Reset means Reset

Regular readers will realise that this isn’t posted on a Friday morning, as normal. For various reasons I’ve had to post early this time. In line with the new fortnightly pattern, the next planned post is still Friday 27 September.

In my previous post I wrote about the new government’s lack of a post-Brexit strategy, at least in public. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so an inevitable consequence of this absence is speculation and criticism. What, beyond a ‘reset’ is the plan, and what does a reset mean? Recent examples include The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley, suggesting that Starmer’s agenda risks antagonizing both pro- and anti-Brexit voters, whilst achieving little of value. Meanwhile, Luke McGee of the I identifies divisions within the Cabinet over how to proceed.

But it’s not just a matter of commentators trying to make sense of things. Political actors are also seeking to shape events. For example, the former leader of Labour MEPs, Richard Corbett, has outlined some of the steps the government could take within its ‘red lines’ whilst warning that these impose a caution which is at odds with the scale of what is needed. TUC leader Paul Nowak gave backing for Starmer’s re-set, but in doing so pushed for more extensive agreements on, especially, youth mobility than the government is publicly willing to entertain. And Labour MPs, along with those of some opposition parties, are pressing the government for clarity and action.

Talk about negotiations

There are some parallels with the period in 2016 when Theresa May kept insisting that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ prior to announcing that it meant hard Brexit. Now ‘reset means reset’. In both cases, in the background intense lobbying was going on within the UK. Meanwhile, in the EU, a steady process of consensus-building was developing about what Brexit would mean, and there are signs that something similar is happening now. A report of a leaked EU internal briefing document (£) suggested that Labour’s plan for a travelling artists’ mobility agreement would not be accepted, and its other publicly stated asks would not be straightforward.

Of course there are also important differences between these periods. Dealing with Brexit was the defining task for the UK government under May, and a major task for the EU. Neither of those things are true now. Moreover, then, there was the prospect (once Article 50 was triggered) of a defined negotiating process. Now, there is no equivalent. This makes a recent article in the Telegraph by Daniel Hannan, entitled “the UK has the whip hand in negotiations with the EU”, even sillier than his usual offerings. For, apart from the fact that it shows that the ‘they need us more than we need them’ fantasy still persists, in this case there are no negotiations with the EU over Brexit. Even holding them will be a UK request that may or may not be granted. In other words, Britain is a demandeur not simply within the negotiations but in seeking them.

Hannan and his ilk have less direct influence now, of course, but the continued existence of this kind of discourse can only feed suspicions in the EU that the UK polity as a whole has yet to purge itself of Brexitism. It’s tempting to add ‘despite the new government’, except that the fear that drives Labour’s timidity is itself a sign of the hold Brexitism still has.

At all events, there is little reason to expect any immediate clarity in what the reset is going to consist of, or achieve. That’s partly because even the first steps to that, of developing and improving relations, are still only just being taken, Starmer’s trip to Dublin last weekend to – yes, of course – ‘reset’ those with Ireland being a recent important example. Relatedly, it is because nothing much of substance is going to happen until the new EU Commission is in place, effectively at the beginning of next year. For that reason, it’s also probably sensible not to read too much into reports, such as that of the leaked briefing document, of what may or may not be agreed.

Familiar farces

During this ‘reset means reset’ period, many of the now familiar features of the post-Brexit (or should we call it pre-reset?) landscape continue. These include reports that the new government will yet again postpone the full introduction of import controls, with what was supposed to have been the October phase now put off until next July. It’s the latest iteration of a farcical saga which I’ve discussed in detail at the time of previous postponements.

This time there is the added feature that whereas, apparently, the new government thinks the need for controls will disappear if and when, following the ‘re-set’, there is an SPS agreement, the EU seem likely to be unwilling to agree to any re-set until the provisions of the original deal have been fully implemented. This includes the provisions for goods coming from Ireland to Great Britain, also much delayed, with construction work beginning only last week on the necessary facilities at Holyhead port. These facilities are due to be completed “sometime in 2025”. We will see.

Even more farcical, although, paradoxically, at the same time eminently sensible, is the latest retreat from the utter absurdity of the UKCA mark. Here too there has been a long history in delays to the date by which CE quality marks would cease to be valid, and UKCA would become mandatory. I discussed this issue in detail in August 2023, when the plan was “indefinitely postponed”. However, as I noted then, some products were not included in that, one case being construction products, where CE marks were still due to be phased out by the end of June 2025.

Last week, the government announced that this date would not apply and gave no other in replacement, suggesting that, for these products too, postponement is now indefinite. So far as I know, no such announcement has been made as regards medical devices, the other main area not covered by the 2023 indefinite postponement, with CE marking for these products due to be phased out by 2028 in some cases and 2030 in others. But I think it is all but inevitable that these will also be dropped.

UKCA was a particularly ludicrous piece of Brexit hubris, which has unravelled because in practice no one wanted it, and the country couldn’t afford it. In that sense, it is a metaphor for Brexit itself, albeit that, unlike Brexit, it proved easy to unravel by simply not doing it. Every time we see the Conformité Européenne mark on a product will serve as a reminder of that.

Evidently neither the latest postponement of import controls nor that of conformity assessment marking show any departure from the pattern of the previous government (from which derived the welcome news of the first Horizon funding for post-Brexit projects). In fact, in terms of things the government can do unilaterally (as opposed to through negotiation with the EU), the sole new departure so far has been the promised legislation to (mainly) track EU product safety, and weights and measures, provisions. Pretty much everything else remains unclear, and will most likely emerge in piecemeal decisions which only in time (if at all) will come to form a pattern of its own. In that sense, the ‘reset means reset’ period is likely to be a long one.

Latest false claims about Freeports

However, whatever the Labour government’s post-Brexit policy intentions may be, one thing which is pretty much irrelevant to them is Freeports. I’m not sure that this is even worth discussing, but there is a new myth gaining traction on social media that because the government apparently has no plans to close what are almost invariably referred to as ‘Sunak’s 86 SEZs and Freeports’ this means that it is precluding the UK from rejoining the EU or even the single market. In a more conspiratorial version, the reason the government doesn’t want to rejoin is in order to continue with ‘SEZs and Freeports’.

This is the latest iteration of something which has been doing the rounds for a few years. It started with the claim that Freeports are, or could become, ‘Charter Cities’, where companies are granted ‘charters’ to set and run legal systems. This would supposedly mean that all regulations, including employment and environmental laws, along with all public healthcare and education, would disappear within these zones. I wrote a detailed debunk of this in 2022, calling it a conspiracy theory because having already claimed that creating Charter Cities was ‘the real agenda’ behind Brexit, the subsequent announcement of Freeports was retro-fitted to ’prove’ this [1].

Subsequently, the same idea re-emerged, not always referring to Charter Cities explicitly, but making a similar false claim that ‘SEZs and Freeports’ were ‘States within a State’, again setting their own corporate legal and regulatory regimes. I wrote another debunk of this, earlier this year. It included reference to the then only emerging claim that ‘SEZs and Freeports’ are somehow a barrier to ever rejoining the EU and the very first references to Labour’s complicity in this.

Since the election, this latter claim, along with repetitions of the previous ones, has become quite widespread on social media. I won’t link to examples because, as a matter of general policy, I don’t make critical comments about social media posts by private individuals, as this can lead to bullying ‘pile-ons’ [2]. However, a quick key word search of X-Twitter, and to an extent BlueSky, will provide examples.

Freeports and the prospects of rejoining

I have put ‘SEZs and Freeports’ in scare quotes because this near-ubiquitous formulation is often the first clue that something misleading is about to follow. SEZ – meaning Special Economic Zone – is a generic term, encompassing many different institutional forms, of which Freeports are one (though they, themselves, are not all the same). So to say ‘SEZs and Freeports’ is a misnomer, and this is not a pedantic matter of jargon: it is a misnomer which carries some highly misleading implications.   

It implies that all 86 UK SEZs (exact numbers vary) are part of this supposed explanation for Brexit or this supposed barrier to re-joining the EU. Describing them as ‘Sunak’s 86 SEZs and Freeports’ makes that implication even stronger, since it suggests that they were his invention. In fact, the majority of these were created before Brexit and before Sunak, and so, self-evidently, neither explain Brexit nor preclude EU membership. Nor, by the way, have any of them ‘turned into’ anything remotely resembling Charter Cities or ‘States within a State’ which, if that was the ‘secret plan’ for them, there would surely be signs of by now.

So what about UK Freeports, specifically, which do, in their present form, post-date Brexit? It’s certainly true that Sunak and others proclaimed them as a post-Brexit ‘freedom’. Oddly enough, I recall correcting some of the initial criticisms of Sunak which were based on the fact that Freeports had existed, though had been closed, when the UK was in the EU. I pointed out that, post-Brexit, UK Freeports would indeed be different as they would not be bound by EU rules, highlighting in particular EU state aid rules. The problem with those initial critiques was that they were a knee-jerk reaction, ignoring key details.

I wrote that in February 2020, so it is somewhat ironic that now, over four years later, some are latching on to the differences between UK and EU Freeports, most especially as regards state aid, but again ignoring key details. (There’s also a certain irony in the way that they are simultaneously presenting Freeports as neo-liberal hellholes in the making and yet also fulminating about state aid, which they pearl-clutchingly tell us is really taxpayers’ money, for all the world like the most doctrinaire of neo-liberals.)

As to the details, there are two questions. One is whether, as a matter of fact, the tax breaks provided to Freeports would not be allowed under EU state aid rules. This is by no means an easy question to answer, as recently highlighted by George Peretz KC, a leading expert in this area, in response to the claim that this is so. It doesn’t just depend on what those tax breaks are, it also depends on the (hypothetical) question of how the EU Commission would interpret them. Moreover, it is simplistic to discuss the state aid issue in terms of EU rules, ignoring those of the UK (which exist: again, it’s not a neo-liberal free for all), the Level Playing Field provisions in the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol, WTO rules, and OECD protocols. In other words, the issue here isn’t reducible to EU rules versus no rules.

The second question is whether, even assuming that UK Freeports do violate EU state aid rules (or any other EU rules), this precludes the UK joining, or applying to join, the EU or the single market. The answer to that is certainly ‘no’ (this also applies to the parallel claim that they would preclude an independent Scotland joining the EU). Many other EU accession countries have had SEZs which, at the time of application, did not comply with EU rules. As part of the accession process, these SEZs either changed their rules or were phased out, in some cases over long periods, hence the idea that UK Freeport contract lengths might delay, even if not prevent, rejoining is also bogus [3].

There’s absolutely no reason to think the same would not be true for any accession process for the UK and, anyway, it would be part of a much wider issue than that of Freeports. If the UK ever rejoins the EU or the single market, any and all divergences from its rules that may have occurred since Brexit will have to be ended. Freeports are different in detail, but no different in principle, to any other such case. The sole reason they are being presented as some kind of special obstacle to rejoining is because of the weird preoccupation with Freeports which has grown up.

It shouldn’t have to be spelt out, but I will do so to avoid misunderstanding. None of this means that Freeports, specifically, or SEZs, generally, are a ‘good thing’. On the contrary, there are serious questions about issues including corruption, various forms of criminality, value for money, and lack of accountability. That is especially clear from questions which have been raised in the case of the Teesside Freeport. Similar questions would arise with or without Brexit (because EU Freeports are by no means immune from criticism). But Freeports don’t ‘explain’ Brexit, they aren’t a vehicle for post-Brexit ‘States within a State’, and, to speak to the latest claims, they are irrelevant to the prospects of rejoining.

That being so, it would make no sense for Labour to continue with Freeports in order to subvert rejoining. Nor do we need to look to Freeports for some secret reason to explain Labour’s hostility to rejoining. The reasons for that may be poor or at least debatable, but they are well-known (freedom of movement, fear of Labour leave voters, fear of it dominating the entirety of the administration etc., etc.). The UK may or may not end up joining the EU again, or the single market, under a Labour government, but Freeports won’t play any part in deciding that.

Ruthless remainers?

Although I don’t think the distraction of these Freeport claims is very widespread amongst serious political actors, they do point to a wider issue for ‘remainers’ or ‘rejoiners’ (or whatever the best term would be: just ‘joiners’, perhaps?) So also, and more importantly, does the present vacuum of this ‘reset means reset’ period which, as I noted above, creates a space for such political actors to influence government policy. That wider issue is the politics of the ‘join’ or ‘rejoin’ movement.

The Bagehot (aka Duncan Robinson) column in the latest issue of the Economist (£) posed some sharp questions for what it called this “strangely ineffective” movement, exhorting “remainers” to become “more organized and more ruthless”, aping the determination of Farage and what became the Brexit movement. It provoked a lot of interesting discussion on social media, and although I don’t have space to discuss it in this post, I will probably return to it in the future.

For now, one observation is that, whilst part of the ‘ruthlessness’ of Brexiters was a quite cavalier disregard for factual accuracy, I do not think that will serve ‘remainers’ well. Ruthlessness needn’t mean truthlessness. That’s not a matter of squeamishness, or even of scruples, it’s more that, with so many excellent arguments against Brexit it’s hardly necessary to make false ones.

 

Notes

[1] I’m not going to re-hash all the tortuous arguments about this, but those who have followed them may be interested in a recently published academic paper by Patrick Holden and Nichola Harmer of Plymouth University, who note that: “The outcome [of the UK’s introduction of post-Brexit Freeports] is a Freeport policy that, whatever its merits, is not forging a neoliberal dynamic in the UK’s political economy.” This is actually a specific instance of a point I’ve made many times on this blog. There were certainly some Brexiters who saw it as vehicle to pursue a massive agenda of neo-liberal deregulation. This was ‘a’ reason for Brexit, but it wasn’t ‘the’ reason for Brexit, and when Brexit happened they found that there were many other constraints on the pursuit of their agenda apart from EU membership. It’s yet another instance of Brexiters simply being wrong about what EU membership meant and what Brexit would mean.

[2] By private individuals, I mean any account where it is not clear that they are posting in a professional capacity as politicians, journalists, or experts within the domain that is the subject of their post, or on behalf of some organization, or might reasonably be considered a ‘public figure’ in some other way.

[3] A related claim is that investors in Freeports would make use of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) systems to sue the UK government if it adapted or closed Freeports in order to re-join the EU. However, that would be irrelevant if the contracts were simply wound down as part of any accession process. That aside, the ISDS claim is a bit like some of the Brexiters' 'technical' sounding claims which are difficult to disentangle as they involve a simplistic take on a deeply complex area, but it certainly isn’t true, as such claims imply, that ISDS would simply be available to foreign investors in such circumstances, as if it were some kind of international court open to all comers. It might (but wouldn’t automatically) apply if the investor was from a country with which the UK had an ISDS agreement as part of an investment or free trade agreement, which, post-CPTPP accession might apply if that country was a CPTPP member (though not if it was Australia or New Zealand). However, typically, ISDS (of which there are very many legitimate criticisms) comes into play in countries which do not have well-developed domestic legal systems to which investors can bring claims. For this reason, those ISDS agreements the UK has entered into have almost entirely been used by UK firms against foreign governments, not by foreign firms against the UK government (the UNTD database records only one such case, from an Indian investor in 2006, though some sources suggest there have been two; either way, no case has succeeded). Anyway, even if the UK sought to re-join, and if an investor in a Freeport had a right to bring an ISDS action, and if it did so, it would not follow that it would win, and even if it did win, whilst that might cost the government some money, it wouldn’t derail rejoining. In short, it is a red herring.

The descent into political insanity

The relatively quiet summer has ended with a bang, and Brexit has now pushed Britain into a dark and dangerous place. The developments this week have been extremely complex, so this will be an unusually long post.

We have seen numerous political and cultural conventions slashed aside by the Brexit Jacobins – the full-frontal media assault on the judiciary and the illegal prorogation of parliament being the most egregious examples. Now, a cabinet minister speaking at the dispatch box of the House of Commons has, almost casually, announced that the government is proposing to “break international law” in pursuit of its Brexit policy. The qualification that it will be only “in a very specific and limited way” was almost immaterial and its ludicrousness is obvious if imagined as a defence in any criminal law trial.

Earlier the same day, Sir Jonathan Jones, the senior civil servant who heads the government’s legal department resigned. He joins a growing list of such resignations, with Brexit always at the centre, and in this case with extra force since it was clearly the result of his refusal to go along with the government’s proposed law-breaking (£). This represents a very serious moment, not just in the history of Brexit but in modern British political history more generally, and it is vital not to be inured to its significance by the continual outrageous acts of the Brexit governments. For when has a government minister ever announced an intention to knowingly break the law?

This is a very big event. Even Theresa May, who in her time often behaved with contempt for parliament and in other highly divisive ways, was moved to warn bluntly of the consequences for any international trust in the UK if the government went down this route. Another former Prime Minister, Sir John Major, subsequently made a similar point as – perhaps even more significantly given his pro-Brexit credentials – did former Tory leader Lord Howard. The Attorney-General, former ERG Chair Suella Braverman, then sought to provide a legal justification of the government’s position which attracted thunderous criticism from across the legal fraternity, with Mark Elliot, Professor of Public Law at Cambridge University, describing it as “utterly risible”.

Meanwhile, the EU requested an immediate meeting of the UK-EU Joint Committee following which it issued an extremely robust statement about this “extremely serious violation of the Withdrawal Agreement and of international law” and calling on the UK to drop its proposed measures by the end of the month with the at least implicit warning of legal action. The UK statement, which was blander in tone - although Michael Gove, the UK co-chair, was reportedly less than polite during the meeting - stated that the UK would not do so. The stage is therefore set for a colossal crisis.

What just happened?

It’s important to hold in mind these reactions because whilst the implications are huge, the underlying issues will, to many, seem arcane and even dull. In brief (more detail: here) the government plans to pass domestic legislation - the UK Internal Market Bill - which would contradict some of the provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), a part of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA), by allowing the UK unilaterally to make changes to its terms, rather than doing so by mutual agreement with the EU via the Joint Committee established to oversee the WA.

In particular, the legislation means that the UK government could unilaterally change or do away with customs formalities on goods travelling from Northern Ireland to Great Britain, and unilaterally remove the role of EU law and regulation in state aid policy in Northern Ireland. The latter has a significance beyond Northern Ireland in that it also aims to prevent the NIP creating any backdoor role for the EU on state aid policy within Great Britain (of which more later). When the draft legislation was published, legal experts confirmed that it empowered the government to breach international law and, indeed, that is made explicit in the Bill.

The significance of this is not that, in itself, it entails ‘ripping up the WA’ but that it creates a conflict between domestic law and the WA, which is a legally binding international treaty. The potential legal consequences of this are that the EU could take immediate action at the ECJ on the basis that even proposing this legislation breaks the ‘good faith’ clause of the WA.  Alternatively, If the powers the legislation gives government were actually exercised that could give rise to a case and, potentially, penalties within the WA’s dispute mechanism.

That is (or may be) for the future. What matter now are the political implications for Brexit (and, though I don’t focus on it here, its implications for Scottish and Welsh devolution). In particular, it explicitly and officially confirms that the UK is ready to make unilateral interpretations of what was jointly agreed and, more widely, opens up the prospect that the UK regards adherence to the WA as in some way conditional upon whatever future agreements are or are not made with the EU.

This directly undercuts the central purpose of the NIP which is to provide guarantees for Northern Ireland’s situation that apply irrespective of anything else that may happen, unless or until any further agreement is reached jointly by the UK and the EU. Moreover, by treating one part of the WA in this way, it does, ultimately, open up the possibility of the UK reneging on the agreement wholesale.

That, as I warned in June, would be to embark on the road to international pariahdom. In that post I said we weren’t on that road yet, but could see the signposts pointing us in that direction. This week, the UK took the first step along it. It is undoubtedly the case that the first such step is the most difficult to take. From here on in it will get easier to continue that journey, and harder to resist those urging that it be made.

Why is this happening?

These latest developments, startling as they may be for those who have tuned out of Brexit in recent times, have not come out of nowhere. In early June Boris Johnson was already talking about the WA as being “defective” and in need of revision (even earlier, in February, there were well-sourced rumours of plans to circumvent the NIP). That of course was the deal that he himself had signed and acclaimed less than six months before. So one part of what we’re seeing is the latest and perhaps strangest example of what I wrote about last week – the way that throughout the process the UK has been internally debating what Brexit means at the same time as actually enacting it. Thus although we’ve long known that fisheries would be a contested issue, it is only more recently that state aid emerged as another such issue. And although the arrangements for Northern Ireland had apparently been settled, the UK is now re-opening them.

There are two reasons for this. One is that Dominic Cummings’ latest obsession is an activist government policy of financial support for technology firms. This isn’t the place to discuss the merits or otherwise (£) of that policy – except to note that it is all of a piece with Cummings’ drearily cliched ‘disruptor’ world view, cribbed from 1990s airport lounge business books. Nor does it really matter that there’s no good reason to think that a robust UK state aid regime – indeed the EU state aid regime – would preclude such a policy (cynics might therefore wonder if the real problem is that such a regime would prevent the Johnson-Cummings government handing out public contracts to its cronies).

What does matter is the extraordinary democratic affront that the peccadilloes of this single unelected advisor should drive national strategy and, worse, that at this late stage it should be introduced as something that might actually scupper a trade deal, with all the economic damage that will cause, and, worse still, that it should lead to the WA itself being put in jeopardy.

The second reason is equally, if not more, shameful. As was clear to many at the time and is now undeniable, Johnson, his government, and his MPs voted for and signed the WA, including the NIP, either without understanding or without caring what it meant. This lack of understanding was not just to do with state aid, but also the border arrangements for Northern Ireland and (although not a feature of this week’s debacle) the Geographical Indications agreement.

There’s no justification for this in general, and certainly none as regards the implications of an Irish Sea border, since these were loudly flagged up by many, including the DUP, at the time. More than that, such a border had already been described by Theresa May in February 2018 as completely unacceptable (£), even though she had agreed to it at the end of the phase 1 negotiations in December 2017. It was this which led to May’s backstop agreement, which Johnson then ‘renegotiated’ to return to the sea border solution – and which he claimed as a great triumph, despite having promised categorically during the Tory leadership election that he would not agree to it. This convoluted and contradictory history is a matter of documented record, and it is simply a lie for the government and Brexiters now to deny it.

So what happened was not an accident, it was wilful, deliberate policy so as to enable Johnson to say that he had got Brexit sorted out and to put that to the electorate as an ‘oven ready deal’, and then – again at his choice - to rush it through parliament with next to no scrutiny, and with the support of every single Tory MP including every member of the ERG. In the process, he repeatedly denied that the Irish Sea border he had agreed to would have the effects that he later admitted it would and which he now wants to repudiate. He was simply too lazy, too dishonest, too impatient, too greedy, too ambitious, too selfish, and too irresponsible to care.

As for Cummings, it seems that he had already essentially lost interest in the details of Brexit (£), being instead fully occupied with both his technology wet dream and his punitive attack on the civil service. Such is the arrogance and irresponsibility of the ‘disruptor’. Having done so much to foist the Brexit disaster on us, he just ceased to care until belatedly realizing that the hitherto obscure (except, for different reasons, to Lexiters) issue of state aid might get in the way of the new toy he is playing with (that toy being what was formerly called the future of our country).

As for the MPs who voted it through, they were partly cowed by the bullying of the new Johnson-Cummings regime – which had dealt so ruthlessly with the 21 members of the ‘Gawkward squad’ in September 2019 – partly, again, too lazy and arrogant to care, and partly on the basis that whatever was agreed with the EU wasn’t really binding. Bernard Jenkin, the arch-Brexiter MP, said exactly that this week, claiming that he and others of his persuasion only voted for the WA because of assurances “that it would be superseded by a full FTA; and if needs be it could be repudiated”*.

There is no way to describe this other than grotesquely dishonest or, if there is, then the only other possibility is grotesquely stupid. How could anyone, with even the scantest knowledge, possibly have thought that this was the case? How could anyone have thought when campaigning in the election, as Jenkin and his colleagues did, to ‘get Brexit done’ with Johnson’s ‘great oven-ready deal’ that it was the case? They knew, or should have known, otherwise but went along with it for reasons of temporary expediency. Now, they are pretending that they never accepted what they had agreed to and are not bound by it.

Back to no deal 1.0?

But, again, this hasn’t come out of nowhere. As I have been warning since the general election, the Brexit Ultras have never accepted the legitimacy of the WA, and have gradually become more and more vociferous in demanding that the UK renege on it entirely. That includes the ERG MPs like Iain Duncan Smith who voted for it, as well as the Brexit Party whose ever-present shadow hangs over the Tory Party (and whose MEPs also voted for the WA, in the European Parliament).

For these people, the issue isn’t this or that detail of the agreement, such as those of state aid or customs formalities, but an ideological fixation with a totally cretinous idea of ‘sovereignty’ in which Britain can simply act with total unilateral autonomy, and do so without any consequences. Tellingly, this was in essence the claim of the Attorney-General’s reasoning as to why the UK can break international law. So not only are they prepared for the ‘no deal 2.0’ of having no trade deal, they want to go back to what the 2017 parliament prevented by reinstating the ‘no deal 1.0’ of having no Withdrawal Agreement.

I also warned in July that, as has happened throughout the Brexit process, what seemed like the fringe opinions of a few obsessive extremists would quickly become mainstream. That is what has started to happen this week. They don’t seem to have been the direct architects of these events – Cummings despises the ERG, and Johnson has never been of the true faith – but they and their media cohorts leapt on the possibility of undermining the WA with glee.

If pandering to them was not the government’s motive then it was certainly its effect. Johnson has already treated the Political Declaration as an irrelevance. Now he is saying that the – his – “Brexit deal never made any sense”, and that he will break international law to flout some of it. That is bound to ramp up expectations amongst the Ultras that their dream of reneging totally is a real prospect. And, indeed, with grim inevitability, within hours of the publication of the Internal Market Bill, ERG members were talking of amendments to extend its provisions even further. As always, the moment they get one thing, no matter how extreme, they will immediately demand something even more extreme.

‘The adults are no longer in charge’

The endless dramas, zig-zags and downright chaos of the UK approach to the Brexit process are in marked contrast with that of the EU. For despite the constant refrain of ‘sovereign equality’, the two have certainly not been at all similar in the dignity of their conduct. The EU has been consistent, rational and principled in its approach. It is hard to think of anything that it has done in the last four years which is in any sense surprising and which hasn’t been long-trailed.

That is not said in a spirit of starry-eyed worship. It’s not, after all, some huge triumph to meet the base line for how we expect international relations to be conducted by liberal democracies. It is how, in the past, the UK would have been expected to behave. That it has not has caused bewilderment and, now, real anger in the EU and is a source of shame for those of us who are British and actually care about our country’s reputation, of which the Brexit faux-patriots are so careless. To get a measure of the damage, it is only necessary to imagine how the Brexiters would react if it were the EU which proposed unilaterally to tamper with the provisions of the WA, and to shamelessly admit that it was ready to do so in defiance of international law.

But as Bobby McDonagh - former Irish Ambassador to the EU, UK and Italy, so not one likely to use undiplomatic language lightly -  observed this week, “the adults are no longer in charge in Downing Street”. Instead, he compares those running the UK to tantrum-throwing toddlers. And, indeed, such tantrums have been a recurring feature of Brexiter behaviour, with repeated cries of ‘it’s not fair’ throughout the long process. In the early years, Theresa May played the role of a governess misguidedly trying to soothe these shrieking man-babies. Now they are in charge.

This makes it harder than ever to understand what the government is doing or to predict what it will do next. It’s almost pointless to try to understand this week’s events in terms of whether or how they might be ‘negotiating ploys’, for example to make the talks so toxic that the EU would walk out in exasperation (as some politicians in the EU are now suggesting) so it could be blamed for no deal; or to make the EU believe that the UK is ready to rip up the entire WA if there is no trade deal, so as to secure such a deal. For what it is worth I don’t think either of these things will happen. As for the motivation, as likely as not all we have seen is an example of the Cummings mantra of ‘doing the unexpected’, as if that had a virtue in itself.

What are the effects of this week’s events?

Whatever the intention, the immediate effect is obvious. In what was already an atmosphere of almost no trust from the EU, the UK government have now eviscerated what little remained. Whilst the issues posed by the Internal Market Bill are a matter for the Joint Committee, their malign influence is bound to spread to the trade negotiations as well. These negotiations have not been helped by the parallel developments this week about UK state aid policy, which have also been very convoluted.

Whilst the Internal Market Bill is partly aimed at avoiding the application of EU state aid rules in any way in the UK, the question remains as to what the UK state aid regime is to be. This is a central bone of contention in the trade negotiations. The EU has softened its initial wish for the UK to follow EU rules, but has asked the UK to specify what its own rules will be. This week, the government announced that, on the one hand, post-transition, it would follow WTO state aid rules and, on the other, that it would develop its own system but not until next year (£).

WTO state aid rules are very different from those of the EU and they do not apply to services, and would obviously not meet the EU’s requirements for a trade deal with the UK (something confirmed by Michel Barnier’s statement at the end of this week’s talks). Yet the UK’s announcement did not rule out developing a new system that would do so, and was explicit in saying that it might agree new obligations within future free trade agreements (including, presumably, with the EU). So this part of the announcement does not scupper the trade talks, but does not advance them, either.

Equally, though, the announcement that the UK’s own system will not be developed until after the transition is over means that the EU request for details of it has been refused which is, as one EU official is quoted as saying, “tantamount to taunting us” (£). So this part of the announcement makes a trade deal more difficult. In effect, it asks the EU to take on trust that the UK will develop a suitably robust regime, just at the moment that with the Internal Market Bill bombshell trust has been so badly undermined. If there is a logic to this, it is impossible to discern. Unsurprisingly, this week’s trade talks ended with no apparent progress having been made.

There will also be repercussions beyond the negotiating tables, as ordinary citizens across Europe view the extraordinary reports of the UK’s behaviour. And there will be repercussions well beyond Europe and Brexit, given the many international disputes in which the UK calls for respect for international law. Such calls will now invite an obvious retort of hypocrisy. Already, senior US politicians are warning of the folly of the government’s conduct (£) and a CNN report suggests that “it could take the UK’s reputation years to recover from the backlash”.

Where might this lead?

I doubt, though, that any of this will concern the Brexit Ultras. Always a nihilist cult, the passage of time has made them utterly indifferent to anything other than Brexit in its most extreme form, and always moving the definition of what that means to a new extremity. They are now willing to sacrifice anything and everything to a cause that has long since ceased to bear any resemblance whatsoever to the promises they made. It has now become – and I don’t use this term lightly or carelessly – a form of political insanity, and it is an insanity which has spread to the entire government.

It’s not clear who can stop this insanity. It’s possible that this latest debacle might finally galvanize sensible voices in the Conservative Party – and there are still a few – to finally draw a line they will not allow the Ultras to cross. Michael Howard’s intervention in particular might be a sign of that, and there are some stirrings of backbench rebellion at the prospect of breaking international law. Even Bernard Jenkin seems slightly uneasy about it. So the most optimistic version is that this new low also marks a floor beneath which we will not sink. But other ERG MPs, such as Andrew Bridgen, remain obdurate. My sense is that things are simply too far gone now for the party to be reclaimed from them.

That aside, the opposition parties can do little in the face of the Tory majority and Keir Starmer, mistakenly in my view, appears unwilling to go anywhere near anything related to Brexit, though that too could change. The House of Lords may delay the Internal Market legislation but is relatively powerless to prevent the wider drift to extremism. Civil servants have limited power, and their final weapon of resignation only strengthens the ideologues. Much of the media are cowed or complicit. The public, for now anyway, are largely apathetic and perhaps understandably more concerned about coronavirus than Brexit.

So it seems that little stands in the way of the government taking ever-more extreme stances. I think that when the dust settles on this week’s events their legacy will have been to bring reneging on the WA, in its entirety, more centrally into political discourse and to have moved the UK one step closer to actually doing it. If this seems far-fetched, then consider that until a few days ago the idea of the UK overturning even one part of the WA would have been laughed at by most, and that of the government announcing its willingness to break international law deemed preposterous.

A complete repudiation, of course, would be a calamity far worse than this week’s news, far worse than no (trade) deal and, actually, far worse than if there had been no (WA) deal in the first place. For, along with all the economic damage, and the likely impact on the Northern Ireland peace process, it would irrevocably mark the UK out as a liar and cheat on the international stage. We aren’t there yet, and it’s not inevitable that we will get there, but we got a step closer this week.

It is worth remembering, as always, that nothing remotely like what is happening now was ever suggested to the voters in the 2016 Referendum or, indeed, the 2019 Election. Indeed there is a level of mendacity in the current re-writing of what was said and promised not years but only months ago which is sickening even to those of us who thought we could no longer be astounded by the incontinent dishonesty, boundless incompetence, and bankrupt morality of the Brexit Ultras.

 

*So much Brexit history has come and gone that it might easily be forgotten that this proposition – that a WA could be made and then later dropped – did not simply emerge as an artefact of the political situation of Johnson’s 2019 governments. Exactly the same idea had been put forward by Michael Gove in September 2018 in an ill-fated attempt to get the Ultras to support May’s Chequers proposals which, had they succeeded, would have become part of the WA. So it is not unreasonable to claim that such chicanery had long been in prospect. All this, as I’ve explained numerous times on this blog, including last week, ultimately roots back to the basic refusal of the Brexiters to accept, or to understand, the sequencing of the Brexit process.

A preview of the blame games

No one knows if there is going to be a UK-EU trade and other future terms deal, and nothing has happened this week to make that clearer. The last two months’ talks, despite Johnson’s call to put some “oomph” into them, have shown that no more progress can be made at a ‘technical’ as opposed to a political level. Hence it was announced this week that Brexit will be taken off the agenda of next week’s EU Ambassadors’ summit due to a “completely wasted” summer. In this relatively quiet limbo-period we are seeing the outlines of a series of blame games and recriminations in the UK which are only likely to intensify in the coming months.

Brexit matters more to Britain than to the EU

Ending this limbo is primarily dependent on political decisions in the UK, in particular about disclosing what its post-Brexit state aid policy is to be. The EU has already shifted from seeking direct application of its state aid rules to accepting something like equivalence between the two regimes – which needs the UK spells out what its regime is to be. It seems very unlikely the EU could soften further on this key issue.

The reality is that Brexit simply doesn’t matter that much anymore for the EU - there’s clearly a preference for some sort of deal, but, as Georgina Wright of the Institute for Government wrote this week, a no deal scenario has long been planned for. It also seems increasingly to be expected. Nor does Brexit have anything like the same political saliency for any EU country – not even Ireland, which will be most affected but is not split over it – that it does for the UK where it is still potential political dynamite.

That dynamite is – obviously – because of the continuing deep divisions over Brexit, but also because of the very practical consequences of no deal for the UK. Without rehearsing all these again, a leaked report this week of government preparations was a reminder of what is potentially at stake, including troops on the streets to keep order, water rationing and major food shortages. This is not ‘Project Fear’, it is planning by a pro-Brexit government, and there is nothing remotely like it in prospect for any EU country.

That difference of priority is insufficiently appreciated in the British polity and media, which, because in general it sees the EU entirely through the lens of Brexit, assumes that Brexit is central to the EU. But although when the UK was a member state, including during the Article 50 negotiations, its internal politics were of interest to, and often accommodated by, the EU all that changed once the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) was signed. At that point, the most crucial EU concerns about Brexit were dealt with, to be replaced with bewilderment and irritation that the UK seems to have decided that the Political Declaration that accompanied it is an irrelevance.

Who would get the blame for no deal?

This is the background to an interesting and widely-discussed report in the Sunday Times (£) by Tim Shipman, a journalist with strong sources in the government and the author of excellent books on the politics of Brexit. The thrust of the report is that the government thinks the EU is dangerously failing to understand that Johnson’s government, unlike – supposedly - May’s, is fully committed to Brexit and willing to entertain no deal. Yet such an analysis itself shows precisely a failure to understand that the whole show has moved on: no deal under May meant no WA, but the WA is now signed and Britain has already left the EU.

Beyond that, the government’s position as reported – I would think accurately – by Shipman remains hopelessly stuck in the same mire as May’s government, itself a result of the impossible promises made by Vote Leave. For although the report presents the UK as humbly seeking a ‘bare bones’ deal because it, unlike May’s administration, embraces and accepts Brexit as a change from membership to third country status that simply isn’t true at all.  Instead, as Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent, pointed out, over a huge swathe of things the UK is still seeking continuity with what it enjoyed as a member state.

That, of course, does still matter to the EU. Not in order to ‘punish’ an ex-member but for the obvious reason that if non-members have the same things as members then membership becomes meaningless. In that respect, far from Johnson’s government having accepted that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, and moved on to a new phase, it is still wedded to at least a version of his familiar ‘cakeist’ fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the EU continues to bat back attempts by the government to turn these fantasies into ‘legal texts’ without any agreement to them having been negotiated.

It obviously doesn’t take a genius to work out what is going on here, not least since it has been in prospect for months, indeed years: the ground is being prepared to blame the EU for no deal because it failed to understand that it was dealing with a British government fully prepared to go down that route if necessary. This was made explicit in a typically bullish editorial in the Sun this week.

That isn’t to say that no deal is inevitable, or that the government has decided on that course. In fact, I suspect the truth is as simple as that the government genuinely believes the dogma of the Brexit echo chamber it now entirely inhabits which insists that ‘the EU always blinks at the last minute’. So on the one hand we’re seeing that strategy repeated and, on the other, getting a taste of how the government and media will present things if no deal turns out to be the consequence: ‘we tried to warn the EU what would happen if it didn’t meet our perfectly reasonable requests but they wouldn’t believe us’.

The logic of this is circular in that the more the EU makes it clear that it will countenance no deal if necessary, the more it confirms the Brexiter view that nothing will change until the very last moment. At the same time, it’s a highly peculiar strategy given that the adverse effects of no deal will be felt much more heavily by the UK than the EU. In effect, it’s a game of chicken which has strapped every man, woman and child in the UK in the path of an oncoming train, and the closer a collision comes the more it justifies staying there. The fallback plan, apparently, is to tell the maimed victims that it was the train driver’s fault.

So that’s the first and, clearly, the foremost blame game on display, that between the UK and the EU. Again, it’s a purely domestic game, because the EU itself won’t be that interested in it, and the member states even less so.

Would the Brexiters be blamed for making false promises?

There are alternatives to blaming the EU. The most obvious – ongoing since the referendum, but which has new zest as the end of the transition approaches – is the disjuncture between what is happening and what was promised by Brexiters. That disjuncture will exist almost as much if there is a deal as if there isn’t, since it is clear that any deal will be far less commodious than was proposed to leave voters in 2016.

We had a small taste of this when former cabinet minister David Gauke pointed out this week (in response to the Shipman article) that Brexiters have long-promised that “the EU will give us whatever we want as long as they believe we’re prepared to walk away” and – in line with my analysis above - are lining up the excuse that “the EU underestimated our determination”. This engendered a huge and furious reaction and what was interesting about that was how precisely it exposed the central flaw of Brexit.

On the one hand, Iain Dale said that Gauke was talking “utter bollocks. Literally no one argued that the EU would give us all we wanted” and Julia Hartley-Brewer said simply “no it isn’t” (i.e. that what Gauke had said was the Brexiters’ position was not). But only a couple of days before during a (separate) discussion of the issue of what Brexiters had promised Hartley-Brewer had re-affirmed that “we do hold all the cards because we will do just fine with or without a deal and the EU knows it” (emphasis in original, but denoted with the symbol “*”).

Since some of the debate about Gauke’s tweet has descended into who has used the literal words “whatever we want”, let me spell out that if one side ‘holds all the cards’ it must follow that it could get whatever it wants since the other side would have no cards, and if those cards consist of being able to do fine without a deal then the leverage consists of being able to walk away. So in all substantive senses, Hartley-Brewer is still making the same claim that Gauke says Brexiters made all along but which both she and Iain Dale say was never made by Brexiters.

I’ve deliberately focused on this micro-fragment of what is in itself a relatively minor discussion because in the welter of all that has been said over the last four years it has become easier and easier for Brexiters to muddy, disown or misrepresent the claims they made. As it would now be an impossible task to subject the entirety of the Brexit debate to the same level of detailed reconstruction, it’s useful to give an illustration of how it works.

What’s especially difficult is that Brexiters often conveyed their message by means of an overall upbeat tone (e.g. that there would be a deal, and a good one) even if sometimes adding in, as it were, the small print some qualification to this message (e.g. but if not we can fall back on WTO terms and that will be fine too). Thus when, now, faced with the overall message, they are able to quote the small print as a ‘get out’ so as to deny they made any promises at all. It is a tactic familiar to dodgy salespeople the world over. Although in this case, in fact, the ‘we hold all the cards’ line was widely used, most famously by Michael Gove, and that is so well-documented as to be beyond reasonable dispute.

That such claims and promise were made matters, and it is important not to allow history to be re-written. But the present point is that, even now, two leading pro-Brexit broadcasters, each with large audiences and presumably significant influence, are able to make diametrically opposite statements – I assume in good faith, and I am not casting aspersions on either of them - about the nature of the Brexit negotiations and what was promised for them. And Dale and Hartley-Brewer are just two examples – the same story could be told using any number of Brexiters in politics or the media. This is not, by the way, an example of the familiar theme of ‘history being written by the victors’, in that what it shows is that the victors give as varied an account of that history as, at the time, they made promises about the future.

This is central to how the Brexit vote was won, because quite contradictory claims and promises were made as a deliberate campaign technique. It is also why the process of actually delivering Brexit has been so fraught, because what those claims meant and how those promises would be delivered was not defined or agreed. This in turn sets up what will inevitably be years of recrimination, denial and counter-attack.

So that is the second of the main emerging blame games: what Brexiters said and promised versus what actually happened or will happen, and of course this goes well beyond the specific example given by Gauke this week.

Would it be blamed on those who didn’t back May’s deal?

Also rumbling away in the background are assessments of what happened during the convoluted and complex political events of 2019. These include, in particular, the idea that politicians (and others) who favoured remain, or at least a soft Brexit, are at fault for not having backed May’s Withdrawal Agreement. On this account, especially if there is no deal, but even if there is a hard Brexit deal, the blame lies with those who were too recalcitrant to back May.

This involves several highly dubious propositions and, again, a certain amount of re-writing of history. It forgets, or downplays, how the hard core of opposition to May’s deal came from the ERG and, especially, the self-styled Spartans amongst them. It forgets that throughout much of 2019 every Brexit outcome was conceivably possible (or, as it often seemed, impossible) and so all shades of opinion opposed to May’s deal had reason to hold out against it in the greater or lesser hope that their preferred outcome would triumph.

Crucially, it neglects the fact that May’s deal was itself ‘hard Brexit’ – out of the single market and customs union - pointing to the eventual Canada-style outcome that remains Johnson’s stated aim – the only real difference being the extent to which she seemed to accept the realities of what that would mean, especially as regards the Level Playing Field. It also neglects that May, too, was not averse to threatening no deal. So hers was by no means the ‘compromise’ approach it is now spoken of as being. And, related to that, it neglects the fact that as the Brexit Ultras now say, as quoted in the Shipman report for example, Johnson’s WA is “basically the same as May’s deal. It’s more than 99% the same”.

Given that the major difference between the two was the substitution of the Irish Sea border for the Irish backstop arrangements, about the only group who can really be criticized for not supporting May’s deal are the DUP – and of them a better critique would be that from the outset, long before the WA or even the triggering of Article 50, their entire support for Brexit was a massive mistake given their core political priority of preserving the union.

Would it be blamed on those who enabled the 2019 election?

A somewhat related revisionism is that those opposed to Brexit were guilty of a terrible error in enabling the 2019 General Election. This charge is aimed especially at the LibDems and also at remainers within the Labour Party. Perhaps it could apply to the SNP, too, but that is less likely to stick since it’s easy to argue that the SNP’s central goal of Scottish independence is well-served by Brexit and, for wider reasons, by a Johnson government – indeed developments since the election seem to bear that out.

This criticism of remainers neglects the fact that there was no prospect of a parliamentary majority for a referendum (and still less for a revocation of Article 50) in the 2019 parliament. Moreover, Johnson had already passed his (then) Withdrawal Agreement Bill at second reading by some 30 votes. So there was a strong argument – and I made it at the time, as did others including Ian Dunt – that, highly risky as it was, a general election was the best and possibly only way to head off the eventual passage of the Bill and to re-constitute parliament in ways more propitious to remain.

None of that is to defend the way that Labour and the LibDems fought the election as regards Brexit, and the LibDem Article 50 revocation policy was – as again I argued that at the time – a total fiasco both in principle and practice. But the fact that agreeing to an election turned out to put a definitive end to the remain cause does not mean that it was a mistake to take that risk, though it is obviously true that taking it did not pay off.

Nor is any of this to deny that the internal state of the People’s Vote movement was – as we now know in more detail (£) – shambolic or that remainers made plenty of mistakes in 2019, including a failure to work together with soft Brexiters (and vice versa). But the calculated risk of the election was not one of them, and can only be presented as such by ignoring what was actually happening in parliamentary votes at that time.

Why does any of this matter?

It may seem pointless to revisit the, often, arcane details of the last four years of Brexit. But doing so is not a scholastic exercise: it is still very much live politics. Brexit was never going to be – and surely everyone can now see this? – a single, quick, or simple event. It is a long, complex, ongoing process which we are still living through. In that context it is vital to retain an accurate record of what was said, by whom, and of who did what, when, and why. The purpose being not, in fact, to assign blame but, rather, responsibility and also, perhaps, to hold on to a sense of reality in the face of the Zersetzung-style techniques that increasingly characterize Brexit.

Much of what is now happening  –  and Johnson’s whole strategy, most obviously in his ban on the use of the word ‘Brexit’  –  can be thought of as a battle between remembering and forgetting. The coming months are going to be crucial ones for defining what Brexit is going to mean for Britain and that is now certain to be very different to what those who voted leave were told it would be. So it’s going to be important to recall how we got to this juncture. After all, if, to reprise an earlier metaphor, a massive national train wreck is in prospect, it’s not unreasonable to ask what led to it - even if it’s small comfort to know the answers.

The long, slow grind continues

It’s about six weeks since Boris Johnson said there was no reason why the outline of a Brexit deal couldn’t be sealed by the end of July, as he put a “tiger in the tank” of the talks. As we reach that date there is no such outline in sight (unless, of course, you count the Political Declaration he signed, which was supposed to be just that).

It’s true that Reuters reported some slightly optimistic noises from Michel Barnier, and there were some very slight indications of progress this week. Against that, the Financial Times has reported (£) that Dominic Cummings favours a very light touch approach to UK state aid regulations post-transition. If so, that would make the prospect of a trade deal very remote, as it goes to the heart of the EU’s longstanding concerns about a level playing field. It would mean, in effect, that there would be no guarantees that, in the future, the UK wouldn’t use state aid to create unfair competition with EU companies (for a detailed overview of the issues of state aid and Brexit, see this 2019 IPPR Report).

If Cummings gets his way (others, especially the Treasury, take a different view) it seems a strange hill for a Tory government to see a trade deal die on. Escaping EU state aid rules was more a feature of the Lexiter case for Brexit (and, in passing, one based on misunderstandings of those rules). But if the report is correct it can be explained in two ways. One is just that it’s the latest outing for the purist sovereignty-at-any-price dogma. The second is that it shows how far the current Tory party is moving from traditional free market ideology, both in terms of potentially supporting uncompetitive industries and in facilitating cronyism in the award of public service contracts.

In this way, a lax state aid regime can be seen as reflecting two, related, longstanding contradictions within Brexit. On the one hand, it shows the contradiction (£) between Brexit as a nationalist, protectionist project and as promoting a globalist, free trade agenda. On the other hand, whilst it is already being talked about by Brexiters in populist terms of protecting British companies and jobs, its actual use might be to enable elite decision makers to give state hand-outs to their chums. Some have suggested that this might have a particular appeal to Cummings.

As well as showing some Brexit contradictions, the state aid issue also reveals some ironies. One is that it is by no means clear what this new ‘British system’ would be, how it would relate to or differ from WTO anti-subsidy rules, and how it would operate given existing state aid commitments signed up to by the government in the Northern Ireland Protocol (I don’t pretend to understand these exceedingly complex issues but they are addressed in a Twitter thread from George Peretz QC – a leading legal expert in this area, commenting on the FT report mentioned above – who most certainly does). The other is that, despite the fact that a light touch system would be anathema to the EU, some Brexiters are actually suggesting that it would be a betrayal of Brexit and would be compromising with Brussels (this, in turn, reflects the way that any actually existing Brexit is seen by some as a ‘betrayal of Brexit’).

Over-promising and under-delivering

The fact that Johnson’s ‘tiger in the tank’ turned out to be a damp squib shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, in December 2016, when Foreign Secretary, he declared that 18 months would be “absolutely ample” to complete a deal with the EU. This inane boosterism is obviously partly just a matter of his general approach to politics – as has been abundantly evident in his handling of coronavirus – but it also falls into the standard Brexiter repertoire of over-promising and under-delivering. All the now infamous quotes about ‘holding all the cards’ and ‘the easiest deal in history’ are testament to that.

Increasingly, such talk seems like the way that in 1914 what became the Great War was expected to ‘all be over by Christmas’. For although the Brexiters continue to hand out metaphorical white feathers to the supposedly spineless and unpatriotic, what we now see is the long, slow grinding attrition of Brexit reality.

It’s impossible to keep up with all of it, but just this week there has been further detail on the multiple lorry sites to be built in Kent, on the lack of customs preparedness (£), on the extra costs Brexit is causing the Home Office, on the lack of preparedness for the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol, on the impact on bank relocations, on the problem of how to manage the Eurotunnel, on the consequences for Gibraltar, on the uncertainty over how Rules of Origin for UK-EU trade will work, and on the impact of Brexit on biodiversity. Meanwhile, a new study from the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance shows the double shock that businesses are going experience when the effects of ending the transition period are overlaid on those of coronavirus, with the sectors relatively unaffected by the virus worst hit by Brexit.

Just from this short list of some of the most recent reports can be seen the enormous range of problems and damage that Brexit is throwing up. It is, to continue the Great War analogy, like reading the daily casualty lists. And just as it seems incredible, now, that there was not more public outcry as those casualties mounted so, too, is it incredible that there is apparently still so little public concern about what Brexit is doing to this country.

Of course coronavirus is a big reason for that since, understandably, it has first call on media time and people’s attention. Another is that the actual impact of many of these things has yet to be felt by the public.  A third is the Labour Party’s decision to remain almost entirely silent about Brexit. That is tactically understandable both because of coronavirus and also because revisiting the Brexit battles would be a gift to the Conservatives. At the same time, it is concerning that it is such a taboo topic. The things just mentioned – and many others – are happening and will continue to happen, and will affect almost every aspect of people’s lives after the end of the transition. To say that is not, in fact, to revisit the Brexit battles but to recognize that we are now on a new terrain, that of Brexit effects.

Public unconcern

The apparent lack of widespread public concern about what is happening, and what is in prospect, may reflect part of the political scientist Professor Matthew Goodwin’s explanation of the continuing popularity of Boris Johnson. In an essay this week in UnHerd, Goodwin suggests that Johnson’s appeal to voters lies in his positivity and forward-looking focus on national renewal and pride, and for this reason “they are generally willing to give him a free pass when he fumbles” on technocratic delivery. They are not “standing behind him because of what Michael Oakeshott called the politics of pragmatism – they do not see the world as the declinists see it, as merely an exercise in performance management”.

Johnson’s positivity contrasts with those Goodwin calls the ‘declinists’ who see Brexit, in particular, as damaging to the international standing and economic well-being of Britain. These “highly-educated” declinists are “Left-wing or liberal”, “gloomy”, “condescending”, often “narcissistic”, “vicious” and associated with “technocracy” and the “elite-driven Remain campaign” (Goodwin is a scholar of populist politics, but it is hard to resist the impression that he has come somewhat to identify with the object of his studies). Their writings, he says, are to be found in the New York Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times (and I venture to suggest that this lowly blog could be seen as a very minor example).

Goodwin is clearly right that Johnson appeals to a political constituency that spans “traditional ‘true-blue’ Tories and instinctively socially conservative blue-collar workers”, and in which patriotism and national identity play a key role, in the way that Margaret Thatcher did in the 1980s. But it’s over 40 years since Thatcher’s first electoral victory and what is missing in the comparison is the new distinction between truth-based and post-truth politics. It’s the latter which, distinctively, Johnson embodies – in a way that, irrespective of one’s views of her, could never have been said of Thatcher - and, whilst there can be no doubting its appeal to many voters it’s a major error to ignore its nature and its limits.

For the case against Brexit isn’t declinist so much as it is evidence-based, and it is that which marks it out from all the empty promises and false predictions of Brexiters. That isn’t to say that the evidence speaks for itself – there are always different interpretations, as well as selections, of evidence – but that it is within the terrain of evidential debate and analysis that the anti-Brexit case is made. The opposite to this is not, as Goodwin (again drawing on the Conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott) has it, the “politics of faith”. It’s the politics of post-truth.

Brexit and post-truth politics

It’s important to understand that post-truth politics is not – or not simply – about lies which, after all, have long been part of politics. Rather, it is about blurring the distinction between truth and lies altogether, and positing that, at best, there are alternative truths. That then takes on a particular twist within populism, with the suggestion that, amongst those alternative truths, there are some which have the special status of being ‘the people’s truth’.

That is obvious in the way that Brexiters routinely wheel out claims – about WTO terms, the interests of German car makers, technological solutions for the Irish border, GATT Article XXIV etc – which don’t have a sound evidence base but which can appear plausible. It’s on view every time they extol the benefits of an ‘independent trade policy’. For the most part, then, they sound as if they are offering a ‘politics of pragmatism’ and, even, a ‘technocratic’ programme. It’s certainly the case that there is a faith-based element of Brexit – that true belief is needed to make it work – and that has had a very important impact on politics and the civil service. However, Brexiters don’t appeal simply, or even primarily, to faith but to alternative, sometimes partial, truths, the repetition of which serves to suggest that the claims propounded by remainers are just an artefact of their elitism.

Goodwin himself says pretty much the same thing in his suggestion that declinists “seldom remain in the world of objective reality … [and] … are neither able to see the world in a balanced way nor in a way that most ordinary voters see it”. The key word here, undoubtedly, is “ordinary”, with its suggestion that these voters – despite being, even on Johnson’s polling, a minority - are the ‘real people’, with a more balanced, more objective or perhaps in some way more authentic view than that of the remainer or declinist elites. That they are ‘ordinary’ makes them, paradoxically, ‘special’.

The same logic was evident in Michael Gove’s now infamous line about people having had enough of experts, which is often quoted but rarely in its full context. He made the remark when confronted with a whole list of organizations which had counselled against Brexit, but then went on to say that instead of relying on these experts he “had faith in the British people to make the right decision”. The experts, he suggested, gave their warnings because they were “people who had done very well thank you out of the EU”, thus, implicitly, tainting ‘their’ truth as that of the elite rather than of the people.

The point is that the invocation of the politics of faith only starts when the attempts to couch the argument in terms of the politics of pragmatism fail. Indeed, Brexiters are delighted to cite experts approvingly – Professor Patrick Minford or Shanker Singham, for example – when they make the case for Brexit. It is only when confronted with the vast bulk of expert opinion to the contrary that expertise is derided.

Yet, accepting that there are always differences of interpretation, truth does have its own validity and each and every truth claim made by Brexiters is gradually being demolished. Eighteen months was not “absolutely ample” to do a deal, German car makers didn’t have the influence it was claimed they would, trade deals haven’t all been rolled over, the European Medical Agency and European Banking Authority didn’t stay in the UK (£), Turkey isn’t joining the EU, GATT Article XXIV doesn’t have the meaning they claimed it did, the Irish border isn’t unaffected by Brexit, and the technological solutions to it do not, at least as yet, exist. In fact, I can’t think of a single claim made by the Brexiters that has so far proved true. Again, it’s only at this point, when the limitations of post-truth politics become unavoidable, that Brexit becomes cast as the ‘politics of faith’.

The dangers of populism

The dangers of this are obvious, for they are the dangers of, precisely, populism. As soon as politics invokes ‘the people’ as a unitary, undifferentiated entity it immediately stigmatises those who disagree as not being of the people – and at the extreme as not being people at all. Even the more benign sounding term ‘ordinary voters’ carries the implication that those they are differentiated from are in some way less real, authentic or normal, voters.

These dangers become particularly acute – and the categories particularly untenable – in the context of a highly divided population. For what can it really mean in relation to Brexit, or to Johnson’s support more generally, to take a population split more or less 50/50 and describe only one group as ‘ordinary’ or as ‘the people’? Indeed, much of the damage of Brexit has been to take a very close result as mandating the least consensual or compromising form of Brexit to be enacted as ‘the will of the people’.

This quasi-mythological invocation of ‘the people’ contributes to forgetting that Brexit was sold to voters not on a faith prospectus but on the basis of post-truth claims that purported to be a pragmatic programme. This is very much the point I made in last week’s post, about how it is only since that it has been claimed that ‘it was never about the money’. Without reprising that argument, consider just the Gove ‘experts’ interview linked to above. There he also makes the explicitly economic case that EU membership meant that British people suffered “lower wages” and had their “access to public services restricted” with the implication that, after leaving the EU, these things would improve.

So how will leave voters react as these and all the other claims become falsified? They may well, for the reasons Goodwin suggests, continue to support Johnson and, for that matter, Brexit on the basis of faith. I’m not so sure of that for two reasons. One is just the general observation that as unemployment rises government voter support tends to fall. The other is the particular nature of Brexit in that, however it is delivered, some or many leavers will regard it as a betrayal. Indeed, if Keir Starmer is smart then he will be able to make much of Johnson having ‘bungled’ Brexit.

However, if voters don’t blame Johnson then who will they blame? As can already be seen, it will be the declinists or, as they are more usually called, the remainer saboteurs – those who are not ‘the people’ - as if they, rather than the Brexiters, were responsible for the promises made but not fulfilled. At that point, politics will turn very ugly indeed.

Or an anti-climax?

But there is another, less alarming but in its own way depressing, scenario, which increasingly seems to me to be quite likely. It’s that a minimal kind of deal is done that at least avoids the most immediate, calamitous effects at the end of transition. The other adverse effects will come in a slow, undramatic way and attract relatively little attention. The economic, cultural and geo-political impoverishment will be locked in but also normalised. Bits and pieces of the relationship will get patched and fudged over the coming years - possibly for the better, possibly not.

If so, the whole Brexit saga will fizzle out with an anticlimactic series of whimpers rather than a bang, leaving both remainers and leavers feeling disgruntled, irritated and cheated. Perhaps that would be appropriate to the long, slow, grinding attrition it has turned into. Whether envisaging such a scenario should be seen as optimistic or pessimistic I am not sure.