Britain is slowly learning what Brexit means

Shortly after last week’s post about Brexit, Russia, and defence went up, the news of Alexei Navalny’s death was announced, and although its cause is still shrouded in secrecy it can hardly be regarded as an accident, if only because of the brutal regime obtaining at the ‘Polar Wolf’ penal colony where he was incarcerated. It was a further reminder of the nature of Putin’s regime, and the anniversary, tomorrow, of its unprovoked attack on Ukraine will provide another. That is even without considering the crazy threats last weekend from Russia’s former President and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev that Washington, London, Berlin, and Kyiv would be obliterated by nuclear missiles if his country was forced out of Ukraine.

As I argued in that post, the combination of the Putin threat and a possible Trump Presidency is provoking renewed debate about, and possible progress towards, closer defence and security integration between the UK and the EU. It is telling that, just as I was writing it, the German Finance Minister even floated the idea of closer Anglo-French nuclear weapons cooperation, with financial support from EU countries, so as to develop a European capability (not that this week’s events have been much of an advert for Britain’s nuclear prowess). Shortly afterwards, that idea was alluded to by a close ally of Emmanuel Macron, on a visit to London to discuss the UK’s possible role in European defence more generally.

Nuclear defence integration isn’t in prospect, but that it is even being discussed is an indication of the seriousness of the situation, and the integrative logic of that situation. That logic was certainly on display last weekend at the annual meeting of the annual Munich Security Conference, which brought perhaps the strongest statement yet from Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy that a Labour government would seek a deep security and defence pact with the EU. At the same time, Valérie Hayer, who leads the Renew Group, the third largest bloc within the European Parliament, indicated strong support for a new defence treaty with the UK.

School for scoundrels

If growing threats are once more teaching the perils of isolation, passing the test will not be easy. Even without Brexit, a defence agreement would have been difficult and Brexit has made it harder. Hayer referred to such an agreement as having been spoken of in Theresa May’s time. That’s true, but it has a convoluted history, which remains important. When May submitted the letter triggering Article 50 in March 2017, there was a strong implication, much resented within the EU, that the UK would use its security and military capabilities as a bargaining tool in the exit negotiations. It’s worth recalling this partly because there is a tendency as time has gone by to depict May as (according to taste) the reasonable and pragmatic face of Brexit or, as Brexit Ultras would have it, unwilling to play ‘hardball’ with the EU.

In fact, apart from security, it was May and the then Chancellor Philip Hammond who threatened the EU with an ‘alternative economic model’ of aggressive tax cuts and deregulation if the UK did not get the kind of trade deal it wanted. Recalling this isn’t just a matter of setting the domestic record straight. It is directly relevant to the present because, although UK-EU relations are now generally better than they have been, there is still a legacy of distrust to be overcome which is not solely connected to how Boris Johnson conducted himself. Having never exactly been an easy partner even before the referendum, Britain came very close to making itself a pariah state in the years after 2016 and the memory of that, along with the spectacle of so many Tory MPs and their allies still obsessively demanding a cleaner break with the EU, as well as derogation from the ECHR, means that creating a new relationship of deep trust will not be easy.

May became considerably less antagonistic in tone in her September 2017 Florence Speech, to the extent that ironically, as I observed at the time, it sounded more like an explanation of why the UK should be joining the EU rather than of why it was leaving. As regards security, specifically, she was also notably diplomatic in her own speech to the Munich Security Conference, in 2018, although as I discussed then it continued to have some ambiguities. (By contrast, Boris Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, had used his appearance at the conference, the year before, to raise hackles by gloating about Britain’s “liberation” from the EU.)

However it was the Russian nerve poison attacks on Salisbury, just a couple of weeks after May’s Munich speech, which really brought home – literally – the fact that the UK needed European allies. That provided the background to the possibility of a deep security and defence pact that Hayer referred to, which was envisaged by the Political Declaration that accompanied May’s Withdrawal Agreement. But once Johnson came to power, he and David Frost proceeded to question its parameters and once again it was suggested, including by Nick Timothy, May’s one-time adviser who had been a key architect of hard Brexit (and, reportedly, had had an input into the Article 50 letter ‘threats’), that security and defence could be used as “leverage” to gain concessions on trade.

It’s not clear that any such concessions were achieved and, at all events, what emerged in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement was, as regards security, a “dialled down” relationship and, as regards foreign and defence policy, no agreement at all. It was really only the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 which created an impetus to greater cooperation, but “the relationship remains unstructured”. As I argued last week, the continuing threat of Russia, plus the threat, and, if it happens, the fact, of a Trump Presidency – along with the advent of a Labour government – may well be a catalyst for a closer and more structured relationship. Certainly some Brexiters have become alive to that possibility, with the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (£) counselling that “if you want to keep Brexit, pray for a Biden victory” and a Spectator article warning (£) against attempts to ‘lock’ Britain into defence integration with the EU. It’s a reminder that however compelling the logic of cooperation, it will encounter opposition from the stubbornly unteachable, which in turn will undermine trust in the UK’s reliability.

Learning the facts of life  

Yet the logic is compelling, and exerts a remorseless pressure. The fundamental point concerns the interconnectedness of the UK and the EU, which didn’t cease to exist because of Brexit. It is an interconnectedness which takes numerous forms, certainly not just in relation to security and defence, but trade, supply chains, culture, education, science, and families. Some of that is to do with the simple fact of being in geographical proximity; some of it is because of the fact of the UK having been a member of the EU, or its predecessors, for almost fifty years, leaving a deep legacy of integration. Brexiters gave no thought to the implications of any of this, and seemed to imagine that many of the conveniences of membership would just carry on as before, despite leaving, whilst relationships with the rest of the world outside the EU, and perhaps even the social mores and values of life before the EEC, could just be picked up as if they had been pickled in aspic since 1973.

The consequence is that Britain is now a learner in the world that it created for itself with Brexit, and a very slow learner at that. The lessons of interconnected defence are being taught the most quickly because the Russian invasion of Ukraine was such a seismic event that even the dullest of pupils couldn’t ignore it. Similarly, galvanized by his self-imposed political imperative to ‘stop the boats’, Rishi Sunak is about to agree a deal, possibly to be signed today, to share information with Frontex, the EU’s border protection agency. It turns out that international irregular migration flows can’t be dealt with at national level, something underscored just yesterday by the news that Europol have dismantled a major gang involved in cross-channel people-smuggling. Who knew?

The same tutorials are being given in other domains. Reality just keeps intruding on Brexiter fantasies. Thus, despite some die-hard Brexiter bumptiousness, it has become obvious from impartial analysis that ‘doing our own trade deals’ is not just of virtually no economic value but is a lot more complicated than the early ‘sign up to anything’ approach that led to the agreements with Australia and New Zealand. At all events, UK trade remains strongly connected to the EU. The lessons about the interconnected nature of regulation are also gradually being learnt. Sometimes, as with the effective abandonment of the UKCA mark, it happens through the laborious process of trial and error. Sometimes, as with this week’s news that UK officials are lobbying the EU to tighten its financial services regulation, it happens through the belated realization that what the EU does actually has a huge effect on Britain and, in this particular case, that robust regulation serves a useful purpose. Once again, who knew?

Cookery lessons

A currently widely-reported example of these dawning realities is Rishi Sunak’s sudden attention to food security, and his newfound interest in farming generally. Much of that interest is no doubt motivated by widespread reports that Tory support in its rural English heartlands is imploding, many of the roots of which lie in Brexit, in (at least) four ways.

First, there is the issue of the increased barriers to trading with the EU, which have added substantial costs to UK food exports, with more costs to come with the introduction of full import controls this year. Second there is the adverse impact on farmers of the new post-Brexit trade deals. Third, there is the impact of freedom of movement of labour having ended. And, fourth, there is the continuing saga of the replacement for the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) system of payments and support. Clearly all of these are inter-related, as the problems faced by farmers reduce UK production, thus aggravating food insecurity (something also brought into focus by the Ukraine war), and, alongside the increased costs of trade with the EU, this contributes to food price inflation and supply disruptions for consumers.

The replacement of CAP is a particularly sorry story. Here is something which was the bête noire of British Eurosceptics since the 1970s and so the one area, above all, for which they should have been prepared for when they finally achieved Brexit. Instead, the introduction of the confusing Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) was botched and chaotic, leading to endless reviews and delays, changes, and much of the promised financial support has never materialized. Even by Brexit standards it is a convoluted story, but the basic fact is that there is still no fully-functioning replacement for the CAP, or even any strategic clarity about whether the aim is to incentivize food production or countryside stewardship.

Computer club

If farming and food security is a case study in post-Brexit Britain’s slow schooling in reality, it also provides illustrations of one of the most significant, if least discussed, aspects of the theme of interconnectedness. A recent article by TC Callis in Kent and Surrey Bylines, discussing the introduction of import controls, drew attention, amongst other things, to how Brexit deprived the UK of access to relevant EU databases. It is a point I have stressed repeatedly in the past, but one which rarely features in media coverage of the issue. Indeed, even now, reports of the dangers of food crime under plans to shift testing facilities from Dover to inland Sevington ignore this issue. But Callis explains how food crime and other risks have been exacerbated by loss of full access to the EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) and, as I’ve pointed out before (although I failed to mention RASFF), there is a whole ecosystem of databases in this sphere, including the EU’s Animal Disease Information System (ADIS) and Trade Control Expert System (TRACES), to which the UK no longer has full access.

Such issues of data-sharing are part of the crucial, if unglamorous, infrastructure which, along with much regulatory infrastructure, keeps daily life going. A litter of acronyms, they are like the hardware and software of the computers we all use but which few people know or care about so long as they work. In the economic sphere, it is lack of access to the EU REACH database that has meant the UK having to develop a separate system, increasing costs in the chemicals industry*, and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is set to be another (as discussed in previous posts). In both these cases, linkage of the UK and EU databases may well be the ultimate outcome, underlining both the pointlessness of duplication as well as the persistent logic of integration and interconnectedness  

In the policing and criminal justice sphere, as with food and diseases, there is a complex EU eco-system of which the UK is no longer a part even though, of course, crime and other security threats to the UK are not confined to national borders. So we remain connected to Europe as regards these threats, but at best semi-connected as regards the means of meeting them. Thus some cooperation, albeit on reduced terms, continues, for example with EUROPOL and EUROJUST, but the UK has lost access to the Schengen Information System II (SIS II) and the European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS), significantly undermining policing.

Notably, it is database access which is central to the deal, mentioned above, that Sunak is doing with the EU over cooperation with Frontex, notably the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR). However that has another implication, which also applies to those EU security databases - like DNA, criminal records, fingerprints and air passenger lists – to which the UK has already negotiated post-Brexit access: it makes it highly unlikely that the UK could abandon the data protection standards of GDPR**. So, in this sense, interconnectedness in one domain begets interconnectedness in others.

Messy work

What we are seeing across all these areas, and many others, is therefore a very complex and untidy picture, which is almost impossible to summarise, or to characterize in any one way. It consists of a series of ad hoc accommodations, sometimes entailing duplication (e.g. UK REACH), sometimes entailing piecemeal deals with the EU (e.g. EUROSUR), sometimes simply meaning loss of functionality or capacity (e.g. SIS II). It should not be forgotten that all of these accommodations come at a financial cost, fragmented in ways which make it impossible to quantify, all of which used to be rolled into the UK’s budgetary contribution to the EU, in return for which we used to have full access to everything rather than to a jumble of patches.

To add to the complexity, almost none of these issues are static, with new systems – whether they be data management systems, regulatory systems, or sector-specific systems like farming support – being rolled out, each with varying transition or implementation periods. Likewise, to the extent that these developments involve recalibrations and redefinitions in particular aspects of the UK-EU relationship, they are also evolutionary rather than static. It is obviously also the case that the pace and scale of change in any particular area varies according to economic or political exigency, which is why the case of defence has a particular momentum just now, but they are all in flux to some degree or another.

But for all that the overall picture is messy and hard to characterize, in almost all cases the direction of travel is the same in pointing to integration. The well-documented tendency to non-divergence in regulation is an aspect of that, but non-divergence really only codes continuation of existing integration. The wider picture is one of closening relationships with the EU, either in the sense of reversing some of the distances initially created by Brexit (e.g. the Frontex deal or, not discussed in this post, rejoining Horizon), even if in clumsy or sub-optimal ways, or in the sense of moving to a greater degree of integration than existed even as an EU member (defence being potentially by far the most important example). For Brexiters, all this betokens the failure to ‘do Brexit properly’, but what it really shows is the failure of Brexit as a concept, or at least as a realistic policy.

A slow and unwilling pupil

There have been many faces of Brexit over the years. The gurning anger of Farage. The blustering buffoonery of Johnson. The psychotic glitter of Braverman. The vapid pipsqueakery of Grimes. The blokeish thuggery of Banks. The creepy unctuousness of Gove. The mad narcissism of Cummings. The born-again zealotry of Truss. The porcine truculence of Frost. The smug spitefulness of Rees-Mogg.

They all still exist, but the dominant image, now, is that of a lumpen, sulky, schoolboy dullard. Kept in for an umpteenth detention, tongue-between-teeth, he ponderously repeats the basic textbook exercises that his juniors mastered long ago, and with painful slowness comes to realize that the things his teachers had been trying to drum in to him for years past are, indeed, true.

 

*Some of these costs have been reduced by recent government changes to the UK REACH system, although, as is typically the case with regulation, this involves trade-offs in terms of creating higher levels of risk.

**Were the UK to do so, the EU would almost certainly withdraw recognition of the UK data protection system, and that would have the effect of locking us out of those EU databases to which we still have full access, as well as having profoundly damaging consequences for the commercial use of data. It remains an open question whether the measures in the current UK Data Protection and Digital Information Bill will constitute sufficient divergence from EU GDPR to lead the EU to revoke its 2021 adequacy decision about the UK regime.

Britain is being choked by the knotweed of Brexit lies

It is difficult to make sense of what Johnson’s Brexit government is doing, or trying to do, as regards the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). I discussed the background in last week’s post, much of which remains relevant, but since then there have been daily, almost hourly, contradictory signals and reports.

What has been confirmed is the recently trailed shift from threatening to invoke Article 16 of the NIP to the much more confrontational threat to pass UK legislation to supposedly unilaterally and permanently override much of the Protocol. This, in itself, is an implicit admission of the failure of the Article 16 threat tactic that has dominated the UK’s approach for well over a year. In truth, it was never viable because, whatever some Brexiters persuaded themselves to believe, it couldn’t do what they thought it would. Another delusion bites the dust, though it continues to be mentioned.

On the ‘legislation’ plan, having failed to act on the rumoured intention to include it in last week’s Queen Speech, it was then set to be announced this week by Liz Truss. This duly happened, on Tuesday, marking the end of any possibility that Truss would ‘re-set’ relations with the EU. But, again contrary to some other previous rumours, the legislation was not tabled and may not be until the summer. So there’s been some slight softening of stance over just a few days. And talks will continue with the EU, although it has previously rejected the substance of Truss’s outline proposals, and the atmosphere will be even more sour as a result of this new threat.

As presaged in my last post, this is a significant escalation but not a decisive moment. Next October is now being spoken of as the deadline for a resolution, its significance being that that is when new elections would have to be held in Northern Ireland if no government has been formed there. But we have seen such deadlines come and go before.

Meanwhile, on Monday, to coincide with a visit to Belfast, Boris Johnson published an article that was more serious and somewhat more emollient than anything he has said before, and he has generally seemed to downplay the significance of the proposed legislation, for example by referring to it as being concerned only with “some relatively minor barriers to trade”. So this seems like a ‘softer’ approach than Truss’s.

The government's tactics are as unclear as ever

Thus, beyond continuing the game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground that has been dragging on for months, it remains unclear what the government’s tactics are. Is the idea of the new threat to satisfy the DUP sufficiently for them to join the power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland? If so, it seems already to have failed since their leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, has suggested that only with the passing of the legislation will that happen.

Is the idea, as discussed in my previous post, to try to garner US support by tying this new approach so closely to upholding the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement (GFA)? Certainly Truss made this central to her announcement, although border expert Professor Katy Hayward, writing in this morning’s Irish Times, argues strongly that the government’s present approach is actually “giving succour to those who want to destroy" the GFA. Moreover, Suella Braverman, the “stooge” Attorney General, has apparently made the “primordial significance” of the GFA key to her advice that the legislation would be legal, although several leading experts say this term is legally meaningless and that there is no hierarchy of treaties whereby the GFA would 'trump' the NIP. 

This marks a shift in tactics from early attempts to justify the UK position primarily in terms of the economic effects on Northern Ireland (presumably in part because Northern Ireland is actually doing better than the rest of the post-Brexit UK as a result of the NIP). It is also a shift from framing the legal justification in terms of the supposed priority of parliamentary sovereignty over international law in the way that Braverman absurdly advised over the Internal Market Bill (IMB).

Another possible reason for this focus on the GFA, apart from the US dimension, is illustrated by the revealing comment in an otherwise predictably fatuous article by David Davis this week (£) that it gives the UK “the moral high ground”, which I suppose is an implicit acknowledgment of the evident moral low ground of seeking to renege on an agreement the UK negotiated and signed only a couple of years ago. It is hardly compelling, though, since, like the government, it signally fails to answer the question of why the NIP is a threat to the GFA now, whereas at the time of signature Johnson declared the two agreements to be fully compatible. Nor does it explain why a consent mechanism was created, despite the opposition of unionists already being known, that didn’t require cross-community agreement which is now deemed inadequate because of … unionist opposition.

Is the idea to play ‘mind games’ with the EU to try to get maximum concessions, the kind of ‘madman’ negotiating approach which was attempted throughout both the trade negotiations and last year’s NIP negotiations? If so, the EU may have noticed that, ultimately, the government backed down on ‘no (trade) deal’, on the illegal IMB clauses, and on Article 16. But, in the nature of that approach, this time might be different. Or is the idea to present impossible demands to the EU knowing they won’t be met but then enabling the UK to scrap the NIP blaming EU intransigence? To put it another way, is the UK using madman tactics, or is It actually mad?

Do the oscillations in the ‘hardness’ of tone reflect differences within the government between, especially, Johnson and Truss, as some reports have it (£)? Or is it Johnson’s own habitual dithering? Or does it (also) reflect blowing in the winds of, on the one hand, diplomatic pressure from the US and feared economic pressures from the EU, and, on the other, of contradictory political pressures from different groups of Tory MPs? Certainly, as so often throughout these Brexit years, negotiations with the EU seem almost secondary to internal negotiations within the Tory Party.

Within that, what is the significance of David Frost’s now constant background chorus of bellicose, and often frankly silly, rhetoric both in the UK (£) and in the US? Of course it may well reflect his ambitions for new political office, despite the failures, abundantly obvious to all but himself, of his previous ministerial career. But is he, as a result, also now taking a similar role to that played over the years by Nigel Farage (now rather silent about Brexit though, tellingly, he and Frost are now cosying up), pressuring the government from the sidelines to stay true to ‘pure Brexit’?

The government’s strategy is as unclear as ever

Along with, and plainly related to, these tactical questions are the bigger, strategic questions of what the government actually wants. Sometimes, Johnson and other ministers have talked as if the entirety of the NIP, and certainly its core provision of an Irish Sea border, is unacceptable in principle, and many Brexiters have called for it to be entirely scrapped because they have never accepted the need for any border at all. Yet at other times they talk as if what is at stake is only operational reforms to the practical application of the agreed deal, albeit going beyond what the EU has offered so far. In Truss’s proposed changes, this question is fudged: she says she does not want to scrap the Protocol, whilst seeking to change the operations so drastically that, in effect, it would amount to doing so.

One problem with this lack of strategic clarity is that, if the real aim is to gain fresh concessions, it reduces the incentive for the EU to offer them: why do so, if it will just lead to the demand for even more, or if the UK isn’t really seeking concessions but an excuse to collapse the whole agreement? But if the real aim is to collapse the agreement, then for how long can it be credible to keep making threats without carrying them out?

Perhaps an even bigger problem is that, despite what Brexiters think, the EU really isn’t pre-occupied with Brexit in the way that, at times, it once was. So even if there is some cunning British negotiating strategy designed to wrongfoot Brussels, it’s more likely to irritate and exasperate than produce sleepless nights. There’s certainly no longer any great interest in accommodating UK domestic politics. That largely ended when the Withdrawal Agreement was signed. Ironically, having left the EU, Brexiters and the Brexit government spend far more time and energy thinking and talking about the EU than the EU spends on Brexit or Britain. That lack of interest, quite as much as border checks, is part and parcel of what it means to be ‘a third country’.

There can be no clarity because there is no honesty

These and related issues can be endlessly debated. But I think the key to making sense of all of them is to recognize that the government can’t be clear about what it is doing because it can’t be honest about how it got to where it is now, and can’t be honest about where it wants to get to in the future. As was always likely, the skein of contradictory lies told over the last six years is thickening and spreading so as to overwhelm the entire post-Brexit polity. So, like knotweed, it is now choking the very Brexit it created and, with that, British politics more generally. That Northern Ireland should be the most visible manifestation of this is not surprising because, certainly since the announcement of ‘hard Brexit’ by Theresa May in her January 2017 Lancaster House speech, it has been at the epicentre of these contradictory lies.

First and foremost are all the lies of the referendum campaign and since, lies about what Brexit would (or would not) mean for Northern Ireland but, more broadly, about how it would be possible to have hard Brexit and yet have frictionless trade, or have ‘the exact same benefits’ as the single market and customs union membership yet without belonging to either. Perhaps most fundamentally, the lie was the idea that the UK could leave the EU and yet, in some ways, still be treated as if it had not. The implication was that Brexit would be a fundamental change, and yet many things would remain exactly the same, or at least could do, if only the EU did not want to ‘punish’ Britain, or was not ‘sulking’ about Brexit, accusations that have become articles of faith to Brexiters (as much as, once, it was an article of faith that ‘we hold all the cards’).

Johnson was the front man for all this and his “cakeism” precisely encapsulated its central ‘out and yet keep the benefits’ dishonesty. But it’s important to understand that he was not the architect of the lies, nor by any means their sole spokesperson. These were the lies of Brexit itself, and they are why the entirety of Brexit, and not just Brexit in Northern Ireland, is failing.

Johnson’s serial dishonesty

That said, it would be politically astute, and not unfair, for the Labour Party in particular to denounce what has happened as Johnson’s Brexit. To do so would certainly be more realistic and reasonable than the present approach of barely talking about it all. For, indeed, much of the current situation does bear the imprint of Johnson’s trademark dishonesty. For it partly arises from his invariable attempts to avoid hard realities and difficult decisions by lying, which have now caught up with him, badly.

Thus the reason he can’t be clear if the strategic aim is to scrap the NIP as unacceptable in principle is because he lied to the electorate in 2019 when he told them he had negotiated a great oven-ready deal. As a result, this week, under robust questioning, he had to say that he had signed the deal but had not anticipated that the EU would implement it in the way it did. However, because he can’t be clear if his aim is to scrap the NIP, he is unable to satisfy the DUP (and other unionists parties) or the ERG because he lied to them in promising that he would do so and, at least as regards the ERG, secured their support for his deal on that basis. For them, in principle and not just in practice the NIP is unacceptable. So anything the EU might conceivably agree to will not satisfy the ERG, if only because they have become so extreme that the very fact of the EU agreeing it would be enough to damn it in their eyes. As Rafael Behr put it in a superb article this week, “there is no concession big enough, no deal good enough” for them.

Yet if Johnson could give these hardliners what they want, and somehow bamboozle voters into forgetting his electoral promises about his 2019 deal, he would face opposition from what’s left of the centrist or traditional right amongst Tory MPs. It’s clear that Theresa May – who no doubt also reflects on how Johnson’s disloyalty and dishonesty undermined her – and some other Tory MPs will oppose a move to break international law, as will many Tory Peers, just as they did the illegal clauses of the IMB. Some, it seems, may tolerate the threat (but not the passing) of legislation as a ‘negotiating ploy’ with the EU to obtain further flexibilities within the NIP, but that just brings back the same questions: is it such a ploy, or is there a real intention to unilaterally disapply the NIP? Johnson can’t tell them the truth of that, either.

The realities of power

Beyond these domestic considerations, if Johnson does satisfy the hardliners then he faces the formidable problem of EU economic power and US power full stop. Neither the old Brexit lie that ‘they need us more than we need them’, nor the wider Brexit fantasy of untrammelled national sovereignty, survive contact with the realities of those powers. As I said in my previous post, a full-on trade war is not in immediate prospect, not least as the whole process of passing, let alone using, legislation to disapply the NIP will take many months.

But there will be at least some EU retaliations if the hardline path continues, and ultimately it will become impossible to avoid the issues which in essence go right back to 2016-17 and the arguments about ‘sequencing’: the prior condition for a trade agreement with the EU was and is the Withdrawal Agreement, with its three planks of the financial settlement, citizens’ rights, and Northern Ireland. Hardline Brexiters conned themselves that there was no need to accept that, and still blame May for doing so. But the reality is that she did, and she did so because in reality she had to.

Thus, in the very final analysis, if the UK completely reneges on the NIP then the EU will, justifiably, regard the trade agreement as void, as already more than hinted at by Maros Sefcovic. Because all the Brexit lies of 2016 are still lies now. If anything, ‘German car makers’ are even less likely to care than they did in 2016, and the UK is even less well-placed to surviving ‘on WTO terms’ than it was when ‘no deal Brexit’ was in prospect. But, again, Johnson and his fellow Brexiters are not able to admit those truths, either to themselves or the electorate.

So although this will all drag on for a long time yet, what is happening is that Johnson’s reported psychological desire to be liked by everyone, his political modus operandi of telling different lies to please different audiences, his predilection to defer making decisions, and his basic ‘cakeist’ refusal to accept that decisions really need to be made are all, finally, catching up with him. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Now, no one believes him, and for this lack of trust, at least, Labour do seem willing to criticize Johnson’s Brexit policy. However, to re-iterate, Johnson’s dishonesty and untrustworthiness, whilst important, have exacerbated rather than created the dishonesty inherent in Brexit.

The most fundamental problem: Brexit itself

One fundamental part of that dishonesty is the avoidance of the paradoxical question: how can you have a border without having a border? That question is central to the running sore of the NIP, but is also implicated in the knots the government is tied in over EU-GB import controls over conformity assessment marking, and over regulatory duplication/ divergence (£)*. Of course one might say that resolving irreconcilable, or even just bitterly contested, issues is the stuff of politics. The peace process and GFA actually provides a good example. However, the politics of Brexit never even attempted the kind of process in which irreconcilabilities and bitter oppositions could be fudged into some kind of workable, durable consensus.

That would have entailed acknowledging the closeness of the vote, the variety of views amongst Brexiters about how it should be done, and the fact that two out of the four nations had voted to remain, as well as the implications for the GFA. This may seem like pointless jobbing back, but it’s crucial to understand that it lies at the heart of the rolling political crisis we have been in since 2016. And the reason is precisely because the realities and the various trade-offs were never honestly admitted, and, worse, that even to try to do so was dishonestly dismissed as undemocratic. That honesty still eludes the British polity, whilst the dishonesty still haunts it.

It has recently become fashionable to say that May’s deal did, if belatedly, face up to the realities and trade-offs but this isn’t really true, or at best it’s only partially true. It is the case that her backstop did so, but the deal was still dishonest because it pretended that this backstop might never need to be used if the subsequent trade agreement was sufficiently deep, or if ‘alternative arrangements’ that would enable a fully open border were to be developed. However, since leaving both the single market and customs union were already red lines, there was no prospect at all of the future trade agreement avoiding the backstop whilst – as realists always said, and has been seen subsequently to be true – there are no ‘alternative arrangements’ sufficient to have replaced the backstop.

If May’s deal is considered honest, it is only by comparison with the infinitely more dishonest deal that Johnson did. But both were dishonest to a degree. May’s by agreeing to what was ostensibly a temporary ‘backstop’ but was actually a permanent ‘frontstop’; Johnson’s by agreeing to what was actually a permanent ‘frontstop’ whilst intending to treat it as a temporary bridge to a much more minimal, or non-existent, border.

A polity choked by lies

The reality is that the only way Brexit could fully be squared with the Northern Ireland situation (and also the only way it could be done without huge economic costs) was through single market membership (perhaps via EFTA) along with a UK-EU customs treaty. Alternatively, within hard Brexit, a deeper trade agreement would – and still could – have allowed a thinner Irish Sea border (and a thinner GB-EU border generally), as would an agreement on dynamic alignment of Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary regulations. Instead of accepting these realities, Brexiters have spent six years lying that there can be a border without having a border and, unsurprisingly, failing to achieve that outcome. In the latest developments, the government is again trying to enact that lie, and it is still failing. And it will inevitably go on failing until reality is accepted (or, perhaps, until Northern Ireland leaves the UK).

The swirl of the current, sometimes confusing, events only postpones facing up to reality, and leaves the country in the limbo which, in one form or another, we have been in since 2016. And it is not cost-free. The general economic damage of hard Brexit is now self-evident except to those who will always deny it. This latest NIP row is also economically damaging, especially to investment (a country on course to a possible trade war with its biggest trade partner isn’t very attractive), as well as being damaging to the fabric of Northern Irish society. It is also damaging to the UK’s international reputation even to be making, yet again, these threats to international law and it is obviously damaging to the UK’s strategic interests in strong, harmonious relationships with the EU and US, especially given the Ukraine war.

But our politics is stuck. It can neither admit reality but nor can it entirely deny it. The consequences of Brexit, including for Northern Ireland, are undeniable. Yet their causes, namely the lies inherent in Brexit, are barely discussable, at least in England. The Tories are too invested in Brexit to be honest about it, and Labour are too scared by Brexit to be vocal about it. So we stagger on, choked by the same old lies, and daily adding new ones, a spreading knotweed first suffocating all other plants in the garden and then undermining the very foundations of the country that used to be our home.

  

*These are all ultimately border questions because hard Brexit has created both a regulatory and a customs border with the EU, so even if not necessarily about what happens ‘at the border’ they all relate to the territory over or within which something (e.g. regulation, conformity assessment, data sharing, tariffs, origin of goods components, recognition of qualifications, validity of passports) applies or happens.

Due to other commitments, I don’t expect to have time to post again until Friday 10 June.

We are still Brexiting

We have now passed the 100-day point since ‘economic Brexit’ – the end of the transition - and to mark it Yorkshire Bylines put together an excellent series of briefings from regular and guest contributors (disclosure: I am one of them). Taken together these provide as good a summary as there is of what has happened during this period.

It may seem as if not much is happening, but that’s far from true. As regards this week, specifically, a few developments stand out. One is the release of February’s trade figures which, as expected, show some bounce back after January’s precipitate decline, but as before it is still too early to see what the eventual structural changes will settle to, especially as regards services trade. Plus the UK has yet to introduce import controls.

So it is certainly far too early to proclaim, as some of the usual suspects have, that the hit to the UK economy has been “completely trivial”. The best analysis I’ve seen of the economic cost of Brexit, updated to include these new figures, comes from John Springford of the Centre for European Reform (which, in fact, shows that, even were there to be no more damage, just what has happened since 2016 is far from ‘trivial’).

The other, more political, story is in reports of progress and a more positive atmosphere (£) in talks between the UK and the EU over implementing the Northern Ireland Protocol against the background of the violence in the province. Yet there is a need for caution, as Mujtaba Rahman suggests, because a durable political solution seems as far off as ever (if, indeed, such is possible). Whatever may happen in the next few days – a ‘stock taking’ meeting between Joint Committee co-chairs David Frost and Maros Sefcovic was held yesterday evening, and Sefcovic is briefing EU Ambassadors this morning, so there may be a statement soon – the issue, as with the economic effects, is to recognize that not too much weight can be put on individual ‘data points’. The implementation of the NIP is not suddenly going to be resolved in a single moment, but will be, at best, an ongoing process that goes in fits and starts.

A multi-threaded process

So just as the structural impact on trade will emerge over time, partly as a result of decisions about supply chains that companies take in the coming months and years, so too will the politics of the UK-EU relationship go in fits and starts. Moreover, the process will be multi-threaded, with the threads not necessarily aligned. Thus even if there is currently some rapprochement over the NIP, we also saw this week reports that the EU will not agree to the UK re-joining the Lugano Convention (£). This, which allows the civil and commercial judgements made in one member’s courts to be enforced in the countries of the other members, is one of the many byways within the Brexit saga. As I discussed in May 2020, when the UK made its application to rejoin, it was questionable whether the EU would agree, and it now seems that it won’t.

My point, then, was that it showed the limitations to the Brexit government’s idea of sovereignty, because like it or not the UK, like every other country, is partly dependent on the decisions of others. Now, it also shows the limitations of the government’s ‘hardball’ approach to post-Brexit negotiations, because it invites the same response from the EU. I am not saying that there is a direct link between the UK’s decision to flout the NIP as regards grace period extensions – still the subject of legal action, which the government this week requested it be given more time to respond to – and the EU’s stance on Lugano membership. But it doesn’t seem outlandish to think that squandering trust and goodwill over one issue has some impact on other issues.

All of this serves to illustrate that the entirety of Brexit is, as it was always going to be, an ongoing process even after the exit and future terms deals were struck. Indeed, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) has still to be ratified by the European Parliament, and setting a date to do so has been held up by concerns over the UK’s violation of the NIP, although votes in some important committees this week suggest that approval may be in prospect. Moreover, the complex architecture of technical sub-committees established by the TCA have still not actually been convened, primarily because the UK government’s pique about the delayed ratification – a classic example of cutting off the nose to spite the face, since it would greatly help UK businesses were they to meet.

Then there all the things which, like Lugano, lie outside of the TCA. These include the still unresolved matters of recognition of financial services regulation and data protection equivalence. The latter now looks to be getting close to being granted but if so then, like anything granted on financial services, it will always be possible for the EU to unilaterally withdraw recognition. In short, we are still Brexiting.

Laying the blame

As noted in my previous post, there’s nothing in opinion polls to suggest a widespread consensus that Brexit was a mistake. If anything, according to pollster Peter Kellner, there has been a slight rise in support for it, probably attributable to perceptions of the vaccine rollout. But commentators leaping to conclude that Brexit has now been accepted as a positive thing (£) are, again, putting too much weight on current data and on small shifts within it. Such judgments are premature, and will be for quite some time.

The reality is that, with small variations, public opinion about Brexit remains more or less evenly split. Yet in a way this is a sign of its failure. After all, Brexit wasn’t supposed by its advocates to create a permanently divided nation. It was supposed to be an incontestably ‘good thing’. Instead, just a few months into actual Brexit, what is striking is how few are standing up to claim credit for it. The more prominent discussion is of the question: who is to blame for this mess?

It is a discussion which entails a certain amount of re-writing of history. This week, the Labour MP Barry Sheerman correctly made the point that Boris Johnson had been repeatedly warned of the dangers Brexit posed for the Northern Ireland peace process. In response, Gavin Barwell, who became Theresa May’s Chief of Staff after the 2017 election, asked Sheerman how many times he had voted “against a Brexit deal which would have avoided these problems, ultimately leading to Theresa May standing down and Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister”. The week before, the Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges made a similar argument, though referencing remainers in general rather than Labour MPs as having responsibility for what is now happening because of having failed to back May’s deal.

A trip to the archives

I anticipate this kind of account gaining considerable traction – in fact it has been swirling around for well over a year already - so it is worth examining in some detail, not least as Barwell was a serious player and, by all accounts, an honourable politician. There are actually two different claims within it. One is that May’s deal could have been passed had Labour (and other opposition) MPs supported it. This has to be about MPs, not ‘remainers’ in some general sense, as only MPs had a chance to vote on it. The second claim is that, had May’s deal passed, the present problems in Northern Ireland would not be happening.

I’ve written before of the perils of such counterfactual history, and back in August 2020 also gave a preview of the ‘blame games’ that would emerge if there were no (trade) deal, many of which are now on display in this different context. So I won’t repeat all that, but focus only on the claims Barwell makes, neither of which stacks up.

Barwell claim #1

On the first claim, the first thing to say is that May made no attempt to garner opposition support for her deal, even though the original ‘meaningful vote’ planned for December 2018 was postponed because it was clear she would lose it. Only after it was held and lost in January 2019 did she belatedly ‘reach out’ to opposition parties but excluded Labour until after losing the third meaningful vote. Moreover, she continually insisted that the only alternatives to her deal were ‘no deal’ or ‘no Brexit’ and thereby – even if unwittingly – encouraged all those who wanted either of those outcomes to oppose it.

More importantly, if her deal had passed in the face of bitter opposition from the ERG and the DUP but with Labour support, it is inconceivable that her government would have survived even long enough to sign the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) with the EU. There would certainly have been a parliamentary Vote of No Confidence, which all opposition parties would have been bound to vote for and, unlike the one which actually occurred in January 2019 (after the first meaningful vote), the ERG and DUP would surely have joined them. That is evident from their “furious” reaction to the talks she did have with Labour. What exactly would have happened then is unclear – presumably a general election with the Tories under a caretaker leader, and whoever that was they could hardly fight on a platform of May’s deal, given how few Tory MPs supported it.

But even if the inconceivable is conceived, and May’s government survived to sign the WA with the EU, what would this have meant for Brexit in general and for Northern Ireland in particular? May’s premiership itself could not have lasted much longer than the WA, if only for lack of DUP support and, anyway, she offered her resignation in return for backing her deal at the time of the third meaningful vote in March 2019. So there would have been a Tory leadership contest, presumably leading to Johnson coming to power, and very likely a general election at that point. If that also yielded a Johnson victory (or if there had been no election but he’d regained DUP support to continue without one) then there would certainly have been an attempt to renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement which he and the ERG would undoubtedly be calling a ‘surrender document’. And, even if that attempt failed, such an administration would (as the actual one did) seek a very distant relationship with the EU.

Barwell claim #2

So, then, Northern Ireland. If May’s WA had been struck and survived, it would still have been regarded by unionists as unacceptable – as the DUP’s implacable opposition to it showed - because there would still have been some degree of differential treatment of Northern Ireland. How much would depend on the future terms agreement not the WA. Barwell suggests that it would have been minimal, or non-existent, because May had promised regulatory alignment. But that promise had no guarantees, and it is impossible to see how May (even if she had continued) could have delivered that in the face of ERG opposition, unless Barwell seriously envisages Labour propping her up for months whilst she negotiated her trade deal, and supporting all the related domestic legislation. In any case, since she couldn’t have survived, the future terms would have been agreed by Johnson, and there would have been no regulatory alignment.

In short, under any realistic assumptions, there is no way that May’s deal (and, even more, anything, such as Common Market 2.0, that might have been agreed to in the Indicative Votes) could have been delivered by the government given the ferocious opposition to it from the ERG and the DUP. And, even if it had, the unionist opposition means it wouldn’t have prevented what is now happening in Northern Ireland. That could only have been averted by enacting it in a form that retained single market and customs union membership, which Brexiters – including the DUP – rejected as did May, from the Lancaster House speech of January 2017 up to and including the Political Declaration which suggested that the future terms deal would exclude freedom of movement of people and would provide for an independent trade policy. So the blame lies squarely with the Brexit Ultras, with May and, of course, with Johnson.

This isn’t ancient history – it’s live politics

This is history, in a way, but that matters because, in George Orwell’s famous line, ‘who controls the past controls the future’. In any case, it is hardly ancient history. It may seem a life time ago – both because of all the Brexit developments since, and of course the pandemic – but it is only a shade over two years ago that the meaningful votes were held. That really is no time at all. And, perhaps more to the point, the reason it is being dredged up again now is because people have political reputations to protect and agendas to pursue, and assigning and diverting blame is crucial to that.

Indeed, just as Barwell contends that the current situation derives from May’s deal having been thwarted, it is now a foundational myth of Brexiter belief that all that is going wrong with Brexit is down to Theresa May having ‘given in’ to the EU’s ‘unreasonable demands’ (as, for example, in historian Ruth Dudley Edwards’ absurd Telegraph piece this week, the more absurd since, like so many now lambasting the sea border, she advocated Johnson’s deal which created it). In doing so they absolve themselves of responsibility, whilst also ignoring that the problems May’s approach created were due to her misguided embrace of the hard Brexit they advocated. In that, they are actually helped by Barwell’s misguided characterization of May’s approach as being a substantive repudiation of hard Brexit since, to them, therein lies her sin.

So what is underway isn’t the ‘post-match inquest’. Because we are ‘still Brexiting’, it is about the live, ongoing politics of how the UK-EU relationship should be conducted and how it should develop. Specifically, the extent to which the impact of the Irish Sea border can be minimized is still a question of UK willingness to align regulations with the EU, especially sanitary and phyto-sanitary regulation. Even such an alignment won’t fully resolve matters, because the unionist objections are more based upon the symbolic politics of the border than the technical details (which is why, in those symbolic terms, May’s deal was almost as objectionable to the DUP as Johnson’s). Still, the technical details do affect the practicalities of supply disruption and that’s not unimportant.

The shape of future UK-EU relations

More generally, the question of a closer or more distant relationship with the EU continues, and will continue. It inevitably did not end with the TCA because of the brute facts of geography and economy. Thus Brexiter accounts of May having ‘given in’ are potent primarily because they give licence to their present attempts to make the relationship with the EU antagonistic and more distant. That is allied with attempts to obscure the damage that Brexit is doing, one part of which is to suggest that if there is any such damage it is down to Brexit not having been done properly because of May’s supposed weakness.

The latter is significant, because one of the crucial fault lines in public opinion now and in the coming period is between those who think that Brexit was intrinsically flawed and those who think it was only flawed in its delivery. As Kellner points out, there is a large constituency of voters whose views about Brexit are not very strongly held and who are liable to change their minds quite easily. Where (and whether) the opinion of this group eventually settles will have an important effect on where the politics of post-Brexit relations lands. However, this terrain is a tricky one for Brexiters because it pushes them in contradictory directions. On the one hand, to defend Brexit they need to downplay or deny the adverse consequences. On the other hand, to critique the way Brexit was done they need to focus on those consequences.

In this context, an important development this week was the formation and first session of the UK Trade and Business Commission, a cross-party group of MPs, business leaders and economists. Its focus will be the trading relations between the UK and the EU, and UK trade deals with other countries. It is noteworthy because almost all parliamentary scrutiny of the ongoing realities of Brexit has been closed down, including the Select Committee on exiting the EU that was chaired by Hilary Benn, who co-chairs this new commission. It is not an official or parliamentary body, and so has the potential to do the same kind of job for the trade and business aspects of Brexit that Independent Sage has done in providing informed, evidence-based data and discussion in relation to coronavirus.

This initiative has already received quite a bit of media coverage, and that is important because it is remarkable how little attention Brexit is now receiving. For example, the fact that the UK has requested extra time to respond to allegations that it has broken international law – hardly, one would have thought, a minor matter – is barely mentioned in the UK media. Where there is high-profile coverage, it eschews mundane but important issues like, say, the fact that the TCA committees haven’t met, in favour of, for example, James Dyson’s airy fatuities about Brexit giving Britain an ‘independence of spirit’.

The politics of ‘don’t know’

Overall, then, the guiding thread in all this is that we are in an unsettled situation across a number of dimensions which makes it too difficult, and too early, to identify a direction of travel. That uncertainty relates to the economics of Brexit, the politics of the UK-EU post-Brexit relationship, the security situation in Northern Ireland, the question of Scottish independence, and, out of all that, the formation of public opinion. Going back again to Kellner’s analysis, this will have big implications for domestic politics: “if Johnson, leading a more-or-less unified party on this issue, can persuade voters that Brexit is going well, he will be hard to defeat at the next election. Wherever Labour ends up, its first task is to undermine that Panglossian sentiment. A bold and compelling alternative to the current version of Brexit would help.”

That echoes my own recent argument that Labour needs to offer a different narrative on Brexit, and now is the time because a ‘common sense’ public opinion about whether Brexit was a success or a failure could coalesce quite quickly. That won’t be based upon arcane details of sanitary and phyto-sanitary regulatory alignment or membership of the Lugano Convention, but formed by big, broad brushstrokes of perception.

There is, however, another and perhaps more plausible scenario. One, quite sensible, reading of the referendum result would have been that the answer the public, considered as a single entity, gave to the question posed was ‘we don’t know’. The biggest scandal of Brexit is that this was then taken as an endorsement for almost the hardest form of Brexit imaginable. But what if, with that having been enacted, the settled view of ‘common sense’ public opinion remains ‘we don’t know’?

If that is how things shake out, then we are in real trouble: doomed to unending domestic division, whilst still, despite everything, having failed to create a stable and sustainable form for our country’s relationship with its continent.

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.