The landscape of the politics of Brexit remains a broad and highly contested terrain, ranging from those convinced it was a great and necessary triumph, to be defended at all costs, to those urging its immediate reversal, with many shades of opinion between. But, under the Labour government, what might be called the immediate practical politics of Brexit operates within a far more restricted space in which only ‘micro-issues’ are subject to political decisions. Those micro-issues and decisions matter, and are worthy of attention, but, ultimately, the question is whether this disjuncture of scale is a sustainable one.
Wes Streeting’s facts of life
The Health Secretary Wes Streeting, whether intentionally or not, recently gave a very clear exposition of the perverse position the government has adopted. He was asked why the idea, not of rejoining the EU, but even of joining the single market was undiscussable. Whilst happy to recall that he, himself, had “campaigned passionately” against Brexit (this, at least, is something which is now sayable for cabinet ministers), he argued that “the people have moved on, the country has moved on and the EU has moved on”, so that there was “no appetite” for such questions to be re-opened.
This is familiar enough stuff, but Streeting then went on to say something more surprising, which I’m not sure has been explicitly expressed by any other cabinet minister: “there’s no doubt that what we warned about in advance of the referendum in terms of the impact on economic growth has come to pass, and that’s a fact of life we have to deal with. I think the sweet spot is working as closely with the European Union where we can, but also showing the agility to work with and through other partners in other markets as well …” [1]
This is different to the kind of things Keir Starmer, in particular, has said, accurately but irrelevantly, about the fact that not all Britain’s economic problems stem from Brexit. Sometimes, that has even morphed into the implication that ‘therefore’ these problems can be solved irrespective of Brexit. By contrast, the Streeting version is that the costs of Brexit are significant but just have to be accepted and, at best, mitigations made at the margin. In effect, this elevates the ‘mustn’t grumble’ mentality, which I alluded to in my most recent post, to the level of government policy.
That still leaves open the question of what Streeting means by “working as closely as possible with the EU where we can”. I wrote in a post at the end of the summer, pointing to the government’s lack of a clear and coherent post-Brexit strategy (a lack which still remains), that the most likely reading of Labour’s approach was that it would be the “maximalist” one of seeking “the maximum closeness, cooperation and alignment with the EU short of breaking the Labour manifesto commitment to its negative red lines”. Actually, it would have been more accurate to say that this is the best that can be hoped for. For that approach has yet to be demonstrated, as illustrated by the current rejection of a Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS), despite that fact it would not violate those red lines.
Backbench pressure?
I also pointed out in that post that one important way in which this government differs from its Tory predecessor is that the backbench pressure will be towards closer ties with the EU, rather than resistant to them or, indeed, agitating for even more distant ties. That is true, but what it is turning out to mean in practice is backbench pressure for such a ‘maximalist’ approach.
Thus, writing recently in the Guardian, Stella Creasy, the MP who chairs the Labour Movement for Europe, set out just that case. It included some of the things mentioned in my post, including seeking to join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention, and embracing, even extending, the EU’s proposals for a YMS. It also supported amendments to strengthen the governments Product Regulation and Metrology Bill (discussed in another recent post), further enhancing the way it will tend to keep many UK and EU regulations aligned.
What Creasy’s article self-avowedly did not do was make the case for rejoining the EU or for abandoning the government’s red lines. Saying that is neither praise nor criticism. It is simply a fact. What it betokens is that the practical politics of Brexit under this government is therefore now entirely about the nature and extent of Brexit damage limitation. That is, there is no dramatic difference of principle between what Streeting said and what Creasy wrote: the issue is entirely one of specific ‘micro-issues’ to be addressed within the framing they share.
That framing still leaves room for some policy debates and choices. Apart from the government’s stated ambitions, such as an SPS deal with the EU, there will be constant decisions to be made, with important upcoming examples including linking UK and EU Emissions Trading Schemes and aligning UK and EU deforestation regulations. Yet, important as these things are, they are still decisions to be made within the limited parameters of what the present government regards as practical politics.
A vanishingly small space?
A year ago I reviewed a book by Peter Foster, the Financial Times journalist who has been one of the best analysts of Brexit (I apologise for these repeated links to earlier posts, but they help, I hope, to provide context and sometimes corroboration, whist avoiding excessive repetition). That book is perhaps the most detailed articulation of what ‘maximalism’ (in this context) means in terms of specific measures.
In my review, I suggested that: “one danger which a Labour government looks likely to face is that, along with Brexiter denunciations, it will also be attacked by remainers and rejoiners as being insufficient to the magnitude of the task. The positive reading of that is it will push Labour towards Foster’s more maximalist version of its presently disclosed policy. The negative reading is that, squeezed between those who say it is too much and those who say it is too little, the space for pragmatism will remain vanishingly small.”
It's arguably too early to be sure yet, but it looks as if it is the latter outcome which is emerging. In practice this would mean that, rather than post-Brexit policy being located right up against the edge of Labour’s red lines, those lines will mark the far boundary of what is possible, and policy will settle between that and the kind of ad hoc accommodations the Sunak government was forced to make despite Brexiter opposition (e.g. watering down the scrapping of retained EU law, postponing if not effectively scrapping UKCA, agreeing the Windsor Framework). That is, if the Sunak approach is defined as minimalism, and the Creasy (or Foster) approach is defined as maximalism, the Starmer government’s approach will end up being somewhere between the two.
If this is so (and, actually, even if what emerges does turn out to be the maximalist approach), it is likely to come under increasing strain as it collides with economic reality. That was illustrated by the government’s much-vaunted International Investment Summit last week. This was the context of both the Streeting interview and the Creasy article, and it also provoked commentators to ask the question which, even if the government wants to believe that ‘the country has moved on’ will not go away: what about Brexit?
Counting the costs of Brexit: latest news
It is a question given added salience by a report the same week from Stephen Hunsaker of UKICE, calculating that, since 2017, the UK may have lost £44 billion of public investment which it would otherwise have received from the European Investment Bank. Like other counterfactual estimates (i.e. what would have happened if Brexit hadn’t happened), such as those of foregone trade, this may have little cut-through with the public. It is hard for people to get agitated about the loss of something that they ‘would have had’ in an alternative history. But for policymakers such things are, or should be, highly important and, indirectly, they do actually have a political significance: even without recognizing the mechanism, voters react negatively to the effects.
There was also a reminder of ‘the costs of Brexit’ in terms of payments made under the Brexit ‘divorce settlement’. This came as the result of a parliamentary question from SNP MP Stephen Gethins about how much has been paid so far, and how much remains to be paid, to which the answers turn out to be £24 billion and £6.4 billion respectively.
Strictly speaking, these are not ‘costs of Brexit’ because they are payments for liabilities the UK had incurred as an EU member so, in that sense, would have been paid one way or another regardless of Brexit. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be forgotten that many Brexiters insisted, amongst them Nigel Farage, that there would be no ‘divorce settlement’ to pay or, even, that the EU would owe money to the UK. Even when installed as Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson said the EU could “go whistle” for a financial settlement. Others of them fantasized that nothing should be agreed until the future terms of trade were also agreed, a fantasy which did not survive what turned out to be the non-existent ‘battle of the summer’ of 2017, although it still lingers on in Brexiter mythology as one of the many ways that Brexit ‘could have worked’.
More generally, the financial settlement was expected to be the most contentious aspect of the Withdrawal Agreement, and one of the more curious parts of the Brexit saga is the way that, having effectively been settled as part of the ‘phase 1 agreement’ in the autumn of 2017, it has scarcely figured in discussion since. By contrast, the issue of Northern Ireland, which had been dismissed by Brexiters as a triviality, proved to be far more toxic, festering on until the Windsor Framework was agreed in February 2023, aspects of which remain unimplemented even now, and is still a running sore to many, including many advocates of Brexit.
All this is worth recalling if only because we should never forget the grotesque ways in which Brexiters fooled themselves and misled others about the most basic realities of leaving the EU. More specifically, in the present context, it serves as another illustration of how, every step of the way, what Brexiters sold as a cost-free project has incurred cost after cost after cost.
A third recent reminder of this is the Reuters’ report that the Lord Mayor of the City of London estimates that Brexit has led to the loss of 40,000 jobs from Britain’s financial centre since 2016. It was a noteworthy report not least because, rather like the financial settlement, the figure for City job losses also has a special place in the iconography of the Brexit process.
Before the referendum, a widely cited report from accountants PWC estimated that the figure would be 70,000 to 100,000. This was dismissed as ‘Project Fear’ by leave campaigners, who later claimed vindication when, in 2022, another accounting giant, EY, estimated that the actual figure had been ‘only’ 7000 jobs. Of course, this was only a vindication because, by then, defence of Brexit had long since moved to claiming it had not been as bad as expected, rather than that it had had the positive benefits promised. If the latest 40,000 figure is correct then, on that logic, it could still be claimed as a vindication. Nevertheless, it would be closer to the lower end of the PWC estimate than to the EY estimate.
Foregoing jobs of this type, on this scale has significant implications. For example, economics commentator Jonty Bloom calculates that, if the figure is indeed 40,000, this represents well over £1 billion per year of foregone tax revenue (even conservatively assuming these jobs to have had an average salary for the sector, and considering only the income tax and national insurance they would have paid). Again, these are counterfactual costs but, whilst that inevitably means they are estimates, counterfactual analysis is the only way of assessing the effects of Brexit. Indeed Brexiters themselves recognize this whenever they claim (usually wrongly or misleadingly) that such-and-such a thing is a ‘benefit of Brexit’ because it wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.
Foregone jobs aside, the wider issue is that, apart from a few pro-Brexit diehards, no one seriously thinks that, overall, Brexit has been anything other than bad for the UK financial services industry. Even the pro-Brexit Telegraph reported (£) earlier this year that Brexit was the “prime suspect in the death of the stock market” and that the referendum was a decisive moment in the City’s “brutal losing streak”. Meanwhile, a review of the sector jointly produced by the City of London Corporation and the Treasury last year (i.e. under the Tory government) identified “strengthening and deepening the EU-UK business relationship” as “a top priority for the UK based financial and professional services sector.”
There’s little sign that this priority will be delivered by the new government, for all Labour’s wooing of the Square Mile. As a recent analysis by Hannah Brenton of Politico explained in some detail, the sector remains “out in the cold”, rarely featuring in the government’s statements about the ‘reset’ with the EU, and barely mentioned in discussions with the EU. Yet, as Brenton points out, financial services account for some 12% of UK GDP and contribute £100 billion in tax revenues (2022 figures). A government which has made GDP growth its central mission and which has a pressing need for tax revenues to repair highly-stressed public services can hardly afford to ignore the sector’s stated priority needs in this way.
Some other facts of life
Constant reminders of the costs of Brexit, such as these, will continue to exert pressure on the narrowness of the political space within which Labour are willing to discuss it. Next week’s budget will be an important example. At one level, it will push discussion of Brexit even further to the margins, as commentators will find many others things in it to talk about.
At another level, it will make the costs of Brexit even more relevant. Battles between the Treasury and spending departments are a basic fact of political life, and those over the forthcoming budget are no different (rather than being, as some reports suggest, the sign of a government in chaos). Nevertheless, they have an added dimension when budgetary constraints are so much tighter than they would have been as the result of a calamitous decision about national strategy.
To put it another way, Wes Streeting may think the costs of Brexit are “just a fact of life we have to deal with”, but he must know that much of the political credibility of the government, not to mention his own career, depends on the funding settlement he obtains for the NHS. The same goes for other ministers and other public services. For this reason, even if ‘the people have moved on from Brexit’ and even if counterfactual losses have no cut-through, it doesn’t follow that bearing those costs has no political consequences. It’s another fact of political life that voters expect results. [2]
From that point of view, the limited space of Labour’s Brexit politics, and the Brexit micro-issues to which it confines the government, is always going to be faced with the question of why it is so small. The ‘macro-question’ of Brexit as a national strategy will not go away. And that isn’t solely or even, ultimately, mainly because of the question of whether Brexit was a mistake. It is for similar, if now updated, strategic reasons to those which, in the 1960s and 1970s, drove the UK repeatedly to seek membership of what was then the EEC (this argument was made with great elegance by the historian Robert Saunders, in an essay marking the day that Britain left the EU). Those reasons, too, are facts of life, deriving from those of economics, geography, and the nature of international relations.
So the issue for this and future governments is the disjuncture between what is economically (and geo-politically) desirable and what is politically viable. The present government has an answer to this, and it is not entirely without merit: it is that re-opening the macro-question of Brexit would be economically damaging because of the instability which would result from the political toxicity of doing so. On this account, there is no disjuncture: it’s not economically desirable because it’s not politically viable. And it’s true that, in particular, many big businesses which have adapted themselves to being outside the single market and customs union are not keen to have that all thrown up into the air again for an indeterminate period with an uncertain outcome.
However, whilst it isn’t unreasonable for the government to take account of those concerns, they do not define the interests of Britain’s economy as a whole, nor those of its citizens. Acting as if they do is not only unhelpful to smaller businesses and to consumer choice, it institutionalizes higher costs, lower investment, and a lower tax base than would otherwise be the case. Equally, it does little to address the geo-political damage of Brexit.
This doesn’t mean, at least in my estimation, that the present government is going to pivot to joining (or rejoining) the single market, let alone the EU. It does mean, though, that an approach based on simply “living with” the costs and damages incurred by choices made by, and in the aftermath of, the 2016 referendum is inherently fragile. It is very unlikely that the politics of Brexit can forever be contained within the small space to which it is currently confined by Labour. For it is also a fact of life that attempts to fit a quart into a pint pot – to use measures that some Brexiters might appreciate – will result in a leakage, if not indeed a flood.
Notes
[1] The last words of this quote seem to suggest a continuation of the last government’s faith in post-Brexit Britain’s ‘nimbleness’ in being able to set its own regulations and make its own trade deals. There’s little reason to share it. But in one respect, at least, there has been a departure from this hubris in that all the existing advisers to the Board of Trade have been dismissed, including Daniel Hannan, one of the major architects of Brexit, and Australia’s former leader Tony Abbott, one of its few international champions.
[2] In the present context, it’s an even harsher fact of political life that some voters expect results that they have denied themselves by their vote to leave the EU, or, however they voted in the referendum, by their unwillingness to see that decision revisited. But there’s nothing new about people holding perversely contradictory views, and it’s one of the tasks of political leadership to persuade them of the need to face realities. The core of the present government’s ‘Brexit problem’ is that it believes this is not possible – and it may well be right.
Showing posts with label Peter Foster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Foster. Show all posts
Friday, 25 October 2024
Thursday, 19 October 2023
Book review: Realism or optimism?
This week’s post, which is a day earlier than usual, is the latest in a series of occasional reviews of Brexit-related books, which can be found via the ‘Book reviews’ tag.
Foster, Peter (2023) What Went Wrong with Brexit and What We Can Do About It. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. ISBN 978-1-80530-125-7 (Hardback). 178 pages. £14.99
I don’t think that, in general, Brexit has been very well-served by British journalists. Political journalists, especially, struggled to capture the way that Brexit grew out of, and brought with it, a very different kind of politics from the traditional Westminster ‘game’. Perhaps even more, they struggled with the politics of the UK-EU negotiations, reflecting the pre-existing lack of British interest in the politics of the EU which was arguably a contributory factor, if minor, to why Brexit happened at all. Beyond that, very few journalists seemed able to engage with the deep technical complexities of Brexit, something which contributed to enabling Brexiter politicians to escape media scrutiny.
Indeed, at the height of the Brexit process, between, say, the triggering of Article 50 and the UK’s formal departure from the EU in 2020, I often found non-UK journalists more helpful in understanding what was going on. Tony Connelly, RTE’s Europe Editor, was undoubtedly the foremost of these, but there were others, including Annette Dittert of Germany’s ARD. Of course, there were also some fantastic UK journalists. Faisal Islam, when Political Editor of Sky News (though less so since he became the BBC’s Economics Editor); Ian Dunt, then the Editor of politics.co.uk; and Lisa O’Carroll, at that time the Guardian’s Brexit correspondent, all come to mind, but again there are others.
Peter Foster was and is undoubtedly one them, and I’ve referred to his work countless times on this blog (to the extent that he even has his own tag, though it by no means captures all the references). What he shares with all of those just mentioned is a capacity to understand the ‘big picture’ of Brexit whilst also engaging with the often arcane, technical details. It’s a quality he showed as the Telegraph’s Europe Editor, when, if I recall correctly, his focus was mainly on the Brexit negotiations, and, since then, as Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times. In fact, especially since taking on the latter role, I would say he is the foremost journalist, whether in the UK or elsewhere, in covering the detail of what Brexit means for, especially, businesses, supply chains, and regulation.
Readable, forensic, and realistic analysis
It is these things which are the main focus of the book (which of course means that there are other components of Brexit which aren’t within its ambit), and it provides a superb and authoritative account of them, made accessible by examples and vignettes. This readability of what might otherwise be rather dry material is also aided by a writing style which, and I imagine this is no easy task, transfers well from newspaper columns to the rather different demands of a book-length treatment.
Foster’s explanation of what Brexit has meant for businesses is forensic, if not brutal. Over and over again, he dissects how Brexiters misled themselves and others in what they were doing. Examples include David Frost’s disastrous, “never seriously substantiated” dismissal of the significance of non-tariff barriers to trade (p. 17), the resurrection of freeports which in economic terms “were destined to be empty vessels” (p. 48), the Brexiters’ “red tape fallacy” (pp. 29-38) that amongst other things led to the UKCA debacle (p. 71), and the “magical construct” of an invisible border between Ireland and Northern Ireland (p. 104).
The book also contains a calmly withering overview of post-Brexit independent trade policy (pp. 54-64) and a careful account of what Brexit has meant for immigration (pp. 81-89). Unsurprisingly, at least to those who have read his FT columns, there are also superbly clear explanations of what Brexit has meant for particular sectors, such as chemicals (pp. 73-75), auto (pp. 75-79) and the travel industry (pp. 94-97).
Underneath all these individual issues lies the “magical thinking and dogma” (p. 41) which has consumed the British political and policy-making process since 2016. The story of how that happened is concisely but crisply narrated in chapter three (pp. 39-53).
All of this forms part one of the book, ‘What went wrong with Brexit’, which accounts for about two-thirds of the text. The briefer second part is concerned with ‘What to do about it’. Here, the discussion is equally assured and well-informed, and, in my opinion, realistic in focusing mainly on what can be done to improve the tone of UK-EU relations and the terms of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. He also suggests that, especially if a better tone is achieved, the UK could re-apply to rejoin the Lugano Convention, having previously been refused, facilitating the resolution of international legal disputes for businesses. Other ideas include seeking to join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention to harmonize Rules of Origin.
Many of these proposals have been made by bodies such as the UK Trade and Business Commission and the Tony Blair Institute, but are helpfully brought together and clearly set out here. What Foster advocates also looks likely to be (the maximalist version of) Labour policy if they get into power, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, and he spells it out in far more detail and with far more clarity than they do.
Again, in my view, rightly, Foster suggests that, taken as a whole, the value of such an approach is a bit greater than some critics, both pro- and anti-Brexit, allow. But he isn’t starry-eyed about it, being far more honest than Labour politicians are (at least openly) about the “limited overall economic impact” (p. 168) these measures would have. Beyond them, he also advocates (pp. 168-175) more sustained and strategic policy-making, rather than the post-Brexit frenzy of half-delivered and often half-baked ideas, especially about how to re-energize business investment.
Misplaced optimism?
Clear-sighted as all this is, and constructive as its suggestions are, there’s a degree of optimism about it that may be misplaced. Foster’s guiding theme is that “it’s time to think again about Brexit by taking an approach based on facts, not fantasy and fallacy” (p.8). That leads to his overall conclusion that “post-Brexit Britain, quite literally, cannot afford more of the wishful thinking that has blighted UK policy-making since the 2016 referendum” (p.168) and “what is now needed is a realistic, sober vision for what Britain should look like in 2050 – allied to fact-based strategies for how to get there” (p. 175).
Again, I think Foster is completely right, but I fear he underestimates the extent to which Brexit has made that all but impossible. As I said in my own Brexit book, it has created a situation of it often seeming as if there are ‘Brexiter truths’ and ‘Remainer truths’. Ultimately this may, and hopefully will, change, but for now it means that “an approach based on facts” – which Foster’s certainly is – will too readily be dismissed, for all his attempts at even-handedness, as the work of a ‘remainer’, or perhaps even as being typical of the ‘globalist’ Financial Times. How can such an approach succeed when even the most basic of facts is so bitterly contested?
That is well-illustrated by Daniel Hannan’s spiteful and dismissive review in the Telegraph (£), which I refer to, reluctantly, simply because it is illustrative; it has no other value. This describes the book as “myopic”, “pro EU”, and an example of “Brexit Derangement Syndrome” that will only interest remainers. In a related way, Foster rightly calls for “ending the politics of betrayal” (pp. 121-127) as part of the way forward but, as I’ve often argued on this blog, though it is far more eloquently discussed by the Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole, that politics is inseparable from Brexit.
Within the context of such tribalism and its associated betrayalism, not only are facts disputed they also get distorted. For example, on one of the few occasions Hannan touches on the substance of Foster’s book, it is to criticize him for not seeing that the UK’s continued use of the CE mark (rather than insisting it be replaced by the UKCA mark) should be regarded as a welcome possible “step towards mutual recognition”. But, for all that it may seem as if there are Brexiter truths and Remainer truths, on these kinds of issues some things are true and some are false. And Hannan’s claim is simply false, for the obvious reason that there is no prospect, and not even any proposal or suggestion, that the EU will start to recognize the UKCA mark reciprocally with the UK’s recognition of the EU mark.
This is only a tiny example, but it is misunderstanding, misrepresenting or ignoring the kinds of ‘nuts and bolts’ issues that Foster specializes in which allows Brexiters to continue to resist – indeed, to viciously disparage – a “realistic, sober vision … allied to fact-based strategies”. That is, it enables them both to ignore reality and to construct an alternative reality.
Catching or contributing to the tide of pragmatism?
Now perhaps the tide is turning, and the influence of Brexiter ideologues like Hannan is diminishing. That seems possible given Sunak’s at least sporadically more pragmatic approach to the EU compared to his predecessors (though as one was a pathological liar and the other plain bonkers, that’s not a high bar), and even more likely if Starmer’s Labour come to power.
Foster clearly believes that this, and growing public disaffection with Brexit, means “that space is now emerging for a re-think” (p. 4). If so, his book may have caught the tide of the times. I hope so. But, as he frequently and strongly emphasizes, “time is of the essence” (p. 8), and it must be an open question whether, especially with the pro-Brexit media denouncing every step towards sense as betrayal, any UK government can move fast and far enough to deliver even the still relatively cautious prospectus the book advocates.
On the other hand, one danger which a Labour government looks likely to face is that, along with Brexiter denunciations, it will also be attacked by remainers and rejoiners as being insufficient to the magnitude of the task. The positive reading of that is it will push Labour towards Foster’s more maximalist version of its presently disclosed policy. The negative reading is that, squeezed between those who say it is too much and those who say it is too little, the space for pragmatism will remain vanishingly small.
None of these observations detracts from that fact that this is an excellent book which should be read by anyone who wants to understand the intricacies – and idiocies - of what Brexit has meant for trade, businesses, supply chains and regulation, and what could be done to address some of them. Indeed, although some of its prescriptions have been made by various think-tanks and committees, this is perhaps the only book providing a serious and sustained analysis of what Britain might now, realistically, do about Brexit. So, even if the tide has not yet turned in a more pragmatic direction, it could help it to do so.
As such, I hope it is widely read, not least by policy-makers and by commentators who, if they shared Foster’s depth of knowledge and acuity of analysis, could do so much to re-shape the tone and content of the debate about Britain’s post-Brexit future.
My only gripe, but it is quite a big one, is with the publisher rather than the author (as I assume it is an issue of house style): the book gives no sources or references and, even more surprisingly, and very irritatingly, does not even have an index.
Foster, Peter (2023) What Went Wrong with Brexit and What We Can Do About It. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. ISBN 978-1-80530-125-7 (Hardback). 178 pages. £14.99
I don’t think that, in general, Brexit has been very well-served by British journalists. Political journalists, especially, struggled to capture the way that Brexit grew out of, and brought with it, a very different kind of politics from the traditional Westminster ‘game’. Perhaps even more, they struggled with the politics of the UK-EU negotiations, reflecting the pre-existing lack of British interest in the politics of the EU which was arguably a contributory factor, if minor, to why Brexit happened at all. Beyond that, very few journalists seemed able to engage with the deep technical complexities of Brexit, something which contributed to enabling Brexiter politicians to escape media scrutiny.
Indeed, at the height of the Brexit process, between, say, the triggering of Article 50 and the UK’s formal departure from the EU in 2020, I often found non-UK journalists more helpful in understanding what was going on. Tony Connelly, RTE’s Europe Editor, was undoubtedly the foremost of these, but there were others, including Annette Dittert of Germany’s ARD. Of course, there were also some fantastic UK journalists. Faisal Islam, when Political Editor of Sky News (though less so since he became the BBC’s Economics Editor); Ian Dunt, then the Editor of politics.co.uk; and Lisa O’Carroll, at that time the Guardian’s Brexit correspondent, all come to mind, but again there are others.
Peter Foster was and is undoubtedly one them, and I’ve referred to his work countless times on this blog (to the extent that he even has his own tag, though it by no means captures all the references). What he shares with all of those just mentioned is a capacity to understand the ‘big picture’ of Brexit whilst also engaging with the often arcane, technical details. It’s a quality he showed as the Telegraph’s Europe Editor, when, if I recall correctly, his focus was mainly on the Brexit negotiations, and, since then, as Public Policy Editor of the Financial Times. In fact, especially since taking on the latter role, I would say he is the foremost journalist, whether in the UK or elsewhere, in covering the detail of what Brexit means for, especially, businesses, supply chains, and regulation.
Readable, forensic, and realistic analysis
It is these things which are the main focus of the book (which of course means that there are other components of Brexit which aren’t within its ambit), and it provides a superb and authoritative account of them, made accessible by examples and vignettes. This readability of what might otherwise be rather dry material is also aided by a writing style which, and I imagine this is no easy task, transfers well from newspaper columns to the rather different demands of a book-length treatment.
Foster’s explanation of what Brexit has meant for businesses is forensic, if not brutal. Over and over again, he dissects how Brexiters misled themselves and others in what they were doing. Examples include David Frost’s disastrous, “never seriously substantiated” dismissal of the significance of non-tariff barriers to trade (p. 17), the resurrection of freeports which in economic terms “were destined to be empty vessels” (p. 48), the Brexiters’ “red tape fallacy” (pp. 29-38) that amongst other things led to the UKCA debacle (p. 71), and the “magical construct” of an invisible border between Ireland and Northern Ireland (p. 104).
The book also contains a calmly withering overview of post-Brexit independent trade policy (pp. 54-64) and a careful account of what Brexit has meant for immigration (pp. 81-89). Unsurprisingly, at least to those who have read his FT columns, there are also superbly clear explanations of what Brexit has meant for particular sectors, such as chemicals (pp. 73-75), auto (pp. 75-79) and the travel industry (pp. 94-97).
Underneath all these individual issues lies the “magical thinking and dogma” (p. 41) which has consumed the British political and policy-making process since 2016. The story of how that happened is concisely but crisply narrated in chapter three (pp. 39-53).
All of this forms part one of the book, ‘What went wrong with Brexit’, which accounts for about two-thirds of the text. The briefer second part is concerned with ‘What to do about it’. Here, the discussion is equally assured and well-informed, and, in my opinion, realistic in focusing mainly on what can be done to improve the tone of UK-EU relations and the terms of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. He also suggests that, especially if a better tone is achieved, the UK could re-apply to rejoin the Lugano Convention, having previously been refused, facilitating the resolution of international legal disputes for businesses. Other ideas include seeking to join the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) Convention to harmonize Rules of Origin.
Many of these proposals have been made by bodies such as the UK Trade and Business Commission and the Tony Blair Institute, but are helpfully brought together and clearly set out here. What Foster advocates also looks likely to be (the maximalist version of) Labour policy if they get into power, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, and he spells it out in far more detail and with far more clarity than they do.
Again, in my view, rightly, Foster suggests that, taken as a whole, the value of such an approach is a bit greater than some critics, both pro- and anti-Brexit, allow. But he isn’t starry-eyed about it, being far more honest than Labour politicians are (at least openly) about the “limited overall economic impact” (p. 168) these measures would have. Beyond them, he also advocates (pp. 168-175) more sustained and strategic policy-making, rather than the post-Brexit frenzy of half-delivered and often half-baked ideas, especially about how to re-energize business investment.
Misplaced optimism?
Clear-sighted as all this is, and constructive as its suggestions are, there’s a degree of optimism about it that may be misplaced. Foster’s guiding theme is that “it’s time to think again about Brexit by taking an approach based on facts, not fantasy and fallacy” (p.8). That leads to his overall conclusion that “post-Brexit Britain, quite literally, cannot afford more of the wishful thinking that has blighted UK policy-making since the 2016 referendum” (p.168) and “what is now needed is a realistic, sober vision for what Britain should look like in 2050 – allied to fact-based strategies for how to get there” (p. 175).
Again, I think Foster is completely right, but I fear he underestimates the extent to which Brexit has made that all but impossible. As I said in my own Brexit book, it has created a situation of it often seeming as if there are ‘Brexiter truths’ and ‘Remainer truths’. Ultimately this may, and hopefully will, change, but for now it means that “an approach based on facts” – which Foster’s certainly is – will too readily be dismissed, for all his attempts at even-handedness, as the work of a ‘remainer’, or perhaps even as being typical of the ‘globalist’ Financial Times. How can such an approach succeed when even the most basic of facts is so bitterly contested?
That is well-illustrated by Daniel Hannan’s spiteful and dismissive review in the Telegraph (£), which I refer to, reluctantly, simply because it is illustrative; it has no other value. This describes the book as “myopic”, “pro EU”, and an example of “Brexit Derangement Syndrome” that will only interest remainers. In a related way, Foster rightly calls for “ending the politics of betrayal” (pp. 121-127) as part of the way forward but, as I’ve often argued on this blog, though it is far more eloquently discussed by the Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole, that politics is inseparable from Brexit.
Within the context of such tribalism and its associated betrayalism, not only are facts disputed they also get distorted. For example, on one of the few occasions Hannan touches on the substance of Foster’s book, it is to criticize him for not seeing that the UK’s continued use of the CE mark (rather than insisting it be replaced by the UKCA mark) should be regarded as a welcome possible “step towards mutual recognition”. But, for all that it may seem as if there are Brexiter truths and Remainer truths, on these kinds of issues some things are true and some are false. And Hannan’s claim is simply false, for the obvious reason that there is no prospect, and not even any proposal or suggestion, that the EU will start to recognize the UKCA mark reciprocally with the UK’s recognition of the EU mark.
This is only a tiny example, but it is misunderstanding, misrepresenting or ignoring the kinds of ‘nuts and bolts’ issues that Foster specializes in which allows Brexiters to continue to resist – indeed, to viciously disparage – a “realistic, sober vision … allied to fact-based strategies”. That is, it enables them both to ignore reality and to construct an alternative reality.
Catching or contributing to the tide of pragmatism?
Now perhaps the tide is turning, and the influence of Brexiter ideologues like Hannan is diminishing. That seems possible given Sunak’s at least sporadically more pragmatic approach to the EU compared to his predecessors (though as one was a pathological liar and the other plain bonkers, that’s not a high bar), and even more likely if Starmer’s Labour come to power.
Foster clearly believes that this, and growing public disaffection with Brexit, means “that space is now emerging for a re-think” (p. 4). If so, his book may have caught the tide of the times. I hope so. But, as he frequently and strongly emphasizes, “time is of the essence” (p. 8), and it must be an open question whether, especially with the pro-Brexit media denouncing every step towards sense as betrayal, any UK government can move fast and far enough to deliver even the still relatively cautious prospectus the book advocates.
On the other hand, one danger which a Labour government looks likely to face is that, along with Brexiter denunciations, it will also be attacked by remainers and rejoiners as being insufficient to the magnitude of the task. The positive reading of that is it will push Labour towards Foster’s more maximalist version of its presently disclosed policy. The negative reading is that, squeezed between those who say it is too much and those who say it is too little, the space for pragmatism will remain vanishingly small.
None of these observations detracts from that fact that this is an excellent book which should be read by anyone who wants to understand the intricacies – and idiocies - of what Brexit has meant for trade, businesses, supply chains and regulation, and what could be done to address some of them. Indeed, although some of its prescriptions have been made by various think-tanks and committees, this is perhaps the only book providing a serious and sustained analysis of what Britain might now, realistically, do about Brexit. So, even if the tide has not yet turned in a more pragmatic direction, it could help it to do so.
As such, I hope it is widely read, not least by policy-makers and by commentators who, if they shared Foster’s depth of knowledge and acuity of analysis, could do so much to re-shape the tone and content of the debate about Britain’s post-Brexit future.
My only gripe, but it is quite a big one, is with the publisher rather than the author (as I assume it is an issue of house style): the book gives no sources or references and, even more surprisingly, and very irritatingly, does not even have an index.
Friday, 25 September 2020
Less than a hundred days left
By recent standards it has been a relatively quiet Brexit week, although also a revealing one in which several chickens have come home to roost as the end of the Transition Period looms ever closer.
The official negotiations resume next week, whilst the ongoing unofficial talks are reported to be progressing “a bit better than expected” according to an EU official. That perhaps means little given how low expectations must have been after the fury in Brussels caused by last week’s events. One cause of that fury – the wholly spurious claim of an EU threat to blockade Northern Ireland’s food supplies, as discussed in my previous post – has been quietly dropped by most politicians for the nonsense it is, although even that was portrayed in the Brexiter press as ‘Barnier caving in’. The damage, of course, is already done.
The IMB fallout
The bigger cause of that fury remains in play, with the passage through Parliament of the Internal Market Bill (IMB), the measures of which include, on the government’s own admission, a knowing breach of international law. However, the rumours I mentioned in my previous post to the effect that the government would seek to slow down the passage of the legislation so as to avoid a confrontation with the EU until after no deal seems inevitable (if that is what happens) seem to be true (£). And if there is a deal the offending clauses may be pulled. Meanwhile, whilst continuing to consider the possibility of taking legal action (£) the EU is holding off doing so for now. The sense is that, for the time being, both sides want to pull back from last week’s row and, as Peter Foster of the FT puts it (£), “a grudging truce has settled back” over the talks.
Nevertheless, the reverberations of Brandon Lewis’s incendiary statement about breaking international law, which is still being defended by the Attorney General, continue to be felt. Some MPs have tried to downplay the significance of what Lewis said but Theresa May, in particular, launched a blistering attack on it during the committee stage this week. For reasons I’ve given elsewhere I do not buy the line that May’s deal was one that should have been supported, and personally I doubt that history will treat her kindly. Much of the current Brexit mess can be laid at her – and her advisers’ - door for the early decisions she made, and for those she did not. Even so, she has recognizable political principles which is a very marked contrast with the corrupt, incompetent and anarchic mess of the current administration.
One indicator of how that administration operates came with the report (£) that Brandon Lewis’s statement was effectively dictated to him by a Downing Street advisor “who gave [him] the words to say”. The advisor, Oliver Lewis (no relation, I assume), is one of several central figures from the Vote Leave campaign – he was its Research Director – who, led by Dominic Cummings, are now installed as special advisers and seem to have been allowed by Johnson to become the de facto government. Many of them are very young, have little or no experience of government and, it’s perhaps fair to say, a greater degree of confidence in their own abilities than a more objective analysis would warrant.
The report stresses that Boris Johnson was barely involved, but perhaps even more shocking is the idea that a member of the Cabinet should, apparently, be taking orders of this sort from an advisor. But it is a measure of the extent to which this under-achieving but over-empowered cadre are able to wreak havoc, whether through abrasive arrogance or plain incompetence. For Brandon Lewis’s words, spoken at the dispatch box of the House of Commons, will leave a long and damaging mark, regardless of the fate of IMB.
Are you ready? Er, no
Oliver Lewis is Johnson’s ‘no deal’ adviser, and is reported to have repeatedly blocked progress in the negotiations with the EU. Whether or not he continues to do so, this week saw the passing of the notable milestone of it being only 100 days until the transition period ends – there are far fewer working days, of course, and fewer still until a deal, if there is to be a deal, has to be finalized for ratification. A new government communication drive marked this moment by asking “are you ready?”.
The answer from numerous business sectors is a resounding no, almost as much so if there is a deal as if there isn’t. The issue here is partly that businesses are overwhelmed by dealing with coronavirus, but the truly shocking thing is the lack of clarity over what they have to prepare for. This was re-affirmed by reports of a meeting at the end of last week between the government and the road haulage industry, which pronounced it “a washout” as the government was unable to provide the details needed of how border systems will operate. As regards business more generally, the British Chambers of Commerce this week published a list showing that no less than 26 out of 35 key questions about a range of post-transition issues remain unanswered.
Road haulage is a crucial industry, so it is a very serious matter that is not likely to be prepared even if there is a deal. This week a leaked letter from Michael Gove suggested that a staggering 70% of EU-bound trucks might not be ready for the new border controls, leading to thousands of lorries facing two-day waits at Dover (in passing, note that almost all the focus seems to be on Dover: much less is said of the significant problems other ports will face).
Subsequently, speaking in parliament, Gove revealed that only a quarter of businesses believe that they are fully ready for the end of the transition period (and that doesn’t necessarily mean they are, by the way), whilst an astonishing 43% believe that the period will be extended. Unless the data were collected before the end of June that is, effectively, an impossibility and perhaps reflects a complacency born of the repeated Article 50 extensions.
But his most remarkable, almost surreal, statement was that, in order to reduce congestion at the ‘short Channel’ ports, there will be a de facto border for trucks entering Kent, which will need special ‘Kent Access Permits’ to be enforced by the police. Who knew that ‘taking control of our borders’ was going to lead not just to erecting a new one in the Irish Sea, but also one around Nigel Farage’s home county?
Separately, it has recently been reported that the development of the new IT systems that will be needed for the UK-EU border is in chaos, and a study published this week by the LSE shows the extent of the disruption to supply chains, especially in the food and drinks industry, that will occur at the end of the transition, again especially if there is no trade deal in place. And a new British Chambers of Commerce survey finds that 52% of UK firms trading internationally have not yet considered the effects of Brexit. But some industries, such as banking, are continuing to shift jobs and operations from the UK to the EU without waiting to see if a deal is done or not.
Whereas the damaging effects of the new border controls will be immediately obvious – queues, supply disruptions and price rises – those of things like banking relocations and their associated impact on tax revenues will be less visible, but no less real.
Incompetence piled on dishonesty …
Since most of the new customs requirements will exist regardless of whether there is a trade deal, the government has been woefully neglectful in leaving the preparations so late. This can be chalked up to general incompetence but there is also a specifically Brexity twist to it. For years talking about the need for such preparations was either dismissed as more Project Fear or made more difficult to admit or be taken seriously because of the ingrained power of the Project Fear narrative. Relatedly, even now there are still Brexiters, perhaps including some in government, who genuinely believe that there is some form of trade deal which avoids the need for borders, as if it were possible to have “the exact same benefits” as single market and customs union membership.
After all, it was not until February 2020 that the Border Delivery Group was established (as an aside, later, its leadership appeared to be a casualty of the witch hunt for supposedly ‘remainer’ civil servants), and although that was not the beginning of the government’s border preparation work it was the first point at which it was officially acknowledged that ‘frictionless’ trade post-Brexit was impossible.
It is worth pausing to reflect on the almost unbelievable dishonesty of this. Even soft ‘Norway style’ Brexit would have had some implications for border friction, but from the moment in January 2017 when hard Brexit became confirmed as the official position any possibility of anything like ‘frictionless’ trade disappeared. No free trade agreement could prevent that. Many experts on trade and customs, many business groups, and many commentators including relative minnows like me were screaming this. Yet it was three whole years before the government officially accepted that this was so, and even then it was not until July 2020 that it published its ‘Border Operating Model’, less than six months before it needs to come into force.
We already know that one of the government’s responses to the border chaos which on Gove’s admission now seems inevitable will be to blame businesses for lack of preparations, which is outrageous considering that the government still can’t give precise details of what they need to do. But we also glimpsed another of the ways the government will respond because it was pre-figured by DEFRA Secretary George Eustice in Select Committee evidence this week: blaming it on the “failure of the EU to plan”. It’s a charge as predictable as it is ludicrous (see the various reports in the Twitter thread link).
Such responses are at one level just boilerplate political blame deflection but, more profoundly, exemplifies the refusal of Brexiters like Eustice ever to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. For that reason alone, it’s important to keep recording and reminding people of the promises that were made for, and the lies told about, Brexit.
The consequences of no deal would of course be that much greater – as set out in an excellent, comprehensive report this week from the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank, covering not just trade but implications for transport, data, citizens, Northern Ireland, and security amongst other things. One issue not mentioned, but in the news again this week (£), is the ongoing saga of Galileo, the EU’s GPS satellite navigation system, with the announcement that the UK has abandoned attempts to build its own alternative system and the suggestion at least that the UK might try to rejoin Galileo.
This is a convoluted story, going back to 2018 when Theresa May pulled out of talks with the EU because of its insistence that the UK could have only limited, third country access to the system and announced that the UK would build its own version (although some experts thought that a compromise deal was possible) at an estimated cost of £5 billion.
That idea was enthusiastically taken up by Johnson (and reportedly driven by, again, Cummings against, or without, expert advice) who decided to buy a bankrupt satellite firm, OneWeb, to deliver it. But in June this year substantial problems emerged (the whole sorry story to that date is well told by Alex Andreou in Byline Times) and the idea has now been dropped. It is unclear at this point what will happen, but the impacts for businesses and for defence are massive. Again, there is less than 100 days to sort this out, but that timescale is a luxury compared with that faced by some UK citizens living in the EU who are customers of those banks which this week announced their accounts would be closed – in some cases before the end of the year.
Piled on even more incompetence
It is becoming clearer by the day, especially in the light of the predictable resurgence of coronavirus, that Johnson’s refusal to extend the Transition Period when he had the chance was a major and possibly catastrophic error of judgment. Far from putting pressure on the EU to ‘blink at the last minute’, it has left Britain woefully unready to cope even if there is a deal. As with the inevitability of an end to frictionless trade, the government was warned over and over again by business bodies and others that this would be the case but chose to ignore them.
Whilst far smaller in magnitude, I think it was also an error of judgment for Keir Starmer not to have at least placed on the record at the time that this was a huge mistake. Even now, in his first conference speech as leader, he said very little about Brexit and did not mention the failure to extend transition at all. I understand perfectly that he needs to avoid being depicted as a ‘remainer’, as Johnson wishes to do. But in taking the line that it is for Johnson to deliver the deal he promised, there is room to make reference to his unilateral decision to compress the time available to reach such a deal, if only as a marker for the future. It would sit well within his more general positioning of Johnson as operationally incompetent.
That critique now has real purchase, to the extent of becoming the dominant narrative, because of the way it is being taken up by so many Conservatives and former allies and supporters of the Prime Minister. Just in the last week or so it seems as if a switch has been flicked in this respect, in a way that is remarkable considering he won a majority of eighty less than a year ago. Coronavirus is of course the main driver of that, but I think that the reverberations of the IMB and the ‘breaking international law’ debacle has played its own, not insignificant, role.
On the one hand, it has created a breach between Johnson and some of the hard core Brexiters like Michael Howard. On the other, it has opened up the entire question of competence in a new way for, as Theresa May pointedly asked, “if the consequences of the Withdrawal Agreement were so bad, why did the government sign it”? This in turn links back not just to Johnson but to the arrogance and hubris of his Downing Street operation, for increasingly there are reports (£) of the resentment that experienced MPs and ministers (and, I would assume, senior civil servants) feel about the transparent contempt with which they are treated by the Vote Leave wunderkinds. Bad enough to be subjected to that indignity by those who are competent; intolerable when it comes from those who are serial bunglers.
So, deal or no deal?
All that may well turn out to be bad news for Johnson’s premiership, but it’s not at all clear what it means for the prospects of a trade deal with the EU. That can be argued in two diametrically opposite ways. One is that, stung by the criticism of his failings, making a deal becomes Johnson’s priority so that at least he can claim to have ‘delivered Brexit’, his central policy, in defiance of the ‘doomsters and gloomsters’. The other is that he pushes the button on his no deal threat in order to gain the adulation of the Brexit Ultras and stoke up the populist culture war he thrives on, and once again ignores all of the warnings of just what a disaster that would cause.
Both have very clear risks. Even the thinnest of deals will enrage the Ultras, whilst not avoiding a level of disruption that compounds the narrative of his incompetence. A thicker deal might be a little less disruptive, but enrage them even more. But no deal would be a gift to Labour and, whilst it might appeal to his core vote, the disruption, would, especially on top of the coronavirus suffering, be deeply unpopular. In particular, there is strong polling evidence of how unpopular no deal would be in the ‘Red Wall’ seats.
I’m assuming, of course, that Johnson’s calculation will be based solely upon his own self-interest and advantage, but that’s not an audaciously unrealistic assumption. Where it will lead him, I have no idea and I’ve seen nothing in any of the UK or EU commentary that suggests that anyone else has either. There is certainly no consensus view.
A straw in the wind may be the fairly upbeat report from James Forsyth in The Times this morning (£), because recently his speculations have had an uncanny knack of proving right, suggesting that he has well-informed sources. But it is perfectly possible – even likely - that Johnson himself doesn’t yet know what he intends. In any case, it should never be forgotten that, as Neale Richmond, the Irish politician who has played a leading role in shaping his country’s response to Brexit, pointedly remarked this week, the negotiations are not an internal Westminster debate, despite what the reporting of some parts of the UK media might suggest.
What is clear, for reasons I’ve argued before, and as trade expert David Henig has argued cogently this week, is that from a UK ‘national interest’ perspective a deal is important. As he says, it’s not that a deal will avoid all the disruption – there will still be plenty of that – but that it would at least begin to re-normalise UK-EU relations. I believe this would also be generally welcomed by the EU.
This is really the next big challenge for the UK, and one which erstwhile remainers can and should try to influence. Sir Simon Fraser, former Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, has recently set out the many challenges for post-Brexit foreign policy. They are considerable, because of the strategic incoherence of Brexit. But a key part of meeting them has to be to move UK-EU relations away from the entirely antagonistic framing that Brexiters give them, even after having left. That will be hard enough, but without a deal – even a very limited one – to build on it will be made impossible for years to come.
Clearly that hope is precisely why the scorched earth Brexiters want there to be no deal. For the rest of us it is important they don’t get their way. They have had their Brexit – and what a colossal mess they are making of it – but that does not give them licence to permanently poison our relationship with our closest friends.
The official negotiations resume next week, whilst the ongoing unofficial talks are reported to be progressing “a bit better than expected” according to an EU official. That perhaps means little given how low expectations must have been after the fury in Brussels caused by last week’s events. One cause of that fury – the wholly spurious claim of an EU threat to blockade Northern Ireland’s food supplies, as discussed in my previous post – has been quietly dropped by most politicians for the nonsense it is, although even that was portrayed in the Brexiter press as ‘Barnier caving in’. The damage, of course, is already done.
The IMB fallout
The bigger cause of that fury remains in play, with the passage through Parliament of the Internal Market Bill (IMB), the measures of which include, on the government’s own admission, a knowing breach of international law. However, the rumours I mentioned in my previous post to the effect that the government would seek to slow down the passage of the legislation so as to avoid a confrontation with the EU until after no deal seems inevitable (if that is what happens) seem to be true (£). And if there is a deal the offending clauses may be pulled. Meanwhile, whilst continuing to consider the possibility of taking legal action (£) the EU is holding off doing so for now. The sense is that, for the time being, both sides want to pull back from last week’s row and, as Peter Foster of the FT puts it (£), “a grudging truce has settled back” over the talks.
Nevertheless, the reverberations of Brandon Lewis’s incendiary statement about breaking international law, which is still being defended by the Attorney General, continue to be felt. Some MPs have tried to downplay the significance of what Lewis said but Theresa May, in particular, launched a blistering attack on it during the committee stage this week. For reasons I’ve given elsewhere I do not buy the line that May’s deal was one that should have been supported, and personally I doubt that history will treat her kindly. Much of the current Brexit mess can be laid at her – and her advisers’ - door for the early decisions she made, and for those she did not. Even so, she has recognizable political principles which is a very marked contrast with the corrupt, incompetent and anarchic mess of the current administration.
One indicator of how that administration operates came with the report (£) that Brandon Lewis’s statement was effectively dictated to him by a Downing Street advisor “who gave [him] the words to say”. The advisor, Oliver Lewis (no relation, I assume), is one of several central figures from the Vote Leave campaign – he was its Research Director – who, led by Dominic Cummings, are now installed as special advisers and seem to have been allowed by Johnson to become the de facto government. Many of them are very young, have little or no experience of government and, it’s perhaps fair to say, a greater degree of confidence in their own abilities than a more objective analysis would warrant.
The report stresses that Boris Johnson was barely involved, but perhaps even more shocking is the idea that a member of the Cabinet should, apparently, be taking orders of this sort from an advisor. But it is a measure of the extent to which this under-achieving but over-empowered cadre are able to wreak havoc, whether through abrasive arrogance or plain incompetence. For Brandon Lewis’s words, spoken at the dispatch box of the House of Commons, will leave a long and damaging mark, regardless of the fate of IMB.
Are you ready? Er, no
Oliver Lewis is Johnson’s ‘no deal’ adviser, and is reported to have repeatedly blocked progress in the negotiations with the EU. Whether or not he continues to do so, this week saw the passing of the notable milestone of it being only 100 days until the transition period ends – there are far fewer working days, of course, and fewer still until a deal, if there is to be a deal, has to be finalized for ratification. A new government communication drive marked this moment by asking “are you ready?”.
The answer from numerous business sectors is a resounding no, almost as much so if there is a deal as if there isn’t. The issue here is partly that businesses are overwhelmed by dealing with coronavirus, but the truly shocking thing is the lack of clarity over what they have to prepare for. This was re-affirmed by reports of a meeting at the end of last week between the government and the road haulage industry, which pronounced it “a washout” as the government was unable to provide the details needed of how border systems will operate. As regards business more generally, the British Chambers of Commerce this week published a list showing that no less than 26 out of 35 key questions about a range of post-transition issues remain unanswered.
Road haulage is a crucial industry, so it is a very serious matter that is not likely to be prepared even if there is a deal. This week a leaked letter from Michael Gove suggested that a staggering 70% of EU-bound trucks might not be ready for the new border controls, leading to thousands of lorries facing two-day waits at Dover (in passing, note that almost all the focus seems to be on Dover: much less is said of the significant problems other ports will face).
Subsequently, speaking in parliament, Gove revealed that only a quarter of businesses believe that they are fully ready for the end of the transition period (and that doesn’t necessarily mean they are, by the way), whilst an astonishing 43% believe that the period will be extended. Unless the data were collected before the end of June that is, effectively, an impossibility and perhaps reflects a complacency born of the repeated Article 50 extensions.
But his most remarkable, almost surreal, statement was that, in order to reduce congestion at the ‘short Channel’ ports, there will be a de facto border for trucks entering Kent, which will need special ‘Kent Access Permits’ to be enforced by the police. Who knew that ‘taking control of our borders’ was going to lead not just to erecting a new one in the Irish Sea, but also one around Nigel Farage’s home county?
Separately, it has recently been reported that the development of the new IT systems that will be needed for the UK-EU border is in chaos, and a study published this week by the LSE shows the extent of the disruption to supply chains, especially in the food and drinks industry, that will occur at the end of the transition, again especially if there is no trade deal in place. And a new British Chambers of Commerce survey finds that 52% of UK firms trading internationally have not yet considered the effects of Brexit. But some industries, such as banking, are continuing to shift jobs and operations from the UK to the EU without waiting to see if a deal is done or not.
Whereas the damaging effects of the new border controls will be immediately obvious – queues, supply disruptions and price rises – those of things like banking relocations and their associated impact on tax revenues will be less visible, but no less real.
Incompetence piled on dishonesty …
Since most of the new customs requirements will exist regardless of whether there is a trade deal, the government has been woefully neglectful in leaving the preparations so late. This can be chalked up to general incompetence but there is also a specifically Brexity twist to it. For years talking about the need for such preparations was either dismissed as more Project Fear or made more difficult to admit or be taken seriously because of the ingrained power of the Project Fear narrative. Relatedly, even now there are still Brexiters, perhaps including some in government, who genuinely believe that there is some form of trade deal which avoids the need for borders, as if it were possible to have “the exact same benefits” as single market and customs union membership.
After all, it was not until February 2020 that the Border Delivery Group was established (as an aside, later, its leadership appeared to be a casualty of the witch hunt for supposedly ‘remainer’ civil servants), and although that was not the beginning of the government’s border preparation work it was the first point at which it was officially acknowledged that ‘frictionless’ trade post-Brexit was impossible.
It is worth pausing to reflect on the almost unbelievable dishonesty of this. Even soft ‘Norway style’ Brexit would have had some implications for border friction, but from the moment in January 2017 when hard Brexit became confirmed as the official position any possibility of anything like ‘frictionless’ trade disappeared. No free trade agreement could prevent that. Many experts on trade and customs, many business groups, and many commentators including relative minnows like me were screaming this. Yet it was three whole years before the government officially accepted that this was so, and even then it was not until July 2020 that it published its ‘Border Operating Model’, less than six months before it needs to come into force.
We already know that one of the government’s responses to the border chaos which on Gove’s admission now seems inevitable will be to blame businesses for lack of preparations, which is outrageous considering that the government still can’t give precise details of what they need to do. But we also glimpsed another of the ways the government will respond because it was pre-figured by DEFRA Secretary George Eustice in Select Committee evidence this week: blaming it on the “failure of the EU to plan”. It’s a charge as predictable as it is ludicrous (see the various reports in the Twitter thread link).
Such responses are at one level just boilerplate political blame deflection but, more profoundly, exemplifies the refusal of Brexiters like Eustice ever to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. For that reason alone, it’s important to keep recording and reminding people of the promises that were made for, and the lies told about, Brexit.
The consequences of no deal would of course be that much greater – as set out in an excellent, comprehensive report this week from the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank, covering not just trade but implications for transport, data, citizens, Northern Ireland, and security amongst other things. One issue not mentioned, but in the news again this week (£), is the ongoing saga of Galileo, the EU’s GPS satellite navigation system, with the announcement that the UK has abandoned attempts to build its own alternative system and the suggestion at least that the UK might try to rejoin Galileo.
This is a convoluted story, going back to 2018 when Theresa May pulled out of talks with the EU because of its insistence that the UK could have only limited, third country access to the system and announced that the UK would build its own version (although some experts thought that a compromise deal was possible) at an estimated cost of £5 billion.
That idea was enthusiastically taken up by Johnson (and reportedly driven by, again, Cummings against, or without, expert advice) who decided to buy a bankrupt satellite firm, OneWeb, to deliver it. But in June this year substantial problems emerged (the whole sorry story to that date is well told by Alex Andreou in Byline Times) and the idea has now been dropped. It is unclear at this point what will happen, but the impacts for businesses and for defence are massive. Again, there is less than 100 days to sort this out, but that timescale is a luxury compared with that faced by some UK citizens living in the EU who are customers of those banks which this week announced their accounts would be closed – in some cases before the end of the year.
Piled on even more incompetence
It is becoming clearer by the day, especially in the light of the predictable resurgence of coronavirus, that Johnson’s refusal to extend the Transition Period when he had the chance was a major and possibly catastrophic error of judgment. Far from putting pressure on the EU to ‘blink at the last minute’, it has left Britain woefully unready to cope even if there is a deal. As with the inevitability of an end to frictionless trade, the government was warned over and over again by business bodies and others that this would be the case but chose to ignore them.
Whilst far smaller in magnitude, I think it was also an error of judgment for Keir Starmer not to have at least placed on the record at the time that this was a huge mistake. Even now, in his first conference speech as leader, he said very little about Brexit and did not mention the failure to extend transition at all. I understand perfectly that he needs to avoid being depicted as a ‘remainer’, as Johnson wishes to do. But in taking the line that it is for Johnson to deliver the deal he promised, there is room to make reference to his unilateral decision to compress the time available to reach such a deal, if only as a marker for the future. It would sit well within his more general positioning of Johnson as operationally incompetent.
That critique now has real purchase, to the extent of becoming the dominant narrative, because of the way it is being taken up by so many Conservatives and former allies and supporters of the Prime Minister. Just in the last week or so it seems as if a switch has been flicked in this respect, in a way that is remarkable considering he won a majority of eighty less than a year ago. Coronavirus is of course the main driver of that, but I think that the reverberations of the IMB and the ‘breaking international law’ debacle has played its own, not insignificant, role.
On the one hand, it has created a breach between Johnson and some of the hard core Brexiters like Michael Howard. On the other, it has opened up the entire question of competence in a new way for, as Theresa May pointedly asked, “if the consequences of the Withdrawal Agreement were so bad, why did the government sign it”? This in turn links back not just to Johnson but to the arrogance and hubris of his Downing Street operation, for increasingly there are reports (£) of the resentment that experienced MPs and ministers (and, I would assume, senior civil servants) feel about the transparent contempt with which they are treated by the Vote Leave wunderkinds. Bad enough to be subjected to that indignity by those who are competent; intolerable when it comes from those who are serial bunglers.
So, deal or no deal?
All that may well turn out to be bad news for Johnson’s premiership, but it’s not at all clear what it means for the prospects of a trade deal with the EU. That can be argued in two diametrically opposite ways. One is that, stung by the criticism of his failings, making a deal becomes Johnson’s priority so that at least he can claim to have ‘delivered Brexit’, his central policy, in defiance of the ‘doomsters and gloomsters’. The other is that he pushes the button on his no deal threat in order to gain the adulation of the Brexit Ultras and stoke up the populist culture war he thrives on, and once again ignores all of the warnings of just what a disaster that would cause.
Both have very clear risks. Even the thinnest of deals will enrage the Ultras, whilst not avoiding a level of disruption that compounds the narrative of his incompetence. A thicker deal might be a little less disruptive, but enrage them even more. But no deal would be a gift to Labour and, whilst it might appeal to his core vote, the disruption, would, especially on top of the coronavirus suffering, be deeply unpopular. In particular, there is strong polling evidence of how unpopular no deal would be in the ‘Red Wall’ seats.
I’m assuming, of course, that Johnson’s calculation will be based solely upon his own self-interest and advantage, but that’s not an audaciously unrealistic assumption. Where it will lead him, I have no idea and I’ve seen nothing in any of the UK or EU commentary that suggests that anyone else has either. There is certainly no consensus view.
A straw in the wind may be the fairly upbeat report from James Forsyth in The Times this morning (£), because recently his speculations have had an uncanny knack of proving right, suggesting that he has well-informed sources. But it is perfectly possible – even likely - that Johnson himself doesn’t yet know what he intends. In any case, it should never be forgotten that, as Neale Richmond, the Irish politician who has played a leading role in shaping his country’s response to Brexit, pointedly remarked this week, the negotiations are not an internal Westminster debate, despite what the reporting of some parts of the UK media might suggest.
What is clear, for reasons I’ve argued before, and as trade expert David Henig has argued cogently this week, is that from a UK ‘national interest’ perspective a deal is important. As he says, it’s not that a deal will avoid all the disruption – there will still be plenty of that – but that it would at least begin to re-normalise UK-EU relations. I believe this would also be generally welcomed by the EU.
This is really the next big challenge for the UK, and one which erstwhile remainers can and should try to influence. Sir Simon Fraser, former Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, has recently set out the many challenges for post-Brexit foreign policy. They are considerable, because of the strategic incoherence of Brexit. But a key part of meeting them has to be to move UK-EU relations away from the entirely antagonistic framing that Brexiters give them, even after having left. That will be hard enough, but without a deal – even a very limited one – to build on it will be made impossible for years to come.
Clearly that hope is precisely why the scorched earth Brexiters want there to be no deal. For the rest of us it is important they don’t get their way. They have had their Brexit – and what a colossal mess they are making of it – but that does not give them licence to permanently poison our relationship with our closest friends.
Friday, 24 April 2020
Coronavirus and Brexit: the connections and their consequences
It is now increasingly clear that there is a complex web of interconnections between Brexit and responses to the coronavirus crisis. I have been writing about that on this blog since the beginning of March (and especially here and here) which I mention not as a boast for any perspicacity on my part but just to avoid repeating too much of what was said in those posts.
There are two ways of thinking about those interconnections. One might be called ‘ideational’, meaning things arising from an overlapping mind-set (it would be to ascribe too much coherence to it to call it an ideology). The other might be called ‘institutional’, meaning those things arising from governmental or administrative overlaps. And, of course, there is an interplay between the two.
Ideational connections
Here, the main issue is the very clear overlap (£) between those who think that the coronavirus restrictions are overdone, should never have happened or should be lifted quickly, and that the whole thing is essentially a fuss about nothing – the self-styled ‘lockdown sceptics’ - and those who support Brexit, think it is easy and simple, and should have been done by now.
There is a small but very influential group of politicians and commentators who approach a nexus of issues in the same way be it Brexit, coronavirus, climate change, immigration, sexual harassment or any number of other things. It’s always the same people, and always the same blokey, angry, resentful, constantly triggered but can’t-you-take-a-joke-snowflake, sneeringly superior yet self-pitying victimhood schtick.
And it’s always the same argumentative tricks – cherry-picked statistics (£350M/ comparative death rates), semi-understood factoids (WTO rules/ herd immunity), bogus past comparisons (we managed fine before/ flu), overblown rhetoric (dictatorship/ house arrest), and drastic exaggerations of their opponents’ claims so as to erect absurd strawmen for demolition (so it means WW3/ we’re all going to die? Really?).
In a previous post I gave Tim Martin, the Wetherspoon’s boss, as an exemplar in discussing this overlap, at least as regards Brexit and coronavirus. Martin, of course, is a passionate advocate of Brexit and ferocious critic of social distancing measures. Since then, fascinating work has been done by Professor Ben Ansell, a political scientist at Oxford University, showing correlations between Brexit-voting areas and lower levels compliance with social distancing instructions.
The data are open to different interpretations – especially the possibility that those in leave voting areas might be more likely to have jobs that cannot be done from home – but a plausible one is that the correlation partly reflects the overlap in mind-set I alluded to (just as there is an overlap in the US between Trump’s core vote and those objecting to coronavirus restrictions).
Another set of interconnections was identified this week by Professor David Edgerton, a historian of science and technology at King’s College London. He argues that both Brexit and the government response to coronavirus reveal shared “fantasies about British scientific and inventive genius”. He also links this to pervasive myths about the Second World War which, of course, have been central to Brexit and are almost unavoidable in relation to the pandemic. As the historian Robert Saunders, of Queen Mary, University of London, remarked, it is as if British politicians only have one historical reference point and it’s one they don’t understand anyway.
Institutional connections
Edgerton’s analysis centres on the government’s attempts to boost ventilator production, the story of which was devastatingly laid bare by Peter Foster in the Financial Times this week (£), provoking an angry response from the government. And here the ideational and institutional connections begin to merge. For as Foster records, the link is not just idiotic comparisons with the Blitz or Spitfire production, but a constant boneheaded refusal of politicians to engage seriously with experts. In other words, governmental failures over coronavirus are inseparable from Brexit ‘simplism’ in general and the Second World War myths in particular.
The institutional interconnections were thrown into even sharper relief by a truly devastating report in The Sunday Times about the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis (which also provoked a furious reaction from the government or perhaps, as is widely rumoured, from Dominic Cummings). They were at least two-fold. One was, simply, political exhaustion from all the Brexit battles of the previous months. A second was the way that planning for a future pandemic had been entirely sidelined by planning for no-deal Brexit, not just in general but in relation to specific recommendations about pandemic planning.
The latter is just another way of saying that it’s impossible to deal simultaneously with coronavirus and the Brexit negotiations, a point I’ve made repeatedly on this blog. It’s also been made, with more authority, by Georgina Wright and by Joe Owen, both of the Institute for Government, and innumerable others.
Why does this matter?
Most obviously, it matters in terms of the concrete question of whether the transition period will be extended. Without repeating the arguments for that, an important development this week was the Scottish government calling for it. It’s also been called for in a punchy editorial, again in The Sunday Times, and by a group of senior ex-civil servants. And a new opinion poll shows that 64% of the public support extension with even 45% of Brexit Party voters doing so. What is also coming into focus in this debate is, as I wrote this week, not just the question of whether to extend but by how much given that only one extension is possible. Yet we still don’t know that it will happen, as Tony Connelly of RTE explains.
But I think there is a deeper importance to all this. 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, 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.
This can be seen in the increasingly bizarre and convoluted stories about (non-)participation in EU procurement schemes, and the Turkish PPE flight. Both bear the hallmarks of the Brexity ideology, dishonesty, bullying, spin and incompetence that are the stock-in-trade of these people.
The realities of delivering Brexit had already found them out, but in the face of the pandemic their entire approach has been comprehensively discredited. If we must use Second World War analogies then, as Peter Oborne writes, Johnson is a Chamberlain not a Churchill. Oborne also notes what is being increasingly widely recognized about Johnson, and which I wrote about when he was still Foreign Secretary, namely that he is always in campaign mode and has no facility for, or much interest in, governing. The same is true of Cummings and, for that matter, the entire Brexit high command which has always been characterised by protest and victimhood not competence and responsibility. That is a disaster in terms of Brexit, but it is – literally – fatal in terms of coronavirus.
But – and this is the worst part of the legacy – despite all this some opinion polls show public approval for their approach continues to grow (and though the picture on growth is mixed, still, it shows continuing majority approval). They have no incentive to change their ways – even if they were capable of doing so - when the rewards for not doing so are so ample. That may change, though, and quickly. I have just a sense that the narrative may be shifting at the moment and one index of that is, actually, the furious responses to adverse news stories, which smack of desperation. It shouldn’t be forgotten how easily public opinion can turn, as it did, for example, over the Iraq War.
A final thought
From those thoughts flows another. In this post, as in many others on this blog, I have referenced academics, journalists and think-tankers who do such extraordinary work in analysing and communicating what is going on. So much for having enough of experts. Indeed, as has been widely remarked upon, it is noteworthy how, in the coronavirus crisis, the UK government has turned not just to medical experts but to academic scientists and to businesses to cope with that crisis.
What is less widely pointed out is that, on the basis of the education profile of the vote to leave the EU, the majority of these are likely to have been against Brexit and are very much the kind of people who for the last four years have been reviled as the ‘liberal elite’. Equally, the heaviest burden in dealing with the sharp end of the crisis has fallen on NHS workers of all sorts, care workers, delivery drivers, supermarket staff and so on. Many of these, at all levels of skill, are immigrants, including many from the EU-27 who did not even have a vote in the Referendum.
Yet it is all these people, rather than the archetypical coastal town pensioner or home counties golf club bore, who are now expected to deal with the coronavirus crisis (just as civil servants are expected to deliver Brexit whilst being traduced as remainer traitors). In this sense, the deepest connection between the coronavirus and Brexit is the way that the former has comprehensively discredited some of the central myths and lies of the latter. It turns out that when the chips are down educated professionals, immigrants, and indeed educated professional immigrants are rather important after all. More so, at least, than contrarian newspaper columnists raging against restrictions on their inalienable right to go around infecting people.
There are two ways of thinking about those interconnections. One might be called ‘ideational’, meaning things arising from an overlapping mind-set (it would be to ascribe too much coherence to it to call it an ideology). The other might be called ‘institutional’, meaning those things arising from governmental or administrative overlaps. And, of course, there is an interplay between the two.
Ideational connections
Here, the main issue is the very clear overlap (£) between those who think that the coronavirus restrictions are overdone, should never have happened or should be lifted quickly, and that the whole thing is essentially a fuss about nothing – the self-styled ‘lockdown sceptics’ - and those who support Brexit, think it is easy and simple, and should have been done by now.
There is a small but very influential group of politicians and commentators who approach a nexus of issues in the same way be it Brexit, coronavirus, climate change, immigration, sexual harassment or any number of other things. It’s always the same people, and always the same blokey, angry, resentful, constantly triggered but can’t-you-take-a-joke-snowflake, sneeringly superior yet self-pitying victimhood schtick.
And it’s always the same argumentative tricks – cherry-picked statistics (£350M/ comparative death rates), semi-understood factoids (WTO rules/ herd immunity), bogus past comparisons (we managed fine before/ flu), overblown rhetoric (dictatorship/ house arrest), and drastic exaggerations of their opponents’ claims so as to erect absurd strawmen for demolition (so it means WW3/ we’re all going to die? Really?).
In a previous post I gave Tim Martin, the Wetherspoon’s boss, as an exemplar in discussing this overlap, at least as regards Brexit and coronavirus. Martin, of course, is a passionate advocate of Brexit and ferocious critic of social distancing measures. Since then, fascinating work has been done by Professor Ben Ansell, a political scientist at Oxford University, showing correlations between Brexit-voting areas and lower levels compliance with social distancing instructions.
The data are open to different interpretations – especially the possibility that those in leave voting areas might be more likely to have jobs that cannot be done from home – but a plausible one is that the correlation partly reflects the overlap in mind-set I alluded to (just as there is an overlap in the US between Trump’s core vote and those objecting to coronavirus restrictions).
Another set of interconnections was identified this week by Professor David Edgerton, a historian of science and technology at King’s College London. He argues that both Brexit and the government response to coronavirus reveal shared “fantasies about British scientific and inventive genius”. He also links this to pervasive myths about the Second World War which, of course, have been central to Brexit and are almost unavoidable in relation to the pandemic. As the historian Robert Saunders, of Queen Mary, University of London, remarked, it is as if British politicians only have one historical reference point and it’s one they don’t understand anyway.
Institutional connections
Edgerton’s analysis centres on the government’s attempts to boost ventilator production, the story of which was devastatingly laid bare by Peter Foster in the Financial Times this week (£), provoking an angry response from the government. And here the ideational and institutional connections begin to merge. For as Foster records, the link is not just idiotic comparisons with the Blitz or Spitfire production, but a constant boneheaded refusal of politicians to engage seriously with experts. In other words, governmental failures over coronavirus are inseparable from Brexit ‘simplism’ in general and the Second World War myths in particular.
The institutional interconnections were thrown into even sharper relief by a truly devastating report in The Sunday Times about the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis (which also provoked a furious reaction from the government or perhaps, as is widely rumoured, from Dominic Cummings). They were at least two-fold. One was, simply, political exhaustion from all the Brexit battles of the previous months. A second was the way that planning for a future pandemic had been entirely sidelined by planning for no-deal Brexit, not just in general but in relation to specific recommendations about pandemic planning.
The latter is just another way of saying that it’s impossible to deal simultaneously with coronavirus and the Brexit negotiations, a point I’ve made repeatedly on this blog. It’s also been made, with more authority, by Georgina Wright and by Joe Owen, both of the Institute for Government, and innumerable others.
Why does this matter?
Most obviously, it matters in terms of the concrete question of whether the transition period will be extended. Without repeating the arguments for that, an important development this week was the Scottish government calling for it. It’s also been called for in a punchy editorial, again in The Sunday Times, and by a group of senior ex-civil servants. And a new opinion poll shows that 64% of the public support extension with even 45% of Brexit Party voters doing so. What is also coming into focus in this debate is, as I wrote this week, not just the question of whether to extend but by how much given that only one extension is possible. Yet we still don’t know that it will happen, as Tony Connelly of RTE explains.
But I think there is a deeper importance to all this. 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, 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.
This can be seen in the increasingly bizarre and convoluted stories about (non-)participation in EU procurement schemes, and the Turkish PPE flight. Both bear the hallmarks of the Brexity ideology, dishonesty, bullying, spin and incompetence that are the stock-in-trade of these people.
The realities of delivering Brexit had already found them out, but in the face of the pandemic their entire approach has been comprehensively discredited. If we must use Second World War analogies then, as Peter Oborne writes, Johnson is a Chamberlain not a Churchill. Oborne also notes what is being increasingly widely recognized about Johnson, and which I wrote about when he was still Foreign Secretary, namely that he is always in campaign mode and has no facility for, or much interest in, governing. The same is true of Cummings and, for that matter, the entire Brexit high command which has always been characterised by protest and victimhood not competence and responsibility. That is a disaster in terms of Brexit, but it is – literally – fatal in terms of coronavirus.
But – and this is the worst part of the legacy – despite all this some opinion polls show public approval for their approach continues to grow (and though the picture on growth is mixed, still, it shows continuing majority approval). They have no incentive to change their ways – even if they were capable of doing so - when the rewards for not doing so are so ample. That may change, though, and quickly. I have just a sense that the narrative may be shifting at the moment and one index of that is, actually, the furious responses to adverse news stories, which smack of desperation. It shouldn’t be forgotten how easily public opinion can turn, as it did, for example, over the Iraq War.
A final thought
From those thoughts flows another. In this post, as in many others on this blog, I have referenced academics, journalists and think-tankers who do such extraordinary work in analysing and communicating what is going on. So much for having enough of experts. Indeed, as has been widely remarked upon, it is noteworthy how, in the coronavirus crisis, the UK government has turned not just to medical experts but to academic scientists and to businesses to cope with that crisis.
What is less widely pointed out is that, on the basis of the education profile of the vote to leave the EU, the majority of these are likely to have been against Brexit and are very much the kind of people who for the last four years have been reviled as the ‘liberal elite’. Equally, the heaviest burden in dealing with the sharp end of the crisis has fallen on NHS workers of all sorts, care workers, delivery drivers, supermarket staff and so on. Many of these, at all levels of skill, are immigrants, including many from the EU-27 who did not even have a vote in the Referendum.
Yet it is all these people, rather than the archetypical coastal town pensioner or home counties golf club bore, who are now expected to deal with the coronavirus crisis (just as civil servants are expected to deliver Brexit whilst being traduced as remainer traitors). In this sense, the deepest connection between the coronavirus and Brexit is the way that the former has comprehensively discredited some of the central myths and lies of the latter. It turns out that when the chips are down educated professionals, immigrants, and indeed educated professional immigrants are rather important after all. More so, at least, than contrarian newspaper columnists raging against restrictions on their inalienable right to go around infecting people.
Friday, 21 February 2020
Zersetzung Brexit
During the Cold War, the Stasi perfected techniques of psychological warfare known as Zersetzung, sometimes translated as ‘disintegration’. Targeted at individuals and dissident groups, it involved “a systematic degradation of reputation, image, and prestige on the basis of true, verifiable and discrediting information together with untrue, credible, irrefutable, and thus also discrediting information; a systematic engineering of social and professional failures to undermine the self-confidence of individuals; ... engendering of doubts regarding future prospects; engendering of mistrust and mutual suspicion within groups …”.
I’m extremely wary of invoking comparisons between Brexit and totalitarianism, because they almost invariably exaggerate what is happening with Brexit, whilst insultingly and irresponsibly downplaying the horrors of totalitarianism. Even so, it’s not entirely fanciful to draw at least metaphorical parallels between Zersetzung and the gaslighting which characterises the government’s approach to Brexit. In particular, there is a comparison in the way that it is becoming almost impossible to separate out what is true from what is false, what is intended from what is accidental, what is incompetent from what is malevolent.
The Irish Sea border
Take the remarks made last Friday by the new Northern Ireland Secretary, Brandon Lewis, saying that there will be no Irish Sea border, despite the fact that this is precisely what the government signed up to in the Withdrawal Agreement.
There are multiple ways of interpreting what Lewis said. Perhaps he is simply ignorant of the facts. That isn’t altogether unbelievable. Yet he claimed to be saying what the government’s policy is, and, indeed, he is saying exactly what Boris Johnson has said. Perhaps he, and Johnson, are lying. That too, doesn’t exactly strain credulity. Yet, if so, to what end? If they are taken at their word, then how can preparations be made for the arrangements which need to be in place in just ten months’ time. As Jess Sergeant of the Institute for Government writes, “until the prime minister acknowledges the extent – or even the existence – of new checks, this work cannot begin in earnest”.
Or perhaps Lewis was engaging in the kind of linguistic sleight of hand referred to in my previous post, and was glossing over the truth that there will be a border for goods by reference to the fact that there will be no border for people, which is also true? Perhaps he was trying to assuage unionist sentiment in Northern Ireland? Perhaps he was trying to pander to Brexiters in his own party and the country? Perhaps he actually means that the government are going to renege on the Withdrawal Agreement?
No one really knows, and that matters not least because of its impact on negotiations with the EU. There, there is growing alarm not so much because of Brandon Lewis’s comments but because of Boris Johnson’s, for they betoken sharply divergent understandings of what the Northern Ireland Protocol in the Withdrawal Agreement means. That in turn calls into question the possibility of achieving a deal on future trade and other terms, and at the very least erodes trust in those negotiations, making it more likely that the EU will want watertight guarantees on everything. It also, of course, has profound potential consequences for the people of Northern Ireland.
Again, there’s no way of knowing what Johnson is really up to. Perhaps he wants to collapse the talks and never had any intention of honouring the Northern Ireland Protocol. For what it is worth I think the truth is more prosaic. It seems more likely to me that Johnson, with his usual arrogance, ambition, and sloppiness simply had no real idea what he was agreeing to and didn’t care. His MPs, including the ERG, and indeed some Labour MPs, just voted it through (I am referring to the pre-election vote on Johnson’s revised Withdrawal Agreement) without paying much attention to what it meant and very possibly without even reading it, and, then, when it came to the election, he proclaimed that he had an ‘oven ready deal’.
The Level Playing Field
Exactly the same thing seems to have happened with the Level Playing Field (LPF) conditions. Having agreed to these at least as the intended direction of travel in the Political Declaration (PD, paragraph 77 on p.14-15 of the link), there is now a concerted attempt to disown them. This began earlier this year and was most recently and forcefully articulated by David Frost in a speech in Brussels last Monday.
Frost, the government’s lead negotiator for the talks with the EU, argued that the UK wants a Canada-style trade deal, and bemoaned the fact that the EU had supposedly previously offered this but was now “experiencing some doubts” (implying the requirement of substantial LPF conditions). These conditions, he argued, would mean that Britain was not an independent country and that to comply with them would negate the very purpose of Brexit and threaten a crisis of democracy.
Again, there are multiple possible interpretations of this. It could, despite his denials that this was so, be some kind of negotiating ploy (if so, it just makes the UK look untrustworthy). It could be a message to the Brexiters that Frost is ‘one of them’, and notably he spent much time burnishing his Eurosceptic credentials, thus hoping to avoid the fate of his predecessor Olly Robbins (good luck with that, as the Ultras will turn on him if he does any kind of deal).
It could have been an attempt to get the EU to understand the constraints of UK politics (in which case, think again – the days when the EU was willing to bend over backwards to accommodate those is long gone). It could mean that the government is now determined to leave without a trade deal, or one of the most minimal sort. It could be that the government didn’t understand what it had signed up to. Or it could mean that the government honestly believes that a good deal can be done without agreeing to LPF.
The substance of Frost’s argument was nugatory. It rests on a wholly naïve notion of what ‘independence’ means, namely freedom from any form of regulation that does not derive solely from UK law. But all sorts of international agreements, including trade agreements, involve some form of dilution of independence in this very crude sense. Many sorts of regulation, including ‘WTO rules’, involve adherence to decisions made on a transnational basis. Individual countries can influence them, but they can’t fully control them. For that matter, the EU itself often adopts rules set by other bodies, for example as regards automotive standards, and the UK is very likely to do the same.
With Brexit, Britain has chosen to lose all influence as regards EU rules. But it can certainly exert ‘independence’ in the sense Frost means simply by not agreeing substantially to the EU’s terms for a future deal – if it’s willing to accept the consequences, economically and politically. Independence, for countries as for individuals, is not just about the freedom to make your own choices, but also taking responsibility for what those choices mean. To be fair to Frost, he seemed to accept that, although only by dismissing (without evidence) almost all the economic forecasts, including those of the government itself, so as to conclude that these consequences will be largely benign.
The war of the slides
Frost’s position was echoed later in the week by the bizarre ‘war of the slides’ (£) which began when the Prime Minister’s press office released a rather whiny tweet showing the Barnier staircase with its indication that a Canada deal was an option for the UK, consistent with the latter’s red lines. Apart from being slightly embarrassing (as if, rather than roaring, the British Lion was grizzling because he’d been promised a trip to the circus), everything about this showed what Peter Foster, Europe Editor of the Daily Telegraph, called “brazen disingenuousness”.
Why? (This list overlaps with but isn’t the same as Foster’s reasons). Because from the outset the EU position has been that LPF provisions would be necessary by virtue of the size, proximity and interconnectedness of the UK and EU economies (a point underlined by its own contribution to the war of the slides). Because, again, this was what Johnson agreed to in the Political Declaration. Because what has changed is that the UK has now introduced a new red line, in addition to those which Theresa May had set and which were incorporated into the staircase. And because Brexiters have for years been saying that they wanted a Canada +++ or Super-Canada deal, and in that sense had always wanted more than to be treated ‘just like Canada’, but either did not understand or concealed the implications of that.
Once again, multiple interpretations are possible. Does the government think that this stance will make the EU suddenly drop LPF? If so, that is not just an absurd hope but also has had the opposite effect by making the EU even more suspicious of Johnson’s mendacity. Is it that the government genuinely still fails to understand what Brexit means, and what it has signed up to in the Political Declaration? Is it a domestic signal to Brexiters, in preparation for quietly accepting EU demands? Or Is it preparation for leaving without a deal and noisily setting the EU up to take the blame?
If it is the latter (what I have been calling no deal 2.0, because it is different to no Withdrawal Agreement and, also, refers to more than trade but, alas, it hasn’t caught on) then the real democratic crisis is this. It would not be remotely what was promised during the Referendum (nor, for that matter, would a bare-bones or even Canada-style deal). And it would certainly not be what was promised at the general election. For that was fought on the basis of what Johnson had agreed with the EU, including the Northern Ireland Protocol in the Withdrawal Agreement and including LPF in the Political Declaration.
It’s true that the Political Declaration is not legally binding with respect to the EU, but it is part of the basis on which Johnson was elected in the UK. This was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ he offered. Going back on what was agreed may also face legal hurdles in the UK, although these probably aren’t insuperable given the size of Johnson’s majority. At all events doing so would do massive damage to Britain’s international credibility, just as it was seeking to make new deals with other countries. However, it certainly can’t be assumed that no deal 2.0 is now inevitable, and the respected trade expert Dmitry Grozoubinski has outlined the space in which a deal could, in principle, occur.
What’s going on?
The truth is that no one actually knows what Johnson’s government is planning, or even if it has a plan. At every new development, whichever direction it takes, there are always some who confidently say that ‘this was the plan all along’. Some are as certain that Brexit is a well worked out neo-liberal plot as others are that the EU and remainers are part of a nefarious neo-liberal conspiracy. Some rush breathlessly from their latest ‘insider’ (aka PR) briefing to announce with X% confidence what the latest central scenario is, whilst others ‘have a friend’ who is very high up and has revealed all but of course the ‘mainstream media’ won’t report it. Some are convinced that the hardest of Brexits is inevitable, others equally sure that Brexit in name only (BRINO) is the only possible outcome.
Having now alienated probably half of the readers of this blog, I’ll see if I can do the same for the other half. I certainly have no more idea than anyone else as to what will happen. But in terms of the underlying process, my thoughts for what they’re worth are these. On the one hand, what we are witnessing is to a degree intentional. It’s now a cliché to talk about ‘the alt-right playbook’ and its connections with the kind of psychological warfare techniques with which I began this post. But it doesn’t need any great conspiracy theory or felt-penned sociograms to see how these techniques have spread or indeed to see how they have developed from more familiar approaches to media management.
The generation of constant uncertainty, the endless revisions of even very recent history, the half-truths and lies, the divisiveness and the distractions are all plain to see and they are intended to have the effect of confusing and manipulating the public. It is disturbing, destabilising, and exhausting to be exposed to it. That is partly what I meant by the comparison with Zersetzung and why several serious analysts are describing these developments as Orwellian. It is also the reason why, as I’ve often written on this blog, it is important to keep attempting to hold on to recorded facts and rationality as the only antidote to these dangerous and shameless tactics.
But, on the other hand, if the implication is that these tactics are being used to disguise the government’s ‘true agenda’ for Brexit then I am not at all convinced. It’s important not to over-estimate the competence of our leaders and their advisers, or the coherence of what they do. In particular, over the last four years what has been astounding is that almost all Brexiters have virtually no idea what they really want or how to achieve it, make constant errors about quite basic facts, and have made endless unnecessary mistakes in their attempts to deliver it. Whilst the latter are now blamed upon ‘Theresa the remainer’, it shouldn’t be forgotten that originally she was their idol nor that she gave government roles to Brexiters like Johnson, Fox, Davis, Grayling, Patel and Truss.
Brexiters haven’t suddenly become competent
So with the Brexiters now totally in control of government, it is as to easy to believe that they think that, say, by playing hardball in threatening no trade deal they will achieve a deal scarcely any different to EU membership as to believe that they are completely uninterested in a deal and have always wanted to leave without one. Or that they are divided amongst themselves on this and everything else and the outcome will depend upon which view wins out. Or that the outcome will be entirely accidental, born of complete incompetence.
That could arise if, for example, having agreed to something he did not bother to understand, Johnson now mulishly doubles down on his mistakes. At all events, Brexiters do not suddenly become competent or well-informed just because they have red boxes to open, as David Davis’s career attests. They may be inflicting a swirl of confusions, lies, half-truths and disinformation upon the country, but they are also themselves lost within that same miasmic fog.
Of course, on either account the outlook for the country is not at all good. The government seems to have simply no idea what it is doing and, especially since last week’s reshuffle, to be populated by subservient nonentities in the grip of group think. If so, there is every chance that it will unintentionally lead us to disaster. Alternatively, it knows exactly what it is doing, the cluelessness is a smokescreen, and disaster is actually the plan. It’s difficult to know which is the more alarming prospect.
From this point of view, the metaphorical comparison with Zersetzung is not, as might be thought, so much to say that psychological warfare is being unleashed upon individuals and groups in order to effect their disintegration. Rather, with Brexit we have a country unleashing a kind of Zersetzung upon itself.
I’m extremely wary of invoking comparisons between Brexit and totalitarianism, because they almost invariably exaggerate what is happening with Brexit, whilst insultingly and irresponsibly downplaying the horrors of totalitarianism. Even so, it’s not entirely fanciful to draw at least metaphorical parallels between Zersetzung and the gaslighting which characterises the government’s approach to Brexit. In particular, there is a comparison in the way that it is becoming almost impossible to separate out what is true from what is false, what is intended from what is accidental, what is incompetent from what is malevolent.
The Irish Sea border
Take the remarks made last Friday by the new Northern Ireland Secretary, Brandon Lewis, saying that there will be no Irish Sea border, despite the fact that this is precisely what the government signed up to in the Withdrawal Agreement.
There are multiple ways of interpreting what Lewis said. Perhaps he is simply ignorant of the facts. That isn’t altogether unbelievable. Yet he claimed to be saying what the government’s policy is, and, indeed, he is saying exactly what Boris Johnson has said. Perhaps he, and Johnson, are lying. That too, doesn’t exactly strain credulity. Yet, if so, to what end? If they are taken at their word, then how can preparations be made for the arrangements which need to be in place in just ten months’ time. As Jess Sergeant of the Institute for Government writes, “until the prime minister acknowledges the extent – or even the existence – of new checks, this work cannot begin in earnest”.
Or perhaps Lewis was engaging in the kind of linguistic sleight of hand referred to in my previous post, and was glossing over the truth that there will be a border for goods by reference to the fact that there will be no border for people, which is also true? Perhaps he was trying to assuage unionist sentiment in Northern Ireland? Perhaps he was trying to pander to Brexiters in his own party and the country? Perhaps he actually means that the government are going to renege on the Withdrawal Agreement?
No one really knows, and that matters not least because of its impact on negotiations with the EU. There, there is growing alarm not so much because of Brandon Lewis’s comments but because of Boris Johnson’s, for they betoken sharply divergent understandings of what the Northern Ireland Protocol in the Withdrawal Agreement means. That in turn calls into question the possibility of achieving a deal on future trade and other terms, and at the very least erodes trust in those negotiations, making it more likely that the EU will want watertight guarantees on everything. It also, of course, has profound potential consequences for the people of Northern Ireland.
Again, there’s no way of knowing what Johnson is really up to. Perhaps he wants to collapse the talks and never had any intention of honouring the Northern Ireland Protocol. For what it is worth I think the truth is more prosaic. It seems more likely to me that Johnson, with his usual arrogance, ambition, and sloppiness simply had no real idea what he was agreeing to and didn’t care. His MPs, including the ERG, and indeed some Labour MPs, just voted it through (I am referring to the pre-election vote on Johnson’s revised Withdrawal Agreement) without paying much attention to what it meant and very possibly without even reading it, and, then, when it came to the election, he proclaimed that he had an ‘oven ready deal’.
The Level Playing Field
Exactly the same thing seems to have happened with the Level Playing Field (LPF) conditions. Having agreed to these at least as the intended direction of travel in the Political Declaration (PD, paragraph 77 on p.14-15 of the link), there is now a concerted attempt to disown them. This began earlier this year and was most recently and forcefully articulated by David Frost in a speech in Brussels last Monday.
Frost, the government’s lead negotiator for the talks with the EU, argued that the UK wants a Canada-style trade deal, and bemoaned the fact that the EU had supposedly previously offered this but was now “experiencing some doubts” (implying the requirement of substantial LPF conditions). These conditions, he argued, would mean that Britain was not an independent country and that to comply with them would negate the very purpose of Brexit and threaten a crisis of democracy.
Again, there are multiple possible interpretations of this. It could, despite his denials that this was so, be some kind of negotiating ploy (if so, it just makes the UK look untrustworthy). It could be a message to the Brexiters that Frost is ‘one of them’, and notably he spent much time burnishing his Eurosceptic credentials, thus hoping to avoid the fate of his predecessor Olly Robbins (good luck with that, as the Ultras will turn on him if he does any kind of deal).
It could have been an attempt to get the EU to understand the constraints of UK politics (in which case, think again – the days when the EU was willing to bend over backwards to accommodate those is long gone). It could mean that the government is now determined to leave without a trade deal, or one of the most minimal sort. It could be that the government didn’t understand what it had signed up to. Or it could mean that the government honestly believes that a good deal can be done without agreeing to LPF.
The substance of Frost’s argument was nugatory. It rests on a wholly naïve notion of what ‘independence’ means, namely freedom from any form of regulation that does not derive solely from UK law. But all sorts of international agreements, including trade agreements, involve some form of dilution of independence in this very crude sense. Many sorts of regulation, including ‘WTO rules’, involve adherence to decisions made on a transnational basis. Individual countries can influence them, but they can’t fully control them. For that matter, the EU itself often adopts rules set by other bodies, for example as regards automotive standards, and the UK is very likely to do the same.
With Brexit, Britain has chosen to lose all influence as regards EU rules. But it can certainly exert ‘independence’ in the sense Frost means simply by not agreeing substantially to the EU’s terms for a future deal – if it’s willing to accept the consequences, economically and politically. Independence, for countries as for individuals, is not just about the freedom to make your own choices, but also taking responsibility for what those choices mean. To be fair to Frost, he seemed to accept that, although only by dismissing (without evidence) almost all the economic forecasts, including those of the government itself, so as to conclude that these consequences will be largely benign.
The war of the slides
Frost’s position was echoed later in the week by the bizarre ‘war of the slides’ (£) which began when the Prime Minister’s press office released a rather whiny tweet showing the Barnier staircase with its indication that a Canada deal was an option for the UK, consistent with the latter’s red lines. Apart from being slightly embarrassing (as if, rather than roaring, the British Lion was grizzling because he’d been promised a trip to the circus), everything about this showed what Peter Foster, Europe Editor of the Daily Telegraph, called “brazen disingenuousness”.
Why? (This list overlaps with but isn’t the same as Foster’s reasons). Because from the outset the EU position has been that LPF provisions would be necessary by virtue of the size, proximity and interconnectedness of the UK and EU economies (a point underlined by its own contribution to the war of the slides). Because, again, this was what Johnson agreed to in the Political Declaration. Because what has changed is that the UK has now introduced a new red line, in addition to those which Theresa May had set and which were incorporated into the staircase. And because Brexiters have for years been saying that they wanted a Canada +++ or Super-Canada deal, and in that sense had always wanted more than to be treated ‘just like Canada’, but either did not understand or concealed the implications of that.
Once again, multiple interpretations are possible. Does the government think that this stance will make the EU suddenly drop LPF? If so, that is not just an absurd hope but also has had the opposite effect by making the EU even more suspicious of Johnson’s mendacity. Is it that the government genuinely still fails to understand what Brexit means, and what it has signed up to in the Political Declaration? Is it a domestic signal to Brexiters, in preparation for quietly accepting EU demands? Or Is it preparation for leaving without a deal and noisily setting the EU up to take the blame?
If it is the latter (what I have been calling no deal 2.0, because it is different to no Withdrawal Agreement and, also, refers to more than trade but, alas, it hasn’t caught on) then the real democratic crisis is this. It would not be remotely what was promised during the Referendum (nor, for that matter, would a bare-bones or even Canada-style deal). And it would certainly not be what was promised at the general election. For that was fought on the basis of what Johnson had agreed with the EU, including the Northern Ireland Protocol in the Withdrawal Agreement and including LPF in the Political Declaration.
It’s true that the Political Declaration is not legally binding with respect to the EU, but it is part of the basis on which Johnson was elected in the UK. This was part of the ‘oven ready deal’ he offered. Going back on what was agreed may also face legal hurdles in the UK, although these probably aren’t insuperable given the size of Johnson’s majority. At all events doing so would do massive damage to Britain’s international credibility, just as it was seeking to make new deals with other countries. However, it certainly can’t be assumed that no deal 2.0 is now inevitable, and the respected trade expert Dmitry Grozoubinski has outlined the space in which a deal could, in principle, occur.
What’s going on?
The truth is that no one actually knows what Johnson’s government is planning, or even if it has a plan. At every new development, whichever direction it takes, there are always some who confidently say that ‘this was the plan all along’. Some are as certain that Brexit is a well worked out neo-liberal plot as others are that the EU and remainers are part of a nefarious neo-liberal conspiracy. Some rush breathlessly from their latest ‘insider’ (aka PR) briefing to announce with X% confidence what the latest central scenario is, whilst others ‘have a friend’ who is very high up and has revealed all but of course the ‘mainstream media’ won’t report it. Some are convinced that the hardest of Brexits is inevitable, others equally sure that Brexit in name only (BRINO) is the only possible outcome.
Having now alienated probably half of the readers of this blog, I’ll see if I can do the same for the other half. I certainly have no more idea than anyone else as to what will happen. But in terms of the underlying process, my thoughts for what they’re worth are these. On the one hand, what we are witnessing is to a degree intentional. It’s now a cliché to talk about ‘the alt-right playbook’ and its connections with the kind of psychological warfare techniques with which I began this post. But it doesn’t need any great conspiracy theory or felt-penned sociograms to see how these techniques have spread or indeed to see how they have developed from more familiar approaches to media management.
The generation of constant uncertainty, the endless revisions of even very recent history, the half-truths and lies, the divisiveness and the distractions are all plain to see and they are intended to have the effect of confusing and manipulating the public. It is disturbing, destabilising, and exhausting to be exposed to it. That is partly what I meant by the comparison with Zersetzung and why several serious analysts are describing these developments as Orwellian. It is also the reason why, as I’ve often written on this blog, it is important to keep attempting to hold on to recorded facts and rationality as the only antidote to these dangerous and shameless tactics.
But, on the other hand, if the implication is that these tactics are being used to disguise the government’s ‘true agenda’ for Brexit then I am not at all convinced. It’s important not to over-estimate the competence of our leaders and their advisers, or the coherence of what they do. In particular, over the last four years what has been astounding is that almost all Brexiters have virtually no idea what they really want or how to achieve it, make constant errors about quite basic facts, and have made endless unnecessary mistakes in their attempts to deliver it. Whilst the latter are now blamed upon ‘Theresa the remainer’, it shouldn’t be forgotten that originally she was their idol nor that she gave government roles to Brexiters like Johnson, Fox, Davis, Grayling, Patel and Truss.
Brexiters haven’t suddenly become competent
So with the Brexiters now totally in control of government, it is as to easy to believe that they think that, say, by playing hardball in threatening no trade deal they will achieve a deal scarcely any different to EU membership as to believe that they are completely uninterested in a deal and have always wanted to leave without one. Or that they are divided amongst themselves on this and everything else and the outcome will depend upon which view wins out. Or that the outcome will be entirely accidental, born of complete incompetence.
That could arise if, for example, having agreed to something he did not bother to understand, Johnson now mulishly doubles down on his mistakes. At all events, Brexiters do not suddenly become competent or well-informed just because they have red boxes to open, as David Davis’s career attests. They may be inflicting a swirl of confusions, lies, half-truths and disinformation upon the country, but they are also themselves lost within that same miasmic fog.
Of course, on either account the outlook for the country is not at all good. The government seems to have simply no idea what it is doing and, especially since last week’s reshuffle, to be populated by subservient nonentities in the grip of group think. If so, there is every chance that it will unintentionally lead us to disaster. Alternatively, it knows exactly what it is doing, the cluelessness is a smokescreen, and disaster is actually the plan. It’s difficult to know which is the more alarming prospect.
From this point of view, the metaphorical comparison with Zersetzung is not, as might be thought, so much to say that psychological warfare is being unleashed upon individuals and groups in order to effect their disintegration. Rather, with Brexit we have a country unleashing a kind of Zersetzung upon itself.
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