The most important Brexit event of the week came and went with relatively little fanfare, yet it marks a significant moment. The opportunity to extend the transition period went unused (though, just about conceivably, could be revived in new form). That was not a surprise because it had been so strongly signalled by the government that the UK would not seek, or agree to any request for, extension. Still, it is remarkable for being a further indication of the total lack of pragmatism or good sense with which Brexit is being undertaken.
Without reprising all the arguments, with an already short period for negotiation, ratification and implementation massively disrupted by coronavirus only sheer dogmatism mitigated against an extension. As for the negotiations themselves, this week’s round finished earlier than scheduled, with seemingly little or no progress or convergence of positions. There are differing interpretations of the significance of this (to get the range, see here and here) but, frankly, there’s little point in speculating. The crunch point will come in the autumn.
Remarkable, too, that the Labour opposition did not even in passing set down a marker about the folly of non-extension. It makes it more difficult to reach a deal, more likely that any deal that is reached will be limited in scope – with all that means for businesses already reeling from coronavirus - and leave much still to be decided. Yet, having engineered this very situation, the latest complaint of the Brexiters is of an EU ‘plot’ to trap Britain in a never-ending process of negotiation.
Brexit has consequences that people should have known
That is just the latest version of the longstanding disconnect between the decisions of Brexiters and their understanding of the consequences. Of the many examples that could be picked, recall the first Brexit Secretary David Davis’ belief (£) that there was nothing to stop the European Medical Agency or the European Banking Authority from headquartering in the UK (both have now left as a direct result of Brexit), the rage over the UK being excluded from the 2023 European City of Culture competition, or second Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab’s belated realization of the significance of Dover-Calais freight traffic.
This week, an example was Brexiter MP Peter Bone’s bemusement (during a Select Committee meeting) that mutual recognition of standards between the UK and EU will not be possible when we have left the single market. Bone has been campaigning to leave for his entire political life, has all the resources of the House of Commons Library at his disposal and yet still hasn’t acquainted himself with relatively basic facts.
Further, perhaps even more egregious, examples were contained in the ever-ludicrous Mark Francois’ letter to Michel Barnier. Francois, the current ERG Chair and very much the Brexiters’ Brexiter, if only for his “puerile bombast”, cemented those dubious credentials by combining a gracelessness of its language (“A missive from a Free Country”; “it is possible you may have heard of us [the ERG]”), with an obvious ignorance of key facts. These included his apparent lack of awareness of the provisions in the Political Declaration for the Level Playing Field, and the existing commitments within the Withdrawal Agreement for some continuing role for the ECJ in the UK’s “national life”. One might think the ERG should know this. But, then, just as - as everyone except Norman Tebbit realises - the ‘socialist’ in ‘National Socialist’ was a misnomer, as was the ‘democratic in ‘German Democratic Republic’, so too is the “research” in the partly taxpayer-funded European Research Group.
It’s easy to ascribe all this to wilful ignorance – famously, the day after the Referendum saw a spike in people googling to find out what leaving the EU meant – and no doubt that would not be unfair, and very possibly over-generous, in relation to Bone and Francois. But for some, and especially for leave voters rather than their leaders, it is part of something different, namely a belief that, somehow, ‘nothing really changes’ as a result of leaving the EU or, if it does, that this is due to the EU being unreasonable or even punitive.
Brexit isn’t just ‘symbolic’
That’s partly to do with the taking for granted of the familiar accoutrements of modern life without realising that they are the product of extensive, albeit largely invisible, institutional arrangements. So ‘of course’ nowadays planes fly us to wherever we want without restrictions, as if this were not the outcome of complex agreements such as the European Common Aviation Area (ECAA), and ‘of course’ we can travel, work and live freely within Europe, as if that were not the outcome of freedom of movement rights.
In some ways, Brexiters, who despise EU bureaucrats and rail against extra-national decision making, seem to treat it as an act of nature that there are Europe-wide regulatory systems whereas, when transition ends, British citizens will be excluded from their provisions. The related underlying issue is that for many Brexiters the vote to ‘take back control’, with all its emotional resonance, was not thought about in concrete legal or institutional terms but as a kind of symbolic, feel-good act.
It’s this – along with its counterpart in rejecting all warnings of the practical consequences as being ‘Project Fear’ – which I think partly explains why business and governmental preparedness for the end of the transition period has been so limited. Many people simply don’t understand or believe how radically things are about to change, even if a trade deal of some sort is done. Only as they belatedly come to do so do they realise what they have let themselves in for, as with MP Bob Stewart’s recent bathetic plea for the continuation of pet passports so that he can still take his dogs to France.
Brexit is having consequences that no one could have known
All of the above (and there are many other examples) is about things which those advocating or supporting Brexit really should and could have checked, revealed, or understood before. It is going to be a hard education in the coming months and years as what Tom Hayes of the Brussels European Employee Relations Group calls “the Brexit of small things” is experienced. And it won’t even be an education unless people come to understand that these were the consequences of what they voted for rather than treating them as EU ‘punishment’.
By contrast, much that is unfolding now as a consequence of, and often in the name of, Brexit are things which were in no way entailed by it. I’m referring, generally, to the completely unrealistic and reckless way that Brexit is being done. But I’m referring more particularly to the way Brexit is being used to undertake what has the makings of a wholesale restructuring of the British State and Constitution.
This has been incipient since the very early days after the Referendum and I touched on it in my first post on this Blog. More recently, in February, I wrote about it at length under the title ‘Brexit is going feral’. I won’t repeat that here (most of it is still valid), but this week we have seen the latest developments in the shape of the defenestration of the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Mark Sedwill, and the accompanying desire of Boris Johnson that he should be replaced by a Brexit supporter (£). The appointment of David Frost, who is pro-Brexit but has little experience of security matters, to one of Sedwill’s erstwhile roles, that of National Security Advisor, is part of the same process, and led to remarkably blunt criticism from Theresa May. This comes on top of the announcement of the departure of the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office which is widely understood to be related to his lack of Brexit enthusiasm.
The dangers of these developments for civil service impartiality are profound, as governmental expert Jill Rutter pointed out last October. The loss of impartiality is not merely a violation of ‘traditional principle’ but, as Rutter argues, as does Jonathan Powell writing of the current developments, it entails the danger that civil servants simply give bad or even dishonest advice to satisfy the prejudices of their political bosses.
In this way the particular issue of using Brexit as a pretext for Civil Service ‘reform’ (Reformation might be a more apt term) is indeed an aspect of the general problem – undertaking Brexit in a reckless and unrealistic way – and will make it even worse. As I wrote in October 2018 that is the inevitable consequence of faith-based politics.
A “rolling coup”
But the outrageousness of what is happening does not end there. Powell – the longstanding Chief of Staff to Tony Blair, and not lacking in reformist enthusiasm – described it as part of a “rolling coup” in his article. In a tweet, he went further, raising the prospect of authoritarianism and the need to resist it. Someone of his seniority and sobriety does not say such things lightly, and his having done so should be taken very seriously indeed.
This is not like any of the previous, almost endemic, tussles between politicians and civil servants. For one thing, it is very clearly being driven by Dominic Cummings’ desire to see “a hard rain” fall on the civil service (£). It is the bitterest ironies that having vilified the supposed rule of unaccountable EU technocrats that this unelected fan – and, dare one say, exemplification - of “weirdos and misfits” should wield such power. The braggartly, bullying language of “a hard rain” is, in itself, indicative of the reason why such a person should be kept from all power, let alone that as extensive as that which Boris Johnson has gifted him.
It’s true that Cummings’ long-time ally Michael Gove gives some political cover to this, but his much-touted speech on civil service reform was really no more than has been boilerplate stuff since the 1968 Fulton Report. Gove’s pseudo-polite, pseudo-reasonable, pseudo-intellectual smarminess is only a gateway drug to Cummings’ rip-it-up nihilism; the magic dragon Gove merely puffs is the unmagical one that Cummings chases.
If Cummings role isn’t enough reason to ‘just say no’, the constitutional implications of this week’s developments are profound, as Robert Saunders, Reader in British Political History at Queen Mary, University of London, has pointed out, with particular reference to the fact that David Frost will be neither a civil servant nor (despite being made a member of the House of Lords) a member of the government. If such appointments are at the behest of the Prime Minister, neither Parliament nor the Cabinet are the source of Executive authority. It is a move towards a presidentialisation of British politics, but with none of the accompanying checks and balances of, for example, the US system. (It is worth mentioning that as, again, Jill Rutter pointed out some time ago, Frost’s position as Brexit negotiator was already an anomalous one).
A coup rooted in Brexit
It is important to recognize that all of this is inseparable from Brexit (not because it is a necessary consequence of Brexit, but because Brexit is a condition for it). It proceeds from the same populist logic of a culture war against ‘the elite’ and, more specifically, is conceived of by Gove and Cummings as rooting out “ineffective, pro-EU bureaucrats” (£, my emphasis added).
It is that ‘pro-EU’ part which marks this as quite different to all the previous approaches to civil service reform, for it targets specific (supposed) political beliefs rather than competence or even willingness to change in some general way. It is happening under a government with Brexit as its central purpose and its sole loyalty test, and one in which numerous former Vote Leave campaign team members, including Cummings, hold crucial advisory roles. It is making pro-Brexit opinion the defining qualification not even just for those civil servants delivering Brexit but for posts which have little or nothing to do with that.
Crucially, nowhere, ever, in any way whatsoever was it suggested that the 2016 Referendum was a vote for such a ‘coup’. Nowhere, ever, in any way whatsoever was it suggested that the pledge at the last election to ‘Get Brexit Done’ meant using it as a cover to undertake such far-reaching changes.
In this respect, what is happening is potentially far more serious than the dishonest way in which the vote for an undefined Brexit was repurposed as a vote for hard Brexit or even for no deal Brexit. For, now, it is being used as a mandate for wholesale changes to the British political system which are nothing at all to do with delivering Brexit. That was always a danger - it is part of the Brexit McCarthyism I first wrote about in March 2017 (these and other references to my previous posts are not intended to show that ‘I told you so’, but that what is happening now is rooted in what has developed over these last four years). Yet it is developing in complex and subtle ways, which are all the more insidious for being so.
For, as has recently been suggested, there is actually little popular appetite for a ‘Brexit culture war’ but – unlike the screaming ‘enemies of the people’ headline - it is being prosecuted in a way that few voters will really be aware of or interested in. The way the National Security Advisor is appointed is, for most, uninteresting and arcane. Civil service ‘reform’ scarcely less so. But - as with the institutional arrangements which underpin, say, air travel or international trade – once the scaffolding of the political system is dismantled people may be appalled by, but will have to live with, the consequences.
Nothing is inevitable
I keep being told (on Twitter, the fount of all wisdom of course) that all this was “the plan all along” and is inevitable. It may have been the plan of some, but little or nothing is ‘inevitable’ in human affairs. History is made by what, collectively, people do, not despite anything they may do. Without that, there’s no meaning to politics. How Brexit plays out is no exception.
This is what I was trying to get at in last week’s post. Some read it, mistakenly, as a call to ‘get behind Brexit’ or to ‘make Brexit work’. That wasn’t the point at all. Rather, it was to suggest that we should not acquiesce to the inevitability of what the ERG and Brexit Party hardliners insist that Brexit means. With the referendum mandate now discharged, we are freed forever of the yoke of the 17.4 million and with that freedom can and should challenge anew all that is being done in the name of Brexit, as well as comparing it with what was promised. Manifestly, that includes the specifics of whatever may or may not be negotiated with the EU. But it also includes all of the ways Brexit is being made use of to do things which were never entailed by Brexit itself.
The Brexiters have been successful in getting Britain to leave the EU. That is a disaster in itself. But it does not follow that they now own our country to be played with as they will, or to be re-made in whatever way they want.
Showing posts with label Peter Bone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Bone. Show all posts
Friday, 3 July 2020
Friday, 29 May 2020
Not moving on, not going away
The Brexit process is in another of its periodic ‘lull before the storm’ moments. So this will be quite a boring post, but at least it's fairly short. There were no talks scheduled this week but next week, when they resume, will be the last negotiations before a decision on whether to extend the Transition Period (TP) or not will have to made. Nothing of substance has shifted on this.
Nothing has changed
Michael Gove and David Frost appeared before the EU Future Relationship Select Committee and made it clear that no extension remains the government position and, also, that whether or not a deal is done there will be no separate implementation period for businesses to adjust (thus, closing down the idea of a TP extension by the back door). As for the prospects of a deal being done, this again was discussed in terms of the need for the EU to shift its position, and to recognize the ‘precedents’ set in its relationships with Canada, Japan, Norway and so on as applying to the UK. All this was just a reiteration of the UK position since the February ‘Negotiations Approach’ document (as discussed and critiqued in a previous post).
So there was nothing new here and no sense of realism in what was said – at one stage David Frost even suggested that “we are still at a relatively early stage of the negotiations” which seems rather bizarre. Nevertheless, it was recognized that a fisheries deal, meant to be completed by the end of June, may not meet this (soft) deadline which might, at a pinch, suggest some realization that the timeframes overall are unrealistic. On the other hand, Frost reiterated the suggestion that not only would the UK not agree an extension period by the end of June, but that Boris Johnson might even walk out of the talks altogether at that point.
On the EU side, a letter from Michel Barnier to opposition party leaders in the UK Parliament re-iterated an openness to a one or two-year extension. No real news there, either, since it says no more than is contained within the Withdrawal Agreement. But it flagged up an important domestic political issue in that the leaders in question did not include Keir Starmer. This was not an oversight on Barnier’s part – his letter was a reply to those opposition leaders who had written to him, and Starmer was not amongst them.
Starmer’s stance on extension
This reflects the fact that he continues to reject demands to call for an extension, saying instead that the government has promised to negotiate a deal by the end of the year and should be held to account on this. This is smart politics, for now, because it prevents Johnson presenting extension as a Labour demand and a remainer trick – and in the process reactivating the Brexit culture war as a party political divide – rather than a rational response to the force majeure of the coronavirus crisis.
But it is now reaching its limits, for several reasons. First, just as a matter of principle, it would be wrong to treat something as crucial as extension as a taboo topic simply for fear of being dubbed a ‘remainer party’. Second, there is a large constituency, by no means confined to erstwhile remainers, who want extension and whose voice Labour should represent. Third, for this reason there are also political advantages in calling for extension because it will appeal to many voters and, also, could position Labour as more business-friendly than the Tories. At the very least it would consolidate Starmer's credentials as a serious-minded pragmatist. And, finally, because it would set down a marker for the future – if Starmer fails to call for an extension in the coming month he will have made Labour to a degree complicit in the consequences of non-extension in a not dissimilar way to how its support for triggering Article 50 made it complicit in Brexit itself.
So, if Starmer continues to be as sure-footed an opposition leader as he has been so far, there are good reasons of principle and tactics to call for extension soon. He would be aided in this if some loud business and civil society voices prepared the ground by doing the same – providing some juicy quotes for use at PMQs in much the same way as he has so effectively used those from medical experts to puncture Johnson’s coronavirus bluster - just as they would be aided in speaking out were he to do so. There really is very little time to be lost in this, and the ongoing coronavirus crisis should not blind Labour, or anyone else, to the fact that what happens in the next month as regards TP extension is going to shape what happens to Britain for years.
Extension and the Cummings affair
Of course, no matter how vociferously an extension is demanded it looks highly unlikely that the government will budge. I wrote in detail about the wider significance of the Cummings affair in an ‘extra’ post on this blog earlier this week. But on the narrow issue of TP extension it is also important, in quite intricate ways.
One of the arguments with which Cummings’ supporters have tried to close down criticism of him from Tory MPs is to suggest that, were he forced to resign, the Brexit project itself would be under threat, and extension would become more likely. This message has a particular salience given that high profile Brexiter MPs including Steve Baker and Peter Bone have been amongst those calling for Cummings’ resignation.
To the extent that he is reportedly adamantly opposed to extension there might be some truth in this but, overall, it seems like a false hare. Is Brexit policy really dependent on just one advisor? This was presumably the thrust behind Bone’s questioning of David Frost at the Select Committee, as to whether he, Frost, operated under orders from Cummings, and whether Brexit policy would collapse without Cummings. The answer was that he does not and that it would not.
What is more important about the Cummings affair is that whether he stays or goes – which still remains an open question - it has made it even less likely that the UK will seek or accept an extension to the TP. On the one hand, with so much internal dissent already in the Tory Party over Cummings, the chances of Johnson now facing down the ERG Ultras is even smaller than before. On the other hand, the discomfort of the affair, coupled with its wider context of the government’s incompetent handling of coronavirus, makes the comfort and relative safety of his core ‘get Brexit done’ message all the more appealing to Johnson.
One might, of course, hope that the small matter of the national interest would be a factor here but to do so would be to invest Johnson with qualities he self-evidently lacks. It would in any case entail that he broke with recent history by framing Tory policy on Europe in terms of national, rather than party, interest. After the election, I wrote that the fundamental dynamics of Brexit remained unchanged and that the third of them was that any government was constrained by the need to avoid massive economic dislocation, which put a break on the second of them, namely internal Tory Party politics.
That has changed, partly because I hadn’t anticipated quite how much “f*** business” was to become actual government policy, but mainly because of the impact coronavirus crisis. Amongst Brexiters, this is interpreted to make it even more likely that the EU will ‘blink’ and do a deal on UK terms by the end of the year and to strengthen the UK’s ‘hand’ (£), but also to mean that, if it doesn’t, the economic damage of no deal will be concealed by or subsumed within that of the virus. So with the dynamic of economic realism more muted, the constraints upon a policy framed purely in terms of the internal interests of the Tory Party are even fewer than before.
Moving on
Yet it is this which, going back to Labour, gives Starmer an opening. As suggested in my previous post, the Cummings episode makes a mockery of the populist claim of anti-elitism, and this can be married together with the idea of a government turning its back on the public interest to good effect. Just as ‘we can now see that they only care for themselves when it comes to lockdown’ so, Labour can argue, ‘we can see that they don’t care about damaging your jobs and livelihoods’.
And, yes, no doubt Johnson will try to twist that round to mean ‘you never accepted Brexit’ but, like much else about Brexit, that will be so 2019. Coronavirus has not only reshaped the arguments for TP extension, it is also, and at speed, reshaping the entire political landscape. Johnson and the Brexiters would love to pull things back to the heady ‘will of the people days’ but ‘the people’ have, to coin the phrase du jour, ‘moved on”. There’s a tide there that Starmer can catch to Labour Party advantage but, much more importantly, to the benefit of us all. For the idea that a country, battered by coronavirus, should be led into the calamity of no deal in just six months’ time, or even just to the shocks of moving from single market membership to a limited trade agreement, is plain crazy.
And, please, let’s have no nonsense about this being to do with thwarting Brexit. Not only has Brexit happened, in the precise sense of having left the EU, but absolutely nothing in what the government now envisages is remotely – remotely – like what leave voters were promised in 2016, or indeed for years afterwards, including at the last election (when, in fact, its details were barely discussed). Not only was an economically advantageous deal promised, but it would be negotiated before the formal process to leave was even begun.
The magnitude of these lies still has the power to shock. The idea that they now mandate a Prime Minister who is daily exposed as being completely out of his depth in every respect, heading a government which already looks exhausted and incompetent (£), and acting solely in the interests of a small faction of fanatical nihilists, to drag us into even greater disaster is grotesque. Grotesque in every conceivable way: democratically, intellectually, economically, and morally.
Nothing has changed
Michael Gove and David Frost appeared before the EU Future Relationship Select Committee and made it clear that no extension remains the government position and, also, that whether or not a deal is done there will be no separate implementation period for businesses to adjust (thus, closing down the idea of a TP extension by the back door). As for the prospects of a deal being done, this again was discussed in terms of the need for the EU to shift its position, and to recognize the ‘precedents’ set in its relationships with Canada, Japan, Norway and so on as applying to the UK. All this was just a reiteration of the UK position since the February ‘Negotiations Approach’ document (as discussed and critiqued in a previous post).
So there was nothing new here and no sense of realism in what was said – at one stage David Frost even suggested that “we are still at a relatively early stage of the negotiations” which seems rather bizarre. Nevertheless, it was recognized that a fisheries deal, meant to be completed by the end of June, may not meet this (soft) deadline which might, at a pinch, suggest some realization that the timeframes overall are unrealistic. On the other hand, Frost reiterated the suggestion that not only would the UK not agree an extension period by the end of June, but that Boris Johnson might even walk out of the talks altogether at that point.
On the EU side, a letter from Michel Barnier to opposition party leaders in the UK Parliament re-iterated an openness to a one or two-year extension. No real news there, either, since it says no more than is contained within the Withdrawal Agreement. But it flagged up an important domestic political issue in that the leaders in question did not include Keir Starmer. This was not an oversight on Barnier’s part – his letter was a reply to those opposition leaders who had written to him, and Starmer was not amongst them.
Starmer’s stance on extension
This reflects the fact that he continues to reject demands to call for an extension, saying instead that the government has promised to negotiate a deal by the end of the year and should be held to account on this. This is smart politics, for now, because it prevents Johnson presenting extension as a Labour demand and a remainer trick – and in the process reactivating the Brexit culture war as a party political divide – rather than a rational response to the force majeure of the coronavirus crisis.
But it is now reaching its limits, for several reasons. First, just as a matter of principle, it would be wrong to treat something as crucial as extension as a taboo topic simply for fear of being dubbed a ‘remainer party’. Second, there is a large constituency, by no means confined to erstwhile remainers, who want extension and whose voice Labour should represent. Third, for this reason there are also political advantages in calling for extension because it will appeal to many voters and, also, could position Labour as more business-friendly than the Tories. At the very least it would consolidate Starmer's credentials as a serious-minded pragmatist. And, finally, because it would set down a marker for the future – if Starmer fails to call for an extension in the coming month he will have made Labour to a degree complicit in the consequences of non-extension in a not dissimilar way to how its support for triggering Article 50 made it complicit in Brexit itself.
So, if Starmer continues to be as sure-footed an opposition leader as he has been so far, there are good reasons of principle and tactics to call for extension soon. He would be aided in this if some loud business and civil society voices prepared the ground by doing the same – providing some juicy quotes for use at PMQs in much the same way as he has so effectively used those from medical experts to puncture Johnson’s coronavirus bluster - just as they would be aided in speaking out were he to do so. There really is very little time to be lost in this, and the ongoing coronavirus crisis should not blind Labour, or anyone else, to the fact that what happens in the next month as regards TP extension is going to shape what happens to Britain for years.
Extension and the Cummings affair
Of course, no matter how vociferously an extension is demanded it looks highly unlikely that the government will budge. I wrote in detail about the wider significance of the Cummings affair in an ‘extra’ post on this blog earlier this week. But on the narrow issue of TP extension it is also important, in quite intricate ways.
One of the arguments with which Cummings’ supporters have tried to close down criticism of him from Tory MPs is to suggest that, were he forced to resign, the Brexit project itself would be under threat, and extension would become more likely. This message has a particular salience given that high profile Brexiter MPs including Steve Baker and Peter Bone have been amongst those calling for Cummings’ resignation.
To the extent that he is reportedly adamantly opposed to extension there might be some truth in this but, overall, it seems like a false hare. Is Brexit policy really dependent on just one advisor? This was presumably the thrust behind Bone’s questioning of David Frost at the Select Committee, as to whether he, Frost, operated under orders from Cummings, and whether Brexit policy would collapse without Cummings. The answer was that he does not and that it would not.
What is more important about the Cummings affair is that whether he stays or goes – which still remains an open question - it has made it even less likely that the UK will seek or accept an extension to the TP. On the one hand, with so much internal dissent already in the Tory Party over Cummings, the chances of Johnson now facing down the ERG Ultras is even smaller than before. On the other hand, the discomfort of the affair, coupled with its wider context of the government’s incompetent handling of coronavirus, makes the comfort and relative safety of his core ‘get Brexit done’ message all the more appealing to Johnson.
One might, of course, hope that the small matter of the national interest would be a factor here but to do so would be to invest Johnson with qualities he self-evidently lacks. It would in any case entail that he broke with recent history by framing Tory policy on Europe in terms of national, rather than party, interest. After the election, I wrote that the fundamental dynamics of Brexit remained unchanged and that the third of them was that any government was constrained by the need to avoid massive economic dislocation, which put a break on the second of them, namely internal Tory Party politics.
That has changed, partly because I hadn’t anticipated quite how much “f*** business” was to become actual government policy, but mainly because of the impact coronavirus crisis. Amongst Brexiters, this is interpreted to make it even more likely that the EU will ‘blink’ and do a deal on UK terms by the end of the year and to strengthen the UK’s ‘hand’ (£), but also to mean that, if it doesn’t, the economic damage of no deal will be concealed by or subsumed within that of the virus. So with the dynamic of economic realism more muted, the constraints upon a policy framed purely in terms of the internal interests of the Tory Party are even fewer than before.
Moving on
Yet it is this which, going back to Labour, gives Starmer an opening. As suggested in my previous post, the Cummings episode makes a mockery of the populist claim of anti-elitism, and this can be married together with the idea of a government turning its back on the public interest to good effect. Just as ‘we can now see that they only care for themselves when it comes to lockdown’ so, Labour can argue, ‘we can see that they don’t care about damaging your jobs and livelihoods’.
And, yes, no doubt Johnson will try to twist that round to mean ‘you never accepted Brexit’ but, like much else about Brexit, that will be so 2019. Coronavirus has not only reshaped the arguments for TP extension, it is also, and at speed, reshaping the entire political landscape. Johnson and the Brexiters would love to pull things back to the heady ‘will of the people days’ but ‘the people’ have, to coin the phrase du jour, ‘moved on”. There’s a tide there that Starmer can catch to Labour Party advantage but, much more importantly, to the benefit of us all. For the idea that a country, battered by coronavirus, should be led into the calamity of no deal in just six months’ time, or even just to the shocks of moving from single market membership to a limited trade agreement, is plain crazy.
And, please, let’s have no nonsense about this being to do with thwarting Brexit. Not only has Brexit happened, in the precise sense of having left the EU, but absolutely nothing in what the government now envisages is remotely – remotely – like what leave voters were promised in 2016, or indeed for years afterwards, including at the last election (when, in fact, its details were barely discussed). Not only was an economically advantageous deal promised, but it would be negotiated before the formal process to leave was even begun.
The magnitude of these lies still has the power to shock. The idea that they now mandate a Prime Minister who is daily exposed as being completely out of his depth in every respect, heading a government which already looks exhausted and incompetent (£), and acting solely in the interests of a small faction of fanatical nihilists, to drag us into even greater disaster is grotesque. Grotesque in every conceivable way: democratically, intellectually, economically, and morally.
Wednesday, 21 November 2018
Brexit redux
Beneath the
headline drama of possible leadership challenges, and whether May’s deal will
make it through the House of Commons, the Brexit Ultras are making a concerted
fightback against what Dominic
Raab calls the “dictated terms” of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA).
That diagnosis conceals the uncomfortable truth that those terms were indeed dictated – by the government’s own red lines about the single market and customs union which the Ultras enthusiastically support, and about the Northern Ireland border having to be free of any physical infrastructure, which the Ultras have never been able convincingly to rebut, and having no customs border in the Irish Sea, which they share. It also arises from the consequences of the timing of the Article 50 notice, which the Ultras absolutely insisted upon.
Return of the zombies
Thus the Ultras are now engaged in the pretence that a different outcome could derive from those same preconditions. One version is the familiar one of needing no exit deal and just reverting to trading on WTO terms ‘as we do with the rest of the world’. This zombie claim refuses to die, despite the fact that the UK does not trade with any country on WTO terms alone and that, in any case, there are numerous non-trade issues, such as aviation, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the WTO.
The other version, at its most general, is that what is needed is a Canada +++ Free Trade Agreement (FTA). But that idea, apart from the limitations it has in its own terms, confuses the eventual agreement on future terms with the WA. An FTA cannot substitute for, and requires as a pre-condition, a WA.
The most peculiar twisting together of these two arguments came from David Davis, who wrote on the Conservative Home website this week that “if we need to leave with no deal and negotiate a free trade agreement during the transition period, then so be it”. But self-evidently the transition period only exists as part of the WA. If there’s no deal, there is no transition period. This is hardly some abstruse, technical detail and it is truly extraordinary that someone who was for two years the Brexit Secretary apparently doesn’t understand it.
That a lack of understanding abounds amongst the Ultras was shown by another very bizarre episode this week in which Owen Paterson (of ‘only a madman would leave the single market’ fame) bemoaned the fact that UK-Oklahoma trade deals were precluded by the WA. Perhaps he just meant commercial deals – in which case he is wrong because neither EU membership nor the WA prevent that. But if he meant an FTA it is nonsense since of course it is the USA, not individual states like Oklahoma, which makes FTAs.
Or perhaps, to be charitable, he was referring to the UK-USA FTA dream so beloved by Brexiters. If so, it is a rather unexciting dream: the estimated long-term benefit of such a deal is 0.1-0.3% GDP compared with a Brexit cost of 1-12% GDP. There’s never been a ‘trade’ justification for an independent trade policy, only the symbolic justification of its being ‘independent’.
Friction about facts
Meanwhile, the ERG produced two documents this week. One was a direct response to the WA in which the strangest in a litany of complaints is that it means the UK “will become a ‘rule-taker’ and will have surrendered our sovereignty”. But the central Brexiter criticism of EU membership is that we have already lost our sovereignty. If so, how can the WA surrender it? To lose sovereignty once might be regarded as misfortune; to do so twice looks like illogic.
Mixed in with this was the predictable moan about having to pay the financial settlement without getting anything back in terms of a trade deal. This, another of the lexicon of zombie Brexiter ‘facts’, again shows the failure to understand the difference between the WA and the future terms agreement.
Perhaps most tellingly, the document makes repeated references to the WA not honouring “the spirit of the 2016 Referendum”. This is significant as it acknowledges, by implication, that the letter of the vote could be met in numerous different ways – including the form it has taken – but arrogating to the ERG the high priest’s role of interpreting the votes of 17.4 Million as a mysterious ‘spirit’ which – amazingly – turns out to be their own interpretation of it.
The second ERG report, fronted by Peter Lilley (he of ‘a deal can be done in 10 minutes’ fame, a line he shamelessly repeated this week) and launched by a veritable ‘Manel’ of ageing Brexiters sought to ‘explode the myths’ of what leaving the Customs Union means. The document was entitled ‘Fact – NOT friction’ (even in the Brexit high command there appears to be a belief that writing something in capital letters makes it extra true) and contained still more confusions.
Throughout it, features of the Single Market and Customs Union are conflated, and whilst some of the points about customs checks are valid, a series of cherry-picked assertions and half-truths simplified and distorted the deeply technical issues involved. The overall problem, as trade expert David Henig identified, is that whilst identifying ways that customs costs and checked can be reduced, these do not amount to their entire removal, which is what is at stake as regards the Northern Ireland border in particular.
When some of these problems were put to Peter Lilley during a BBC interview he reacted with anger, accusing Chris Morris, the BBC’s Brexit fact-checker, of arguing for remain. But whilst there is plenty of room for opinion in the Brexit debate there are plenty of facts too, and dismissing them because they are inconvenient is the kind of confirmation bias which has made that debate so intractable. It is evident in the Ultras’ dismissal of the Treasury, and of the civil service in general, as remainer propagandists.
Of course this creates the difficulty that Brexiters like Bernard Jenkin promptly decried the fact-checker’s facts as being no more than remainer opinion. Our opinions are facts, your facts are just opinions is a logic doomed to infinite circularity. And whilst it proved very successful for the Brexit campaign, it is hopeless when it comes to delivering policy.
The only way out of this impasse is to go outside the very tiny coterie of economists and lawyers upon whom the Ultras rely for advice, mostly affiliated with the Institute for Economic Affairs. For within the wider world of economists, business people and trade experts there is broad agreement on the core facts of how trade and supply chains actually work. Ignoring that is a bit like basing policies on smoking only on the advice of the tobacco industry, on the basis that the medical profession has an anti-smoking bias.
What if the Brexiters were in charge?
How can we explain the rehearsal of all of these, to be charitable, misunderstandings? Given that there is nothing new in them, it’s unlikely that the Ultras really expect the government to change policy. More likely, they are setting the stage for years of culture wars to come in which they will disown the problems caused by Brexit by saying – rather as diehard Marxists say of actually existing communism - that all would have been well if only it been done ‘properly’.
Which leads to a thought experiment, for which a rather strong stomach is needed. Imagine for a moment that the Ultras had been given their head, and we play the whole of the last 2 years again, redux. Rees-Mogg would be PM and, say, Peter Bone the Chancellor, with Nadine Dorries as Foreign Secretary. For Brexit Secretary – why not? - David Davis could bring valuable energy and diligence to the role. And every other ministerial position would be filled with true believers – Bridgen, Rosindell, Jenkyns – truly a government of all the talents. The civil service would have had to be cleared out, of course, to give the dream team a clear run, but they could be replaced with, say, Patrick Minford, Melanie Phillips, John Longworth and Tim Martin. After all, they all appear convinced that the perfect Brexit would be easily delivered.
This is an extension of an idea in Robert Shrimsley’s recent FT column (£) where he considers the complaint that ‘it would all have been different if a leaver was in charge’ – this, of course, arising from the persistent refrain that May is a closet remainer. Shrimsley’s excoriating view is that we know how that would work out because we’ve seen in the last two years that the record of the Brexit hardliners is “an uninterrupted litany of cowardice, incompetence and blame shifting”. And, indeed, it is hard to resist the conclusion that a government of the sort I’ve described would be an unmitigated, catastrophic disaster.
And yet it is at least plausible that such a government would actually end up delivering something remarkably similar to the Withdrawal Agreement that May has come up with, and which they so despise. For, as I said at the beginning of this post, it is from the decisions that May took with the full approval of the Ultras that the present situation has arisen.
I don’t think that she was being dishonest in embracing their hard Brexit, always intending to backtrack somewhat. At the time of the Lancaster House speech, which they were so happy with, I am quite certain that she had believed it to be workable.
It was the ineluctable logic of the negotiations, of the Good Friday Agreement, and of the concerted business lobbying that spelt out the economic consequences of her approach that led her away from that position, whilst stubbornly retaining many of its core features. Whoever was in charge would have faced that same logic had they made the same initial decisions. Which is another way of saying that although Brexiters can shout down the fact-checkers, they can’t shout down the facts.
That diagnosis conceals the uncomfortable truth that those terms were indeed dictated – by the government’s own red lines about the single market and customs union which the Ultras enthusiastically support, and about the Northern Ireland border having to be free of any physical infrastructure, which the Ultras have never been able convincingly to rebut, and having no customs border in the Irish Sea, which they share. It also arises from the consequences of the timing of the Article 50 notice, which the Ultras absolutely insisted upon.
Return of the zombies
Thus the Ultras are now engaged in the pretence that a different outcome could derive from those same preconditions. One version is the familiar one of needing no exit deal and just reverting to trading on WTO terms ‘as we do with the rest of the world’. This zombie claim refuses to die, despite the fact that the UK does not trade with any country on WTO terms alone and that, in any case, there are numerous non-trade issues, such as aviation, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the WTO.
The other version, at its most general, is that what is needed is a Canada +++ Free Trade Agreement (FTA). But that idea, apart from the limitations it has in its own terms, confuses the eventual agreement on future terms with the WA. An FTA cannot substitute for, and requires as a pre-condition, a WA.
The most peculiar twisting together of these two arguments came from David Davis, who wrote on the Conservative Home website this week that “if we need to leave with no deal and negotiate a free trade agreement during the transition period, then so be it”. But self-evidently the transition period only exists as part of the WA. If there’s no deal, there is no transition period. This is hardly some abstruse, technical detail and it is truly extraordinary that someone who was for two years the Brexit Secretary apparently doesn’t understand it.
That a lack of understanding abounds amongst the Ultras was shown by another very bizarre episode this week in which Owen Paterson (of ‘only a madman would leave the single market’ fame) bemoaned the fact that UK-Oklahoma trade deals were precluded by the WA. Perhaps he just meant commercial deals – in which case he is wrong because neither EU membership nor the WA prevent that. But if he meant an FTA it is nonsense since of course it is the USA, not individual states like Oklahoma, which makes FTAs.
Or perhaps, to be charitable, he was referring to the UK-USA FTA dream so beloved by Brexiters. If so, it is a rather unexciting dream: the estimated long-term benefit of such a deal is 0.1-0.3% GDP compared with a Brexit cost of 1-12% GDP. There’s never been a ‘trade’ justification for an independent trade policy, only the symbolic justification of its being ‘independent’.
Friction about facts
Meanwhile, the ERG produced two documents this week. One was a direct response to the WA in which the strangest in a litany of complaints is that it means the UK “will become a ‘rule-taker’ and will have surrendered our sovereignty”. But the central Brexiter criticism of EU membership is that we have already lost our sovereignty. If so, how can the WA surrender it? To lose sovereignty once might be regarded as misfortune; to do so twice looks like illogic.
Mixed in with this was the predictable moan about having to pay the financial settlement without getting anything back in terms of a trade deal. This, another of the lexicon of zombie Brexiter ‘facts’, again shows the failure to understand the difference between the WA and the future terms agreement.
Perhaps most tellingly, the document makes repeated references to the WA not honouring “the spirit of the 2016 Referendum”. This is significant as it acknowledges, by implication, that the letter of the vote could be met in numerous different ways – including the form it has taken – but arrogating to the ERG the high priest’s role of interpreting the votes of 17.4 Million as a mysterious ‘spirit’ which – amazingly – turns out to be their own interpretation of it.
The second ERG report, fronted by Peter Lilley (he of ‘a deal can be done in 10 minutes’ fame, a line he shamelessly repeated this week) and launched by a veritable ‘Manel’ of ageing Brexiters sought to ‘explode the myths’ of what leaving the Customs Union means. The document was entitled ‘Fact – NOT friction’ (even in the Brexit high command there appears to be a belief that writing something in capital letters makes it extra true) and contained still more confusions.
Throughout it, features of the Single Market and Customs Union are conflated, and whilst some of the points about customs checks are valid, a series of cherry-picked assertions and half-truths simplified and distorted the deeply technical issues involved. The overall problem, as trade expert David Henig identified, is that whilst identifying ways that customs costs and checked can be reduced, these do not amount to their entire removal, which is what is at stake as regards the Northern Ireland border in particular.
When some of these problems were put to Peter Lilley during a BBC interview he reacted with anger, accusing Chris Morris, the BBC’s Brexit fact-checker, of arguing for remain. But whilst there is plenty of room for opinion in the Brexit debate there are plenty of facts too, and dismissing them because they are inconvenient is the kind of confirmation bias which has made that debate so intractable. It is evident in the Ultras’ dismissal of the Treasury, and of the civil service in general, as remainer propagandists.
Of course this creates the difficulty that Brexiters like Bernard Jenkin promptly decried the fact-checker’s facts as being no more than remainer opinion. Our opinions are facts, your facts are just opinions is a logic doomed to infinite circularity. And whilst it proved very successful for the Brexit campaign, it is hopeless when it comes to delivering policy.
The only way out of this impasse is to go outside the very tiny coterie of economists and lawyers upon whom the Ultras rely for advice, mostly affiliated with the Institute for Economic Affairs. For within the wider world of economists, business people and trade experts there is broad agreement on the core facts of how trade and supply chains actually work. Ignoring that is a bit like basing policies on smoking only on the advice of the tobacco industry, on the basis that the medical profession has an anti-smoking bias.
What if the Brexiters were in charge?
How can we explain the rehearsal of all of these, to be charitable, misunderstandings? Given that there is nothing new in them, it’s unlikely that the Ultras really expect the government to change policy. More likely, they are setting the stage for years of culture wars to come in which they will disown the problems caused by Brexit by saying – rather as diehard Marxists say of actually existing communism - that all would have been well if only it been done ‘properly’.
Which leads to a thought experiment, for which a rather strong stomach is needed. Imagine for a moment that the Ultras had been given their head, and we play the whole of the last 2 years again, redux. Rees-Mogg would be PM and, say, Peter Bone the Chancellor, with Nadine Dorries as Foreign Secretary. For Brexit Secretary – why not? - David Davis could bring valuable energy and diligence to the role. And every other ministerial position would be filled with true believers – Bridgen, Rosindell, Jenkyns – truly a government of all the talents. The civil service would have had to be cleared out, of course, to give the dream team a clear run, but they could be replaced with, say, Patrick Minford, Melanie Phillips, John Longworth and Tim Martin. After all, they all appear convinced that the perfect Brexit would be easily delivered.
This is an extension of an idea in Robert Shrimsley’s recent FT column (£) where he considers the complaint that ‘it would all have been different if a leaver was in charge’ – this, of course, arising from the persistent refrain that May is a closet remainer. Shrimsley’s excoriating view is that we know how that would work out because we’ve seen in the last two years that the record of the Brexit hardliners is “an uninterrupted litany of cowardice, incompetence and blame shifting”. And, indeed, it is hard to resist the conclusion that a government of the sort I’ve described would be an unmitigated, catastrophic disaster.
And yet it is at least plausible that such a government would actually end up delivering something remarkably similar to the Withdrawal Agreement that May has come up with, and which they so despise. For, as I said at the beginning of this post, it is from the decisions that May took with the full approval of the Ultras that the present situation has arisen.
I don’t think that she was being dishonest in embracing their hard Brexit, always intending to backtrack somewhat. At the time of the Lancaster House speech, which they were so happy with, I am quite certain that she had believed it to be workable.
It was the ineluctable logic of the negotiations, of the Good Friday Agreement, and of the concerted business lobbying that spelt out the economic consequences of her approach that led her away from that position, whilst stubbornly retaining many of its core features. Whoever was in charge would have faced that same logic had they made the same initial decisions. Which is another way of saying that although Brexiters can shout down the fact-checkers, they can’t shout down the facts.
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