking, leading to eighteen months of infighting that culminated with May’s defenestration and replacement by Johnson

The second main way that Brexit has gone round in circles is the refusal of Brexiters to accept – or perhaps their inability to understand – the very basic proposition that leaving the single market (SM) and leaving the customs union (CU) both, in different ways, create borders. This isn’t some ruse of the EU’s, still less is it the EU’s punishment or even choice. It is the logical and legal consequence of leaving the institutions that remove borders.

If, as Brexiters insist, Brexit must mean the UK setting its own regulations and its own tariffs, then there must be a territory within which these apply, and if there is a territory then there must be a border delineating that territory. That is true in general, and it has the economic consequence of making ‘frictionless trade’ with the EU impossible. And it is true in the particular case of Northern Ireland, with all the political ramifications of that, something which again some Brexiters still insist is confected by the EU, or Ireland, or both.

Yet for years the UK continued to talk about frictionless trade as perfectly possible, even after hard Brexit had been announced. Even now, it’s common to see Brexiters talking as if post-Brexit borders will only happen if the EU insists upon it. As for Northern Ireland, the number of times under which ‘alternative arrangements’, ‘technological solutions’ and the ‘Malthouse compromise’ have come and gone in the Brexit debate is almost impossible to count. To these examples could be added other zombie ideas, of which the claims about GATT Article XXIV are perhaps the most infamous.

Choices have consequences

So the years of the Brexit process have been characterised by a repetitive grinding down of these recurrent refusals to face reality. What could and should have been understood before the Referendum – and certainly before beginning the Article 50 process – has had to be taught, like simple arithmetic to a child who is simultaneously truculent and dull-witted, to the Brexiters (or, as it seems to outsiders, to the UK itself). And these lessons – whilst varying in content - are all of the same general sort: in choosing Brexit, the UK has chosen the consequences of Brexit, which can’t be magicked away. In particular, if the UK is outside the EU (SM, CU) then none of the things which come with being in the EU (SM, CU) any longer apply.

The impossibility of frictionless trade and the unavailability of ‘alternative arrangements’ for borders has now –  at least at governmental level – been accepted (though, jaw-droppingly, is now described as “growing the customs sector” as if it were some sensible industrial policy rather than the introduction of massive new costs). Yet it is still necessary and justified for Michel Barnier to remind  the UK that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, as he did at the end of the last round of talks.

For although the UK’s negotiating position under Johnson and David Frost has superficially accepted being a ‘third country’ to the EU, it continues to seek things which go well beyond what any third country has* in a whole swathe of areas. And, more subtly, by framing many of its demands in terms of third country precedents, the UK fails to understand that these do not constitute a set of established ‘rights’ for a third country but are contingent upon what – in the specific circumstances of the UK – it is in the interests of the EU to agree.

Brexiters’ negotiating conundrums

This idea that the EU is likely to give the UK a generous deal is one of the strangest features of Brexit. It appears in various slightly different guises. One is that those who most loathe the EU and denounce it for any manner of evils, including that of bureaucratic rigidity and being a ‘protectionist racket’, seem, paradoxically, to have had as their working assumption that the EU would be charitable - or, in Brexiter-speak, ‘flexible’ - in its approach to a departing member.

Another equally contradictory version is that the UK holds all the cards whereas the EU is desperate for a deal (German car makers, trade surplus etc) and in any case moribund and on the point of collapse, but at the same time is a powerful bully, willing and able to punish the UK. Similar ideas are present when it’s claimed that the UK would be fine if there’s no deal and yet when the EU warns of the prospect no deal it is making a ‘threat’ to the UK; or, conversely, that the UK can gain leverage by threatening the EU with the damage of no deal and yet no deal would not damage the UK.

But the underlying issue here is that these negotiations do not conform to the normal idea of two sides each seeking to pursue its own rational interests. On the UK side that is partly because these fantasies about the EU mean that it is treated as this peculiar mixture of ogre and pushover, but it is more because, in pursuing Brexit, the UK is in the position of doing something which is not in its rational interests. If nothing else, that is clear from the fact that, as a trade negotiation, it’s unique in setting out to create worse terms than currently exist for both parties. For the EU, that has been forced upon it, and given Brexit happened it is acting rationally to protect its own interests – which turn out to be different to those ascribed to it by Brexiters, but no less rational for that (in brief: prioritising the protection of single market integrity).

For the UK it arises from the nature of Brexit itself. Brexiters themselves sometimes acknowledge this, when saying that they fought and won an emotional battle for ‘independence’, but don’t then follow through to realise that this has put the UK permanently on the back foot in negotiations over its interests, since these have been defined in irrational terms. That follow through has been avoided by insisting that the costs of the emotional appeal to sovereignty are just Project Fear, and that sovereignty comes, or ought to come, cheaply or even at no cost at all. So the emotional argument is cloaked in a pseudo-rational veneer. No hard choices have to be made because we can gain sovereignty (as Brexiters see it) without losing anything. This is also why Brexiters have repeatedly sought to discredit or conceal projections of the costs of Brexit.

This leads to a negotiating position which is partly captured by the familiar clichés of ‘cakeism’ and ‘cherry picking’, but it’s actually much more perverse than that. The idea of having the cake (of membership) whilst eating the cake (of leaving), or of picking the juicy, enjoyable cherries and leaving the rest does imply a rationality – even if an opportunistic and unrealistic one. But the extreme Brexiter position is so emotionally hostile to everything associated with the EU that actually the cake is tainted and the cherries suspect. So they don’t just want what they can’t have, but they want what they don’t want. They are caught between wanting ‘a’ deal, but not wanting any actual deal.

If all that sounds convoluted, a different way of stating the Brexiters’ negotiating conundrum is this: whatever benefits the EU has economically, they all come at the price of sovereignty – we want sovereignty and we don’t care what it costs – but actually it’s cost free – or it would be if the EU was reasonable and would agree to what we want – then we’d have the exact same benefits as before – but those benefits come at the price of sovereignty -  so if they agree to what we want then it isn’t sovereignty, which is what we want at all costs.

This, which has always been the background to, and in many ways incorporated into, the UK’s official negotiating position, effectively makes any negotiated outcome impossible.

The sand in the gears

But there’s always been some sand in the gears of this rickety Heath Robinson of an argument, which is that any government actually in power, even one defined by Brexit, has to have at least one eye on reality. In power, rather than jeering from the side lines, no government can afford the political and economic price of sovereignty at all costs when those costs become manifest. Which is why Brexiters like David Davis, Steve Baker, Dominic Raab and Suella Braverman all resigned from ministerial positions where they had responsibility for enacting Brexit so that they could preserve their fantasies intact.

That was true for Johnson, as well, when he resigned as Foreign Secretary, but the lure of premiership brought him back to the table. So he now faces a similar situation to Theresa May in being forced to at least partly confront reality. She, of course, got shredded by her party for doing so, a fact that won’t be lost on Johnson not least since he led the charge. Since of his own volition there has been no Transition Period extension, he now has no more room to indulge the fantasies he did so much to promote at the expense of the realities he did so much to deny.

Hence we’re now reaching a pivotal moment, because in the next few months, one way or another, the UK-EU relationship is going to be re-framed by a deal of some sort, or by no deal. Either will have a big negative impact on individuals and businesses but, despite the claims of some, no deal will be considerably worse than a deal. In that sense, what happens matters greatly, including the precise nature of any deal which is done as that could have big impacts on specific sectors or activities. But in some ways the outcome won’t have much effect on the underlying situation.

Deal or no deal, the Brexit psychodrama will continue

If Johnson strikes a deal of any sort, then the Ultras within and outside his party will decry it for having compromised sovereignty. If he doesn’t strike a deal, then that won’t just be an end to matters but the beginning of fresh – and very urgent and difficult - negotiations which will be caught in the same insoluble loops and conundrums of the last four years of Brexit.

There is therefore no scenario that won’t have Brexiters saying ‘this is not what Brexit was meant to be’ and there is no scenario in which they will say ‘now we have what we always wanted’. Not only will they denounce any deal, but If there is the no deal ‘clean Brexit’ the most extreme call for they will say that the UK could have had a perfect deal but for betrayal by May and the remainers, and the intransigence of the EU. And deal or no deal (but especially no deal) they will step up their agitation to renege on the Withdrawal Agreement as a price not worth paying.

That is really worth reflecting upon. No matter how much pain Brexit causes the UK it is never going to stop the Brexiters complaining. David Cameron once famously called on his party to “stop banging on about Europe”. That didn’t happen, and so the Referendum was meant to put the issue to bed. When that was won by Brexiters, it might have been thought that that, surely, would put an end to matters. But it didn’t, and nothing will, no matter what is or is not agreed in the coming months. The Tory psychodrama about Europe, into which they have dragged the entire nation, is far from over.

So as the new Brexit term begins, no one should think that it will bring a resolution. We’re not about to graduate from Brexit, we’re just changing schools. The difference is that we are moving from the sheltered junior school of EU membership and the transition period, to the much harsher senior school outside.

 

*The link at this point is a handy extract of the relevant parts from a speech given by Michel Barnier at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Ireland this week.

A preview of the blame games

No one knows if there is going to be a UK-EU trade and other future terms deal, and nothing has happened this week to make that clearer. The last two months’ talks, despite Johnson’s call to put some “oomph” into them, have shown that no more progress can be made at a ‘technical’ as opposed to a political level. Hence it was announced this week that Brexit will be taken off the agenda of next week’s EU Ambassadors’ summit due to a “completely wasted” summer. In this relatively quiet limbo-period we are seeing the outlines of a series of blame games and recriminations in the UK which are only likely to intensify in the coming months.

Brexit matters more to Britain than to the EU

Ending this limbo is primarily dependent on political decisions in the UK, in particular about disclosing what its post-Brexit state aid policy is to be. The EU has already shifted from seeking direct application of its state aid rules to accepting something like equivalence between the two regimes – which needs the UK spells out what its regime is to be. It seems very unlikely the EU could soften further on this key issue.

The reality is that Brexit simply doesn’t matter that much anymore for the EU - there’s clearly a preference for some sort of deal, but, as Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government wrote this week, a no deal scenario has long been planned for. It also seems increasingly to be expected. Nor does Brexit have anything like the same political saliency for any EU country – not even Ireland, which will be most affected but is not split over it – that it does for the UK where it is still potential political dynamite.

That dynamite is – obviously – because of the continuing deep divisions over Brexit, but also because of the very practical consequences of no deal for the UK. Without rehearsing all these again, a leaked report this week of government preparations was a reminder of what is potentially at stake, including troops on the streets to keep order, water rationing and major food shortages. This is not ‘Project Fear’, it is planning by a pro-Brexit government, and there is nothing remotely like it in prospect for any EU country.

That difference of priority is insufficiently appreciated in the British polity and media, which, because in general it sees the EU entirely through the lens of Brexit, assumes that Brexit is central to the EU. But although when the UK was a member state, including during the Article 50 negotiations, its internal politics were of interest to, and often accommodated by, the EU all that changed once the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) was signed. At that point, the most crucial EU concerns about Brexit were dealt with, to be replaced with bewilderment and irritation that the UK seems to have decided that the Political Declaration that accompanied it is an irrelevance.

Who would get the blame for no deal?

This is the background to an interesting and widely-discussed report in the Sunday Times (£) by Tim Shipman, a journalist with strong sources in the government and the author of excellent books on the politics of Brexit. The thrust of the report is that the government thinks the EU is dangerously failing to understand that Johnson’s government, unlike – supposedly - May’s, is fully committed to Brexit and willing to entertain no deal. Yet such an analysis itself shows precisely a failure to understand that the whole show has moved on: no deal under May meant no WA, but the WA is now signed and Britain has already left the EU.

Beyond that, the government’s position as reported – I would think accurately – by Shipman remains hopelessly stuck in the same mire as May’s government, itself a result of the impossible promises made by Vote Leave. For although the report presents the UK as humbly seeking a ‘bare bones’ deal because it, unlike May’s administration, embraces and accepts Brexit as a change from membership to third country status that simply isn’t true at all.  Instead, as Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent, pointed out, over a huge swathe of things the UK is still seeking continuity with what it enjoyed as a member state.

That, of course, does still matter to the EU. Not in order to ‘punish’ an ex-member but for the obvious reason that if non-members have the same things as members then membership becomes meaningless. In that respect, far from Johnson’s government having accepted that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, and moved on to a new phase, it is still wedded to at least a version of his familiar ‘cakeist’ fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the EU continues to bat back attempts by the government to turn these fantasies into ‘legal texts’ without any agreement to them having been negotiated.

It obviously doesn’t take a genius to work out what is going on here, not least since it has been in prospect for months, indeed years: the ground is being prepared to blame the EU for no deal because it failed to understand that it was dealing with a British government fully prepared to go down that route if necessary. This was made explicit in a typically bullish editorial in the Sun this week.

That isn’t to say that no deal is inevitable, or that the government has decided on that course. In fact, I suspect the truth is as simple as that the government genuinely believes the dogma of the Brexit echo chamber it now entirely inhabits which insists that ‘the EU always blinks at the last minute’. So on the one hand we’re seeing that strategy repeated and, on the other, getting a taste of how the government and media will present things if no deal turns out to be the consequence: ‘we tried to warn the EU what would happen if it didn’t meet our perfectly reasonable requests but they wouldn’t believe us’.

The logic of this is circular in that the more the EU makes it clear that it will countenance no deal if necessary, the more it confirms the Brexiter view that nothing will change until the very last moment. At the same time, it’s a highly peculiar strategy given that the adverse effects of no deal will be felt much more heavily by the UK than the EU. In effect, it’s a game of chicken which has strapped every man, woman and child in the UK in the path of an oncoming train, and the closer a collision comes the more it justifies staying there. The fallback plan, apparently, is to tell the maimed victims that it was the train driver’s fault.

So that’s the first and, clearly, the foremost blame game on display, that between the UK and the EU. Again, it’s a purely domestic game, because the EU itself won’t be that interested in it, and the member states even less so.

Would the Brexiters be blamed for making false promises?

There are alternatives to blaming the EU. The most obvious – ongoing since the referendum, but which has new zest as the end of the transition approaches – is the disjuncture between what is happening and what was promised by Brexiters. That disjuncture will exist almost as much if there is a deal as if there isn’t, since it is clear that any deal will be far less commodious than was proposed to leave voters in 2016.

We had a small taste of this when former cabinet minister David Gauke pointed out this week (in response to the Shipman article) that Brexiters have long-promised that “the EU will give us whatever we want as long as they believe we’re prepared to walk away” and – in line with my analysis above - are lining up the excuse that “the EU underestimated our determination”. This engendered a huge and furious reaction and what was interesting about that was how precisely it exposed the central flaw of Brexit.

On the one hand, Iain Dale said that Gauke was talking “utter bollocks. Literally no one argued that the EU would give us all we wanted” and Julia Hartley-Brewer said simply “no it isn’t” (i.e. that what Gauke had said was the Brexiters’ position was not). But only a couple of days before during a (separate) discussion of the issue of what Brexiters had promised Hartley-Brewer had re-affirmed that “we do hold all the cards because we will do just fine with or without a deal and the EU knows it” (emphasis in original, but denoted with the symbol “*”).

Since some of the debate about Gauke’s tweet has descended into who has used the literal words “whatever we want”, let me spell out that if one side ‘holds all the cards’ it must follow that it could get whatever it wants since the other side would have no cards, and if those cards consist of being able to do fine without a deal then the leverage consists of being able to walk away. So in all substantive senses, Hartley-Brewer is still making the same claim that Gauke says Brexiters made all along but which both she and Iain Dale say was never made by Brexiters.

I’ve deliberately focused on this micro-fragment of what is in itself a relatively minor discussion because in the welter of all that has been said over the last four years it has become easier and easier for Brexiters to muddy, disown or misrepresent the claims they made. As it would now be an impossible task to subject the entirety of the Brexit debate to the same level of detailed reconstruction, it’s useful to give an illustration of how it works.

What’s especially difficult is that Brexiters often conveyed their message by means of an overall upbeat tone (e.g. that there would be a deal, and a good one) even if sometimes adding in, as it were, the small print some qualification to this message (e.g. but if not we can fall back on WTO terms and that will be fine too). Thus when, now, faced with the overall message, they are able to quote the small print as a ‘get out’ so as to deny they made any promises at all. It is a tactic familiar to dodgy salespeople the world over. Although in this case, in fact, the ‘we hold all the cards’ line was widely used, most famously by Michael Gove, and that is so well-documented as to be beyond reasonable dispute.

That such claims and promise were made matters, and it is important not to allow history to be re-written. But the present point is that, even now, two leading pro-Brexit broadcasters, each with large audiences and presumably significant influence, are able to make diametrically opposite statements – I assume in good faith, and I am not casting aspersions on either of them - about the nature of the Brexit negotiations and what was promised for them. And Dale and Hartley-Brewer are just two examples – the same story could be told using any number of Brexiters in politics or the media. This is not, by the way, an example of the familiar theme of ‘history being written by the victors’, in that what it shows is that the victors give as varied an account of that history as, at the time, they made promises about the future.

This is central to how the Brexit vote was won, because quite contradictory claims and promises were made as a deliberate campaign technique. It is also why the process of actually delivering Brexit has been so fraught, because what those claims meant and how those promises would be delivered was not defined or agreed. This in turn sets up what will inevitably be years of recrimination, denial and counter-attack.

So that is the second of the main emerging blame games: what Brexiters said and promised versus what actually happened or will happen, and of course this goes well beyond the specific example given by Gauke this week.

Would it be blamed on those who didn’t back May’s deal?

Also rumbling away in the background are assessments of what happened during the convoluted and complex political events of 2019. These include, in particular, the idea that politicians (and others) who favoured remain, or at least a soft Brexit, are at fault for not having backed May’s Withdrawal Agreement. On this account, especially if there is no deal, but even if there is a hard Brexit deal, the blame lies with those who were too recalcitrant to back May.

This involves several highly dubious propositions and, again, a certain amount of re-writing of history. It forgets, or downplays, how the hard core of opposition to May’s deal came from the ERG and, especially, the self-styled Spartans amongst them. It forgets that throughout much of 2019 every Brexit outcome was conceivably possible (or, as it often seemed, impossible) and so all shades of opinion opposed to May’s deal had reason to hold out against it in the greater or lesser hope that their preferred outcome would triumph.

Crucially, it neglects the fact that May’s deal was itself ‘hard Brexit’ – out of the single market and customs union - pointing to the eventual Canada-style outcome that remains Johnson’s stated aim – the only real difference being the extent to which she seemed to accept the realities of what that would mean, especially as regards the Level Playing Field. It also neglects that May, too, was not averse to threatening no deal. So hers was by no means the ‘compromise’ approach it is now spoken of as being. And, related to that, it neglects the fact that as the Brexit Ultras now say, as quoted in the Shipman report for example, Johnson’s WA is “basically the same as May’s deal. It’s more than 99% the same”.

Given that the major difference between the two was the substitution of the Irish Sea border for the Irish backstop arrangements, about the only group who can really be criticized for not supporting May’s deal are the DUP – and of them a better critique would be that from the outset, long before the WA or even the triggering of Article 50, their entire support for Brexit was a massive mistake given their core political priority of preserving the union.

Would it be blamed on those who enabled the 2019 election?

A somewhat related revisionism is that those opposed to Brexit were guilty of a terrible error in enabling the 2019 General Election. This charge is aimed especially at the LibDems and also at remainers within the Labour Party. Perhaps it could apply to the SNP, too, but that is less likely to stick since it’s easy to argue that the SNP’s central goal of Scottish independence is well-served by Brexit and, for wider reasons, by a Johnson government – indeed developments since the election seem to bear that out.

This criticism of remainers neglects the fact that there was no prospect of a parliamentary majority for a referendum (and still less for a revocation of Article 50) in the 2019 parliament. Moreover, Johnson had already passed his (then) Withdrawal Agreement Bill at second reading by some 30 votes. So there was a strong argument – and I made it at the time, as did others including Ian Dunt – that, highly risky as it was, a general election was the best and possibly only way to head off the eventual passage of the Bill and to re-constitute parliament in ways more propitious to remain.

None of that is to defend the way that Labour and the LibDems fought the election as regards Brexit, and the LibDem Article 50 revocation policy was – as again I argued that at the time – a total fiasco both in principle and practice. But the fact that agreeing to an election turned out to put a definitive end to the remain cause does not mean that it was a mistake to take that risk, though it is obviously true that taking it did not pay off.

Nor is any of this to deny that the internal state of the People’s Vote movement was – as we now know in more detail (£) – shambolic or that remainers made plenty of mistakes in 2019, including a failure to work together with soft Brexiters (and vice versa). But the calculated risk of the election was not one of them, and can only be presented as such by ignoring what was actually happening in parliamentary votes at that time.

Why does any of this matter?

It may seem pointless to revisit the, often, arcane details of the last four years of Brexit. But doing so is not a scholastic exercise: it is still very much live politics. Brexit was never going to be – and surely everyone can now see this? – a single, quick, or simple event. It is a long, complex, ongoing process which we are still living through. In that context it is vital to retain an accurate record of what was said, by whom, and of who did what, when, and why. The purpose being not, in fact, to assign blame but, rather, responsibility and also, perhaps, to hold on to a sense of reality in the face of the Zersetzung-style techniques that increasingly characterize Brexit.

Much of what is now happening  –  and Johnson’s whole strategy, most obviously in his ban on the use of the word ‘Brexit’  –  can be thought of as a battle between remembering and forgetting. The coming months are going to be crucial ones for defining what Brexit is going to mean for Britain and that is now certain to be very different to what those who voted leave were told it would be. So it’s going to be important to recall how we got to this juncture. After all, if, to reprise an earlier metaphor, a massive national train wreck is in prospect, it’s not unreasonable to ask what led to it - even if it’s small comfort to know the answers.

The political psychology beneath the Brexit talks

Despite another round of negotiations having been held it has been a relatively quiet Brexit week. The main noise emerging from the talks has been about UK fury at the EU’s “intransigence” (£) over road haulage rights. It’s a story with long familiar components, including the attempt to ‘cherry pick’ desired parts of single market membership, and arrogant and probably unrealistic calculations by Brexiters – including the ‘they need us more than we need them’ motif - of where the EU ‘should see’ that its interests lie. As regards the latter, the present case is another version of the tired old argument that the UK’s goods trade deficit with the EU will be in Britain’s favour.

That relative quietness is not surprising because the real action will come in the autumn, with a deal, if there is to be deal, needed by mid-October for ratification to be viable by the end of the transition. It’s also not surprising because the news has been dominated by others important things, principally the fiasco over exam results.

There are some interconnections between the Brexit and non-Brexit news. First, in a general way, and as with the handling of coronavirus, it is increasingly obvious that a government defined solely by ‘getting Brexit done’ is singularly ill-equipped to govern. That arises from the combination of Johnson’s lazy boosterism, Cummings’ arrogant control freakery, and the application of a Brexit loyalty test – rather than competence – as the sole criterion for ministerial office and civil servants’ influence. Together, to labour a point repeatedly made on this blog, this means that we have a Vote Leave campaign in office rather than an administration in the normal sense of the word.

Beyond that, the latest example of incompetence and backtracking has led some commentators to wonder if it will make Johnson more cautious of risking the debacle of no deal and others to anticipate that on Brexit, too, he might perform a U-turn (I suppose that means in terms of softening its form, or perhaps by belatedly finding some way to extend transition).

I don’t think that either of these scenarios is at all plausible. Whilst it’s true that there is now a repeated pattern of this government underestimating or ignoring complexities and having to U-turn as a result, because Brexit is such a central and defining policy it is highly unlikely to carry over into that. Doing so would be certain to rip the Tory Party apart and end Johnson’s premiership. It is the one piece of incompetence (even though others would see it as pragmatism) that his increasingly fractious party will not tolerate. For the same reason, his continual failures in every other area are likely to make him, if anything, even more reckless as regards the EU, and even more likely to seek to curry favour with the Ultras in his party who don’t want a deal.

Deal or no deal?

So the question of whether or not there will be a deal with the EU still lies in the balance – and it shouldn’t be forgotten what an extraordinary state of affairs this is, given the promises made by Brexiters and the fact that the transition ends in just four months’ time. Early reports on this week’s talks suggest very limited progress.

Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform made out a strong case this week for why a deal would be preferable. In brief, he gives five reasons: avoiding tariffs and quotas; making non-trade agreements on regulation more likely; enhancing customs co-operation; facilitating the implementation (which anyway has to occur) of the Northern Ireland Protocol; providing a platform for further agreements in the future.

Other analyses this week make related arguments. Pernille Rudlin, an expert in Japanese business, pointed out that, notwithstanding the possible UK-Japan trade deal, a UK-EU deal remains crucial to the future of Japanese investments in the UK. And Sir Julian King, a former senior diplomat now affiliated to Oxford University and RUSI, discussed the need for a future security relationship (analysis of which has been often eclipsed by the focus on trade). At UK insistence security (like defence and foreign policy) has been treated separately from the current talks, and barely discussed at all*, but as King and Lowe both, in different ways, imply, the fate of the two is interlinked to a degree if only because the animosity that would attend no deal on trade would be likely to spill over into any talks about security.

Somewhat related was a fascinating article by Naomi Smith, Chief Executive of Best for Britain, about EU-China trade talks (actually published last week, but I missed it then). She makes the point that these talks are ambitious in scope, seeking a deep relationship, with the establishment of (yes!) rigorous Level Playing Field conditions the likely requirement and consequence. This, she suggests, offers an obvious template for a comprehensive UK-EU agreement which could be achieved immediately, built on existing alignment and links, rather than over the years that the EU-China deal will take. With Brexit delivered, why not take advantage of such possibilities, be similarly ambitious, and steal a march on a China?

In a way, this is a particular version of the argument I made in a recent post about the need for a whole new Brexit debate, one no longer viewed through the prism of the Referendum and British Euroscepticism, but starting afresh from the fact of Brexit and calculating where British interests lie without the dead weight of the ‘in or out’ question that has dogged relations with the EU for decades.

For we know the stumbling block to what Smith is proposing. It is the Brexit Ultras' refusal to consider the kind of comprehensive agreement she advocates. Even Lowe’s more downbeat suggestion that a trade deal is “better than nothing”, or King’s “dialled down [security] relationship” that is “still worth doing”, goes too far for some of them. Some believe that any such deal would end up being the basis for a gradual, re-integrationist project (£), overlapping with others who prefer the ‘sovereign purity’ of no deal. In other words, they still view the post-Brexit relationship entirely through the lens of the pre-Brexit question of membership.

Should remainers** hope for no deal?

But what of those of us who view Brexit as a terrible mistake? That is not an easy question. There is a strong temptation to welcome no deal at the end of transition so as more fully to expose that folly. Only if the damage done is blindingly obvious – with significant food and drug shortages, price rises, border queues and other disruptions – will the Brexiter chickens finally come home to roost. For as Lowe points out – contrary to the wholly fallacious claims of some Brexiters – there is a significant difference between even a ‘thin’ deal and no deal. But tempting as it may be, such a position has big problems.

First, most obvious, and most important is, precisely, the damage that would be done. This wouldn’t be some academic seminar in which an argument would be satisfyingly won. It would impose real hardship, and possibly worse than hardship, on the entire country, remain and leave voters alike. My own view is that it would be an unconscionable position in itself, and an impolitic one to boot: if ‘no deal 2.0’ comes about let it be because of the intransigence of the Ultras or governmental incompetence, and not accompanied by remainer cheers.

Second, it’s unrealistic anyway. Whatever damage is done by no deal the Brexit Ultras will never admit that they were wrong. They will claim it was not due to Brexit and/or that it was due to Brexit not being done ‘properly’. Some ordinary leave voters will not be convinced by that, of course, but the politicians and commentators who have brought us Brexit are never going to recant, whatever happens. Certainly not a single one of any standing has yet done so, and I can’t see that changing in any circumstances now. So, although the temptations are entirely understandable, wishing for no deal in order to discredit Brexit is all pain and no gain.

The Museum of Brexit

Such temptations are obviously related to the discussion in my recent post of the Brexit culture war, ‘remainer vengefulness’, and the perhaps now permanent divisions that have been created. The main reason why it is so tempting for remainers to imagine a ‘gotcha’ moment is the daily taunts and sneers directed to them by Brexiters. The latest goad came this week with the revival of plans for ‘Museum of Brexit’, reported in various newspapers. It’s clear that the intention is to be a celebration, rather than any kind of even-handed record, of Brexit. However, the reports might almost have been parodic, since it is hard to imagine even the most enthusiastic of Brexiters being much attracted by the – at once underwhelming and slightly distasteful - suggestion that exhibits will include “Wetherspoon beer mats, one of Nigel Farage’s old suits and even pro-Brexit condoms”.

In any case, despite having the support of several Tory MPs, and assorted other high profile Brexiters, it’s by no means clear that this particular chamber of horrors will ever see the light of day. But that’s not really the point. It’s (presumably) more intended to gee up leave voters who may now be wondering what the point of it all was. In that respect, it is interesting and important that the museum is intended “to remember all the little people in pub meetings up and down the country who kept the flame of sovereignty and independence alive during the dark years”.

The fantasy of the Brexiter resistance

It would be easy to sneer at this, but doing so misses the opportunity to gain insight into some aspects of the complex political psychology of Brexit. Because it’s actually quite a fascinating identity to offer, partly because of its strange elitist yet anti-elitist formulation of “the little people” which I think ties in with the ‘Passport to Pimlico’ strand in Brexit and also the way (as I’ve discussed before) this can be consonant with accepting as leaders those who are self-evidently of the elite (Johnson, Rees-Mogg etc.) and yet are seen as ‘authentic’ toffs, rather than the moralising, political correct killjoys of the ‘liberal elite’. So ‘little people’, here, isn’t seen as condescending as it would be if remainers used it. Rather, it codes an ordered world in which each has their proper, but respected, place.

More to the point, the museum’s purpose invokes an image of an underground resistance movement to an occupation. Of course this, with Brexit as liberation, is precisely how some Brexiters imagine the situation, comparing – quite ludicrously and, actually, insultingly – leaving the EU with escaping colonial rule. Similarly, ludicrous and insulting comparisons of the EU with the USSR or the Third Reich are all too common. The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole has written eloquently and persuasively about this mythology of invasion and resistance as being at the heart of the political psychology that lay behind Brexit. Depicting longstanding leave activists as resistance cells – along with the very idea of a museum – suggests that Brexiters are now beginning to develop a kind of historical narrative of themselves above and beyond the immediate one of Brexit being ‘the will of the people’.

That matters because – to the extent that it takes hold – it serves to cement leaver identity well beyond the enactment of Brexit, since one of the key ways that (sub-)cultures are produced is through a narration of their own past. It obviously has the potential to morph into the already familiar victim narrative of ‘a people betrayed’. But it contains something else that is important and possibly less obvious. For unlike, say, the French Resistance after the Liberation, these keepers of the flame have not emerged from the “dark years” to be feted, admired and even envied by their more cautious or compromised compatriots. Still less – again unlike the French Resistance – do we see non-resisters queueing up to pretend that they, too, were amongst the freedom fighters.

Brexiters’ need for validation

I think that this is significant for how events have unfolded since 2016. Committed Brexiters, to the extent they believed that they would win at all, expected that on that glorious day they would be recognized as national saviours. Equally, many of them expected that the EU itself would swiftly collapse, and other countries would follow the trail they had blazed to liberation.

That none of this has happened partly accounts for the way that Brexiters continue to be so embittered and angry, despite having won. That psychology is multi-stranded, and the strands are not necessarily consistent. So it’s partly, as I (and others) have written before, including in a piece this week in Byline Times, about a victimhood both wanted and denied. Associated with that it’s also – as again Fintan O’Toole has repeatedly argued – that liberation from an entirely imagined oppression is bound be unsatisfying. And it’s about the unerasable knowledge that victory was achieved only through lies.

But there’s another strand, which is about recognition denied. For even if the EU really was every bit as oppressive as they claim, what kind of ‘liberation’ can it be when about half of your compatriots didn’t want it in the first place and more than half now think it mistaken? This explains why, even now, day after day in arguments on social media and elsewhere, Brexiters keep trying to get remainers not just to accept the referendum result but to accept that leaving is a good and desirable thing. That’s more than a demand for “losers’ consent”, for what is being demanded is ‘losers’ validation’. That contradicts, of course, the desire for victimhood, creating one of the many paradoxes of this political psychology.

Similarly, this explains why – despite having left the EU – there are still constant attempts to depict it as being in crisis and on the point of implosion, whether over coronavirus, or budget negotiations, or events in Hungary and Poland. Why do they care, now that we have left? But, again, what is being sought is validation through the anticipated domino effect that ‘we were right’. And again, it contains a paradox since were the EU to disappear then so, too, would the entire basis of Brexiter political identity.

Why does it matter?

More hard-headed readers may feel impatient with all this psychological speculation. But it has a specific and immediately practical significance which reaches right inside the negotiating rooms where the future relationship was being discussed again this week, framed by UK insistence on being a ‘sovereign equal’ and EU insistence on ‘conformity to rules’. Because for Brexiters – who now control the government – this framing is precisely that of resistance and invasion, which explains why progress has been so limited. It is the hidden background to every row about EU ‘intransigence’, such as this week’s about road haulage.

More broadly, it is one driver of the constantly antagonistic approach to the exit and, now, future terms negotiations. Rather than striding confidently to national freedom and renewal, the tone from the outset has been one of resentment, hostility and suspicion, wanting and needing to depict the EU as unreasonable and punitive so as to ‘prove we were right to leave’, whilst acting as if Britain were the aggrieved party, almost as if we were being forced to leave. This in turn makes a ‘successful’ Brexit – one that at least minimizes economic damage and which does not trash national reputation – an impossibility. Which in turn makes those who did not vote leave even less likely to recant and validate the idea of Brexit being a good thing.

The even more hard-headed may want to know what the solution to all this is. The answer to that is that, for now at least, there is no answer. How can there be, when a nation is completely re-inventing its place in the world against the wishes of half its population, and with the other half gripped by a political psychology woven of paradoxical and contradictory impulses that have led them to vote for something undefined and that, however defined, is, because of that psychology, offensive to large numbers of those who did so?



*I’m grateful to Professor Simon Usherwood of Surrey University for confirming that this statement is correct. The question arises because there are some complexities as to how ‘security’ is defined and to what extent it can be separated from issues of law enforcement and judicial cooperation in criminal matters, which have been discussed.

**It’s really not satisfactory to keep using the word ‘remainers’ now that remaining in the EU is no longer an option. I just mean people who did not want to leave and still wish we hadn’t. But to constantly use a term like, say, ‘erstwhile remainers’ would be very clumsy.