The customs row reveals the fundamental paradox of Brexit politics

For weeks now, and with intensifying fury, the government have been bitterly split between two versions of what will succeed Britain’s membership of the Customs Union. It is a row that is beyond satire. Both versions (‘customs partnership’ and ‘maximum facilitation’) are impossible, resting upon technologies that do not currently exist and which could not be delivered in the necessary time frame even if they did. Both versions are markedly inferior to what they would replace. Both versions have already been rejected by the EU. Neither of them, even if they could be made to work and even if they could be agreed with the EU, would completely solve one of the main things they are supposed to solve – an Irish border with no physical infrastructure. And this, which is in any case but one aspect of a far larger set of issues that need to be resolved, is occurring almost two years since Britain voted to leave the EU, well over a year since Britain began the process of doing so, and less than six months before the terms of withdrawal need to be ready for ratification.

To call this situation absurd would be excessively generous. It is demented. But, strangely, in the perverse politics of Brexit it makes complete sense. To understand why, it’s necessary to understand the fundamental structural paradox built into those politics. It consists of two, irreconcilable, imperatives.

The first imperative is that Brexit, and specifically hard Brexit, must be done because it is the ‘Will of the People’ as interpreted by the high priests of the ERG and accepted as her duty by Theresa May. The second imperative is that which bears down upon all governments: they will be destroyed if they pursue policies which significantly damage the economic well-being of the country.

If it were really true, as many of the Ultras claim, that it is the Will of the People to leave the EU regardless of any economic consequences, then there would be no problem at all for the government. It could do as the Ultras urge, and leave with no deal or the most minimal of deals. The ‘People’ would applaud them for doing their will. In any case, contradictorily, the Ultras claim that those economic consequences are only Project Fear anyway.

But no serious evaluation – including that of the government itself - of what such a Brexit would mean is so sanguine. The Prime Minister certainly isn’t, warning during the General Election campaign that getting Brexit terms ‘wrong’ would be a disaster. No responsible, or just self-interested, government could do it. If that is true, the logic is obvious: those who voted for Brexit simply didn’t understand the consequences of doing so and must be told so. But that is unsayable in the new political correctness that Brexit has ushered in: it would be elitist disdain for the ‘People’.

Caught between these two irreconcilable imperatives – that hard Brexit must be done, but it must not have any adverse consequences – May’s government has, ever since the Brexit White Paper, tried to find a way of reconciling them. This is what I have called in a previous post the Mobius Strip of Brexiter madness - trying to keep almost all the features of being in the EU, whilst leaving the EU. The government is trying to do so over issues as diverse as data protection and Euratom, it remains the hope of what the future ‘trade deal’ will be, and, right now, it is what the debate (if it can be graced with that name) over future customs arrangements is about: an attempt to be ‘in and yet not in’ or ‘out and yet not out’.

Given that the imperatives are irreconcilable, it’s inevitable that the attempt to do so will fail. But what the customs issue is revealing is something different and even worse. By trying to satisfy both imperatives the Prime Minister is trying to pursue a course which can satisfy neither: a customs partnership which is both unacceptable to the Ultras (because it is not really ‘out’) and yet also does not avoid the damage (because it is not really ‘in’). There can be no middle way between mutually exclusive alternatives, and the pretence that there is could only be sustained if Brexit were just a matter of domestic political debate. It hasn’t been that since the Article 50 process was, by the choice of the British government, begun; the now rapidly nearing end to that process enforces the question: are you in or out? To which the answer can’t be ‘a bit of both’.

It was entirely predictable that the government’s attempt avoid the structural bind imposed by these two incompatible imperatives would fail. It was less predictable that it would have flared up over the customs union, since the more important issue is the single market. That it has flared up reflects, primarily, the fact that Labour changed their stance on a customs union, thus changing the parliamentary arithmetic.

What happens on customs will almost certainly shape what happens on the single market. Because it is not just the government who are dodging the structural bind, the same basic flaw is present in Labour’s ‘jobs first Brexit’. If Labour get to the point of recognizing that for the nonsense it is, and their position on the single market changes, then that, too, will come up for grabs. The recent vote in the House of Lords carrying the single market amendment the Withdrawal Bill now puts Labour’s stance clearly in the spotlight. So it is becoming at least conceivable that the inbuilt Commons majority for soft rather than hard Brexit will prevail.

And if we get to that point then the question as to why leave the EU at all will become irresistible, for a rather ironic reason. Before the Referendum, many Brexiters argued that all they wanted was a ‘soft Brexit’, and many voted leave accordingly. If they had stuck with that ambition, they would probably have succeeded. Instead, since then, most leading Brexiters have argued that soft Brexit would be no Brexit at all. So if it turns out that soft Brexit is all that can be delivered then they will have little to complain about if that morphs into the proposition that we might as well stay in. Which also explains why we are in the current bizarre situation. For the Ultras know, quite as well as anyone else, where it potentially leads: making the choice that the government have so far ducked between the two incompatible imperatives that frame Brexit.

If that choice is faced up to honestly then, again ironically, the structural bind will disappear. For it is only by virtue of the Ultras’ sleight of hand and May’s poor leadership that the Will of the People imperative translates into hard Brexit. In fact, numerous opinion polls show a clear majority for remaining in the single market. If that policy were pursued, then – whilst it would still be damaging to Britain both economically and in terms of wider geo-politics – the second imperative would also be met. Rather than satisfying neither imperative, the government could satisfy both. Unless or until we get to that point the Brexit debate will continue in its present form, as exemplified by the customs row. That is to say, a situation more ludicrous that even the most audacious political satirist would have dared imagine.

Britain still refuses to get real about Brexit

In December 2017, after the end of the phase 1 talks, I wrote on this blog that what would now happen would be that “we will continue to travel endlessly around the Mobius Strip of Brexiter madness. That is to say, on the one hand the Ultras will keep finding new ways to imagine that it is possible to have all of features of being in the single market without being in the single market, whilst the EU will keep finding new ways to explain that this cannot be so”. The Chequers Awayday meeting was the last chance the government had before the phase 2 talks start to get off this endless fantasy loop. They blew it, and have arrived back at something that was first mooted as far back as 2016: a form of sector-by-sector Brexit.

The current version goes by various new names – three baskets, managed divergence or, freshly minted today, ‘ambitious managed divergence’. Whatever term is used the idea is almost certainly doomed to failure. In December 2016 I discussed some of the reasons why in a blog on UK in a Changing Europe website. I won’t reprise all that now, but one issue, which may not be immediately obvious, is that business sectors are rarely, if ever, discrete, clearly bounded, entities. For example, the government can talk about ‘the automotive sector’ but that pulls in goods and services from all kinds of other sectors, such as textiles or computer software. Sectors do not stand alone.

That indeed is one of the reasons why (as is already clear) the EU are highly unlikely to agree anything like the Chequers model. That is often expressed in terms of a refusal to allow ‘cherry picking’, but I think that is a misleading expression, implying that the juicy cherries are there to be plucked if only the EU would be more flexible or if the UK were to negotiate bullishly enough.

The real point is that the single market is, conceptually, precisely that: a single market. It is not in principle a single market in X or in Y, and if it were to be, or become, so it would lose what is central to its defining characteristic and its economic rationale. It is true that, to the extent that it is still a work in progress, especially in services, some sectors lie outside it and are only gradually being brought in. But those sectoral exceptions are temporary, usually for reasons of technical difficulty; anomalies to be rectified, not end states to be made permanent. The single market doesn’t just unify national markets, it creates a unified market tout court.

There is another issue – perhaps not worth spending much time on, since the whole model is almost certainly not going to happen, but important for understanding one of the key confusions of Brexiters. That confusion is the now often-stated idea that a UK trade deal with the EU will be easy because of existing convergence, which is the thing that is time-consuming in normal trade deals. The meta-problem with that is that this is not an ordinary trade deal in that it will be concerned – uniquely – with divergence not convergence, as discussed in a previous blog post. But within that, there is a particular issue that arises from the idea of a sector-by sector Brexit.

If we think about a normal trade deal, one of the key sources of delay is that powerful business groups lobby for their sectors to be excluded (i.e. to protect themselves from competition) and/or to shape the forms that regulatory convergence takes. In the Brexit case, the same lobbying will happen but in reverse: almost all sectors will lobby to be amongst those included in the single market and/or to shape the forms that regulatory divergence will take. So whereas it would very probably be fairly quick to agree a soft Brexit of Britain staying entirely in the single market (via EEA/EFTA), it will be no quicker to negotiate a sectoral Brexit than it would be to negotiate any other trade deal – in other words, many years.

But all this is, as I say, largely beside the point. Unless something drastic changes on the UK red line on the ECJ (and that’s not impossible: we already see signs of it softening over Citizens’ Rights and security), then ‘ambitious managed divergence’ is a dead duck. It simply won’t work to have some sectors of the UK economy in the single market on the basis of the UK sticking to EU regulations for this or that sector or having some form of mutual recognition agreement (itself a much more complex matter than the government seems to understand, which would need another post but in the meantime see this briefing from the Institute for Government). The reason it won’t work is simple: what happens when there are differences between, or disputes about, the application of regulations? Some body has to decide, and that has to be a supra-national body. The UK courts by definition are national not supra-national, so it has to be the ECJ. This the key take away from a detailed assessment of ‘sectoral Brexit’ from the UK Trade Policy Observatory (which is well worth a read not just on the ECJ issue, but also those of mutual recognition agreements and the WTO constraints on sectoral Brexit).

So, still, the Brexit government is trying to square the circles of incompatible demands. What they want is logically impossible to deliver, and it doesn’t matter a jot how often Brexiters invoke ‘the Will of the People’ to insist that it ‘must’ be delivered. You can vote that the earth is flat, but it doesn’t make it so, and it doesn’t enable ships to sail or aircraft to fly to insist it ‘must’ be so. It is extremely unfortunate – and, frankly, embarrassing - that it falls to the EU to keep having to  tell the British government that its demands are impossible because that, of course, feeds the Brexiters’ narrative of ‘punishment’. It would be far preferable if our own politicians were to have the courage to tell the British people the truth.

The Conservative Party, of course, is hamstrung by its ERG Ultras, who have been out again in force this week demanding a scorched earth Brexit (for a revealing analysis of this group and its motivations see Otto English’s blog, and for an analysis of the inadequacy of the ERG letter’s understanding of the WTO issues it raises, see ex-WTO official Peter Ungphakorn’s twitter thread). As a result, the government shows only occasional flashes of realism (for example, this week, on the likely need for a longer transition period and on an acceptance that EU nationals arriving in the UK during the transition period will have full rights), and these only after having resisted the obvious for so long that this realism can be positioned as a betrayal by the Ultras.

It is Labour who hold the key, because although politics is a complex business sometimes it can be thought of in the very simple way of parliamentary arithmetic. For the time being, they are only inching towards something realistic in terms of a customs union, but it is too little and too slow. It’s actually quite strange that the Labour leadership seem to have reservations about a comprehensive customs union only on the grounds that it would entail the Common Commercial Policy (CCP; i.e. no independent trade policy), since business doesn’t care about that (as the business benefits are almost non-existent whilst the costs are huge) and the Corbynite objection to the EU is on the grounds of global neo-liberalization.

It is a tantalising thought that if Jeremy Corbyn were to come out in favour not just of a comprehensive customs treaty but also single market membership then he would be both the most left-wing leader of the Labour Party in modern times and the champion of the ‘jobs first Brexit’ he apparently wants, whilst also positioning Labour as ‘the party of business’. That term used to be the unquestioned possession of the Conservatives, of course, and one of the strangest political turnarounds of Brexit is how unequivocally they have become an anti-business party as well as becoming committed to damaging British geo-political standing and influence. Above all, the Conservative Party used to pride itself on being ‘non-ideological’ and pragmatic. In its Brexit incarnation it is neither. Hence we have a government committed – and there is no precedent for this in modern British history that I am aware of – to the art of the impossible.

May and the ERG Ultras are manacled together

There are perhaps 50 - I have seen estimates varying between 40 and 80 - Tory MPs in the so-called European Research Group (ERG; ‘so-called’ as this is not some anodyne bunch of researchers, but a group of fanatical, extremist ideologues). They include several Ministers, perhaps nine Cabinet members, and many of the media’s darlings for Brexit commentary including, of course, the ERG’s current chairman Jacob Rees-Mogg. Even before becoming its leader he seemed to appear on the BBC quite as often as any of the Corporation’s most senior journalists. Now, he might as well have his own dedicated studio. It is this group of, for the most part, middle-aged white men who are holding the government, and hence our country, to ransom. They speak – they speak splenetically - for themselves and no doubt some, possibly many, leave voters, but they purport to speak for all leave voters and hence, of course, for ‘the People’.

May made a fatal miscalculation in thinking that the Ultras would be appeased by hard Brexit. As Major and Cameron had found before her, every concession made to them only produced a new and even more extreme demand. Thus whereas before the Referendum many of them said that a soft Brexit (i.e. staying in the single market and having a comprehensive customs treaty) would be enough, immediately afterwards they insisted that only hard Brexit would do. But when that became the government’s policy, they started agitating for a no deal Brexit. Some of them, such as Nadine Dorries, seem to have no idea what they are advocating or why. It might be thought that Dorries is an outlier and that all the other members are well-apprised of the practical meanings of hard Brexit, but a glance at the list of their names suggests that this might be excessively charitable.

By promising hard Brexit at the point that she was politically strongest, May created an impossible situation which has become clear now that she is so weak. What she accepted was that the lies of the Leave campaign could be made true. That is, that it would be possible to have all of the economic benefits of being in the EU without any of the politically unpalatable consequences in terms of, in particular, free movement of people and ECJ jurisdiction. This could never be delivered, not because the EU would never agree to it, but because they couldn’t agree to it since it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the single market is: an entity which by definition entails free movement and which by definition requires a supra-national regulator.

Trapped by her own choices into delivering an undeliverable policy, May is now stuck. She can’t easily retreat from hard Brexit having promised it, and she can’t follow the ERG punks to a no deal Brexit without comprehensively wrecking the British economy – meaning not just mass unemployment but the end of air travel and the introduction of food rationing that would occur as a consequence of a ‘no deal’ Brexit. The Ultras don’t care about that – some of them probably believe it would be a good way of toughening us up – but for anyone with any remote sense of public duty, let alone any political nous, it’s a complete non-starter. In recent weeks it seems as if business leaders and civil servants have convinced May of this.

It’s against this background that the various storms and spats of the last week are to be understood. As predicted in my previous post, the quiet period of recent weeks has come to an abrupt end. The leak of the government’s economic forecasts produced no real surprises. They are in line with what most previous forecasts have suggested in showing that all forms of Brexit are economically damaging, and the harder the Brexit, the greater the damage. But the response underscored just how rabid the Ultras have become, denouncing not just the forecasts themselves but impugning the motives of the civil servants who prepared them. Such criticism of the civil service was always inevitable, as I have said since the first post on the blog, and has been bubbling away for a while. But as the realities bite they are becoming more vociferous, and although Steve Baker (former ERG Chair, now DExEU Minister) had to apologise for having voiced them in the House of Commons there can surely be little doubt that many Brexit Ultras are convinced that the civil service is part of a great remainer elite conspiracy.

But the more vociferous the Ultras become the greater the sense that events are moving away from them. The response to the leaked economic forecasts as a new instalment of ‘Project Fear’ is not just predictable, it’s shop-soiled; whilst the Will of the People in which they have so successfully cloaked themselves now looks distinctly moth-eaten. Time has taken its toll on the Ultras mainly because just as having agitated for a Referendum for years they were unable to produce a plan for how Brexit should be done, so too have they failed to come up with anything workable since the Referendum. On the contrary, what has been exposed is that a government that has adopted their hard Brexit position has been unable to craft it into something deliverable. That’s the real significance of Baker’s apology: when in government posts the Ultras are forced to take responsibility in a way that they are free from outside of government.

It’s for this reason that the Ultras hold off deposing May, which they surely have the numbers to do, as Rafael Behr argues in a superb essay in Prospect this week. They don’t want to take responsibility for delivering something which has already been shown to be undeliverable, and prefer to complain of betrayal. Victimhood, as I have argued several times on this blog, is their comfort zone. That can, as we have seen in abundance over Brexit, make for effective politics; it doesn’t make for effective policy. The moment for the Ultras to strike, if they were going to, passed with the phase 1 deal. If they strike now they are as likely to see Brexit slip through their fingers as get anything close to what they want than they will get from May’s government. Hence Liam Fox this week telling the Ultras they must learn to live with disappointment.

Yet if the Ultras are not able to bring down May, she is also not able to stand up to them. So she continues to grind out her mantras of ‘deep and special partnership’, the ‘Brexit the British people want’ and refusing to commit one way or another on the current question about a UK-EU customs treaty. Maybe she doesn’t want to stand up to them, and believes this tosh she comes out with – but if so, what’s clear is that at every stage she ends up conceding on things the Ultras hold dear. They know that she’s done it, they know that she will continue to do it, but there’s nothing they can do to stop her. But she can’t tell them that that is what she will continue to do, and maybe doesn’t even realise that this is what she will continue to do.

And so, for the time being anyway – for it surely can’t continue forever – Brexit Britain limps along with a terrified, mauled zoo keeper chained to a snarling, feral beast; each reliant on the other, but each loathing the other. At one moment the keeper lashes the beast spitefully with her whip; the next moment the beast lacerates the keeper savagely with its claws. Each time, a little blood is drawn but they remain manacled together because they have manacled themselves to each other. Meanwhile the rest of us, and the rest of the world, look on in horror, dismay and disgust at this revolting spectacle.

2018: the year that Brexit gets real and the year for getting real about Brexit

It is eighteen months since the EU Referendum and a great deal has happened since then, but most of it has been removed from any sense of reality. For the first six months all we knew was that ‘Brexit means Brexit’, something which lasted until the Lancaster House speech when it was announced that Brexit meant leaving the single market, the customs union and all institutions and agencies that entailed a role for the ECJ; a position then endorsed by the White Paper. It is worth pausing to reflect on this, because that six month delay gives the lie to the claim that the Referendum vote automatically entailed hard Brexit: had it done so, there would have been no such delay in announcing it. We also now know that the Cabinet did not have a formal discussion of the government’s post-Brexit plan until just a couple of weeks ago, and that no detailed impact assessment of it was made. So it would seem that the hard Brexit decision was made by Theresa May and her advisers, rather than by Cabinet, and with little understanding of what its implications would be.

Nevertheless, it was this decision, endorsed by Parliament, which framed the terms of the Article 50 letter and thus fundamentally shaped the way that the phase 1 negotiations occurred. Throughout those negotiations Brexiters continued to spout nonsense – that there would be the ‘row of the summer’ over sequencing; that the EU could ‘go whistle’ for a financial settlement; that ‘no deal’ was a possible or even desirable outcome; that the Irish border issue could be solved by magical, non-existent technologies. All this – along, of course, with the bizarre decision to call an election, and its outcome – was a stupendous waste of time and good will. Thus nine months into the Article 50 period the UK has agreed to pretty much everything the EU set out at the beginning, as was always inevitable unless the government was willing to accept the ‘no deal’ calamity that a breakdown of the talks would mean. Yet even at that point some Brexiters tried to say that the phase 1 agreement wasn’t really binding – only to be immediately disabused of that by the EU.

That, in brief, has been the story so far (for far more detail, see the last 110 posts on this blog!) and it is a woeful one of incompetence, unforced errors and a profound refusal by the government and especially the Brexit Ultras to engage in a serious and realistic way with the policy that they, themselves, wish to pursue. But 2018 is the year that Brexit will get real, and politicians will have to get real about Brexit – real with themselves, real with the public, and real about the EU-27. The crunch date will come, of course, in October 2018 when the final terms of the Article 50 process will need to be agreed for ratification to occur by March 2019 (see Paul Waugh of HuffPost for a great summary of the process).

That is an astonishingly short period of time – really, only nine months - and there is simply no way that it can be achieved if the government continue in the way that they have conducted themselves over the last nine months. But there is another, less obvious, crunch date coming and that is March 2018. That date will mark a year before Brexit actually happens and if by then it is not clear that there will be standstill (i.e. status quo) transition period then really serious disinvestments and relocations will begin to happen because a year is about the minimum timeframe for businesses to make those kind of decisions.

So this is the first and most urgent thing the government need to get real about and they have to do so in the next few weeks. There is going to have to be a standstill transition and if the Ultras don’t like the idea of being a “vassal state” then tough. That’s the consequence of the policy they sold to the British people. The only alternative would be to seek to extend the Article 50 period. It’s highly unlikely, but not impossible, that the EU-27 would agree, of course, but in any case Ultras won’t accept that because they see it as postponing, perhaps forever, Brexit. But the time has come for Mrs May to stop pandering to the foot-stamping Ultras who have so consistently and so conspicuously failed to understand or accept the basic consequences of their own actions. Nothing will satisfy the Ultras because they don’t want to be satisfied and let’s be clear: they represent only a tiny fraction of leave voters, and certainly don’t express ‘the will of the people’.

It is also down to Mrs May, and the government in general, to stop peddling factually nonsensical claims to the British people about what is going to happen now, or what can happen now. Thus, first, what was agreed in phase 1 is not contingent on the outcome of phase 2. It defines the agreed exit terms. Second, phase 2 is not going to yield a future trade deal, it can only (both because of the terms of the Article 50 process, and the timescale) yield a political framework within which that trade deal can be negotiated once Britain has become a third country. There will be no trade deal in March 2019, nor will there be one for a long time after that, and very probably this will mean a significantly longer transition period than is currently envisaged by either the UK or the EU.

Third, whatever the final terms of trade are going to be, May, the government, and Brexiters in general, have got to get real, and quickly, about the incompatible nature of the policies and red lines they currently espouse. That is, there isn’t going to be anything remotely close to the current trade arrangements unless the UK stays in the single market via EFTA/EEA and signs a customs treaty very similar to customs union membership. If the terms are going to be something like CETA then that is going to be a long way from the current situation, especially as regards services, and, in turn is going to be incompatible with having an open border in Ireland. Moreover, as regards non-trade issues then, just as has been accepted for citizens’ rights, participation in all sorts of agencies in areas including aviation, nuclear materials, security and policing will mean accepting some role for the ECJ. There are multiple circles that can't be squared here, and May should give a Prime Ministerial speech or broadcast to explain this to the British people. They deserve, and can for the most part undoubtedly take, some honesty and realism.

There are also some more specific things to get real about. The governmental structure created to handle Brexit doesn’t make sense, split as it is between the Cabinet Office and DExEU, the latter of which has been a mess from the start and which has suffered multiple resignations and staffing problems at both political and administrative levels. This was most sharply revealed by OIly Robbins' move from DExEU to the Cabinet Office. DExEU appears to be dysfunctional and it is not clear that David Davis is on top of his job or, even, what his job is. Whilst rethinking his role and that of his department, it would be a good time for Liam Fox to be told that there is no prospect of him making any substantive progress on trade deals with other countries: it’s not just that no deals can be signed until after the transition period, it’s that no country will discuss the details of such deals until the final terms of Brexit are known. And, finally, all politicians need to get real about the fact that EU leaders and officials do actually have access to the British media: statements made for home consumption can and do adversely affect the negotiations.

So much for the government, but in 2018 the Labour opposition are also going to have to get real and clarify their position. In particular, if they have got any sense, they will clearly and concertedly back staying in the single market as the only way of both ‘honouring the Referendum result’ and avoiding the complexity and damage of Brexit. There are signs that they are inching towards that policy but inching is no longer good enough. Talking about a ‘jobs first Brexit’ or being opposed to a ‘Tory Brexit’ is simply meaningless. The only way to make those slogans meaningful is to support a soft Brexit or no Brexit at all. And that, too, needs to be the position of the Tory backbench ‘rebels’. They will need to do far, far more than they did in backing amendment seven, the one time in 2017 they showed even a fraction of the ruthlessness of their Ultra colleagues.

And, finally, 2018 is also the year when ‘hard remainers’ are going to have to get real. Although it’s conceivable that Brexit might be abandoned completely, this looks less and less likely for the reasons I set out in detail in another post. I don’t like that, and I’d be happy to be proved wrong, but barring a major, sustained change in the opinion polls in the next few months that is how it seems to me. If this is so, it means that the best hope of minimizing the damage now is to seek the kind of soft Brexit which, were it not for the baleful influence of the Brexit Ultras, we might have had and could – just possibly – still get.

In the very first post on the blog, I wrote that it started from the position that the Referendum vote was a national catastrophe, and that is still my view. But even given that – or even for those reading this who do not share this view – what has been striking about all that has happened since the vote is that the botched and incompetent way that the government have approached Brexit has made the worst of a bad job (see this great summary from Jonathan Lis). They have only a few months – really, only a few weeks - left to retrieve the situation and they can only do that by firmly squashing the Ultras. If they do not then any pleasure that we remainers may feel at seeing Brexit crash and burn will be more than offset by seeing the consequences. Because a crash and burn won’t take us back to 22 June 2016 but will propel us into a national evisceration in 2019.

Government paralysis risks a Brexit disaster

With each day bringing ever more peculiar political stories it is easy to take for granted the over-arching peculiarity shaping British government, as if it were a normal situation. That is to say, we have a minority government whose central and defining policy is to change fundamentally Britain’s economy and foreign policy in ways which will damage, and are already damaging, both; and this on the basis of the most extreme interpretation of a very narrow referendum result, itself conceivably influenced by a foreign power, an interpretation which is not supported by the majority of MPs, nor by half the cabinet, nor by the majority of the electorate and which the Prime Minister herself probably does not think is in the best interests of the country. I cannot think of a precedent in the history of Britain, or any other country, for such a situation. No matter how familiar these facts are we should never take them to be normal.

It is from this perverse situation that everything else flows, with cabinet ministers quite airily articulating their own version of what form Brexit will take so that (even leaving aside Priti Patel’s freelance adventures in diplomacy) Britain no longer has a functioning foreign policy, as Ian Dunt argued in an excoriating article this week. Meanwhile, having insisted that its 58 sectoral impact assessments, full of “excruciating detail”, must on no account be published since they would reveal the UK’s ‘negotiating hand’, the government now announces that, in fact, they do not exist. Which suggests either that on one of these points they were lying, or that the damage of publishing them would consist of revealing to the EU how little proper planning had been undertaken.

If the latter, it is, alas, likely that the EU are all too well aware of this. Indeed, there are widespread reports of growing frustration and bewilderment within the EU. Despite Britain’s frequent calls for quicker progress, this week’s talks are to be brief and, according the government, no more than a ‘stock taking’ exercise rather than substantive negotiations. A closely argued article by Jonathan Lis this week, based on high level contacts in Brussels, suggested that the EU is now coming to the view that a ‘no deal’ outcome, with all the chaos that entails, in March 2019 is more likely than not. And it is reported that a deadline of three weeks will be set for Britain to agree the terms of a financial settlement if there are to be talks about a transition agreement (itself a highly complex matter, as a new analysis by Professor Kenneth Armstrong discusses).

It hardly needs to be spelt out, but the reason why things are stalled is that the government can do nothing because as soon as it does it will fall apart (there have been rumours of a serious offer on the financial settlement, but nothing has happened yet). For that matter, The Times is today reporting (£) that Brussels are preparing for the British government to fall by the end of the year. I argued in my previous post that this must be a real possibility, underscored by the fact that the cabinet meeting was cancelled this week, apparently because of the depth of the political crisis and divisions engulfing it. If this doesn’t happen, then the paralysis will continue. But paralysis does not mean stasis, because each day that goes by brings March 2019 closer, and brings no deal closer. This, of course, is precisely what the Brexit ultras want and is the reason they continue to support May. The issue thus becomes whether and when the more pragmatic parts of the Tory party (and pragmatic in this context does not mean remainers or even soft Brexiters, it just means not belonging to the kamikaze tendency) are prepared to stand up and say that this ludicrous situation cannot continue, bringing the government down if needs be.

If that does not happen soon the damage will be huge. And yet if it does happen soon the Ultras will inevitably say that all would have been well had the government survived and continued on its kamikaze course. In those circumstances, a new government of whatever stripe might well continue on just such a course. So it may be that it is not until the damage – economic and political – really ramps up that there is any chance of the Ultras being discredited, if not in their own eyes then those of the public. Thus we are on a very perilous tightrope with no certainty, and perhaps only a slender chance, of getting to the other side more or less intact. If the government implodes too soon, the Ultras may still drag us to disaster; if it struggles on as it is for too long the disaster will arrive of its own accord and it will be too late to do anything about it.