The tangled web

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive”  Sir Walter Scott

In an article this week the Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik neatly skewered the present political situation in the UK. Referring to Brexit amongst other things, she wrote that “an entire government has been built on fantasy and false promises” and made the crucial point “if your product is a con, you need a conman”.

It will be become more important, not less, to remember this if it turns out that we are seeing the end days of Boris Johnson’s premiership, for despite their close associations Brexit is not Johnson and Johnson isn’t Brexit. It’s true that Johnson has been complicit in creating the catastrophic mess that Brexit has become and told all manner of lies about it, as he has about so many other things. But the mess and the lies were inherent to Brexit. Brexit was the con, and Johnson wasn’t even the only conman.

It’s also important to understand what it means to say that the mess and lies were inherent to Brexit. The point is not simply that lies were told in pursuit of getting people to vote for it, or to defend the manner in which it was executed. That is true, but may not be so very different to other policies undertaken by many governments when, for example, statistics are manipulated in misleading ways or deceptive rhetoric is deployed. It might even be said that the remain campaign engaged in some of that. What’s different about Brexit is that it wasn’t just sold with lies, it actually consisted of lies.

This is the reason why it is not only justifiable but inevitable that, even as years go by, there continues to be outrage about what has been done, an outrage forcefully articulated by political commentator Jonathan Lis last week: “our withdrawal from the EU licensed a specific form of corruption: lying to people’s faces about things they could see before their eyes”. Continued outrage is justifiable because of the sheer scale of the offence, and it’s inevitable because now and for many years to come the consequences of the lies told are with us. More than that, the lies keep being re-told and added to – yes, by Johnson, but not just by Johnson: consider the numerous examples provided by Jacob Rees-Mogg in the remainder of this post. That is why it has proved impossible to ‘move on’ from Brexit.

The Northern Ireland Protocol lies

Nowhere is that more obvious than in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). The immediate crisis that developed last week when the DUP tried to halt Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary (SPS) checks on the GB-NI border has abated somewhat, because of the court ruling which temporarily blocked that attempt pending another hearing next month, but the situation Is far from resolved. Meanwhile, the UK-EU negotiations continue as, it’s worth recalling, they have in one form or another for over a year now, under first Michael Gove, then David Frost and now Liz Truss. So do the UK threats to invoke Article 16, which go back to January 2021, just days after the NIP became operational, and were repeated this week by Boris Johnson during Prime Minister’s Questions.

RTE’s Europe Editor Tony Connelly produced an excellent account of the background to last week’s events, and what runs through it is the UK government’s dishonesty about what it agreed to in the NIP and its dishonesty in not implementing it. All of this ultimately derives from the foundational dishonesty of the Brexiters that their project created no need of any border at all (something repeated by Rees-Mogg in Parliament this week). Then, along the way, there was dishonesty about the EU’s short-lived plan to suspend vaccine exports, about the unilateral suspension of grace periods, about what Article 16 means, and about many other things which I’ve summarized elsewhere. The latest dishonesty would seem to be that by unilaterally axing the agreed checks, the NIP can be got rid of, or substantially ignored, without recourse to the Article 16 process.

Lies piled on lies

To emphasise, the dynamic here is twofold: lies repeated and lies added. As a source quoted in Connelly’s report says of the current events “We’re basically back to the trilemma of 2017”. Yet things do change in the repetition and in the new additions for, as the source goes on, “except now it’s worse, because at that time there was more trust that the UK government was actually trying to do something in the interests of Northern Ireland. Now you're dealing with the people who screwed Northern Ireland over and over again, starting with the referendum, starting with Brexit".

One of the consequences of becoming so mired in lies is that it is almost impossible to change course. Like a mendacious child or a cheating spouse, once the first lie is told it leads to the second and the third and then to a doubling-down on the first. Perhaps, early on, there could be a moment to come clean and start afresh, but at some point that becomes impossible. You are living the lie. Perhaps, even, it no longer seems to be a lie any more, and the lie is living you. I think that something like this has happened to at least some Brexiters.

At all events, because the NIP has become so shot through with lies, it has become all but impossible to take the obvious step, which would solve many of the current disputes, of taking up the EU’s offer of an SPS alignment agreement which was made at least as early as July 2021. This would get rid of most of the checks to which the government and the DUP object, has the support of farmers and others including those in Northern Ireland, and at one time was actually advocated by Edwin Poots and the DUP (£).

The sovereignty lies

It's conceivable that Truss will now take, or try to take, this step. But here another feature of how Brexit consists of lies comes into play. Neither the NIP nor any other aspect of Brexit exists in isolation from others. Hence, along with the lies about the NIP, the barrier to SPS alignment is the many lies (or, at best, misunderstandings) about ‘sovereignty’. On this account, to agree to ‘dynamic alignment’ would be to concede sovereignty to the EU and, thus, be a betrayal of Brexit. Again there is a foundational lie, and then a series of additions or permutations.

The foundational lie is that EU membership entailed a loss of sovereignty, something discredited by, amongst other things, the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017 which stated that “Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU” (paragraph 2.1). Then, like mould spores, the lies about sovereignty spread. It comes to mean that any role for the ECJ is a denial of sovereignty. It leads to false claims about how sovereignty enabled the early approval of vaccines (repeated by Rees-Mogg this week) and many of the other supposed benefits of Brexit. It takes strange and convoluted forms. In relation to SPS alignment these include that this would preclude a trade deal with the US when, apart from the fact that no such deal is in prospect, that implies that setting SPS regulations to suit the US would be fine but doing so to suit the EU would violate sovereignty.

The ’nothing should change’ lie

Even more bizarre is the idea – voiced by former Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers in an interview on Radio 4 last week (starts 40.55) - that the EU should just accept that UK products meet SPS standards because, as yet, our rules haven’t greatly diverged. This is a version of the much older, deeper, lie that current regulatory harmonization would yield an easy and comprehensive trade deal which would be virtually indistinguishable from trading as an EU member. That was the basis of Liam Fox’s “easiest deal in history” claim, which is rightly much-mocked but is rarely examined for the flaws in its underlying reasoning. Those flaws made it irrelevant in the context of the UK wanting to have the right to diverge, just as Villiers suggestion is irrelevant whilst the UK refuses dynamic alignment.

All this in turn is a version of the even deeper, most intangible, strangest and yet perhaps most pervasive of Brexit lies. That, somehow, the UK could have Brexit and yet not be treated like a third country and, from that, the lie that if the UK was treated as a third country it would be ‘punishment’. This was again in evidence in the Villiers interview when she bemoaned the EU treating the UK as it does other non-members, and in this way being unreasonable. It’s also the basis of the lie – also told by Villiers – that Brexit had no implications for the Irish border.

In this way, the sovereignty lies intersect not just with those about the NIP but with those about trade and regulation. In relation to trade, apart from the point just mentioned, the foundational lie was the repeated referendum claims that “there is a free trade zone that stretches from Iceland to the Russian border, and we will still be part of it”. Yet the only realistic meaning of this – that, like Iceland, the UK would be in the single market – was denounced as a betrayal of Brexit as it would not restore sovereignty (e.g. over freedom of movement of people, but over regulation more generally). From this, new lies flowed, such as Johnson’s false claim that his trade deal meant there would be no non-tariff barriers to UK-EU trade, and all the subsequent attempts to downplay damage to trade as ‘teething problems’.

The ‘red tape’ lies

On regulation, the sovereignty lies intersected with the lie that Brexit would get rid of bureaucratic red tape, when the opposite was always going to be the case and has been demonstrated in the last year, as shown in this week’s devastating report from the Public Accounts Committee. It leads, as discussed in last week’s post, to all the current attempts to create ‘independent’ regulatory systems, even though in general these lead to more ‘red tape’.

A new example this week is the suggestion that the UK could “capitalise on our regulatory freedoms” by not implementing new EU car safety regulations – regulations the UK contributed to developing whilst it was a member – even though they would reduce deaths and injuries. Like many of the other deregulatory proposals, it probably won’t happen as it is so patently foolish and because of the fissures within the Brexit coalition, although with Rees-Mogg now appointed Brexit Opportunities Minister (sic) who can say?

Notably, Rees-Mogg’s first act was to ask Sun readers to provide examples of ‘petty EU regulations’ they would like abolished. It was a tawdry piece of populism, ludicrously invoking Lord Kitchener, presumably intended to suggest that this is ‘the People’s Brexit’. Actually, Rees-Mogg is likely to find that ‘the people’ are in practice rather attached to regulation, especially where it stops them being killed. For it is increasingly obvious that the de-regulation (or, more often, as per last week’s post, re-regulation) enabled by Brexit is a solution in search of a problem, rather than a response to any actual problem. Supposedly, just because it would use ‘our Brexit freedoms’ it must be ‘a good thing’.

This reflects the absolutely central flaw in the sovereignty lie, which is that it treats national sovereignty as an abstract notion of unimpeded freedom rather than as a practical tool for doing things with freedom. That is why Brexiters are incapable of seeing that the choice to be a member of the EU doesn’t take away sovereignty but is one of the things a country can do with its sovereignty. Brexit is another such thing that can be done with sovereignty – but it doesn’t make us ‘more’ sovereign, it just means we exercise sovereignty in a different and less effective way. The issue is not, therefore, sovereignty in the abstract, as a ‘good thing’ whatever the consequences (as some Brexiters would now have us believe), but whether the uses made of it have good outcomes (which is the way that, by and large, Brexit was sold to leave voters).

Again, once the basic lies have been told and believed it lodges and then gives rise to new lies. An example this week is the proposal from the Global Britain Commission that the UK could have “a massive post-Brexit windfall” by increasing exports per capita to the same level as Germany. It seems to have escaped the Commission’s attention that Germany has achieved this level of exports without leaving the EU, and so the idea of it being a windfall of Brexit is a peculiar one. It’s just the same old lie about the value of having an ‘independent trade policy’, dressed up in the new – and stranger – clothes that Germany provides the comparator.

The promises betrayed

Whilst a lot of these lies were inherent to Brexit, and were never possible to deliver even in theory, other kinds of lie are about promises that might have been delivered in theory but in practice turned out have been false. The obvious example here is the claim that the centrality of parliamentary democracy would be re-asserted (made again this week in Rees-Mogg’s execrable Sun article).

In fact, we’ve seen the government having to be forced by the courts to hold the Article 50 vote and by backbench rebels to hold the Meaningful Votes, an illegal prorogation of parliament, and a massive grab of Executive power through the use of ‘Henry VIII powers’ which looks set to continue with the forthcoming “Brexit Freedoms Bill”. In a similar way, Brexit has seen erosion of the powers of the devolved institutions. Moreover, the promise that Brexit would mean more parliamentary scrutiny of trade deals and other international agreements than was afforded to the UK as an EU member has not transpired and seems unlikely to.

One reason why such promises have not been kept roots back to the way the Brexit process unfolded under Theresa May (showing, again, that Johnson isn’t the only cause of the present situation) and the wider public discourse which obtained at that time. For she and others consistently represented parliament as being subordinate to and subversive of “the will of the people”.

This morphed into the idea, which Johnson continued and developed, of the government as a pure distillation of the people’s will, and parliamentary democracy as its usurper, in direct contradiction to the earlier message about Brexit and parliament. In this, and many other ways, the lies and dishonesty of Brexit have morphed into the much wider ones of the culture war and of the entire political landscape. Brexit, as Lis observes, was the “original sin” from which the rest flowed.

The multi-Mobius serpo-viral Brexit gaslighting device TM

In the past, I’ve used the metaphor of the Mobius strip to capture the way that Brexit events keep recurring as the same old lies and fantasies keep encountering the same old realities. And that does capture some aspects, such as the constant return to the Irish border trilemma. No answer can be found because no answer exists, so the lies just keep taking us back to the same place. But, as suggested in this post, a better image would be a more complex one of numerous such strips, intertwined and writhing around like snakes, and reproducing and mutating like viruses.

True believers in Brexit may, as speculated earlier, have come to believe all the lies to be true. The even bigger problem is that many politicians who know they are lies, especially if they are in the Conservative or Labour parties, pretend not know this. Admittedly it’s not always easy to tell the difference. For example, does Dover MP Nathalie Elphicke really believe, as she said in Parliament this week in a version of the ‘nothing should change’ lie, that the now endemic lorry queues in her constituency are “not because of Brexit but because of Brussels bureaucracy”? Who knows, but there are certainly many MPs, probably including some of those who cheered her, who know such things are idiotic nonsense but don’t speak out.

That arises from fear of their own parliamentary and constituency parties, of the media and of sections of the electorate, but it is horribly dangerous and corrosive. Dangerous because it means that nothing truthful, and therefore nothing practical, can be done about Brexit. Corrosive because it has spawned a wider dishonesty, as argued forcefully by former Prime Minister Sir John Major in a speech yesterday. Johnson may be the most consummate liar, but his demise will not end that dishonesty.

That is why, referring again to Jonathan Lis’s recent article, we must not give up on talking about Brexit. He is surely right that “the Brexit specialists may be exhausted”. I can certainly relate to that. He’s also right that “everything there is to say on Brexit has been said many times”. I can relate to that, too. And the reason it is so is precisely because of the endless repetitions of old lies and the new ones they spawn. If we stop pointing them out, they easily become ignored or forgotten.

More than that, the weaving together of strands of lies in the way I’ve described here is what enables Brexiters to gaslight the general public. It just becomes totally exhausting and confusing to disentangle the long chain of events that lies behind, say, the ongoing NIP rows and crises. It can be easier, even for the well-intentioned and well-informed, to become disorientated to the extent of wondering if the Brexiters may have a point. However, even if that happens – no, especially if that happens – it doesn’t solve any of the problems all the lies have created, it just takes away any prospect of them being solved.

Of course there is a way to escape the tangled web of lies that Brexit and Brexiters have woven. It is for all those who know them to be lies to start telling the truth, and for all those who tell the lies to be exposed.

 

Many thanks to those who completed the survey at the end of last week’s post (now closed, though if you are part-way through completing it you will still be able to submit your response when ready). As a result, I can say that, certainly for now, I will not be migrating this blog to Substack or any other platform, and I will not be charging for access. For those interested, I’ve written a short discussion of the survey results.

Still stuck on the Mobius Strip

David Frost presumably speaks for the whole government in his claim that Britain is “now looking forward”. It can only be presumed, since virtually no other government minister, including the Prime Minister, actually says anything in public about Brexit any more. That in itself is remarkable, as if Brexit was either a triviality or, perhaps more to the point, an embarrassment, like a relative whose drunken rantings are studiously ignored at family parties.

Yet the even more remarkable thing about Brexit is how the government – in the person of Frost – continues to go around precisely the same old loop about what it actually means. Central to this Mobius Strip of Brexiter madness, as I’ve been calling it for some years, are two inter-related false claims. One is that there is a form of trade deal which can largely replicate single market membership but without freedom of movement of people or ECJ involvement. The other is that such a deal would also mean that ‘the Irish border issue’ would substantially disappear. Its generic form is the recurring fantasy that we’ve left the EU, but we shouldn’t be treated as if we’ve left the EU.

It might have been thought that these fantasies had been jettisoned when Boris Johnson agreed both the Withdrawal Agreement which, via the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), established the Irish Sea border, and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) which created a trade arrangement entirely different (and necessarily inferior) to that of single market membership. The two are linked, in multiple ways, but most importantly because the relative thinness of the TCA entails a relative thickness to the Irish Sea Border.

The enduring fantasies of Brexit

However, as the ongoing disputes over the NIP show, the fantasies still endure. In the latest post on his invariably excellent Europe blog, RTE’s Tony Connelly dissects Frost’s stance on these disputes. At its heart (as per numerous recent posts on this blog) is the idea that ‘regulatory equivalence’, described in the latest version of Frost’s proposals as “equivalence with teeth”, removes the need for regulatory alignment and, supposedly, the need for most border checks. This possibility also means, in Frost’s view, that the whole thinking behind what was originally Theresa May’s backstop was flawed and, in turn, that the frontstop (that he negotiated) was not necessary, and really only an artefact of the concessions that May had already made.

This is now locked-in as the Brexiters’ analysis of why their project has gone so horribly wrong as shown, for example, in a recent article by Bernard Jenkin. Some of this is the boilerplate stuff about obstructive remainers and the nasty EU, but at its core is the claim that what should have been agreed (and still may be!) is “a proper free trade agreement with mutual recognition of product standards, and regulatory equivalence”. This in turn would do away with the need for the NIP which, like Frost, he regards as “the forced inheritance of Mrs May’s backstop” and resulting (of course) from EU and Irish perfidy, with Leo Varadkar painted as the particular villain.

In these assessments, Frost and Jenkin are still stuck in the confusion that has dogged the Brexit process, namely the fundamental difference between a free trade agreement and a single market. It was present during the referendum campaign, expressed later by David Davis in his “exact same benefits” formulation, repeated endlessly in the promises of ‘frictionless trade’, and it lives on in Jenkin’s refusal to understand the failure of Brexit and, most dangerously, in Frost’s continuing attempts to turn a fantasy into a reality.

For it is a fantasy. Commenting on Frost’s proposals on regulatory equivalence, the leading trade expert David Henig points out that “the major problem is this doesn’t exist anywhere in the world”. It simply isn’t true to say, as Jenkin does, that a “proper” trade agreement would or could have the characteristics he claims. Limited agreements on mutual recognition and equivalence do exist, but they fall very far short of the scope that is being proposed and that would be necessary to address the volume and diversity of UK-EU trade. As so often, Brexiters latch on to half-understood concepts to imagine that there is some ‘magic bullet’ that will enable the UK to leave the single market and yet enjoy its benefits.

But we’ve been all round this loop before, endlessly, throughout 2017 and 2018 (for explanation of why Jenkin’s and Frost’s proposals are a non-starter, see, for example, the Institute for Government briefing of September 2017, the UK Trade Policy Observatory article of August 2018 and the EU Law Analysis blog post of March 2018). It’s all old, utterly discredited, ground. The respected Eurasia Group analyst Mujtaba Rahman, in an almost despairing comment on Jenkin’s article puts it this way: “Why can’t Bernard Jenkin and his idiotic Merry Men understand? The full benefits of Single Market are unlocked for those who accept its entire ecosystem: dynamic reg[ulatory] alignment, oversight, 4 freedoms. The terms he is wining [= whining? pining?] for are fantasy; have no basis in reality”.

The corollary of that fantasy is the entirely dishonest notion that the NIP was unnecessary, growing from the dishonest view that the backstop was unnecessary, growing from the dishonest view that the Irish border issue was confected and is nonsense. It is bizarre, and really rather despicable, that even five years on so many Brexiters claim this. It’s not as if it is a particularly difficult idea to grasp: the single market and customs union removed regulatory and customs borders; leaving them reinstates those borders. But, collectively, the Brexiters have persuaded themselves this is not true, egged on by the echo chamber of their think tanks and discussion groups. They don’t understand because they don’t want to understand.

Chilled meat – latest news

The psychological or anthropological peculiarities of Brexit tribalism matter as they are a large part of what got us into this mess and, more importantly, because under Frost they continue to shape post-Brexit policy. The most recent argument over chilled meats has been temporarily dealt with by the EU accepting the UK’s request to extended the grace period for their movement between Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and announcing some relaxations of other rules). But this only postpones the conflict, and in fact itself expresses aspects of the conflict.

The EU have emphasised that this is not a postponement in order to agree a way to keep the movement flowing permanently. It is to allow businesses to re-organize supply chains so that Northern Ireland sells chilled meats sourced there or in the EU (most obviously Ireland), the point being that there is a general ban on third countries sending chilled meat products into the single market. This was accepted by the UK in the NIP, and in the original creation of the grace period last December the government’s declaration also appeared to recognize it was only in order to allow an adjustment. However, now, Frost is saying that the extension is to allow the creation of an agreement whereby chilled meats will continue to go GB>NI permanently.

This is wrapped up with the bigger issue of the UK’s desire for an equivalence regime rather than a dynamic alignment regime for sanitary and phyto-sanitary (SPS) regulations. However, even were there to be an equivalence regime (on the lines of the EU-New Zealand arrangement) it would not prevent the chilled meats ban coming into effect. All this is now set to be the ‘battle of the autumn’, when a variety of grace periods, including those extended by the UK without EU agreement which are the subject of legal action, are set to expire*.

It has become quite common, not just amongst Brexiters, to point out that the chilled meats issue is only a relatively minor one, and to suggest that the EU ought to show flexibility over it. But it is important to recognize why it is so pivotal. The UK has not made any fuss about the fact that the ban already applies to GB>EU trade (there was no grace period, so this has been the case since 1 January); it is its application to GB>NI trade that is contested. So what is at stake is the UK’s more general refusal to accept that Northern Ireland remains effectively within the EU single market for goods. This is at the heart of the NIP and, therefore, the chilled meats dispute is not a triviality because were the EU to be ‘flexible’ about it then, in principle, the entire edifice of the NIP would be threatened.

The fact that the UK sought, and obtained, EU agreement to the latest chilled meats extension, rather than extending it unilaterally, might be read as a sign of a more conciliatory approach, perhaps as a result of the intervention of the Biden administration. However, Tony Connelly’s sources suggest that “the Johnson-Frost hardball approach has survived intact”. I don’t have Connelly’s sources (in fact, I don’t have any sources other then those publicly available to everyone) but this is consistent with what I have been arguing for weeks.  

Without repeating those arguments, there is no doubt in my mind that Johnson and Frost have persuaded themselves that their approach has worked, and I am sure that they interpret the EU’s acceptance of extension, in the face of their threat otherwise to unilaterally extend, as evidence of that. Their ultimate aim is to chip away at the NIP until it becomes meaningless and, if the EU allows that to happen, leaving it, and especially Ireland, with the problems of dealing with potentially non-compliant goods finding their way into the single market, including the possibility of outbreaks of animal or even human diseases.

Dangerous nonsense

All this is obviously much more dangerous than in the earlier iterations of Brexiters’ refusal to understand what Brexit meant. In the past, that was an internal UK matter, shaping the debate about what kind of agreements might be sought with the EU. Now those agreements have been made but, as I noted at the time of the Withdrawal Agreement (December 2019), “many in the ERG will now be thinking that Johnson’s deal was only the bastard offspring of May’s ill-fated premiership and the ‘remainer parliament’, and feel no allegiance to it. They kept quiet during the election campaign, which required them to pledge support for Johnson’s deal, but that won’t necessarily last”.

That proved true as within months Brexiters began agitating to abandon it, including some of those ERG MPs who had voted for it. One outgrowth of this was the legal action launched last February which aimed ultimately at having the NIP declared illegal, which has this week been rejected by the High Court in Belfast (there may be an appeal). The case was brought by Unionist Brexiters, including Ben Habib who, as was drily noted in the judgment, had, when a Brexit Party MEP, voted for the agreement that he now wanted declared illegal. That isn’t a legal flaw in the case, but it does expose its political ludicrousness.

The latest iteration of this nonsense comes from pro-Brexit economist Graham Gudgin who also argues that the NIP was only agreed because in 2019 Parliament, and especially the Benn Act, had deprived the government of the leverage of threatening no deal – itself an absurd proposition. Even more extraordinarily, he then argues that the government may not have really understood what it had agreed to, perhaps because of lack of experience within the civil service. This is really the most tragi-comic of ironies. For whilst constantly bellowing that Britain is a sovereign nation and the sovereign equal of the EU, the Brexiters are also saying we want a new deal because we didn’t understand the one that we signed!

The vain imagination is that if they go once more around the Mobius strip they will end up at the promised land. They won’t, of course, but the process of trying will create yet more instability and yet more deterioration of the UK’s reputation. That will not deter Frost, though, because built in to the ‘hardball’ theory is that you have to live through some ‘turbulence’ in order to achieve victory. Gudgin, meanwhile, recognizes that this might ultimately end in a trade war, but is not concerned as “the imbalance in trade” is to the UK’s advantage. In other words, they are now round to that part of the loop where ‘the EU need us more than we need them’ and, by implication, all the stuff about German car makers.

Sovereignty and reality

As Maros Sefcovic re-iterated this week, a solution to most of the practical problems caused by the NIP is on offer from the EU in the form of a ‘Swiss-style’ regulatory alignment agreement, which could even be temporary were the UK to decide to diverge in the future. This is still rejected by the UK on grounds of ‘sovereignty’ and yet, although the mechanism is very different, this is pretty much the situation which now obtains with data protection. For this week the EU announced that it would treat UK data protection regulations as ‘adequate’ for purposes of commercial and other data sharing activities between the UK and the EU. This is hugely important for both business and security, so is good news (though it wasn’t done out of kindness). But the point is it is predicated upon, and its continuation is contingent upon, the fact that UK law in this area continues to be essentially the same as EU law.

This doesn’t say much for the Brexiters’ concept of sovereignty, since it is entirely in the EU’s gift, and reflects the reality of the UK’s economic and geographical proximity to the EU which makes that concept so silly. Still, it’s true that the UK is free to diverge in the future, if it is willing to take the consequences of losing adequacy approval. So, by the same token, why not do the same over SPS regulations, especially since the government’s avowed policy is not to lower standards? There is no logical difference in terms of sovereignty (and, as someone used to say, would it really be so awful to be like Switzerland?), so I think the answer can only lie in the point made earlier: that it is part of an attempt to resile from the NIP in toto.

It is the reality of economic and geographical proximity, and the limitations of naïve ideas about sovereignty, which tie together many of the latest Brexit events and will go on doing so. For example, this week planned legislation was announced for the UK’s post-Brexit state aid policy. But we have yet to see what it will actually allow us to do that we couldn’t whilst in the EU (£), it will still have to be compliant with the level playing field commitments in the TCA, and also with WTO rules. Far less high profile was the announcement that the British Standards Institute will be accepted as a non-EEA member of various European standards committees (this isn’t an EU decision, per se, but it is relevant to post-Brexit standards alignment).

Then there was the news of Nissan’s investment in electric car and battery production. That is good in itself, though we do not know how much government support was involved, but again it reflects the proximity of the EU market (few, if any, UK-built Nissans will be sold anywhere else, no matter how many trade deals the UK makes on the other side of the world). Bringing battery production to the UK (via a Chinese partner) is part of ensuring that Nissan’s cars will continue to meet the rules of origin requirements of the TCA so that they can be sold tariff-free in the EU. It’s an accommodation to Brexit, rather than a benefit of Brexit. From this point of view it is possible to argue (but impossible to prove) that it wouldn’t have happened but for Brexit, although it’s also bound up with the move to electric vehicles in both the EU and the UK.

Naturally, despite normally being so insistent on proof of causality, Brexiters are crowing that this discredits the warnings of Nissan and remainers, conveniently forgetting that those warnings related mainly to the no-deal Brexit so many of them advocated. In fact, car makers are an important case where the TCA has considerable value, although it has by no means been a panacea for them or for Japanese companies in the UK. Other significant industries have fared less well, such as financial services where it has this week been rather quietly announced that the UK is giving up on seeking a regulatory equivalence deal with the EU.

Accommodation, too, lies behind the extension of Jersey’s ‘amnesty’ on French fishing rights in its waters, avoiding a resumption of the high-profile conflicts earlier this year. As with the NIP grace periods, or the postponement of UK import controls, it seems that Brexit works best when it isn’t actually implemented. No extension, though, to the deadline for EU citizens to apply for settled status which expired this week amidst technological chaos and a huge backlog. None of the ‘flexibility’ or ‘pragmatism’ Frost keeps calling for from the EU for them. For the one thing which Brexiters show no sign of wanting to revisit is their unremitting hostility to foreigners, even if that is not true of the public in general (£) and even if post-Brexit immigration policy is beginning to cause massive problems across multiple sectors. Hence also the continuing refusal to countenance a mobility agreement with the EU, despite the damage to Britain’s touring arts industry which Frost rather sneeringly dismissed this week.

The Danse Macabre

So the Danse Macabre of Brexit continues, with fantasy and reality locked in a grotesque embrace, or what The Sun would perhaps call a ‘steamy clinch’.

On the one hand, there are all these disparate daily attempts across multiple areas of life and commerce to reconcile, accommodate, work round or endure the conflict between a half-baked theory of sovereignty and the practicalities of an interconnected continent – whether they be about regulations and standards, trade, fishing, or individuals and families trying to secure their residency rights. In a sense one might say that, in doing so, people are trying to ‘move on’ from Brexit and to ‘look forward’ as Frost declaims.

On the other hand, even as institutions, companies and individuals try to make workable the mess that Brexit has created for them, the Brexiters themselves, Frost included, can’t move on at all. Hence they remain stuck on the same loop they have been going round since 2016. In that fetid stagnancy, they endlessly revisit the contradictions between their delusions of what Brexit should be, the realities of what it could be, and the facts of what they agreed that it actually would be. There’s no good reason to expect it to end any time soon.

 

*There is a confusing little legal wrinkle in all this which, to the best of my non-lawyer’s understanding is this: the chilled meats extension announced last December was technically ‘unilateral’ on the part of the UK, but was nevertheless agreed (‘taken note of’) by the EU as a pragmatic way of avoiding a formal treaty change. As such, it was uncontentious. By contrast, the extension of various other grace periods last March was literally done unilaterally by the UK with no EU agreement, hence it is this which has given rise to ongoing legal dispute.

A normal week in crazy Brexit Britain

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

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

The NIP: the calm before the next storm?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strange days indeed

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

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

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

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

An incoherent strategy …

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

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

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

… derived from an incoherent project …

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

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

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

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

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

… rooted in an inherent contradiction

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

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

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

The politics of “gormlessness”

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

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

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

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

Brexit unhinged

We’re now a couple of months into actual Brexit, in the sense of the end of the transition period, although still only in the first phase of complete implementation of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). That is because there are some grace periods for aspects of the arrangements for the Irish Sea border and because of the delay in the imposition of import controls by the UK.

Northern Ireland grace periods

As regards the former, the government this week announced its intention unilaterally to extend these grace periods. This is going to cause a major row with the EU, a row the government has been itching to have for weeks, since such unilateral action flouts the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) and as such breaks international law. This is the first sign of David Frost’s avowedly more confrontational approach as incoming co-chair of the Joint Committee overseeing the NIP, and of course is a reminder of the crisis caused by the illegal clauses in the original Internal Market Bill in 2020, which nearly scuppered the TCA being completed.

Frost claims that the move is “temporary” and “technical”, but that isn’t the issue – what matters is that it is unilateral. It also seems unnecessarily provocative given that extension was under discussion and might very well have been agreed. There are genuine reasons why an extension is needed, for example in relation to processing parcel deliveries.

It now appears likely that the EU will seek legal redress and there may be political consequences too: the UK still needs the EU to confirm data protection and financial services equivalence, and indeed to ratify the TCA. The European Parliament has now postponed setting a date for TCA ratification in response and there does seem to be at least an outside possibility that it might refuse to ratify.

UK import controls

As for UK import controls, these have not yet happened not because, as some Brexiters imagine (the relevant part is about one minute into to the clip linked to), the UK is being ‘nice’ whereas the EU is being inflexible – it is because the UK was not ready. That, despite insisting that the transition period should not be extended, and despite having decided over four years ago that Brexit meant leaving both the single market and the customs union. As with the Irish Sea border issues, which the UK has known about since agreeing the NIP over a year ago, there is no issue of principle here, just the incompetence of the Brexit government. It is a testament to the profound failure of Brexiters to actually understand or accept the consequences of what they were urging and, perhaps even worse, of what they agreed to.

As things stand, from 1 April, the UK is due to introduce sanitary and phyto-sanitary checks and then, from 1 July, all other customs and regulatory checks will be made. It’s possible, of course, that, just as it is trying to do over the NIP, the government will delay full implementation, or will do so only with a ‘light touch’, not least because it is still not clear the necessary port infrastructure will be ready. Such a delay would not have the legal and political ramifications of breaking the NIP. Even so, it shouldn’t be imagined that it would be a cost-free decision because these checks serve a purpose in terms of ensuring, for example, food safety standards. Delaying implementation will certainly make life easier for legitimate importers, but will also increase the possibility of unscrupulous traders bringing in defective or dangerous products.

However, assuming the full checks are introduced as planned, then as reported this week it will create a ‘perfect storm’ right at the time that, hopefully, businesses are opening up again as Covid restrictions are lifted. Hospitality and catering businesses would be especially vulnerable. It is not even as if imports are unaffected by Brexit already. Whilst most attention has focused on the plight of British exporters to the EU, it has emerged this week that German exports to the UK (i.e. UK imports from Germany) slumped by 30% in January compared with the year before, reported to be directly attributable to Brexit. Since there are no import controls, this is presumably due to the VAT changes, customs charges and significant delays which are already stifling goods imports (£).

The first instalment of Brexit damage

So all of the Brexit damage since ending transition being catalogued so assiduously in ‘the Kelemen archive’ is really only the first instalment of what is to come (the link is to #202, the date of my last post: scroll down for damage since then, scroll up for damage before then). And whilst it is true that there is some evidence of improvement in, for example, the percentage of lorries being turned back at EU ports due to inadequate documentation, this means it is falling back from very high levels to a ‘new normal’ which is lower than the peak but higher than would otherwise be the case. It also probably reflects that some firms have simply given up on trading with the EU, as well as the re-routing of Ireland-EU trade, which is threatening to destroy Welsh ports.

We will see, as official figures come in over the coming months, the extent of the suppression of UK-EU trade – but it is a question of extent, not of whether or not trade volumes will be suppressed because, by definition, trade barriers mean less trade than would otherwise be the case. Yet you would hardly know from this week’s budget that Britain’s trading economy is in turmoil (£). The word Brexit wasn’t used by the Chancellor, though it was referenced in relation to the largely bogus idea of freeports (see sections 3 and 4 of the link), and perhaps in the implicit admission that ending freedom of movement wasn’t such a great idea. There was, however, a rare mention of the B-word by Keir Starmer in his response – perhaps a sign that he is renouncing his Trappist vow of silence on all things Brexit.

Meanwhile, looking further ahead, there will be another set of challenges for importers when, at the beginning of next year, the CE mark ceases to be recognized in the UK and all goods will have to bear the UKCA mark to be placed for sale in the UK market. British-made goods will, of course, also have to carry this mark, but, if they are to be exported to the EU, will need the CE mark. It’s exactly the kind of regulatory duplication that the single market avoids, and yet another way in which Brexit will increase business ‘red tape’.

Cads!

It seems that the government is becoming sensitive to the growing realization that Brexit is just as damaging to the economy as the project formerly known as fear warned. Even with, as per my last post, the Labour party’s silence and a largely unchallenging media, the steady accumulation of negative news stories over the last two months is creating a narrative in which it is accepted, if only tacitly, that Brexit isn’t working in the way the Brexiters claimed it would. That may only elicit a resigned shrug from the general population, especially given the impact of Covid, but it is suggestive that Brexiters are losing their propaganda battle.

It is only in that context that the government’s astonishingly dishonest advertising campaign of the last week or so can be understood. It would have been easy to miss that there is a campaign because its dishonesty consists primarily in the placement of paid for stories in newspapers including the Independent, the Daily Mail, The Sun, the Evening Standard and the Metro, along with hundreds of local newspapers. It’s necessary to look very carefully to see that these are, indeed, billed as written ‘in association with the UK government’ or as ‘sponsored articles’. To all intents and purposes they look like legitimate news stories. This suggests almost a desperation on the part of the government to provide supposedly ‘good news’ about Brexit.

This desperation extends beyond the dishonesty of the means of dissemination to the content of the message. Some assiduous sleuthing by Anthony Robinson for Yorkshire Bylines found that the three companies profiled in several of the stories (specifically, those in the Metro and the Mail – the other ones linked to above seem to be mainly the same, but there are a few variations) are, respectively, very small, not exporting much, and a subsidiary of a Japanese company whose European headquarters is in the Netherlands. In other words, none is really representative of the many hundreds of SMEs struggling to export because of Brexit, and it has subsequently emerged that the owner of one of the businesses has been charged with embezzlement, theft and fraud. These companies, it has to be assumed, are the best examples the government could find.

If this seems somewhat unhinged – and the sort of use of public money that, surely, the Taxpayers’ (sic) Alliance should object to? – it is as nothing compared with the way the Brexit Ultras are conducting themselves. This week, a group of ERG MPs, led by Andrew ‘Irish passports for all’ Bridgen, wrote a semi-literate letter to David Frost bemoaning, as is boilerplate stuff for the Ultras, the barriers to UK exports caused by the Brexit they championed (but now regard, in Bridgen’s peculiarly Woosterish language, as the EU ‘playing the cad’) and proposing a retaliatory ban on imports of bottled water from the EU. They, too, seem to think that the lack of UK import controls is some sort of generosity by the government, whilst being bemused as to why the EU suddenly stopped ‘taking on trust’ UK exports on 1 January.

At one level it is laughable. This is not only the Brexit they campaigned for, saying that the UK ‘held all the cards’, it’s the trade deal they voted for only a few weeks ago. Now, they propose to embark on a trade war with the EU. At another level, it is serious, because it shows how the Ultras are now determined to permanently toxify UK-EU relations. Brexit was never going to be enough for them. Nothing would ever be enough for them. In some ways, the entire Brexit story comes down to that gluttonous insatiability and the inability of the British polity to impose any dietary restrictions upon it.

Bridgen et al.’s particular gripe at the moment is the EU applying its rules on shellfish imports from third countries such as the UK. This cause was taken up by the Brexiter DEFRA Secretary George Eustice in a letter to the EU’s Health and Food Safety Commissioner, complaining that the ‘ban’ was unjustified and had been sprung on the UK without warning. But alas - as reported again by Anthony Robinson in Yorkshire Bylines, who has become a great source for important Brexit stories - it emerged from her reply that Eustice himself had signed a letter to UK businesses back in December, explaining that these third country rules would apply once the transition ended. There was no impropriety in what had happened, nor any unexpected surprise. Eustice was either incompetent, or playing to the gallery of the fishing industry and the Ultras. Shades here of the embarrassing Francois-Barnier exchange of letters last July.

Taken together, these developments show the latest phase of a dynamic which has been present in various forms throughout the Brexit process. The government has to try to present the Brexit they have delivered as a triumph, whilst the Ultras have to present it as a failure and a betrayal of real Brexit. Johnson is now caught in that dynamic quite as much as Theresa May was, because it is about the disjuncture between Brexit as an actual policy and Brexit as a grievance campaign and a utopian fantasy. It’s a disjuncture for which he, more than perhaps anyone else, is responsible.

Growing tensions in Northern Ireland

This dynamic is set to continue for years, with Northern Ireland as its most dangerous fault line, as this week’s provocative and deeply irresponsible threat of “guerrilla warfare” over the Protocol from the DUP (Brexiters to the core, don’t forget) underscores. There is now a real possibility of events spiralling out of control. Last month saw the temporary suspension of sea border checks because of threats of violence against staff. This week the ‘Loyalist Communities Council’ which represents Loyalist paramilitary organizations - the UVF, UDA and Red Hand Commando – wrote to Boris Johnson withdrawing their support for the Good Friday/ Belfast Agreement. The text of the letter makes it clear that the reason is the NIP, and Brexiters such as, notably, Kate Hoey were quick to emphasise this.

The letter does not in itself threaten violence, and states a commitment to “peaceful and democratic” opposition to the NIP. But, given its source, it can hardly be regarded as a benign statement and has the potential to, at the least, further destabilise an already tense and complex situation. As I wrote a few weeks ago, “what is now becoming ever-clearer is that Brexit threw a huge rock into the high delicate and fragile machinery of the Northern Ireland peace process, a machinery of complex checks and balances which had as an implicit condition the fact that both Ireland and the UK were within the EU”. As I explain in that post, it is a situation which has its roots deep in the entire idea of Brexit, as well as the way it has been undertaken.

But even if that is regarded as ancient history, the situation it has now created calls for careful, patient and skilful diplomacy and not Frost’s bombast and Johnson’s carelessness, both of which are likely to inflame rather than defuse matters. There is now an urgent need not just for a less confrontational posture within the Joint Committee, but for the UK to recognize the diplomatic status of the EU Ambassador to the UK and to move quickly to restore goodwill and trust to the UK relationship with Dublin. Part of this would be to drop the bogus claim that the rising tensions are the result of the EU’s quickly abandoned plan to invoke Article 16 of the NIP over vaccine supplies.

The paramilitaries’ letter makes much play, as have Unionist politicians like David Trimble (who has also warned of the growing tensions that are resulting), of the fact that the consent of the people of Northern Ireland to the NIP has not been sought in the way required by the Good Friday/ Belfast Agreement. I would not regard myself as at all qualified to comment on the complexities of Northern Ireland’s politics, but to the extent that Trimble appears to make a legitimate point, and to do so from a position of substantial authority given his joint award of the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in creating the Agreement, it seems to me that another legitimate point arises.

For it is Brexit itself which has given rise to the NIP and to the Irish Sea border – and the same would have been true for any other way of dealing with the issues Brexit posed - and yet the majority in Northern Ireland voted against it, by 56% to 44%. That seems to me to be the primary consent problem, and it derives from the flawed way the Referendum was set up, as well as from the Brexiters’ failure then, and in some cases even now, to accept what Brexit, especially hard Brexit, would mean for Northern Ireland. And Trimble himself can hardly be exempted from that as not only did he support Brexit, but he welcomed and supported Johnson’s deal which established the NIP and, at the time, said that it was “fully in accordance with the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement”, despite the warnings of both John Major and Tony Blair to the contrary.

Yes, but vaccines …

As all this unfolds, there is an emergent, and again desperate, Brexiter narrative, encountered in their now Pavlovian response to any criticism of Brexit: ‘yes, but vaccines’. The idea here is that the undoubtedly more successful roll-out of Covid vaccines in the UK compared with the EU is the ultimate validation of Brexit. As usual, it is deeply disingenuous and opportunistic. It’s not, after all, as if this was the issue that Brexit was sold on in 2016. But, more to the point, as Martin Fletcher writing in the New Statesman explains, the UK could have done exactly what it has done if it had been a member of the EU. Indeed, the UK’s regulatory approval and procurement of vaccines, and the beginning of the vaccination programme, all happened when the UK was still bound by EU rules during the transition period.

The standard Brexiter response is that EU political pressure would have prevented this. But that is nonsense – and I also disagree with Fletcher's view that it would have been “politically harder” as an EU member – because the UK’s EU membership was always characterised by opting out of collective EU initiatives. And although counterfactual history is necessarily problematic, it’s not hard to envisage that had the Referendum gone the other way, and if there was still a Tory government facing great pressure from its own Eurosceptics and the Faragists outside, the UK would have been especially likely to use its freedom to act unilaterally, as an increasing number of EU countries are now doing (£). Anyway, if we are doing counterfactuals, who is to say that the EU response to Covid would have been the same had the UK still been a member?

In short, the ‘vaccines’ argument is entirely bogus. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that it won’t stick as the new common sense, fanned not just by Brexiters but by self-proclaimed “diehard remoaners” like Ed Cumming, the author of a fatuous piece about “self-loathing liberals” in last Sunday’s Observer.

TL;DR

So two months in things aren’t looking at all good. The government is reduced to planting disingenuous stories in the press about the success of Brexit, its ministers and backbenchers don’t understand or don’t accept the Brexit deals they voted for, and it now again proposes to break international law by flouting part of what it agreed to. Relations with the EU are more fraught than ever. The Northern Ireland peace process is under strain. The Ultras are proposing a trade war with the EU, whilst trade with the EU is in chaos with SMEs especially suffering, billions of pounds of assets have fled the UK, the Brexiters’ iconic fishing industry is close to collapse, and many of the new restrictions on trade haven’t even been implemented yet. We’re not even at the end of the beginning, and, no, vaccines don’t give Brexiters a get out of jail free card.

Last Saturday morning, in his invariably insightful weekly blog, RTE’s Tony Connelly wrote of EU-UK relations being at a “crossroads” between “perpetual tension” or “co-operation and friendship”. Less than a week on, several steps have been taken in the former direction. There’s every sign that both the UK government and the Brexit Ultras want to take us further down that road, to the relish of even more sinister actors. I very much fear that it is now too late to take the other path.

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