Brexit: the next phase

The main Brexit news since my last post is the announcement of an agreement about Gibraltar made between the EU, UK, Spain, and Gibraltar. Although at this stage only a political agreement, which still needs to be put into legal text and ratified, this marks a certain kind of milestone in the Brexit process, for it is the last part of the negotiations which began under the aegis of Article 50. So, combined with the recent announcements at the ‘reset Summit’, it can be seen as the end of one phase and the beginning of another.

The Rock took ages

It’s worth pausing just to reflect on that, given that it is over eight years since Article 50 was triggered by Theresa May, five and a half years since the UK left the EU, and just a few days from now it will be the ninth anniversary of the referendum itself. I am not sure who first said it (possibly Rafael Behr), but the biggest lie about Brexit, a title for which there is much competition, was that it would be quick and easy.

It is somehow fitting that Gibraltar should be the last of the ‘withdrawal issues’ to be resolved since, at the very beginning for the Article 50 process, it gave rise to a strong candidate for another much-competed for title, the maddest moment of Brexit. I am referring to the time, in April 2017, when senior Tories, including Michael Howard, talked of the possibility of going to war with Spain. This followed the publication, immediately after the UK sent the Article 50 letter, of the EU Council’s draft negotiating guidelines. As I wrote at the time, and elaborated in more detail in April 2024, when it seemed as if a deal was in the offing, this episode contained within it many lessons which have run through the entirety of the Brexit saga, like words through a stick of rock (that is the last ‘rock’ pun).

I won’t repeat that discussion here. But it is relevant to say that the terms of what have been agreed are pretty much as trailed in 2024, and not very different to the ad hoc arrangements created in 2018 and semi-formalized at the end of the transition period. So it hardly needed to take so long to deal with, because the reality is that something like what has been agreed was the only credible option, and certainly the best option for the people who live and/or work in Gibraltar.

What has been agreed?

On the central issue of contention, there will be no passport or other checks on goods and people crossing the land border between Gibraltar and Spain, but there will be dual passport controls at Gibraltar’s airport and sea port (most arrivals at the latter are from cruise ships, with passengers pre-cleared for landing).

This means that the UK/Gibraltar authorities will operate one set of checks, and the Spanish authorities will operate another set, and these latter will also be checks for Schengen Area entry/ exit. It is a situation which has been compared with the kind of dual controls operated on Eurostar services between London and Paris/ Brussels (although the mechanics will be slightly different). This means in effect, although not, according to Foreign Secretary David Lammy, in formal terms, Gibraltar will be within the Schengen travel area.

One aspect of what has been agreed is that it will be Spanish, and not EU Frontex, border staff who will be policing the Schengen checks. This had been the subject of dispute during the negotiations, and appears to be a negotiating ‘victory’ for Spain, as, under the Tory government, the UK had apparently wanted Frontex to police the controls. It is hard to see why, though. It is no different to the way that the French authorities police Schengen for Eurostar travel, and one might have thought that Tory Brexiters would prefer a national agency to an EU agency, but it may be that, on this issue, their concern was more about any implication of Spanish sovereignty over Gibraltar. In practical terms, it seems irrelevant either way.

Much of the detail of this, and the rest of the agreement, including the precise arrangements for the UK RAF and military base on Gibraltar, has yet to be disclosed (although Lammy has said there will be “zero change” as regards the military base). There will also be a ‘level playing field’ agreement, encompassing state aid, taxation, labour, environment, trade and sustainable development, anti-money laundering, transport, the rights of frontier workers and social security coordination, presumably along the lines of what is in the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).

Those things aside, perhaps the most significant provision is that there will be an EU-Gibraltar customs union, with implications for the harmonization of duties, including on alcohol and tobacco. It is an interesting development, since, Gibraltar was not a part of the EU customs union when the UK was a member state (and therefore customs union member), so in this respect Gibraltar, uniquely amongst British territories, will become closer to the EU as a result of Brexit [1]. That is perhaps some recompense for having to endure, with Brexit, something which 96% of Gibraltarians voted against.

Sovereignty betrayed, part 94

All of this led to predictable cries of betrayal and loss of sovereignty from Brexiters, although it’s worth saying that the Conservative frontbenchers, perhaps mindful that their party was gearing up to agree something very similar last year, have so far been fairly muted in opposing it. No such constraints exist for Tory backbenchers like Mark ‘D-Day’ Francois, or for the Reform blowhards who denounced the agreement as a “surrender”, but on this occasion their position is even more convoluted than usual since they seem unsure whether what is at issue is their usual bleat about ‘surrender’ to the EU or whether it is a ‘surrender’ to Spain.

There has been some of the former, mainly in relation to the tax harmonization and eventual customs union plan. However, the main focus of Brexiter complaint has been the fact that Spain will police the airport controls, with the possibility that British citizens could be refused entry by Spanish border guards (they would, of course, have been equally, or more, outraged had the deal put EU Frontex staff in charge: we know this, because they were outraged when it was under discussion).

Actually, one thing which the official statement of the agreement makes abundantly clear is that it exists “without prejudice to the respective legal positions of Spain and the United Kingdom with regard to sovereignty and jurisdiction”. But if the Brexiters believe otherwise, then they should acknowledge that it is yet another example of how they misled British voters before the referendum.

For in May 2016 the then Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said: “I genuinely believe that the threat of leaving the European Union is as big a threat to Gibraltar's future security and Gibraltar's future sovereignty as the more traditional threats that we routinely talk about.” The reaction from Brexiters was furious, with Liam Fox enraged that the possibility should even have been mentioned, saying: “I think there are limits to what you can and cannot say in any campaign that goes way beyond acceptable limits” [sic]. All this was reported in the Daily Express under an inevitable headline about ‘Project Fear’.

So now, in 2025, if the Brexiters are really saying that Gibraltar’s sovereignty has been undermined by Brexit, they should surely admit that Hammond was right and Fox was wrong. Alternatively, they might reflect on the way that their ideological counterparts in Spain have also reviled this week’s deal as an abject surrender of sovereignty, but on their telling it is the Spanish government which has made the surrender!

Brexitism and the Beeb

But this is to ask for consistency and self-awareness from those who can barely muster a coherent argument, or even basic knowledge of the facts. To take one example, David Bannerman, one of the most hardcore of Brexiters, fulminated that the deal violated the sovereign rights of British passport holders to live in Gibraltar all year round (since Schengen rules would not allow this). It fell to Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, to school the Tory ex-MEP that such rights had never existed. It was a reminder of the way that, even now, after all these years, some of those most committed to Brexit have so little understanding of the practicalities of what being in the EU meant.

Equally illuminating was the way that former Brexit Party MEP Lucy Harris [2] spluttered about the deal having “sold off” Gibraltar and being “anti-British” before eventually settling on it being “anti-democratic”. This, she argued, was because the people of Gibraltar hadn’t been consulted, and because it “insulted” them and also “Brexit voters, northern voters of this country” (the country she presumably meant, in a rather ‘anti-British’ usage, being England). That was a strange juxtaposition, since it is not obvious how something can insult both those who voted to remain and those who voted to leave, and of course the deal is very much what Gibraltarians have been wanting for years (and was negotiated, and will be subject to ratification, by their elected representatives).

Harris’s comments would hardly be worth dwelling on – and, like her fellow Brexiters, she does not have any practical alternatives to the agreement – except that they illustrate how, even as the last part of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU is laid to rest, the ‘Brexitism’ it spawned is more vibrant than ever. There is now an almost literally endless supply of Brexiters – low-grade, if you like, but, still, as in this example, appearing on flagship current affairs shows on the BBC and other major news outlets – who are able to do little more than spout slogans.

In the case of the BBC, especially, I suspect it is because they have been so cowed by populist attacks that they feel obliged to give representation to a position that has so few elected representatives that they have to fall back on people like Harris. This forces others (including BBC journalists themselves) to respond as if engaging with serious comment, and as a consequence political discourse as a whole becomes framed by Brexitist talking points. And whilst the BBC is not the only culprit, it is, by virtue of its position, undoubtedly the key media institution influencing that discursive framing.

A new phase in the Brexit process

Whilst the Gibraltar announcement can be seen as the last moment of the Article 50 process, it can also be understood as part of the beginning of the reset process. As I mentioned in a recent post, there had been reports that a deal over Gibraltar would be a precondition for any reset deal to be announced at the UK-EU Summit in May. As it turned out, the Summit produced an agreement (of sorts) in advance of the Gibraltar announcement, but it is hard to believe there was no linkage between the two. That is to say, the Gibraltar agreement was almost certainly anticipated at the time of the Summit and/or had it subsequently failed the materialize then the potential deals envisaged by the Summit would have been unlikely to progress.

Indeed there is a wider point here. The first substantive paragraph of the Joint Statement of the Summit affirmed that in announcing their new “strategic partnership” the UK and the EU “agreed this would build on the stable foundation for our relationship set by the Withdrawal Agreement, including the Windsor Framework, and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and reaffirmed our commitment to their full, timely and faithful implementation.” In other words, there is a clear sense, and a clear expectation, that the reset is contingent upon delivering the original withdrawal terms. That should now be taken to include the belated completion of those terms by the finalisation of the Gibraltar agreement.

This presumably has the potential to be at least a background feature of negotiations about the various potential reset deals, such as an SPS deal, in that they would be likely to be jeopardised by any actual or perceived failure of the UK to implement the existing agreements. That might include issues such as failing to honour the level playing field commitments of the TCA, for example over state aid, failing to fully implement the Windsor Framework version of the Northern Ireland Protocol, or failing to operate the EU Settled Status Scheme arising from the Withdrawal Agreement in an effective and equitable manner. In short, we may be moving to a new phase in UK-EU relations, but it is still anchored in the previous phases, and the new phase creates a negotiating ratchet (for both the UK and the EU, but most obviously for the EU, as the UK is the demandeur) to ensure compliance with the previous agreements [3].

What the new phase will look like

Whether or not that turns out to play a part in ongoing reset negotiations, what certainly will be an issue is the extent to which the UK has already passively or actively diverged from EU regulations. It is true that, in fact, there has been relatively little regulatory divergence since Brexit, and once the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill becomes law (as it is about to) it will be easier to avoid passive divergence. However, there have been some potentially significant active divergences already, most obviously those relevant to a future SPS agreement.

One important example is the divergence in gene-editing regulations. As I discussed in a post in February 2022, when the legislation was being developed, this is a regulatory area which, although not without its critics, could justifiably be thought of as a Brexit opportunity. That legislation, which only applies to England, has now been passed, as the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 and was welcomed as “game-changing” by the John Innes Centre, a leading research centre in the area (and, somewhat less enthusiastically, by Peter Mills of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics).

This legislation explicitly moves away from the EU’s approach to Genetically Modified Organisms regulation but an additional complexity is that the EU’s approach, too, is in flux. This means that it is not, at present, knowable exactly how the UK and EU approaches will differ at the point of any SPS deal which may be done. This situation does not present insurmountable obstacles to such a deal, and Jiyeong Go and Emily Lydgate of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy have recently set out a much more detailed explanation of the issues, including some possible resolutions. But it is illustrative of the kind of detailed, technical practicalities which will have to be thrashed out, presumably behind closed doors, in the coming months (or even years).

A second example is animal welfare where, again, Brexit has enabled what some see as positive developments, most notably the Animal Welfare (Livestock Exports) Act 2024, banning the export of live animals (although other promised post-Brexit legislation, such as the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill 2021, was shelved). Brexiters and some animal welfare campaigners have already begun to raise concerns that such divergences from EU regulations will not survive an SPS deal. Again, this need not be an insurmountable obstacle to an SPS deal, but it shows that the negotiations will take time, and may involve political difficulties within both the UK and the EU because of the powerful interest and lobby groups with a stake in the issues. It is not just about Brexiters blindly insisting that all divergence from the EU is good, it is also about interest groups who genuinely see particular divergences as desirable.

Whilst these examples both relate to a possible SPS agreement, the underlying issue of dealing with such divergence as has already occurred will feature in any area which entails dynamic alignment of UK and EU regulations. The Summit documents suggested that these might include linking Emissions Trading Systems, and UK participation in the EU internal energy market. Although not mentioned, another area which I understand to still be on the UK government’s agenda is a linkage of the UK and EU REACH systems for chemical regulation. That has always been a sensible idea, since in substantive terms they are very similar, but it would pose, amongst other things, issues of passive divergence, for example in terms of different approaches to ‘forever chemicals’. In an interesting assessment of how the reset might now progress, former senior civil servant Sir Martin Donnelly has identified other areas where dynamic alignment might open up new cooperation. These include medical devices and pharmaceuticals and even, in what would be a rather different vein, VAT harmonization.

Whatever the scope of what is pursued, the overall point is that this emerging Brexit ‘phase’ is going to be characterised by a whole series of highly technical negotiations in various, often discrete, policy areas. Of course that was also true in previous times, but the difference now is that they will not be held within a single, even if complex, process. No doubt there will be some overall political coordination, in both the UK and the EU, but it won’t be like the Article 50 process. Nor is there likely to be the same level of media interest, and there certainly won’t be the kind of parliamentary attention (one of the criticisms, even from those who welcome it in principle, of the Gibraltar agreement is that, like post-Brexit trade deals, it will be subject to almost no parliamentary scrutiny).

So I suspect that it is going to be quite difficult to keep track of developments. It will probably require paying attention to the specialist trade media in particular sectors, and perhaps to periodic howls of rage from Brexiters when they realize what is happening (such howls should be a reminder, to ‘remainers’, that there is a genuine, if limited, anti-Brexit agenda within Labour’s policy). There will also be some specific public moments, such as future summits, meetings of the various bodies set up by the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, and, as regards the TCA specifically, its own scheduled operational review in 2026.

Equally, there is now much less at stake than there was. That shouldn’t be misunderstood. Things like the Gibraltar agreement certainly matter for those affected, and the various reset deals will (or might) make a real difference to those within the relevant areas. But the basic architecture of Brexit is quite clearly not going to change under this government, which will presumably last until 2028 or 2029, and the EU has no particular interest in effecting more than marginal changes. As I argued in a recent post, there won’t be another ‘reset’, just some ongoing resetting of Brexit which may see (at best) a sanding off of some its rougher edges.

Nine years on

So, with that, I am going to sign off for the summer since I don’t anticipate there being much Brexit news of note. That may turn out to be one of those predictions that looks stupid in retrospect, in which case I will post. Otherwise, I plan to resume at the beginning of September. If I am right in what I have written here about the nature of the Brexit process in this ‘new phase’ then I suspect the focus of this blog is increasingly going to become not so much Brexit – the UK leaving the EU – as the Brexitism which is one of its most significant and, in some ways, most surprising legacies.

Meanwhile, one reasonably safe prediction is that next week, when, as mentioned above, the ninth anniversary of the Brexit referendum falls, there will be a spike of commentary. Most of it will be predictable, and some of it will also be intensely irritating. I would simply suggest reading Daniel Hannan’s risible essay, penned two days before the referendum, depicting what Brexit would seem like when we reached 24 June 2025.

That, if anything, exemplifies a prediction that has turned out to look stupid. But it’s more than that. It was a prediction which was never going to come true. So my other suggestion for the anniversary is to read, if you haven’t already done so, my book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to), the second, updated, edition of which was published in September 2023. It tells the story of what happened, starting the day after the 2016 referendum. I’m biased, of course, but I’m not entirely alone in thinking it is about the best book about Brexit.

Have a good summer, and many thanks to the many tens of thousands of you who continue to read this blog regularly. I appreciate it, especially now that there are so many other ‘content creators’ competing for your attention.

 

Notes

[1] For those who may be wondering, Gibraltar does not participate in any of the Free Trade Agreements made by the UK since Brexit, so it forming a customs union with the EU will not imply any revision to those Agreements.

[2] Harris was elected as a Brexit Party MEP in May 2019. She subsequently resigned the party Whip in December 2019 and, in January 2020, sat as a Conservative MEP until the UK left the EU at the end of that month. No doubt she has many qualities, but I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that she is not a major political figure.

[3] In case it is not obvious, I am not really suggesting that there have simply been two, neat, phases of Brexit. It would be possible to divide what has happened since 2016 into several phases, or none. But the combination of a) the Gibraltar agreement being the last of the original, Article 50, withdrawal issues; b) the near-contemporaneous announcements made at the reset Summit; and c) the way that the reset Summit formally marked how the Labour government’s approach to Brexit differs from its predecessors does constitute one way of periodizing the Brexit process to date, if only for heuristic purposes.

Brexiter attacks on the civil service point to the wider dangers of faith-based politics

As Brexit develops it become ever clearer that whatever happens is going to be nothing whatsoever like what was promised by leading leavers. But, of course, rather than draw the obvious conclusion – that those promises were impossible fantasies – they blame everyone and everything other than themselves. The worse Brexit becomes, the more certain they are of their rightness and that they are the victims of betrayal.

Of the many groups in line for the blame – the EU, remainers up to and including ‘Theresa the remainer’, the judiciary, academics, the BBC – civil servants are currently under the greatest attack. As I pointed out in the very first post on this blog, suspicion and criticism of the civil service started almost immediately after the referendum, with it being positioned as the epitome of the ‘pro-remain establishment’ bent on thwarting ‘the will of the people’.

Olly Robbins has recently emerged as the Brexiters’ chief bogeyman, with juvenile booing of his name at the ‘Brexit means Brexit’ meeting at the Tory Conference. He is attacked particularly for having supposedly out-manoeuvred David Davis – not, perhaps, something that would require particularly Machiavellian cunning – to produce the Chequers Proposal. Things have reached such a pitch that the acting Head of the Civil Service took the unusual step this week of writing to a national newspaper to defend Robbins from his critics. Meanwhile, the head of HMRC has received death threats for giving evidence to a Select Committee – that is, for doing his job - on the costs of Brexit.

It is not simply individuals who are in the firing line for what Daniel Hannan has recently called “monstrous ineptness”, with the generic ‘Sir Humphrey’ accused of being “blinded by his closeness to his European counterparts”. And these are benign comments compared with the self-serving sabotage that civil servants are routinely accused of on social media. In making such accusations, the key board warriors are doing no more than parroting what has become a standard attack line from Brexit Ultras. This despite the fact that a major research study this year found no evidence whatsoever of civil service attempts to frustrate Brexit.

Although it’s impossible to be certain what’s going on inside government, the remarks of recently retired or resigned civil servants make it pretty clear. Civil servants doing their job of providing advice based upon evidence and practical realities are constantly having to say things which Brexiter politicians don’t like and don’t want to believe. As Sir Gus O’Donnell pugnaciously pointed out earlier this year, civil servants “look at the evidence and we go where it is … of course if you are selling snake oil, you don’t like the idea of experts testing your products”.  That is quite evident in, for (particular) example, the numerous public statements of Sir Ivan Rogers since his resignation, for doing just that.

And it has an inevitability about it: whilst some of the claims that Brexiters make are in areas where there are legitimately debatable points of view (the abstract value of sovereignty, for example), many are based on simple errors of fact about which there can be no legitimate debate (the basic terms on which international trade operates, for example). The consequence is that civil servants have been asked to deliver impossible policies, and when they are, by definition, unable to do so they are accused of at best incompetence and at worse disloyalty.

It’s not difficult to imagine that Philip Hammond was accurate in describing the way Boris Johnson approached Brexit discussions: “Boris sits there and at the end of it he says ‘yeah but, er, there must be away, I mean if you just, if you, erm, come on Phil, we can do it. I know we can get there’. And that’s it”. But that is not just about Johnson, even though he may be an especially egregious example. It is what has characterised the approach of pretty much all the high profile Brexiters: no concrete and realistic proposals are made, but a vague ‘can do’ attitude is invoked as if that can substitute for such proposals. It is this which has dogged Brexit all along: no viable plan is put forward and any attempt to do so immediately divides Brexiters amongst themselves.

All of this points to something deeper and much more dangerous. What is going on, as an aspect of a wider culture war, is a collision between technocratic politics based upon rational argument and evidence, and faith-based politics based upon feeling and sentiment (this is, at least in part, the thesis of William Davies’ recent book Nervous States).

No doubt both have always been in some degree present – and it would be a soulless politics indeed that was purely technocratic. But it becomes extremely problematic when feeling and sentiment completely swamp rationality and evidence. That is not just because it creates unworkable policy but because it becomes self-re-enforcing: the more the policy fails, the greater the belief that with more faith it would work. It’s not just that it isn’t evidence-based or even that it is evidence-immune, it is that it thrives on evidence that contradicts it.

What is problematic becomes a serious danger when it gets combined, as has happened with Brexit, with cult-like demands for loyalty, and a tribalism that insists that those who do not share the faith are not just unbelievers but enemies, traitors and saboteurs. It is that world that the more Jacobin Brexiters are liable to create, one in which every institution, every policy and – in the end – every person is assessed for fidelity to the pure, true flame of Brexit faith. There is much written of the economic damage of Brexit, but if this is the politics we end up with then that will be a damage far greater and even less retrievable.

The week that Brexit plumbed new depths of absurdity

Any expectation that the New Year would concentrate Brexiters’ minds on the pragmatic realities of Brexit has been abundantly dashed this week, with a string of absurdities. Yet, absurdities though they be, each of them is revealing of some of the deep and recurring flaws within Brexit.

So, first, came the news that David Davis had consulted lawyers as to possible legal action against the EU for producing documents outlining the consequences of Britain becoming a third country to the EU after Brexit (see, for example, this one on the consequences for road transport). The legal advice, predictably, was that there was no basis for such an action but even to entertain the idea is extraordinary (and to which court would the case be taken? The despised ECJ presumably). For it is an ineluctable consequence of Brexit that, in March 2019, Britain will become a third country, and a real possibility – actually welcomed by some Brexiters – is that there will be no deal. It was even rumoured this week, although nothing came of it, that Britain would create a Minister charged with planning for a no deal scenario. Thus it is bizarre that Davis would think it illegitimate for the EU to plan for this. Equally bizarre was his claim that the EU was not giving sufficient credence to a transition (or, in Brexit-speak, implementation) period since – apart from the fact that this is by no means assured – the EU documents in question did, precisely, identify this as a possibility that could mitigate or defer the full consequences of being a third country.

This piece of nonsense was elegantly taken apart by Jonathan Lis in the latest of his string of excellent, excoriating articles on the government’s approach to Brexit. But in addition to the points he makes I think this episode is a fresh illustration of something I have written about before on this blog (in fact, it is by a long way the most read post), namely that Brexiters constantly talk as if Britain is being expelled from the EU rather than choosing to leave. So the consequences are treated as if they are a punishment for, rather than being entailed by, that choice.

The notion of punishment also formed the backdrop to the ‘charm offensive’ visit to Germany by Davis and Philip Hammond this week. Speaking to a business audience, Hammond argued that it would be crazy to ‘punish’ Britain for Brexit by creating new barriers to trade between Britain and Germany (and the EU generally) since, currently, none exist. Well, quite. But of course that is what the government’s policy of (hard) Brexit does.

In making these arguments, and to this audience, Hammond was channelling some recurrent themes in Brexiter mythology going back to before the Referendum. First, that it would be possible to get round the EU-27 by dealing directly with individual member states, especially Germany. The Brexiters in government have repeatedly tried this ploy and repeatedly failed. Second, that German businesses are going to come to the rescue of Brexit and force Germany and in turn the EU to drop its defence of the integrity of the single market. They haven’t and they won’t (because they also care about the integrity of the single market); and moreover they can’t (because they don’t make German, still less EU, trade policy). And, third, that existing regulatory convergence makes a Brexit trade deal easy. It doesn’t, because the deal is going to be about divergence, not convergence.

And then the final absurdity, Nigel Farage’s suggestion that he was warming to the idea of a second referendum - not on the final terms, but a re-run of the in/out choice – in the expectation of a more emphatic vote to leave to scarify the ‘remoaners’ once and for all. As many commentators have pointed out, this is most obviously understood in terms of Farage’s desire to be back in the limelight and to reprise what no doubt he considers his finest hour.

But I think there is something deeper here than Farage’s ego. There is a significant strand of Brexiter thinking, exemplified by Farage, which is besotted with a self-pitying sense of victimhood. For these people, winning the Referendum was actually a catastrophe, taking away their victim status and requiring them to do something quite hateful to them: to take responsibility for delivering what they said they wanted and which they claimed would be easy. It is that which accounts for the way that since the Referendum they have continually acted as if they were still fighting it. And, more profoundly, it directly feeds into talking about Brexit as if Britain were being forced out of the EU on ‘punitive’ terms, thus perpetuating a sense of victimhood. In this way, there is a seamless weave between Farage’s desire to re-live his moment in the sun, Davis’s attempt to blame the EU for the consequences of Brexit, and Hammond’s talk of post-Brexit trade on anything other than near identical terms to EU membership being punitive.

Until the Referendum – or at least until the Article 50 letter – Britain could keep going round these endless loops of brassy, breezy optimism (‘they need us more than we need them’ and variants thereof) and sullen, lachrymose victimhood (‘ordinary folk done down by the EUSSR and the establishment’). That won’t do now that Brexit is happening, and happening very soon. Brexiters love to say that the refusal of ‘remoaners’ to accept Brexit is undermining the country in the EU negotiations but the reality is that what makes Britain ridiculous – and incomprehensible – to the EU is, precisely, the deep-rooted inability of Brexiters to accept Brexit.

For Brexiters are no longer – if they ever were – the insurgents. Now, they drive government policy and are in the key positions of authority to deliver Brexit. And that has exposed both their completely inadequate grasp of the practicalities of what Brexit means and their psychological aversion to taking responsibility for it. Farage apparently believes that a second referendum would deliver an overwhelming mandate for Brexit but I suspect that in his heart of hearts he – and many other Brexiters – would prefer to lose such a Referendum. Then, not only would all the boring practicalities of responsibility to deliver an impossible policy be avoided but also Brexiters could return to their comfort zone of victimhood.

And if that analysis is right, then the absurdity of Britain leaving the EU becomes truly enormous: for it means that we are doing so against the wishes not just of remainers but of leavers too.  

Brexit is becoming a battle for Britain's political soul

As the complexity and chaos of Brexit become increasingly clear, the behaviour of Brexiters is becoming correspondingly unhinged and dangerous. This is most obviously manifest in calls for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to be charged with treason or at least to be sacked for ‘sabotaging’ Brexit. His heresy is not to have questioned Brexit or even hard Brexit. It is simply that he is resisting spending money on preparations for a ‘no deal’ Brexit – preparations which would in any case be pointless even if the catastrophe of such a Brexit were something any sane politician would countenance as a possibility. For some Brexiters his ‘crime’ is the even more trivial one that he does not show enough positive enthusiasm for Brexit.

More insidious than, although part of, this Brexit McCarthyism is the re-writing of history which is going on apace. Examples include airbrushing out assurances given by Theresa Villiers (then the Northern Ireland Secretary) and Boris Johnson that the Irish border would be unaffected by Brexit; or the impossible promises by the Leave campaign that a new deal with the EU would be negotiated before even beginning the legal process to leave. Most fundamentally, all those Brexiters who assured voters that an advantageous Brexit deal would be easy, quick and inevitable are now insisting either that they always knew it would be hard or, even, that no deal has always been the most likely outcome. The latest offender is Nigel Lawson, but as I have catalogued elsewhere there are numerous other examples, including Peter Lilley, Peter Hargreaves, David Davis and Liam Fox.

This matters hugely not in order to hark back to the Referendum campaign but in terms of what happens now. Because it is becoming ever clearer that nothing that the Leave campaign promised voters was true and that had they told the truth about what leaving the EU meant then far fewer people would have voted for it. What this means now is that the lies told are coming back to haunt them and in particular to fatally undermine what has been their most effective line since the vote: that Brexit is the “Will of the People”. Manifestly that falls apart if what people who voted leave were promised turns out to have been a lie. There’s nothing new about that insight, of course, it has been the case since the very first hours after the Referendum but it can only become more obvious as the situation unfolds. It is not just that people will change their minds – as they are beginning to do – it is that the very legitimacy of the result is discredited in a way it could not be had Leave won on the basis of an honest campaign.

It is because of this that Brexiters are so desperate to conceal what they promised, and so viciously turning on those, such as Hammond, who are not “true believers”. That now even extends beyond the re-writing of the past to a demand that evidence about the present and future be falsified. Thus John Redwood this week called for the Treasury to revise its economic forecasts so as to be more ‘realistic’ and ‘optimistic’ about Brexit (quite how they could be both is an absurdity in itself). Forecasts are not facts, but that they are forecasts is a fact and to demand that standard models of forecasting (for all their imperfections) be doctored to fit in with Brexiter faith is ridiculous.

It is crucial that we do not think of this as just the normal business of politics, with protagonists putting the best gloss they can upon their positions. What is underway is something much more fundamental, in a sense even more fundamental than Brexit. The hardcore Brexiters of both the political Right and Left think of themselves – correctly, in my view – as enacting a revolution, and in pursuit of that they are not just willing to risk economic disaster but actually hope to destroy liberal political discourse in its broadest sense. The sinister language of traitors, sabotage and loyalty tests is not the last desperate throw of the dice as Brexit goes wrong; it is the beginning of what they want to be the normal terrain of politics. Similarly, the re-writing of history and of facts is not just a tactical gambit, it is part and parcel of their desired form of politics as decoupled from evidence, logic and rationality.

This won’t go away if and when Brexit is shown to fail. The Brexiters will not take that to show they were wrong but will say that it re-affirms they are right, as we are already seeing is the case. Nor will it go away by conceding to their demands about what form Brexit will take, since we have already seen that each concession made to them only brings forth an even more extreme demand. In a way, the Brexiters’ growing immoderation is doing us a favour in giving a warning as to what kind of country they want whilst there is still the outside chance of avoiding the Brexit which would allow them to create it. For whatever else may have been the ‘will of the people’ it was not the Jacobinism that the Brexit ultras are now revealing to the public.

In this sense, there is a battle underway which is not just about Brexit but about the political soul of the nation. And if this is so, it becomes vital that all of us, but politicians especially, recognize and respond to what is at stake. It goes beyond political party loyalties and cuts across them. There can really be no case, now, for politicians to enact or support the enactment of Brexit when – as seems to be the case for May, Hammond and Damian Green amongst many others – they not only do not believe in it but actually know it is hugely damaging. If they fail to act on that knowledge they will not only be complicit in that damage but in the even greater disaster of taking the British polity down a toxic path that leads inexorably to dark, dangerous and violent places.

Can a hard Brexit be averted?

The unfolding events are very difficult to read, and any reading is likely to be out of date even before it is written. This post is about where I think we are currently. [Before starting, it may be useful to clarify key terms, since their meaning is shifting. By soft Brexit I mean remaining in the single market and customs union. By hard Brexit I mean leaving both of these and seeking a free trade agreement with the EU. By ultra Brexit I mean leaving the EU with no trade agreement and possibly no agreements on anything].

The failure of the Tory party to win the election clearly places their hard Brexit plan in jeopardy in that it was not endorsed by the electorate. The consequence has been to open the debate that Theresa May refused to have after the Referendum about what sort of Brexit that vote meant, itself a consequence of the abject failure of the Leave campaign to specify what form of Brexit those who voted to leave were voting for. That latter point is crucial, because it means that the ‘will of the people’ argument (flawed as it is in general) is irrelevant to the question of how Brexit should be enacted.

What this now means is that the Tory civil war on the EU which has ripped it apart since the Maastricht rebellions of the early 1990s, and which the referendum was supposed to solve, is now raging again. In fact, it never stopped: but in the months after May’s anointment it was stifled by her embrace of hard Brexit. It is worth constantly reminding ourselves what a massive price the UK’s economy, cultural cohesion and geo-political standing is being forced to pay for this internal party factionalism, driven by perhaps no more than 70 Tory MPs.

As to how the current battle in that war is going, it’s difficult to say. There are many signs of an emerging soft Brexit ascendancy: the appointments of Gavin Barwell as May’s Chief of Staff and Damian Green as de facto deputy Prime Minister being prime examples of this, since both are (or at least were) strongly for remain. The newly elected group of Scottish Tory MPs and the Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson would also seem to be pushing the government in a soft Brexit direction.

The need for DUP support, likely to be predicated upon a ‘soft border’, is being reported to imply staying in the customs union (and, if so, that means no independent trade deals, a major plank of the hard and ultra Brexit positions). But I think that in reality a soft border is only possible if the UK is also in the single market. Consider: if there is free movement of people into the Republic of Ireland from the rest of the EU, but no free movement into Northern Ireland as part of the UK, then how can passport controls at the border be avoided? What else would stop a Bulgarian, say, entering the Republic with no restriction and then entering the UK? It is no good talking about the Common Travel Area as a model here: it derives from a situation which pre-dates the existence of the single market.

All this, plus renewed and intense business lobbying to stay in the single market and customs union, pushes the Tories to soft Brexit. But other signs point in the opposite direction. Michael Gove’s appointment to DEFRA is one; and it will be interesting to see how he squares his new role with promises to farmers during the leave campaign that Brexit would not affect their subsidies. More specifically, Brexit Secretary David Davis has indicated in a series of interviews today that hard Brexit is non-negotiable. That may well shift, but if it does then nothing will be resolved as it would almost certainly lead to a leadership challenge from the monomaniac, dogmatic Tory hard Brexiters and, if that challenge was successful, almost certainly a second election.

So the Tories are in a horrible mess. Labour are in an equally confused state, although being out of government it presents less pressing problems. Their absurd manifesto position of wanting the benefits of the single market and customs union but without membership of either and excluding freedom of movement may have helped them to secure the votes of both remainers and ex-UKIPpers, but as a serious policy position it is meaningless. The official position of seeking ‘tariff free access’ to the single market shows a pitiful ignorance of the (inter-related) issues of single market membership (cf. ‘access’) and non-tariffs (cf. ‘tariffs’). It doesn’t even make sense in terms of their other stated position of wanting any Brexit deal to deliver exactly the same benefits as EU membership. Meanwhile other influential voices within the Labour Party are speaking of single market membership as their preferred option. They need to agree on that, and very quickly, if hard Brexit is to be avoided.

A curious and very unfortunate consequences of the splits within each party is that they produced manifestos which were similar with respect to Brexit. This allows the ludicrous claim currently being made by Brexiters that, although neither party won, there is a consensus view amongst the electorate in favour of hard Brexit. The reality is almost certainly the exact opposite: if there is still a majority in the country for Brexit at all, it is for soft Brexit and the same is true amongst MPs.

Underneath all the complexities and uncertainties it’s that last thing we should hold on to. If we must use the dire phrase ‘the will of the people’ then it is not – either in terms of direct or representative democracy – a will for hard Brexit, and may not even any more be for any Brexit. It is now vital that our political institutions align with that.

The window to do so is very small indeed. Because of May’s grotesque irresponsibility in triggering Article 50 before embarking on the election, Britain has now used up almost 3 months of the 24 month A50 period – that’s one day out of eight -and in that time has not just done nothing to progress negotiations but has plunged itself into a new debate about what those negotiations are even about. In the meantime, businesses are relocating, investments are on hold or going elsewhere, staffing of public services is falling apart, the economy is on a knife edge, and the lives of millions (both in the UK and the EU) are in a turmoil of uncertainty.

Some of that damage will never be undone, including that to the UK’s reputation, but it could at least be staunched by a rapid commitment to soft Brexit. It’s extraordinary that an obvious solution to most of the Brexit problems facing the UK is still, even after this election, no more than a possibility. That election has given the UK a final chance but it is time-limited. Unless some way can be conjured up to pause the A50 process then we have perhaps a couple of weeks left to avoid disaster.


Update (14 June 2017): The situation described above persists and has, if anything, intensified. Thus on the one hand we have reports that Philip Hammond is seeking to soften the previous Brexit plans at least to the extent of seeking to remain in the customs union; whilst on the other hand one of the hardest of Brexiters, Steve Baker, who leads the ERG Group, has been appointed as minister in the DExEU (amidst reports of chaos within that department). May has also appointed several ‘soft Brexiters’ to various positions, and yet maintains that the White Paper hard Brexit remains the plan. It may be that there is Machiavellian intent in all this, but if so it is hard to decipher and it seems more likely she is simply so weakened that she has to try to keep everyone ‘on board’ for now. It is hard to see how that can survive contact with the reality of the opening of negotiations, which she insists will go ahead as planned. Meanwhile, different people within Labour Party continue to indicate different positions on the single market and customs union. There is now a palpable sense of political crisis, ironically pointed up by the pomp and ceremony of yesterday’s opening of parliament which seem a brittle and hollow shell around chaos rather than a signifier of traditional certainties and continuities.

Many people are calling for a cross-party group to take Brexit forward but it is hard to see how this can make a difference, since the parties themselves do not have agreed positions. There is a strong argument to say that other parties should stay well clear: this is the (predominantly) Tory Brexiters’ mess and they should own it. Conversely, a cross-party group would inevitably led Brexiters to complain, as the disaster unfolds, that this disaster was due to the other parties rather than to the wholly unworkable policy of Brexit. The way out might end up being some kind of cross-party arrangement but, if so, it should be one which reflects the majority view amongst – it can reasonably be assumed – both MPs and the public that Brexit should be completely abandoned. That would of course entail massive political fallout, but there is no scenario anymore which does not entail that.

So we remain in an unholy mess: a statement which I suspect will not need updating for some years to come.

Update (16 June 2017): The basic situation on ‘soft versus hard’ remains unchanged, so I am not writing a new post. Philip Hammond did not give his Mansion House speech on a softer Brexit, citing the dreadful London tower fire as the reason for cancellation. However, it seem hard to resist connecting the cancellation to the report, shortly before the cancellation, that the DUP support May’s rather than Hammond’s versions (I cannot bring myself to call them visions) of Brexit. At the same time, it seems difficult to reconcile the DUP’s reported position with their apparent desire to avoid a hard border, and there continues to be a strong head of steam within the Tory Party against hard Brexit Labour’s position remains opaque, despite an article suggesting a possible (but unspecified) change of course in an article by Keir Starmer today.

Nevertheless, the government intends to proceed with opening negotiations with the EU on Monday on the basis of the White Paper hard Brexit position. It is difficult to overstate the absurdity, and indeed gross irresponsibility of this: there is currently no government in place, and no agreement as to what the government’s position will turn out to be. For a fantastic analysis of this situation, which I will not try to better, see Ian Dunt’s piece Brexit talks start on Monday and we have no idea what we are doing.

 

[For ongoing links to a wide variety of news items and analyses of Brexit, please follow me on twitter. I tweet exclusively on Brexit with the focus on reputable sources and well-informed commentators, but avoid (with occasional lapses) extensive debate as the issues involved are usually too complex for tweets. Nor do I seek to persuade the unpersuadable – the aim is imply to provide high quality information for those who may be interested in it. Twitter ID: @chrisgreybrexit].

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