Crazy time

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

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

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

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

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

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

The roots of this last-minute crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paying the price

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

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

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

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

No deal is still the worst outcome

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deal or no deal, the Brexiters will call it betrayal

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

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

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

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

Brexit, beached

With Joe Biden’s victory now assured, millions of words have now been written – in the UK, if nowhere else – as to what it means for the US-UK relationship and for Brexit in particular. Of these, I’ve found the analyses of CNN’s Luke McGee, James Kane of the Institute for Government, and Lisa O’Carroll, the Guardian’s Brexit correspondent, especially insightful. There are also some intriguing thoughts about the wider consequences of a Biden presidency, so far as I know only in the form of a twitter thread, from Charles Grant, Director of the Centre for European Reform.

2016 recedes into history

My own take is that it’s worth taking a step back from Trump’s defeat to recall what his victory in 2016 meant for Brexiters, namely to validate their project as being not an anomaly but as having caught the tide of history. With the self-proclaimed ‘Mr Brexit’ in the White House, and plucky Brexit Britain at his side, the EU would shortly collapse and a new era would begin. And it’s important to clarify what the Brexiters and Trump shared in their imagination of that new era – it was one of separate nations, unhampered by the constraints of international organizations or multi-lateral agreements, but making bilateral agreements if and when it was in their interests. A US-UK trade deal would be emblematic of how that new world would be, as well as a symbolic affirmation of Brexit itself.

It’s true that Trump’s hostility to NATO, the WTO, the UN, the WHO and so on was never matched, or even shared, by the UK government or by most Brexiters. Indeed, the latter seem to find the prospect of obeying ‘WTO rules’ positively exciting. But they very much shared his vision of the nation state. Ironically, Brexiters failed to appreciate that, by definition, that meant that for all his talk Trump was never going to grant the UK a trade deal on any terms other than his own, and actually he blew hot and cold on the whole idea. In any case, despite his delusions of grandeur he operated within his own constraints. In particular, it has been plain since at least August 2019 that Congress would not ratify any trade deal if Brexit posed a threat to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA).

Much attention is now focused on the prospects of such a trade deal with Biden’s America, and his own very strong and stated commitment to the GFA. But the more important point is that his election strips away the last vestige of Trump’s 2016 boost for Brexit. The EU has manifestly not collapsed and is not going to, there is no sign of any other member wanting to follow the sorry path of Brexit, and the populist wave has not triumphed. And of course all the predictions of how as ‘the fifth largest economy’ the UK ‘held all the cards’ in delivering Brexit have long ago been discredited.

Now, there will be a US administration strongly committed to the EU and more generally to multi-lateralism and international co-operation. It’s only necessary to read Nigel Farage’s snivelly lament for the hours he spent in Trump Tower to see how fatally isolated the Brexit project now is. That sense is compounded by the emerging news of the imminent departure of Dominic Cummings and the rest of the Vote Leave team from Downing Street. Far from having caught the tide of history it is now beached on the mudflats of a failed international putsch, the ghastly remnants of an experiment that has gone so horribly wrong that government ministers are supposed to no longer refer to it by name.

Can the government recognize what’s changed?

So the question now is whether the UK government recognizes all this or whether it is so captured by Brexiter ideology as to be incapable of doing so. As it happens, there is a very precise litmus test immediately available to answer that question in the form of the Internal Market Bill (IMB) or more specifically those clauses relating to Northern Ireland which, on the government’s own admission, would be in violation of international law. If the government persists this will make not just a trade deal but harmonious relations with the US generally impossible, as it will with the EU.

It is increasingly clear that this is not simply because of what the effects on the GFA might be but also, more broadly, because of the disdain of the EU and, now, the US for Johnson’s brazen disregard for international law even if the GFA isn’t damaged. In that sense it is irrelevant whether the IMB clauses do or – as can certainly be argued - don’t in themselves threaten the GFA, or even whether or not they are ever invoked. What matters is simply their existence if they are passed into law. Comments this week from both Simon Coveney, the Irish Foreign Affairs Minister, and US Congressman Brendan Boyle underline this. For both, the key issue is the betrayal of trust over an agreement so recently signed by the UK government.

Sovereignty and independence in an interdependent world

This in turn goes to the heart of the inadequacy of the Brexiter understanding of what ‘independence’ and ‘sovereignty’ mean, which seems to be one of untrammeled freedom of action. On the one hand, this is what led them to believe, as no other EU member does, that being in the EU meant not being an independent and sovereign state (a lie nailed by the very first Brexit White Paper in February 2017, which stated that “Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU”). On the other hand, it led them to think that as an ‘independent’ country the UK can operate without constraints.

This was the gist of Suella Braverman’s advice that the IMB was legal: “Parliamentary supremacy means it is entirely constitutional and proper for Parliament to enact legislation, even if it breaches international treaty obligations”. It also permeates Johnson’s negotiating position with the EU within which the idea of being ‘sovereign equals’ translates into the accusation of ‘bad faith’ if the EU doesn’t give the UK exactly what it wants (£). It even drizzles right down the food chain to the boorish antics of the Brexit Party in the European Parliament, as if ‘independence’ is a licence to ridicule and insult others.

The way the Brexit Ultras think about independence was well-illustrated this week by Iain Duncan Smith’s insistence that Brexit has nothing to do with the US because “we are a sovereign nation” as if this precluded the US – also a sovereign nation, after all – from taking its own view of Brexit. In a similar vein was John Redwood’s letter to Joe Biden (draft text here), which can be read as “a warning” to the President-elect to recognize the significance of the UK “becoming a truly independent nation again”.

Despite insisting that the UK will uphold the GFA (and, following the bizarre new line of Brexiters, that it is the EU that threatens it), it is clear that Redwood does not understand the Biden concerns about the IMB and, from his tweets, that he doesn’t accept that it breaks international law. Instead, he waves the size of the 2016 leave vote as if it had any significance now that Britain has left the EU, and as if it provided an alibi for Britain to conduct itself however it wants. That vote is all they now have, since they are incapable of identifying what benefits this ‘independence’ has, what they actually want to do with it, or how it can possibly justify the mounting damage it is causing (for which, see the latest updates to Yorkshire Bylines’ Digby Jones Index)

‘So what?’ would be an obvious reaction and, presumably, that of the third assistant letter-opener to the Biden junior staffer who is most likely the closest person to him to read it (although, that said, it is unlikely, along with the Foreign Secretary’s equivocation, the Prime Minister’s terse – and botched - congratulations and the putrid tweet of some previously obscure peer that got reported in the US, to have done anything to endear the UK to the incoming President). But, unfortunately, we in this country are obliged to take notice of Redwood, Duncan Smith and their fellow ERG backwoodsmen since they continue to exert a grip upon our politics. Indeed, to read Redwood’s letter one could be forgiven for thinking that he spoke for the British government, rather than being a mildly eccentric backbencher who has not held ministerial office for 25 years. So their understanding of what ‘independence’ means matters.

And it is an understanding based on fantasy. The real world is an interdependent one, in which nations face constraints, their actions have consequences and, indeed, they must reckon with the sovereignty of others. Even if the formal enforcement mechanisms of international law and of international agreements are relatively weak, the realpolitik is that other countries, especially those with which you want to do deals, have ways of showing their displeasure. At the other end of the scale, behaving insultingly to other countries does not make them admire your independence of action but reduces their respect for, and goodwill towards, you.

Same old issue: purism vs pragmatism

So in the coming days, even hours, Johnson’s government is going to have to decide whether to prioritise the purism of this ersatz independence above pragmatic reality and, in a way, that is just the latest version of the choices Brexit Britain has faced all along. And, as has also always been the case, the answer lies in the internal battles of the Tory Party. In general, these have always pushed the government towards purism – the main, almost the sole, exception having been when Johnson agreed his deal which, awful as it was, was more pragmatic than no (withdrawal) deal at all.

But the political circumstances are very different now. Johnson was far more popular and powerful within his own party, and the Brexiters had glimpsed the possibility of losing Brexit altogether. So they supported a deal they hated and which they have since sought to repudiate. Now, he is beleaguered on every front, especially because of Covid-19, his inner team is in disarray, and his backbenchers are in a febrile and rebellious mood. The Brexiters have got Brexit – there is no going back on that – and no longer have the fear of losing it, and many would be happy with a no (trade) deal outcome. So if Johnson moves to do a deal with the EU they are likely to strike. It’s true that their parliamentary scope to derail it is fairly limited, but they have other weapons, most potently that of challenging his leadership, something which is already rumoured in any case.

Yet pragmatism suggests that if Johnson wants to avoid quite serious international isolation he will need to do a deal with the EU – it will be a thin deal, though potentially could develop into something more extensive in the future – both for its own value and as a way of aligning with Biden’s wider agenda. To do so will entail not only U-turning on IMB but also offering substantive concessions to the EU on one or all three of fisheries, subsidies and governance. And it can’t be assumed that the concessions EU will seek will be unchanged by events. After all, just as the Biden presidency leaves the UK isolated so too does it strengthen the EU.

Some regard it as inevitable that he will now do a deal, although the apparent insistence on retaining the offending clauses of the IMB, even though their rejection by the House of Lords provided a ready get out, suggests otherwise. As Peter Foster, writing in the FT (£), suggests it would be wrong to “underestimate the emotional attachment of Mr Johnson and his inner Brexit circle” to the clauses as “a vital assertion of British sovereignty”. But with that inner Brexit circle now dissolving, as Cummings and Cain depart at the end of the year, does that mark a shift away from their purism making a deal more likely – or even, as some rumours suggest, does it arise from that shift having happened - or will no deal be the last hurrah of their final weeks in power? What, if anything, is the significance of the rumours that David Frost was about to resign but that he has now decided not to?

The deep roots of Brexit’s failure

My own view is still that even now it is impossible to predict which way Johnson will go, and pointless to try not least given the chaos of his administration. But clearly the IMB issue is going to come to a head very soon – the negotiations as a whole are going to the wire but 19 November seems to be the absolute deadline – and when it does then, whatever the outcome, it will represent the latest episode in one of the deepest flaws in the Brexiters’ entire project. For as Jon Worth outlines in detail in an excellent blog this week the IMB mess arises from the Brexit Ultras’ refusal to accept or even to understand the ‘trilemma’ posed for (hard) Brexit by Northern Ireland (see also this explanation from law Professor Phil Syrpis).

At root, that comes from an even deeper failure, as outlined in my post of March 2017, to understand the nature of borders – both why they exist and what is needed to make them disappear. Brexit has been constantly caught on the ‘cakeist’ hook that Brexiters want both to leave all the institutions that make borders disappear whilst refusing to accept that this means that borders must re-appear.

It is, as ever, worth recalling what Boris Johnson, like other Brexiters, had to say about the Irish border when they were selling Brexit to the British people: “the situation would be absolutely unchanged”. Even in September 2018 he described the border problem as “a gnat”. He rejected the initial idea of a sea border, rejected May’s backstop arrangements, then signed up to a sea border and has ever since sought to deny the consequences of having done so, with the IMB being the result. As to what he does now, with no pain-free choices left then as Rafael Behr argues it will simply be a matter of how he calculates he can best avoid blame.

Johnson is Johnson, and bears a heavy responsibility for Brexit. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that he was one of many leading Brexiters who, orchestrated by Dominic Cummings, cajoled voters into leaving the EU without knowing or caring about what happened to Northern Ireland, to the GFA, and certainly to Ireland. For that matter, they didn’t know or care what Brexit meant for everything from creating customs arrangements to disrupting medical supplies to road haulage (£) to musicians’ tours to financial services (£) to data transfer, police and judicial cooperation to the millions of lives left in limbo, and so much else besides. They didn’t know or care at the time of the Referendum and, for the most part, they haven’t bothered to find out since. Worse, throughout all these years they have vilified and belittled those who did know and care.

So as Brexit limps on, the unloved orphan of a failing populism, to some kind of resolution of at least what the end of the transition period will mean, we shouldn’t forget the lies shamelessly told, the promises blithely made, and the fears viciously propagated which have brought us to this shambolic point.

While we are waiting

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

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

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

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

The US election and ‘Global Britain’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A role for Labour?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A country unprepared

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

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

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

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

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

The insanity continues

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

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

 

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

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

Beyond folly

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

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

Petulant children and the role of the man-baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning Japanese

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

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

Meanwhile in the real world …

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

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

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

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

The blindingly obvious is undiscussable

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is worse than folly. It is insanity.

In for the long haul

A month ago Boris Johnson set a deadline of 15 October for a trade deal with the EU to be done. That date has passed, no deal has as yet been done, but Johnson has not walked away from the negotiations. Perhaps he never intended to and it was just more empty bluster, as in July and September. Perhaps, as some pundits have been reporting, he will do so today when he is due to respond to the European Council meeting. Or perhaps he would like to, but is constrained by the resurgent Covid-19 crisis. Sometimes in politics manufacturing a new crisis can distract attention from an existing one, but it can also simply magnify the sense of a government losing control.

It is clear that the EU will not walk out of the talks and that whilst they continue, fisheries, state aid and the governance of any agreement remain the familiar, widely-reported, stumbling blocks. Of these, the third, governance, has grown in salience because the Internal Market Bill (IMB) has so badly damaged the EU’s trust in the UK (£). But the truth is that this lack of trust has been growing over years, as I catalogued in a post last May, accelerating with Johnson’s cavalier repudiation of much of the Political Declaration.

Lack of trust is now central

The IMB was just the last straw, and - even if the relevant clauses get abandoned, as they still may - its attempt at hardball tactics has badly misfired. For, especially given the new Covid-19 situation, Johnson might want to play the same trick as he did in January and sign up to some kind of deal which he could then try to backtrack on later. If so, the IMB has made that a great deal harder. He has played his tricks so many times that there is no longer any goodwill. Trust and goodwill can sound like airy-fairy concepts in the cold-eyed world of trade negotiations and international relations but they are indispensable, especially in such a complex and unprecedented negotiation as this one.

The fault is not Johnson’s alone. Apart from the back story going back to 2016, trust in the UK is also much damaged by the spectacle of Iain Duncan Smith, and other Brexiters (£), now repeatedly calling for the Withdrawal Agreement to be repudiated. At the same time, there are increasing concerns about the government’s commitment to the rule of law, not just because of the IMB but also the recent attacks from the Home Office on the legal profession, attacks repeated by Johnson in his party conference speech. The backdrop of the illegal prorogation of parliament and the grab of executive power in relation to both Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, especially through the extensive use of Statutory Instruments, contributes to these concerns. As David Allen Green, the Financial Times’ Law and Policy commentator, discusses, there is now a question as to whether Britain is moving towards “government by decree”.

Also rumbling away in the background is the long-standing hostility of many parts of the Tory Party – strongly overlapping with those that are the most pro-Brexit – to the Human Rights Act and, even, to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Indeed it is worth recalling that before the Referendum, Theresa May, whilst campaigning to remain in the EU, proposed that Britain leave the ECHR. Perhaps of more relevance at the present time is Dominic Cummings’ assertion that after Brexit “we’ll be coming for the ECHR”.

No doubt this would find considerable support amongst many leave voters. Throughout the Referendum campaign in conversations and on social media when leavers were asked to give examples of EU laws they disliked these were almost invariably judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (usually garbled versions of these, but that is another matter). Although this is only based on my own experience, I’m pretty sure it was the case more generally. It perhaps doesn’t need to be said here, but the ECHR and its Court are not EU institutions, and Brexit does not affect Britain’s participation in them.

At all events, the Tory 2019 election manifesto promised a review of the Human Rights Act, which translates the ECHR into UK law. This has itself been an issue within the future terms negotiations as it impacts on the EU’s willingness to share security and law enforcement data. Recent reports suggest that the UK has now agreed “not to materially alter” the spirit of the Human Rights Act in order to achieve agreement on such data sharing. Nevertheless, the very fact that Britain’s wholehearted commitment to the ECHR is in question is significant.

A problematic neighbour

So viewed from an EU perspective Britain now looks like a very problematic neighbour. In summary, its government has spoken quite openly of a willingness to flout international law. Influential politicians advocate reneging completely on an international treaty. Its commitment to the domestic rule of law is fraying and that to the ECHR is under debate.

It may well be that much of the noise in these areas comes from some rather cranky and even extreme individuals and thinktanks. But anyone observing British politics over the last few years will have seen how, again and again, ideas which have started there have become mainstream within a short period of time. For example, when in January 2019 Jacob-Rees-Mogg was urging Theresa May to prorogue parliament it was a very niche view. Eight months later, under Johnson and with Rees-Mogg’s connivance, it was attempted and the court ruling of its illegality remains much resented by Brexiters.

Indeed, more generally, one might see the entirety of Brexit as a story of a fringe idea colonising mainstream politics, and thereafter a progressively harder and more extreme version of Brexit become mainstream. So one way of thinking about the situation now is that, having seen Britain signally fail to confine the Brexit Ultras to the margins, and having seen every accommodation made to them by the British polity met with a still harder demand, the EU is now seeking to build a ‘firewall’, in the form of strict governance procedures, between itself and the country the Ultras have captured.

For who knows just how rogue the UK is going to go in the next few years? For that matter, what kind of state will it be if, as seems increasingly likely, Scotland departs and, as is by no means impossible, Northern Ireland also? Even if those things don’t happen – but especially if they do, leaving a mainly English rump – what is the EU to make of a country which, despite having achieved Brexit, still configures its relationship with the EU in wholly antagonistic terms? That may change with the passage of time and political generations, but it’s equally likely to become entrenched and even more bellicose.

The import of all this for the current negotiations is that even if from a British perspective the issue is (perhaps) to get some sort of deal over the line by the start of January so as to at least minimise disruption, from an EU perspective things look different. Not only would the disruption be less for the EU and it is better prepared for it but, more to the point, whatever gets agreed now will have long-term consequences.

Having been repeatedly stung by British perfidy – especially over the Withdrawal Agreement/ Political Declaration - there is a strong incentive to nail down the governance terms of any agreement, and if that is not possible to accept that there will be no deal this year. As Clement Beaune, the French European Affairs Minister said this week, “it’s a matter of how the UK is a partner of trust in the years to come”.

Britain unprepared

If such strategic considerations inform the EU’s approach to these final phases of the negotiations, in the UK it is short-term factors which mainly predominate. I’ve been writing since at least October 2018 about the lack of preparedness of businesses (and other organizations) for Brexit, and in several recent posts about how government information for businesses has come too late and been lacking in key operational detail. Throughout that time there has been a drumbeat of implicit criticism from the government of businesses for being unprepared (and – paradoxically – a veritable orchestra attacking business bodies for their warnings of how much will change).

In recent days, these criticisms have mounted. First, the Business Secretary, Alok Sharma, issued a panicky sounding “urgent message” to businesses to get ready for the end of transition. The next day Cabinet Office minister Lord Agnew accused them of “burying their heads in the sand”, attracting widespread condemnation (£). I’m conscious that I keep repeating that I am repeating myself but as I wrote a few weeks ago these criticisms of business are outrageous given the years of dishonest promises of continued ‘frictionless trade’, the lateness of government planning for the effects of Brexit, and the dismissal of the warnings about both.

Even now, although it is true that some of what is to come will occur with or without a deal, businesses that will face tariffs if there isn’t a deal are left in limbo since, in at least some cases, this is not something they can prepare for as it will simply sound their death knell regardless of any actions they take in advance. Nor are tariffs the only issue. It has long been explained to Brexiters that a ‘Canada-style’ Free Trade Agreement – actually, any Free Trade Agreement – will do relatively little for services trade and, certainly, will offer far less integration than single market membership. But for years they either ignored it, or pretended that a ‘Super-Canada’ deal would be done that would magically avoid this problem. 

The reason why trade agreements do little for services is because, even more than for goods trade, liberalisation requires removing non-tariff barriers. This in turn entails some loss of national regulatory control or, in Brexiter terms, sovereignty. An example of the kind of issue at stake is the mutual recognition of professional qualifications in, for example, law and accountancy, and in fact, despite its recent rhetoric of asking for no more than what Canada has, the UK has been seeking such recognition in the negotiations with the EU.

This seems to have been unsuccessful (though that cannot yet be said definitively) and if so that is unsurprising as it is a version of ‘cakeism’ – that is, wanting to have a benefit of single market membership without being a member. The consequence, as a House of Lords sub-committee reported this week (£), will be very considerable potential damage to the UK’s £225 billion professional services industry. As with sectors like pharmaceuticals, auto, aerospace, chemicals and also some that get less attention (e.g. music, computer gaming, fintech) the UK is ripping up some of its biggest economic success stories – areas where, to use the government’s favourite phrase, Britain is ‘world-beating’ – in the name of the Brexit theology of sovereignty.

Holding all the cards?

Also unsuccessful has been the “UK plea” for special allowances on electric car and battery exports (this would have meant an exemption for this sector from rules of origin which, in general, we already know will be applied). This, remember, is a sector identified by Boris Johnson in 2019 as being one in which the UK plans to emerge as a future world leader. And in the balance are arrangements for air travel at the end of the Transition Period if there is no deal. As things stand, it is not known what will be in place but, in the event of no deal, the Transport Secretary says “we expect the EU to bring forward contingency measures” so that flights can continue. Hardly reassuring for those wanting to plan travel for a time which is now less than eighty days away.

It’s worth noting the tone in both these stories. Whereas the Brexiters promised that Britain would ‘hold all the cards’ once it voted to leave the EU it is now a matter of ‘pleading’ with the EU for special treatment and being entirely dependent upon the EU to keep something as basic as air travel to the continent. That’s not the result of EU ‘bullying’ but the fact, as the air travel case illustrates literally, that if a country disconnects itself from an interconnected world then inevitably it becomes the supplicant when seeking to reconnect itself. Sovereignty doesn’t put planes in the air.

But there is small comfort in the spectacle of all the Brexiter claims being discredited. Between the ravages that Covid-19 is inflicting on businesses and those self-inflicted by Brexit it is becoming increasingly difficult to see what kind of economy Britain is going to be left with this time next year. And that self-inflicted wound isn’t just a result of Brexit, but of the way Brexit has been done and even just of the bone-headed refusal, in the midst of a pandemic, to extend the Transition Period, which would at least have cushioned or delayed much of the damage.

Time is running out but negotiations will never end

Having refused to do so when it was both possible and obviously going to be needed has now exposed the UK to a dire set of risks, for the end of year deadline is one that Johnson cannot now conveniently drop. It is ironic that David Frost is reportedly complaining that (£) the EU is “using the old playbook” of “running down the clock” when it was the UK that ensured that the clock stopped on 31 January. That of course was predicated on the theory that ‘the EU always blinks at the last minute’, a theory now being tested to destruction, with the most recent EU Council statement having a decidedly ‘take it or leave it’ tone.

This exposes the obvious difficulty with the government’s approach which is that it entails the UK being willing to ‘walk away’ without a deal. But apart from all the damage that would do, disproportionately to the UK, the story about contingency measures for air travel in the event of no deal shows the hollowness of the idea. For immediately after having done so Johnson would have to return to the table to agree these and other measures. So if later today, or any other time, he were to announce the end of future terms talks then almost the next day they would resume in a new form.

In several recent posts I’ve argued that it is pointless trying to predict whether or not there will be a deal, and I must confess to becoming increasingly irritated by the numerous pundits trying to do so. But, in addition to that, the wider implication of what I’ve written today is that if there is no deal – and, in a less dramatic way, even if there is a deal – that won’t be a ‘settled’ relationship, and so won’t be the end of ‘Brexit negotiations’. It will be the beginning of more negotiations.

So, depressing as it is to say it, the current ‘deal or no deal’ episode isn’t even the prelude to a resolution. For, given the irreducible fact that the EU is a major economic bloc sitting geographically right next door, there will be never-ending negotiations of one sort or another. Indeed it must be conceded that one, at least, of the Brexiters’ slogans has been proved true. Unsurprisingly so, since it was the truism that ‘we’re leaving the EU but we’re not leaving Europe’.

 

For the first time this year I will be taking a break from blogging next week. It may turn out to be a big week for Brexit news, which would be unfortunate. I hope to post again on Friday 30 October or shortly thereafter. Many thanks to all who read and help to publicise the Blog, which has this week hit the milestone of 4.5 million visits since its launch just over four years ago. I know that there are many other places people can go for Brexit news and analysis, so it is much appreciated and never taken for granted that you come to this site. Maybe this is also a moment to say that I’m sorry I don’t acknowledge every (mainly) kind comment made on Twitter – on ‘blog days’, especially, my notifications tend to go wild. But I do appreciate every one of them. CG