Britain - the neighbour from hell

As predicted in recent posts, including last week’s, there is no sign that the government’s confrontational approach to the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) is going to change. Neither the Biden intervention nor the EU’s agreement to extend the chilled meats grace period, plus other recent flexibilities, is going to make any difference. What may just be beginning to change is the willingness of Labour to challenge it, with Keir Starmer making some unusually critical comments about Johnson's and Frost’s failings over Brexit.

The Frost-Lewis article

The continuing antagonism of this approach was sharply intensified by an article co-authored by David Frost and Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in the Irish Times last weekend, which has had reverberations throughout the week. It articulates what has emerged as the standard Brexiter case against the NIP, including the familiar dishonesty about the significance of the EU’s aborted proposal to invoke Article 16, but a few features are worth flagging up. In particular, it is important in its formulation of the central problem as being “the inflexible requirement to treat the movement of goods into Northern Ireland as if they were crossing an external EU frontier” (my emphasis added). This is noteworthy because it effectively rejects the core meaning of the NIP, and the reason why it exists. For it is not a matter of ‘as if’: the NIP is, precisely, an agreement about where the external EU frontier will be.

The refusal – repeated by Frost at an event this week - to accept this basic fact actually gives the lie to the recurrent motif in the article that the issue is that UK did not “expect” the border to be enforced as it is required to be, or had “assumed” that it would not be. Even taken in its own terms, this suggests rank incompetence on the part of Frost and the government. But that is actually far too generous, because they must have known at the time and were certainly advised of it by civil servants. Frost and Lewis write as if the NIP was just a general document, with all the details left to be filled in later, but whilst it’s true that there is scope for it to evolve over time, it also contains detailed provisions in the annexes for how it will work.

So whilst Frost and Lewis claim that EU insistence on implementing these provisions is to take a “theological approach”, as if to imply that all they seek is a little flexibility, their rejection of the central tenet of the NIP shows that this is not the case at all. Nor is their implication that their objections have only arisen as a result of trying to implement the NIP true. In fact Lewis, like Johnson and other ministers, denied from the outset that a sea border had been agreed at all. Moreover, as Professor Ronan McCrea points out, what Frost is proposing about the sea border neglects the wider context of compromises and trade-offs of which it is only one element. Meanwhile, lurking behind Frost, Lewis and Johnson is the DUP’s new leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, pushing for sea border controls to be removed “within weeks” (£).*

Irish reactions to Frost-Lewis

The placing of this article in the Irish media is both significant and deliberate. It signals that the UK stance is not just for domestic consumption, but is one the government is intent on pursuing. That this is so is underlined by the fact the that the UK Ambassador to Ireland approached RTE shortly before the article was published, knowing its content, and proposing that this meant it would be a “good time” to give an interview. This duly went ahead on Saturday and consisted of an uncompromising defence of the article.

So Frost-Lewis had not committed some accidental diplomatic gaffe: there appears to be a concerted British strategy in play which can’t be dismissed as playing to the Brexiter gallery (since neither the Irish Times nor RTE is the right theatre for this). It may be part of an attempt to garner support in Ireland for the UK case, perhaps with the idea that the Irish government might act as the UK advocate within the EU. If so, the reaction to it suggests it will fail and, indeed, that the article is seen as an unnecessarily provocative gesture.

Thus Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign minister, was highly (though diplomatically) critical of it, remarking that it seemed to amount to an attempt to “dismantle elements of the protocol piece by piece”. Media reports in Ireland quote senior officials saying the Irish government will not act as a go-between for the UK, and also that “there was a growing feeling on the EU side that the UK were ‘banking’ concessions offered by the EU”.

Subsequently, there was a much more robust response, the more striking given his traditionally pro-British stance, from the former Taoiseach John Bruton, lacerating Frost-Lewis for refusing to take responsibility for what the UK had signed, and for behaving in a “menacing” manner towards Ireland. It is well worth reading as a comprehensive dismantling of the UK position, including the abundantly clear fact that Frost has no intention of using the chilled meats grace period extension for the purpose of reorganizing supply chains, which was why it was granted (and why it existed in the first place).

Wider implications for UK-EU relations

The article caused ripples well beyond Ireland, as such ‘megaphone diplomacy’ was bound, and presumably intended, to do. Later in the week Maros Sefcovic spoke of a lack of trust, deepened by the Frost-Lewis article, and others of a growing feeling that Frost-Johnson never intended to honour the NIP. Meanwhile the EU Ambassador to the UK suggested that the UK was not interested in finding solutions to the NIP’s operations (implying, I assume, that it wants to ditch it altogether).

In short, all of the things I’ve been saying on this blog for weeks are now increasingly appearing in public statements (I don’t mean to imply any special insight on my part, it’s just that, obviously, I’m not subject to any of the diplomatic constraints that politicians and officials have on what they can say). The question of how the EU responds remains difficult to answer, and probably won’t be clear until the autumn, at the earliest. Sefcovic is talking about stepping up legal action over the unilateral extension of grace periods, but the real issue isn’t this or that disputed issue but the overarching refusal of the UK government to accept the basic tenets of the agreement it signed, and the antagonistic manner with which it conducts itself.

Some in the EU may still think, as some British commentators do, that the UK will quietly become more reasonable whilst continuing to bluster for domestic purposes. I think that is unlikely and, as mentioned, the placing of the Frost-Lewis article in the Irish Times is one indication of that. It also underestimates the extent to which post-Brexit British politics has become detached from rational calculation or, perhaps, operates according a rationality of its own. Thus, as I’ve remarked before, it seems clear that Frost-Johnson believe that their approach works, has no domestic downsides and will have few international repercussions.

The problem for the EU is how to react to a country which behaves in a hostile way, but hasn’t quite gone rogue; a country which alternates sabre-rattling about breaking international law with passive-aggressive talk of ‘our European friends and partners’.  My sense is that the default EU position is to keep talking and to try to dampen down or postpone outright conflict, but for how long is that sustainable?

Increasingly, the situation for the EU seems like that of a law-abiding citizen stuck with the neighbour from hell. At first, you try polite, rational argument – surely, if you just calmly explain your point of view the noisy all-night parties, drunken rows and revving engines will stop? But they just swear at you and turn the music up louder. So you explore legal sanctions, but these are weak and treated by the neighbour as an affront, even a justification for behaving even more badly. The aggravation worsens, but never quite to the point where you can take decisive action. All the time there are more-or-less implicit threats which you, used to reasonable conduct, don’t really know how to deal with. You keep trying to talk, but the more you do the more your neighbour senses your weakness. Perhaps one day, goaded beyond endurance, you lash out – only to have your neighbour report you for harassment. Or perhaps you give up trying, and put up with your nerves being shredded by broken nights and endless rows. It’s an intolerable, yet insoluble, situation – the more so as in this case moving house is impossible.

Brexit bites hard at home

So much for UK-EU relations. Meanwhile, the domestic damage of Brexit is racking up. Six months on from the end of the transition period, there is ever-more detail emerging about the damage to a wide variety of sectors where exporting has become more difficult and more expensive, with 17% of companies that used to trade with the EU having stopped doing so (£). Inevitably it will have been smaller traders who are most likely to have given up, but firms which have incorporated the new costs will also suffer in terms of reduced competitiveness.

All this has downstream consequences for employment and tax revenues, but the immediate looming crisis is the supply disruptions caused by a lack of HGV drivers. This is substantially, though by no means entirely, linked to Brexit and although there have been warnings for months it is only now feeding through into tangible gaps on supermarket shelves (as well as shortages of, for example, construction materials), even as food rots unpicked in fields. Astonishingly, the government response is to temporarily allow even longer working hours for HGV drivers, something greeted with dismay by the haulage industry as being neither a safe nor a sustainable solution.

The wider issue is that of skills gaps caused by the end of freedom of movement of people (£). One easy, and not unreasonable, response is to say that firms should pay more and/or offer better conditions of employment and/or invest more in training. However, apart from the fact that this also implies consumers paying higher prices (which, again, may not be unreasonable), the underlying problem is not shortages in this or that sector but across the board, and it derives mainly from the ageing demographics of UK society (although there are debates about what these look like and what they imply).

Not for the first time in recent history the UK economy needs more immigration for economic reasons. The tragedy, however, is not that ending of freedom of movement ended an easy answer to this need, it is that freedom of movement meant so much more than economic migration – it enabled lives and families to be created and enriched in non-economic ways, as well. Skills shortages may be the most obvious, but are only the most superficial, sign of what has been lost.

The unending culture war

The intangible losses implied by that go wider than freedom of movement. Whilst it would be ridiculous to blame Brexit for any and every intolerance or nastiness in British society, there is a palpable sense that Britain – or England, anyway - has become meaner and coarser as a result, or at least that it has enabled the more open expression of mean and coarse sentiments. That can’t be proved but, if nothing else, the fact that Johnson’s government extended what worked in campaigning for Brexit into the wider, now daily fought, culture war has pushed things in that direction. After all, you can’t have a culture war in which there are no cultural casualties. Perhaps worse than that, in a culture war neither victory nor defeat can ever be declared: it must always feed on some new outrage.

That is one, and arguably one of the most severe, legacies of Brexit. Not just because of a general coarsening but because ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ are now conflated with the wider culture war battles. Empirical evidence doesn’t really support it, but pro-Brexit commentators like Matthew Lynn (£) explicitly link ‘pro and anti-maskers’ with remainers and leavers. Others make the same linkage with ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ opinions, and this in turn gets linked with all the stuff about ‘cancel culture’ and so on. To see how these and other things get mashed up together by the culture warriors, a good place to look is the recent interview on GBNews – itself a medium and outcome of the culture war – with Douglas Murray. Even the football tournament which some readers may be aware is currently underway is being linked to Brexit in a wide variety of ways (there’s a whole post that could be written just about that).

Brexit is crucial to this culture war, not just as having been a gateway to it but because there was a vote on Brexit. It was this victory – narrow and tainted as it was – which gave a new inflection to what had always been rhetorically claimed as ‘the silent majority’ by putting a number on it. With that came the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and the positioning of its opponents as not only wrongheaded but anti-democratic.

The paradox of Brexit

At the risk of labouring the earlier analogy, imagine yourself, now, an unwilling occupant of the house of the neighbour from hell. Your home has been taken over by anti-social hooligans and you are stuck with it as they rampage from room to room, smashing things up. This is effectively the situation of half the British people. Of course you might decide to leave if you can and, unbelievably, Brexiters are now denouncing an “EU plot” to attract British citizens to take up citizenship in EU countries because, as Bernard Jenkin explains, “their career opportunities are so limited [compared] with what they were”. The specific loss being raised was that of their freedom of movement, and the refusal of the government to have a mobility agreement with the EU. Only a dolt like Jenkin could fail to understand it is a consequence of the Brexit he advocated.

The two components of the analogy are linked. Inherent in any populist politics, and one of the ways in which ‘populist’ is not the same as ‘popular’, is that it claims to speak for a people always under attack (thus Lynn, again, writes of an “EU plot to destroy the City” [£]). That is why it is so belligerent in its use of symbols, such as the flag, in a way that a truly popular politics would be too self-confident to need to be. The perceived attack is both from external enemies who would dominate the people and internal traitors who would undermine and weaken them. Waving the flag is meant to scarify the external enemy, whilst exposing the traitors who do not fly it or of whom it can be claimed, no matter how absurdly, that they mock it.

Yet the two elements often come into sharp conflict, as can be seen in the current situation regarding asylum seekers. On the one hand, the government is developing an ever-more spiteful and mean-spirited policy with its Nationality and Borders Bill published this week, in clear pursuit of its domestic culture war. On the other hand, it has discovered that Brexit makes it harder, not easier, to pursue such a policy and that it needs the agreement of other countries to replace the UK’s previous membership of the EU’s ‘Dublin regulations’.

As the BBC’s Home editor Mark Easton put it, it is “the paradox of Brexit that taking control of your borders requires more international co-operation, not less”. That doesn’t just apply to control of borders, of course. It exposes the entire fantasy of a sovereignty that can be exercised without regard for that of others, and the lie inherent in the ‘take back control’ slogan. It really is time that David Frost and Boris Johnson understood this, but there’s absolutely no sign that they will.

 

*For an assessment of Donaldson, the DUP and the NIP see Dr Lisa Claire Whitten’s analysis on the UK in a Changing Europe website

Brexit means Brexit and we're making a mess of it*

The entire Brexit process has been depressingly repetitious in all kinds of ways, none more so than the endless complaints over the last five years that the EU is ‘bullying’ or ‘punishing’ the UK for having left. So there’s some small pleasure in identifying what might be called a new variant of the Brexiters’ self-pity virus in a piece this week in their house journal the Express. On display there was the original strain (the EU has to punish the UK to deter further ‘defections’), along with the more recent Frost mutation (the EU has yet to ‘adjust’ to the UK being sovereign). But nested inside was the slightly different version that the EU’s ‘belligerence’ is in fact “an early sign that our split will be a resounding success”. So what was originally proposed to be an attempt to stop Brexit being a success is now reconfigured as a round of applause for it.

Only in the strange world of Brexiter logic could such a leap be made and, though of only passing interest in itself, it is a development which has a wider significance. It is part of the way that despite having achieved their dream of legal detachment, and on far more distant terms than most of them actually dreamt of, Brexiters remain not just psychologically attached to the EU but obsessed with it. The counterpart of that is an imagination that the EU remains similarly obsessed with Brexit whereas, as Georgina Wright of Institut Montaigne commented in relation to the Express article, UK-EU relations are now very low on the list of EU priorities. In short, the EU has moved on, but the UK is stuck.

A parallel universe

But Brexiters are not only still obsessed with the EU, they are also still fixated on what they see as domestic appeasement and betrayal. Thus in the heartlands of Brexiter discussion, such as on the Conservative Woman website this week, along with all the usual stuff about EU “bullying” and “blackmail”, the “theological (sic) lecturer and Anglican clergyman” Timothy Bradshaw declares that “we all know that Brexit remains in the balance as the Remainer establishment of Whitehall and Westminster continues their [sic] so-far-successful campaign to keep the umbilical cord uncut from Brussels”. Within this article’s extraordinary parallel universe, replete with countless misrepresentations or misunderstandings, especially about the Northern Ireland Protocol, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Brandon Lewis are supposedly “scared witless by the EU”, Dominic Raab is denounced as “a latter-day Europhile” (yes, really), whilst David Frost is suspected of deploying “combative rhetoric … for public consumption only”.

Such sentiments were always going to prevail amongst the most committed Brexiters because, to reprise a longstanding theme of this blog, any actual delivery of Brexit would be seen by them as a betrayal. Plus, in a grim irony, Johnson, with his hardline approach to Brexit, is finding what all his predecessors have found, and what he himself used to come to power, namely that no approach will ever be hard enough to satisfy these committed Brexiters, including many on his own backbenches. But it would be quite wrong to dismiss this as the pitiable rantings of a few obscure or fringe figures. Rather, it is part of a much wider and ongoing battle to shape the narrative of what Brexit means and what it has done to our country.

Thus the relentless claims of external bullying by the EU and internal betrayal by remainers, apart from being the standard tropes of Ur-fascism, provide cover for the already obvious negative economic consequences of hard Brexit. There are almost daily reports of businesses and whole sectors damaged, of labour shortages (£), price rises and, beyond economics, of the damage to UK global standing and influence. Since the supposed ‘national liberation’ has so patently not led to any ‘sunny uplands’, it is necessary to claim that ‘true’ liberation has yet to be achieved. This also explains why the Brexiters cling so desperately to the false claim that Brexit enabled the UK to have an independent vaccines delivery programme. For, false as it is, it is about the only thing that has stuck in public discourse as a practical benefit of Brexit. Hence, too, the ongoing though much less successful attempt to present trade deals as such a benefit. And hence the gesture politics of, for example, deploying an aircraft carrier to the Indian Ocean or building a new Royal Yacht (£).

Northern Ireland: still the central issue

Nowhere are the claims about EU punishment more evident, or more dangerous (in a literal, physical, sense), than in relation to the Northern lreland Protocol (NIP). Again, whilst the tirades of bloggers like Bradshaw might easily be dismissed, such claims matter when they come from figures like the new DUP leader Edwin Poots. Poots, who wants the NIP scrapped in its entirety, accuses the EU of using Northern Ireland like “a plaything” and of not caring about the peace process, and blames the Protocol for rising violence. In fact, as many commentators and politicians within Northern Ireland pointed out in response, the NIP (unlike Brexit itself) enjoys widespread support amongst the people of Northern Ireland.

Obviously Poots objects to the NIP because of the Irish Sea border, because, correctly, he sees it as undermining the union. But the line about it undermining the peace process and the Good Friday/ Belfast Agreement (GFA) is the opportunistic one which, earlier this year, Brexiters like Dominic Raab belatedly tried to mobilise in the belief that it would have more cut through with the US (and, perhaps, the EU). I assume that the thinking is that because this argument was the reason an Irish land border was rejected then it will also lead to the Irish Sea border being rejected.

But even without assessing the merits of that thinking in its own terms, it has two very obvious problems. One is the same as has existed ever since the UK decided in 2017 that Brexit meant hard Brexit: were it to be accepted then where would the border go? The Brexiters still have no answer to this question except to fantasise that a border is unnecessary anywhere. Even their old stand-by that the answer is ‘technological solutions’ is no longer available as an argument against the NIP since if it were true such solutions existed then why can’t they be deployed at the sea border?

The other problem is that it is too late. The NIP isn’t, in its substance, any longer a matter for negotiation. It forms part of an international treaty agreed and signed by the UK government. The time for the UK to decide it violated the GFA was before doing so. Certainly neither the EU nor the US are now suddenly going to say that it does so. Rather, both are insisting that to preserve stability in Northern Ireland the NIP must be implemented, not re-negotiated.

For some weeks now there have been intense technical talks about NIP implementation, and a crunch point is likely to come with the expected ‘stock-taking’ meeting of the Joint Committee next Wednesday. This (at least this period, if not necessarily this single meeting) has the potential to be another watershed for what Brexit means and for what sort of country post-Brexit Britain is going to be. Just as happened after the vote to leave the EU, again after leaving the EU, and once again after the end of the transition period, there is a choice as to whether to persist with a sour, resentful hostility towards the EU, as if Brexit were something done ‘to’ Britain rather than by Britain or, even, that the EU had forced Britain to leave.

That perverse inversion of the truth is now pervasive with, for example, Matthew Lynn writing in the Spectator this week that the UK “has been frozen out of the single market” by the EU, as if leaving it had not been the UK’s choice. It is also evident in the amnesia that allows the government to forget not just that it agreed the NIP but that it pronounced it a triumph, and so to pretend that it was imposed upon the UK. And it is evident in the now almost daily moans about Britons being ‘denied’ freedom of movement rights to, in particular, Spain. In short, there is still a widespread refusal amongst Brexiters to accept that Brexit means Brexit.

Britain faces another choice

On the NIP specifically, there are reported to be solutions in sight to many of the operational difficulties and, on the biggest of them, an offer from the EU of a veterinary agreement, potentially on a temporary basis. Such a ‘Swiss-style’ arrangement is generally understood to mean that about 80% of the border checks would be abolished. Poots, in familiar ‘Ulster says no’ mode, is adamantly opposed to the latter (because, of course, it would be about making the Irish Sea border work more smoothly, whereas the DUP don’t want it to work, they want it dropped entirely).

The question, then, is whether Johnson and Frost are also going to ‘say no’ to these facilitations which would largely solve the implementation problems? Might they even, as they keep threatening, seek to suspend the NIP using Article 16? If the former, then the same rows rumble on with, coming up fast, the end of the grace periods for the NIP and, more generally, UK import controls still to come. If the latter, the rows intensify into a crisis.

Factors in these decisions include the extent to which Johnson and Frost genuinely have a blind ideological commitment to their peculiar concept of sovereignty, the extent to which they see advantage for their electoral base in maintaining permanently antagonistic relations with the EU, and, relatedly, the extent of the pressure from Brexit Ultras within and outside the Tory Party to do so. Also potentially relevant is what pressure comes from Joe Biden (£), who will meet Johnson a few hours after the Joint Committee meeting, to accept the EU’s offer of solutions.

So it remains to be seen what will happen but, as things stand, reports suggest that so far the technical talks have yielded only limited agreement. This isn’t surprising, because the scope for technical agreement is ultimately a political issue. Frost continues to say that the NIP is “unsustainable”, whilst the EU’s Ambassador to the UK says that there is no alternative to it, and points out that the UK has failed to suggest a viable alternative. What Frost continues to propose, and claims to be a “pragmatic” solution, is not viable because what it means, in effect, is for the border not to be fully enforced.

In short, once again, Frost’s idea is that Brexit shouldn’t mean Brexit. More specifically, he is effectively saying that the NIP (which he negotiated) shouldn’t mean the NIP. And testimony this week from Sir Jonathan Jones (the former head of the Government Legal Service who resigned over the illegal clauses in the Internal Market Bill) confirms what had long been suspected: even as it agreed the NIP the government did not really accept, and always wanted to find ways round, what it had signed up to. It is important to keep recalling that this dishonesty and irresponsibility is what lies at the heart of the current problems.

All this seems to suggest that no agreement on how to implement the NIP is in prospect, and a reliable (i.e. Tony Connelly) report this morning says that the EU is both pessimistic about the prospects and rapidly running out of patience. If so, and the UK’s decision is, again, to wallow in resentment and anger then it will mean remaining in the cul-de-sac where post-Brexit Britain is, effectively, stuck as Brexit Britain – that is, unable to move on from all the debates and battles of 2016. This would mean that relations with the EU continue to be viewed entirely through the now dead question of whether or not Britain should leave the EU. In turn, that will mean being stuck in the performative gesture politics of ‘Global Britain’ grandstanding. Meanwhile, if Connelly’s report that the EU may take retaliatory measures over the failure to implement the NIP proves correct, then, under the new variant of Brexit logic, Brexiters will treat this as sign of success.

It doesn’t have to be like this

There are alternatives, which would focus not so much on gestures as concrete practicalities. For example, the Institute for Government this week produced a report urging a strategic and joined-up approach to managing regulatory divergence. Meanwhile, there are some suggestions of enhanced defence and security agreements between the UK and individual member states of the EU. There could also be an immediate and serious correction of the unfolding scandal of how EU nationals are treated at UK borders.

I’ve argued may times in the past that had Brexiters been both more competent and more confident they would have approached the entire Brexit process in a spirit of generosity and cooperation, rather than in the dog-in-a-manger way they chose. It’s still not entirely too late to change this. But of course the obstacles are formidable, most especially because of the dogged attachment of the most extreme Brexiters to continued hostilities. Ironically, another, though smaller, obstacle is that some erstwhile remainers scoff at the possibility of the kinds of limited ‘de-escalations’ just mentioned, and certainly it’s true that none of them is going to recreate EU membership or compensate for Brexit. So one pole insists that cooperation with the EU is pointless as it renders Brexit a failure, whilst the other insists that Brexit is a failure which renders cooperation with the EU pointless.

Be that as it may, the key issue in the immediate term – meaning, even, the next couple of weeks as regards the NIP situation – is the current government’s stance. The completion this week of the first annual deal with the EU on fishing rights (£), as well as the recent decision to recognize the EU Ambassador, might be taken as small signs that this stance is becoming more conciliatory, but are negated by Frost’s continuing bullishness about the NIP. In a sense the government has hamstrung itself by the fact that this hardline approach to the Protocol makes good relations with the EU impossible whilst still being insufficiently hardline to satisfy the insatiable Brexit Ultras, including the DUP, who want to scrap it altogether.

Certainly at some point in the future a UK government needs to become both more conciliatory and, simply, more realistic about UK-EU relations (this, I think, should be the core of Labour’s future European policy). The longer that takes, the more difficult it will become as the already eviscerated goodwill will become harder to rebuild with each month and year that goes by in the present mode.

It is that which, at least in part, explains the Brexit Ultras’ dogmatic insistence on depicting the EU as malign, illustrated in microcosm by immediate reactions to the announcement of the fishing rights deal. No agreements on anything, ever, with the EU will satisfy them. They want to create a relationship so damaged as to be beyond future repair, believing that if the earth is not completely scorched then the ‘remainer establishment’ will find some way to plant the seeds that might, even, lead eventually to re-joining. The deepest irony is that, for all their accusations against remainers, it is this dogmatism that also prevents any possibility of ‘making a success of Brexit’. That is why they are making such a mess of it.

 

*The saga has been going on for so long that some may have forgotten that the full version of Theresa May’s early line was “Brexit means Brexit and we’re going to make a success of it”.

 

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My book Brexit Unfolded. How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to) will be published by Biteback on 23 June 2021. It can be pre-ordered from Biteback, or via other online platforms, as a paperback or e-book.

This period will shape the post-Brexit narrative

The stories of Brexit disruption catalogued in my last few posts continue apace, not least because firms which had built up stockpiles in anticipation of the end of the transition period are now starting to replenish them. However, remaining stockpiles and the new* trade barriers, plus the pandemic, mean that freight movements between the UK and the EU are still 38% down on this time last year. Some 65% of trucks returning to Calais/Dunkirk are empty, over twice what is normal, and there are daily reports of companies struggling, or failing, to deal with export processes (£).

The UK is not yet imposing full import controls, but even without that there are numerous reports of customers astounded to find that they have to pay customs duties, import VAT and handling charges on goods delivered to them from the EU. This links with reports of uncollected incoming freight piling up at ports (£).

There are now the very beginnings of hard data about the aggregate effects, including indications of a harp drop in services exports. Obviously Covid is playing a big part, but the fact that the UK figures are worse than the US, France and Germany amongst others is suggestive of a Brexit effect, and the IMF has reduced its forecast for UK output growth for the first quarter of 2021 by 1% as a result of Brexit disruption.

The long-term effects of Brexit on trade have yet to be seen but the fundamental reality remains, not as a matter of doctrine but as matter of plain definition: Brexit creates new barriers to trade with the EU and so suppresses trade with the EU. As I argued in a piece in Byline Times this week these barriers are in the process of becoming structurally embedded, and small firms are the biggest losers (£). Of course it may, now, be creating new opportunities – for customs agents, say, as when the government said Brexit was ‘growing the customs sector’, or for staff at Kent lorry parks – but it would be perverse to call these, in any substantive sense, ‘benefits’.

That is not to deny that there are numerous business benefits of Brexit. It’s just that they don’t accrue to British businesses and people. EU countries are the happy beneficiaries of financial services leaving London (£). Irish ferry companies are mopping up business by creating new routes to bypass Brexit Britain to the detriment of Welsh ports (activity through Holyhead has dropped by 50% and through Fishguard by a whopping 75% since the end of the transition period). Dutch, and no doubt other, warehousing and logistics firms are experiencing a boom as UK firms seeks bases in the EU.

The latter connects with the most extraordinary Brexit story of the week, with it being reported that government officials are advising British firms to set up EU subsidiaries (and, hence, to shift employment) to avoid the problems of Brexit. The reason this is extraordinary is not in the idea of firms doing so – that is simply the economic logic of the situation Brexit has created – but in the fact that a government extolling the virtues of Brexit is providing such advice. That said, it’s a story that needs to be treated with a little caution in that it’s not clear how widespread this advice is, nor whether it is official advice as opposed to informal suggestion.

Brexiters’ reactions

It is interesting, and politically important, to see how leading Brexiters are reacting to what is happening, not least because this may set the tone for how leavers, especially, in the general public respond. It’s a mixed bag, but mainly depressing. Some are simply boneheaded refusals to understand it, as with John Redwood calling for the government to intervene to ensure the free flow of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But of course the end to such a free flow was integral to the Withdrawal Agreement. Since Redwood stood on a manifesto to which that agreement was central, voted for it in parliament, and the government signed it his comment is either stupid or dishonest.

Others resort to sophistry, to put it more charitably than is probably warranted, such as former Brexit Party MEP Ben Habib. He claimed this week that the plight of the fishing industry was not down to Brexit but caused by the pandemic suppressing demand as restaurants in the UK and EU were closed, by the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) having given EU fishing boats unfettered access to UK waters so that EU fishermen could supply EU restaurants (even though Habib says these are closed), and by the bureaucracy created by the TCA for UK fish exporters to the EU.

Where to begin? The pandemic has been going on for a year, but the rotting fish piles only began when the transition period ended, so they plainly are very much to do with Brexit. It can’t be because EU fishermen have taken all the fish, or these fish piles would not exist, and these fish piles are there not because there are no customers for them but because they can’t be shipped to those customers. That is, indeed, because of the bureaucracy that now attaches to UK exports, including fish, to the EU. Which is, precisely, down to Brexit because it was created by leaving the single market and customs union, as advocated by Habib.

A different account was given this week by another Brexit Party ex-MEP Lance Forman, who himself works in the fish industry (he owns and manages a smoked salmon business). He offered a more coherent argument, yet one which still denies that what is happening is a problem of Brexit. Rather, he suggested it is a problem of lack of preparedness for the bureaucracy entailed by Brexit. It’s a fine distinction, in that the bureaucracy is, itself, a problem of Brexit which adds new costs to trade with the EU. But it’s true that some of the export delays might well have been avoided with better preparation. However, a big reason for that lack of preparation was that, until far too late, Brexiters refused to admit that there would be new bureaucracy – denouncing warnings as Project Fear – and because they regarded any extension to the transition period, which might have aided preparation, as unconscionable.

Forman also bemoaned the fact that the EU is applying import controls when the UK is not doing so. But that arises simply because the UK government is not ready to do so, again an argument for extending transition, but not some unreasonable disparity of treatment. Thus, whilst the tone is more urbane, it is all of a piece with reports, such as the Daily Mail’s, which speak of the “dirty tricks” of “pernickety jobsworths” in enforcing the rules which the 17.4 million – who, don’t forget, knew exactly what they were voting for, and it is remainer elitism to suggest otherwise – voted for.

Whatever the tone, the meaning is the same: a refusal to accept that the damage that is being done to British business, well beyond fishing, is the direct consequence of Brexit and the unavoidable responsibility of those who advocated it. This isn’t surprising, because it has long been the hallmark of Brexiters that they abjure responsibility – it’s always someone else’s fault or because, as its apologists are wont to say of Communism, Brexit inevitably hasn’t been done ‘properly’. In May 2018 I compiled a list of six excuses that Brexiters make for why the consequences of Brexit are nothing to do with them. They continue to be rolled out.

Brexit really does mean Brexit

But I think there are some other features of Brexit mentality lurking in all this as well. One is the frequent implication that the EU is some kind of cuddly uncle who will or ought to be ‘nice’ to Britain. That’s sometimes found amongst remainers, too, but it is far more bizarre from Brexiters who, having spent decades denouncing the EU for every evil under the sun, now seem to expect that it will just benignly waive the rules in order to help the UK out of a mess of its own making. Linked to that is the phenomenon, which I have also noted in the past on this blog, whereby some Brexiters seem to think that leaving the EU was a kind of symbolic act, rather than one with concrete legal effects. So it seems to come as a surprise and, somehow, ‘not fair’ when the EU applies the rules to Britain that apply to other third countries.

It is neither surprising nor is it ‘petty’ or ‘vindictive’ to do so, as was said during the recent row (£) about the confiscation of a ham sandwich. This rule exists and is enforced because of the very real dangers of African swine fever, which can devastate pig farming, or even of foot and mouth disease. Indeed this is why, back in 2019, the British government launched a campaign warning tourists not to bring such items back home with them. So what, exactly, do Brexiters expect EU border officials to do? Just shrug and say that because you’re coming from Britain the rules don’t apply? Or let you off because you didn’t realize these rules existed and that Brexit would mean they applied to Britain?

What of the future?

There is an obvious linkage between this lack of realism and the idea that the adverse effects of Brexit are the fault of the EU, or ‘punishment’ from the EU. To the extent that this narrative takes hold there is little chance of any honest appraisal of Brexit. Equally, it contributes to the continuing antagonism with which the Brexiters seem determined to conduct relations with the EU post-Brexit.

The ongoing row over the diplomatic status of the EU’s Ambassador is a good example of this. It’s not just that this is – indeed – petty, it’s also, as Georgina Wright argues on the Institut Montaigne blog, misguided in terms of the UK’s interests and global standing. Britain’s stance on this is causing serious anger across the EU’s member states (£) and it is intensifying, with the EU now cancelling a meeting with the UK’s Ambassador (£).

That matters, because apart from growing the economic costs of Brexit, the geo-political ones have also been profound. As Dr Rudolf Adam, of the University of the Federal Armed Forces Neubiberg (Munich), writes “the enduring legacy of Brexit is a massive loss of respect and sympathy for a country that for centuries was admired as a bastion of pragmatism and liberal values. The UK is losing soft power faster than hard power.”

Amongst other things, that implies the UK needs to work constructively with the EU through the TCA partnership apparatus and also, especially, to make the Northern Ireland Protocol work via the Joint Committee. Moreover, there are and will be a huge range of security and foreign policy issues – Hong Kong, Russia – where the UK will need the support and friendship of the EU and, no doubt, vice versa. And any idea that the UK can take a leading role in international responses to climate change, or anything else, whilst maintaining a ‘dog in the manger’ attitude to the EU is absurd.

From that point of view, there’s no conceivable benefit to Britain in taking this position of the EU Ambassador. It would seem to be explained partly by the visceral hatred that Brexiters have for the EU. It may also be a prelude to far more substantive conflicts over the TCA and may have the effect, if not the intention, of providing a ready-made narrative to justify pulling out of it.

Equally, again in effect if not intention, continued and growing antagonism towards the EU serves to divert attention from the Brexiters being held to account for what they have done, because it enables them to present the consequences of Brexit as being the fault of the EU and to deflect anger onto the EU. In this way, Brexiters can continue to re-fight the battles of the referendum.

It’s hard to resist the conclusion that this lies behind current attempts to justify Brexit by reference to the failures of the vaccination programme in the EU or the row over vaccine delivery (£), which needless to say is more complicated than the tabloids allow (see also, for the wider context of the issue, this report in Politico). Tellingly, as Maria Tadeo, Bloomberg TV’s Europe reporter, says, within EU countries, the narrative of this row is not generally framed in terms of Brexit at all. It certainly has little to do, or should have little to do, with the case for a long-term strategic partnership between the EU and the UK.

Shaping the narrative

The coming few months will therefore be very significant for two reasons. Firstly, because this is the period during which the effects of Brexit will be most visible and, therefore, during which the possibility of holding Brexiters to account is the greatest. This is why it is important to keep highlighting those effects and challenging attempts to deny them. If they manage to implant a narrative that these effects are nothing to do with Brexit, or are down to the EU being unreasonable, that may well become established and much more difficult to challenge later. For, by then, the visible effects will have declined (though the underlying damage will continue) and, of course, the longer-term effects will be difficult to definitively disentangle from those of Covid, in particular.

That cuts both ways, of course, in that it makes highly dubious the current attempts to claim that, had Brexit not happened, the UK’s vaccine programme would have suffered compared with how it actually is. That may or may not be true – any such claim requires a long string of counterfactuals about what would and would not have been done by multiple actors in that alternative universe. Clearly that isn’t so for straightforward cases such as that leaving the customs union creates new processes and costs for exporters.

Secondly, and even more importantly, although the damage of Brexit itself is now unavoidable regardless of who is held to be responsible for it, it is not inevitable that post-Brexit UK-EU relations have to be added to the list of that damage. As I have been arguing for months, the mandate of the 2016 referendum has now been fully discharged. Nowhere in that vote was there a mandate for Brexiters to permanently sour UK-EU relations post-Brexit, nor should those relations continue to be seen through the prism of the now dead question of whether the UK should remain a member of the EU.

So the current period is potentially crucial for changing the tone of those relations and shifting them from the virulently hostile ones the Brexiters are seeking to embed. It’s clear, as with the vaccine row, that they will weaponize whatever comes to hand in that attempt. The chances of such a change of tone are, in any case, negligible given that we have a government which is Brexiter to the core. But they are not non-existent because no government has complete control of the narrative. Other politicians, journalists, grass roots organizations, and civil society generally also have a role. And then, as the old cliché has it, there are ‘events, dear boy, events’.

 
 
*Some people dislike the term ‘new’ in this context, because what is happening is, rather, the re-imposition of barriers which had been removed by the customs union or single market. However, I think it is a reasonable usage for two reasons. First because, obviously, it is intended to mean ‘new as compared with when the UK was an EU member’. Second, because in a certain sense we are not simply facing a return to pre-customs union, pre-single market days as these rules are now being applied in the context of a very different economy to when the UK joined the EEC in 1973, in particular as regards the realities of international supply chains.

Blockades, mythical and metaphorical

The Internal Market Bill (IMB) and its repercussions have been the predominant theme of this week’s developments. Almost as soon as I wrote my previous post, Brexiter MPs started justifying that Bill in terms of the supposed EU threat to ‘blockade’ food supplies travelling from Great Britain (GB) to Northern Ireland (NI). In particular, it was this threat which was used to justify the incendiary step of including the clauses in this legislation which would break international law. This justification has now been widely repeated, including by the Prime Minister.

This was a dishonest linkage to make, because there is nothing in the IMB which would prevent this mythical ‘blockade’ (though there are rumours that the forthcoming Finance Bill will do so). The two areas in which the Bill proposes powers to defy international law are – as detailed in the previous post – goods flows from NI to GB and  the state aid rules in the NI Protocol (NIP). This point was made in a very effective parliamentary performance from Ed Miliband during the IMB second reading debate this week, in which he challenged Boris Johnson to explain his claim – which, unsurprisingly, as it would have been impossible, the Prime Minister refused to do.

The myth of the ‘blockade’ threat

As so often in the Brexit saga, disentangling the different strands of what is being said and why is complex. The first time a linkage between the IMB and the ‘blockade’ threat was suggested seems to have been in a report in The Sun on Tuesday of last week, where it was said that Michel Barnier had made “veiled threats” about GB to NI food flows during the trade negotiations and that it was these which had provoked the government to its move against the NIP (quite how the timings of this would have worked is unclear, by the way).

The story was given legs by a reference in Barnier’s statement at the end of last week’s talks when he said that “more clarity is needed [about GB’s proposed future sanitary and phytosanitary regime] for the EU to do the assessment for the third-country listing of the UK”. Such listing will be needed for GB agricultural produce to enter NI at the end of the transition. The UK position – as articulated by David Frost - is that this is a non-issue as GB will continue to follow EU standards, and if it proposes to change these will give the EU and the WTO plenty of notice.

Whether this issue is being used as negotiating leverage in the trade talks or not I don’t know. But it certainly doesn’t amount to the threat of a ‘blockade’ with its connotations of naval interdiction. Rather, it is a reminder of the procedural, rules-based nature of the EU as an institution and, for that matter, of international trade. It is not enough for the UK just to say it will follow the EU’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) standards and, as Boris Johnson asserted at this week’s liaison committee, that the EU should automatically list the UK with its failure to do so meaning it is not acting in good faith. Rather, like any third country, which is what the UK has chosen to be, it needs to submit the relevant documentation for assessment.

If it is compliant, then the EU would have no grounds to refuse third country listing, and there is no suggestion that it would do so. Even if it did, the UK’s correct response would be to seek redress through the WA dispute system (and, perhaps - I am not sure - through the WTO) and in the meantime to make use of the existing provision within the NIP whereby “serious economic … difficulties” can be addressed by unilateral action, thus avoiding any ‘blockade’.

In short, there’s no reason to think that the EU is minded to punish the UK in this way, even if it was it couldn’t, even if it could the UK has no need to break international law to respond to it, and even if it did need to the IMB doesn’t provide the means.

My guess is that the UK has not wanted to submit its SPS plans because of the likely contradictions between following EU SPS rules and making trade deals with other countries, especially the US (although it is reported that the government now says it will do so by the end of October). For the EU’s part, there is presumably a reluctance just to take it on trust that the UK will comply and will give adequate notice of any changes. Similarly, it is reluctant to take on trust that the UK’s post-Brexit State Aid regime will be robust and wants to see the precise detail before agreeing a trade deal.

Such a lack of trust is the inevitable consequence of the bellicose, negative and sometimes duplicitous way that the UK has approached the Brexit negotiations over the last four years. Doing so has consequences, and those consequences have caught up with Britain. They can only be compounded by the current threat to break international law, so if that threat was indeed meant as a counter to Barnier’s position about third country listing then it is counter-productive anyway.

The wider attack line

However, the initial reporting was not the same as what came to be said, in that it only suggested the IMB clauses were being used to ‘talk tough’ in reply to the EU’s ‘threats’. It was not until a few days later that it began to be falsely claimed that the Bill was actually a way of neutering those threats.

The obvious reason is that the ‘blockade’ line offers, to Brexit supporters in the population and the media, something that sounds sufficiently serious to justify the breaking of international law. Perhaps it was developed in part because of the backlash against that plan. However, it is only one strand within a wider and much more dangerous narrative that the Brexiters are developing. For the ‘blockade’ allegation is part of a thoroughgoing attempt to claim that the EU are not negotiating in ‘good faith’. As noted above, the Prime Minister himself explicitly linked third country SPS listing with good faith this week.  But the wider attack is that not just for this reason but more generally it is the EU and not the UK which is in breach of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and, therefore, of international law.

It takes quite some brass neck – actually, it takes a sociopathic lack of self-awareness and pathological dishonesty - to make such a claim, but none of these qualities are alien to the Brexit Ultras. As usual (cf. GATT Article XXIV) they seize like barrack-room lawyers everywhere on some half-understood (if that) legal text to give themselves a veneer of authority with which to impress the gullible. Currently, it is Article 184 of the WA (see p.287 of link) according to a semi-literate briefing produced by the ERG (described by law Professor Steve Peers as “perhaps the worst legal analysis I have ever seen, and I am including students who leave their exam booklet blank”).

This article requires both sides to negotiate in good faith and to use their best endeavours to secure agreements on the future relationship. Risibly, the Brexiters interpret this to mean that if the EU doesn’t give the UK a deal that it wants then that violates the article and means the EU is not acting in good faith. They also conveniently ignore that Article 184 refers to the agreements to be sought as those referred to in the Political Declaration – the very document which, with its references to level playing field conditions, they and the Brexit government have disowned. Even in its own terms it’s nonsense since if, as claimed, the EU is in breach of the WA then, as with the ‘blockade’ non-issue, the remedy is to use the dispute resolution procedure within the WA rather than unilaterally to break its terms.

Never mind. Like so many other bogus Brexiter claims this one – along with other equally footling ideas such as that the NI Protocol was only designed to be temporary – are now being pumped out by any and every Brexiter MP and their social media foot soldiers. So too is the Brexiters’ idea that since the Miller case (which forced the parliamentary vote on triggering Article 50) confirmed the primacy of parliamentary sovereignty over the Executive then ‘therefore’ this means parliament doesn’t have to obey international law. It’s hard to be too scathing of the woeful intellectual inadequacy and dishonesty of such gibberish.

The motivation here is obvious. Even in these post-truth times it strains public credulity that a government that signed a deal six months ago can now claim it is deeply flawed. Admittedly Bernard Jenkin now openly says that “the UK made a mistake in signing the WA” – something he and the rest of the ERG voted to do - but if that becomes the Brexiter message then it suggests that the entire basis on which the Tories campaigned and won the General Election was also a mistake. It might even invite the heretical thought that if MPs can change their minds about what they voted for then so too could the electorate that voted for Brexit.

So, instead, the blame is being ascribed to the EU for bad faith and for making ‘extreme’ interpretations of the WA. This, rather than Brexiter delusion or duplicity, is then used to justify reneging on parts of it or in due course – as I have been suggesting for some time is the Ultras’ hope – on its entirety.

The IMB at home and abroad

For the time being that only extends to the provisions of the IMB, assuming it passes. This is now likely because it seems the government has conceded to its ‘rebels’ that the provisions which would break international law can only be activated with a further parliamentary vote (and with some other new caveats). It is only a fig leaf, with little substantive meaning, although it does show that there are still lines – even if only shakily drawn in the sand – that Johnson isn’t quite able to cross.

But as so often in the Brexit process – the Chequers Proposal and the ‘Malthouse Compromise’ come to mind – attempts to broker domestic agreement, even if successful, myopically ignore international consequences. In particular, the existence of this legislation even in very slightly softened form is anathema to the EU.

There seems to be some dispute as to whether simply passing (or even just proposing) such a law would, in itself, be grounds for the EU to take legal action, or whether that would require the powers granted to be exercised. It is also a political question as to whether the EU would do so even if legally able, to which the answer seems to be ‘not yet’. Either way, assuming the relevant clauses pass in any form the damage will have been done to the last residue of the EU’s trust. The EU won’t walk away from the trade talks, and a deal is still possible, but the inviolability of the WA as a condition for such a deal has been forcibly reaffirmed. And it will taint the UK’s international reputation as Ursula von der Leyen has warned (£), with potential effects going far beyond Brexit.

Already this week we have seen signs of that, with robust statements from Joe Biden and other US politicians re-confirming that a UK-US trade deal is unthinkable if the Good Friday Agreement is compromised. Breaching the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) in the ways proposed by the IMB doesn’t in itself necessarily do that, but it could be a move in that direction.

Indeed Dominic Raab’s visit to the US, which occasioned these statements, showed how this could be. For in defending the IMB he made the extraordinary comment that it was only necessary because the EU was trying to erect a regulatory border down the Irish Sea. Yet that it is precisely what the UK has agreed to. So if Raab actually understood and meant what he said – an open question, since he appears to be totally out of his depth - then the entire basis of the provisions in the NIP which prevent a land border with Ireland, and therefore the GFA, would be compromised.

Brexiter MPs reacted with fury to Biden’s intervention but, like it or not, as a consequence of Brexit Britain has, as it were, blockaded itself into isolation, and can be booted around by the big players whether that be the US, EU or China. Arch-Brexiter John Redwood may blithely opine that “trade deals are nice to have but not essential … Getting back full control of our money, our laws and our borders is essential”, but that always hollow slogan now sounds increasingly like the last desperate cry of a country sinking into oblivion. Not waving, but drowning.

Domestically, the IMB may initially have looked smart. The Tories could depict Labour’s opposition to the Bill as “siding with the EU”, and many voters will surely take the view that breaking international law isn’t ‘really’ breaking the law. And as one said on a vox pop on Radio 4 this week ‘it’s not as if we’ll be torturing people’. Plus for many Tory core voters almost anything that seems to further the Brexit cause, or even just sticks fingers up at the EU, or even just enrages the liberal metropolitan elite, will be greeted with rapture.

Yet those voters – and more importantly the Brexit Ultras – may be infuriated at having been marched up the hill of flouting the WA only to be marched half-way back down again when Johnson encountered some opposition. There are also rumours that the legislation may now be delayed, despite the initial claim that it was so urgent it had to be rammed through quickly, which would be a further climbdown.

So the IMB is beginning to look like yet another Johnson fiasco. He has raised the Ultras’ hopes of ditching the WA – or at least of ‘sticking one’ on the EU - then backtracked. Yet the damage to relations with the EU and to the UK’s wider reputation is done anyway, and won’t be forgotten for a very long time. In this respect, too, he seems to have blockaded himself into a corner.

The underlying problem: trying to turn lies into policy

Aside from their immediate motivations and effects, these latest events re-emphasise something more fundamental about Brexit. It has always been based upon a denial of, or at best a naivety about, reality. In particular, as Tom McTague wrote in The Atlantic this week, a denial of the reality of the meaning of Brexit for Northern Ireland (or of Northern Ireland for Brexit). Consider the absurd dismissal of this reality by Boris Johnson and others in 2016, insisting that Brexit would have no impact on the Irish border because of – again, invoking a bit of legal-sounding mumbo-jumbo – the longstanding existence of a Common Travel Area. But there has to be a border somewhere. Having for reasons of expedience accepted that it would be across the Irish Sea, Johnson is now trying yet again to deny the need for a border.

Brexit wasn’t just a denial of the reality of Northern Ireland but also of the nature of the single market, the nature of the EU, and much else besides. Looking at the Vote Leave campaign documents now, there is scarcely a sentence in them that anyone could now seriously defend. The line in the final page summary about “having better relations with our European friends” has a particularly hollow ring to it this week, whilst the core economic claim that “there is a free trade zone from Iceland to Turkey to the Russian border and we will be part of it”, always a lie, now looks like the ravings of a lunatic.

As I wrote in March 2019, you can lie but you can’t turn lies into policy. The attempt to do so is the reason the UK is being driven to more and more extreme positions. It is that which has given the events of the last few years their strangely repetitive quality as, like moths dashing themselves against a window pane, the Brexiters keep trying to buck reality. A small example of that came this week when Geoffrey Cox refused to support the IMB on the basis that it broke international law by unilaterally over-riding the WA. Cox – himself a Brexiter, demonstrating that they are not all Ultras – had also as the then Attorney-General refused in the face great pressure to advise that the government could legally unilaterally exit what was then the backstop in May’s WA. That was eighteen months ago, but the Ultras are still convinced there is a way around having to honour what you agree to.

What we see in the government’s present contortions over the IMB is, as Rafael Behr wrote with customary insight this week, “the dawning, desperate realisation that there is no way to reconcile responsible statecraft with the fulfilment of Eurosceptic fantasy”. But the realisation, if that is what it is, has come too late. The UK government and Eurosceptic (or Brexiter) fantasy are now inseparable and – in their aims to reshape the civil service and judiciary – they threaten also to capture the institutions of the state.

Of course, for those who have the true faith, it is neither fantasy nor lies, and no event or experience can shake them into accepting reality. Some, at least, still genuinely believe that there is some kind of trade agreement that can largely replicate single market membership without any of the obligations. They still believe that either now or after a few months without a deal the EU will make such an agreement, no doubt at the behest of German car makers. They still believe that it doesn’t matter much anyway, as ‘WTO terms’ will be just fine. They still believe that the Irish border issue is one confected by Brussels and perhaps Dublin. The real blockade is of their brains: fanatical Brexiter ideology prevents the entry of reality.

What now?

Their fantasy will, as it always has done, seek to drive Brexit policy in a harder and harder direction. It is the only way of outflanking encroaching reality – if we push harder our dreams will come true, and if they don’t come true it is because we aren’t pushing hard enough - and is also the only way of sustaining the populist culture war that secures them the votes they need. Derogation from the European Convention of Human Rights is the already emerging next step, perhaps after a no (trade) deal Brexit and, if so, the subsequent ripping up of the WA in its entirety. For there is surely no way that either the financial settlement or the NI provisions would survive Brexiter pressure in the absence of a trade deal (though one must pray that those for citizens’ rights would).

That seems a perfectly feasible short-term scenario, and at the beginning of this week might have seemed the most likely. Certainly Sir Ivan Rogers, who has been right about most things to do with Brexit, believes that that there will be no deal.  But in this febrile atmosphere, and with a Prime Minister so lacking in consistency, principle, or even basic competence, Brexit predictions are more difficult than ever. So as the week ends it still looks possible that after all the chaos of this autumn (of which there is much more to come) clears away, some kind of fairly limited deal will be done. At least, there are a few straws in the wind – as regards both fisheries and even state aid – that this might be so.

If so, the economic consequences will be bad but not dramatic and not very visible, just a gradual decline of prosperity. Relations with the EU will be sour but not totally destroyed. Resentfully the UK will comply with the Irish Sea border, and the complex, rickety mechanisms for doing so may just about work. There will be years of ongoing negotiations on a piecemeal basis, and constant attempts by the UK to push to the limit and beyond what it had agreed. The Brexiters will be sulphurous and constantly urging more antagonistic stances, and still convinced that their fantasy would have been possible had it not been betrayed.

It’s hardly an inspiring vision, yet, limited though it is, an optimistic one which in another week may seem hopelessly unrealistic. For there are many obstacles to reaching even this very modest destination. Brexit has blockaded Britain from any more convivial one.

Negotiating events

With Britain having left the EU, this week saw the beginning of the negotiations about the future terms of UK-EU trade and other relationships. That anodyne sentence ought to anger leave voters as it is not what they were assured by the Vote Leave campaign which stated that “we will negotiate the terms of a new deal before we start any legal process to leave “ (p.11 of link). Given that we are constantly told that the government is enacting what people voted for it is perfectly reasonable to continue to record that what is happening is very far from that.

The talks begin in an atmosphere of deep distrust (£). Many believe that they will collapse with no deal being done, and some believe that this is actually the government’s plan. By contrast, the respected trade expert Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform makes the ‘relatively’ optimistic argument that a deal is still possible. But this, he says, is “largely due the UK’s lack of ambition”. In other words, a quite limited zero tariffs, zero quotas deal is conceivable although, as Lowe notes, even this will entail compromises to be made by both sides.

Here, too, we are a long way from what was promised. Not only was a deal supposed to be easy, but it was supposedly going to be a deep and special relationship, going well beyond a basic Free Trade Agreement. The flaws in that claim have been widely remarked upon, but the more fundamental – though related - issue is, indeed, that of the distrustful atmosphere, since it is this which now makes an extensive deal so unlikely and no deal at all quite possible.

The consequences of Brexiter negativity

There was no inevitability about that. I’m not by any means someone who imagines the EU to be perfect or faultless. But very little of this is down to them. The Referendum result was greeted with sadness and some bemusement, and subject to reasonable conditions as extensive a relationship as the UK wants has been on offer. The EU has been remarkably consistent about this, and has behaved very much as the UK would have wanted it to had it been another country leaving and the UK remaining a member. It has certainly been fairly rigid in its approach, but that’s an inevitable feature of being a multilateral rules-based entity. If it were not, Brexiters would be the first to denounce it for doing shabby back-room deals without regard for the consent of its members and the rules that bind them.

Rather, it has arisen because, from the beginning, Brexiters have reacted to their victory not with happiness but with anger, and this infected first Theresa May’s approach to Brexit and now Boris Johnson’s. Immediately, there was talk of not paying the divorce settlement, suspicion about the EU’s motives, disparaging comparisons with the USSR or Nazi Germany, and bellicose sabre-rattling.

Ridiculous expectations of what the UK could have as an ex-member were held even as the red lines ruling these out became harder and harder, and as it became clear these expectations would not be met the invariable reaction was to treat this as punishment. And when agreements were made, as at the end of phase 1 of the Article 50 talks, the UK immediately repudiated them as non-binding. This has developed to the current situation where radically different claims about what the Northern Ireland Protocol means threaten to derail the negotiations entirely. Here again we should recall that this only arises because of the false claim of the Leave campaign that Brexit would have no implications at all for the Irish border.

This is not ‘remainer negativity’. It is about, precisely, ‘Brexiter negativity’. Had they approached Brexit in a confident, positive, generous even joyful fashion then the outcome might have been very different. But instead the story has been one of hostility and dog-in-the-manger resentment, stoked up by a vitriolic media. Moreover, the onus was on Britain, as the initiator of the divorce, to set a magnanimous tone. Only at brief moments, such as May’s Florence speech, has there been such a tone, and that speech sounded more like a case for Britain joining the EU than for leaving. Johnson’s passive-aggressive references to ‘our European friends’ certainly lack any such magnanimity, whilst the childishly insulting antics of Farage and other Brexit Party MEPs in the European Parliament have undoubtedly done much damage to UK-EU relations. No such discourtesy has been evident from the EU.

Brexit beyond logic and reason

So we have now arrived at a point where out of sheer, dogmatic, remorseless antipathy to anything and everything remotely connected with the EU the UK is ripping up almost every form of co-operation, regardless of the costs. Examples include the Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System programme. This is a complicated story, involving two different aspects, the first being British companies’ rights to bid for certain sorts of contracts and the second being British access to its full military capabilities. In both these respects, what was offered to Britain, as a third country, was very limited. Still, negotiations were ongoing, and there was potential scope for an agreement, but in 2018 Theresa May pulled out of the talks and announced that the UK would develop its own system at massive expense, initially estimated to be £3-4 billion. This week, it emerged (£) that this system was delayed, over-budget, and mired in disputes.

Needless to say, Galileo did not even figure in the Referendum campaign, any more than did Euratom which the UK is also leaving in order to replicate its functions at national level at huge cost. Even Dominic Cummings has described that decision as “near-retarded” and, far from being the will of the people, only 10% of the public support it.

Certainly no one knew Brexit meant, or wanted it to mean, the latest government decision to pull out of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) – having ratified membership well after the Referendum, in 2018 - which is not even an EU body. This decision will have major consequences for knowledge-intensive businesses, in particular. Nor, especially now, is it likely to be a public priority to leave EWRS, the EU’s pandemic warning system, but that is what the government have just decided to do along with also deciding not to pursue participation in the European Arrest Warrant. Needless to say, again, none of this was set out even during the recent election campaign.

These last three examples all show a hardening of the UK’s position under Johnson even compared with May, and, along with other cases, they flow from two things. On the one hand, an almost pathological aversion to even the most minimal and peripheral roles for the ECJ. On the other hand, an idea that anything sought in the non-trade arena that is outside of a ‘Canada-style’ relationship will give the EU a negotiating advantage in the trade arena by conceding that the UK wants more from Brexit than such a relationship.

This assumes that the EU would drop its Level Playing Field (LPF) conditions for a trade deal since, on non-trade issues, the UK demonstrably ‘only wanted to be like Canada’. But that is a non sequitur, as the LPF demand is connected to the size and proximity of the UK economy to the EU – and hence to the trading relationship – and will exist quite independently of the non-trade considerations.

So, on either of these rationales, all that is achieved is a quite spectacular British cutting off of its nose to spite its face. And this is where, certainly, there is a distinction to be drawn between the EU and the UK in their approaches to Brexit. For the EU has been both rigid and, yes, ruthless in pursuit of its interests. There’s nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with the UK doing the same. But the UK is doing things which can in no conceivable sense be in its interests. That isn’t the same as saying that Brexit is not in the national interest – I think that is so, but clearly the government and a large part of the population disagree – it is saying that Brexit can be pursued without this attempt to totally eviscerate even the most limited and benign forms of mutually advantageous administrative cooperation.

Of course, some will say, that is because the Conservative Party is just acting in its own interests. But there are few votes in leaving the EWRS, for example. Of course, others will say, but it’s all about their shadowy hedge fund backers. But there is little money to be made from leaving the UPC, for example. And neither the EWRS nor the UPC will do much to stoke up the culture war, and are certainly not needed to do so.

In the absence of any discernible logic it’s difficult, therefore, to overstate the total insanity with which Britain is now approaching Brexit. It goes way beyond anything that is remotely necessary to ‘respect the 2016 vote’ and way beyond what any but a tiny handful of voters ever imagined Brexit to mean. It is certainly way beyond even the hard Brexit that Theresa May embraced for all that, as noted, some of it roots back to that time.

A question of loyalty

In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the conflict between the government and civil servants is intensifying, as discussed in my previous post. As if in confirmation of that analysis, almost immediately after that post came the dramatic resignation of Sir Philip Rutnam. In the post I alluded to the conflicts in the Home Office and also said that we could expect further push back from the civil service against the position in which it has been put by Brexit. These conflicts certainly shouldn’t be complacently downplayed as just the familiar fights between ministers and civil servants that have long occurred.

Whilst the issues about Priti Patel’s alleged behavior go beyond Brexit, it does lie at their heart in that the clashes with Rutnam began over the workload entailed by Brexit, and the risks entailed by seeking to deliver that work in the very short time frame the government is insisting upon in order to meet its self-imposed refusal to seek an extension to the transition period. Certainly the media and social media debate that followed Rutnam’s resignation demonstrated that it split along remainer versus leaver lines. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of that debate was the suggestion that since Patel is pursuing ‘the will of the people’ any behavior would be justified.

It is also hard to resist the conclusion that the resignation, and its manner, were part of a much wider battle in which, in the words of Sir Mark Sedwill, Head of the Civil Service, in a statement the week before, the civil service is asserting its “enduring work to protect and promote the interests of our citizens, communities and country”. The wording is crucial here, since this work is posited as something additional to (and therefore different from) serving the government and, unlike the government, is “enduring”. That is a direct contrast with the convention articulated in the 1985 Armstrong Memorandum that “the Civil Service as such has no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly constituted government of the day”.

Senior civil servants use language with great precision: Sedwill’s message was clear and intended, and it makes sense precisely in the context of a significant gap opening up between serving the government and serving the national interest. It’s a complicated distinction (for who is to say what is in the national interest, and why should civil servants have any particular role in defining it), but it does differ from simply disagreeing with policy.

Perhaps it is more akin to whistle-blowing in organizational contexts. Some may condemn particular instances of it, but most will agree that, in principle, there is a point at which individual conscience and professional values take precedence over organizational loyalties and legal undertakings. We don’t nowadays think much of the ethics of those German military officers who served the Nazi regime whilst not subscribing to it, because they treated their oath of loyalty as sacred (and, no, I’m not comparing the government to the Nazis, just making a point about the principle).

Not that the issue is necessarily, at least not yet, one of a complete divergence between politicians and civil servants. But the latter clearly have to be able to tell ministers if – as seems to have happened – the work needed for Brexit cannot be done in time. There’s no disloyalty in that, nor is there even necessarily any disagreement with Brexit. The problem arises if, as discussed in my previous post, stating such facts is taken to connote such disloyalty, and arise from a lack of true faith and belief. It is the importation of the Brexiter culture war into the corridors of power, bringing with it precisely the distrust and toxicity which has infected the negotiations with the EU, not to mention the entire country.

The power of events

So that brings us back to this first week of negotiations. As they ended, Michel Barnier spoke of the “serious divergences” between the two sides, with the expected issues being named – fishing, LPF, governance – but also security. In the past, the latter might not have figured in the list, and might have been seen as a potentially less contentious area, but the UK has decided not to open this chapter of the talks yet and the reasoning must presumably be that the government sees this as an area of leverage given Britain’s greater resources in this area, especially as regards intelligence capacity.

That has been hovering as an idea since Theresa May’s Article 50 notification letter, but then seemed to be softened in her Munich speech. Now it seems to have been weaponised again.  Even so, the overall sense of the first week’s talks was that they were less confrontational than might have been expected.

It is clearly far too early to predict how things are going to develop, but for what it is worth I am beginning to think that the government is going to become less bellicose and more flexible in its Brexit approach than has so far been the case. The reason for this is not so much Brexit itself but that, having started office in a very gung-ho manner, thinking that its parliamentary majority and disruptor ideology would enable it to sweep all before it, the experience of governing has already been chastening. The resignation of Sajid Javid, the flooding emergency, the court judgment about Heathrow expansion, the now growing row over Priti Patel, the Flybe collapse and, especially, the developing Coronavirus crisis have all played their part.

Suddenly, this feels like a beleaguered administration. The hubris I wrote about just last week is, already, looking just a little faded. In particular, Coronavirus has forced Johnson to bow to pressure to appear in public, forced ministers to appear on shows they had been boycotting, forced politicians and the public to recognize the need for experts and technocratic planning, and demonstrated the power of unexpected events to derail economic and political plans.

This analysis may be premature and flawed – over-reacting to what may be ephemeral news - but if it is right then it could lead to a limited, partial deal being struck in Brussels, under cover of the Coronavirus causing postponement of meetings (£), and this then used to justify some extension of the transition period under a different name in order to resolve outstanding issues. There are already a few speculations to that effect, as the links given show.

That’s not to say that this would be an especially desirable outcome. It might avert a new cliff edge next January, but would mean a continued slow burn of economic damage, deferred investment and so on. And that would further bolster the denialism about the adverse effects of Brexit, as these would be more gradual and more difficult to disentangle from other factors such as, indeed, the economic impact of the Coronavirus as well as all the other expected and unexpected things which will occur. Indeed, one reason to think that this scenario might have some appeal to the government is that it would be consistent with the attempt to lose all talk of Brexit and have it merge with the wider swirl of events.