What the Covid Inquiry tells us about Brexit

The Hallett Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic still has a long way to go, but the evidence it is taking is already revealing an extraordinary picture of the British government at the time and, in the process, much about Brexit. It is tempting to say that it is not revealing much that many of us did not guess, but, apart from the fact that there’s much in the detail that is fresh, there is an important difference between ‘guessing’ and seeing hard evidence laid out in documents or given by witnesses under oath. And, actually, what is emerging is even more dire than could have been guessed.

What we could guess

Of course, it is not an inquiry into the handling of Brexit but it has long been clear that there were multiple intersections and interactions between that and the handling of Covid. I discussed many of them during the pandemic period, including in what is still the most-read post on the blog, from April 2020, which also gives links to some of the other places they are discussed by me and others. 

Some of those posts contain details which are now irrelevant, but the overall picture that is emerging confirms what is perhaps the central point made in that April 2020 post:

“What both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way we are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister, a dud stand in [i.e. Dominic Raab], and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing.

They are the legacy of Brexit. They were brought into power by Brexit. But all the things which secured the vote for Brexit – the clever-but-dumb messaging, the leadership-by-slogan, the appeal to nostalgic sentiment, the disdain for facts and evidence, the valorisation of anger and divisiveness, the bluff ‘commonsense’ and the ‘bluffers’ book’ knowledge – are without exception precisely the opposite of what is needed for effective governance in general, and crisis management in particular.”  

What ‘the people in the room’ are telling us

I’ve quoted that at length not to say ‘I told you so’ (and, in any case, I was hardly the only person saying similar things at the time), but because it serves as a fair summary of what we have been hearing recently at the Hallett Inquiry. As Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Political Commentator of The Observer, wrote in his column last Sunday, “the testimony from the people in the room” has shown that Johnson was “comprehensively incapable of doing the job”. But, Rawnsley continues, it wasn’t just Johnson who failed, it was the cabinet and senior civil servants, and the blame for that lies in part with Dominic Cummings and his Vote Leave team.

Cummings’ own self-serving and obscenity-strewn testimony to the Inquiry, in both its written and, especially, its oral form, showed his utter contempt for ministers and civil servants, whilst in itself giving a glimpse of the bullying and misogynistic culture which, as confirmed by Helen MacNamara’s evidence, permeated the inner workings of the administration. MacNamara, the most senior female civil servant at the time, makes it clear that this culture was not just morally grotesque, but substantively and substantially impaired the quality of decision-making.

Moreover, although it may appear unconnected, or at least less malign, I think the “unbelievably bullish approach that everything is going to be great”, which MacNamara says characterised the early days of the Covid crisis, is inseparable from the vicious machismo she describes. The blokey boosterism, which is also instantly recognizable as being identical to Johnson’s approach to Brexit as well, is the affable face that quickly contorts to hate-filled thuggishness, at least behind closed doors, when it encounters any challenge. Unsurprisingly, this culture was not just misogynistic but semi-racist, “laughing at the Italians” and in doing so being not just laddishly unpleasant but, again, substantively damaging the Covid response by jeering at what could have been useful lessons.

It must be beyond question that Johnson and Cummings were jointly responsible for this culture and all that came with it, though no doubt others played a part, and they had presumably transferred it over from the Vote Leave campaign operation. More generally, for all their well-attested differences, Johnson and Cummings were conjoined, enablers of each other and enabled by each other. Cummings is quite explicit about this in his evidence, as well as showing a shameless contempt for democracy, declaring that “we” (by which he seems to mean the Vote Leave cabal) had the right to pick and choose who would be Prime Minister, and that “we” installed Johnson despite knowing how unfit for office he was. [1]

Meanwhile, it was, of course, Johnson who appointed Cummings as his Chief Adviser and gave him such latitude of powers, a latitude which amongst other things, led to the resignation of the then Chancellor Sajid Javid, just as the pandemic was starting. And it was Johnson who expended so much political capital to keep him in post after the ‘Barnard Castle’ scandal. They were two cheeks - one flabby and purpled, the other scrawny and pockmarked - of the same backside, and what lay between them, connecting them, defining them, was Brexit.

Brexit, too, explains the uselessness of the Cabinet which, as Rawnsley says, the Inquiry is showing to have “failed to act as a collective decision-making body and a restraint on a dangerously dysfunctional Prime Minister”. How could it have been otherwise given that, as Martin Kettle wrote when Johnson appointed his first Cabinet, it consisted of “mostly second-rate ideologues, many of them with negligible records of ministerial achievement and several of them with very dubious political ethics. All the positions of power are held by Brexit extremists. The rest are political hostages to the hard Brexiters.”  

The undermining of the civil service

As for the role of the civil service, part of what is at stake here was, as MacNamara’s evidence disclosed, changes that Brexit had wrought on the processes and machinery of government. But there is certainly more to it than that. Rawnsley points out that the Hallett Inquiry shows Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, to cut an “abject figure”, but his appointment to that role, in the middle of the Covid crisis, was partly because his predecessor, Sir Mark Sedwill, was seen by Johnson as “too much of a Europhile” (£) whilst Case was described as a “Boris Johnson ally”. It has also been reported that he had originally been brought into Number 10 as Permanent Secretary at Cummings’ behest. [2]

The wasn’t just a matter of a Prime Minster smoothly, if ruthlessly, appointing a more congenial or compliant Cabinet Secretary. On the one hand, Cummings’ written testimony (p.59, para. 276) reveals the utterly chaotic manner in which Sedwill’s ejection began. On the other hand, other evidence to the Inquiry shows that, Johnson ‘ally’ or not, Case, prior to taking over that role, had confided to Sedwill that he had “never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country”, referring, apparently, to Johnson and his special advisers. [3]

Crucially, this particular episode was itself part of a wider picture in which many senior civil servants had already left, or were leaving or being sidelined, because of a perceived lack of commitment to Brexit. Indeed, in my post of 28 February 2020 – the date is important as it is just as the Covid pandemic was developing, and shortly before the first lockdown – I recorded in detail how the civil service was under attack for supposedly being anti-Brexit, with reports of a ‘hit list’ of senior civil servants the government wanted to expunge. It was not long afterwards, in June, that Cummings made his threat of a “hard rain coming” for the civil service (£). That was, of course, only the latest instalment in a process which had been going on since the referendum, and, in Cummings’ case, stretching back to his days as a special adviser to Michael Gove in the Department for Education, when ‘the Blob’ first emerged as a term of abuse in British politics. The title of my February post is also worth noting – ‘Brexit is going feral’ – given that evidence to Hallett this week shows that, just four months later, ‘feral’ was exactly the term applied to Johnson’s government by Case, and apparently endorsed by Sedwill.

It's vital to recall this vitriolic attack on the civil service from Johnson and Cummings, and Brexiters generally, because it is quite as important as, if not more important than, the related issue, which is getting far more attention, of how Hallett is showing that Brexit was prioritized over tackling Covid. It wasn’t just that Brexit overloaded the bandwidth of the civil service, Brexiters also undermined the civil service as an institution. Even now, Cummings presumably includes the civil service amongst the “insiders” who “refus[ed] to accept the referendum result” who he blames for the lockdown having been necessary at all. For, on Cummings account, it was this alleged “refusal” that meant that Brexit created the “constitutional and political crisis that consumed a vast amount of the focus of the core of the state 2016-2019”.  Unsurprisingly, as Anthony Robinson observes, this account conveniently ignores the role of the Vote Leave campaign in creating this crisis.

Frost (as always) muddies the waters

In a similar way, like Billy Bunter to Cummings’ Flashman, David Frost responded to MacNamara’s evidence that the government focused on Brexit to the exclusion of everything else from July 2019 with the justificatory bleat that “we were in the biggest constitutional crisis for a hundred years”. He also asserted that the claim that ‘no-deal Brexit’ planning got in the way of pandemic planning does not accord with the facts because the Brexit deal was completed in October 2019 (i.e. before Covid), and the Transition Period meant that “there was no economic shock and no new arrangements to prepare for during the height of the Covid crisis”.

As so often with Brexiters’ claims it is complicated to unpick them, and Frost is particularly prone to tendentiousness. The only constitutional crisis between 2016 and 2019, and certainly between July and October 2019, was the unlawful Prorogation of Parliament, for which Johnson and Cummings were entirely responsible. Frost makes it sound as if this crisis was something the government heroically struggled against when, in fact, it was something the government created. It’s true that there had been a rolling political crisis since at least the 2017 election but, stripped of all its great complexity, that was not a constitutional crisis but a simple reflection of there being no parliamentary majority for any particular form of Brexit, just as was the case in the country. [4]

It’s also true that this political crisis still existed until the December 2019 election, and the Inquiry has already heard evidence that the work streams implementing provisions from the 2016 Exercise Cygnus on pandemic planning had been largely halted by no-deal Brexit planning. However, it is not true the completion of the Brexit deal, in the sense of the agreement with the EU of the text of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) in October 2019, ended no-deal planning. Firstly, that WA was not agreed by parliament until after the election. Secondly, even when it had been agreed, it initiated a new phase of no-deal planning – this time concerned with the possibility of there being no future terms, or trade, agreement.

This also means that it is either completely dishonest or totally ignorant for Frost to say that there were “no new arrangements” to prepare for during the Covid crisis of 2020. There were. Whether or not there was to be a trade deal, it would mean completely different trading (and other) arrangements compared with being in the single market, customs union, and other EU entities, once the Transition Period was over. Which of these two outcomes would prevail was not known until Christmas Eve of 2020 and so, throughout the year, there was the prospect of at least major change, and possibly of major disruption, to be prepared for. That was as true for businesses and other organizations affected as it was for the government.

The (non-) extension of the Transition Period

Moreover, Frost fails to mention that, until July 2020, the UK had the possibility of seeking to extend the Transition Period, something which the EU would almost certainly have agreed. Doing so would have helped the UK to deal with Covid, by taking away the urgency of the negotiations and the imminency of the changes that the end of the transition would bring. It would also have helped the UK to deal with Brexit, by deferring completion of the trade deal until the exigencies of the Covid emergency were over. For although the focus of attention arising from the Hallett hearings is how Brexit got in the way of dealing with Covid, it is equally the case that Covid got in the way of dealing with Brexit. For Frost to use the Transition Period as a defence against there having been such mutual impacts whilst ignoring his government’s refusal to extend the period, which would have reduced or contained them, is absurd.

As I wrote in June 2020, the decision on whether to extend the Transition Period wasn’t the last gasp of the battle over whether Brexit would happen, it was the Brexiters’ first challenge to show that they could govern Britain after leaving the EU, rather than just campaign for Britain to leave the EU. It is a challenge they comprehensively failed, because they were (as they still are) locked into the idea of defending Brexit against ‘betrayal’. Never mind that, by that time, Britain had actually left the EU, and that could no longer be prevented: they just ploughed on.

In doing so, they not only pulled time and attention away from dealing with Covid, they also ensured that Covid-battered businesses had no time to prepare for the end of the Transition Period. Even if Brexit were not intrinsically a huge folly, they ensured that it came into effect in the most unpropitious of circumstances, and they did so with absolutely no justification beyond the stiff-necked false pride that the period could not be extended even in the extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic.

The Covid government was also the Brexit government

The Hallett Inquiry is beginning to uncover the deep dysfunctions in the way that the government handled the pandemic and, almost as a side-issue, showing some things about Brexit. But the real significance of the Inquiry for Brexit is that the government it is exposing to view is exactly the same government that before, during, and after the pandemic was handling Brexit. So, although it is not an Inquiry into the handling of Brexit, it is surely inconceivable that the way it handled Covid does not also apply to Brexit to some degree.

For, self-evidently, these dysfunctions did not arrive with the pandemic but pre-dated it, at least as far back as Johnson and Cummings coming to power (though, as noted, some features, especially the denigration of the civil service, go back further). It is inconceivable that the factionalism and infighting, the misogyny and the vapid boosterism, were not all occurring in the period when, after Johnson came to office, the Withdrawal Agreement and, especially, the Northern Ireland Protocol, were still being negotiated. It is certainly true, by definition, that the government dealing with the Covid crisis in 2020 was the same as that which was undertaking the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) negotiations during 2020. And, although Cummings departed in November 2020, it was still the Johnson government, with all the flaws Hallett is revealing, which, throughout 2021 and until he resigned in June 2022, was embroiled in the ongoing row with the EU over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

There are already plenty of reports that show how little Johnson understood about the practicalities of Brexit. To take just one example, he reportedly “slumped in his chair” when “the penny dropped”, during a meeting with Jean-Claude Juncker in September 2019, that his ideas about the Irish border were totally unworkable. But we now know that this same Johnson, during Covid, seriously suggested being injected with the virus on live TV to show its harmlessness, and seriously asked whether the virus could be destroyed by blowing a “special hairdryer” up the nostrils, actually circulating a You Tube video of someone demonstrating this ‘cure’. Patently someone so dull-witted, or, more accurately, so lazy-minded, as to do these things would be equally incapable of grasping even quite basic things about Brexit, let alone its more complex details.

Similarly, the Inquiry is revealing how during Covid Johnson was flip-flopping daily, or even hourly, on both the overall strategy and the detailed measures for dealing with the pandemic. So it is surely reasonable to assume that he behaved in the same way on detailed issues in relation to the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA, and also on the big questions about them, most especially whether to allow there to be one or both versions of no-deal Brexit.

It is also surely reasonable to assume that he flip-flopped in the same way during the long period when it was rumoured that he would, or would not, invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol and, subsequently, whether he would pass and make use of the Northern Ireland Bill to pull out of the Protocol in its entirety. Relatedly, we already knew that during the Withdrawal Agreement negotiations at least one senior Tory thought that “the Irish really should know their place”. So, learning now about how the Johnson administration jeered at the Italian response to the pandemic, it hardly strains credulity to suppose that it was similarly contemptuous of the Irish position on Brexit and the Protocol. 

Whilst Johnson is the most obvious culprit here, the same applies to his entire administration, including his feeble and mediocre Cabinet and his team of arrogant and bumptious Vote Leave Special Advisors, both during and after the Cummings’ period. If, as the Hallett evidence so far suggests, the entirety of this administration suffered from multiple deficiencies in handling Covid, then it is inconceivable that it became super-competent when dealing with Brexit. And whilst it might be said that the pandemic was a wholly unusual and complex problem, the same is true of Brexit. If they differ, it is not in that but in the fact that Covid was a crisis imposed on the UK, as it was on other countries, whereas Brexit was imposed by, indeed created by, the Brexiters, many of whom were by this time running the country. So they were incapable of dealing with either, but with Brexit they had the added culpability of having caused it.

We may never have a Public Inquiry into Brexit, and if we do it will have to encompass different issues and cover a longer period than Hallett. Yet, even without that, Hallett is providing a glimpse of just how rotten the Johnson period of Brexit was – the period, don’t forget that ‘got Brexit done’. If, as Covid data expert Professor Christina Pagel argues, Hallett has already “laid bare the government’s dereliction of duty” we can hardly imagine that the very same government at the very same time was the epitome of care and competence in its handling of Brexit. But the cases are different. We didn’t have this government because of Covid, but because of Brexit. In this sense, Brexit was the ‘original sin’ for which we paid twice-over. Once by having an utterly useless government when Covid hit, twice by having an utterly useless government to deliver Brexit. And that is before even considering the price inherent in Brexit itself. [5]

 
Notes

[1] This is not to say that Johnson could not have become Prime Minister without Brexit (and Cummings). Simon Wren-Lewis’s blog this week has an interesting discussion of this.

[2] Because for the purposes of this post I am splicing together different parts of testimony to Hallett it may be confusing as to what jobs Simon Case was doing at different times. In May 2020 he was appointed as Downing Street Permanent Secretary, a role that had been unfilled since being vacated by Sir Jeremy Heywood in 2012 (it had in any case only been created in 2010), who became Cabinet Secretary until his retirement in 2018, when he was succeeded by Mark Sedwill. Then, in September 2020, Case was appointed Cabinet Secretary, replacing Sedwill.

[3] The Cummings’ evidence referred to in this paragraph is confusing in that it suggests that Sedwill was initially sacked in May 2020, and subsequently refers to Case as having been Cabinet Secretary in July. This doesn’t square with the public record of posts held, but it seems to be that the outcome of the botched sacking was Sedwill’s resignation and that, by July, it had been decided that Case would be his successor even though he wasn’t formally in post. There is much more detail on all this in Beckie Smith’s report in Civil Service World. Another confusing issue is why, if Case was indeed a Johnson ‘ally’ and Cummings had supported his appointment in May 2020, did he speak about them in the disparaging terms quoted here? A possible answer is that it is because that quote comes from July 2020, by which time he had come to witness the chaotic nature of the administration.

[4] Frost, especially, has been vociferous in insisting that this political crisis was also a constitutional crisis, because it enabled, on occasion and most notably with the 'Benn Act' of October 2019, the House of Commons to take control of its business from the Executive. But this was absolutely consistent with the Constitution: Parliament is sovereign, and the Executive only has power to the extent that it commands a parliamentary majority. As regards ‘no-deal Brexit’ in the sense of no WA (the subject of the Benn Act), it did not.

[5] Part of that price is the damage to trade, and another Brexit story this week is the publication of a woeful IEA report denying that damage. Fortunately, Professor Gerhard Schnyder has done an excellent, painstaking job in exposing its numerous and profound flaws. I know from experience that undertaking that kind of detailed debunk is a hard, time-consuming business, because such reports contain nested layers of falsity or misunderstanding. But it really matters, not least because such reports gain so much traction including, in this case, endorsement by Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch.

Zeno's Brexit

The Ancient Greek philosopher Zeno articulated a series of paradoxes, one of the most famous being the ‘dichotomy’ or ‘race course’ paradox. In order to reach a destination, a runner must first reach the half-way point, but to reach that point must first get a quarter of the way there, and to do that must get an eighth of the way there, and so on. Since this generates an infinite sequence that never quite adds up to the full distance, it is impossible for the runner ever to reach the destination point.

Brexit has often felt like being stuck on such a never-ending journey, and never more so than over the last two months. Recall that the last of the scheduled rounds of the transition period talks finished at the beginning of October. Then Boris Johnson set 15 October as the absolute deadline, after which he would walk away, which he sort-of did but actually didn’t once Michel Barnier had placated him by using the ‘right words’ about the negotiations. Then it was reported that 19 November was regarded by the EU as the absolute deadline, but here we still are.

Endless rumours

Throughout, there have been leaks of progress and of the opposite, and speculations at the end of each week that ‘early next week’ will see the breakthrough of a deal, or the abandonment of the search for a deal. This week has been no different.

Early in the week it was rumoured that the EU was about to ‘cave in’ to British demands but by Thursday there were reports that the EU might pull out of the talks today (Friday). There were reports that Michel Barnier had called an ‘urgent’ meeting of fisheries ministers for Friday, with speculations this might betoken an imminent deal … or an imminent collapse of talks … but within hours it became clear that that it was not urgent, and probably betokens nothing. At the time of writing, it has just been reported that contrary to previous reports Barnier will be coming to London after all and there will be talks over the weekend. Some reports suggest a deal may be done – yes – early next week. Others are now talking of the EU summit of 10 and 11 December as being the crucial date.

So we remain in the hall of smoke and mirrors. We do know, so familiar have they become, that the stumbling blocks are level playing field, fisheries, and governance. One possibility that has been touted (£) as regards one or both of the former two is to use review clauses so as to, in effect, create interim agreements allowing a deal to be done in time (although even so it will take very nimble footwork in both the UK and the EU to ratify such a deal).

This is both a plausible and a depressing prospect. Plausible because it offers both sides a way of ‘kicking the can’ down the road in the way that has often characterized the Brexit process. Depressing because it would mean that, come 1 January, the answer to the question ‘is there a deal or not?’ would be a less than resounding ‘yes and no’. Actually, this will be the answer anyway because there will be a myriad of things left in the air even if there is a deal. These include financial services regulation (of which more below) and carbon trading. Still, it would be particularly anticlimactic if the very areas so long held up as preventing a deal were to be left hanging ambiguously.

Lack of trust

Even if this, or something like it, is what happens it seems (to me) that the issue of governance cannot be fudged in this way. An imprecise or 'gentleman’s' agreement to settle fine details later, on the basis of trust, might once have been possible. But it is no longer so because of the manner in which the UK has conducted itself.

It’s actually possible to identify a very precise moment when trust was broken: it was Sunday 10 December 2017 when the then Brexit Secretary David Davis said on the Andrew Marr show that the phase 1 agreement of the Article 50 talks was merely “a statement of intent” and not binding. It was this which led the EU to put that agreement into legal text (which Theresa May then rejected as unacceptable because of the Northern Ireland-only backstop, but to which Johnson later signed up).

Davis’s 'gaffe' was pivotal in undermining trust and was compounded by several other episodes including the way that Boris Johnson treated the Political Declaration in a similarly cavalier way. Both cases showed that in the absence of a legally binding text, Brexit Britain could not be trusted to keep to its agreements. Even worse, and the final nail in the coffin of trust in the UK, was the Internal Market Bill (IMB) with its clauses which even reneged on what had been the legally binding treaty.

It is such considerations, but especially the IMB, which surely lay behind Ursula von der Leyen saying this week that “'we want to know what remedies are available in case one side will deviate in the future, because trust is good but law is better. And crucially in the light of recent experience a strong governance system is essential to ensure what has been agreed is actually done”. It should be said that whilst many of the costs of Brexit are inherent to it, this squandering of goodwill and of international reputation by the UK is one of the costs that have arisen not because of Brexit itself but from the incompetent, antagonistic and dishonest way in which it has been executed.

Nowhere near ready

On the subject of incompetence, it is becoming ever clearer just how woefully unprepared the UK is for the end of the transition, even with a deal. Northern Ireland businesses, in particular, face “a very, very difficult time” in January. In England, a trial run of France’s new border procedures this week saw massive lorry queues build up in Kent. This was not, as leading customs expert Dr Anna Jerzewska explained, because the French operation wasn’t working correctly. It was because it was working correctly but the UK systems are not yet operational.

The scale of these problems was indicated in a leaked letter from the Road Haulage Association, describing the process of working with the government on border issues as “a complete shambles”, whilst many of the detailed practical complexities are explained by international freight forwarder John Shirley on the UCL European Institute website. None of this is news to those experts who work in this area, nor to those who have listened to them over the last few years (hence readers of this far from expert blog would have been well aware of it). But their concerns were dismissed as Project Fear and swept aside by unkeepable promises of ‘frictionless trade’.  

It is almost beyond belief, though also entirely predictable, that Michael Gove is blaming the now inevitable disruption on the EU for its ‘rules are rules’ approach to border controls. Nothing more clearly illustrates the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Brexit than for one of its leading architects to eschew responsibility for the inevitable adverse consequences of what he advocated.

Whilst much attention is being (belatedly) given to the mechanics of goods trade, it shouldn’t be forgotten that built in to the government’s preference for hard Brexit are other consequences, including the still unresolved issue of data protection adequacy. This is hugely significant for both trade and for security cooperation, but does not form part of the negotiations being instead reliant on a decision by the European Commission. So no one yet knows what the situation will be on 1 January and probably will not know for a while afterwards.

Then there is the inevitability of a major worsening of market access for services trade of all sorts. That goes well beyond financial services, of course, but these – whatever their public unpopularity – are a major part of the UK economy and they generate significant employment and tax revenues. How they will be regulated is also not part of the future terms negotiations. It has long been known that they will lose ‘passporting’ rights and the remaining best hope is an ‘equivalence regime’. But as Vicki Pryce, former Joint Head of the Government Economic Service, has explained we know for a fact that this will not be in place for January. Within this general picture, there are also particular issues emerging for European derivatives trading in London (£), a market where many trillions of assets are traded under the regulation of the European Securities and Markets Authority.

Follow the money? (A short detour into political theory, which some may want to skip)

The chilling effect of Brexit on financial services leads to some interesting questions. I am regularly told (sometimes in rather lofty tones, as if such a thought had never occurred to me) that my discussions of Brexit would be improved if only I were to ‘follow the money’ which, apparently, explains all. What this usually implies is some version of the argument outlined by George Monbiot this week that Brexit is the creature of one kind of capitalism – which he calls “warlord capitalism” – that has captured the Tory Party and is at war with another kind of capitalism which he calls “housetrained” and is horrified by Brexit. That’s an important observation, and as he says relates to the extraordinary shift in the modern Conservative Party away from its traditional business base, including the City, which has in turn had a big impact on how Brexit has developed.

But an observation is all it is – it doesn’t explain why it is the ‘warlord’ money rather than the ‘housetrained’ money which is being followed by the Tory Party (or anyone else). Following the money is sometimes a good dictum, but it doesn’t take you very far when it points in quite contradictory directions. To understand why the Tory Party has taken the path it has would require a detailed study of its recent history and its funding, taking in why it incubated such extreme Euroscepticism (as it was then called) long before its funding base shifted, and considering the role of its mainly elderly and nationalist membership.

Beyond that, this type of analysis rests, at least implicitly, on a version of Marxist theory whereby the (economic) base is primary and to a greater or lesser extent determining of the (cultural) superstructure. Culture then becomes little more than the dancing puppet of economic paymasters and their interests. When it comes to political explanation, that almost inevitably leads proponents of such analysis to some form of ‘false consciousness’ argument in order to explain why so many people support and vote for things which are against their economic interests.

And, indeed, this is precisely where Monbiot ends up, when he writes that he sees “Nigel Farage and similar blowhards as little more than smoke bombs, creating a camouflage of xenophobia and culture wars. The persistent trick of modern politics – and it seems to fool us repeatedly – is to disguise economic and political interests as cultural movements” (my emphases added).

The limitations of such an analysis have long been identified. In particular, it’s instructive to recall how in the 1980s writers on the left, especially the sociologist Professor Stuart Hall, started to explain that Thatcher kept winning elections because contrary to the assumption of economic primacy, in Hall's words, “material interests … are not escalators which automatically deliver people to their appointed destinations, ‘in place’, within the political ideological spectrum”. It’s an important insight that remains true.

Coming to Brexit specifically, viewing leave voters as the unwitting dupes of ‘warlord capitalism’ and funded by Robert Mercer doesn’t take us anywhere. For whilst (some) remainers may believe that to be so, it has a precise mirror-image in the repeated claim made by (some) leavers that remainers are the mouthpieces of the ‘global elite’ and funded by George Soros. Of course remain voters no more accept that to be true of themselves than leave voters accept the mirror-image accusation aimed at them. Neither claim has any analytical value, or explains anything. Rather, they are tactics to discredit or demonize opponents.

Ultimately, the injunction to follow the money is not just reductive but is also a circular and unfalsifiable argument. For just as some now say that the fact of Brexit is explained by capitalist manipulation of leave voters so too, had remain won, some would have said that that was explained by the capitalist manipulation of remain voters. All you have to do, they’d say then as they do now, is to ‘follow the money’. In fact, it would very likely be the same people saying it, since Monbiot virtually does so when pointing to how the remain campaign was funded by the likes of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Trying to explain Brexit by ‘following the money’ takes you into an analytical cul-de-sac.

So whilst the debate about the relationship between economics and culture is a perennial one, and discussing it is well beyond the scope of this blog, in general I think of them as inextricably bound threads, not base and superstructure. I prefer both/and explanations to either/or explanations, prefer contingency to determinism, and see as much cock-up as conspiracy.

In any case, what this blog does cover is the weekly goings on and how they fit into the wider Brexit process. It would be absurd to think that each twist and turn ‘is exactly what the hedge funds wanted all along’ but if one did hold so reductive a view it would be as tedious to keep writing it as it would to keep reading it.

Back to the same old stuff

Coming back now to the main line of discussion, namely preparedness for the end of the transition, overall, a government report leaked this week identifies “notable risks” of “systemic economic crisis” potentially leading to public unrest in the new year due to a combination of Brexit, Covid and other factors (flu, flooding). Again it is fair to say that such a scenario was not inherent in Brexit but arises from the way it has been done. In particular, it was blindingly obvious in June that Covid meant that ending the Transition Period in the middle of the following winter was utterly reckless. That it was not extended can be blamed primarily upon the influence of a relatively small group of Tory MPs – and the larger but still small section of the population who share their views - whose obsessional hatred of the EU has made them immune to all reason. That an entire country should have its fate decided by such people is both a tragedy and an indictment of the political system.

Even now they are proposing as tests for the acceptability of any deal that may be done criteria which, as Professor Anand Menon of King’s College London points out, are effectively impossible for a deal to meet and which have already been failed by the Withdrawal Agreement which has been signed. And even now, as Brendan Donnelly, Director of Federal Trust, writes it is the “specific dysfunctions of the Conservative Party” which will frame whether Johnson agrees to a deal or not. It is already reported (£) that the ERG will oppose a deal if it doesn’t respect their peculiar view of ‘sovereignty’.

Donnelly also mentions that Labour’s stance on backing any deal will also play a part. What that part will be is unclear, not least because the nature of any parliamentary vote that may be held is unclear. There will be no straightforward ‘meaningful vote’ to accept or reject a deal, and there are various different, including some quite complex, mechanisms the government could use for ratification. Depending which is chosen, parliament would have various more or less effective ways of delaying, and possibly even derailing, ratification, posing different choices and options for those wishing to do so.

It is clear that Labour are split on how to approach this (whatever ‘this’ turns out to be), and although the rumours suggest that Keir Starmer will want his MPs to support a deal whatever it contains others are arguing for abstention. I’ve been critical of Labour’s stance on Brexit for years, and of Starmer’s near silence on it since becoming leader, but I can see that this is a genuinely difficult dilemma. The reason for that is that whilst no deal would be worse than a deal – not least for Labour voters – they are both bad outcomes to different degrees. The Tories may have put themselves in the position of having to pick from them, but why should Labour allow itself to be complicit? Yet to the extent that supporting, opposing or abstaining might all affect the outcome (assuming a sizeable Tory revolt) then that complicity is unavoidable.

There will also be significant parliamentary issues in the event of no deal. Of course there would be no vote on that, but there would be votes on the Internal Market Bill and, with the possibility of a substantial Tory revolt on that, it is questionable whether the UK would have a functioning internal market of its own, at the very moment it left the single market of the EU. This would be a profound crisis in its own right.

Back to Zeno

All this remains up in the air, with – really, this is astonishing - barely more than a month to go. For now we continue on the journey that apparently never ends. But Zeno’s paradox may not be an apt reference after all because, as well as suggesting that the race course can never be completed (the ‘progressive’ version of this paradox), it equally means that it can never be started (the ‘regressive’ version of the paradox). And, alas, we know that it did start, over four years ago.

So perhaps we need to look instead to Classical mythology to describe our situation, maybe to Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock up the hill or, as seems more appropriate to the painfulness of it all, poor old Prometheus having his liver pecked out by an eagle day after day.

Prometheus of course was being punished for having stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, and Sisyphus was an all-round bad egg (murdering, cheating and generally getting above himself).

It is not clear what crime we have committed to have to endure the endless torture of Brexit.

Crazy time

I am not sure which cliché to apply to the current Brexit situation. Nail biting? Like having teeth pulled? Like watching paint dry? Perhaps it is some grotesque combination of all three and is like watching someone having their fingernails pulled out. At all events it is still unclear what is going to happen as regards a deal.

Most reports are now giving the first half of next week as the absolute crunch point. It surely can’t be much later given there are already problems for how any deal would be ratified in time for the end of the transition period in terms of both the UK process and, even more, the EU process. That said, it was reported yesterday by RTE’s Tony Connelly (an invariably reliable source) that the EU is looking for workarounds on its process.

The now perennial ‘will there, won’t there be a deal’ question is actually one of those occasions where it would be quite legitimate to show ‘balance’ by reference to expert opinion on both sides of the debate. For it really is the case that highly well-informed people are split pretty much equally. For example, Mujtaba Rahman, Managing Director for Europe at the Eurasia Group cautiously envisages a deal whilst John Peet, Political and Brexit Editor of The Economist, is sceptical that it is in prospect.

There’s certainly little point in trying to decode the various leaks and speculations in the press since there’s no way of knowing to what extent these derive from the spin operations of politicians or political factions and, in some cases, they are reported by what are self-evidently client journalists. The wisest words, perhaps, about the growing speculation that a deal is about to be struck come from Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe editor: “all the rumours and whispers you hear are just smoke and mirrors” so such speculation should be “handled with care”.

Meanwhile, there are now just 41 days to go, which include the Christmas holiday, before ‘economic Brexit’, and the country is in a mixture of lockdown and other restrictions due to the coronavirus. And the talks have been temporarily suspended because one of the negotiators has been infected, and Michel Barnier is in self-isolation.

It is a crazy way to be trying to settle an issue of such complexity and importance, and which will have such consequences for years to come.

The roots of this last-minute crisis

Despite the familiar Brexiter claim, we are not in this situation because ‘EU talks always go to the wire’. That is to confuse the internal talks at various summits between member states with those between the EU and third countries, which is what Britain now is. Rather, it arises because of the spectacularly incompetent way in which British governments, the Brexiters, and the wider British polity have conducted themselves since 2016.

That is most obvious in what almost everyone can now see was the utter foolishness of the government not requesting a transition period extension when it was possible, and saying it would not accept such a request from the EU. That period was always going to be too short and with Covid-19 impossibly so. The decision was not taken thoughtlessly, but derived from two things. The first was the belief – naïve in my view, but I suppose it remains to be seen for sure – that ‘the EU always blinks at the last minute’. From this perspective extension was pointless as it would only delay that last minute.

The second reason goes deep into the entire Brexit process. It was that any extension would immediately have been denounced by Brexiters as backsliding and betrayal. Their power and their paranoia have been recurrent themes since 2016 and are the main reason for the UK persistently boxing itself into time constraints and deadlines of its own making. The most obvious early example was that it led Theresa May in her 2016 party conference speech to promise to trigger Article 50 by the end of March 2017. That was a totally arbitrary date – there had been nothing in the Referendum result that dictated a time frame – and sticking to it meant that Britain entered the time-constrained Article 50 period with no real plan for how to enact Brexit.

That was part of a wider story of how much of the last four years has consisted of rushed decisions (such as Cameron’s resignation and the truncated leadership contest that installed May) and self-imposed deadlines some of which, unlike that for the Article 50 trigger, were then broken (such as May’s repeated pledges not to seek Article 50 extension and Johnson’s ‘die in a ditch’ promise). This story is in turn nested within an even wider one, which is that so much of the last four years has been about internal UK politics rather than about a negotiation with the EU.

On the one hand, there have been two general elections and two Tory leadership contests. On the other hand, there have been intense efforts to construct versions of Brexit that might get domestic political support (e.g. the first Brexit white paper, the Chequers proposal, the Malthouse compromise) without any consideration for the fact that they had no chance at all of being agreed with the EU. Then, when the outlines of future terms were agreed in the Political Declaration, Johnson, again for domestic reasons, repudiated it so that the negotiations during the transition period had effectively to go back to a blank sheet. And now, at this final moment of those negotiations, and amidst all the coronavirus disruption, the inner circle of the government – I don’t mean the cabinet, which hardly matters these days, but the unelected advisors formerly known as Vote Leave who have been running the country for the last year – has fallen into infighting and disarray.

I don’t think that Brexit could ever have had a good outcome, but for it even to have had a chance of avoiding total disaster what was needed was first to carefully build a domestic political consensus around something that could realistically be agreed with the EU,  and only then to trigger Article 50, negotiate with the EU and, finally, to deliver something that might have at least been a stable end-state. In the meantime, the organizational preparations needed to implement this plan would have been made. But Brexiters were too impatient, too suspicious of betrayal, and simply insufficiently interested in the practicalities of Brexit for such a process to have been followed.

So the situation we now find ourselves in did not arise by accident and it isn’t just something to do with the current phase of Brexit. It is the latest stage and the latest consequence of years of incompetence, if not worse. For, of course, the incompetence is inextricably linked to the dishonesty of the claims and promises made. To give just one example – but a major one – the years of lying about how the UK could leave the single market and customs union but still have ‘frictionless trade’ or something very close to it explains both why no realistic plan for the future was developed and why preparations for border controls were not begun until far too late.

Paying the price

The price for all this is being, and will continue to be, paid by British businesses and their customers, and by the general public, in costs, inconvenience, job losses, and numerous other ways. There are now almost daily reports of the lack of readiness for the end of transition, irrespective of whether there is a deal, unless as part of a deal there is an agreed ‘adjustment’ or ‘implementation’ period as many business groups are now vociferously calling for.

A small round up of recent examples includes: shortage of warehouse space, lack of information for road hauliers (final guidelines are apparently due on 7 December!) alongside lack of awareness amongst truck drivers (£),  no regulatory equivalence for financial services in place (this is a separate issue to the negotiations), several trade agreements not yet rolled over, Felixstowe container port in chaos (partly because of pre-Brexit stockpiling), projected labour shortages across numerous sectors (including social care and – yes – fishing), and the dire lack of preparations for the border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland with attendant risks of a “bonanza for organized crime”.

Whilst much of this is indeed in prospect even if there is a deal, things will be even worse without one. Yet in an extraordinary interview last weekend, DEFRA Secretary George Eustice spoke of such a scenario in terms which suggested he has not the tiniest understanding of how business works, or of the impact of import tariffs on prices and consumer choice, and of export tariffs on costs and jobs. Blithely saying that he “didn’t accept” what a dairy industry leader warned the effect of tariffs to be, he went on to opine that Arla, the Danish manufacture of Lurpak butter, would re-locate to the UK in order to sell to the British market.

This provoked immediate incredulity but, in an interesting micro-example of how the Brexit narrative operates, that incredulity brought forth a torrent of (orchestrated?) social media comments that Lurpak was already produced in Leeds in the UK. In other words, that those deriding Eustice for his lack of realism were actually indulging in another bout of Project Fear, that everything would continue as usual and so on. Such claims get circulated so quickly and in such volume that they quickly lodge as established truth. But, in fact, as Lurpak subsequently clarified (no pun intended) it is not true – it is, and can only be, produced in Denmark. As with Eustice’s casual dismissal of industry expertise, it’s a minor, but revealing, illustration of how we got into this mess.

No deal is still the worst outcome

Eustice is evidently not alone in ignoring business concerns. It’s reported that some in the cabinet think that the difference between deal and no deal is too small to matter as no deal “would only be 20% worse than the deal on the table”. This is a dangerous myth which has been put about in recent weeks by some Brexiters and, it has to be said, by some erstwhile remainers. It is true that both outcomes are bad, in the sense of being very substantially worse than being an EU member, and substantially worse than a soft Brexit would have been. It is also true, and should never be forgotten, that both are far worse than what Brexiters promised in the referendum and for years afterwards. In that sense, the recently launched Voices for a Better Deal campaign is well justified.

But even as things stand the difference between deal and no deal is a very significant one for goods trade, because it is this which will be affected by tariffs. To belittle this as a minor matter is deeply irresponsible on economic grounds alone but, also, it shouldn’t be forgotten that this is not just a trade negotiation. No deal would also have other malign consequences, for example for security cooperation.

In addition, a deal, however limited, would be a basis for something better in the future, and might at least presage more harmonious relations, and of course any possibility of an ‘adjustment period’ is dependent upon there being a deal. Conversely, whatever ‘no-dealers’ may think, ending transition without a deal would not be an end-state. As I’ve been arguing for months now (and for years in relation to the original no deal scenario) It would simply initiate a whole new set of negotiations in the context of zero good will.

At first, these would be on the urgent mitigations needed to deal with the immediate disruptions. So, yet again, Britain would have imposed time pressure on itself and, crucially, would be entirely dependent on the EU to create those mitigations (e.g. to enable continued air travel). Then, shortly after that immediate crisis, all the other issues of trade, security, data, fisheries and so on would still be in need of resolution. They would not have disappeared by virtue of ‘no deal’, they would just have been postponed.

Moreover, the political implications of no deal for Northern Ireland could be considerable. Although in principle the Northern Ireland Protocol exists to cover this eventuality, in practice there would still be much detail to be worked out. Presumably in these circumstances the UK would enact and implement the illegal clauses of the Internal Market Bill that have caused such consternation, and perhaps would also make other unilateral decisions about the operation of the Protocol. This in turn would sour relations with Biden’s America as well as with the EU. Indeed, more widely, no deal would inevitably see the Brexiters pushing much harder in their campaign for the government to renege on the Withdrawal Agreement in toto, with dire consequences for Britain’s international relations.

For all these reasons, no deal would be the final folly of the botched implementation of the terrible idea of Brexit. I understand that some believe that, thereby, the entirety of the Brexit project would be discredited in a cathartic moment of truth. However, the practical consequences would be so dire as to make that a pyrrhic victory, and it is by no means certain that the scales would fall from the eyes of the public in general or of leave voters in particular. I am sure that it would not result in the leading Brexiters recanting and, actually, that it would cause them to become ever more extreme in their demands and ever more convinced of their rectitude.

Deal or no deal, the Brexiters will call it betrayal

It seems so obviously rational and sensible that there should be a deal that anyone waking from a coma would wonder (amongst many other things) why there is even any question of it not being done. But, alas, those of us who have been awake for the last four and a half years are only too well aware that rationality and sense have nothing to do with it. Indeed, the capacity of Brexiters, within and outside government, to in any given situation make foolish and irrational choices based on ignorance, prejudice and lies is so great that if a deal is done it will come as a surprise to many.

What will not be a surprise - because it is a certainty - is that, if a deal is done, it will be denounced by many Brexiters as a betrayal of ‘true Brexit’ (even though some of those saying this will have been advocating a free trade deal as their desired outcome). In the same way, if there is not a deal, they will say that this is because of EU ‘punishment’ (even though some of those saying this will have been advocating no deal as their desired outcome) and so ‘proves’ that we were right all along to leave, but also that it is because of the failure of the government to negotiate effectively, due to betrayal by remainer politicians and civil servants. (Needless to say, any delay in ending the transition period or even implementing anything agreed will also infuriate them).

These reactions are inevitable both because the promises made for Brexit were undeliverable, and because, as I wrote exactly four years ago today, some of its most enthusiastic adherents are so psychologically invested in victimhood that betrayal is not what they most fear but what they most crave.

That is the real tragedy of Brexit. Not just that it is being done against the wishes of so many of us – now, in fact, the majority – but that whatever now happens those who want it most will be the most unhappy with it. It is about as perfect a definition of a lose-lose situation as could be imagined.

While we are waiting

The absence in the last week or so of the sound and fury that has accompanied the Brexit future terms negotiations since the end of the summer holidays might betoken that they are proceeding well. Early this week there were reports of substantive progress on fisheries. Tediously if predictably this was described in the Brexiter press as Michel Barnier ‘caving in’ and “handing” fishermen a “huge boost” but, in line with the general confusion of Brexiter logic, the same paper on the same day disapprovingly described it as a “compromise” between the UK and EU negotiators which will “anger leavers”. It’s an interesting illustration of the impossibility of satisfying Brexiter demands.

On the other hand, suggestions of a fisheries breakthrough were subsequently downplayed, and Barnier himself gave a decidedly downbeat assessment when briefing the European Parliament on the progress of the negotiations on Wednesday, re-iterating the same areas of contention as there have been for months. His remarks were echoed by David Frost. Talks, it seems, will resume on Sunday or, on some accounts, Monday but it may be of significance that the European Commission’s new economic forecast assumes there will not be a deal.

So for now the bogus drama of ‘will they or won’t they?’ continues and remains as pointless as ever, as do the breathless faux-scientific assessments that a deal is now ‘X% likely’ and the faux-worldly pronouncements that ‘a last-minute deal was always the plan’ or, with equal certainty, that ‘no deal was always the plan’. It is abundantly clear that there has never been a plan ‘all along’ and very likely that there isn’t one even now.

The pilots in the Brexit flight deck have never been able to agree on their destination and, for that matter, have never qualified for their flying licences. To the extent that there has been a plan, in recent months it appears to have been the belief that the large mountainside to which the plane is heading will disappear at the last moment. And whilst that is hardly a comforting prospect for those of us strapped in the passenger seats, it’s better to be honest about our situation than flatter our leaders by crediting them with a competence, even if a malign competence, that they so manifestly lack.

The US election and ‘Global Britain’

If a last-minute swerve to a deal is in the offing it is at least partly bound up with the outcome of the US presidential election, which (for anyone who has missed hearing about it) seems increasingly likely to be a victory for Joe Biden, for the largely symbolic reasons discussed in my previous post. Indeed many commentators believe it makes a deal with the EU almost certain, since it supposedly makes a UK-US deal less likely (this, according a spectacularly deranged column in the Express, is all ‘remainers’ fault’). If this is so then the important question it gives rise to is what, exactly, the UK will do in order the make a deal happen? Clearly it will be necessary to give ground on at least one of the three issues of fisheries, subsidy policy and governance, and very likely more than one. A further important question is whether there will be time for any deal struck to be ratified by the European Parliament so as to be in place by the beginning of 2021.

That what the UK decides about its relationship with the EU should be contingent upon the decision of the US electorate gives the lie to the naïve ideas of national sovereignty propounded by Brexiters. It also  reflects the still unresolved question of what Britain’s post-Brexit geo-political strategy consists of, given that the ‘Global Britain’ slogan remains as meaningless as ever. It can’t just mean rolling over trade agreements that it used to have via the EU, and it surely isn’t compatible with mean-spirited and draconian immigration and asylum systems aimed solely at the Tory electoral base, still less with brazen assertions of the willingness to break international law.

In a select committee appearance this week the International Trade Secretary, Liz Truss, appears to think that the big advantage of Global Britain being an ‘independent’ state is that it is “now helping set global rules with like-minded democracies”, which she links to the goal of “ultimately” joining “the Trans Pacific Partnership” (sic*). Yet that would be a better description of Britain’s role when a member of the EU than as an aspiring member of a much more limited entity, not least as regards the setting of global regulatory standards, on the other side of the world.

In a typically acute article in The Atlantic this week, Tom McTague posed a series of questions about why the outcome of the US election mattered so much for the UK: “if the election of one president or another is an existential challenge, then perhaps the issue is Britain’s strategy itself. If Britain’s global trade policy is dependent on reaching a deal with the US, then is that strategy wise to begin with? … In the end, all these challenges reveal the essential question that lurks underneath: what kind of country does Britain seek to be?”

Unusually, and surely a considerable feather in McTague’s journalistic cap, this question was taken up in the House of Commons and posed directly to the Defence Secretary who, perhaps unsurprisingly, “did not agree at all” (and, indeed, did not answer at all). Of course that kind of question is, in a strict sense, unanswerable. Countries can’t meaningfully create mission statements in the way that companies do, and even when companies do so they invariably conceal or gloss over disparate and often contradictory realities. And countries, like companies, fall into strategies by virtue of events as much or more than by design.

Even so, it’s a legitimate question in the context of Brexit, which enacted a deliberate rejection of a central anchor of what Britain’s post-imperial, post-war place in the world had become. It wasn’t asked during the Referendum campaign and, four years later, it remains unanswered. At its heart, as I’ve argued before, is how to reconcile Brexit, which was, contradictorily, both a nationalist and a globalist project, with a world which is neither of those things but, instead, regionalised.

Back on the home front: Coronavirus nudging Johnson to a deal?

Global politics aside, domestically the Covid-19 situation also nudges Boris Johnson in the direction of doing a deal with the EU. I started arguing in March, and it is now so obvious as to be a truism, that the politics of Brexit and of the coronavirus pandemic are inextricably bound together. With a second English lockdown now underway, and very widespread criticism of Johnson’s inept handling of the crisis, it’s arguable that he just can’t afford to fail to secure the deal he promised in the election

The counter-argument, obviously, is that the lockdown would distract attention from no deal but I think that’s less plausible. Apart from the additional trauma it would heap on the economy it would only cement the sense, eloquently described by Rachel Sylvester in The Times this week (£), of a Prime Minister whose administration was in a downward spiral of failure. Nor would this just be a matter of one disaster on top of another, since both can be seen to flow from the same deficiencies (£) of inane boosterism and an inability to master complex policy detail and, indeed, a pathological aversion to even attempting such mastery. Ultimately, both reflect the inability of Johnson and those around him to meet the challenge of governing rather than campaigning.

But – and it is a big but – this imbrication of Covid-19 and Brexit does not unambiguously make a deal with the EU the path of least resistance for Johnson, which is the path that this most unprincipled and unserious of politicians will invariably seek. Many of those within his own party who are most vociferously opposed to the new lockdown – the Redwoods and Swaynes – are also those most likely to attack any deal which he might strike and, more fundamentally, most likely to see no deal not as a failure but as their desired outcome. Having faced their challenge over the lockdown, he may be less willing to risk doing so over the far more incendiary issue of an EU deal, especially with Farage poised (£) to ginger up opposition on both counts.

A role for Labour?

In this context, the Labour Party’s position becomes important. On lockdown, Johnson was able to defeat his backbench rebels because of Labour support, and their numbers were probably curtailed by the knowledge that this would be so. But will Keir Starmer be so compliant in supporting any deal that may be reached? There are grounds to think not since, political tactics aside, there are good reasons of principle why he should be critical of it. For whilst some may greet any deal with relief it is virtually inevitable now that its terms are going to be fairly thin, and certainly cannot yield anything like the “frictionless trade” that for so long was promised.

It may be said that such promises, which were always nonsense once Theresa May insisted on hard Brexit, have already been abandoned but even without insisting on that as a benchmark any deal will manifestly not be the “super Canada-plus” one Johnson promised during the election either. At the very least, the near abandonment of the services sector by any conceivable free trade agreement ought to be fertile ground for Labour to argue, with complete accuracy, that Britain is going to suffer grievous economic damage. Clearly all of this applies, in trumps, if no trade deal is made.

However, there is a ‘big but’ to this, as well. Starmer has been remarkably – and in my view mistakenly – silent on Brexit since becoming leader. Of course the reasons why are obvious and well-known, and in their own way good. It deprives Johnson of his culture war comfort zone of burbling on about the will of the people, and whipping up his base, and avoids Labour having to confront the divisions amongst its own voters. But whilst that justifies Starmer in not foregrounding Brexit, it makes no sense to treat something so important as totally off-limits.

In particular, Starmer would have been wise to set down a small, quiet marker in the summer that the failure to extend the Transition Period when it was possible was a mistake. For it has now proven to be not just a mistake but a catastrophic error of judgment (and, tactically, saying so would fit well with the Starmer narrative of how such errors have characterised Johnson’s approach to Covid-19).

Even without having done so, and irrespective of whether a trade deal is reached in the coming week or so, the very real problems of the imminent end to transition, now compounded by the lockdown, ought to be meat and drink to the leader of the opposition. I flagged some of these problems in my previous post, and did so in more detail in an article in Prospect this week. Without reprising that here, a key point is how the failure to prepare has deep roots right back to the Referendum campaign’s dismissal of all adverse effects of Brexit as Project Fear.

That’s not a point that it would be useful for Starmer, or any other politician, to pursue now because few will care and many will see it as re-litigating the whole Brexit question. Nevertheless, it is one which continues to matter for those of us who are not willing to ignore how the present mess has not just arisen by some quirk of nature as from a blue sky. Rather it grows directly and inevitably out of the grotesque mendacity, ignorance, and irresponsibility of Brexiters going back years. It should never be forgotten or forgiven in the swirl of news about its daily consequences.

A country unprepared

Those consequences continue to be somewhat under the public radar for the time being, mainly eclipsed by coronavirus but also because each in itself can seem trivial or even dull. An example this week is the problem Scottish potato farmers are having in selling their goods to Northern Ireland because of uncertainty about post-Brexit trade rules (and, specifically, the application of phytosanitary rules). It is an instructive example in that in agriculture, as in many other industries, decisions about what to produce and where to place orders are necessarily having to be made now (as they have been for some time). It’s just not viable to continue to insist that businesses need to ‘get ready’ for the end of transition when they already have to make such decisions without knowing what they are facing.

One thing that businesses in Great Britain sending goods to Northern Ireland do know is that they will have to make customs declarations – as many as 30 million a year, it was reported this week. But exactly how this and other aspects of GB>NI and NI>GB trade will actually work remain unclear. The Institute for Government** produced a highly informative report this week, authored by Joe Marshall, Maddy Thimont Jack, Jess Sargeant and Nick Jones, entitled ‘Preparing Brexit. How ready is the UK?’ and they describe the unknowns in some detail. They document how several major decisions about the Northern Ireland Protocol that have still to be made and, as regards GB-NI trade specifically, state that delays in information “[have made] it all but impossible for businesses to prepare to date” (p.22).

The report, whilst acknowledging progress that has been made, especially as regards legislation and some regulatory bodies, towards readiness for the end of transition shows that there remain significant gaps. Apart from those relating to Northern Ireland, these are to do with management of the GB-EU border and the preparedness of both businesses and individuals.

Overall, the report concludes that “the UK is still not ready for life outside the EU” (p.50) and makes the important point that the end of the transition period will in no way mark the end of the Brexit process. Whilst the tone is studiously neutral, on my reading (but judge for yourself) this report envisages significant disruption in January and regards the failure to extend the transition period as an error of judgment on the scale I suggested above.

The IfG report is entirely consistent with this week’s National Audit Office (NAO) report on UK border preparedness, which warns of “significant disruption” at the end of the transition period, principally because of inadequate infrastructure and IT systems, as well as lack of business preparation. Again, the lack of clarity about how the Northern Ireland sea border will work is highlighted. The response of a government spokesperson to the NAO report, that the government is running a major information campaign so that individuals and businesses know how “to grasp the new opportunities available as the transition period ends”, can only be the work of a comedian. For there are no ‘new opportunities’, except, perhaps, for smugglers, only new costs and inconveniences.

The insanity continues

And so what in my previous post I called the insanity continues. Since then, as anticipated, there is not only the new lockdown in England but also the (sensible) hesitance of the government to say that it will indeed end on schedule at the start of December, which suggests that it may well be prolonged. As even the most hard-pressed of civil servants and business managers can expect to take a Christmas holiday this means the actual time available to prepare for the end of transition is now nugatory. And whilst I have suggested that the Labour opposition could be more vocal in exposing the folly of what is happening, it is not in power.

The ensuing disruption, like the wider economic damage of Brexit, will be squarely attributable to the hubris and incompetence of Johnson’s Brexit government.

 

*She meant the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, as it has been called for over two years. Interestingly, Truss seemed to assume that the US will join it even though this was when there was even less clarity about the election result. Trump, of course, pulled out of the talks for what was to have been the TPP. It has long been touted that the UK sees joining the CPTPP as creating a backdoor route to an agreement with the US if a Biden presidency were to also join. It remains an open question whether any of this will happen.

**I often refer to the Institute for Government’s work on this blog and would like to acknowledge, explicitly, just how excellent it is. Throughout the Brexit process the stream of high quality data and analysis its researchers have provided has been truly remarkable and, since it is freely available, a massive public service (and, no, I have no relationship or involvement to disclose).

Beyond folly

The last ten days were supposed to be my break from Brexit hence, as trailed two weeks ago, there was no post on this blog last Friday. But escaping did not prove easy, gloomily conscious as I was of taking my first trip to the EU since Britain ceased to be a member and my last before the transition period ends. Even if that had not been in my mind, in motorway service stations and elsewhere was the unavoidable message of the government’s increasingly panicky campaign: “time is running out”. Brexit is not mentioned of course, for we are not supposed to recall that what were to have been the ‘sunny uplands’ turn out to be a quagmire of paperwork, cost, and inconvenience.

A further reminder, as I drove through Kent, was the sight of huge construction works for one of the lorry parks that will be needed post-transition. Then, taking the Dover to Dunkirk ferry laden with lorries from Portugal to Lithuania to Bulgaria, just a few of the 2.1 million that Dover’s port handles each year, it was hard not to wonder who thinks that what this huge, complex artery of international trade really needs is to have a whole lot of new disruptions. And, over in Dunkirk, the new sanitary and phytosanitary lanes were a visible indication of just what leaving the EU and the single market means in, literally, concrete terms (it is notable that the new facilities and systems needed for Brexit in EU ports have been in place for months whereas, for all the talk of taking back control, the UK is still developing them).

Petulant children and the role of the man-baby

None of this, as everyone should know by now, will be avoided by an EU-UK trade deal, although it will be worsened without a deal. On that issue, the outcome remains opaque. The talks have resumed after the UK’s sort-of-but-not-really walk out, a resumption enabled by Michel Barnier ‘conceding’ to British demands to use the ‘right’ words (intensification, compromise needed on both sides, British sovereignty respected).

In the Ladybird book of international negotiations that seems to be Boris Johnson and David Frost’s go-to text this perhaps counts as a victory and I doubt they have any inkling that to outsiders it resembles an adult placating a petulant child. As Tony Connelly of RTE reports – within a detailed explanation of how the talks faltered and resumed - an EU diplomat described the conversations that preceded the resumption as the UK being “in the therapeutic phase”.

Connelly and others also report that one reason the outcome remains unknowable is Johnson’s almost pathological aversion to making the necessary choices, with their inevitable costs. One widely discussed suggestion is that he will await the outcome of the US Presidential election before deciding which way to jump. In brief, if Trump were to win then Johnson would be more likely to opt for no deal with the EU, in the expectation that a trade deal with the US is more likely than it would be under Biden (for a wider discussion of what the US election means for the UK see Patrick Wintour’s excellent in-depth analysis, and for what it means for the prospects of a trade deal see my recent article in Byline Times).

It is a plausible enough theory of Johnson’s decision-making process if only because it is so inane. Economically, of course, no US trade deal could come close to compensating for the damage of there being no deal with the EU (government estimates being +0.16% GDP over 15 years for the former and -7.6% GDP over 15 years for the latter). And if Johnson hasn’t yet learned that Trump is a blowhard who, for all his talk, is not going to do Brexit Britain any special favours, then he simply hasn’t been paying attention. Not that that would be a radical departure from character.

Yet there is a political, or perhaps just a superstitious, rationale for this theory. Trump’s demise, if it comes, will be as symbolically important for Brexit as Brexit was for his election in 2016. It will mark the rout of the figurehead of nationalist populism and, as Rafael Behr observed some time ago, would scupper Johnson’s “bumbling English Trump tribute act” and the “tantrum diplomacy” that goes with it (of which the UK’s recent outburst over continuing the talks is a good example). Indeed the parasitical relationship of the Brexiters to Trump was made plain this week by Nigel Farage’s cringingly sycophantic endorsement of his idol, in which he underscored that a defeat for the Washington man-baby would be a defeat for nationalists globally.

So on this account a Biden win most likely heralds a trade deal with the EU (unless, something underpriced in UK discussions which are almost invariably parochial, such a win hardens EU demands upon the UK or at least reduces willingness to accede to those made by the UK). If so, for all that it will by definition make Britain poorer than the present trading relationship, it will be spun as a great victory by Johnson.

Turning Japanese

A tiny foretaste of just how dishonest that spin will be came this week in the government’s triumphant announcement that, as a result of the trade deal it has just signed with Japan, soy sauce will be cheaper from 1 January as it will attract a zero tariff. It turned out to be a lie of a strange and complex sort in that soy sauce currently has no tariff charged anyway because of the EU-Japan trade deal which the UK is leaving, so the deal with Japan doesn’t make it cheaper it just stops it getting more expensive by virtue of trading on WTO terms. Anyway, much of it doesn’t come from Japan but from the EU, with which the government says trading on WTO terms is fine. And, anyway, you’d have to use an awful lot of soy sauce to benefit by more than a few pence. These and other nonsensical or misleading features of the announcement have been documented by Full Fact.

As for the Japan trade deal more generally, it should be filed under ‘not bad news’ rather than ‘good news’ in that, despite some features which do go beyond what the UK had via the EU-Japan deal, it mainly continues those provisions. So if it hadn’t happened it would be a further example of Brexit damage. That it is being trumpeted as evidence of the virtues of Brexit is indicative of the shameless disinformation and ludicrous boosterism of this government, which will go into overdrive if there were to be a deal with the EU. If and when that happens it will be worth recalling how Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement was also greeted as a huge triumph by those who, only months later, denounced it as a disaster.

Meanwhile in the real world …

Moving from Brexiter PR back into the real world what we find are new reports of impending labour shortages once transition ends in fields ranging from agriculture to dentistry (£), of regulatory uncertainty in industries from aerospace (£) to chemicals (£), and of ongoing difficulties in the recruitment of trained customs staff (£). Many of these stories are, as they have been for years, under the public radar, appearing in the business pages of newspapers or in the specialist media of particular industries. There is more cut through when the Brexit effects on holidaymakers are reported, as with last weekend’s outrage at the “petty EU” for “threatening” British tourists with longer passport queues from next year.

It’s a story that encapsulates so much of the Brexiter mindset. That this was likely to be an effect of Brexit is not a new idea, but they dismissed it as more Project Fear. Then, when it threatens to become a reality, they treat it as a form of punishment as if whilst leaving the EU Britain ought to retain the rights it had as a member. As the years have gone on, this mindset seems to have become so ingrained that there is no way of reasoning with it: all the adverse effects of Brexit are either denied (they won’t happen, it’s just scaremongering), ignored (they aren’t happening), displaced (they are happening but it’s not because of Brexit) or disowned (they shouldn’t happen, it’s only because the EU are punishing us).

Between this barrage of misinformation and the general lack of profile in the news of Brexit effects, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a YouGov poll this week found a very low level of public awareness of how things will change once the transition ends. It should also be noted that even where respondents believe they are clear about what will happen it doesn’t mean that they are. On one specific issue which will affect individuals travelling to the EU – the need to pay for electronic authorization to travel – just 9% knew that from 2022 this will be a requirement, whilst another 14% knew it would be required, but wrongly thought it would begin in 2021 (it doesn’t because the system isn’t ready yet).

The interesting and important question will be how people react as the post-transition effects become obvious and, crucially, who they blame. Another YouGov poll this week suggests that 57% of people would blame the government if the transition ends with no deal. But what of those adverse effects that will arise even if there is a deal? Clearly the Brexiter press will push the EU punishment narrative, but this may have much less traction than in the past, if only because public perceptions of governmental competence have been damaged by the handling of the Covid-19 crisis. That of course is now the backdrop to everything and whilst it does not diminish the significance of Brexit it does inflect it in new ways.

The blindingly obvious is undiscussable

As I return from France, it, like Germany, is going back into lockdown (and I am beginning a two-week quarantine). The clocks have changed, the weather is awful, much of the UK is subject to stringent restrictions and everyone can see that even greater ones are in prospect. Over 45,000 of our fellow citizens have died because of the virus – in March, it was hoped that 20,000 would be the maximum – and infections continue to rise.  We are heading for a long, hard winter and with some two-thirds of businesses at risk of insolvency along with millions of jobs  we face a potentially cataclysmic situation that will damage the livelihoods of all but the most comfortably cushioned.

Few of us have experienced anything like this and much that is familiar is being ripped up by force majeure. But, still, Britain pushes on with the one, supposedly inviolable, immutable policy of Brexit. A policy of such folly that the government no longer dares mention it by name and which even its most enthusiastic proponents have ceased to try to justify in any serious way. The Brexit Emperor lacks not just clothes but skin and flesh.

Yet even now – hugely difficult as it would be – it wouldn’t be totally impossible given the extraordinary circumstances for the UK to at least try to find some route to extending the transition, which ends in only two months’ time, rather than to just parrot that “time is running out”. It seems feasible that if the UK was open to such an idea the EU would be at least willing to explore how to make it work, if only because of the worsening Covid-19 situation in many of its member states.

There are plenty of people who can see just how ludicrous this is, but it isn’t in any serious sense within the realms of what is even politically discussable - and way beyond what Johnson’s woefully incompetent and incontinently dishonest leadership is able to deliver. And whilst the mechanics would be hugely complicated the proposition is not: in the face of so overwhelming a public health crisis, and with so much undecided even about the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement (especially as regards Northern Ireland), there is just not enough time to agree and to move to a new relationship which by any standards is important for both parties. So - let’s just take some more time.

In any other context, political or personal, it would be so blindingly obvious as to not need saying. That it is near to unsayable and certainly won’t happen is down solely to the warthog stubbornness of a small group of fanatical Brexiters still fighting the battle to leave that they have already won, and totally indifferent to its costs.

So we blunder on, prisoners of a series of past decisions that we do not have the wit or the will to revisit, and of a small but powerful group of ideologues we are either too cowardly or too weak to face down.

It is worse than folly. It is insanity.