Ignorance and irresponsibility continue into the final days of the Brexit negotiations

The revelation that Dominic Raab had not until now “quite understood” the UK’s reliance on the Dover-Calais crossing for goods trade between the UK and the EU has attracted widespread criticism and understandable mockery. It is indeed shocking that the Cabinet Minister in charge of Brexit should only now grasp something so basic to his brief. Yet it is not surprising. It is part of a pattern of ignorance for which there is plenty of evidence – including Raab’s own bemusement (prior to his current role, but after years of campaigning for hard Brexit) that leaving the customs union would increase bureaucracy.

It would be wrong to single out Raab. Scratch the surface of just about any prominent Brexiter and the same kinds of ignorance are revealed. It’s perfectly understandable and reasonable that no one, on any side of the debate, has anything like a comprehensive knowledge of Brexit and its effects – it is just too huge and hydra-headed a phenomenon for that to be possible. But it’s not at all unreasonable to expect politicians – who, after all, have access to numerous resources, including the excellent House of Commons Library briefings – to understand the core, basic issues of what they argue for. Especially when that is so fundamental and total a shift in national history as Brexit.

That they do not have such an understanding has been revealed time and time again. Sometimes it is ludicrous, as with the revelation that convinced Brexiter MP Nadine Dorries was asking as recently as last January what a Customs Union was and, when it was explained, opined that as it sounded complicated that confirmed that Britain should leave. Or the belief of another Ultra, Andrew Bridgen, that English people are entitled to Irish passports. Or the mistaken claim, made by just about every pro-Brexit MP, but let’s take John Redwood as an example, that the UK currently conducts its non-EU trade on WTO terms. It would be possible to fill a book – and no doubt, one day, someone will – of such nonsenses.

At least Dorries, Bridgen and Redwood have never had any responsibility for delivery (though that isn’t to say they don’t influence it). Unlike David Davis who believed that post-Brexit the UK could negotiate trade deals with individual EU member states. That was a particularly egregious error given that one of the Brexiters’ most fervent complaints is that membership of the EU Common Commercial Policy precludes Britain, as a member state, from doing such deals.

Almost worse than outright ignorance is the lofty deployment – Rees-Mogg is a particular specialist - of supposedly technical arguments, almost invariably on the basis of semi-digested factoids, or half-truths, or selective quotations, or just plain errors. Examples include periodically recurring claims that ‘an EU Report’ has shown how there can be a soft border in Ireland (it’s not an EU Report and it doesn’t show that), or that there is a frictionless border between the USA and Canada, or Switzerland and France (there isn’t, in either case). Again, there's a book to be filled of similar examples.

To repeat, the fault here is not making errors – we all do that, myself certainly included – it is regurgitating them endlessly even when the errors are corrected. It should also be said that there are plenty on the Remain side who are guilty of the same thing, and that it is not confined to Tory politicians (Labour’s repeated claim that a Customs Union with the EU would solve the Irish border issue is an especially gross example, as is Jeremy Corbyn’s mistaken claim that it is impossible to be in the single market if not a member of the EU but that it is possible to ‘retain the benefits’). The difference, though, at least as regards remainers, is that the policy the UK is pursuing is that of the Brexit, so the onus is on Brexiters to get their facts right.

Of course there is nothing new in any of this – many of these points have been made before on this blog, and also by many other people apart from me. But they are worth repeating because we are now hurtling towards what is very possibly going to be the point of no return. It seems increasingly likely that there will be a Withdrawal Agreement within the next few days, and it is going to be put forward by politicians, some or most of whom are ignorant of basic facts, to be voted on by other politicians who are similarly ignorant. Even in these dog days of the negotiations, Brexiter Cabinet ministers – Raab, again, and Liam Fox – are talking of the Northern Ireland backstop as being something which could be time-limited or unilaterally revocable by the UK, neither of which can, by definition of a backstop, be true.

What is also important – and perhaps crucial to what has unfolded - is that the entire impetus for the Brexit project is predicated not just upon ignorance of, but an absolute refusal to engage with, the complex practicalities of Brexit. After all, it might have been expected that those who have schemed, dreamed and campaigned – sometimes for decades – for Brexit would be falling over themselves in a rapture to have the chance to put it into practice.

Not a bit of it. Those who support Brexit most strongly are far happier standing outside the delivery process rather than taking responsibility for it. That is clear in the way that Boris Johnson prefers to act as if he is still campaigning for Brexit rather than stay in the government delivering it, and why several other Brexiters – perhaps more principled than Johnson, although that is not to put them in a vanishingly small minority – such as Steve Baker prefer the pleasures of purity to the dull compromises of governing. It is most bizarrely evident in David Davis’ criticism today of the Government’s Brexit negotiating strategy: he was responsible for it until last summer.

So we have a strange and, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented situation. A group of people who are passionate and uncompromising advocates of a fundamental economic and geo-political shift for a nation don’t actually know much about what it means in practice, and have very little interest in delivering it. It is political irresponsibility on a wanton, scandalous scale.

Ironically, though, it is just this ignorance and irresponsibility that is one of the things Theresa May will gamble on in what I suspect* we will see next week: an attempt to play on the fact that her MPs don’t really grasp or care enough about the detail to get her deal through. If that’s right – and, if so, I’ll write about it next week – that will be an even greater irresponsibility, as it will set the stage for years of political infighting, strategic drift and economic decline as the meaning and implications of her deal unfold and unwind.

*Update (9/11/18) With the resignation today of Jo Johnson and the growing sense of opposition to May's plan from all sides, this suspicion looks less well-founded than it did yesterday. Or, at least, that if the attempt is made it is less likely to succeed.

The polarised Brexit debate keeps missing essential points

Given the intense polarisation of the Brexit debate, it’s perhaps not surprising that each twist and turn of events is seized on by the different sides as confirmation of their positions – but, in the process, crucial points about these events are missed or side-lined.

Hence the news last week that the certification of Britain’s post-Brexit WTO commitments had been challenged by other WTO members was leapt on by some over-enthusiastic remainers, saying this meant that the whole idea of ‘trading on WTO terms’ was dead, or even that Britain’s WTO membership had in some way been vetoed. In the world of social media this rapidly did the rounds as if it were fact.

With understandable irritation, many trade experts pointed out that this was not the case at all: trading on uncertified commitments is perfectly possible, and by no means unknown, whilst negotiations with WTO members continue, possibly over many years. Indeed, Liam Fox put out a statement to that effect.

But much of the commentary, from some of those who were factually right as well as from those who were blatantly wrong, missed the essential point about this story. What mattered was that, despite numerous warnings going back years, Brexiters had presented ‘regaining our seat’ at the WTO as an entirely simple matter.

The big lie: Brexit would be easy

As the Chair of the Commons Select Committee on International Trade, Angus McNeil, pointed out, Liam Fox had in the past assured the committee that the certification of commitments was well in hand, whereas in fact it is going to entail years of bi-lateral negotiations (quite apart from, and on top of, the negotiations with the EU). It’s a foretaste of the way that, far from meaning that with one bound Britain is free, trading on WTO terms means entering a whole new arena of international compromises, alliance-building and back-room deals.

The days of having to negotiate with just 27 other countries as an EU member, from a position of some power, and of acting as part of a bloc of 28 within the WTO may come to be viewed with some nostalgia compared with being one of 160 or so.

So it’s not that what has happened is some crushing blow for Brexit, it is that it’s just one, relatively minor, example of the multiplicity of ways that Brexiters have misrepresented or ignored the complexities of Brexit. As Nick Cohen has put it, the big lie about Brexit was not the £350M a week for the NHS on the side of the bus, but that it would be easy.

Being a third country

Other Brexit stories this week showed a similar propensity to miss the essential in the rush to make partisan points. One especially convoluted example related to the port of Calais. It was falsely reported that France would seek to create chaos – and perhaps even a ‘blockade’ – at the port. Evidence, said Brexiters, of Britain being ‘punished’ (in fact, France is attempting to find ways to streamline the application of the third country controls that a ‘no deal’ Brexit would inevitably entail).

Piling nonsense upon nonsense it was also reported that Britain had a plan to circumvent this supposed punishment, by chartering ships to go to other EU ports in Holland or Belgium – but, of course, such ports would also have to implement third country controls. Then, as it became more widely reported that there were no plans to cause unnecessary delays at Calais, Brexiters pivoted round to dismiss the whole episode as a Project Fear story because nothing would change at Calais – which, in fact, it would if there is no deal because it would, indeed, be necessary to introduce third country controls.

In a more muted way, the same thing could be said of reports (later denied) that a deal on financial services post-Brexit had been done, with sterling rising as a result. This was a puzzling story, anyway, in that any such deal would surely be part of the future terms agreement to be negotiated after Brexit, rather than something to be completed now as part of the Withdrawal Agreement phase.

But, more to the present point, it was unclear why such a deal – reported to be based on ‘regulatory equivalence’ between the UK and EU – would be much of a break through, still less a triumph. Such equivalence would be a fairly standard offering to a third country, inferior in very many respects to existing market access as an EU member, and, in practice, pretty close to the ‘vassalage’ that Brexiters abhor. So the story here – if it was a story, which it probably wasn’t – was neither remarkable nor what it was claimed to be.

In both of these stories the essential point being missed was nothing about punishment or breakthroughs, but the simple, remorseless factual logic of what choosing to be third country – that is to say, choosing Brexit – means. It seems that, even now, both politicians and the public don’t really understand that meaning.

The Leave.EU investigation

Within the swirl of these and other stories, claim and counter-claim are difficult to disentangle and each is saturated with the attempts by various sides within the debate to inscribe them with their preferred narrative. That clearly applies to the most substantive of this week’s developments, the news that Arron Banks (and Liz Bilney) have been referred to the National Crime Agency for the investigation of alleged crimes committed in the funding of the Leave.EU campaign during the referendum.

For some remainers, this opens up the issue of whether leave’s victory in the referendum had been obtained by dishonest means, and that without them the result would have been different. For some leavers, the relevant issue is the money spent by the government in support of remaining in the EU (but not as part of the official campaign).

But both of these responses miss the point. The issue isn’t the outcome of the vote (and, anyway, for all anyone knows the number voting to leave might have been higher without the stridently xenophobic tone of Leave.EU segment of the campaign). The issue isn’t even the fairness of the resources each side had at its disposal. The issue is the specific, procedural one of whether the law was broken.

Of course, there have already been fines levied by the Electoral Commission on Vote Leave (£61K) and on Darren Grimes (£21K) of BeLeave. These are the subject of on-going appeals. How long this will take I am not sure. At all events it would seem likely that the NCA investigation of Banks will take quite some time and, if it were to end in criminal prosecutions, it will surely be many months at the very least before the outcome is known. In these circumstances it seems incredible that the government does not seek to pause the Brexit process (clearly this might not succeed: it would entail the EU-27 unanimously agreeing to extend the Article 50 period).

I don’t mean by that that I expect the government will do this, just that it seems obvious that it should be attempted. Otherwise, what are we really saying about the country’s commitment to having a legal framework within which democratic politics is conducted? If those laws exist for a reason, they must surely be adhered to. It cannot be enough to say that anyone who breaches them can be punished, but with no implications for the vote which was conducted in breach of them. It would be like fining those who mis-sold PPI but not compensating the victims of mis-selling.

Given how strongly people feel about Brexit, the best way to think about the principle here is to forget that it is Brexit which is at stake and imagine it simply in the abstract: what should happen to a vote about anything in such circumstances? From that perspective, first, we need to establish definitively if the law was breached and then, if it was, there seems a compelling argument for a re-run of the vote. (This is quite separate from the argument about a People’s Vote on the final deal: it’s an argument for an exact re-run of the ‘in or out’ question, although undoubtedly the campaigns would be different in the light of what has been learned about Brexit since 2016).

An outlandish proposition?

That such an obvious proposition seems so outlandish, and extremely unlikely to be realised, grows out of the deformed political culture engendered by the referendum and the Brexit debate since. Theresa May bears much responsibility for this – the stubborn, monocular idea that nothing but that vote and delivering her narrow interpretation of it matters – as, of course, do the media. There’s no doubt in my mind that, especially since the Mail’s infamous ‘Enemies of the People’ headline, most politicians have been virtually terrified into abdication of their sense, logic and judgment.

However that may be, insisting now that a pause is necessary might not cause the earthquake that some may expect. The Brexiters would cry betrayal, of course, but they have debased that currency through over-use. Once you call everything a betrayal – as they have from day one – it soon loses its rhetorical power. Especially given that if Brexit is enacted, and however it is enacted, they will call that a betrayal anyway. More narrowly, the post-Dacre Daily Mail is markedly less strident in tone, and less to be feared.

As for those – probably the majority of the population – who don’t compulsively follow Brexit, a pause would probably hardly register amongst the interminable talk of transitions and backstops and backstops to backstops. Indeed there is a sense that many voters, including leave voters, feel that, having voted, they have done their bit and are not that bothered about what happens now or how.

On the other hand, we are often told that a second referendum (i.e. a final deal referendum) would in some way dent people’s faith in democracy. That argument seems to have no logic, but even it were true how much more would such faith be damaged if it emerges that there was large-scale, criminal conduct in the original poll? Once we are past Brexit day it will be too late to do anything. By then, it might seem self-evident that we should have pursued what is currently dismissed as an impossible course of action.

Suppose, even, that compelling evidence emerges of major interference by Russia? Which of our patriotic politicians will then want blithely to tell electors that nothing had been done when the allegations were first referred for criminal investigation because Brexit was the will of the British people? Might ‘I was just doing the will of the people’ end up being as discredited a defence as its closely-related cousin ‘I was just following orders’?