In the Brexit debate, discussion of its geo-political damage has often been the poor relation of that of its economic damage. It’s easy to understand why, as the economic damage is more tangible and, to a degree, more quantifiable. The latest evidence of that came this week in a new analysis by Goldman Sachs, the significance of which is that, for the first time, it drew together all of the different counterfactual models, with the headline finding being that that UK GDP is now 5% lower than it would have been without Brexit.
However, ultimately, the geo-political damage may be even more important and more likely to lead to a softening, or even reversal, of Brexit. That isn’t because Brexit is the cause of all Britain’s geo-political problems, any more than EU membership would resolve them, but because Brexit has created additional problems whilst doing nothing at all to help those which would exist anyway.
Geo-politics does not just mean defence, and certainly not just defence in its traditional military meanings, but includes those things along with the wider panoply of security, soft power, diplomacy, and international relations. Thus configured, it is climate change which presents the biggest set of geo-political challenges for Britain, as for every other country, but, for all the urgency of that, those relating to war in its various forms have a particular immediacy.
That immediacy has been ratcheted up several notches by Donald Trump’s latest comments about Russia and NATO, including that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to members not reaching the 2% of GDP defence spending target. That would be a direct violation of the basic principle of mutual defence, leading the NATO Secretary-General to say that the comments “undermine all of our security”.
This comes at a time when, of course, there is a real possibility of a second Trump Presidency and, if that comes about, there are now multiple signs that it would be (even) more extreme than the first one, and far less constrained. The liberal Conservative historian and journalist Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump would “abandon NATO”, even if not formally leaving it. Whether or not that proves true, there can be no doubt of the close affinities between Trump and Putin, something in plain sight last week when Tucker Carlson – who has been described as “perhaps the highest-profile proponent of ‘Trumpism’” – conducted a sycophantic interview with the Russian leader.
General background
I’ve written at length before about the nexus of geo-political issues around Brexit, Trump and Russia, initially when ‘previewing the geo-political costs of Brexit’ at the time of Putin’s poison attacks in Salisbury in March 2018, and then in March 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Much that is in those two posts still stands, and I will avoid repeating them save to briefly draw out three general points.
First, Brexit necessarily fractured the central tenet of UK geo-political strategy by destroying its role as a US-EU bridge. Burning one end of that bridge was bound to fray the other end, under any US Presidency, and the Northern Ireland aspects of Brexit were always potentially liable to cause further tensions in UK-US relations. Equally, whilst a Trump Presidency would have been difficult for the UK even without Brexit, and will be if it recurs, it is a particular delusion of Brexiters that Trump regards Brexit Britain with some kind of special affection. In fact, whilst he may be happy to heap praise on sycophants like Nigel Farage, the idea that he has any interest in what happens to the UK, or even any loyalty to such court jesters, is preposterous.
Secondly, Brexiters showed a crucial strategic ignorance in configuring NATO as the only international organization needed to meet Britain’s security and defence needs, and the EU as entirely irrelevant to these, when, in fact, the two have become increasingly intertwined. That has become even more obvious since the invasion of Ukraine, which also showed the absurdity of the Brexiters’ vision of ‘Global Britain’ and its associated ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’. As the revised Integrated Review of 2023 recognized, the European continent remains the UK’s primary defence theatre and, within that theatre, Russia its sole, but considerable, threat.
Thirdly, even without delving into the murky question of direct Russian interference in the Referendum (a question which could only really be answered by the intelligence services, who were not asked to do so for the 2021 ‘Russia Report’), Brexit was undoubtedly welcome to Putin, and fully consistent with his longstanding attempts to destabilize both the UK and the EU. It is a point insufficiently made to the plastic patriots of Brexit just how comprehensively they played into his hands, even if it cannot be proved that they were his puppets.
The Russian threat and responses to it
These general points provide the background to the current situation. It is one in which the threat of Russia is undeniable. Putin may not have had the swift victory he expected in Ukraine but may salvage something he will be able to claim as victory, especially if a Trump presidency withdraws US support to Kiev, or even without that, if Republican resistance to such support persists. Nor has prosecution of the war prevented continuing Russian aggression, both overt and covert, elsewhere in Europe.
For example, last year, NATO intercepted over 300 Russian planes threatening its airspace, mainly over the Baltic states, with the RAF responsible for at least 50 of these interceptions. Meanwhile, Russian interference and influence in Kosovo and Serbia, Moldova, Bosnia, and Montenegro continued. Just this week Moscow put the Estonian Prime Minister on a so-called ‘wanted list’, as part of its ongoing attempts to bully and intimidate its neighbours. And whilst the 2021 Russia Report may not have delved into the Brexit referendum, it gave no room to doubt the extent of Russian activity in political disinformation campaigns against the UK, whilst as recently as last December the intelligence authorities revealed the ongoing nature of Russian cyber-attacks.
All of this, and more, is what underlies the recent upsurge of concern about the possibility of a major conflict on European soil, including Grant Shapps’ reference to this now being a “pre-war generation” in his first speech as Defence Secretary. Personally, I don’t take Shapps seriously as Defence Secretary or in any other capacity, but I do take seriously the warnings of the Chief of the General Staff. Such warnings certainly should not be dismissed as coming from blimpish or self-interested military ‘brass hats’; for example, the left-wing journalist Paul Mason has been vocal in making the case for Britain to re-arm in the face of the threat from Putin’s Russia.
Moreover, the same warnings are being sounded in several other European countries, building upon pre-existing concerns about Russian aggression, concerns which led, amongst other things, to Sweden and Finland seeking NATO membership. The last barrier to Sweden’s application, approval by Hungary, looks close to being cleared, and the country is already participating in NATO exercises as well as preparing its citizens for the possibility of all-out war. Finland’s membership has already begun, and is being actively operated, with that country, too, being in an advanced stage of readiness for war. Meanwhile, Germany has embarked on a major rearmament programme whilst Poland has doubled the size of its armed forces (£) in recent years and looks set to continue to prioritize defence under its new government. Given these, and similar, developments, British political and military leaders have if anything been rather slow to prepare the public for the threat we face.
The Trumpist-Putinist-Brexitist axis
However, Britain’s capacity to prepare is hobbled, and not just by the fact that we are economically struggling, the more so because of Brexit. It is also because there is a very powerful, if contradictory, axis which undermines attempts to do so.
On the one hand, there are those on the populist right like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson (despite his professed support for Ukraine), and Nigel Farage who are openly supportive of Trump’s re-election, and, at least in the case of Farage, public admirers of Putin. They have been joined this week in their support of Trump by John Hayes, a less well-known but highly influential right-wing Tory MP, and it’s noteworthy, in itself, just how many Tories are lining up to offer such endorsements in what is, after all, a foreign election.
On the other hand, there is the unreconstructed old hard left, including Jeremy Corbyn and the Stop the War Coalition, elements of which are “among the worst disseminators of Kremlin propaganda in the UK”. These are not the words of a ‘Centrist’, still less a Conservative, but of the radical journalist George Monbiot, and the veteran campaigner Peter Tatchell has made similar points.
Spanning these two groups is the peculiar, and peculiarly influential and well-connected, one of the Revolutionary Communist Party turned Libertarians who coalesce around Spiked, which constantly mocks and undermines the warnings about Russia, including these most recent ones.
It is not a coincidence that all three of these groupings are also pro-Brexit and anti-EU. What links Brexitists, Trump, and Putin is a shared hatred of any notion of a liberal, rules-based international order. And whilst it would be fatuous to deny the many criticisms of that notion, and what it has meant in practice, most disgracefully as regards the Iraq War, it is far more fatuous, if not downright evil, to suggest that illiberal, lawless international disorder would be preferable. Yet, although they would never put it in those terms, that is precisely what all those groupings would prefer, albeit for wildly different reasons. Some dream of a global powerplay between Great Nations led by Strong Men, some of the chaos upon which disaster capitalists can thrive, some of the final collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions to usher in a socialist utopia.
Actually, they only differ wildly in what they ultimately want. They are identical in what they see as the route to getting it: if all the cards are thrown up in the air, then it becomes possible that they may be made to land at the desired outcome. What gets left out of that analysis is the fact that amongst those ‘cards’ are the lives of millions of people which will be disrupted, deformed, and destroyed in the process; the dead, the maimed, the tortured, the dispossessed, the damaged, the broken. And whilst historical parallels are never exact, we’ve seen all this before in Europe. The same utopian dreams, the same subjugation of means to ends, the same grand power-plays in which ordinary lives are just collateral damage in the service of great dreams and causes.
The logic of integration
In this context, Brexit is only a minor event, but with a European war now being widely discussed as a serious possibility it takes on a new importance. Of course, such a war is by no means inevitable, but it is the decisions taken in the period after possibility and before inevitability which are crucial. Those decisions are quite as acute for the EU as for the UK. It isn’t that staying in the EU would have made them go away, and the EU is deeply divided between countries (£), including the Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, Poland and some of the Balkan states, which are acutely aware of the Russian threat and preparing to meet it, and those, including Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia, which are in various ways allies or appeasers of the Putin regime.
Yet such divisions would exist, and probably to a greater extent, if the EU did not exist. And, either way, the UK would have to have a relationship with what is, after all, its own continent. Brexiters may wax lyrical about the days when Britain ‘stood alone’, but forget that this wasn’t its choice, and was its moment of maximum peril precisely because of its isolation. In fact, the EU does exist, so what is that relationship to be? At the very least, there is now a stronger case than ever for a deep UK-EU security and defence pact – something always envisaged by the Political Declaration that accompanied the Withdrawal Agreement, but which got sacrificed by the Johnson-Frost antagonistic ‘sovereignty-first’ negotiations – and, unlike any proposals Britain might make to deepen trade and economic relationships, this is an area where the UK genuinely has something to offer the EU.
This is because, despite cuts in personnel numbers, especially army personnel, and despite some recent high-profile equipment failures, the UK still has profound defence capabilities – not in the sense of a capacity to be ‘Global Britain’, but in the context of a European conflict. It remains the world’s sixth military power, and the most powerful in Europe (not including Russia), with on some estimates the best special forces in the world, and has a substantial cyber-war and intelligence capacity, probably second only to the US as a regards signals intelligence. There is far too much self-congratulatory guff about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ capabilities in all kinds of sectors and, no doubt, much hyperbole about its military capacity, but that capacity is real and, importantly, provides a base that could rapidly be built upon, though the longer that is put off the harder it will become.
At the same time, the UK is never going to be strong enough to go it alone, and whilst it has much to offer the EU it has as much or more to gain from cooperation, perhaps even integration, with the EU. The idea of an EU army, for so long the imaginary bugbear of Eurosceptics, has recently been re-proposed by the Italian government, although the reactions from other EU members make it unlikely to gain traction for now, and the barriers to such an entity are technical as well as political. However, post-Ukraine there has been an intensification of integrative measures, and an exercise last October involving the forces of nine EU countries was for the first time conducted from an EU operational headquarters, as part of an attempt to enable the EU to act independently of NATO.
This seems set to be the direction of travel for the EU and, if so, the argument for UK involvement, and ever-deepening involvement at that, becomes stronger, the more so if Trump does come to power. That’s speculative, but it is justifiable given that we have already witnessed the way that the Ukraine war served to improve what at the time were very acrimonious UK-EU relations. In the event of actual hostilities breaking out the logic would surely become stronger still and if, in that scenario, the US failed to meet its NATO commitments it might become irresistible. For it is difficult to over-state just how profound the impact of such hostilities would be, not just in terms of military operations and alliances but for everyday life.
What would war mean for Britain?
During the Cold War it was generally assumed that if there was a conflict with Russia it would be a nuclear one. Einstein supposedly said that whilst he didn’t know what weapons would be used in World War Three, he knew that those used in World War Four would be sticks and stones. Within that climate of Armageddon, many if not most of us became fatalistic: if war happened, survival was highly unlikely and perhaps not to be desired anyway. The kind of advice offered by the infamous 1976 ‘Protect and Survive’ pamphlet, which included making a shelter from a large table surrounded by furniture and bags of earth, seemed, to say the least, hopelessly optimistic.
However, nuclear war isn’t the scenario we are facing. Rather, it is one of forms of more or less conventional warfare, probably conducted mainly on Eastern European soil, though in a wider airspace, and also cyber and information warfare. For the UK, according to security expert Professor Anthony Glees, the consequences would include food, fuel and medicine shortages, rationing, and curfews. Glees also envisages that “a British Quisling government would be established, probably under a well-known domestic politician known to be sympathetic to Putin”. One wonders who he might have had in mind.
Perhaps this is unduly grim, but, on his first prediction, we have already seen with Ukraine, the pandemic, and Brexit the fragility of supply chains, and have ample evidence of how quickly such fragility engenders panic-buying, hoarding, and de facto rationing. As for Glees’ even grimmer second prediction, it is certainly obvious that, at the very least, the strange but powerful pro-Trump, pro-Putin alliance I identified above would be vocal in demanding British disengagement from the conflict.
Indeed, it is all too easy to anticipate that they would cry that here, finally, was the great Brexit dividend: what has conflict between Russia and the EU got to do with us? Once again appeasers would talk of quarrels in faraway countries, between people of whom we know nothing. It is equally easy to anticipate how, just as Johnson dismisses those who are alarmed by Trump as the ‘wokerati’, these voices would be declaring, in their various accents, that it was only the liberal/imperialist/globalist/Europhile elite who want conflict with Putin. So, even if such a war did not produce the Quisling government Glees anticipates, it would be enmeshed within the Brexit or Brexitist culture war, with Brexiters acting as Putin’s fifth column. Just in itself, this is a good reason why Brexitism needs to be driven to the margins of British politics.
The European ideal
To re-emphasize, none of this is to suggest that Brexit is the cause of the threats and challenges posed by Putin and Trump, or that those threats and challenges fall less heavily on the EU and its members. It’s more subtle than that. Brexit doesn’t prevent British military and other cooperation with the EU, but it makes it less straightforward and certainly doesn’t help it. Brexit certainly removes UK influence on the EU’s response to Russia, and to other geo-political threats. And to the ways that geo-politics impinges on supply chains, Brexit adds additional frictions.
But the biggest point is this. Brexit has put a fracture in the basic idea of ‘Europe’, expressed institutionally by the EU, as a defining bulwark of liberal democracy and freedom. The need for such a bulwark becomes more important if the US retreats further from what has been, warts and all, its global role in that respect (£). Any groans from Brexiters about democracy and sovereignty (as discussed in last week’s post) don’t negate the fact that EU membership entails commitment to the EU’s founding values of “human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”. Nor is that fact negated by any whataboutery relating to Hungary, currently, or Poland, recently: such anomalies as there are don’t detract from the enormity of having united a continent around such values, every word of which stands in stark contrast to Russia, not to mention many other parts of the world.
The word ‘united’ is the key one. Brexiters may say that Britain need not belong to the EU to share its values in these respects. But sharing is not the same as uniting. There is, to coin a phrase from a different context, power in a union. Having witnessed the break-up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the rise of the European Union, including the alacrity with which the one-time Warsaw Pact countries signed up for it, there’s probably no one who understands that as well as Vladimir Putin.
Showing posts with label Political Declaration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Political Declaration. Show all posts
Friday, 16 February 2024
Friday, 12 June 2020
Brexit Britain risks heading to international pariahdom
The irritation in Michel Barnier’s press statement at the end of last week’s negotiations was palpable. “Things cannot go on like this”, he despairingly warned, and his particular concern was the UK “backtracking on the Political Declaration”. It was a strong indication that any remaining trust in the negotiations has all but disappeared, and that hasn’t just happened in the last few weeks. Rather, it has been in the making for years.
If not earlier, it perhaps began when the Brexiters, including Boris Johnson, denied the legitimacy of any financial settlement – something I will come back to. It became entrenched when David Davis and Theresa May immediately disowned the backstop they had agreed to end of the phase 1 of the Article 50 negotiations in December 2017. Many other examples could be given.
Distrust is now endemic
Under Johnson’s premiership that lack of trust has become endemic. That’s partly because EU leaders recall the long years of lies he told whilst a Telegraph columnist, and have disdain for his role in the Referendum. It’s not difficult to imagine that he is one of those whom Donald Tusk was referring to as warranting a “special place in hell” for having advocated Brexit with no plan. But it is more because of the way in which, since coming to power, Johnson has seemed to resile from what he agreed, especially as regards Northern Ireland.
In a post last month, following the Frost letter, I lamented that the bitter truth is that the UK can no longer be trusted. Yet the Brexit ‘patriots’ feel no shame and, worse, no realism. Their response to Barnier’s press statement was to crow that he was ‘rattled’ by Britain’s ‘tough stance’ – yet apparently not so cowed as to stop him being ‘rude’ and ‘insulting’! The more ‘cerebral’ and, indeed, the official response was to point out, echoing Davis’ comments about the phase 1 agreement, that the Political Declaration (PD) is not legally binding.
The Political Declaration isn’t irrelevant
That is perfectly true, but it is a very long and dangerous jump from that to treating it as totally irrelevant. It was signed by Boris Johnson as a commitment of ‘good faith’ to the agreed framework for the future. As Simon Usherwood, Professor of Politics at Surrey University, points out reneging on it has damaging reputational consequences. It’s not just dishonest but, perhaps worse, naïve, for Johnson to treat as if it were one of his throwaway newspaper columns. You simply can’t conduct international relations that way and expect it just to be laughed off, or forgiven and forgotten, by other countries.
It’s clearly the case that, as a framework, it does not address the detailed provisions of the future agreement. Equally clearly, within negotiation there will legitimately be ‘maximalist’ and ‘minimalist’ interpretations of how to operationalize the framework. But that is not at all the same as simply treating it as totally irrelevant (as, indeed, Brexiters used to realise).
For example, on one of the key areas of contention referred to by Barnier, Level Playing Field (LPF) provisions, paragraph 77 of the PD is very explicit about how economic interdependence and geographical proximity mean there must be robust commitments on state aid, competition law and so on. So, yes, there is legitimate negotiation space around what ‘robust’ means in practical terms, but it is simply dishonest for Brexiters, including Johnson, to pretend that these issues have been newly introduced by the EU (£)*. If Johnson objected, the time to do so was before signing the document off.
Ominous signs
But more ominous than the ongoing disavowal of the PD was a report in the Brexiters’ house journal, The Express, that the government regards the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) as having “unfair defects” that must be remedied. That marks a significant escalation because it is not based on any claim that it is legally non-binding: there is no dispute that the WA was signed as a legally binding international treaty. Reneging on it would go beyond reputational damage.
The justification for this stance is telling. On the one hand, the report refers to an unnamed ‘government source’ (does that mean Dominic Cummings?) as linking the ‘defects’ to what was agreed by Theresa May and Olly Robbins, and the constraints of the May parliament. This reflects something which has been swirling around Brexiter circles for months now – a sense that, despite Johnson signing it, it was in some way not legitimate because of those antecedents including what they regard as a ‘remainer’ parliament. It is dangerous nonsense for whilst, as they are wont to say, no parliament can bind its successor, that does not mean that international treaties negotiated during one parliament become irrelevant afterwards. International relations would scarcely be possible if that were so. And, in any case, it’s an absurdity as Johnson didn’t sign the WA and PD until January 2020 - after the election. He owns them.
This relates to the other aspect of the supposed justification for re-opening the WA, namely that the government did not have time to deal with all the “defects” of May’s deal, just to replace the Northern Ireland backstop. But not only is the government now resiling from the frontstop that replaced it, it was the government that insisted – against much warning – that the whole thing had to be rushed through with scarcely any scrutiny to meet the deadline of 31 January. Moreover, we now know – courtesy of Steve Baker – that the ERG hardliners were persuaded by Dominic Cummings to support the WA, without needing to read it, on the basis that Michael Gove said it could be changed later.
As with Brexit in general, the easiest way to understand the outrageousness of this is to think about it the other way round, and imagine how the UK, and Brexiters especially, would react if the EU said that with Juncker, Tusk et al now gone, the EU no longer felt bound by the WA and PD. Or if the states and MEPs who had voted to ratify the WA now said that they had done so without bothering to read it as they had been told it could all be re-written afterwards. The shrieks of anger would be deafening, and the opprobrium heaped on the EU vitriolic.
The deal formerly known as ‘oven-ready’
Of course it’s not just the trust of the EU which is being betrayed by this deepening farrago of lies. It’s also the British electorate. For don’t forget that this near-discarded PD and this ‘defective’ WA used to go under a very different name: together, they were the “oven-ready deal” that Johnson promised would “get Brexit done” during the 2019 General Election campaign. This was “the great new deal”, not in any way to be confused with May’s despised efforts. In vain did I and countless others warn that it would just be the beginning of a new process of negotiation. Still, at least it might have been assumed that those negotiations would go forward on the basis of the WA and PD, not backwards to try to re-write them.
Such an assumption was always going to be naïve, though. And this goes to the heart of why the EU is right to distrust Johnson. Again and again as Prime Minister (never mind about beforehand) he has shown not just dishonesty but a palpable scorn for law and the normal political process. The doyen of law and policy commentators, David Allen Green, who invariably uses words with great precision, last year wrote of Johnson “going rogue” (£) over the question of whether he would obey the law requiring him to seek an extension to the Article 50 period. It was, Green said, “unprecedented” for a Prime Minister even to be contemplating not doing so. This was also in the context of the illegal prorogation of parliament and these and other examples provide ample evidence of the subfusc authoritarianism that Johnson’s jokey persona increasingly fails to cloak. No doubt it is echoed, amplified, and incited by Cummings’ infamous contempt for ‘playing by the rules’.
This makes Johnson a difficult character for the EU to deal with, but that character is only one manifestation of the problem. As noted above, the UK government’s behaviour since Brexit has been repeatedly untrustworthy, even under the leadership of May, whose character was very different. The underlying issue is neither of them, but the now near comprehensive ‘ERG-ification’ of the Tory Party and, hence, government. Perhaps because the old familiar trappings of the political spectacle persist, it’s easy to miss how hollowed-out Britain’s political institutions have become during these Brexit years.
Government by cult
Indeed, the EU’s bewilderment – like that of many commentators including, at times, myself – stems from a failure to appreciate quite how far and deep that process has gone. The ERG is rather like the Terminator which “can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop ever …”. So the hope that, at some point, rationality will assert itself – for example over the damage of no deal or extending the transition period – keeps being dashed. Similarly, the idea that some ‘compromise’ from the EU would unlock things, even if such compromise was possible, is flawed. Really, one could imagine that if the EU conceded on every single UK demand the Brexit Ultras would still denounce it as insultingly inadequate.
We’ve arrived here step by step because every demand made by the Ultras has been conceded – the Referendum, then the row about the question to be asked, then the franchise. And each demand met has led to a still harder one, from ‘we just want to be like Norway’ right up to the point that we are just about at which is that any deal and any form of relationship with the EU is intolerable. That’s totally unrealistic, of course, since the EU will still be there (although the hardcore of the Ultras always believes it will collapse) but realism isn’t part of the story here. Indeed, realistically, it’s far more likely that Brexit will lead to the break up of the United Kingdom.
That an entire government should be in hock to an effectively nihilistic cult is partly to do with the internal history of the modern Conservative Party, the ruthlessness of the ERG, and their parliamentary numbers which are enough to pose a threat even when the government has a large majority. But it requires that those who are far from membership of the cult – and, still, there are plenty of Tory MPs in that category – for one reason or another go along with it. At the present moment, that means buying into the narrative that all that is happening is a tough negotiating stance which will yield an eleventh hour ‘blink’ from the EU and, for this reason, no transition extension should be sought.
Beyond that, it requires a much larger number of people within the electorate to accept the situation – either being themselves cultists, or buying in to the strategy as described or, and here the numbers are probably very large, thinking that it is all a lot of noise and that in the end ‘they’ (whoever that might be) will ‘sort things out’. There is much danger in that. It rests upon the complacent assumption that ‘things are bound to go on much as always’. Yet few realise the complex web of systems and regulations that create what they take for granted, and they may very well not forgive the ‘disruptors’ for ripping those systems up.
The idea floating around that any damage from there being no trade deal will be ascribed to the wider coronavirus crisis is unlikely to be correct when specific consequences – food shortages being the most obvious, but Bloomberg have compiled an extensive and alarming list – kick in overnight, making causation very obvious. If anything, coming on top of all the pain of coronavirus, public tolerance is likely to be less forthcoming, and much of the disruption will occur even with a trade deal.
So far, with the exception of the immediate sharp fall in sterling after the Referendum, Brexiters have been able to provide alibis for the damaging effects of Brexit (what one might call the ‘diesel decoy’). I’m not sure that will be so as people begin to experience what Tom Hayes calls ‘the Brexit of small things’, the things that affect their daily lives. On the other hand, that currency collapse of 2016, which would in any other context have led to a political crisis, was almost shrugged off - so who knows?
The road to pariahdom
But even if the government ride out the domestic economic and political consequences of no deal, the damage to Britain’s international reputation will be substantial. That will matter in relation to the EU and also in relation to other countries, who will see Britain as untrustworthy and irrational but also as desperate to do trade deals on any terms it is given.
For example, it’s already the case that Japan regards Brexit as a betrayal of the trust upon which basis its companies invested so heavily in the UK, and already the case that it is set to make tough demands in trade talks, which have just begun. Their outcome, says Michito Tsuruoka of Keio University writing in the Japan Times, is crucially bound up with the progress and outcome of the UK-EU talks. Indeed, he says, “no country wants to conclude a definitive trade deal with the UK without knowing the final shape of the EU-UK partnership”.
More generally, writing about the ‘original’ no deal scenario, Dr Nicholas Westcott of SOAS argued starkly that it would be “a heavy international defeat for Britain … we would have proven unable to negotiate – with our nearest friends – a deal that protected our economic interests. And the world will see this. They – the US, China, India, Russia, the Gulf States, African and Latin American countries, Spain, Mauritius, Argentina - all will say to themselves that Britain is now weak, it needs our support, and we can ask for whatever we want”. In short, no deal with the EU has a much wider import: it, or any other outcome of the negotiations, will directly impact upon the UK’s global standing and upon global relationships as well as those with our nearest neighbours.
And the thing about no deal is that that won’t be an end to the matter. That’s not simply because – as Tom Hayes, again, points out and as I did , in a different way, last week – all the unresolved issues will still be in need of resolution. It’s also because of the implications of the analysis of the ERG, above. For if it is correct that whatever they get they always want more, then what ‘more’ would they ask for having achieved the no trade deal scenario that many of them advocate?
The answer to that is already clear, even before it has happened, in what is already being said about the defects in the WA. That claim will intensify, because the Ultras have never accepted the idea of a financial settlement being made in the absence of a trade deal, and have always argued that any such settlement should be contingent upon a trade deal. Indeed Johnson, during his leadership campaign, threatened just that, whether in order to pander them or from conviction hardly matters.
So if there is no trade deal come next January they will unquestionably try to force the government to break the WA by reneging on the financial settlement and, very likely, as the signs are already there, the Northern Ireland Protocol, with all that will mean for relations with both Ireland and the US, though probably not, I think and hope, the Citizens’ Rights agreement. We will then be well beyond the current damage to trust and reputation, and headed down the road to pariahdom. We’re not quite on that road yet, but we’ve had glimpses recently of the signposts to it and if, as seems increasingly likely, there is no deal it’s the one the Ultras will be urging us down.
If so, it’s worth recalling that they haven’t, so far, failed to get their own way.
*Actually, on social media at least, it is more common to see Brexiters claim that the EU has reneged not so much on the PD but on the Barnier staircase. On this account, that staircase promised a Canada deal, denoted by the Canadian flag. However, apart from the ludicrousness of regarding a signed agreement as non-binding but a PowerPoint slide as a promise, and as a promise of a deal on the same terms as Canada (when more stringent LPF conditions had been set in more formal documents), it is a misreading of that slide. What actually appears are the Canadian and South Korean flags – an indication of the general category of such a deal (FTA) and also of the fact that within that category there are different variants: not all FTAs are the same.
If not earlier, it perhaps began when the Brexiters, including Boris Johnson, denied the legitimacy of any financial settlement – something I will come back to. It became entrenched when David Davis and Theresa May immediately disowned the backstop they had agreed to end of the phase 1 of the Article 50 negotiations in December 2017. Many other examples could be given.
Distrust is now endemic
Under Johnson’s premiership that lack of trust has become endemic. That’s partly because EU leaders recall the long years of lies he told whilst a Telegraph columnist, and have disdain for his role in the Referendum. It’s not difficult to imagine that he is one of those whom Donald Tusk was referring to as warranting a “special place in hell” for having advocated Brexit with no plan. But it is more because of the way in which, since coming to power, Johnson has seemed to resile from what he agreed, especially as regards Northern Ireland.
In a post last month, following the Frost letter, I lamented that the bitter truth is that the UK can no longer be trusted. Yet the Brexit ‘patriots’ feel no shame and, worse, no realism. Their response to Barnier’s press statement was to crow that he was ‘rattled’ by Britain’s ‘tough stance’ – yet apparently not so cowed as to stop him being ‘rude’ and ‘insulting’! The more ‘cerebral’ and, indeed, the official response was to point out, echoing Davis’ comments about the phase 1 agreement, that the Political Declaration (PD) is not legally binding.
The Political Declaration isn’t irrelevant
That is perfectly true, but it is a very long and dangerous jump from that to treating it as totally irrelevant. It was signed by Boris Johnson as a commitment of ‘good faith’ to the agreed framework for the future. As Simon Usherwood, Professor of Politics at Surrey University, points out reneging on it has damaging reputational consequences. It’s not just dishonest but, perhaps worse, naïve, for Johnson to treat as if it were one of his throwaway newspaper columns. You simply can’t conduct international relations that way and expect it just to be laughed off, or forgiven and forgotten, by other countries.
It’s clearly the case that, as a framework, it does not address the detailed provisions of the future agreement. Equally clearly, within negotiation there will legitimately be ‘maximalist’ and ‘minimalist’ interpretations of how to operationalize the framework. But that is not at all the same as simply treating it as totally irrelevant (as, indeed, Brexiters used to realise).
For example, on one of the key areas of contention referred to by Barnier, Level Playing Field (LPF) provisions, paragraph 77 of the PD is very explicit about how economic interdependence and geographical proximity mean there must be robust commitments on state aid, competition law and so on. So, yes, there is legitimate negotiation space around what ‘robust’ means in practical terms, but it is simply dishonest for Brexiters, including Johnson, to pretend that these issues have been newly introduced by the EU (£)*. If Johnson objected, the time to do so was before signing the document off.
Ominous signs
But more ominous than the ongoing disavowal of the PD was a report in the Brexiters’ house journal, The Express, that the government regards the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) as having “unfair defects” that must be remedied. That marks a significant escalation because it is not based on any claim that it is legally non-binding: there is no dispute that the WA was signed as a legally binding international treaty. Reneging on it would go beyond reputational damage.
The justification for this stance is telling. On the one hand, the report refers to an unnamed ‘government source’ (does that mean Dominic Cummings?) as linking the ‘defects’ to what was agreed by Theresa May and Olly Robbins, and the constraints of the May parliament. This reflects something which has been swirling around Brexiter circles for months now – a sense that, despite Johnson signing it, it was in some way not legitimate because of those antecedents including what they regard as a ‘remainer’ parliament. It is dangerous nonsense for whilst, as they are wont to say, no parliament can bind its successor, that does not mean that international treaties negotiated during one parliament become irrelevant afterwards. International relations would scarcely be possible if that were so. And, in any case, it’s an absurdity as Johnson didn’t sign the WA and PD until January 2020 - after the election. He owns them.
This relates to the other aspect of the supposed justification for re-opening the WA, namely that the government did not have time to deal with all the “defects” of May’s deal, just to replace the Northern Ireland backstop. But not only is the government now resiling from the frontstop that replaced it, it was the government that insisted – against much warning – that the whole thing had to be rushed through with scarcely any scrutiny to meet the deadline of 31 January. Moreover, we now know – courtesy of Steve Baker – that the ERG hardliners were persuaded by Dominic Cummings to support the WA, without needing to read it, on the basis that Michael Gove said it could be changed later.
As with Brexit in general, the easiest way to understand the outrageousness of this is to think about it the other way round, and imagine how the UK, and Brexiters especially, would react if the EU said that with Juncker, Tusk et al now gone, the EU no longer felt bound by the WA and PD. Or if the states and MEPs who had voted to ratify the WA now said that they had done so without bothering to read it as they had been told it could all be re-written afterwards. The shrieks of anger would be deafening, and the opprobrium heaped on the EU vitriolic.
The deal formerly known as ‘oven-ready’
Of course it’s not just the trust of the EU which is being betrayed by this deepening farrago of lies. It’s also the British electorate. For don’t forget that this near-discarded PD and this ‘defective’ WA used to go under a very different name: together, they were the “oven-ready deal” that Johnson promised would “get Brexit done” during the 2019 General Election campaign. This was “the great new deal”, not in any way to be confused with May’s despised efforts. In vain did I and countless others warn that it would just be the beginning of a new process of negotiation. Still, at least it might have been assumed that those negotiations would go forward on the basis of the WA and PD, not backwards to try to re-write them.
Such an assumption was always going to be naïve, though. And this goes to the heart of why the EU is right to distrust Johnson. Again and again as Prime Minister (never mind about beforehand) he has shown not just dishonesty but a palpable scorn for law and the normal political process. The doyen of law and policy commentators, David Allen Green, who invariably uses words with great precision, last year wrote of Johnson “going rogue” (£) over the question of whether he would obey the law requiring him to seek an extension to the Article 50 period. It was, Green said, “unprecedented” for a Prime Minister even to be contemplating not doing so. This was also in the context of the illegal prorogation of parliament and these and other examples provide ample evidence of the subfusc authoritarianism that Johnson’s jokey persona increasingly fails to cloak. No doubt it is echoed, amplified, and incited by Cummings’ infamous contempt for ‘playing by the rules’.
This makes Johnson a difficult character for the EU to deal with, but that character is only one manifestation of the problem. As noted above, the UK government’s behaviour since Brexit has been repeatedly untrustworthy, even under the leadership of May, whose character was very different. The underlying issue is neither of them, but the now near comprehensive ‘ERG-ification’ of the Tory Party and, hence, government. Perhaps because the old familiar trappings of the political spectacle persist, it’s easy to miss how hollowed-out Britain’s political institutions have become during these Brexit years.
Government by cult
Indeed, the EU’s bewilderment – like that of many commentators including, at times, myself – stems from a failure to appreciate quite how far and deep that process has gone. The ERG is rather like the Terminator which “can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop ever …”. So the hope that, at some point, rationality will assert itself – for example over the damage of no deal or extending the transition period – keeps being dashed. Similarly, the idea that some ‘compromise’ from the EU would unlock things, even if such compromise was possible, is flawed. Really, one could imagine that if the EU conceded on every single UK demand the Brexit Ultras would still denounce it as insultingly inadequate.
We’ve arrived here step by step because every demand made by the Ultras has been conceded – the Referendum, then the row about the question to be asked, then the franchise. And each demand met has led to a still harder one, from ‘we just want to be like Norway’ right up to the point that we are just about at which is that any deal and any form of relationship with the EU is intolerable. That’s totally unrealistic, of course, since the EU will still be there (although the hardcore of the Ultras always believes it will collapse) but realism isn’t part of the story here. Indeed, realistically, it’s far more likely that Brexit will lead to the break up of the United Kingdom.
That an entire government should be in hock to an effectively nihilistic cult is partly to do with the internal history of the modern Conservative Party, the ruthlessness of the ERG, and their parliamentary numbers which are enough to pose a threat even when the government has a large majority. But it requires that those who are far from membership of the cult – and, still, there are plenty of Tory MPs in that category – for one reason or another go along with it. At the present moment, that means buying into the narrative that all that is happening is a tough negotiating stance which will yield an eleventh hour ‘blink’ from the EU and, for this reason, no transition extension should be sought.
Beyond that, it requires a much larger number of people within the electorate to accept the situation – either being themselves cultists, or buying in to the strategy as described or, and here the numbers are probably very large, thinking that it is all a lot of noise and that in the end ‘they’ (whoever that might be) will ‘sort things out’. There is much danger in that. It rests upon the complacent assumption that ‘things are bound to go on much as always’. Yet few realise the complex web of systems and regulations that create what they take for granted, and they may very well not forgive the ‘disruptors’ for ripping those systems up.
The idea floating around that any damage from there being no trade deal will be ascribed to the wider coronavirus crisis is unlikely to be correct when specific consequences – food shortages being the most obvious, but Bloomberg have compiled an extensive and alarming list – kick in overnight, making causation very obvious. If anything, coming on top of all the pain of coronavirus, public tolerance is likely to be less forthcoming, and much of the disruption will occur even with a trade deal.
So far, with the exception of the immediate sharp fall in sterling after the Referendum, Brexiters have been able to provide alibis for the damaging effects of Brexit (what one might call the ‘diesel decoy’). I’m not sure that will be so as people begin to experience what Tom Hayes calls ‘the Brexit of small things’, the things that affect their daily lives. On the other hand, that currency collapse of 2016, which would in any other context have led to a political crisis, was almost shrugged off - so who knows?
The road to pariahdom
But even if the government ride out the domestic economic and political consequences of no deal, the damage to Britain’s international reputation will be substantial. That will matter in relation to the EU and also in relation to other countries, who will see Britain as untrustworthy and irrational but also as desperate to do trade deals on any terms it is given.
For example, it’s already the case that Japan regards Brexit as a betrayal of the trust upon which basis its companies invested so heavily in the UK, and already the case that it is set to make tough demands in trade talks, which have just begun. Their outcome, says Michito Tsuruoka of Keio University writing in the Japan Times, is crucially bound up with the progress and outcome of the UK-EU talks. Indeed, he says, “no country wants to conclude a definitive trade deal with the UK without knowing the final shape of the EU-UK partnership”.
More generally, writing about the ‘original’ no deal scenario, Dr Nicholas Westcott of SOAS argued starkly that it would be “a heavy international defeat for Britain … we would have proven unable to negotiate – with our nearest friends – a deal that protected our economic interests. And the world will see this. They – the US, China, India, Russia, the Gulf States, African and Latin American countries, Spain, Mauritius, Argentina - all will say to themselves that Britain is now weak, it needs our support, and we can ask for whatever we want”. In short, no deal with the EU has a much wider import: it, or any other outcome of the negotiations, will directly impact upon the UK’s global standing and upon global relationships as well as those with our nearest neighbours.
And the thing about no deal is that that won’t be an end to the matter. That’s not simply because – as Tom Hayes, again, points out and as I did , in a different way, last week – all the unresolved issues will still be in need of resolution. It’s also because of the implications of the analysis of the ERG, above. For if it is correct that whatever they get they always want more, then what ‘more’ would they ask for having achieved the no trade deal scenario that many of them advocate?
The answer to that is already clear, even before it has happened, in what is already being said about the defects in the WA. That claim will intensify, because the Ultras have never accepted the idea of a financial settlement being made in the absence of a trade deal, and have always argued that any such settlement should be contingent upon a trade deal. Indeed Johnson, during his leadership campaign, threatened just that, whether in order to pander them or from conviction hardly matters.
So if there is no trade deal come next January they will unquestionably try to force the government to break the WA by reneging on the financial settlement and, very likely, as the signs are already there, the Northern Ireland Protocol, with all that will mean for relations with both Ireland and the US, though probably not, I think and hope, the Citizens’ Rights agreement. We will then be well beyond the current damage to trust and reputation, and headed down the road to pariahdom. We’re not quite on that road yet, but we’ve had glimpses recently of the signposts to it and if, as seems increasingly likely, there is no deal it’s the one the Ultras will be urging us down.
If so, it’s worth recalling that they haven’t, so far, failed to get their own way.
*Actually, on social media at least, it is more common to see Brexiters claim that the EU has reneged not so much on the PD but on the Barnier staircase. On this account, that staircase promised a Canada deal, denoted by the Canadian flag. However, apart from the ludicrousness of regarding a signed agreement as non-binding but a PowerPoint slide as a promise, and as a promise of a deal on the same terms as Canada (when more stringent LPF conditions had been set in more formal documents), it is a misreading of that slide. What actually appears are the Canadian and South Korean flags – an indication of the general category of such a deal (FTA) and also of the fact that within that category there are different variants: not all FTAs are the same.
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.
Friday, 18 January 2019
A dangerous political void
There is now
a dangerous void of leadership and policy at the heart of British politics.
Indeed it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, as regards Brexit, the
UK no longer has a functioning government. There are no obvious solutions in
sight, and the outcome is completely unpredictable.
The House of Commons has decided that it has confidence in Theresa May’s government, but at the same time that it is opposed, on a massive scale, to the central and defining policy of that government: a truly bizarre situation. In rejecting May’s Brexit deal, the core underlying problem with Brexit itself was revealed: there is no consensus about what it means, even amongst those who support it.
Thus some voted for the deal because it ‘delivers Brexit’, whilst others opposed it because it ‘betrays Brexit’ whilst still others opposed it because it is ‘the wrong sort of Brexit’. The consequences of the failure of the Leave campaign to specify its meaning, and of May to build a durable consensus as to what it could mean, have now been brutally revealed, as has the vacuity of every proponent of Brexit claiming that their particular version is sanctified by 17.4 million votes.
Pointless politics and junk ideas
So May is now, far too late, in the process of ‘reaching out’ across parties to modify her deal. But, so far, it seems that the only aspect she is willing to modify relates to the Irish backstop provisions. Since there is no prospect of the EU re-negotiating the substantive parts of this, since changes which aren’t substantive will not placate those who oppose the deal on those grounds, and since much of the opposition isn’t simply or even at all to do with the backstop, this seems to be an utterly pointless exercise.
By, apparently, insisting that her main ‘red lines’ still define the true meaning of Brexit, May therefore begins this exercise by rejecting the main Labour demand, to remain in a customs union. But that demand is, in and of itself, also pointless. Being in a customs union (not, note, ‘the customs union’, which is only for EU members) in itself has little value. It certainly doesn’t solve the Irish border issue, nor does it deliver frictionless trade. Equally pointless is the reason given for not being in a customs union, an independent trade policy, since the economic benefits of this are, at best, nugatory and swamped by the wider costs of Brexit.
May also rejects the demand to ‘take no deal off the table’, made from any number of quarters, including Labour. But this demand is also pointless. No deal can only be avoided by agreeing to do something else. If nothing else is agreed, no deal happens by default. Equally pointless is the commonly given reason for not taking it off the table, that it gives the UK leverage in negotiating the Withdrawal Agreement, since those negotiations are closed. There is no reason at all to think that the EU-27 would extend the Article 50 period to re-open those talks, or that a substantively different outcome would result.
This makes Labour’s idea that, if in power, it could negotiate a better deal as ludicrous as the ERG idea that May’s Withdrawal Agreement can be rewritten - or, even more ludicrous, dropped altogether as a prelude to miraculously negotiating a future trade deal having refused the preconditions for such a negotiation. These are junk ideas, with no foundation in political reality and at this very late stage in the day we shouldn’t have to suffer politicians and others propounding them.
Remote prospects for a solution
Where there is scope for renegotiation is in the Political Declaration on future terms. It is here that May’s red lines are plain and where they could, if she would agree, be dropped. The particular issue, of course, is the single market (and, hence, the freedom of movement and ECJ red lines). Yet not only is she adamant about these red lines, but Labour’s policy of seeking a “strong single market relationship” is so vapid as to be entirely meaningless. For that matter, it is not notably at odds with what May would claim she seeks.
The real issue is single market membership: what used to be described as soft Brexit until the goalposts changed so that it meant anything other than the kamikaze Brexit of no deal. If Labour were to pivot to supporting single market membership (as well as a form of customs union), and amending the Political Declaration accordingly, it seems highly likely that, with Tory rebels, that would command a majority in the Commons. It’s not even entirely inconceivable that the DUP would support it, in that it upholds their deepest red line of Northern Ireland and Great Britain leaving on the same terms. Alternatively, a cross-party coalition of backbenchers might conceivably be able to create a majority for amending the Political Declaration in defiance of both front benches.
This would only take things so far, though. For the point about the Political Declaration, of course, is that it is non-binding. So even if a cobbled together cross-parliamentary alliance were to get such an adjustment it would be immediately prone to unpicking, post-Brexit – for example by a Brexiter successor to Theresa May.
Alternatively, if Labour were to spearhead and succeed in this initiative, the likely fallout in terms of Tory splits could well be a successful no confidence vote, an election and, potentially, a Labour government to implement soft Brexit. If Labour hadn’t led the way then much more difficult, but not entirely impossible given these crisis times, would be some form of semi-permanent coalition based upon that which had forced the amendment of the Political Declaration. In effect, this would be a form of national government.
If a parliamentary majority for another referendum could be found, however, that would only need to endure long enough to frame the legislation and hold the vote (and, of course, seek the Article 50 extension that would be needed and, most think, would be granted). But May is resolutely opposed (even though it is actually the only route by which her deal might have a chance, possibly a good chance, of succeeding), as is Corbyn. Again, were Labour to change position then that would make it far easier both to create a parliamentary majority for a referendum and to sustain it to agree the vexed issues of the question and the franchise. What the outcome of a referendum would be is, of course, another matter.
All pathways are blocked
So every pathway is convoluted and currently blocked by one or more apparently immovable obstacle. The incoherent nature of the Brexit project was always likely to have brought us here, but it has been compounded by lamentable leadership. May seems to care about nothing but her monocular version of Brexit whilst Corbyn seems to care nothing about Brexit at all, to the extent that he apparently doesn’t understand even the most basic facts about it.
Despite their political differences, May and Corbyn are remarkably similar in their grotesque rigidity, and their slightly tetchy muleishness born of a mediocrity of character, intellect and judgment. Indeed the most notable thing about the closing speeches in the ‘no confidence’ debate was that they provided devastating critiques of both party leaders. Certainly neither seems remotely prepared or competent to create and lead the kind of temporary or semi-permanent cross-party parliamentary alliance that looks like the only route out of this mess.
A theme of many posts on this blog has been that various actors within the Brexit process need to face up to realities. Indeed, the central reason for the current fiasco is that so many have failed to do so. From that perspective, we all now need to face up to the reality of what is happening. The leaders of the two main parties are woefully inadequate and neither has a deliverable policy on Brexit (May’s is in tatters and Corbyn barely has a policy at all), the party system is completely inadequate to the situation, and parliament is spavined.
Unless something radical changes – and it may, precisely because of the desperate plight we are now in - then it seems highly likely that Britain will leave the EU with no deal. That will mean that in ten weeks’ time we will face severe economic and social dislocation, with the probability of food and medicine shortages, troops on the street, disruptions to travel and much else.
It would be an outcome desired by only a tiny minority of grossly irresponsible ideologues in parliament and amongst the public. The division, crisis and extremism it would unleash make that feared were there to be another referendum, or even a revocation of Article 50 without a vote, seem like a walk in the park.
The House of Commons has decided that it has confidence in Theresa May’s government, but at the same time that it is opposed, on a massive scale, to the central and defining policy of that government: a truly bizarre situation. In rejecting May’s Brexit deal, the core underlying problem with Brexit itself was revealed: there is no consensus about what it means, even amongst those who support it.
Thus some voted for the deal because it ‘delivers Brexit’, whilst others opposed it because it ‘betrays Brexit’ whilst still others opposed it because it is ‘the wrong sort of Brexit’. The consequences of the failure of the Leave campaign to specify its meaning, and of May to build a durable consensus as to what it could mean, have now been brutally revealed, as has the vacuity of every proponent of Brexit claiming that their particular version is sanctified by 17.4 million votes.
Pointless politics and junk ideas
So May is now, far too late, in the process of ‘reaching out’ across parties to modify her deal. But, so far, it seems that the only aspect she is willing to modify relates to the Irish backstop provisions. Since there is no prospect of the EU re-negotiating the substantive parts of this, since changes which aren’t substantive will not placate those who oppose the deal on those grounds, and since much of the opposition isn’t simply or even at all to do with the backstop, this seems to be an utterly pointless exercise.
By, apparently, insisting that her main ‘red lines’ still define the true meaning of Brexit, May therefore begins this exercise by rejecting the main Labour demand, to remain in a customs union. But that demand is, in and of itself, also pointless. Being in a customs union (not, note, ‘the customs union’, which is only for EU members) in itself has little value. It certainly doesn’t solve the Irish border issue, nor does it deliver frictionless trade. Equally pointless is the reason given for not being in a customs union, an independent trade policy, since the economic benefits of this are, at best, nugatory and swamped by the wider costs of Brexit.
May also rejects the demand to ‘take no deal off the table’, made from any number of quarters, including Labour. But this demand is also pointless. No deal can only be avoided by agreeing to do something else. If nothing else is agreed, no deal happens by default. Equally pointless is the commonly given reason for not taking it off the table, that it gives the UK leverage in negotiating the Withdrawal Agreement, since those negotiations are closed. There is no reason at all to think that the EU-27 would extend the Article 50 period to re-open those talks, or that a substantively different outcome would result.
This makes Labour’s idea that, if in power, it could negotiate a better deal as ludicrous as the ERG idea that May’s Withdrawal Agreement can be rewritten - or, even more ludicrous, dropped altogether as a prelude to miraculously negotiating a future trade deal having refused the preconditions for such a negotiation. These are junk ideas, with no foundation in political reality and at this very late stage in the day we shouldn’t have to suffer politicians and others propounding them.
Remote prospects for a solution
Where there is scope for renegotiation is in the Political Declaration on future terms. It is here that May’s red lines are plain and where they could, if she would agree, be dropped. The particular issue, of course, is the single market (and, hence, the freedom of movement and ECJ red lines). Yet not only is she adamant about these red lines, but Labour’s policy of seeking a “strong single market relationship” is so vapid as to be entirely meaningless. For that matter, it is not notably at odds with what May would claim she seeks.
The real issue is single market membership: what used to be described as soft Brexit until the goalposts changed so that it meant anything other than the kamikaze Brexit of no deal. If Labour were to pivot to supporting single market membership (as well as a form of customs union), and amending the Political Declaration accordingly, it seems highly likely that, with Tory rebels, that would command a majority in the Commons. It’s not even entirely inconceivable that the DUP would support it, in that it upholds their deepest red line of Northern Ireland and Great Britain leaving on the same terms. Alternatively, a cross-party coalition of backbenchers might conceivably be able to create a majority for amending the Political Declaration in defiance of both front benches.
This would only take things so far, though. For the point about the Political Declaration, of course, is that it is non-binding. So even if a cobbled together cross-parliamentary alliance were to get such an adjustment it would be immediately prone to unpicking, post-Brexit – for example by a Brexiter successor to Theresa May.
Alternatively, if Labour were to spearhead and succeed in this initiative, the likely fallout in terms of Tory splits could well be a successful no confidence vote, an election and, potentially, a Labour government to implement soft Brexit. If Labour hadn’t led the way then much more difficult, but not entirely impossible given these crisis times, would be some form of semi-permanent coalition based upon that which had forced the amendment of the Political Declaration. In effect, this would be a form of national government.
If a parliamentary majority for another referendum could be found, however, that would only need to endure long enough to frame the legislation and hold the vote (and, of course, seek the Article 50 extension that would be needed and, most think, would be granted). But May is resolutely opposed (even though it is actually the only route by which her deal might have a chance, possibly a good chance, of succeeding), as is Corbyn. Again, were Labour to change position then that would make it far easier both to create a parliamentary majority for a referendum and to sustain it to agree the vexed issues of the question and the franchise. What the outcome of a referendum would be is, of course, another matter.
All pathways are blocked
So every pathway is convoluted and currently blocked by one or more apparently immovable obstacle. The incoherent nature of the Brexit project was always likely to have brought us here, but it has been compounded by lamentable leadership. May seems to care about nothing but her monocular version of Brexit whilst Corbyn seems to care nothing about Brexit at all, to the extent that he apparently doesn’t understand even the most basic facts about it.
Despite their political differences, May and Corbyn are remarkably similar in their grotesque rigidity, and their slightly tetchy muleishness born of a mediocrity of character, intellect and judgment. Indeed the most notable thing about the closing speeches in the ‘no confidence’ debate was that they provided devastating critiques of both party leaders. Certainly neither seems remotely prepared or competent to create and lead the kind of temporary or semi-permanent cross-party parliamentary alliance that looks like the only route out of this mess.
A theme of many posts on this blog has been that various actors within the Brexit process need to face up to realities. Indeed, the central reason for the current fiasco is that so many have failed to do so. From that perspective, we all now need to face up to the reality of what is happening. The leaders of the two main parties are woefully inadequate and neither has a deliverable policy on Brexit (May’s is in tatters and Corbyn barely has a policy at all), the party system is completely inadequate to the situation, and parliament is spavined.
Unless something radical changes – and it may, precisely because of the desperate plight we are now in - then it seems highly likely that Britain will leave the EU with no deal. That will mean that in ten weeks’ time we will face severe economic and social dislocation, with the probability of food and medicine shortages, troops on the street, disruptions to travel and much else.
It would be an outcome desired by only a tiny minority of grossly irresponsible ideologues in parliament and amongst the public. The division, crisis and extremism it would unleash make that feared were there to be another referendum, or even a revocation of Article 50 without a vote, seem like a walk in the park.
Friday, 11 January 2019
The backstop is a symptom, not a cause, of the Brexit crisis
It is
apposite that Sky News are now badging all of their Brexit coverage with the
label ‘Brexit Crisis’. For the political crisis which has been incipient since,
at least, the 2017 General Election is now well underway, and will almost
certainly intensify.
At the moment, almost all attention is on the Parliamentary debate and delayed vote on May’s Brexit deal and, within it, much of the focus of complaint is on the Northern Ireland backstop in the Withdrawal Agreement. But this fails to recognize that the backstop is an aspect of, and grows out of, a much deeper set of problems. It also fails to recognize the full significance of the relationship between the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and the Political Declaration on future terms (PD).
A two-stage process
Brexit was always going to be a two-stage process, because of the nature of Article 50. Thus criticising May’s deal for not including a binding future terms, and especially future trade terms, deal is misguided and, sometimes, opportunistic – although it is legitimate to point out that many Brexiters, and for a time May, said or implied that this would be possible. What can also fairly be said (and, notably, it was the main line of Sir Keir Starmer’s critique in this week’s resumed debate) is that the level of detail and precision of the PD is much lower than it might have been had any substantive phase 2 discussions taken place. And the reason they did not is, entirely, because until the Chequers’ Proposal in July 2018 the UK government advanced no plan for what should be discussed and, when it did, it promptly fell into massive, and still ongoing, infighting.
That reflects what remains the unavoidable, central fact about Brexit. The UK voted for it, and then embarked on enacting it, without having agreed what it meant in terms of a final destination. Even so, it is not the case, as is sometimes suggested (e.g. Starmer, again), that the PD leaves all destination options open. Of course, it is not legally binding. But it should not be dismissed or ignored to the extent that it is being, as if only the WA mattered.
For the PD does set a direction of travel, most significantly in terms of the reference – reportedly at May’s personal insistence – to ‘respecting the result of the 2016 Referendum’ by ending freedom of movement of people and allowing the UK to have an independent trade policy. In other words, it embodies the red lines of no single market membership and no form of customs union.
That this is in the PD is the core reason for the backstop being in the WA. As soon as those red lines were set, the necessary implication was a border around the UK. This is not for some arcane technical reason and still less due to EU or Irish chicanery. It flows from the basic fact that if the UK wishes to set its own tariffs and regulations there has to be a territory within which they apply and so there has to be a border. Indeed, who would want to do a trade deal with the UK if this were not so? This automatically means trade cannot be completely frictionless, and, since no technology exists (yet, and may never do so) to completely remove the need for any new physical infrastructure at the Irish border specifically, the backstop was devised.
However, even if – as the Norway+ advocates* are seeking – the PD were to be written without these red lines being incorporated, that would not make the backstop go away (and they do not claim otherwise). The non-binding nature of the PD is normally talked about as if the issue were simply that it is not a binding agreement between the UK and the EU, and as if the main danger were of the EU refusing to do a deal. More important is the corollary of that, which is that the UK might at any point re-adopt May’s red lines, or new ones; or the UK might continue to fail to agree what it wanted, making the danger that it could not agree to any deal.
Since there is clearly still no stable consensus in the UK about what Brexit should mean, then there is nothing to say that a new government, or a new Prime Minister, or both, would not overturn anything the Norway+ MPs might manage to insert in the PD before the end of March by dint of the crisis. This might have been different had, post-Referendum, a durable consensus around a Norway+ outcome been built, but it wasn’t and there isn’t time to do so before March.
An FTA +++ is an FTA
At all events, as things stand, the PD is as it is, and it reflects the UK red lines for future terms. Yet a bizarre feature of the present debate is that the Ultra Brexiters are in complete agreement these red lines, but they will not accept the consequence of them for the WA, and hence oppose it. It is this which has led to latest iteration of the ‘no deal’ deal fantasy, in a document produced this week by Global Britain and Labour Leave.
Aside from repeating many long-discredited claims or half-truths about trade on WTO terms, its core proposition is that the UK can leave with no WA (going straight to WTO or, as the report meaninglessly puts it, WTO +++ terms) but then seek to negotiate a future terms agreement which they designate as a Canada +++ Free Trade Agreement (FTA).
To call this naïve is to flatter it absurdly, and not just because of the backstop issue; it also embodies the persistent Brexiter misunderstanding that the financial settlement is a down payment for the future, rather than a settling of past accounts. The idea that a viable first step for a new relationship is to renege on what you agreed during the previous relationship doesn’t deserve serious scrutiny, and to present it as if it did is grossly irresponsible. May is right to argue that the WA, in something like the present form, is the necessary gateway to an FTA.
So whereas the Norway+ group try to downplay the two stages of WA and PD by over-claiming what the future terms statement can do, the Brexit Ultras try to circumvent the two stages altogether by imagining there can be future terms with no WA at all.
But, in any case, no amount of ‘+’ signs or ‘super-‘ prefixes can avoid the fact that, even if agreed, this would be a FTA which means a border. If it didn’t, the Brexiters would have nothing to fear from agreeing the backstop and the WA. It is presumably because they know it does mean a border that they object to the backstop as being something that would end up being permanent. But for the same reason, the EU could never agree an FTA without first agreeing the backstop and the WA. In short, the whole idea is ludicrous in every conceivable respect, but that is, or ought to be, well-known and is not really the key point.
The backstop is not the real problem with May’s deal
Rather, the key point is that it’s not the backstop in the WA that is the terrible problem with May’s deal, it is that the backstop is a consequence of the terrible problem of making an FTA the best available form of the future terms. And the main reason why that is a terrible problem is, in one word: services. The clear implication of the PD is that it will prioritise “comprehensive arrangements” for goods trade (although, even there, trade is not the only issue – the internal supply chains of goods manufacturers will still suffer) over services trade, where all that seems to be envisaged are more or less standard third country market access terms.
Indeed, this is an inevitable feature of any FTA end state. The latest Global Britain/ Labour Leave document again naively latches on to a sentence spoken by Donald Tusk – taking it out of context and without understanding its meaning - to the effect that an FTA would, like other FTAs, “address services”. But, of course, the reality is that “other FTAs” barely “address services” beyond the limited liberalisation of WTO terms, and certainly far less than occurs within the single market.
Of course, there are good reasons to argue that the UK economy is over-reliant on services, although that is the consequence of 30 or more years of UK policy, rather than of EU membership. But correcting that by yanking the country out of the most comprehensive services trade bloc in the world, and moreover the one closest to us, is not the way to do it. There are good reasons to argue that I should reduce my waistline, but self-surgery with a hacksaw is not a sensible method of going about it.
What is especially bizarre about the FTA model of Brexit is that pre-referendum all the talk was of the negotiating advantage of a trade deficit. But (even if that is an advantage) that deficit is in goods trade, not services trade where the UK has a surplus with the EU-27, so setting up a situation where the EU has much better access to the UK goods market than the UK has to the EU’s services market is, to say the least, perverse. But that is what the PD suggests.
These and other issues are discussed with great acuity in a recent article by Matt Ross – based in part on an interview with former Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell – on the Global Government Forum website. The key point made in that discussion is that almost none of the current UK political debate is really focussing on what would happen next if May’s deal were to be passed. There is an over-attention to the WA and an under-attention to the PD (or, as I have tried to suggest here, insufficient attention to how these are inextricably linked).
What will follow, the article suggests, are years of one-sided negotiation, with UK politics still in turmoil and – at best – a highly disadvantageous final deal, or even, after all that, no deal at all. In the meantime, inevitably, the existing process of business disinvestment and relocation – which is already dramatic and alarming – will continue.
What is Brexit? The still unanswered question
Of course it seems more likely than not that May’s deal will not pass next week. In that case, the Brexit crisis is going to become full-blown and the increasingly ugly public mood will turn uglier yet. The pro-Brexit demonstrators outside Parliament know what they want to happen. It is encapsulated in their monotonous, aggressive chant of “Out means Out”.
But that tells us nothing and simply begs the question that Brexiters, and the government that tried to implement their referendum victory, have never been able agree an answer to: what does ‘out’ mean? From which failure all that has happened since, and is happening now, has flowed.
So if May’s version of what Brexit means does fail, then, possibly after May has wasted even more time, MPs (and it will likely fall to MPs collectively, since there is scarcely a functioning government any more) are going to have to agree what ‘out’ does mean. That seems unlikely given the failure so far to do so. Or they must find a way of abandoning Brexit altogether. And they’ll have to do it quickly, because in less than 80 days these decisions will be made for them and, of course, for the rest of us.
At the moment, almost all attention is on the Parliamentary debate and delayed vote on May’s Brexit deal and, within it, much of the focus of complaint is on the Northern Ireland backstop in the Withdrawal Agreement. But this fails to recognize that the backstop is an aspect of, and grows out of, a much deeper set of problems. It also fails to recognize the full significance of the relationship between the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and the Political Declaration on future terms (PD).
A two-stage process
Brexit was always going to be a two-stage process, because of the nature of Article 50. Thus criticising May’s deal for not including a binding future terms, and especially future trade terms, deal is misguided and, sometimes, opportunistic – although it is legitimate to point out that many Brexiters, and for a time May, said or implied that this would be possible. What can also fairly be said (and, notably, it was the main line of Sir Keir Starmer’s critique in this week’s resumed debate) is that the level of detail and precision of the PD is much lower than it might have been had any substantive phase 2 discussions taken place. And the reason they did not is, entirely, because until the Chequers’ Proposal in July 2018 the UK government advanced no plan for what should be discussed and, when it did, it promptly fell into massive, and still ongoing, infighting.
That reflects what remains the unavoidable, central fact about Brexit. The UK voted for it, and then embarked on enacting it, without having agreed what it meant in terms of a final destination. Even so, it is not the case, as is sometimes suggested (e.g. Starmer, again), that the PD leaves all destination options open. Of course, it is not legally binding. But it should not be dismissed or ignored to the extent that it is being, as if only the WA mattered.
For the PD does set a direction of travel, most significantly in terms of the reference – reportedly at May’s personal insistence – to ‘respecting the result of the 2016 Referendum’ by ending freedom of movement of people and allowing the UK to have an independent trade policy. In other words, it embodies the red lines of no single market membership and no form of customs union.
That this is in the PD is the core reason for the backstop being in the WA. As soon as those red lines were set, the necessary implication was a border around the UK. This is not for some arcane technical reason and still less due to EU or Irish chicanery. It flows from the basic fact that if the UK wishes to set its own tariffs and regulations there has to be a territory within which they apply and so there has to be a border. Indeed, who would want to do a trade deal with the UK if this were not so? This automatically means trade cannot be completely frictionless, and, since no technology exists (yet, and may never do so) to completely remove the need for any new physical infrastructure at the Irish border specifically, the backstop was devised.
However, even if – as the Norway+ advocates* are seeking – the PD were to be written without these red lines being incorporated, that would not make the backstop go away (and they do not claim otherwise). The non-binding nature of the PD is normally talked about as if the issue were simply that it is not a binding agreement between the UK and the EU, and as if the main danger were of the EU refusing to do a deal. More important is the corollary of that, which is that the UK might at any point re-adopt May’s red lines, or new ones; or the UK might continue to fail to agree what it wanted, making the danger that it could not agree to any deal.
Since there is clearly still no stable consensus in the UK about what Brexit should mean, then there is nothing to say that a new government, or a new Prime Minister, or both, would not overturn anything the Norway+ MPs might manage to insert in the PD before the end of March by dint of the crisis. This might have been different had, post-Referendum, a durable consensus around a Norway+ outcome been built, but it wasn’t and there isn’t time to do so before March.
An FTA +++ is an FTA
At all events, as things stand, the PD is as it is, and it reflects the UK red lines for future terms. Yet a bizarre feature of the present debate is that the Ultra Brexiters are in complete agreement these red lines, but they will not accept the consequence of them for the WA, and hence oppose it. It is this which has led to latest iteration of the ‘no deal’ deal fantasy, in a document produced this week by Global Britain and Labour Leave.
Aside from repeating many long-discredited claims or half-truths about trade on WTO terms, its core proposition is that the UK can leave with no WA (going straight to WTO or, as the report meaninglessly puts it, WTO +++ terms) but then seek to negotiate a future terms agreement which they designate as a Canada +++ Free Trade Agreement (FTA).
To call this naïve is to flatter it absurdly, and not just because of the backstop issue; it also embodies the persistent Brexiter misunderstanding that the financial settlement is a down payment for the future, rather than a settling of past accounts. The idea that a viable first step for a new relationship is to renege on what you agreed during the previous relationship doesn’t deserve serious scrutiny, and to present it as if it did is grossly irresponsible. May is right to argue that the WA, in something like the present form, is the necessary gateway to an FTA.
So whereas the Norway+ group try to downplay the two stages of WA and PD by over-claiming what the future terms statement can do, the Brexit Ultras try to circumvent the two stages altogether by imagining there can be future terms with no WA at all.
But, in any case, no amount of ‘+’ signs or ‘super-‘ prefixes can avoid the fact that, even if agreed, this would be a FTA which means a border. If it didn’t, the Brexiters would have nothing to fear from agreeing the backstop and the WA. It is presumably because they know it does mean a border that they object to the backstop as being something that would end up being permanent. But for the same reason, the EU could never agree an FTA without first agreeing the backstop and the WA. In short, the whole idea is ludicrous in every conceivable respect, but that is, or ought to be, well-known and is not really the key point.
The backstop is not the real problem with May’s deal
Rather, the key point is that it’s not the backstop in the WA that is the terrible problem with May’s deal, it is that the backstop is a consequence of the terrible problem of making an FTA the best available form of the future terms. And the main reason why that is a terrible problem is, in one word: services. The clear implication of the PD is that it will prioritise “comprehensive arrangements” for goods trade (although, even there, trade is not the only issue – the internal supply chains of goods manufacturers will still suffer) over services trade, where all that seems to be envisaged are more or less standard third country market access terms.
Indeed, this is an inevitable feature of any FTA end state. The latest Global Britain/ Labour Leave document again naively latches on to a sentence spoken by Donald Tusk – taking it out of context and without understanding its meaning - to the effect that an FTA would, like other FTAs, “address services”. But, of course, the reality is that “other FTAs” barely “address services” beyond the limited liberalisation of WTO terms, and certainly far less than occurs within the single market.
Of course, there are good reasons to argue that the UK economy is over-reliant on services, although that is the consequence of 30 or more years of UK policy, rather than of EU membership. But correcting that by yanking the country out of the most comprehensive services trade bloc in the world, and moreover the one closest to us, is not the way to do it. There are good reasons to argue that I should reduce my waistline, but self-surgery with a hacksaw is not a sensible method of going about it.
What is especially bizarre about the FTA model of Brexit is that pre-referendum all the talk was of the negotiating advantage of a trade deficit. But (even if that is an advantage) that deficit is in goods trade, not services trade where the UK has a surplus with the EU-27, so setting up a situation where the EU has much better access to the UK goods market than the UK has to the EU’s services market is, to say the least, perverse. But that is what the PD suggests.
These and other issues are discussed with great acuity in a recent article by Matt Ross – based in part on an interview with former Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell – on the Global Government Forum website. The key point made in that discussion is that almost none of the current UK political debate is really focussing on what would happen next if May’s deal were to be passed. There is an over-attention to the WA and an under-attention to the PD (or, as I have tried to suggest here, insufficient attention to how these are inextricably linked).
What will follow, the article suggests, are years of one-sided negotiation, with UK politics still in turmoil and – at best – a highly disadvantageous final deal, or even, after all that, no deal at all. In the meantime, inevitably, the existing process of business disinvestment and relocation – which is already dramatic and alarming – will continue.
What is Brexit? The still unanswered question
Of course it seems more likely than not that May’s deal will not pass next week. In that case, the Brexit crisis is going to become full-blown and the increasingly ugly public mood will turn uglier yet. The pro-Brexit demonstrators outside Parliament know what they want to happen. It is encapsulated in their monotonous, aggressive chant of “Out means Out”.
But that tells us nothing and simply begs the question that Brexiters, and the government that tried to implement their referendum victory, have never been able agree an answer to: what does ‘out’ mean? From which failure all that has happened since, and is happening now, has flowed.
So if May’s version of what Brexit means does fail, then, possibly after May has wasted even more time, MPs (and it will likely fall to MPs collectively, since there is scarcely a functioning government any more) are going to have to agree what ‘out’ does mean. That seems unlikely given the failure so far to do so. Or they must find a way of abandoning Brexit altogether. And they’ll have to do it quickly, because in less than 80 days these decisions will be made for them and, of course, for the rest of us.
*Norway+ now seems to have morphed – perhaps because people
felt there were not enough Brexit models around - into being described as ‘Common
Market 2.0’, but the central idea remains single market membership and a
customs union, with the immediate route being the WA as currently written but
with a “significantly reworked” PD to reflect this idea.
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