Proustian moments at Le Café Brexit

There is an old saying that if you sit for long enough outside a café in Paris then, eventually, everyone you have ever loved will walk by. I was reminded of this not by the opening of the Paris Olympics but, perhaps more surprisingly, by an article this week in the Financial Times (£). In it, economics commentator Martin Sandbu ponders the possibility that, with the new government’s more positive and relatively more pragmatic approach to EU relations, some new agreement might be reached whereby the UK as a whole, and not just Northern Ireland, participated in the single market for goods.

It made for a kind of Proustian moment. For here, walking past Le Café Brexit, so to speak, was one, or perhaps two or even three, of the Brexit models we once knew so well, although Sandbu does not mention them by name in the article. Most obviously, it reprises the ‘Ukraine model’, first propounded, so far as I know, by Andrew Duff in November 2016. It also resembles the perhaps less familiar ‘Jersey model’, first propounded, again so far as I know, by John Springford and Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform in January 2018.

For that matter, it resembles what, in June 2018, seemed to be what Theresa May might seek to negotiate. (I mean by that not what ended up being her backstop proposal as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol in the Withdrawal Agreement, but what was floated as the potential final form of UK-EU relations.)

The sight of once familiar faces

Since the faces of these old ‘loves’ (if, indeed, they warrant that term) may now have been forgotten, it’s worth just briefly recalling their main features. Under the Jersey model, the UK would be in the single market for goods, including agriculture, accepting EU rules not just on products but things like state aid, and social and environmental standards, and be part of the EU VAT regime and, effectively, its customs union.

Under the Ukraine model*, there would be a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) effectively entailing membership of the single market for goods and some services, again accepting product rules as well as things like state aid and social and environmental standards. There would be customs cooperation, rather than a customs union (though Duff suggests the model could be augmented with a customs treaty). However, in a more expanded sense, the Ukraine model encompasses not just a DCFTA but an Association Agreement, encompassing wide-ranging political cooperation, including in areas of foreign, defence, and security policy.

Needless to say, in both cases there is considerably greater complexity than this (for which, see the links above), and no one regards them as precise templates for a UK-EU relationship rather than being indicative of a certain type or category of relationship. Why were they not pursued? One answer can be found in another remembrance of past things, this time the famous ‘Barnier staircase’, the diagram which encapsulated the various categories into which post-Brexit relations might fall, along with the declared UK red lines which ruled all of them out other than a ‘standard’ Free Trade Agreement indicated by the Canadian and South Korean flags on that step of the staircase.

The Jersey model doesn’t feature on the staircase, but the UK red lines which precluded it were partly the same as those for the Ukraine model, which does appear as one of the steps: no ECJ jurisdiction and regulatory autonomy. The Jersey model would also cross the red line of having an independent trade policy, at least as regards agreements about trade in goods. At the same time, it is worth recalling that the Ukraine model, certainly, and the Jersey model, possibly or even probably, does not cross the UK red line of ending freedom of movement of people.

Why are we seeing them again now?

Why, then, might these models have become relevant again, at least from a UK perspective? Firstly because, in a general sense, the Labour government has committed to “tearing down” the barriers to trade created by Brexit. These models would do so, at least for goods trade, by removing many of the non-tariff barriers to trade with the EU, and not just tariff barriers (as, to a large extent, the existing trade agreement does). Since it is goods trade, rather than services trade, which has been most badly affected by Brexit, this would, unlike some of the more modest reforms Labour have suggested, actually make a meaningful economic difference and this, in turn, would assist Labour’s broader growth agenda (it would also considerably, if not entirely, remove the need for the Irish Sea border).

Secondly, and more specifically, Sandbu stresses the significance, which I highlighted in my most recent blog post, of Labour’s planned legislation to shadow EU product safety regulations. It is an important development, rightly described as “a real blow to the Brexiters” by Niall Ó Conghaile in East Anglia Bylines, and one which requires no agreement with the EU. But it also seems likely that the government will agree ‘dynamic alignment’ of Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) regulations with the EU, at least if it is serious about reaching the ‘veterinary agreement’ which has been presented as central to its European policy. Of course, product safety and SPS are by no means exhaustive of the EU regulations, but the point is that, unlike the Tory governments, the present administration has no doctrinaire objection to regulatory alignment. Nor does Starmer have to contend with Brexit Ultras on his backbenches opposing it.

Dating isn’t the same as marriage

Even under the Tories, it was de facto accepted that the possibilities for regulatory divergence were very limited in a practical sense, which Is why they identified so few, and pursued even fewer. Moreover, as the recent example of ‘tethered plastic bottle caps’ has illustrated, to the bemusement of Brexiters like poor old Isabel Oakeshott (£), whatever the UK government may do, UK businesses will often decide to follow new EU regulations.

That’s for the fairly obvious reason that it is cheaper to produce to only one standard, especially if it is that of the larger market, but, in any case, to produce to the standard which is required by one market and is acceptable in the other market (i.e. in this case, tethered plastic bottle caps are now legally required for sale in the EU and acceptable, although not legally required, in Great Britain). Moreover, there is an additional incentive for UK manufacturers, specifically, to produce goods to a standard which will be acceptable in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland, where EU rules apply anyway (an early example being that of baby food manufacture).

This is just one illustration of something that Brexiters have never been able to understand. They (generally) manage to grasp that exported goods have to meet the standards of their destination market, but don’t understand why firms producing goods which are not for export should have to comply with the EU rules, depicting this as unnecessary red tape. And, with Brexit, they proceeded on that basis, only to find that doing so actually increased red tape. Hence, for the most part, the UK continues to comply with EU rules but without having any say in making them (or, at least, only a very limited say, in some cases, via the British Standards Institute’s membership of European standard-setting bodies). So much for ‘sovereignty’.

But the Brexiters also failed to understand something which is admittedly more complicated, and which is highly germane to the re-appearance of the Ukraine and Jersey models. The fact that goods produced in the UK meet EU standards doesn’t in itself make those goods legally saleable in the single market. Alignment doesn’t mean access, any more than dating means marriage. It is exactly the same issue, though in reverse, which some remainers fail to understand when they wrongly assume that goods sold in the UK marked ‘Not for sale in the EU’ (NFEU) must mean that those goods do not meet EU standards.

So, for this reason, even if the Labour government shadows EU regulations for product safety and in every other area, whilst that is helpful for businesses (by ensuring there is no need to produce to two standards**), that does not in itself replicate or gain the benefits of single market membership. But if regulatory alignment is no longer a red line for the UK, then there is no good reason not to make it de jure and not just de facto (in other words, to agree dynamic alignment not just in relation to SPS, but across the board for goods)? Similarly, if dynamic alignment for SPS is to be agreed, then that crosses the previous red line on ECJ jurisdiction, which would ultimately be needed in the event of, for example, disputes. So why not do the same for all goods?

In short, since, under Labour, the UK red lines which the Barnier staircase showed to preclude the Ukraine model have now, apparently, gone, then why could the Ukraine model not be revived? Indeed, given Labour’s very clear desire for a deep security pact, there seems little the government would object to, on doctrinaire grounds, in the wider model of not just a DCFTA but an Association Agreement.

One potential issue, with the Jersey, though not the Ukraine, model, is that it implies a customs treaty, which would limit the possibilities for an independent UK trade policy. And, despite the very limited economic rationale for such independence, Labour seem as committed to this as the Tories were. However, even the Jersey model would not preclude UK trade agreements with other countries on services, and whilst it is true that, historically, FTAs have been goods-focused, it is at least arguable that a smarter UK policy would be to develop a focus on services deals. Indeed, last year’s ‘Trading Up’ report from the Nuffield Foundation funded Economy 2030 project advocated precisely that, along with replicating the arrangements for goods in Northern Ireland across the whole UK economy.

It takes two to tango

So much for the UK side, but about the EU? Sandbu suggests that admitting the UK to the single market for goods would require the EU “to abandon the theology of four inseparable single market freedoms”. It’s a slightly irritating formulation, since it’s hardly a ‘theology’, but presumably one thing he has in mind is the issue of freedom of movement of people, which remains a UK red line under Labour. However, the Ukraine model does not entail such freedom of movement (and, hence, that did not feature on the staircase as precluding the model).

Nevertheless, in terms of the likelihood of the EU agreeing to it, an obvious objection is that the current Brexit trade arrangements actually work fairly well for the EU, and also that the dividing line between goods and services is an increasingly blurred one. Moreover, as a report this week emphasized, the EU are likely to want to see the existing Brexit deal fully implemented before considering a new one. It’s also questionable whether either the Jersey model (which really only arises from the historically curious status of the Channel Islands, and anyway relates to a tiny territory) or the Ukraine model (which relates to a much smaller economy than that of the UK, and is really predicated on being a path of entry to full EU membership, rather than an exit destination), would prove attractive or practicable from an EU perspective.

There is also the perennial problem of Britain’s Brexiters, despite them being out of government. Even Labour’s fairly modest policy on tracking EU product safety standards got a full frontpage headline in the Express declaring it to be ‘The Great Brexit Betrayal’, and the rage at something like a Ukraine-style Association Agreement can be all too easily imagined. So one question is whether Labour have the courage to defy the wave of criticism that would come from the press, and which might well impact on the electorate. My sense is that the answer is that they don’t, but I’ll come back to that.

The bigger issue is what this means for the EU. It is exactly the same problem as that which would be created by the UK rejoining the EU, or the single market as a whole: what happens if the Tories pledge to reverse whatever Labour agree, if and when they return to power? That is a huge concern for the EU, and one which we know the Brexiters would play on because at least one of them, David Frost, has already openly stated (£) that both the “Conservatives and the Reform Party must ... raise doubts on the EU side about how politically sustainable any deal might be in the medium term”. This wasn’t a reference to a single market for goods deal, or to an Association Agreement, specifically, but clearly would apply to them, and it did make explicit reference to the policy of regulatory ‘mirroring’.

It's tempting to think that what Frost and his fellow Brexit Ultras say is now irrelevant but, unfortunately, they retain a wrecking power. For the EU, having gone through the pain and aggravation of Brexit and reached what appears to be a durable form for the future relationship, and with many other issues far higher up its agenda, there’s not much incentive for a major change in that relationship anyway. But there still less if there is a real risk that, a few years later, the UK might pull out of it.

This in turn makes it less likely that Labour will seek such an agreement, even if they were minded to take on the domestic opposition to it. Why take that hit to embark on a policy which they can’t be sure of delivering? And this is a point that those who are impatient for progress, up to and including joining the EU, should take note of. Suppose Labour pursued being in the single market for goods, and were rebuffed by the EU. Then, regardless of the underlying reasons for it, it would become an established fact of British political life that ‘the EU will never give us more’.

It is this, I imagine, which informs Labour’s rather stealthy approach to alignment and to closer relations generally. Some, at least, within the government may well hope that gradually, if circumstances change, that will morph into a substantive change in the institutional form of the relationship, perhaps in a second term of office, perhaps with the Tory Party smashed again, and an eventual marginalization of the Brexiters. Such an approach could include, apart from a security pact, seeking the kind of detailed trade easements recently discussed by trade expert Sam Lowe.

The realities of single life

However, even if I am right to hypothesize that there is the coherent long game in play (and, obviously, I may not be), whilst the government ponders asking the EU to set up home together, it still has to face up to the issues of being single. The most immediate of these is the completion of full import controls on goods from the EU. This is one of the major hanging threads from Brexit, deriving from the twin scandals of Brexiters’ failure to understand that such controls were the necessary consequence of hard Brexit, and the Tory government’s abject incompetence in setting them up.

It bears repeating that the equivalent controls on the EU side were introduced, in full, the day after the transition period ended. That is now over three and half years ago, and not only has Britain repeatedly delayed doing the same but also, as I’ve detailed in the past, the Tory government created an almost incomprehensible array of partial and/or deferred implementations, with a patchwork of completion dates over the coming years. This is borne out by a National Audit Office report of May 2024, which was scathing about the costs, delays, and lack of clarity about the future timetable. Within that timetable, at least as things stand, October will see the introduction of the next phase of safety and security declarations, as well as some of the physical checks left hanging from the previous phase.

Labour’s intention is to make much of this unnecessary by reaching an SPS deal with the EU, but since negotiations will not even begin until early next year, not least because the new commission will not be in place until then, what happens in October? Another delay, with the attendant biosecurity risks? Meanwhile, the costs of preparing the new facilities will continue to mount, and port operators are already calling for compensation if it turns out these are not necessary following a new SPS agreement.

This is actually just the latest iteration of this issue, as changes that the previous government made to the checks required have already led to significant wasted expenditure on port facilities, as recently reported by Sophie Inge of Politico. There is hardly a better illustration of the absurd folly of Brexit than this saga of dishonesty, incompetence, cost, and the fact that rectifying it will entail further cost. It may also be another example of the way the Tories ‘salted the earth’ in anticipation of losing the election.

At least the import controls issue is one where, however difficult and expensive it may be, there is a potential solution. It is less clear that this is so for another Brexit-related issue the new government will soon have to face, the introduction, probably in November, of the EU’s new Entry/Exit System (EES) and, probably next May, of the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS). Taken together, these systems will introduce new processes for travellers entering the EU, and are likely to cause substantial extra delays at British airports, the Eurostar terminal, and ports, especially Dover.

Unlike import controls, these are not a hanging thread from Brexit, but they are a consequence of it. That’s not, as some Brexit commentators persist in claiming, because they are some sort of EU ‘punishment’. It is simply that they apply to all third country nationals entering the EU. The fact that they are likely to impact especially upon British nationals is because of the volume of travel between the UK and the EU. That, rather like the extent of UK-EU trade and supply chains, is yet another reflection of the basic facts of geography and economics that the Brexiters refused to understand. Now, it’s yet another price we are all going to have to pay for that ignorance.

As things stand, unless there is a further delay for technical reasons, which is possible, there isn’t much the government can do other than, as is reported to be happening, lobbying the EU to water down the impact of these new measures. But it’s not clear whether, or why, the EU will agree, and it is another example of the Brexiter myth of sovereignty that the only way Britain can ease the travel queues for its own citizens is by going ‘cap in hand’ to Brussels. What is in the government’s power, and has now been announced, is legislation to extend the rights of French border officials to operate on UK territory in Dover. That’s perfectly sensible, though, again, it scarcely betokens a great win for Brexit sovereignty.

Brexit: unloved and unlovable

It is still only the very early days of the new government, and it would be unrealistic to expect more than the beginnings of the re-set in the tone of relations with the EU, which we have started to see. In that sense, whilst it may be reasonable for commentators to take notice of foregone models of Brexit, these are still only passers-by at Le Café Brexit.

As we sip water from our bottle, with its tethered plastic top, we may have glimpses of paths not taken, and which might one day be available again, but for now we are stuck with the unloved and, even to its most ardent advocates, distinctly unlovable dishonesty, cost, and confusion of the Brexit we – in the collective sense of the polity – have chosen. As Proust put it, “it is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused”, and Brexit has certainly induced some especially stinging ones.

But Proust also suggested that “we are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full”. Although Brexit is already unpopular, that has still to happen. However, with the full impact of import controls and the new barriers to travel still to come, not to mention the accumulating drag on economic growth, it is perfectly possible that the harsh and bitter divorce created by May, Johnson and Frost may give way to a new kind of relationship and eventually, who knows, even a re-marriage. Or, since both parties will have changed, and lost times can never really be retrieved, perhaps that possibility would better be called, simply, a marriage.

Update 02/08/24, 08.26: since writing this post, I’ve seen that, just yesterday, it was reported that many of the import control processes and checks due to come into effect in October are going to be postponed, yet again, this time until the end of June 2025. Another Proustian moment! As before, this prevents, or defers, disruption, but at the risk of biosecurity breaches. It also maintains the farce of asymmetrical border controls. 

Notes

*Of course, this ‘Ukraine model’ was developed prior to the war with Russia, which has had many effects upon Ukraine’s relationship with the EU. My use of the term here simply refers to the basic type of the relationship, which is also illustrated by those the EU has with Georgia and Moldova. Note also that Andrew Duff has continued to develop and advocate this model since 2016, for example in a European Policy Centre discussion paper of March 2024.

**Some readers may be thinking the plastic bottle tops example makes this point irrelevant, since businesses don’t need the UK government to shadow EU regulations if they, as businesses, do so anyway. However, the bottle top example is of a particular sort, in that the EU standard, whilst not required in the GB market, is entirely legal here. But, absent of UK shadowing of EU regulations, there could be cases in which goods conforming to EU standards were illegal to sell in terms of UK standards. The legislation prevents this happening, at least within its domain of safety standards, and albeit with some caveats.

I am not planning to post again until Friday 30 August, unless there is a major Brexit development. During that period, I will be pondering the future of this blog, which by then will be about to enter its ninth year, and circumstances have become very different. I might just continue as before, but other possibilities include scaling back from a weekly to a fortnightly, or even monthly, post; or scaling back to posting only whenever there is a major, or interesting, development however frequently or infrequently that may be. I’d be interested in the view of readers on this, and in particular whether a regular post (so you know when it will be coming) is preferable to an ‘as and when’ post, and, if a regular post is preferable, whether every week, every fortnight, or every month would be better. If you have a view, please leave a comment below this post, or a message on X-Twitter.

A normal week in crazy Brexit Britain

It has been a pretty standard week for directly Brexit-related news – I put it that way because in many ways almost everything the government does, from demanding that the BBC project ‘British values', to badging the new rail system as ‘Great British Railways’, to giving British people the borders they ‘deserve' can be seen as framed by Brexiter sensibilities. And, of course, this week’s Dominic Cummings show grows organically out of the politics of Brexit, not least because but for Brexit neither he nor, possibly, Boris Johnson would ever have been in power. It can also be seen as the (final?) implosion of the elevation of the Vote Leave cabal to the centre of government in 2019.

More of Cummings below, but, these wider issues aside, what has been going on with Brexit this week is mainly a continuation of the issues discussed in my previous post, namely the row over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) and the nature of Britain’s post-Brexit trading relationships.

The NIP: the calm before the next storm?

As regards the NIP, RTE’s Tony Connelly provided his usual excellent commentary of the current situation in his blog post last Saturday. It gives a wealth of detail on the issues at stake, which I won’t repeat. Nor will I repeat the points I made last week about the deeper roots of this current situation in Northern Ireland.

However, there is one aspect of those roots which I didn’t mention but which is an important part of what is happening now. From the beginning, it was an article of faith amongst Brexiters that a trade deal with the EU would be easy because the UK was already aligned with EU rules. This was stated by numerous leading Brexiters before the referendum, was the substantive rationale for Liam Fox’s much-mocked ‘easiest deal in history’ claim, and was re-stated in David Davis’s preface to the first Brexit White Paper in 2017:

“We approach these negotiations from a unique position. As things stand, we have the exact same rules, regulations and standards as the rest of the EU. Unlike most negotiations, these talks will not be about bringing together two divergent systems but about managing the continued cooperation of the UK and the EU.”

As I and many others pointed out whenever such claims were made, they were nonsense, precisely because this was a unique situation in which the aim was not to move towards alignment (in which case, of course, existing alignment would make that process effortless) but to move away from it; not to bring two divergent systems together, but to make two aligned systems diverge. This became all the more true under Boris Johnson and David Frost’s approach to Brexit, which made freedom to diverge from EU regulations the acid test of ‘sovereignty’.

The same basic confusion is now being played out in the NIP rows, especially with respect to sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) rules and checks. Frost repeatedly, for example at last week’s Select Committee, makes the point that the EU should operate a lighter, ‘risk-based’ approach for the UK because of “the fact that we both operate the high food standards which are, in most areas, extremely similar”. Yet at the same time he is adamant that dynamic alignment with EU rules is unacceptable.  So he wants the benefit of being aligned … without making any commitment to being aligned. It is a specific version of the more general Brexiter proposition, discussed in last week’s post, that the UK has left but shouldn’t be treated as if it has left.

It is this which creates what Connelly describes as the current “dangerous stand-off” between the UK and the EU, and although there is seemingly a lull in hostilities at the moment it seems highly likely that there will be a further outbreak in the next few weeks. The European Commission President, at the EU leaders’ meeting this week, made it clear that the NIP must be fully implemented, whereas the UK continues to seek “common sense” solutions (translation: don’t hold us to what we agreed), and wants these in place in time for the mid-June ‘marching season’ in Northern Ireland.

Some believe that Frost will quietly cave in, via some face-saving formula, and that is quite possible. But my sense remains (for reasons discussed in detail in my post a couple of months ago) that he and the government are convinced that the ‘hardball’ tactics of flouting the NIP pay dividends. If so, then after this period of resumed negotiations there will be another explosion. That diagnosis is given extra weight by calls this week from International Trade Secretary Liz Truss to scrap Irish Sea border controls altogether.

Strange days indeed

In this, Truss is presumably burnishing her credentials with the party membership as a possible successor to Johnson (as, no doubt, with her hardline anti-immigration stance, is Priti Patel), in which she is aided by the Brexit tabloids’ adoration of her for delivering the UK’s new trade deals – or deal, really, since the only substantively new trade deal she has (almost) done is that with Australia. Yet the Brexiters’ reactions to that deal have been mixed. Some are breathlessly enthusiastic, such as Dominic Lawson (in a Sunday Times article demolished almost line-by-line by the NFU’s Director of Trade and Business Strategy). Others, notably the ‘journalist’ Isabel Oakeshott, are appalled that it marks “the death knell of the traditional British farm” (an outburst for which she was roundly mocked).

Certainly there is something strange in the Tory Party choosing to alienate what has always been a central part of its political constituency but, then, as its treatment of the City shows, the Brexit Tory Party is a very different beast to that of bygone years. That said, trade expert Sam Lowe argues that, in practice, the deal with Australia is unlikely to have a huge impact, whether that be on farmers or consumers, to the extent of it being “almost unobservable”. That is because, in brief, tariff abolition is no longer the central issue in terms of trade liberalization, and because nothing will change the fact that the UK and Australia are geographically remote – and, as the Brexiters never seem to understand, distance is a key determinant of trade volumes.

Nevertheless, the strangeness of the situation can be seen by imagining what would have happened if, whilst a member of the EU, the EU had struck a deal with Australia on similar terms (something highly unlikely precisely because of the possible effects on farmers). Almost certainly the Brexit press would be denouncing it as a ‘Brussels Betrayal of British Beef’ and, again almost certainly, the UK government would have vetoed any such deal. Yet when made by Britain, it is hailed as a triumph. (It’s worth noting that this point was raised by Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Trade Secretary this week, a further welcome sign that Labour are now becoming bolder in challenging the government’s post-Brexit policy).

Nor does the strangeness end there. Within the Brexiters’ central argument that what was crucial was the restoration of the sovereignty of the British parliament, a specific sub-theme was that with Britain making its own trade deals, these would be subject to debate and scrutiny by the British people’s elected representatives. Yet, in fact, as the Department for International Trade oxymoronically stated this week “we have always been clear parliament will be able to scrutinise Free Trade Agreements following signature rather than at the stage where agreement in principle is reached”. It need hardly be said that this renders scrutiny totally meaningless and represents, in microcosm, the ‘war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’ doublethink of Brexit as a whole.

An incoherent strategy …

What lies behind all this is, as James Kane of the Institute for Government explains, the lack of a coherent post-Brexit trade strategy. To the extent that there is any strategy at all it seems to simply be that ‘signing trade deals’ is a good thing because, as a member of the EU, Britain was not able to do so. Supposedly, the ‘big prize’ now in sight is accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Barely mentioned, if at all, prior to the Referendum, this emerged under Liam Fox as being a key post-Brexit aspiration. It has become all the more so since the prospects of a UK-US trade deal have receded, and to some extent it is seen as a substitute for such a deal (if the US were to revert to the pre-Trump aspiration of also joining what is now CPTPP, which is not clear).

Thus Truss, and the government, are explicitly claiming that the US-Australia deal paves the way for CPTPP membership. This is not, as they sometimes imply, because it is a pre-requisite of membership but because it arguably smooths the way to it since what would have been Australia’s key ask during CPTPP negotiations (tariff-free access for, especially, agricultural products) will already have been satisfied. The interplay between the UK’s CPTPP accession negotiations and those with Australia (and the same, presumably, applies to New Zealand other CPTPP members) is a fascinating issue, as a discussion last week between trade experts Dmitry Grozoubinski, Sam Lowe and Anna Isaacs showed.

The general takeaway from that discussion might be that international trade negotiations comprise a series of complex interrelated trade-offs between multiple parties. For example, the most important practical consequence of what the UK has agreed with Australia about beef tariffs may be what that leads to in terms of what is demanded of it by the US or Brazil. These complexities require a strategy which goes beyond simply assuming that any deal is a good deal and the more deals the better. Or, at least, it does if the aim is maximizing the UK’s economic interest rather than the performative one of generating good headlines for domestic political reasons.

… derived from an incoherent project …

However, that brings us back to the basic incoherence of Brexit as an economic project. Since distance does matter so much, fiddling around making trade deals with remote countries is fairly pointless. Given that Brexit has happened, it’s worth doing, so far as it goes, but it isn’t a benefit, still less a triumph, for Brexit; it’s just some fairly minor damage limitation.

A new ONS trade report is a sharp reminder of this. To try (although it’s not completely possible) to disentangle Brexit and Covid effects they compare the first quarter of 2021 with the first quarter of 2018, and report that trade with the EU decreased by 23.1% (whereas trade with non-EU countries decreased by just 0.8%, suggesting that the Brexit negotiating process and its outcome, rather than the pandemic, was a key driver). The report also shows that, since the end of the transition, post-Brexit trade arrangements have become a far bigger challenge for businesses than the pandemic. The nature of those challenges, especially for small businesses, was spelt out in minute detail in testimony given to the UK Trade and Business Commission yesterday. It is also clear from a new survey showing that 56% of UK businesses think Brexit has had a negative effect on them and just 5% that it has been positive.

Given that, prior to Brexit, the EU-27 accounted for about 50% of UK trade, it’s obvious that to compensate for such massive decreases in trade with the EU, that with non-EU countries would have to be revolutionised and the constraints of distance make that virtually impossible, no matter how many, or even how good, the trade deals the UK strikes. In short, far from the promise that “Brexit will cement our status as a great trading nation” (£), it is causing Britain to become a less great trading nation. No doubt Brexiters and the government will try to spin these latest figures as showing that the UK is ‘re-balancing’ away from its dependence on the EU for trade to being a ‘truly Global Britain’, because of course it (already) means that trade with the EU is less than 50% of UK trade. But it will be nonsense – it just means that the trade pie as a whole has shrunk.

In a related development, and following from the recent failure of the UK and Norway to reach a deal on fishing, it now seems likely that the UK-Norway trade deal will collapse. This was a temporary rollover deal, agreed last December, to be superseded by a permanent and possibly more extensive agreement. But Norwegian politicians are concerned about the impact on their farmers of tariff-free British beef and cheese imports. Note that although Australia’s economy (USD 1.4 trillion, 2019) is much larger than Norway’s (USD 403 billion, 2019), Norway is a more significant trading partner for the UK (£27,436 million, 2019) than is Australia (£16,041 million, 2019).

It’s instructive to see the reactions of leave voters to the news that the Norway deal may fall through. These included rage that this is punishment for leaving the EU (apparently oblivious to the fact that Norway isn’t in the EU) and suggestions that Norway should realise that, being the smaller economy, it needs a deal more than the UK (a strange inversion of what they used to say about the UK-EU negotiations). As always, bellicose victimhood is the guiding theme.

… rooted in an inherent contradiction

The issue of protecting farmers, whether Norwegian or British, goes to the heart of the trade dilemmas Brexit poses for the UK. Whilst Brexiters deride the EU as a ‘protectionist racket’ (an accusation based more on a bad pun than a serious analysis), the protection of agriculture is, globally, almost invariably the most contentious of trade policy issues. In part, as Brexiters should appreciate, that is because of the complex interactions of national identity, soil, and foodstuffs. As regards Brexit, it is also because of the peculiar contradiction of nationalism and globalism. Many who voted leave believed that it would mean not just good news for farmers but the restoration of the heavy industries which have declined in the years since Britain joined the EEC (though of course that wasn’t the cause).

Those votes were immediately taken by the Brexit global free traders as permission to pursue their own agenda – most notably in Fox’s ‘Manchester speech’, made in September 2016 before the hard Brexit of leaving the single market and customs union had even been announced. And, as the deal with Australia suggests, the UK is going to concede tariff-free access to British markets whilst getting almost nothing in return. The gamble Johnson’s government is making is that leave voters will swallow this on politically nationalistic grounds (‘Britain is a global trading nation once more’) and ignore, or be unaware of, its consequences for economic nationalism.

In this gamble, the government may be assisted by one of the strangest features of the way that Brexiters are framing post-Brexit trade deals, and trade more generally. Rather than thinking of these issues in terms of economic rationality or the economics of competitive advantage, they seem to imagine them in terms of ‘cultural affinity’. That imagination (which is what it is, since it involves a hopelessly outdated and sentimental apprehension) is most obvious in the still thriving CANZUK fantasy, but also applies to an Australia-only deal.

The politics of “gormlessness”

It is a gamble that is quite likely to succeed. And everyone knows why, even though it is deemed unsayable in what in 2017 I called the new political correctness of Brexit: the coalition of voters which chose Brexit and which now supports Johnson’s government is largely ignorant of the realities of contemporary trade, business, and international relations. It’s this which unites the Home Counties golf club bore, pontificating about how he ran his import-export business just fine before the EEC, with the coastal town pensioner lamenting that ‘I just want my country back’. Despite the overlap between leading Brexiters and free speech union libertarians that obvious fact – far more than anything proscribed by ‘woke’ activists – is something that cannot be said because to do so is, supposedly, ‘elitist’.

It is this electoral base which chose to endorse what, as Cummings has so eloquently told us, is the “completely crazy” situation of him and Boris Johnson being in positions of power. Almost all attention has focussed, understandably, on what Cummings’ testimony revealed about the dysfunctional government and woefully inadequate leadership during the coronavirus crisis. But it is crucial to remember that at the same time this same government and this same leadership were engaged in the highly complex trade and cooperation negotiations with the EU.

More specifically, it was in this period that Johnson refused to extend the transition, despite the chaos that was going on. It was in this period that he – apparently with the support of both Cummings and Frost – threatened to break international law with the Internal Market Bill. It was throughout this period that he was constantly threatening to end the transition with no trade deal in place and claiming that the UK was fully prepared to cope with the disruption that would have ensued. And it was from the decisions taken in this period that many of the present consequences of Brexit arise.

Not only that but, whilst Cummings may have gone, Johnson and his Brexit government remain in place. And just as, vaccines notwithstanding, the government continues to bodge the management of the pandemic so too does it continue, as Fintan O’Toole put it this week (£), to “strategise gormlessness” in its approach to Brexit, especially in continuing to ascribe its malign effects to others. It remains to be seen whether the Cummings revelations about coronavirus policy dent Johnson’s support within his electoral base, but it’s unlikely that his ‘gormless’ Brexit strategy will do so. After all, it is a strategy designed precisely to appeal to that base.

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.

Brexiters need to stop campaigning and start governing

Brexit day has come and gone. But as has been widely remarked, though apparently not universally understood, nothing really changes in the Transition Period, so there is no radical rupture in daily life.

The big question is whether that also means that nothing really changes in the way that Britain approaches Brexit. For last Friday did mark a rupture in one, crucial, way. Brexit, in the formal sense of Britain leaving the EU has happened, and a new phase has begun.

The issue now is not so much whether remainers accept that (£) – they don’t have much choice anyway - it’s whether Brexiters do. In particular, the issue is whether Brexiters – who now, unequivocally, form the government – are able to shift from campaigning to, indeed, governing.

What would this mean?

Stopping the lies

The first and most important thing that would have to change is for Boris Johnson, his government, and all the Brexiter commentators and advisers to stop lying. If they are serious about Brexit they need to face up to the realities of what it entails and that means telling the truth to themselves and others.

To take an example from this week. Hardly had the celebrations ended than Johnson was reported to be “infuriated” that the EU had “reneged” on its commitments to strike a ‘Canada- style’ free trade deal by now insisting on ‘Level Playing Field’ (LPF) commitments in terms of state aid, workers’ rights, environmental standards and so on. But that this was the EU’s position has been clear for at least a year and, more importantly, was set out in the text of the Political Declaration (paragraph 77) that Johnson himself signed. It’s this kind of constant gaslighting that would need to stop.

There’s more to it than that, though. Suppose that it were true that the EU had hardened its position, or suppose that it does, indeed, harden position in the coming months. In that case: welcome to the real world – there’s no point in having a foot-stamping, ‘it’s not fair’ tantrum.  This is what Brexit means. This is what you wanted. The UK is now a third country with respect to the EU, which will pursue what it judges to be its own interests and those of its member states. Britain is no longer a member state, and the EU will, quite properly, have no regard for our interests.

It seems strange to have to remind Brexiters that the EU is not some cuddly, kind uncle, showering largesse upon the world. It is ruthless in pursuit and protection of its own interests. So too will be the US, or Japan, or China, or India, or any other country with which the UK seeks to made trade deals, including ‘cosy’ Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Nor is this confined to matters of trade, and trade itself is linked with other issues. That is evident in the row over Huawei 5G with the US (£) and the report that Spain will have a veto over the application of any UK-EU deal to Gibraltar. The latter caused much pearl-clutching from Brexiters but, again, there is nothing new here. It was the subject of one of the earliest rows in the Brexit process, back in April 2017. And as I wrote at the time, this row contained several lessons for how Brexit would proceed.

These lessons included, again, the need for realism. Just as the UK used Spain’s accession to the EU in 1986 to garner EU support for the UK’s rights over Gibraltar (in that case, to have an open border with Spain), so the converse applies now that the UK is leaving. Another lesson was that the UK needed to drop the idea that only France and Germany mattered in terms of negotiating with the EU. As the pivotal influence that Ireland has had over the last three years should have demonstrated, that simply isn’t true. The EU will negotiate as a bloc, on the basis of a mandate from the Council, and with regard to the (various) interests of all its members.

Getting real

If Brexiters are going to get serious about governing, what also has to end is responding to these and similar things through the victimhood narrative of being punished by the EU or the bullish assertion that it all proves that Britain is right to leave. These are campaigning stances – arguments, if you believe them, for leaving the EU. But Britain has left the EU. The campaign is over. It’s time to get real.

That ‘getting real’ also includes being honest about the economic and political effects of what is being done. A trade deal, of any sort, with the EU is going to do little for services. A minimal trade deal will do relatively little even for goods. If the approach is to be de-alignment then recognize, as Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform explains, that “flexibility does not come for free”.

All reputable economic forecasts show that, whatever the trade deal, we will be somewhat poorer and if there is no trade deal we will be much poorer. There’s no longer any need to try to rubbish those forecasts (or forecasts in general, although in fact, with one notable exception namely that of ‘Economists for Brexit’, these have been fairly accurate). If they turn out to be wrong then they will turn out to be wrong, but admit that, at the moment, that’s the most likely outcome. So plan on that basis.

Trade deals with those countries with which the EU has deals are not all going to roll over on identical terms, and even where they do this will only put the UK back to the position it would have been without Brexit. Trade deals with new countries, even the US, will not make a huge difference and will not off-set the loss of trade with the EU. Be honest and realistic about the priorities and possibilities for global trade policy as Sam Lowe (again, but in a different article) suggests.

There are going to be border checks and other formalities between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so stop pretending otherwise. Recognize that in due course that may lead to Irish reunification. Also recognize that Brexit has made the case for another independence referendum in Scotland all but unanswerable, or at all events ensured that calls for it will be increasingly vociferous. It will surely happen eventually. So accept that and, with it, the possibility that Scotland will leave the UK.

Almost all of these things are, in my view, damaging. But that argument is over. Now that they are going to happen what matters is, again, for Brexiters to stop trying to win a campaign argument and start being realistic. If they think they are a price worth paying then so be it, but admit the price and start working out how to go about paying it.

And getting real means dropping all the tired old lines – still being wheeled out by the likes of David Davis - about how Britain’s trade deficit with the EU, and the needs of German car makers, guarantee a great trade deal. They helped win the campaign, but the campaign is over. They were lies but they’re no longer needed. Or, for those who want to insist they are true, they are still redundant as we’ll soon get that great trade deal anyway.

Developing a serious strategy

The second big change that would be needed is also about truthfulness and realism, but on a bigger canvas. I’ve several times argued that Brexit is not just a strategic error but, actually, a strategic absence. Again, that’s linked to its having been a campaign and protest movement. The historian Professor Robert Saunders has provided a more developed version of that argument in a truly superb essay on his blog.

It’s well worth reading in full but, in brief, Saunders argues that Britain joining the EU was a belated strategic response to its changed economic and geo-political situation in the aftermath of the Second World War. It may, he says although he does not agree, have been the wrong response, as Brexiters believe. But that does not mean that the challenges it responded to have gone away.

Moreover, he argues that the British Euroscepticism that ultimately gave rise to Brexit has its roots in a 1990s analysis of the world order which, in 2020, is redundant. Therefore we need, in his words, to get “serious about the choices in front of us” which “will require more imagination, more humility and a more clear-eyed appreciation of the options than anyone has yet offered in Britain’s tortured Brexit debate”.

It is a proposal in line with Sam Lowe’s analysis of post-Brexit trade priorities, referred to earlier, in which he argues that a long-term trade strategy must have a coherent economic or geo-political purpose rather than being a search for “political trophies”, although of course trade strategy is only one aspect of the wider point.

All this I agree with. Developing such a strategy will be difficult and the more so because it needs to be done quickly. It needs a big public conversation which should have preceded the Referendum or, at least, been developed once the result was known. ‘Global Britain’ is not such a strategy but rather, as the Foreign Affairs Select Committee put it in 2018, a slogan in need of substance.

Showing competence

Given the current time pressure and all the operational things that will need to be done – for example in developing new customs procedures – there is probably not the political or administrative bandwidth to achieve it in the next eleven months. But it is important to at least begin, and not just because such a strategy is needed in itself. Rather, along with being truthful and realistic about what Brexit means, doing so would at least send a signal of competence. That would do something to repair the battering Brexit has given to the UK’s image abroad, but it would also be an important domestic signal.

There is much talk of the need to reach out to those who voted for Brexit because they had been ‘left behind’ (though that could and should have been done long ago, without Brexit). But there is also a need to reach out to remainers, and perhaps to a particular group amongst them. Call them ‘the Establishment’ if you must, but like it or not the many business people, professionals, administrators and so on who, as the demographics of the Referendum voting suggest, largely did not want Brexit are going to have to deal with its effects.

In my previous post I argued at length how dangerous it is that we are embarking on a complete change of direction whilst being so internally divided. That would be true even if Brexit was the most wonderful idea there had ever been. Any such policy needs some minimal level of buy-in from those who have to deliver it.

Having failed for three years to provide the consensus-building leadership that might have created that, the government now has a final chance to at least demonstrate that it will approach Brexit in a realistic way, being truthful about its actual effects and challenges. I don’t suggest that this would win over many remainers, but it might at least persuade some that Brexit has moved from unicorn fantasies to a deliverable, if still to them undesirable, project.

Getting out of the echo chamber

A final part of the shift from campaigning to governing would be for government ministers to look beyond the advisors who – I assume – they most closely rely on. Many of them, including Dominic Cummings but not limited to him, have their background in, precisely, the Leave campaign. Relatedly, the whole shady network sometimes known as the Tufton Street mafia is a big part of the problem, because it is from this that so much of the misinformation has flowed. Again, this would be the case even if Brexit were the most wonderful of ideas. It’s always a problem to confine advice to ‘true believers’ as it is a recipe for groupthink and poor decision making.

For Brexiters to recognize this involves dropping the idea – born both of being in campaign mode but also of a victim mentality – that they face a ‘remainer conspiracy’, whose lack of positivity will put a brake on Brexit. Yet if Brexit is supposed to be a realistic project, rather than an act of faith-healing, it requires that ministers get technically competent advice rather than just the soothing balm of being told what they want to hear.

Equally, if the government is really serious about ‘bringing the country back together’ then it would start engaging with people outside of the doctrinaire Brexiter camp. Instead, this week has seen journalists excluded from briefings and business groups not invited to Johnson’s speech on his Brexit ‘plans’. Echo chambers are bad enough on social media, and they’re certainly no basis for effective government.

Will any of this happen?

The short answer, of course, is ‘no’. The very nature of last weekend’s celebrations gives a clue as to why. It showed how, for many who were celebrating, the pleasure comes from triumphing over remainers rather than leaving the EU. That triumph can be endlessly relived, but doing so won’t deliver Brexit. Some, burning EU flags, are more concerned with hatred for the EU than with what Britain outside the EU would be. If Brexit leaders continue to pander to these two sentiments then, as for the last three years, Brexit will continue to be entirely focussed on the campaign, not on governing.

Still others were pro-Brexit but were protesting against Johnson’s Brexit for not being the real thing. That betrayalism, which no doubt Farage and some in the ERG will continue to articulate, means that Johnson is likely to continue to approach Brexit as a tactical party management device rather than as a matter of policy delivery. In any case he is an unlikely person to lead a shift from campaigning, given that it entails both being honest and also giving attention to practical detail and delivery. These things are hardly his most obvious strengths, and were he minded to try he would have started immediately after Brexit day, if not indeed when he became Prime Minister.

Instead, we’ve already seen in this first week we that nothing’s going to change. Apart from the bogus claims about the EU having suddenly invented its LPF requirements, we had the equally bogus idea that the UK could prosper with an ‘Australian-style deal’. In trade terms, since there is no EU-Australia free trade agreement, that just means no trade deal i.e. WTO terms (plus a few bits and pieces). Presumably Johnson’s advisors have suggested his formulation sounds more palatable.

So, still no honesty and, given the devastating effects it would have, still no realism and still no strategy. Johnson’s Brexit speech, according to politics Professor Tim Bale, was “of little substance” and did not have “a whole lot of realism”. Childishly, but in line with government policy (£), he refused to use the word ‘Brexit’. Unsurprisingly, the pound fell by about 1% against both the dollar and the euro as he spoke.

To the victor the spoils

That is one small example of the fact that Brexiters, led by Johnson, will now have to confront reality even if they refuse to be realistic. Slogans and rhetoric won the campaign, but neither they nor ‘true belief’ will make a difference to that reality. Strangely, those on the free-market Right, many of whom are such ardent Brexiters, used to know that ‘you can’t buck the market’.

So whatever kind of deal gets agreed with the EU it will have real consequences on business locations and investments, on growth, on the pound, on prices and on employment. They will happen even if Brexiters deny them, or discount them as ‘remainer negativity’, as if they were still campaigning rather than governing, still trying to win the argument rather than delivering their promises.

Brexiters are no longer, if they ever were, the victims they portray themselves to be. As Nigel Farage said at last week’s celebrations, “the war is over, we have won” (£). To the victor, go the spoils. They are now ‘the elite’ and ‘the Establishment’ but with that power comes responsibility and accountability. Like it or not, they can no longer run away from the consequences, but there’s no sign that they are going to stop trying.