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).
Showing posts with label globalization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label globalization. Show all posts
Friday, 6 November 2020
Friday, 10 July 2020
Brexit Britain's place in the world
As the talks between the UK and the EU limp on – this week, again, they finished early with little sign of progress - and coronavirus and its consequences continue to dominate the news, the Brexit process has fallen into one of its periodic quiet phases. There are reports of UK lack of preparedness for the end of transition, and an EU statement about the many things which, deal or no deal, will change at that point. However, the first isn’t at all surprising and the second isn’t, for the most part, news though it may shock those who haven't been paying attention. On a more amusing note, Michel Barnier’s reply to Mark Francois’ letter (discussed in last week’s post) drily pointed out that it had been complaining about things which Boris Johnson had agreed to and which he, Francois, had voted for.
Most likely the quiet phase will continue over the summer. But it was clear from the beginning that Brexit was never going to be simply about a redefinition of the UK-EU relationship and we are starting to see in greater detail just how profound and complex a geo-political shift is underway (£). Trade is only one issue to be navigated and trade itself cannot readily be separated from international relations more generally.
For example, as Philip Hammond, the former Chancellor, remarked in an interview this week, with the UK introducing new trade barriers with the EU it becomes increasingly important to improve trade relations with China. Yet these relations cannot be taken in isolation from political disputes over, currently, Hong Kong and Huawei. And the UK’s stance on the latter, in particular, impacts in turn upon relations with the US. Britain is caught in a world of economic and political power blocs, but without belonging to any, in which any course of action regarding one of them has adverse consequences with respect to another.
Britain found a role – and threw it away
The bigger picture, of course, relates to Britain’s place in the world. Having famously lost an empire but failed to find a role in the first two post-war decades, membership of what became the EU led to its finding a role of sorts. With Brexit, it has been observed that “Britain has lost a role and failed to find an empire”. That role, primarily of being a transatlantic bridge, was not always a comfortable one – the Iraq War being an obvious example – but, in any event, it is a bridge that was burned with Brexit.
It’s important to focus on both ends of that bridge. The impression given by some Brexit Ultras is that after the end of December the EU will simply disappear from view (perhaps one subtext of the current misnomer of an ‘Australia-style deal’ is that they imagine being on the other side of the world from Europe). Global Britain will then focus on its relations with the wider world and cement that with the US in particular. But whether or not there is a UK-EU deal there will still be relationships between the two, and between the UK and individual member states.
Dr Helene von Bismarck, an historian specialising in British international relations, has written this week about how Anglo-German relations, despite the genuine commitment from both countries to a good future partnership, will face the problem of how to put that commitment into practice. How, she pointedly asks, “can joint interests between a Britain that seeks to be ‘global’ but shies away from any form of institutionalised cooperation with the EU, and a Germany committed firmly to Europe be organized and managed in the future”?
Similar questions will arise for Anglo-French relations, and others. Repairing relations with Ireland, which have been horribly mangled by Brexit, will pose particularly profound challenges. Managing relations with Spain, especially as regards Gibraltar will be another complexity. At the core of all this is the strategic incoherence of Brexit in the context of a regionalised and multi-polar world.
A Biden Presidency?
Coming back to the other end of the bridge, the implications of that incoherence are coming into sharper focus as the possibility grows that Trump will lose the Presidential elections. His much-vaunted support for Brexit has never translated into anything concrete anyway, and if Joe Biden wins then UK-US relations will be transformed. Not so much in terms of any trade deal – it’s likely that any US administration would make similar demands and make use of similar leverage – but because, like Obama, Biden and his team are well-known to regard Brexit as a serious mistake. A mistake for Britain, no doubt, but more particularly a mistake in terms of American interests.
A very thorough discussion of this was provided by Henry Zeffman in The Times this week (£). Biden is significantly more pro-EU than Trump (not a high bar, admittedly), and has strong links with Ireland. On the other hand, hardly less than Trump, he is likely to regard China with suspicion. More generally, a Biden presidency would represent some return to the US’s ‘normal’ advocacy of the rules-based multilateral order and to that extent might regard Brexit as one of the things which has put that in peril.
But, more importantly, US-UK relations would be governed by unsentimental calculation of interests. And as a foreign policy expert quoted in Zeffman’s article summarises those, “London has become a less valuable geo-political partner as a result of Brexit, which has eroded Britain’s traditional role as a transatlantic bridge”. That isn’t to say that there would not be particular issues where the two countries may find common ground, but it is more likely to be ad hoc rather than amounting to a coherent – still less a ‘special’ - relationship.
Why seek a ‘global role’ anyway?
Of course, there will be many in the UK who think ‘so much the better’. The problem, though, is what should replace it to re-define Britain’s global role. But one might put that a different way. Why should Britain seek a ‘global role’ anyway? Why not accept being a medium-sized power whose global sway is largely in the past, and which has plenty of domestic problems to address rather than seeking to project itself on the world stage?
Here, the nationalism of the Brexit project, and its carry forward in Johnson’s endless rhetoric about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ or even ‘world-beating’ status in this that and the other is a major barrier to rational thinking. For of course any such national self-appraisal would probably have meant that Brexit would never have happened anyway – plenty of other former colonial powers of various vintages have found EU membership perfectly congenial. Plenty of them, too, don’t experience any conflict between such membership and being a ‘global trading nation’. And France manages to operate as a nuclear power and permanent member of the UN Security Council whilst being a central player in the EU. But the continuing appeal of British exceptionalism mitigated against that, which reflects the fact the present conundrum of post-Brexit Britain’s role has roots which long pre-date 2016.
The Suez Crisis, no matter how it may have appeared at the time, does not in retrospect seem to have occasioned a profound shift in public (as opposed to official) realization that world powerdom was over; the Falklands War gave fresh impetus to the idea that Britain could project global military power at will even though, arguably, it could no longer be repeated (£). In particular, whilst from the 1970s Britain seemed to have found its post-imperial role via Europe, that was never anchored in a wider public debate about its past, either in terms of Empire or in terms of the ever-present mythologization of the Second World War. If anything, acting as the ‘transatlantic bridge’ served to prolong a certain delusion of grandeur, and enabled the historical amnesia I have written about in a previous post.
Sham patriotism
Having failed to have such a reckoning with the past when it might, perhaps, have been possible, it’s very difficult to see how it can occur in the present, highly partisan, times when it is most needed. The clear power imbalance in the Brexit negotiations – underscored by Angela Merkel’s recent comments – which has played out since 2017 cannot, in such times, serve as an education. It is invariably dismissed as punishment or bullying. Nor can the obvious implications of the way that Ireland has been able to exert such influence because of its EU membership. Consider reactions such as that “the Irish should really know their place” and the hostility of the Brexit press to Leo Varadkar. Even Hammond’s straightforwardly factual statements about the realpolitik of Brexit and China brought a furious denunciation from Brexiters.
So what should be lessons in political, economic and diplomatic reality simply entrench the division between those who understood it all along and those who deny it. That is especially so when news is refracted through a media which is not just partisan but parochial. The way that Brexit Britain is regarded by the wider world – take India, for example - scarcely registers, even as fantasies about ‘Global Britain’ and the Commonwealth are indulged in, often with more than a sense of being “the last gasp of empire” as Sally Tomlinson and Danny Dorling argue.
Unable to learn such lessons, this week Brexiters hailed Britain’s new independent post-Brexit sanctions policy as a great “victory”. Yet if the aim of sanctions is to be effective, they will be far more so if undertaken in concert with others. As with Britain’s ‘independent trade policy’, which has little to commend itself economically, the emphasis is entirely on the ‘independence’ – on the symbolism rather than the substance.
Why independence matters, what it achieves, or what it even consists of remain stubbornly ignored. It’s just better to have a ‘British’ policy than a policy, or that policy becomes good policy by virtue of being British. That looks like patriotism but it’s a sham, not because it makes use of symbols but precisely because it lacks any accompanying substance. The failure of the British rival to the Galileo Project is one obvious example, indicating how hollow a slogan ‘taking back control’ is in a world where interdependence is vital.
Fiddling while home burns
The bitter irony is that just at the moment that Britain is least well-equipped but most in need of a serious re-appraisal of its place in the world, this sham patriotism neglects the ways in which, domestically, it is falling apart. A favourite Brexiter line is that Britain is “the fifth largest economy in the world”, yet it is bedevilled by a longstanding productivity growth problem, dramatic levels of inequality and crumbling public services. A report from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) last year showed how, on a range of measures, Britain is actually ‘undeveloping’.
The current coronavirus has exposed many of these problems to a greater degree, and exacerbated some of them, but it has also, as Fintan O’Toole argued recently, shown the delusions of Johnson’s Brexity world-beating rhetoric. The issue, again, is symbolism over substance. There is no patriotism in endlessly declaring national superiority whilst daily delivering outcomes that are, as in this case, so much worse than most other countries.
The break-up of Britain?
The strangest irony of all in this is that Britain, largely as a result of Brexit, although again exacerbated by coronavirus, looks ever more likely to, literally, fall apart. I’m not going to express any opinion on the merits of the case for Scottish independence or Irish unification (any such opinion would be ill-informed and presumptuous on my part, and whatever opinion I might express would probably invite more of a backlash than, even having written about Brexit for years, I could cope with). But it’s been obvious since the Referendum that Brexit would make Scottish independence more likely, and the hard form and non-consensual way it has been undertaken since has made that even more true. It’s now quite widely seen as inevitable that there will be another vote, and the latest polls suggest that, if so, the outcome would be independence.
Equally, Northern Ireland, which also did not vote for Brexit, was always going to be dramatically affected by it. As hard Brexit developed, and given the measures agreed in the Northern Ireland Protocol to accommodate it, what is about to be created is a significant continuation of economic integration and unification within the island of Ireland along with a significant economic barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. That clearly makes the prospect of political unification much greater and at the very least puts it on the agenda in a way which wasn’t true prior to Brexit. Even Wales – where a majority voted for Brexit – may be seeing increased support for independence.
Rethinking Britain?
So questions about Britain’s post-Brexit ‘place in the world’ (rather than ‘global role’ per se) need also to be thought about in terms of what Britain itself is. And with no apparent appetite from the Conservative and, cough, Unionist Party to give serious consideration to either issue, there’s a real possibility that they will still be chuntering on about Global Britain when Britain has simply ceased to exist.
I don’t think that all the blame for this lies with the Conservatives, or even simply with politicians. It’s also the case that the, specifically, English public don’t really want to have the kind of debate that is needed. How often do countries ever really do so? Context is crucial. I would suggest the answer is usually only after some sort of cataclysmic event – most obviously war, occupation or the fall of dictatorships. Often, that is only partial and takes a very long time, as in the very different cases of Austria’s post-war history or Spain’s post-Franco period. Invariably, it is painful.
Moreover, ‘debate’ is perhaps a misnomer if it implies a formal, organized conversation. That sometimes happens, as with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and similar initiatives in other countries. But I suppose – I don’t have any expertise in this area - the reality is that countries more usually re-orientate themselves via multiple, connected but not entirely formalised processes. Perhaps the gradual social liberalisation of Ireland is an instructive example of that.
At all events, there needs to be an impetus and a willingness to do it. Could Brexit provide these? That’s an especially difficult question because Brexit both potentially occasions such a debate but, also, represents an absolute refusal to engage in one: it has only been about what Britain did not want to be, not, in any practical sense, about what it could or should become, still less about what it has been. On the other hand, any such national debate would, if multi-stranded, be not just about Brexit but other aspects of Britain’s past and future. The current increased awareness of the role slavery played in that past could be the beginnings of one example. Discussions of how an ageing society will shape the future of Britain might be another.
So, yes, perhaps - but perhaps not yet. Awful as it is, Brexit isn’t on a par with war, occupation or dictatorship, and its effects will emerge gradually and be difficult to disentangle from other events. Unless or until those effects become very clear there’s insufficient impetus. And it will probably need the coming to power and the coming of age of a new generation to supply the willingness.
What the UK will look like by then, and whether it even still exists, remains to be seen.
Most likely the quiet phase will continue over the summer. But it was clear from the beginning that Brexit was never going to be simply about a redefinition of the UK-EU relationship and we are starting to see in greater detail just how profound and complex a geo-political shift is underway (£). Trade is only one issue to be navigated and trade itself cannot readily be separated from international relations more generally.
For example, as Philip Hammond, the former Chancellor, remarked in an interview this week, with the UK introducing new trade barriers with the EU it becomes increasingly important to improve trade relations with China. Yet these relations cannot be taken in isolation from political disputes over, currently, Hong Kong and Huawei. And the UK’s stance on the latter, in particular, impacts in turn upon relations with the US. Britain is caught in a world of economic and political power blocs, but without belonging to any, in which any course of action regarding one of them has adverse consequences with respect to another.
Britain found a role – and threw it away
The bigger picture, of course, relates to Britain’s place in the world. Having famously lost an empire but failed to find a role in the first two post-war decades, membership of what became the EU led to its finding a role of sorts. With Brexit, it has been observed that “Britain has lost a role and failed to find an empire”. That role, primarily of being a transatlantic bridge, was not always a comfortable one – the Iraq War being an obvious example – but, in any event, it is a bridge that was burned with Brexit.
It’s important to focus on both ends of that bridge. The impression given by some Brexit Ultras is that after the end of December the EU will simply disappear from view (perhaps one subtext of the current misnomer of an ‘Australia-style deal’ is that they imagine being on the other side of the world from Europe). Global Britain will then focus on its relations with the wider world and cement that with the US in particular. But whether or not there is a UK-EU deal there will still be relationships between the two, and between the UK and individual member states.
Dr Helene von Bismarck, an historian specialising in British international relations, has written this week about how Anglo-German relations, despite the genuine commitment from both countries to a good future partnership, will face the problem of how to put that commitment into practice. How, she pointedly asks, “can joint interests between a Britain that seeks to be ‘global’ but shies away from any form of institutionalised cooperation with the EU, and a Germany committed firmly to Europe be organized and managed in the future”?
Similar questions will arise for Anglo-French relations, and others. Repairing relations with Ireland, which have been horribly mangled by Brexit, will pose particularly profound challenges. Managing relations with Spain, especially as regards Gibraltar will be another complexity. At the core of all this is the strategic incoherence of Brexit in the context of a regionalised and multi-polar world.
A Biden Presidency?
Coming back to the other end of the bridge, the implications of that incoherence are coming into sharper focus as the possibility grows that Trump will lose the Presidential elections. His much-vaunted support for Brexit has never translated into anything concrete anyway, and if Joe Biden wins then UK-US relations will be transformed. Not so much in terms of any trade deal – it’s likely that any US administration would make similar demands and make use of similar leverage – but because, like Obama, Biden and his team are well-known to regard Brexit as a serious mistake. A mistake for Britain, no doubt, but more particularly a mistake in terms of American interests.
A very thorough discussion of this was provided by Henry Zeffman in The Times this week (£). Biden is significantly more pro-EU than Trump (not a high bar, admittedly), and has strong links with Ireland. On the other hand, hardly less than Trump, he is likely to regard China with suspicion. More generally, a Biden presidency would represent some return to the US’s ‘normal’ advocacy of the rules-based multilateral order and to that extent might regard Brexit as one of the things which has put that in peril.
But, more importantly, US-UK relations would be governed by unsentimental calculation of interests. And as a foreign policy expert quoted in Zeffman’s article summarises those, “London has become a less valuable geo-political partner as a result of Brexit, which has eroded Britain’s traditional role as a transatlantic bridge”. That isn’t to say that there would not be particular issues where the two countries may find common ground, but it is more likely to be ad hoc rather than amounting to a coherent – still less a ‘special’ - relationship.
Why seek a ‘global role’ anyway?
Of course, there will be many in the UK who think ‘so much the better’. The problem, though, is what should replace it to re-define Britain’s global role. But one might put that a different way. Why should Britain seek a ‘global role’ anyway? Why not accept being a medium-sized power whose global sway is largely in the past, and which has plenty of domestic problems to address rather than seeking to project itself on the world stage?
Here, the nationalism of the Brexit project, and its carry forward in Johnson’s endless rhetoric about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ or even ‘world-beating’ status in this that and the other is a major barrier to rational thinking. For of course any such national self-appraisal would probably have meant that Brexit would never have happened anyway – plenty of other former colonial powers of various vintages have found EU membership perfectly congenial. Plenty of them, too, don’t experience any conflict between such membership and being a ‘global trading nation’. And France manages to operate as a nuclear power and permanent member of the UN Security Council whilst being a central player in the EU. But the continuing appeal of British exceptionalism mitigated against that, which reflects the fact the present conundrum of post-Brexit Britain’s role has roots which long pre-date 2016.
The Suez Crisis, no matter how it may have appeared at the time, does not in retrospect seem to have occasioned a profound shift in public (as opposed to official) realization that world powerdom was over; the Falklands War gave fresh impetus to the idea that Britain could project global military power at will even though, arguably, it could no longer be repeated (£). In particular, whilst from the 1970s Britain seemed to have found its post-imperial role via Europe, that was never anchored in a wider public debate about its past, either in terms of Empire or in terms of the ever-present mythologization of the Second World War. If anything, acting as the ‘transatlantic bridge’ served to prolong a certain delusion of grandeur, and enabled the historical amnesia I have written about in a previous post.
Sham patriotism
Having failed to have such a reckoning with the past when it might, perhaps, have been possible, it’s very difficult to see how it can occur in the present, highly partisan, times when it is most needed. The clear power imbalance in the Brexit negotiations – underscored by Angela Merkel’s recent comments – which has played out since 2017 cannot, in such times, serve as an education. It is invariably dismissed as punishment or bullying. Nor can the obvious implications of the way that Ireland has been able to exert such influence because of its EU membership. Consider reactions such as that “the Irish should really know their place” and the hostility of the Brexit press to Leo Varadkar. Even Hammond’s straightforwardly factual statements about the realpolitik of Brexit and China brought a furious denunciation from Brexiters.
So what should be lessons in political, economic and diplomatic reality simply entrench the division between those who understood it all along and those who deny it. That is especially so when news is refracted through a media which is not just partisan but parochial. The way that Brexit Britain is regarded by the wider world – take India, for example - scarcely registers, even as fantasies about ‘Global Britain’ and the Commonwealth are indulged in, often with more than a sense of being “the last gasp of empire” as Sally Tomlinson and Danny Dorling argue.
Unable to learn such lessons, this week Brexiters hailed Britain’s new independent post-Brexit sanctions policy as a great “victory”. Yet if the aim of sanctions is to be effective, they will be far more so if undertaken in concert with others. As with Britain’s ‘independent trade policy’, which has little to commend itself economically, the emphasis is entirely on the ‘independence’ – on the symbolism rather than the substance.
Why independence matters, what it achieves, or what it even consists of remain stubbornly ignored. It’s just better to have a ‘British’ policy than a policy, or that policy becomes good policy by virtue of being British. That looks like patriotism but it’s a sham, not because it makes use of symbols but precisely because it lacks any accompanying substance. The failure of the British rival to the Galileo Project is one obvious example, indicating how hollow a slogan ‘taking back control’ is in a world where interdependence is vital.
Fiddling while home burns
The bitter irony is that just at the moment that Britain is least well-equipped but most in need of a serious re-appraisal of its place in the world, this sham patriotism neglects the ways in which, domestically, it is falling apart. A favourite Brexiter line is that Britain is “the fifth largest economy in the world”, yet it is bedevilled by a longstanding productivity growth problem, dramatic levels of inequality and crumbling public services. A report from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) last year showed how, on a range of measures, Britain is actually ‘undeveloping’.
The current coronavirus has exposed many of these problems to a greater degree, and exacerbated some of them, but it has also, as Fintan O’Toole argued recently, shown the delusions of Johnson’s Brexity world-beating rhetoric. The issue, again, is symbolism over substance. There is no patriotism in endlessly declaring national superiority whilst daily delivering outcomes that are, as in this case, so much worse than most other countries.
The break-up of Britain?
The strangest irony of all in this is that Britain, largely as a result of Brexit, although again exacerbated by coronavirus, looks ever more likely to, literally, fall apart. I’m not going to express any opinion on the merits of the case for Scottish independence or Irish unification (any such opinion would be ill-informed and presumptuous on my part, and whatever opinion I might express would probably invite more of a backlash than, even having written about Brexit for years, I could cope with). But it’s been obvious since the Referendum that Brexit would make Scottish independence more likely, and the hard form and non-consensual way it has been undertaken since has made that even more true. It’s now quite widely seen as inevitable that there will be another vote, and the latest polls suggest that, if so, the outcome would be independence.
Equally, Northern Ireland, which also did not vote for Brexit, was always going to be dramatically affected by it. As hard Brexit developed, and given the measures agreed in the Northern Ireland Protocol to accommodate it, what is about to be created is a significant continuation of economic integration and unification within the island of Ireland along with a significant economic barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. That clearly makes the prospect of political unification much greater and at the very least puts it on the agenda in a way which wasn’t true prior to Brexit. Even Wales – where a majority voted for Brexit – may be seeing increased support for independence.
Rethinking Britain?
So questions about Britain’s post-Brexit ‘place in the world’ (rather than ‘global role’ per se) need also to be thought about in terms of what Britain itself is. And with no apparent appetite from the Conservative and, cough, Unionist Party to give serious consideration to either issue, there’s a real possibility that they will still be chuntering on about Global Britain when Britain has simply ceased to exist.
I don’t think that all the blame for this lies with the Conservatives, or even simply with politicians. It’s also the case that the, specifically, English public don’t really want to have the kind of debate that is needed. How often do countries ever really do so? Context is crucial. I would suggest the answer is usually only after some sort of cataclysmic event – most obviously war, occupation or the fall of dictatorships. Often, that is only partial and takes a very long time, as in the very different cases of Austria’s post-war history or Spain’s post-Franco period. Invariably, it is painful.
Moreover, ‘debate’ is perhaps a misnomer if it implies a formal, organized conversation. That sometimes happens, as with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and similar initiatives in other countries. But I suppose – I don’t have any expertise in this area - the reality is that countries more usually re-orientate themselves via multiple, connected but not entirely formalised processes. Perhaps the gradual social liberalisation of Ireland is an instructive example of that.
At all events, there needs to be an impetus and a willingness to do it. Could Brexit provide these? That’s an especially difficult question because Brexit both potentially occasions such a debate but, also, represents an absolute refusal to engage in one: it has only been about what Britain did not want to be, not, in any practical sense, about what it could or should become, still less about what it has been. On the other hand, any such national debate would, if multi-stranded, be not just about Brexit but other aspects of Britain’s past and future. The current increased awareness of the role slavery played in that past could be the beginnings of one example. Discussions of how an ageing society will shape the future of Britain might be another.
So, yes, perhaps - but perhaps not yet. Awful as it is, Brexit isn’t on a par with war, occupation or dictatorship, and its effects will emerge gradually and be difficult to disentangle from other events. Unless or until those effects become very clear there’s insufficient impetus. And it will probably need the coming to power and the coming of age of a new generation to supply the willingness.
What the UK will look like by then, and whether it even still exists, remains to be seen.
Friday, 6 December 2019
Decision time
As the
election campaign enters its final days my
warning at the outset that, despite this being an election defined
by Brexit, there would be no
substantive discussion of Brexit has come true.
Labour have failed to fill out what their ‘sensible Brexit’ would look like, especially as regards the single market. But at least they are being clear in offering voters the choice, if and when the time comes, of whether they want this Brexit or not - even if they are not engaging seriously with the timetable for such a referendum. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have said little beyond their ‘get Brexit done’ slogan, apart from Johnson’s usual blustering non sequiturs.
Difficult choices deferred
Even so, within that bluster can be seen the outlines of some of the real and difficult choices which, if he is elected, Johnson would immediately face over Brexit. The most obvious and widely discussed example is the insistence that no extension will be sought to the transition period. Beyond that, a piece by Denis Staunton, the London Editor of The Irish Times, argues that statements made by Johnson in relation to a possible future US trade deal, to the abandonment of EU state aid and public procurement rules, and to post-Brexit UK-EU arbitration mechanisms could all significantly affect the options open to him if he wins the election.
In particular, Staunton argues, Johnson is setting up a scenario in which the UK is too distantly aligned with the EU to achieve decent terms of trade with them, whilst – partly because of the promises he has made about the NHS, and agriculture and food standards –being too closely aligned to the EU to achieve a meaningful, or any, trade deal with the US.
Underlying causes
This observation grows from one of the central contradictions of Brexit. Sold to voters by a largely nationalist and protectionist campaign, it was immediately re-described after the Referendum as an endorsement of globalism and trade liberalization. Hence the shift from a referendum campaign dominated by immigration policy to a post-referendum debate dominated by trade policy, which had been only peripheral before. Unsurprisingly, for the purposes of this election campaign in which he hopes to rebuild the leave alliance and, in particular, woo Labour leave voters, Johnson has reprised the nationalist and protectionist message, including anti-immigration sentiment.
Beyond these immediate political issues lies the strategic incoherence of the entire Brexit project. In a world characterised by two, or arguably three, regulatory super blocs (US, EU and, arguably,China
With that comes a political reality of having to obey rules and follow policies made outside of national parliaments - either by multilateral engagement or simply by force majeure in consequence of isolation - rendering the entire ‘regaining sovereignty’ or ‘taking back control’ argument redundant. By leaving the EU,Britain
will have less rather than more control over its regulation and policy choices,
and will be poorer and less influential into the bargain. It’s a definitional
lose-lose made inevitable by a world characterised not so much by globalization
as by economic
and political regionalization.
These complex strategic realities and trade-offs that Brexit entails are precisely what should have been discussed by its advocates (and critics) as the central theme of this election. Instead, as Matt Ross explained in detail in an excellent analysis on Global Governance Forum this week, Johnson is set to reprise all of the problems and mistakes that have dogged the Brexit process to date (many of which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog).
The post-truth election
Of course, it’s very likely that Johnson did not fully understand the implications of the things he said. And, even if he did, it’s hardly inconceivable that he will backtrack on them if he wins the election, dumping promises made about protecting British industries and public services. For the most depressing thing about this campaign is the extent to which we have seen the full (though perhaps still not yet final) flowering of the post-truth politics that characterised the Referendum.
That is very different from the traditional, and rather lazy, refrain that ‘all politicians lie’. Rather, it is a politics in which the truth does not matter, or even – and perhaps more accurately - that there is no truth to be told and no way of telling what the truth is anyway. In a punchy assessment in the New York Times, Peter Geoghegan and Mary Fitzgerald itemise some of the ways that has characterised the campaign. For example, after the Conservatives were found to have created a supposed ‘fact checker’ Twitter account, the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, opined that voters “don’t give a toss” about what happens online.
More insidiously, when asked about the fake fact-checker in a Channel 4 News interview, Michael Gove attacked the interviewer for asking ideologically loaded questions and, even, refused to look at the evidence of its existence on the reporter’s laptop on the grounds that it might have been doctored. So ‘fake news’ is defended on the basis that the accusation is itself fake news, creating a dizzying spiral in which no one knows what to believe and, perhaps, concludes that they might as well believe whatever they want to believe. And who’s to say that your belief is better than my belief – except an elitist?
Depressing and despicable as these and many similar incidents have been, they do contain at least a glimmer of hope. For, of course, many voters do ‘give a toss’ about what is said on line. If they did not, then why bother with on line political campaigning at all? And they do care about facts and some attempt at objectivity. If they did not, then why pretend to be an objective fact-checker? And they do see ideological loaded-ness in reporting as problematic. If they did not, then why use the accusation (unfounded as it was) as an attack line against reporters?
That’s not to say that politics could ever be simply about ‘the facts’, absent of interpretation and judgement. Indeed, where facts are not disputed they do not generally form part of normal politics, whilst much of what normal politics consists of is a contestation over securing widespread acceptance of facts and designing policy accordingly. But that only works if there is some shared commitment to evidence, logic, and rules of argument. It’s this which is under attack in post-truth politics.
Voting matters
Even in this world, democracy can still be a powerful force. Whatever manipulations may occur, people still have agency, and have the capacity to make their own choices based on evidence, logic and argument. Voting still matters, and the right to vote should not be cynically dismissed – as those denied it, such as EU nationals in UK elections, can attest. Despite – perhaps because of – the squalid and dishonest campaign for this election, people have a responsibility to use that vote. Not voting, however attractive some find it, does not evade that responsibility since it also has an impact on the outcome.
But in many constituencies the British first-past-the-post electoral system makes it hard to make your vote count. This election is likely to see tactical voting and party-switching on an unprecedented scale, not least because of the way that Brexit cuts across party allegiances. And because of the anticipated closeness of the outcome, these decisions will matter. However, the very volatility of opinion polls and the complex local variations make it difficult for individual voters to make tactical voting decisions (£).
In my previous post I highlighted Jon Worth’s tactical voting information site. Since then, he has refined it to create a short video for every single seat in which tactical voting can make a difference to the outcome of Brexit. For those who want to keep open the possibility of preventing Brexit, it provides a well-informed steer as to how to vote. Another useful site is VoteSmart2019. These sites cannot entirely solve all of the indeterminacies caused by voter volatility but are certainly a helpful guide, especially if used in conjunction with new polling data as it emerges and local conversations with other voters.
Dilemmas for tactical voters
Whatever the difficulties of assessing how to vote tactically, for voters who want to prevent Brexit there is no excuse for refusing to do so because ‘the LibDems supported Austerity’ or because ‘Labour supported the Iraq War’. If you want to stop Brexit, then, to be brutal, those things, important as they are in their own right, are not relevant to doing so. Even intense concern about and opposition to anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, which is understandably creating anguish for some potential tactical voters, can arguably, as suggested by Jonathan Lis, be combined with voting Labour.
Whilst that is a genuinely agonizing dilemma, those remain voters – perhaps especially habitual Tory and LibDem voters – whose fear is that a Corbyn administration would be too economically extreme face a less difficult choice. For they should recognize that the only realistic alternative to a Johnson majority government is a Corbyn minority government. There is no realistic prospect of Labour having a majority. So Corbyn would be highly constrained in what he could do. Yes, some increased public services spending – which will also happen under a Tory government – and taxation but nothing very radical.
That may or may not be a good thing but, as always on this blog, I am only concerned with the implications for Brexit. And with LibDem and SNP support what a minority Labour government would be both able and obliged to deliver is another referendum and, with it, the chance – only the chance, but the only chance – of remaining in the EU. No other realistic combination of events does this.
The other side of that coin is that whereas a minority Labour government would be highly constrained, a majority Tory government would be a very different beast from any that we have seen in the past. Every Tory MP elected will have pledged to an immediate Brexit and to no extension of the transition period, even if there is no trade deal in place. Compared with the last parliament, the more liberally and independently minded will have gone, whether those who left by choice or those who lost the party whip. They include, don’t forget, the deeply Eurosceptic Philip Hammond, and not just the veteran Europhile Ken Clarke.
So the next Tory benches are going to be far more extreme than, even, those of the Thatcher years, and not just in relation to Brexit. Voters who may for decades have been unhesitatingly Tory should note that Michael Heseltine now advocates voting LibDem. Neither he nor Ken Clarke (who, despite his latter-day cuddly image, was also a central figure in Thatcher’s governments, and the architect of the NHS internal market) are really ‘centrists’, but the rapid shift of the Tory Party has made them strangers to it.
If it is no longer even the party of Thatcher, still less is it that of Macmillan, Heath or Major. It is certainly very different to any previous Tory Party in its unsympathetic, even disdainful, attitude to business (£). So whilst voting tactically will only mean a constrained minority Labour administration, the alternative is an unconstrained Tory majority government in the grip of its own extremism.
A test for remainers’ commitment
Throughout these election period blogs, I’ve been using a formulation along the lines of ‘those voters for whom remain is their primary or sole objective’. Ultimately, the question of tactical voting by remainers and, therefore, very possibly the election outcome will come down to the extent to which they do indeed prioritise remain in that way. If they do, it will cut through party loyalties and habits and all other misgivings and concerns.
That will be testing for those whose commitment to remain is relatively weak, or weaker than it has been, compared with other concerns. It will actually be even more testing for the most passionate and committed remainers. For some, perhaps many, of them, there is a strong temptation to ‘purity’ which could lead them to voting, probably, LibDem in seats where a tactical vote for Labour would be more likely to defeat the Conservative candidate.
Such voters may consider Labour not to be a ‘true remain’ party, may recall the dithering and ambiguity of Labour over Brexit, and may consider that Corbyn, himself, is ideologically pro-Brexit. All of which may be fair comment and may provide a rationalisation for the comfort of staying true to a party which is unequivocally anti-Brexit. That will be their choice, but it will be a choice with an undeniable consequence. That consequence will be to make the slim chance of avoiding Brexit slimmer still.
A decisive moment
This time next week I will be writing my next blog post. If it is discussing the fact that Brexit is now a certainty the responsibility for that will lie in part with remain voters who valued something else – remainer purity, party loyalty or simply another political consideration – more than they did the possibility of avoiding Brexit.
Of course if that is the outcome there will be many who are responsible for it, well beyond remain (non-)tactical voters. Most obviously it will have been caused by those who genuinely want Brexit, or a Tory government, or both – which is perfectly reasonable, though they will be surprised at the Brexit they get – including any tactical voting decisions made by Brexit Party supporters. But there is another group of voters who out of boredom or ignorance are apparently simply content to accept the lies they have been told and to ignore the lack of proper discussion of what Brexit will entail, petulantly insisting that they ‘just want it done’.
Perhaps if, as happened with the Referendum, enough people of such a mind-set vote in this election to endorse Brexit then they will get what is due to them. For, as H.L. Mencken – a deeply anti-Semitic and generally rather vile character, by the way – in his oft-used quotation had it, “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”.
Labour have failed to fill out what their ‘sensible Brexit’ would look like, especially as regards the single market. But at least they are being clear in offering voters the choice, if and when the time comes, of whether they want this Brexit or not - even if they are not engaging seriously with the timetable for such a referendum. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have said little beyond their ‘get Brexit done’ slogan, apart from Johnson’s usual blustering non sequiturs.
Difficult choices deferred
Even so, within that bluster can be seen the outlines of some of the real and difficult choices which, if he is elected, Johnson would immediately face over Brexit. The most obvious and widely discussed example is the insistence that no extension will be sought to the transition period. Beyond that, a piece by Denis Staunton, the London Editor of The Irish Times, argues that statements made by Johnson in relation to a possible future US trade deal, to the abandonment of EU state aid and public procurement rules, and to post-Brexit UK-EU arbitration mechanisms could all significantly affect the options open to him if he wins the election.
In particular, Staunton argues, Johnson is setting up a scenario in which the UK is too distantly aligned with the EU to achieve decent terms of trade with them, whilst – partly because of the promises he has made about the NHS, and agriculture and food standards –being too closely aligned to the EU to achieve a meaningful, or any, trade deal with the US.
Underlying causes
This observation grows from one of the central contradictions of Brexit. Sold to voters by a largely nationalist and protectionist campaign, it was immediately re-described after the Referendum as an endorsement of globalism and trade liberalization. Hence the shift from a referendum campaign dominated by immigration policy to a post-referendum debate dominated by trade policy, which had been only peripheral before. Unsurprisingly, for the purposes of this election campaign in which he hopes to rebuild the leave alliance and, in particular, woo Labour leave voters, Johnson has reprised the nationalist and protectionist message, including anti-immigration sentiment.
Beyond these immediate political issues lies the strategic incoherence of the entire Brexit project. In a world characterised by two, or arguably three, regulatory super blocs (US, EU and, arguably,
With that comes a political reality of having to obey rules and follow policies made outside of national parliaments - either by multilateral engagement or simply by force majeure in consequence of isolation - rendering the entire ‘regaining sovereignty’ or ‘taking back control’ argument redundant. By leaving the EU,
These complex strategic realities and trade-offs that Brexit entails are precisely what should have been discussed by its advocates (and critics) as the central theme of this election. Instead, as Matt Ross explained in detail in an excellent analysis on Global Governance Forum this week, Johnson is set to reprise all of the problems and mistakes that have dogged the Brexit process to date (many of which will be familiar to regular readers of this blog).
The post-truth election
Of course, it’s very likely that Johnson did not fully understand the implications of the things he said. And, even if he did, it’s hardly inconceivable that he will backtrack on them if he wins the election, dumping promises made about protecting British industries and public services. For the most depressing thing about this campaign is the extent to which we have seen the full (though perhaps still not yet final) flowering of the post-truth politics that characterised the Referendum.
That is very different from the traditional, and rather lazy, refrain that ‘all politicians lie’. Rather, it is a politics in which the truth does not matter, or even – and perhaps more accurately - that there is no truth to be told and no way of telling what the truth is anyway. In a punchy assessment in the New York Times, Peter Geoghegan and Mary Fitzgerald itemise some of the ways that has characterised the campaign. For example, after the Conservatives were found to have created a supposed ‘fact checker’ Twitter account, the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, opined that voters “don’t give a toss” about what happens online.
More insidiously, when asked about the fake fact-checker in a Channel 4 News interview, Michael Gove attacked the interviewer for asking ideologically loaded questions and, even, refused to look at the evidence of its existence on the reporter’s laptop on the grounds that it might have been doctored. So ‘fake news’ is defended on the basis that the accusation is itself fake news, creating a dizzying spiral in which no one knows what to believe and, perhaps, concludes that they might as well believe whatever they want to believe. And who’s to say that your belief is better than my belief – except an elitist?
Depressing and despicable as these and many similar incidents have been, they do contain at least a glimmer of hope. For, of course, many voters do ‘give a toss’ about what is said on line. If they did not, then why bother with on line political campaigning at all? And they do care about facts and some attempt at objectivity. If they did not, then why pretend to be an objective fact-checker? And they do see ideological loaded-ness in reporting as problematic. If they did not, then why use the accusation (unfounded as it was) as an attack line against reporters?
That’s not to say that politics could ever be simply about ‘the facts’, absent of interpretation and judgement. Indeed, where facts are not disputed they do not generally form part of normal politics, whilst much of what normal politics consists of is a contestation over securing widespread acceptance of facts and designing policy accordingly. But that only works if there is some shared commitment to evidence, logic, and rules of argument. It’s this which is under attack in post-truth politics.
Voting matters
Even in this world, democracy can still be a powerful force. Whatever manipulations may occur, people still have agency, and have the capacity to make their own choices based on evidence, logic and argument. Voting still matters, and the right to vote should not be cynically dismissed – as those denied it, such as EU nationals in UK elections, can attest. Despite – perhaps because of – the squalid and dishonest campaign for this election, people have a responsibility to use that vote. Not voting, however attractive some find it, does not evade that responsibility since it also has an impact on the outcome.
But in many constituencies the British first-past-the-post electoral system makes it hard to make your vote count. This election is likely to see tactical voting and party-switching on an unprecedented scale, not least because of the way that Brexit cuts across party allegiances. And because of the anticipated closeness of the outcome, these decisions will matter. However, the very volatility of opinion polls and the complex local variations make it difficult for individual voters to make tactical voting decisions (£).
In my previous post I highlighted Jon Worth’s tactical voting information site. Since then, he has refined it to create a short video for every single seat in which tactical voting can make a difference to the outcome of Brexit. For those who want to keep open the possibility of preventing Brexit, it provides a well-informed steer as to how to vote. Another useful site is VoteSmart2019. These sites cannot entirely solve all of the indeterminacies caused by voter volatility but are certainly a helpful guide, especially if used in conjunction with new polling data as it emerges and local conversations with other voters.
Dilemmas for tactical voters
Whatever the difficulties of assessing how to vote tactically, for voters who want to prevent Brexit there is no excuse for refusing to do so because ‘the LibDems supported Austerity’ or because ‘Labour supported the Iraq War’. If you want to stop Brexit, then, to be brutal, those things, important as they are in their own right, are not relevant to doing so. Even intense concern about and opposition to anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, which is understandably creating anguish for some potential tactical voters, can arguably, as suggested by Jonathan Lis, be combined with voting Labour.
Whilst that is a genuinely agonizing dilemma, those remain voters – perhaps especially habitual Tory and LibDem voters – whose fear is that a Corbyn administration would be too economically extreme face a less difficult choice. For they should recognize that the only realistic alternative to a Johnson majority government is a Corbyn minority government. There is no realistic prospect of Labour having a majority. So Corbyn would be highly constrained in what he could do. Yes, some increased public services spending – which will also happen under a Tory government – and taxation but nothing very radical.
That may or may not be a good thing but, as always on this blog, I am only concerned with the implications for Brexit. And with LibDem and SNP support what a minority Labour government would be both able and obliged to deliver is another referendum and, with it, the chance – only the chance, but the only chance – of remaining in the EU. No other realistic combination of events does this.
The other side of that coin is that whereas a minority Labour government would be highly constrained, a majority Tory government would be a very different beast from any that we have seen in the past. Every Tory MP elected will have pledged to an immediate Brexit and to no extension of the transition period, even if there is no trade deal in place. Compared with the last parliament, the more liberally and independently minded will have gone, whether those who left by choice or those who lost the party whip. They include, don’t forget, the deeply Eurosceptic Philip Hammond, and not just the veteran Europhile Ken Clarke.
So the next Tory benches are going to be far more extreme than, even, those of the Thatcher years, and not just in relation to Brexit. Voters who may for decades have been unhesitatingly Tory should note that Michael Heseltine now advocates voting LibDem. Neither he nor Ken Clarke (who, despite his latter-day cuddly image, was also a central figure in Thatcher’s governments, and the architect of the NHS internal market) are really ‘centrists’, but the rapid shift of the Tory Party has made them strangers to it.
If it is no longer even the party of Thatcher, still less is it that of Macmillan, Heath or Major. It is certainly very different to any previous Tory Party in its unsympathetic, even disdainful, attitude to business (£). So whilst voting tactically will only mean a constrained minority Labour administration, the alternative is an unconstrained Tory majority government in the grip of its own extremism.
A test for remainers’ commitment
Throughout these election period blogs, I’ve been using a formulation along the lines of ‘those voters for whom remain is their primary or sole objective’. Ultimately, the question of tactical voting by remainers and, therefore, very possibly the election outcome will come down to the extent to which they do indeed prioritise remain in that way. If they do, it will cut through party loyalties and habits and all other misgivings and concerns.
That will be testing for those whose commitment to remain is relatively weak, or weaker than it has been, compared with other concerns. It will actually be even more testing for the most passionate and committed remainers. For some, perhaps many, of them, there is a strong temptation to ‘purity’ which could lead them to voting, probably, LibDem in seats where a tactical vote for Labour would be more likely to defeat the Conservative candidate.
Such voters may consider Labour not to be a ‘true remain’ party, may recall the dithering and ambiguity of Labour over Brexit, and may consider that Corbyn, himself, is ideologically pro-Brexit. All of which may be fair comment and may provide a rationalisation for the comfort of staying true to a party which is unequivocally anti-Brexit. That will be their choice, but it will be a choice with an undeniable consequence. That consequence will be to make the slim chance of avoiding Brexit slimmer still.
A decisive moment
This time next week I will be writing my next blog post. If it is discussing the fact that Brexit is now a certainty the responsibility for that will lie in part with remain voters who valued something else – remainer purity, party loyalty or simply another political consideration – more than they did the possibility of avoiding Brexit.
Of course if that is the outcome there will be many who are responsible for it, well beyond remain (non-)tactical voters. Most obviously it will have been caused by those who genuinely want Brexit, or a Tory government, or both – which is perfectly reasonable, though they will be surprised at the Brexit they get – including any tactical voting decisions made by Brexit Party supporters. But there is another group of voters who out of boredom or ignorance are apparently simply content to accept the lies they have been told and to ignore the lack of proper discussion of what Brexit will entail, petulantly insisting that they ‘just want it done’.
Perhaps if, as happened with the Referendum, enough people of such a mind-set vote in this election to endorse Brexit then they will get what is due to them. For, as H.L. Mencken – a deeply anti-Semitic and generally rather vile character, by the way – in his oft-used quotation had it, “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”.
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