This has been quite an important week for post-Brexit politics, in that there has been the clearest indication yet of the approach of the anticipated future Labour government, and certainly the most extensive media coverage of it, perhaps because that prospect is becoming closer. At the same time, there’s been the clearest indication yet of how Labour’s policy will differ, to an extent, from the present Tory government and differ, considerably, from the probable position of a post-election-loss Tory Party.
Labour’s ‘new’ post-Brexit stance
It is the latest stage in what has already been a long, slow process, which I’ve discussed many times in the past on this blog, most recently in June of this year. This means that, in some respects, there is little that is new. Keir Starmer has been talking since July 2022 – although it seemed to have to be dragged out of him – about seeking to improve the terms of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), including a security pact and a veterinary agreement. And in January of this year Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy made what I argued was a significant speech, which included plans for closer and more harmonious relations with the EU.
However, Labour are now making relations with the EU a more central part of their electoral offer, and doing so more loudly and slightly more confidently, perhaps emboldened by the clear polling evidence that so many voters regard Brexit as having been a failure. Indeed the pollster Professor Sir John Curtice argues that Labour aren’t so much being bolder as “playing catch-up” with public opinion.
This began to be signaled by Starmer’s visit to meet Europol officials in The Hague last week to discuss enhanced cross-border intelligence cooperation, during which he announced Labour’s plans to strike a deal with the EU over irregular migration. Then, last weekend, he and David Lammy used a conference in Montreal to re-iterate that in government Labour would seek to re-set relations with the EU as their “number one” foreign policy goal. This isn’t just about the TCA, and would include participation in structured, formal strategic dialogue, presumably along the lines already offered by the EU but rebuffed by Rishi Sunak (£).
During the Montreal visit, Starmer also gave a major interview to the Financial Times, which, tellingly, was widely reported by other media outlets, including the BBC main news bulletins, pledging “to seek a major rewrite of Britain’s Brexit deal” as part of the TCA review in 2026. Subsequently, footage emerged, though it was hardly surprising, of him emphasising that, under Labour, there would be no desire to diverge from EU environmental, food and employment standards. Then, also widely reported, including in the French media, was Starmer’s trip, along with Lammy and Rachel Reeves, to Paris, where he held what seems to have been a positive meeting with Emmanuel Macron.
In last week’s post I suggested that a Labour government might be able to fashion “a more coherent strategy, to the extent that it might pursue closer ties with the EU across all policy areas” and, even in the short period since then, it now seems clear that this is what they will offer. As such, again as I pointed out last week, it offers a contrast to the ad hoc and inconsistent Brexit ‘pragmatism’ of Rishi Sunak, constantly hamstrung by his own lack of vision as well as the leaden, lumpen, dead weight of his Brexit Ultra MPs, and the ever-present Conservative terror of a Farageist revival.
It’s worth adding that, for all that Starmer has repeatedly endorsed the hard Brexit red lines of not re-joining the EU or the single market, he has at least implicitly rejected the Tories’ doctrinaire opposition to (almost) any role for the ECJ. That in itself opens up some space for creating closer relationships with the EU, as it is often what precludes them (for example in relation to security and commercial database sharing). That is a contrast both with one of Theresa May’s original Lancaster House ‘red lines’ and with Boris Johnson’s adolescent ‘sovereignty first’ approach to the TCA negotiations.
Moreover, it is clear from his FT interview that Starmer has set his own red line against the ‘Brexit 2.0’ of derogating from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which so many Brexit Ultras are agitating for and which, possibly, and I would think probably, will be adopted as Conservative policy after the next election. For that matter, given Sunak’s embrace this week of the anti-Net Zero agenda of the Tory right, it’s not inconceivable that, alongside promises of a fresh push to post-Brexit regulatory divergence, it will be their policy before the election. Some may regard Starmer’s stance as a small mercy, but I think it is rather more than that: Brexit itself is bad enough, but Brexit 2.0 on top of it would be even worse.
The Brexiters’ reactions
As this new, or newly communicated, approach from Labour began to emerge, the Brexiters’ knives were sharpened, if sharpness is a quality that can be applied to what, in both senses of the word, are such dull blades. Some of their reaction had a slightly surprising tinge. We’re well-used to them predicting the imminent collapse of the EU, but, in the Telegraph, both Associate Editor Camilla Tominey (£) and columnist Nigel Farage (£) were making the slightly different argument that, according to Tominey, only “poor deluded souls ‘remain’ under the illusion that the EU is some sort of friendly and progressive family of nations” whilst, according to Farage, “it is not the cuddly place Remainers think it is”. As evidence, both of them referred to the rise of the AfD in Germany, the illiberal regimes in Poland and Hungary, and the possibility of a Le Pen presidency in France. Why would “idiot remainers”, as Farage charmingly put it, want closer ties?
It was a strange line to take. There may be some remainers who are starry-eyed about the EU, but there are at least as many Brexiters who are constantly astonished that the EU is ‘mean’ and ‘unfriendly’ for reserving the rights and benefits of membership to its own members, something which most remainers see as self-evident. And even those with the mildest of liberal sensibilities hardly need instruction from Farage, of all people, about the dangers of neo-fascist and populist regimes. Beyond that, the very fact that individual members of the EU follow their own political paths gives the lie to the Brexiter claim that membership precludes national sovereignty.
But there is an even more fundamental issue, and it lies at the heart of the fallacy of Brexit. Brexiters used to say ‘we’re leaving the EU, not leaving Europe’, a slogan which, unusually, is simultaneously a truism, nonsense, and an important insight. The important insight is that, whether or not the UK is a member of the EU, the EU and its member states are there, right next door to us. Indeed, even if the EU didn’t exist at all, the nations of Europe would be there, right next door to us. Those irreducible geo-political facts mean that, whether in terms of trade, defence, irregular migration or anything else, the UK necessarily has a significant relationship with those countries.
So the issue is how, and how best, to relate to them. Brexiters have never even tried to give a reason why being absent from the institutions that link them is a better way of relating (as opposed to their claims about the supposed benefits domestically, or in terms of relating to non-EU countries and bodies). And they most certainly haven’t given any reason why, having decided to leave those institutions, a relationship of distance and antagonism is better than one of close cooperation.
Otherwise, most of the reactions from Tories, and Brexiters generally, to Labour’s approach have been fairly predictable. Early out of the trap, like an unusually well-conditioned Pavlovian dog hearing the distant ringing of a bell, David Frost dribbled (£) that “Britain is now in serious danger of losing Brexit” because “Labour wants to take us back closer to the EU”. It didn’t make much sense as a critique, though. Frost, like many Brexiters, gives as his central ‘philosophical’ argument that democratically elected UK governments should be free to pursue whatever policies they judge to be in the UK’s best interests. So if such a government decides being closer to the EU is in the national interest, then, even in Frost’s own terms, it doesn’t mean ‘losing’ Brexit but enacting it.
A few days later, Frost came up with the even more predictable line (£) of “Brexit betrayal”. If possible, this made even less sense than his previous effort, if only because, in insisting that the EU would not countenance an improvement to the TCA he negotiated, he not only negated his claim that it was already a wonderful deal – since he implicitly conceded that, were the EU minded to agree, a better deal is possible – he also negated the very claim that a ‘betrayal’ was in prospect.
In fact, this was a recurring contradiction in the Brexiters’ reaction, such as the Mail’s report on Starmer’s meeting with Macron. On the one hand, the prospects of the EU agreeing any re-negotiation were dismissed – strangely, the Brexiters have now abandoned all their claims about Britain ‘holding all the cards’ or ‘them needing us more than we need them’ – whilst, on the other hand, the non-outcome of this non-negotiation was presented as something to fear.
That aside, Frost’s second article was revealing in being laced with disparagement of the present Tory government for “paving the way” to Labour’s supposed betrayal, a good indicator of how the Tories will conduct their election defeat post-mortem. Frost will undoubtedly be a leading player in the autopsy, which seems almost certain to conclude that Sunak failed to be a ‘true’ Conservative and Brexiter. This will, again almost certainly, presage a lurch to the ‘National Conservative’ right. Liz Truss’s attempt this week to exhume the corpse of her disastrous ‘true Brexit’ premiership (£) can also be seen as the beginning of the same dismal process, as discussed by Josh Self, the increasingly excellent political commentator who succeeded Ian Dunt as Editor of politics.co.uk.
Political dad dancing
The meta-issue in all this, shown by the reaction of Frost and numerous other Brexiters, is the endless betrayalist narrative that permeates Brexit. But its very endlessness shows its absurdity. Just how many times can Brexit be betrayed? And if it has already been betrayed then what does it matter what Labour now do? Similarly, having warned us in October 2019, and in December 2020, and in November 2022 that we were getting ‘Brexit in Name Only’, it is hard to imagine why anyone would feel greatly stirred by Nigel Farage’s latest hand-wringing about how “two years into a Labour government it will [be] Brexit in Name Only”.
In fact, generally, although the Brexiters’ attack on Labour’s plans will undoubtedly continue to resonate with hardcore Leave voters, it’s hard to see it having wider cut-through. Things have moved on from the ‘will of the people’ days, especially given how many voters, including leave voters, have become disillusioned with Brexit, and the way that Sunak’s government has already, in a limited way, accepted the deficiencies of the Johnson Brexit. In this sense, if Labour are still 'playing catch-up' with public opinion, the Tories are simply ignoring it.
For that matter, not only has there been little regulatory divergence from the EU under the Tories – because for the most part it is totally impractical, either politically or economically – but, also, there is considerable public support for things staying that way, including amongst leave voters, in line with Labour’s policy. Similarly, whilst Starmer’s mention of not diverging on environmental, food and employment standards got the predictable ‘betrayal’ treatment on this morning’s Mail front page, a commitment to at least non-regression of environmental and labour standards is part of the TCA that Johnson agreed.
However, the only songs the Brexiters have are the old ones. For example, in his moonlighting role as a GB News presenter, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s squeaky diatribe against Labour focused primarily on the possibility of re-negotiating the Brexit deal leading to the UK “shadowing” the EU through “alignment”. But it seemed embarrassingly dated, the political equivalent of dad dancing, given the numerous ways that this is happening under the Tories, for reasons very well-understood by Rees-Mogg himself (£), as illustrated by his support for the idea of the UK unilaterally adopting EU regulations and conformity assessment marking, so as to avoid the ‘red tape’ of divergence or duplication.
Rees-Mogg also deployed an altogether more cynical, and probably more electorally potent, criticism in suggesting that the public had thought that all the arguments about Brexit were over. This was the standard response from the Conservatives, with a government spokesperson telling the BBC that Starmer "wants to take Britain back to square one on Brexit, reopening the arguments of the past all over again". It is a response that eschews any discussion about the merits of a closer relationship with the EU but instead plays upon the perhaps widespread desire amongst the electorate to simply not hear anything more about Brexit. Yet, apart from being cynical, it is also dishonest, since it is the Brexiters who constantly try to drag the debate back to the toxicity of 2016, not least with the accusation that any steps to a closer the relationship are 'betraying Brexit'.
By contrast, Labour’s policy is plainly an attempt to avoid ‘reopening the old arguments’ at all costs, hence Starmer’s insistence that there is no case to re-join the EU or the single market. That attempt attracts the hostility of Brexiters, who argue that his real agenda is rejoining, and that seeking a closer relationship is a route to this. But, ironically, it attracts as much hostility from re-joiners, who argue that his real agenda ought to be rejoining, and that seeking a closer relationship doesn’t offer any route to this.
Towards ‘de-Brexitification’?
My reading is slightly different. I think what Labour are doing, sensibly, is to try to ‘de-Brexitify’ the entire question of UK-EU relations, and to approach them as a policy issue that may be very different in detail, but no different in kind, from the way the UK conducts its relations with other friendly powers. Contrary to the Brexiters’ criticisms, that doesn’t entail reversing Brexit, but contrary to the re-joiners’ criticisms it does not preclude doing so, and is a necessary step to doing so.
If successful, normalizing relations, and not framing them constantly in terms of the now dead question of whether to leave the EU, would be a good thing in itself, undoing some of the damage of Brexit, as well as providing at least one of the preconditions for a viable case for joining the EU to be made (another being an active campaign movement for doing so). To put that another way, whilst Brexiters are wrong to think that Starmer’s insistence that ‘there is no case to re-join’ conceals a current intention to do just that, it really shouldn’t be difficult for re-joiners to envisage that, at some time down the line, he will say that circumstances have changed and that there is now such a case.
It may well be that Labour, at least in public statements, are pinning far too much on the TCA review, which is designed as a technical stock-taking exercise rather than a vehicle for re-negotiation. This week, the UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) research centre produced an excellent report on this, explaining that, as things stand, the EU is likely to approach the review from just such a ‘minimalist’ perspective, and that if a Labour government wants to make the scope more ‘maximalist’, then the onus will be on it to persuade the EU that this is worthwhile, which won’t be easy. Moreover, even if that persuasion is successful in setting a maximalist agenda, then pursuing it to a successful conclusion will take a long time to negotiate. Peter Foster and Andy Bounds of the Financial Times provided a similarly cautious analysis (£).
However, an interesting Twitter (or X, or perhaps ex-Twitter) thread by Mujtaba Rahman, the well-connected and insightful Europe MD of the Eurasia Group, offered a perhaps more subtle, and rather more optimistic, perspective. Amongst other things, he argues that the importance of changing the tone of the UK-EU relationship shouldn’t be underestimated. That’s not, as is sometimes dismissively suggested, for the naïve reason of thinking that a more ‘friendly’ atmosphere will make much concrete difference, but because Labour look set to bring what Rahman characterizes as a “more consistent, more serious and more forward-leaning engagement” than the UK government has shown since 2016. That, along with greater realism than the Tories have shown, could create new incentives for the EU to engage with the UK.
Domestically, Rahman suggests that Labour ruling out all forms of re-joining gives them “political cover” to make non-trivial improvements. It’s true, as the UKICE report points out, that even the maximalist version of the TCA review would not greatly shift the economic dial, but the report also provides a list of the substantive improvements that could result. Of course, they aren’t going to ‘make Brexit work’, but it simply isn’t true, despite what most re-joiner critics of Labour insist, that Starmer’s red lines preclude any progress of any value at all. Indeed, that’s demonstrated by the UKICE point that the maximalist version of the TCA review would require protracted negotiation. That would hardly be so if the possible changes were as trivial as those critics claim.
Rahman also points out that the positions of both Labour and the EU are in flux, with many possible outcomes. One indication of this was the publication this week of a Franco-German plan, reported by The Times (£) as being “designed with Labour in mind”, although better understood as part of a far broader EU discussion about enlargement, for new forms of tiered ‘associate membership’ of the EU, within which the UK might find a place. It’s not an altogether new idea, although the context is, and a shadow minister was quick to disown any interest in it, which is unsurprising as it goes much further than Labour are willing to go this side of the election. But it does point to the way that, as Ian Dunt of the i put it, “a new kind of European future” could emerge for Britain.
The domestic choice
Whether or not that is so, the domestic politics of Brexit are becoming clearer, at least in terms of what the alternative to the Tories’ approach consists of. It is a Labour, or perhaps Labour-led, government which won’t offer (and, arguably, couldn’t deliver, at least in its first term) a reversal of hard Brexit, but will develop as close and as harmonious a relationship as the EU will agree to short of that. That isn’t just about the TCA review, but the entirety of the ongoing relationship.
That opens some clear water between the parties, though it is of slender breadth. As Rafael Behr eloquently put it in the Guardian, “the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are both shopping for European policy in the narrow aisle between economic grasp of the problem and political fear of the remedy”. The difference, though, is slightly greater than it seems, and greater than Behr perhaps allows, not so much in itself as in the direction and speed of travel it points to. Just as it is now widely understood, even by most Brexiters, that Brexit is a process, not an event, the same holds for ‘de-Brexitificaton’ and even ‘de-Brexiting’, if they are to happen.
The problem, of course, as Behr concludes, is that “time is already running out”. More accurately, the problem is the tension between two different timescales. The more time that passes since the 2016 referendum, the more the toxicity of Brexit recedes, the more its sensitivity as a political issue reduces, the more the generation of politicians which was obsessed with getting it passes, and the more the electoral demographic that most supported it is replaced by that which was most opposed to it. On the other hand, the more time that goes by without being a member of at least the single market, the more the economic damage racks up as, without also being a member of the EU, does the geo-political damage.
Within that framing, the first timescale isn’t much affected by who is in power, but would be slightly accelerated by a Labour government if only because that would marginalize Tory Brexiter politicians. The second timescale could be slightly shortened by a Labour government, and the interim damage slightly reduced, or possibly considerably reduced compared with what a Tory government might decide to do if elected.
It may not seem like much of a choice, but it is a choice, and this week made it clearer than ever that it will be the one facing us at the next election. The outcome will make some difference to post-Brexit policy in the following years, but could make a huge difference to the choices available in the election after that.
Note: I have re-enabled comments on this blog, for an experimental period, under a strict comments policy.
Friday, 22 September 2023
Friday, 15 September 2023
The eighth summer of Brexit: pragmatism without honesty
The recurring word in most commentary on this summer’s Brexit events is ‘pragmatism’. It refers to the range of ways, some quieter than others, in which the government is trying to soften or avoid some aspects of the damage of Brexit. It’s a fair description, so far as it goes, and there is something to welcome in the damage limitation measures it is applied to, so far as they go. It may be further evidence that, as I suggested last March, Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ is finally breaking. However, it is very far from showing anything like honesty about Brexit, and it consists of ad hoc measures rather than a coherent post-Brexit strategy.
Nevertheless, there is an emerging pattern. For, although this summer’s Brexit news stories are quite disparate in nature and detail, they are all variations on the same theme in being attempts to deal with the consequences of the delusion that Brexit meant ‘taking back control’ without admitting that it was a delusion. It is this which means that such pragmatism as there is still lacks honesty about what Brexit actually means.
How independence brought dependence
This is evident in the only event that prompted me to post during this summer break, namely the decision to indefinitely postpone the introduction of the UKCA mark. I won’t write about it in detail again now, but it was always one of the most hubristic examples of the supposed ‘independence’ that Brexit would bring, and although it has long been on the cards that it would be dropped, much cost has been incurred in indulging that hubris. And whilst dropping it is, indeed, ‘pragmatic’ the government, and Brexiters generally, are reluctant to spell out that it means that Britain is now dependent upon CE marking, dependent upon EU approved bodies to test and certify conformity to the standards necessary for this marking, and effectively accepting the same product standards as the EU.
The UKCA announcement was swiftly followed by reports of yet another delay in the introduction of import controls although, incredibly, it was not until the end of August that the government formally confirmed this. This also creates a dependency in that, in effect, the UK is now dependent upon the EU to ensure that the goods it exports are safe and meet all requisite standards. But the EU has no responsibility and no system to do this for third countries. As I discussed at some length last time import controls were postponed, this creates increased risks because the UK is no longer part of the eco-system of single market institutions that reduce those risks. Hence the British Veterinary Association has warned that this latest postponement “is putting the UK’s biosecurity at serious risk of imported diseases”.
Those and other risks are real, but they are trumped by the fact that Britain simply can’t afford to implement Brexit import controls. This latest postponement was perhaps the first time the government overtly admitted that doing so would cause inflation, especially of food prices, although it wasn’t the first time that it had been admitted it would cause costs. Jacob Rees-Mogg had already conceded that at the time of the previous postponement. Such admissions also at least implicitly acknowledge the costs in the other direction of trade, in other words the EU controls on UK imports which have been in place since the end of the transition period.
There is perhaps some honesty in this, but even that is concealed by the government’s pretence that its border strategy involves “using Brexit freedoms” and the usual tedious, and again hubristic, rhetoric that when import controls are introduced they will be part of a high-tech “world-class border”. Mere competence, of course, is as disdained as it is elusive. It’s a boast which seems all the more vain given that this summer also saw the very quiet announcement of “a new phased approach” (meaning, again, delayed) to introducing the Customs Declaration Service (CDS), the system meant to replace the Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) service. CDS is supposed to provide a much more streamlined service so as to mitigate some of the Brexit frictions but, as I noted in a post in January 2021, it has been subject to persistent delays, going back to at least February 2019.
Freedom to do … not much
The decisions about UKCA and import controls are similar in responding to the impracticality and costs of ‘taking back control’ by acting as if Brexit hadn’t happened. It turns out that the best way to use the wonderful freedoms of Brexit is not to make use of them at all. That is unsayable for the government, and on the same day as the UKCA decision was announced, with the timing perhaps designed to sweeten the pill for Brexiters, the UK’s new post-Brexit alcohol duties regime came into force, complete with the populist tag of the ‘Brexit Pubs Guarantee’.
Here, at least, is something that can be said to have been made possible by Brexit, although whether the specific issue of cheaper beer in pubs required Brexit is disputed by breweries, as are its benefits to the pub trade. More generally, most parts of the alcoholic beverages industry are unhappy about the new regime, and, far from cutting red tape, it introduces a far more complex structure of duties and looks set to create strange anomalies in, for example, the pricing of different strengths of wine.
But even if it is to be counted as a result of Brexit, there are only a very small number of these “micro-divergences” in tax policy, and it is unlikely that there will be many more to come, according to KPMG UK’s Head of Tax Policy. Indeed, in most respects Brexit ‘freedoms’ are unused, not just in relation to tax policy divergence but regulatory divergence, as the latest edition of the UK in a Changing Europe’s regulatory divergence tracker, released in July, shows.
This isn’t, as the Brexit Ultras moan, through lack of political will, but again because doing so is too impractical and costly. However, that doesn’t mean that continuing the pre-Brexit status quo of regulatory alignment in most areas is cost-free. Once outside the single market, it isn’t enough simply to be aligned, it has to be formally demonstrated by individual firms selling into the EU, just as it does by those of any third country. That entails both direct costs, and indirect costs in terms of delays – precisely the kinds of costs that single market membership gets rid of. In short, leaving the single market makes regulatory alignment expensive, but regulatory divergence is even more expensive. So we pay for the price of a freedom we cannot afford to exercise, and Brexiters call this sovereignty.
Freedom to … follow
But it’s actually worse than that. Not only can we not afford to diverge, we cannot afford not to follow. Even without the UK making any active choices to diverge from EU regulations, ‘passive’ divergence occurs whenever the EU itself changes regulations. Each time this happens it puts pressure on the UK to shadow the EU, partly because of the costs to British businesses and organizations of not doing so, and partly because in many cases a failure to do so increases divergence between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thus ‘thickening’ the Irish Sea border. As time goes by the significance of this “ratchet effect” becomes ever-clearer (£).
The imminent introduction of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a significant case in point, and we will hear much more about it when transitional implementation arrangements begin this October. As with most things Brexit, the technical details are ferociously complex, but in essence it means a tax on embedded carbon in EU imports of goods in many sectors, with an associated system of trading in carbon certificates, as well as systems of reporting and monitoring. British firms exporting to the EU will be immediately and directly affected (if they are to continue to export), imposing considerable new costs, although reports suggest that most of them are unaware of what is about to happen (£) with CBAM (and with several other major upcoming EU regulatory changes).
At the same time, the UK is planning to have its own CBAM system, although it is unlikely to be ready until at least 2026, and it is possible that in outline it will be very similar to the EU’s. However, unless there is an agreement linking the two systems then British firms will have to show compliance with both. This sounds rather like the ill-fated plan to have ‘our own’ UKCA mark, but UK CBAM is perhaps more akin to the still postponed UK REACH system for the chemicals industry in that both could only link to the EU’s equivalents by agreement with the EU. It is a subtle difference, but an important one. Whereas things like delaying UKCA and import controls, or passive regulatory alignment, can be done by the UK without any agreement from the EU, things like creating linkage or mutual recognition with EU systems overtly make the UK a supplicant to the EU.
Brexit Britain’s supplication
This is evident in a much more politically visible policy area, which has permeated this summer’s news, namely the frenzy over ‘stopping the boats’. Entirely unsurprisingly, the government has discovered that, here too, ‘taking back control’ does not actually have any substantive meaning, and that its policy requires agreements with others – not just the EU, but some of its members, such as France and Italy (£), and other countries, such as Turkey.
Of course, irregular migration is very much an issue across the EU, and were the UK still a member it would have a significant role in shaping EU policy, as well as benefitting from its shared arrangements, such as the Dublin 3 Regulations. That can include the right to return asylum seekers for claims processing in the first safe participating country they reached, and it is reported that Rishi Sunak (£) would like to replicate that right in a UK-EU agreement. Indeed, a returns agreement is something that was sought during the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) negotiations, but the EU turned it down. Reportedly, it has done so again.
It is not difficult to see why. The UK, because of its geographical position, is very unlikely to be the first safe country arrived at (unless arrival was by air) and, if it is, unlikely to then be used as a point of departure to an EU country. So a ‘returns policy’, in itself, would be almost entirely one-way, which is hardly in the interests of the EU or its members. Inevitably, Brexiters are incapable of understanding this, with bone-headed former MEP David Bannerman tweeting rancorously about “our so called friends in the EU showing their true colours again”, and an Express article trotting out the usual paranoid and self-pitying line about “Brexit punishment”.
By contrast, the Labour Party’s plan, which hit the headlines this week, is rather more honest and realistic in recognizing that any deal with the EU needs to offer something for both sides (though it can’t be assumed the EU will agree to it). It seems to include offering agreement to take some asylum seekers from the EU, via managed routes, in exchange for EU agreement to accept returns of those arriving in the UK by irregular routes. But the government reaction to this more, well, pragmatic proposal was to denounce it as surrendering control to Brussels and making Britain a “dumping ground” for “illegal migrants” (sic), whilst the Brexit Blob went into predictable hysteria.
This serves to illustrate the continuing dishonesty – as well as the stupidity – that surrounds Brexit, which precludes a realistic post-Brexit strategy. Rather than accept the reality of being a supplicant to the EU, the Brexiters either expect to be gifted what they want, and denounce the EU as malevolent for not doing so, or, if some deal is made or even proposed, they denounce it as ‘surrender’ and betrayal of Brexit. They certainly haven’t grasped that being outside the EU means less, not more, control, something which will be shown again in this policy area if, as a report this week suggests, the UK is about to sign a deal to access the EU Border Agency, Frontex. Such ‘opt-ins’, for all that they may be desirable to both the UK and the EU, are invariably different in character from full membership, and invariably shaped by the fact that it is the UK ‘joining in with’ an EU programme or initiative rather than vice versa.
Something similar applies to the last of this summer’s main Brexit stories, with the UK finally, and belatedly, agreeing terms to re-join the Horizon Europe programme. Again this is widely seen by sensible commentators as a sign of an emerging pragmatism. Yet, as with the other examples, there is little honesty from the government about what that pragmatism means. In particular, not only has the UK’s absence from the scheme in itself done significant damage to British science, but the new associate membership, which operates without freedom of movement of people which does so much to promote easy and flexible cooperation, is inferior to what we had before.
So this is a recurring theme. When particular instances of the damage of Brexit become undeniable, the government sometimes seeks to patch them with some kind of solution, be it a delay, quiet alignment, or cooperation, but there is no honesty about the fact that the ‘solution’ is rarely as good as what has been lost, or, even if it is, that the very need for ‘solutions’ demonstrates that Brexit is the cause of so many problems, and that all the effort used to create such solutions is itself a cost of Brexit.
At the same time, even these sub-optimal solutions come in the teeth of Brexiter opposition with, in the case of Horizon, the Telegraph’s Matthew Lynn (£) sneering at all the scientists and industrialists relieved that there has been at least a fix of sorts, on the grounds that they apparently don’t recognize that “Europe is finished” and is a “failing bloc”. But whatever Brexiters may want to think, the UK wanted and badly needed Horizon, and for all that they continue to rail against the implementation of the Windsor Framework they refuse to see that it was only that agreement that unlocked the possibility of being in the Horizon scheme. In this sense, the EU’s refusal to agree Horizon terms until the Northern Ireland Protocol row was settled was an effective negotiating lever.
Yet a quite astonishingly ignorant Telegraph editorial (£) insisted that the delay over Horizon showed the EU to be irrational and self-harming and that, far from being a supplicant, the UK’s participation was needed to prevent the EU becoming a “scientific backwater”. Indeed, the article suggests, it was a clear case of ‘them needing us more than we need them’ whilst the Express reported it as the EU “backing down”. But even here there is no consistent logic, with still other Brexiters, such as David Frost, warning that the UK will be ‘held hostage’ by Horizon membership.
And this, too, is a recurring theme. Endless claims that the EU is failing, that it ‘needs us more than we need them’, but that, paradoxically, it is able to punish and hold hostage the UK are amongst many examples of how the Brexiters have learned literally nothing from the last seven years. Indeed, now they are making ever more strident calls for a ‘Brexit 2.0’ of leaving the ECHR. That may come to nothing, but the vociferousness of the demand, and its reach well into the higher ranks of the cabinet, is an important sign that the madness of Brexitism is alive and kicking, despite the failure of Brexit. This enduring madness sustains the tension, which has existed in various forms throughout the entire Brexit process, between the practical realities of what Brexit means and the implacable demands and fantasies of Brexiters within and outside government.
Brexiters’ continued denial
One sign of this is the way that, even now, the Brexit Ultras continue to claim that Brexit has had no adverse effects on trade and the economy generally, or even that its effects have been positive. This summer seems to have seen an upsurge in such attempts, in ways which are as brazenly dishonest as they are desperate. These attempts have shown all the now familiar tricks, including cherry-picking particular data points (especially relating to the pandemic), citing trade figures without adjustment for inflation, or making comparisons between the UK and the EU (or individual members) rather than between the UK when an EU member and when not.
The latter of these, something to which anti-Brexit commentators are also sometimes prone, is especially misleading because, of course, whether or not a member of the EU, the UK economy is often, if not always, better or worse performing than the EU average, or the Eurozone, or individual EU members (Germany being a currently popular comparator). To see how asinine such comparisons are, consider whether, when the UK was a member of the EU, Brexiters would have argued that the relative performance of the UK and the EU had any implications for the case for belonging to or leaving the EU. Undoubtedly, they would (and probably did) say that if the UK was performing better than the EU it ‘proved’ we did not need to be a member, and were held back by being ‘shackled’ to the EU; but if the EU was performing better than the UK it ‘proved’ we should not be a member as the EU was ‘rigged’ to our disadvantage.
But even comparing the UK during and after membership is not really sufficient. What is necessary is to estimate the ‘counterfactual’ of how the UK would have performed had it remained a member of the EU compared with how it has in fact performed since leaving, the OBR’s being the best-known and most authoritative example. Such estimates are difficult to make, and bound to be imperfect, but although the Brexiters are happy to dismiss all such estimates (£) they fail to provide a convincing one of their own. Instead, they frequently simply assert that Brexit has had a beneficial effect, effectively positing an implicit and indefensible counterfactual, especially by pointing to increases in the nominal value of trade (ignoring inflation, as well as things like unusual energy trade fluctuations, changes in statistical methodology etc.).
The endless and varied kinds of chicanery used to make these assertions has the effect, no doubt intended, of making it exhausting to debunk each individual example. But, even without doing so, it is easy to demonstrate their hollowness. For, crucially, no Brexiter is able to explain how Brexit could conceivably be responsible for increasing trade or economic growth, or how even sustaining their levels could be because of, rather than despite, Brexit. It has increased trade barriers with the EU, and, even if the much-vaunted new trade deals are going to have much value (they won’t), it is far too early for them to have had any impact, as those with Australia and New Zealand only came into force at the end of May, whilst CPTPP membership has yet to begin. Nor can any supposed Brexit boost have come from deregulation since, as noted above, and as Brexiters themselves constantly and vociferously complain, there has been almost no regulatory divergence.
So there is no reason in principle why Brexit could have a positive, or even neutral, effect on trade or the economy generally. Moreover, the claim that it does so flies in the face of what businesses themselves say. Even in the fanatical pages of the Express, an article headlining business backing for Brexit and hostility to any idea of re-joining was replete with examples of businesses saying the exact opposite, primarily because of the ‘red tape’ barriers to trade that Brexit has created. By contrast, there are no examples of businesses for whom trade with the EU has become easier as a result of Brexit. The latter is important, because Brexit was supposed to have a positive effect, not just ‘to not to be (too) negative’. This point is also relevant to the wholly bogus way that Brexiters treat any post-Brexit good news - such as this week’s announcement of BMW’s investment in the Mini plant – as if it were somehow attributable to Brexit. Again, the question is: what investments, if any, have been made that would not have happened without Brexit, and how do they compare with those investments which would have been made, but for Brexit?
So what happens now?
The consequence of the continuing power of this invincible stupidity is a kind of political drift. Where the economic or political costs are high enough, and those affected lobby strongly enough, we see the government seeking accommodations of various sorts to mitigate or minimise some of them, but in cases where the immediate costs are not too high, such as its dismissal this summer of the EU’s offer of formal ‘strategic dialogue’ (£), we see the government pandering to the Brexit Ultras.
This is why the government’s supposed ‘pragmatism’ over this summer only consists of ad hoc, sub-optimal fixes, which may slightly reduce the damage of Brexit in a few policy areas but are constrained by the ongoing ‘conspiracy of silence’ which prevents honesty about the reality even of those fixes, let alone about the abject failure of Brexit across every single policy area. That silence is shared by the Tory and Labour Parties, and it comes from the fear both have of the unquenchable and unreasoning fury of the Brexit Ultras, a fury so hair-triggered that it is provoked even by the waving of EU flags at the Last Night of the Proms. I don’t think we will see an end to the power of the Ultras at least until a few of the high-profile ones publicly admit that Brexit, in principle and not just in delivery, was a catastrophic error.
Even so, it is possible that a Labour government might be able to fashion ‘pragmatism’ into a more coherent strategy, to the extent that it might pursue closer ties with the EU across all policy areas (it will in any case inherit, perhaps by Tory design, some of the present government’s delayed or deferred implementations, such as import controls). At least such a government would not have the dead-weight of Brexit Ultra MPs that makes this impossible for the Tories, and although it would still face the massed ranks of the pro-Brexit media – a taste of which we saw with this week’s furore over its asylum plans - it might, when in power, be more able to resist or ignore their attacks. However, there is little sign that Labour will be any more honest about the costs and limitations of such an approach, since to do so would open up the obvious question of why that approach was not bolder.
Yesterday saw the publication of the revised edition of my book Brexit Unfolded. How No One Got What They Wanted (and why they were never going to). When the first edition was published, in 2021, the sub-title was perhaps provocative. Now, it is almost a truism, whilst also being a taboo for the main parties. The new edition tells the story of what happened from the end of the transition period up to last June, and concludes that the situation is that “now they can’t agree what to do about it”, creating, at least for now, a political – and national – impasse.
So what happens now? Seven years ago, I returned from holiday and wrote the first post on this blog. It finished with the words “it is this strange new landscape that I will comment on in the months and years to come”, but I did not really anticipate that I would do so for so many years as I have, and certainly didn’t anticipate that the blog would receive the attention it has (for which, as always, I am grateful). The landscape now is just as strange, if not even stranger, although in some ways depressingly unchanged. Entering the eighth year of blogging, I will continue to try to record and analyse it.
Nevertheless, there is an emerging pattern. For, although this summer’s Brexit news stories are quite disparate in nature and detail, they are all variations on the same theme in being attempts to deal with the consequences of the delusion that Brexit meant ‘taking back control’ without admitting that it was a delusion. It is this which means that such pragmatism as there is still lacks honesty about what Brexit actually means.
How independence brought dependence
This is evident in the only event that prompted me to post during this summer break, namely the decision to indefinitely postpone the introduction of the UKCA mark. I won’t write about it in detail again now, but it was always one of the most hubristic examples of the supposed ‘independence’ that Brexit would bring, and although it has long been on the cards that it would be dropped, much cost has been incurred in indulging that hubris. And whilst dropping it is, indeed, ‘pragmatic’ the government, and Brexiters generally, are reluctant to spell out that it means that Britain is now dependent upon CE marking, dependent upon EU approved bodies to test and certify conformity to the standards necessary for this marking, and effectively accepting the same product standards as the EU.
The UKCA announcement was swiftly followed by reports of yet another delay in the introduction of import controls although, incredibly, it was not until the end of August that the government formally confirmed this. This also creates a dependency in that, in effect, the UK is now dependent upon the EU to ensure that the goods it exports are safe and meet all requisite standards. But the EU has no responsibility and no system to do this for third countries. As I discussed at some length last time import controls were postponed, this creates increased risks because the UK is no longer part of the eco-system of single market institutions that reduce those risks. Hence the British Veterinary Association has warned that this latest postponement “is putting the UK’s biosecurity at serious risk of imported diseases”.
Those and other risks are real, but they are trumped by the fact that Britain simply can’t afford to implement Brexit import controls. This latest postponement was perhaps the first time the government overtly admitted that doing so would cause inflation, especially of food prices, although it wasn’t the first time that it had been admitted it would cause costs. Jacob Rees-Mogg had already conceded that at the time of the previous postponement. Such admissions also at least implicitly acknowledge the costs in the other direction of trade, in other words the EU controls on UK imports which have been in place since the end of the transition period.
There is perhaps some honesty in this, but even that is concealed by the government’s pretence that its border strategy involves “using Brexit freedoms” and the usual tedious, and again hubristic, rhetoric that when import controls are introduced they will be part of a high-tech “world-class border”. Mere competence, of course, is as disdained as it is elusive. It’s a boast which seems all the more vain given that this summer also saw the very quiet announcement of “a new phased approach” (meaning, again, delayed) to introducing the Customs Declaration Service (CDS), the system meant to replace the Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) service. CDS is supposed to provide a much more streamlined service so as to mitigate some of the Brexit frictions but, as I noted in a post in January 2021, it has been subject to persistent delays, going back to at least February 2019.
Freedom to do … not much
The decisions about UKCA and import controls are similar in responding to the impracticality and costs of ‘taking back control’ by acting as if Brexit hadn’t happened. It turns out that the best way to use the wonderful freedoms of Brexit is not to make use of them at all. That is unsayable for the government, and on the same day as the UKCA decision was announced, with the timing perhaps designed to sweeten the pill for Brexiters, the UK’s new post-Brexit alcohol duties regime came into force, complete with the populist tag of the ‘Brexit Pubs Guarantee’.
Here, at least, is something that can be said to have been made possible by Brexit, although whether the specific issue of cheaper beer in pubs required Brexit is disputed by breweries, as are its benefits to the pub trade. More generally, most parts of the alcoholic beverages industry are unhappy about the new regime, and, far from cutting red tape, it introduces a far more complex structure of duties and looks set to create strange anomalies in, for example, the pricing of different strengths of wine.
But even if it is to be counted as a result of Brexit, there are only a very small number of these “micro-divergences” in tax policy, and it is unlikely that there will be many more to come, according to KPMG UK’s Head of Tax Policy. Indeed, in most respects Brexit ‘freedoms’ are unused, not just in relation to tax policy divergence but regulatory divergence, as the latest edition of the UK in a Changing Europe’s regulatory divergence tracker, released in July, shows.
This isn’t, as the Brexit Ultras moan, through lack of political will, but again because doing so is too impractical and costly. However, that doesn’t mean that continuing the pre-Brexit status quo of regulatory alignment in most areas is cost-free. Once outside the single market, it isn’t enough simply to be aligned, it has to be formally demonstrated by individual firms selling into the EU, just as it does by those of any third country. That entails both direct costs, and indirect costs in terms of delays – precisely the kinds of costs that single market membership gets rid of. In short, leaving the single market makes regulatory alignment expensive, but regulatory divergence is even more expensive. So we pay for the price of a freedom we cannot afford to exercise, and Brexiters call this sovereignty.
Freedom to … follow
But it’s actually worse than that. Not only can we not afford to diverge, we cannot afford not to follow. Even without the UK making any active choices to diverge from EU regulations, ‘passive’ divergence occurs whenever the EU itself changes regulations. Each time this happens it puts pressure on the UK to shadow the EU, partly because of the costs to British businesses and organizations of not doing so, and partly because in many cases a failure to do so increases divergence between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thus ‘thickening’ the Irish Sea border. As time goes by the significance of this “ratchet effect” becomes ever-clearer (£).
The imminent introduction of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a significant case in point, and we will hear much more about it when transitional implementation arrangements begin this October. As with most things Brexit, the technical details are ferociously complex, but in essence it means a tax on embedded carbon in EU imports of goods in many sectors, with an associated system of trading in carbon certificates, as well as systems of reporting and monitoring. British firms exporting to the EU will be immediately and directly affected (if they are to continue to export), imposing considerable new costs, although reports suggest that most of them are unaware of what is about to happen (£) with CBAM (and with several other major upcoming EU regulatory changes).
At the same time, the UK is planning to have its own CBAM system, although it is unlikely to be ready until at least 2026, and it is possible that in outline it will be very similar to the EU’s. However, unless there is an agreement linking the two systems then British firms will have to show compliance with both. This sounds rather like the ill-fated plan to have ‘our own’ UKCA mark, but UK CBAM is perhaps more akin to the still postponed UK REACH system for the chemicals industry in that both could only link to the EU’s equivalents by agreement with the EU. It is a subtle difference, but an important one. Whereas things like delaying UKCA and import controls, or passive regulatory alignment, can be done by the UK without any agreement from the EU, things like creating linkage or mutual recognition with EU systems overtly make the UK a supplicant to the EU.
Brexit Britain’s supplication
This is evident in a much more politically visible policy area, which has permeated this summer’s news, namely the frenzy over ‘stopping the boats’. Entirely unsurprisingly, the government has discovered that, here too, ‘taking back control’ does not actually have any substantive meaning, and that its policy requires agreements with others – not just the EU, but some of its members, such as France and Italy (£), and other countries, such as Turkey.
Of course, irregular migration is very much an issue across the EU, and were the UK still a member it would have a significant role in shaping EU policy, as well as benefitting from its shared arrangements, such as the Dublin 3 Regulations. That can include the right to return asylum seekers for claims processing in the first safe participating country they reached, and it is reported that Rishi Sunak (£) would like to replicate that right in a UK-EU agreement. Indeed, a returns agreement is something that was sought during the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) negotiations, but the EU turned it down. Reportedly, it has done so again.
It is not difficult to see why. The UK, because of its geographical position, is very unlikely to be the first safe country arrived at (unless arrival was by air) and, if it is, unlikely to then be used as a point of departure to an EU country. So a ‘returns policy’, in itself, would be almost entirely one-way, which is hardly in the interests of the EU or its members. Inevitably, Brexiters are incapable of understanding this, with bone-headed former MEP David Bannerman tweeting rancorously about “our so called friends in the EU showing their true colours again”, and an Express article trotting out the usual paranoid and self-pitying line about “Brexit punishment”.
By contrast, the Labour Party’s plan, which hit the headlines this week, is rather more honest and realistic in recognizing that any deal with the EU needs to offer something for both sides (though it can’t be assumed the EU will agree to it). It seems to include offering agreement to take some asylum seekers from the EU, via managed routes, in exchange for EU agreement to accept returns of those arriving in the UK by irregular routes. But the government reaction to this more, well, pragmatic proposal was to denounce it as surrendering control to Brussels and making Britain a “dumping ground” for “illegal migrants” (sic), whilst the Brexit Blob went into predictable hysteria.
This serves to illustrate the continuing dishonesty – as well as the stupidity – that surrounds Brexit, which precludes a realistic post-Brexit strategy. Rather than accept the reality of being a supplicant to the EU, the Brexiters either expect to be gifted what they want, and denounce the EU as malevolent for not doing so, or, if some deal is made or even proposed, they denounce it as ‘surrender’ and betrayal of Brexit. They certainly haven’t grasped that being outside the EU means less, not more, control, something which will be shown again in this policy area if, as a report this week suggests, the UK is about to sign a deal to access the EU Border Agency, Frontex. Such ‘opt-ins’, for all that they may be desirable to both the UK and the EU, are invariably different in character from full membership, and invariably shaped by the fact that it is the UK ‘joining in with’ an EU programme or initiative rather than vice versa.
Something similar applies to the last of this summer’s main Brexit stories, with the UK finally, and belatedly, agreeing terms to re-join the Horizon Europe programme. Again this is widely seen by sensible commentators as a sign of an emerging pragmatism. Yet, as with the other examples, there is little honesty from the government about what that pragmatism means. In particular, not only has the UK’s absence from the scheme in itself done significant damage to British science, but the new associate membership, which operates without freedom of movement of people which does so much to promote easy and flexible cooperation, is inferior to what we had before.
So this is a recurring theme. When particular instances of the damage of Brexit become undeniable, the government sometimes seeks to patch them with some kind of solution, be it a delay, quiet alignment, or cooperation, but there is no honesty about the fact that the ‘solution’ is rarely as good as what has been lost, or, even if it is, that the very need for ‘solutions’ demonstrates that Brexit is the cause of so many problems, and that all the effort used to create such solutions is itself a cost of Brexit.
At the same time, even these sub-optimal solutions come in the teeth of Brexiter opposition with, in the case of Horizon, the Telegraph’s Matthew Lynn (£) sneering at all the scientists and industrialists relieved that there has been at least a fix of sorts, on the grounds that they apparently don’t recognize that “Europe is finished” and is a “failing bloc”. But whatever Brexiters may want to think, the UK wanted and badly needed Horizon, and for all that they continue to rail against the implementation of the Windsor Framework they refuse to see that it was only that agreement that unlocked the possibility of being in the Horizon scheme. In this sense, the EU’s refusal to agree Horizon terms until the Northern Ireland Protocol row was settled was an effective negotiating lever.
Yet a quite astonishingly ignorant Telegraph editorial (£) insisted that the delay over Horizon showed the EU to be irrational and self-harming and that, far from being a supplicant, the UK’s participation was needed to prevent the EU becoming a “scientific backwater”. Indeed, the article suggests, it was a clear case of ‘them needing us more than we need them’ whilst the Express reported it as the EU “backing down”. But even here there is no consistent logic, with still other Brexiters, such as David Frost, warning that the UK will be ‘held hostage’ by Horizon membership.
And this, too, is a recurring theme. Endless claims that the EU is failing, that it ‘needs us more than we need them’, but that, paradoxically, it is able to punish and hold hostage the UK are amongst many examples of how the Brexiters have learned literally nothing from the last seven years. Indeed, now they are making ever more strident calls for a ‘Brexit 2.0’ of leaving the ECHR. That may come to nothing, but the vociferousness of the demand, and its reach well into the higher ranks of the cabinet, is an important sign that the madness of Brexitism is alive and kicking, despite the failure of Brexit. This enduring madness sustains the tension, which has existed in various forms throughout the entire Brexit process, between the practical realities of what Brexit means and the implacable demands and fantasies of Brexiters within and outside government.
Brexiters’ continued denial
One sign of this is the way that, even now, the Brexit Ultras continue to claim that Brexit has had no adverse effects on trade and the economy generally, or even that its effects have been positive. This summer seems to have seen an upsurge in such attempts, in ways which are as brazenly dishonest as they are desperate. These attempts have shown all the now familiar tricks, including cherry-picking particular data points (especially relating to the pandemic), citing trade figures without adjustment for inflation, or making comparisons between the UK and the EU (or individual members) rather than between the UK when an EU member and when not.
The latter of these, something to which anti-Brexit commentators are also sometimes prone, is especially misleading because, of course, whether or not a member of the EU, the UK economy is often, if not always, better or worse performing than the EU average, or the Eurozone, or individual EU members (Germany being a currently popular comparator). To see how asinine such comparisons are, consider whether, when the UK was a member of the EU, Brexiters would have argued that the relative performance of the UK and the EU had any implications for the case for belonging to or leaving the EU. Undoubtedly, they would (and probably did) say that if the UK was performing better than the EU it ‘proved’ we did not need to be a member, and were held back by being ‘shackled’ to the EU; but if the EU was performing better than the UK it ‘proved’ we should not be a member as the EU was ‘rigged’ to our disadvantage.
But even comparing the UK during and after membership is not really sufficient. What is necessary is to estimate the ‘counterfactual’ of how the UK would have performed had it remained a member of the EU compared with how it has in fact performed since leaving, the OBR’s being the best-known and most authoritative example. Such estimates are difficult to make, and bound to be imperfect, but although the Brexiters are happy to dismiss all such estimates (£) they fail to provide a convincing one of their own. Instead, they frequently simply assert that Brexit has had a beneficial effect, effectively positing an implicit and indefensible counterfactual, especially by pointing to increases in the nominal value of trade (ignoring inflation, as well as things like unusual energy trade fluctuations, changes in statistical methodology etc.).
The endless and varied kinds of chicanery used to make these assertions has the effect, no doubt intended, of making it exhausting to debunk each individual example. But, even without doing so, it is easy to demonstrate their hollowness. For, crucially, no Brexiter is able to explain how Brexit could conceivably be responsible for increasing trade or economic growth, or how even sustaining their levels could be because of, rather than despite, Brexit. It has increased trade barriers with the EU, and, even if the much-vaunted new trade deals are going to have much value (they won’t), it is far too early for them to have had any impact, as those with Australia and New Zealand only came into force at the end of May, whilst CPTPP membership has yet to begin. Nor can any supposed Brexit boost have come from deregulation since, as noted above, and as Brexiters themselves constantly and vociferously complain, there has been almost no regulatory divergence.
So there is no reason in principle why Brexit could have a positive, or even neutral, effect on trade or the economy generally. Moreover, the claim that it does so flies in the face of what businesses themselves say. Even in the fanatical pages of the Express, an article headlining business backing for Brexit and hostility to any idea of re-joining was replete with examples of businesses saying the exact opposite, primarily because of the ‘red tape’ barriers to trade that Brexit has created. By contrast, there are no examples of businesses for whom trade with the EU has become easier as a result of Brexit. The latter is important, because Brexit was supposed to have a positive effect, not just ‘to not to be (too) negative’. This point is also relevant to the wholly bogus way that Brexiters treat any post-Brexit good news - such as this week’s announcement of BMW’s investment in the Mini plant – as if it were somehow attributable to Brexit. Again, the question is: what investments, if any, have been made that would not have happened without Brexit, and how do they compare with those investments which would have been made, but for Brexit?
So what happens now?
The consequence of the continuing power of this invincible stupidity is a kind of political drift. Where the economic or political costs are high enough, and those affected lobby strongly enough, we see the government seeking accommodations of various sorts to mitigate or minimise some of them, but in cases where the immediate costs are not too high, such as its dismissal this summer of the EU’s offer of formal ‘strategic dialogue’ (£), we see the government pandering to the Brexit Ultras.
This is why the government’s supposed ‘pragmatism’ over this summer only consists of ad hoc, sub-optimal fixes, which may slightly reduce the damage of Brexit in a few policy areas but are constrained by the ongoing ‘conspiracy of silence’ which prevents honesty about the reality even of those fixes, let alone about the abject failure of Brexit across every single policy area. That silence is shared by the Tory and Labour Parties, and it comes from the fear both have of the unquenchable and unreasoning fury of the Brexit Ultras, a fury so hair-triggered that it is provoked even by the waving of EU flags at the Last Night of the Proms. I don’t think we will see an end to the power of the Ultras at least until a few of the high-profile ones publicly admit that Brexit, in principle and not just in delivery, was a catastrophic error.
Even so, it is possible that a Labour government might be able to fashion ‘pragmatism’ into a more coherent strategy, to the extent that it might pursue closer ties with the EU across all policy areas (it will in any case inherit, perhaps by Tory design, some of the present government’s delayed or deferred implementations, such as import controls). At least such a government would not have the dead-weight of Brexit Ultra MPs that makes this impossible for the Tories, and although it would still face the massed ranks of the pro-Brexit media – a taste of which we saw with this week’s furore over its asylum plans - it might, when in power, be more able to resist or ignore their attacks. However, there is little sign that Labour will be any more honest about the costs and limitations of such an approach, since to do so would open up the obvious question of why that approach was not bolder.
Yesterday saw the publication of the revised edition of my book Brexit Unfolded. How No One Got What They Wanted (and why they were never going to). When the first edition was published, in 2021, the sub-title was perhaps provocative. Now, it is almost a truism, whilst also being a taboo for the main parties. The new edition tells the story of what happened from the end of the transition period up to last June, and concludes that the situation is that “now they can’t agree what to do about it”, creating, at least for now, a political – and national – impasse.
So what happens now? Seven years ago, I returned from holiday and wrote the first post on this blog. It finished with the words “it is this strange new landscape that I will comment on in the months and years to come”, but I did not really anticipate that I would do so for so many years as I have, and certainly didn’t anticipate that the blog would receive the attention it has (for which, as always, I am grateful). The landscape now is just as strange, if not even stranger, although in some ways depressingly unchanged. Entering the eighth year of blogging, I will continue to try to record and analyse it.
Friday, 11 August 2023
Book review: Plus ça change?
Bale, Tim (2023) The Conservative Party After Brexit. Turmoil and Transformation. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 978-1-5095-4061-5 (Hardback). 368pp. £25
(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’.)
By any reckoning, the last seven years of British politics have been tumultuous, and at least one measure of that is the extraordinary churn of Prime Ministers – five, counting Cameron, since 2016 – and with that four Tory Party leadership contests and two General Elections. The Brexit referendum was the trigger which began this period, and the Brexit process that followed provided much of the content and context that ran through it.
Charting what happened during those years is a daunting and serious task, and in Tim Bale it has a serious and impressive analyst. Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, he has longstanding research expertise in, amongst other things, the Conservative Party. It is this party, and especially its leadership, which is the focus of this superb book. In it, Bale presents an assured, detailed account of the exceptionally complex story of the premierships of May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, with the emphasis on the first two, reflecting the brevity of Truss’s tenure and, at the time of the book’s writing, the newness of Sunak’s.
Yet, whilst being a serious and detailed book, written with the academic rigour that would be expected of the author, it is highly readable. Some Amazon reviews disagree about its readability, so perhaps it depends on what you are used to, but in my view Bale writes crisply and with brio, and for all the command of detail displayed it is never stodgy. There is also a certain amount of wry humour. To give just one example, recording that Truss did not offer David Frost a role in her administration, Bale adds the laconic observation “or at least not one he felt was commensurate with what he regarded anyway as his considerable talents” (p. 271). The ‘anyway’ adds a particular sting.
It is, very much, the story of the premierships both in the sense that these provide the structuring frame of the book and that the focus is largely on individuals. Most obviously that means the leaders themselves, but also what might be called the ‘high politics’ of their tenures. Thus the analysis includes the composition of different cabinets, the coalitions of support in leadership elections and parliamentary votes, the role of advisors, the tactical calculations of party political advantage, the opinion polls and their interpretation, the electoral manoeuvres, and the role of the media.
This is a deliberate choice, flagged up in the introduction, to capture the way that “individuals, and therefore parties as a whole, are as much tactical and reactive as they are strategic and proactive” (p.3). The consequence is, perhaps, to downplay the role of ideology, but it is an approach which is helpful in revealing how much of the Brexit process was haphazard and, certainly, ‘unstrategic’. Anyone who still thinks there was any kind of ‘a plan’ for Brexit will be firmly disabused of that idea by reading this book.
Distance and engagement
That last comment reflects the way that, given the focus of this blog, which in turn reflects my own preoccupations, I approached the book primarily through the lens of Brexit. But, as I read it, I began to see that this is not, actually, a very sensible approach. Of course, as the title suggests, Brexit is a more than major presence, but this is first and foremost a book about the Conservative Party, and that observation, which may seem trite, is an important one. It is not just about delineating the empirical scope of the book but about the way that Bale brings an impressive, and to me usefully disconcerting, perspective, that is at once distant and engaged.
It is distant, in the sense that he manages to stand back a bit from the tumult of the events he describes so that, whilst they are in some sense extraordinary, they can also be seen as ‘business as usual’. So Brexit, rather than being some huge disjuncture in political life, can be read in the context of, and having some of the characteristics of, “the really big splits in the Conservative Party’s long history” (p.3). That point isn’t heavily emphasized in the text, but it is an implicit ‘viewing point’ throughout, and re-reappears right at the end when the possibility of an impending heavy electoral defeat is discussed alongside reminders of defeats in the mid-1940s, mid-1960s, and mid-1990s (p. 294).
So whereas all of us who have lived through the last few years may feel – as perhaps people at any period do – that there is something special and unprecedented about these ‘Brexit years’, Bale gives us a glimpse, at least, of how political historians may well come to write about it. It is the slight jolt that this gives (at least to me) which explains why I referred to it being a ‘usefully disconcerting’ perspective. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Bale provides, perhaps earlier than any other academic, the second draft of the history of Brexit (or, at least, those aspects of it with which the book is concerned).
Yet it is also an engaged approach, in that by delving into the weeds of political tactics and the ad hoc responses to the pressure of immediate events and headlines, Brexit is also re-positioned, but this time as being continuous with the mundane realities of politics and so, in that different sense, again understandable as ‘business as usual’. For example, although this may reflect my own naivety, I was struck by the way that, throughout this account, Tory politicians are shown to have approached Brexit not – or not simply, or even primarily – as a massive upheaval of national geo-political strategy but as an opportunity to gain party political advantage.
So, to give an example within that, whereas I had probably assumed that May would have spent her early days immersing herself in the technical complexities of Brexit, Bale suggests that “the new Prime Minister and her advisers seemed to be seizing opportunistically … on the way Brexit had ripped apart Labour’s already fraying electoral coalition.” (p. 23). Of course, it might have been better all round had my assumption had been right, but Bale’s account is all too plausible.
Similarly, I tend to see events like the resignations of leading Brexiters (e.g., David Davis, Dominic Raab, p.63 and p.72 respectively) as being about their perennial preference for fantasy over reality; or the crucial parliamentary votes over Brexit as being, centrally, about the implacability of the Ultras’ ideology. But, here, although the “near religious” (p.73) fervour of some of the Brexiters features, such events are configured as being at least as much about the perennial issues of party management, careerism, whipping operations, and ‘counting heads’.
A corrective to Brexit-obsessives?
The wider issue these examples point to is that Bale’s analysis is a useful corrective for those who, like me, tend to write, at least implicitly, as if Brexit was pretty much the only political issue of the last seven years. That is just about defensible for the period up to January 2020, when the UK left the EU, but it is simply not true after that. That’s not exactly a news item, even for Brexit obsessives, but I suppose I still had a residual sense that Brexit ‘ought’ to have been central, because it is so important, with other events being seen as a distraction. But Bale’s account suggests to me that, for the political actors themselves, in the press of events, Brexit was not experienced in that way. This may well also be true of voters, and perhaps explains why, to my puzzlement at the time, the details of Brexit were actually rather little discussed during the general elections (or indeed the leadership elections) of this period.
None of this is to imply that Bale downplays Brexit. It is, rather, that he contextualises it, showing how it became imbricated with multiple other strands of politics. To take just a couple of numerous possible examples, Johnson’s initial, and as it turned out short-lived and ill-fated attempt, to protect Owen Paterson from the effects of the lobbying scandal that ended his career was bound up with the latter’s longstanding place amongst ‘Eurosceptics’ (p.215). Likewise, the overlap between ‘lockdown sceptics’ and the Brexit Ultras illustrates how ostensibly different issues were intertwined with Brexit (p. 173). Conversely, no one reading Bale’s account of Johnson’s downfall as Prime Minister (pp. 258-260) could possibly be taken in by Johnson’s own subsequent claims that he had been the victim of vengeful remainers.
So, in all of these ways, Bale’s book is a valuable challenge to Brexit-obsessives - including me and, very likely, many readers of this blog - by providing an account which has an implicit historical distance alongside an explicit focus on the everyday practicalities of politics. It certainly made me think differently. Equally, it could be seen as a challenge to the most ideologically-committed of Brexiters in that, for all they may have believed themselves to be engaged in a revolution, the outcome has been far less dramatic than they thought. Indeed, there’s already a discernible disappointment amongst such Brexiters not just with Brexit but with its failure to usher in a ‘new way of doing politics’. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?
It is worth saying that in this respect my reading of the book differs from most, if not all, of the other reviews of it I have seen (e.g. Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian), which makes me wonder if mine is fallacious – though evidently not to the extent of revising it. Most reviews put great weight on Bale’s undoubtedly well-founded suggestion that the Conservatives have “slipped their moorings as mainstream centre-right party” (p.291). Nevertheless, what I found more striking was how, despite everything that has happened, the political process itself, and the terms of political debate, have not dramatically changed. Yes, the norms and conventions of political conduct have been strained and frayed and, yes, political discourse has substantially coarsened and polarised, but the basic contours of both remain recognizable. In terms of the book’s subtitle, then, the ‘turmoil’ is undoubted, but the ‘transformation’ is less clear-cut.
Whether that was Bale’s intention I am not sure but, at all events, he leaves open the question of what is going to happen to the Conservative Party now. That’s wise, because it isn’t yet possible to have a genuine historical distance and so it remains unknowable whether the ‘final draft of history’ (if there could ever be such a thing) will conclude that Brexit marks a fundamental shift for British politics in general, and the Conservative Party in particular, or whether it is only an episode, possibly important or conceivably only ephemeral. My own expectation, for what very little it is worth, is that, assuming defeat at the next election, the Tories will spin off into the weird world of the emergent ‘National Conservatism’ before electoral defeats, and the realities of electoral demographics, pull them back to something more recognizably normal. The only rider to that is that things would change dramatically if the ‘first past the post’ system were reformed in the meanwhile, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Encore!
Overall, this is an excellent book and a hugely important addition to the emergent literature on the politics of Brexit. It is also an exemplar of how academics can and should write for general audiences, something still rarer than it should be.
If I have a criticism, then it is that I would like to have seen more fine-grained analysis of the party membership, and also of party funding. Of course, the huge significance of the membership as a ‘selectorate’ of the leadership is made abundantly clear, as is the way it has all but driven out the relative liberalism of the Cameron period (e.g., pp. 126-127). Even so, there’s still something puzzling to me about just how radicalized the membership seems to have become in recent years, and in the extent to which both its members and its funders seem to have become so out of tune with the mainstream of, especially, business interests.
Moreover, it is curious that they seem to have done so in different ways, with the membership so obsessed with social traditionalism and the funders (I suspect) increasingly reflecting highly untraditional ‘disruptor’ or even ‘disaster’ capitalism. Might this be the long-term unwinding for the always fragile coalition of social traditionalism and economic liberalism that Thatcher’s Conservative Party managed to sustain? Might it reflect the changing nature of British capitalism?
These are questions of political sociology and political economy which perhaps can’t be answered within what I’ve called the ‘high politics’ focus of this book, for all the virtues of that focus. For that matter, perhaps they are questions that would need another book and, if so, then undoubtedly Bale would be its ideal author. Equally, it would be fascinating to read, as a companion volume to this one, his analysis of the Labour Party after Brexit. But, just as the finest performances are greeted with multiple cries of ‘encore’, it is hardly a criticism to conclude, after having read a book, that I’d like to read two more books by the same author.
(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’.)
By any reckoning, the last seven years of British politics have been tumultuous, and at least one measure of that is the extraordinary churn of Prime Ministers – five, counting Cameron, since 2016 – and with that four Tory Party leadership contests and two General Elections. The Brexit referendum was the trigger which began this period, and the Brexit process that followed provided much of the content and context that ran through it.
Charting what happened during those years is a daunting and serious task, and in Tim Bale it has a serious and impressive analyst. Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, he has longstanding research expertise in, amongst other things, the Conservative Party. It is this party, and especially its leadership, which is the focus of this superb book. In it, Bale presents an assured, detailed account of the exceptionally complex story of the premierships of May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, with the emphasis on the first two, reflecting the brevity of Truss’s tenure and, at the time of the book’s writing, the newness of Sunak’s.
Yet, whilst being a serious and detailed book, written with the academic rigour that would be expected of the author, it is highly readable. Some Amazon reviews disagree about its readability, so perhaps it depends on what you are used to, but in my view Bale writes crisply and with brio, and for all the command of detail displayed it is never stodgy. There is also a certain amount of wry humour. To give just one example, recording that Truss did not offer David Frost a role in her administration, Bale adds the laconic observation “or at least not one he felt was commensurate with what he regarded anyway as his considerable talents” (p. 271). The ‘anyway’ adds a particular sting.
It is, very much, the story of the premierships both in the sense that these provide the structuring frame of the book and that the focus is largely on individuals. Most obviously that means the leaders themselves, but also what might be called the ‘high politics’ of their tenures. Thus the analysis includes the composition of different cabinets, the coalitions of support in leadership elections and parliamentary votes, the role of advisors, the tactical calculations of party political advantage, the opinion polls and their interpretation, the electoral manoeuvres, and the role of the media.
This is a deliberate choice, flagged up in the introduction, to capture the way that “individuals, and therefore parties as a whole, are as much tactical and reactive as they are strategic and proactive” (p.3). The consequence is, perhaps, to downplay the role of ideology, but it is an approach which is helpful in revealing how much of the Brexit process was haphazard and, certainly, ‘unstrategic’. Anyone who still thinks there was any kind of ‘a plan’ for Brexit will be firmly disabused of that idea by reading this book.
Distance and engagement
That last comment reflects the way that, given the focus of this blog, which in turn reflects my own preoccupations, I approached the book primarily through the lens of Brexit. But, as I read it, I began to see that this is not, actually, a very sensible approach. Of course, as the title suggests, Brexit is a more than major presence, but this is first and foremost a book about the Conservative Party, and that observation, which may seem trite, is an important one. It is not just about delineating the empirical scope of the book but about the way that Bale brings an impressive, and to me usefully disconcerting, perspective, that is at once distant and engaged.
It is distant, in the sense that he manages to stand back a bit from the tumult of the events he describes so that, whilst they are in some sense extraordinary, they can also be seen as ‘business as usual’. So Brexit, rather than being some huge disjuncture in political life, can be read in the context of, and having some of the characteristics of, “the really big splits in the Conservative Party’s long history” (p.3). That point isn’t heavily emphasized in the text, but it is an implicit ‘viewing point’ throughout, and re-reappears right at the end when the possibility of an impending heavy electoral defeat is discussed alongside reminders of defeats in the mid-1940s, mid-1960s, and mid-1990s (p. 294).
So whereas all of us who have lived through the last few years may feel – as perhaps people at any period do – that there is something special and unprecedented about these ‘Brexit years’, Bale gives us a glimpse, at least, of how political historians may well come to write about it. It is the slight jolt that this gives (at least to me) which explains why I referred to it being a ‘usefully disconcerting’ perspective. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Bale provides, perhaps earlier than any other academic, the second draft of the history of Brexit (or, at least, those aspects of it with which the book is concerned).
Yet it is also an engaged approach, in that by delving into the weeds of political tactics and the ad hoc responses to the pressure of immediate events and headlines, Brexit is also re-positioned, but this time as being continuous with the mundane realities of politics and so, in that different sense, again understandable as ‘business as usual’. For example, although this may reflect my own naivety, I was struck by the way that, throughout this account, Tory politicians are shown to have approached Brexit not – or not simply, or even primarily – as a massive upheaval of national geo-political strategy but as an opportunity to gain party political advantage.
So, to give an example within that, whereas I had probably assumed that May would have spent her early days immersing herself in the technical complexities of Brexit, Bale suggests that “the new Prime Minister and her advisers seemed to be seizing opportunistically … on the way Brexit had ripped apart Labour’s already fraying electoral coalition.” (p. 23). Of course, it might have been better all round had my assumption had been right, but Bale’s account is all too plausible.
Similarly, I tend to see events like the resignations of leading Brexiters (e.g., David Davis, Dominic Raab, p.63 and p.72 respectively) as being about their perennial preference for fantasy over reality; or the crucial parliamentary votes over Brexit as being, centrally, about the implacability of the Ultras’ ideology. But, here, although the “near religious” (p.73) fervour of some of the Brexiters features, such events are configured as being at least as much about the perennial issues of party management, careerism, whipping operations, and ‘counting heads’.
A corrective to Brexit-obsessives?
The wider issue these examples point to is that Bale’s analysis is a useful corrective for those who, like me, tend to write, at least implicitly, as if Brexit was pretty much the only political issue of the last seven years. That is just about defensible for the period up to January 2020, when the UK left the EU, but it is simply not true after that. That’s not exactly a news item, even for Brexit obsessives, but I suppose I still had a residual sense that Brexit ‘ought’ to have been central, because it is so important, with other events being seen as a distraction. But Bale’s account suggests to me that, for the political actors themselves, in the press of events, Brexit was not experienced in that way. This may well also be true of voters, and perhaps explains why, to my puzzlement at the time, the details of Brexit were actually rather little discussed during the general elections (or indeed the leadership elections) of this period.
None of this is to imply that Bale downplays Brexit. It is, rather, that he contextualises it, showing how it became imbricated with multiple other strands of politics. To take just a couple of numerous possible examples, Johnson’s initial, and as it turned out short-lived and ill-fated attempt, to protect Owen Paterson from the effects of the lobbying scandal that ended his career was bound up with the latter’s longstanding place amongst ‘Eurosceptics’ (p.215). Likewise, the overlap between ‘lockdown sceptics’ and the Brexit Ultras illustrates how ostensibly different issues were intertwined with Brexit (p. 173). Conversely, no one reading Bale’s account of Johnson’s downfall as Prime Minister (pp. 258-260) could possibly be taken in by Johnson’s own subsequent claims that he had been the victim of vengeful remainers.
So, in all of these ways, Bale’s book is a valuable challenge to Brexit-obsessives - including me and, very likely, many readers of this blog - by providing an account which has an implicit historical distance alongside an explicit focus on the everyday practicalities of politics. It certainly made me think differently. Equally, it could be seen as a challenge to the most ideologically-committed of Brexiters in that, for all they may have believed themselves to be engaged in a revolution, the outcome has been far less dramatic than they thought. Indeed, there’s already a discernible disappointment amongst such Brexiters not just with Brexit but with its failure to usher in a ‘new way of doing politics’. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?
It is worth saying that in this respect my reading of the book differs from most, if not all, of the other reviews of it I have seen (e.g. Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian), which makes me wonder if mine is fallacious – though evidently not to the extent of revising it. Most reviews put great weight on Bale’s undoubtedly well-founded suggestion that the Conservatives have “slipped their moorings as mainstream centre-right party” (p.291). Nevertheless, what I found more striking was how, despite everything that has happened, the political process itself, and the terms of political debate, have not dramatically changed. Yes, the norms and conventions of political conduct have been strained and frayed and, yes, political discourse has substantially coarsened and polarised, but the basic contours of both remain recognizable. In terms of the book’s subtitle, then, the ‘turmoil’ is undoubted, but the ‘transformation’ is less clear-cut.
Whether that was Bale’s intention I am not sure but, at all events, he leaves open the question of what is going to happen to the Conservative Party now. That’s wise, because it isn’t yet possible to have a genuine historical distance and so it remains unknowable whether the ‘final draft of history’ (if there could ever be such a thing) will conclude that Brexit marks a fundamental shift for British politics in general, and the Conservative Party in particular, or whether it is only an episode, possibly important or conceivably only ephemeral. My own expectation, for what very little it is worth, is that, assuming defeat at the next election, the Tories will spin off into the weird world of the emergent ‘National Conservatism’ before electoral defeats, and the realities of electoral demographics, pull them back to something more recognizably normal. The only rider to that is that things would change dramatically if the ‘first past the post’ system were reformed in the meanwhile, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Encore!
Overall, this is an excellent book and a hugely important addition to the emergent literature on the politics of Brexit. It is also an exemplar of how academics can and should write for general audiences, something still rarer than it should be.
If I have a criticism, then it is that I would like to have seen more fine-grained analysis of the party membership, and also of party funding. Of course, the huge significance of the membership as a ‘selectorate’ of the leadership is made abundantly clear, as is the way it has all but driven out the relative liberalism of the Cameron period (e.g., pp. 126-127). Even so, there’s still something puzzling to me about just how radicalized the membership seems to have become in recent years, and in the extent to which both its members and its funders seem to have become so out of tune with the mainstream of, especially, business interests.
Moreover, it is curious that they seem to have done so in different ways, with the membership so obsessed with social traditionalism and the funders (I suspect) increasingly reflecting highly untraditional ‘disruptor’ or even ‘disaster’ capitalism. Might this be the long-term unwinding for the always fragile coalition of social traditionalism and economic liberalism that Thatcher’s Conservative Party managed to sustain? Might it reflect the changing nature of British capitalism?
These are questions of political sociology and political economy which perhaps can’t be answered within what I’ve called the ‘high politics’ focus of this book, for all the virtues of that focus. For that matter, perhaps they are questions that would need another book and, if so, then undoubtedly Bale would be its ideal author. Equally, it would be fascinating to read, as a companion volume to this one, his analysis of the Labour Party after Brexit. But, just as the finest performances are greeted with multiple cries of ‘encore’, it is hardly a criticism to conclude, after having read a book, that I’d like to read two more books by the same author.
Tuesday, 1 August 2023
UKCA: a symbol of the folly of Brexit
I said that I would break the ‘summer recess’ of this blog if a Brexit event of sufficient interest or importance occurred and it has, with the government’s announcement today of an “indefinite extension to the use of CE [Conformité Européenne] marking for British businesses”. It sounds dull enough to make you weep, but, actually, both in and of itself and as an illustrative case, it blows a huge hole in the entire case for Brexit. So it should be a cause for weeping, though not tears of boredom but, first, tears of laughter at the utter farce of what has happened and, then, tears of rage at what it means.
A brief history of UKCA
The origins of this saga go right
back to 2019 (£), when the government began to plan for a ‘no deal Brexit’
and realized that one consequence would be for the use of CE conformity
assessment marking of products. This is the system whereby many types of goods
offered for sale in the EU single market must bear a mark showing conformity to
EU safety, health and environmental standards. Crucially, this isn’t just about
placing a mark on the product or its packaging, but about registering, at a
cost, the evidence that the product actually does meet the relevant standards
via a ‘notified
body’ within an EU member state (although in some cases self-declaration is
possible).
In the face of a possible ‘no deal Brexit’, the
government announced that, were it to happen, the CE mark could and would go on
being used in the UK until, at some unspecified point, being replaced by a UK
system, of an unspecified nature. In the event, ‘no deal Brexit’ was averted,
both in the original sense of leaving without a Withdrawal Agreement and the
later sense of leaving without a trade agreement. However, in line with the
Johnson-Frost ‘sovereignty first’ Brexit, it was still intended that the UK
would have what by that time we knew would be called the United Kingdom Conformity
Assessed (UKCA) system. During the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) talks,
the UK sought a ‘mutual recognition agreement’ as between CE and UKCA systems,
but this proved impossible.
At the time the TCA was struck, so much attention was focused
on the issue of post-Brexit terms of trade, not to mention on the still-raging
pandemic, that what UKCA was going to mean was scarcely recognized outside
those businesses affected by it, and not always even by them. But once the
transition period ended, and the TCA dust settled, it became clear that
manufacturers were going to face dual systems of conformity assessment. I think
that this was the
first time I mentioned what I called this “especially absurd consequence of
Brexit” on this blog, and I have returned to it several times in the years
since.
The absurdity was that, at least initially, the actual
standards to which conformity would be assessed were in almost all cases
identical. So a firm selling identical goods in both Great Britain (GB) and the
EU would have to mark them differently, and register their conformity
assessment separately. For British exporters this represented costly
duplication, which was especially onerous for small firms but no less real for
big firms, and created a disincentive to serve both markets. Equally, overseas firms
(not only, but including, those of the EU) exporting goods to Britain faced the
new costs of UKCA, thus potentially increasing prices or, especially if their
UK market was quite small, simply not offering their goods for sale here, thus
potentially reducing consumer choice. The situation was even more nightmarish
in Northern Ireland where, as discussed in an
August 2021 post, the CE mark would continue to be used because it
effectively remains in the EU single market for goods, in some cases alongside a new UKNI
mark (but not if the good was bound for the EU), but goods made in Northern
Ireland that were bound for GB would need the UKCA mark.
Unsurprisingly, at least to anyone who understood it,
the introduction of compulsory UKCA marking has been repeatedly postponed from
what was initially going to be January 2022, reflecting both the time and
effort needed from businesses as well as persistent lack of governmental
clarity about how it would operate, and also the lack of registration capacity.
Meanwhile, in February 2022, even Jacob
Rees-Mogg seemed to have grasped the ludicrous burden of extra ‘red tape’
it required, although the government
continued to insist that it was on course for implementation, at that point
in January 2023. Subsequently, in
November 2022, that date was extended to January 2025.*
What does the new announcement mean?
It is that latter deadline which has now been
indefinitely postponed, with the CE mark now being indefinitely valid for firms
to place goods for sale on the UK market (including Northern Ireland), as well
as in the EU single market. This doesn’t mean the end of the UKCA mark.
Companies can still use it to place goods on the GB market (but not Northern
Ireland or the EU) if they are confident that they only sell in GB and are only
going to sell in GB. Some such firms, especially if they have already made the transition,
may well do so. However, even for these, there must now be a question mark as
to the extent to which consumers will recognize and be convinced by what will
surely be a minority usage. Moreover, these firms may find that their goods are
unacceptable when offered to other UK firms as components in finished goods
destined for the EU or Northern Ireland.
I suggested in
May 2023 that the writing might be on the wall for UKCA once the government
retreated
on its plans for the wholesale scrapping of Retained EU Law (REUL). For
what that seemed to presage was the abandonment of ideas for widespread divergence
from EU goods product standards. This latest UKCA announcement presumably
points even more strongly in the same direction since unless the UK continues
to adhere to the relevant EU standards then the CE mark will not be achievable.
Perhaps there will be some cases where UK standards do diverge and there, too,
there will be an ongoing role for UKCA, but it hardly makes sense to tell firms
that they can go on using CE marking in the UK if there is also an intention to depart extensively from EU standards.
True, that implies consistency in government policy
where there has been little so far. For example, in June 2021, almost unnoticed,
it
was agreed that UK would continue to participate in CEN (the European
Committee for Standardization) and CENELEC (the European Electrotechnical
Committee for Standardization), which seemed to imply an intention to remain
aligned with EU product standards even though the process for scrapping REUL,
which began in September 2022, might have (and, some Brexiters surely hoped,
did) implied otherwise.
However, although there was always a strong
possibility that CE marking would continue to be valid, it would have been a
brave firm which acted on this assumption, so although today’s announcement
is a sensible one, in and of itself, it doesn’t obviate the fact that many
firms have sent considerable amounts of money (how much will probably never be
known) on what has turned out to be unnecessary. It is perfectly possible that
some have even already gone out of business as a result. It is also possible
that some UK firms have already decided to cease trading with EU customers, or overseas
firms with UK customers, and they may or may not now seek, or be able, to revive
that trade. In other words, although now abandoned, the replacement of the CE
mark with the UKCA mark has already been highly costly.
In this sense, the government’s suggestion that this today’s
change of policy is part of its plans to “ease business burdens” and “cut red
tape” shows extraordinary chutzpah, if not downright shamelessness. Not
only has it already created costs, but to the extent it is now reducing them it
is only taking away costs its own Brexit policies have created. That it made a
similar suggestion when postponing introducing post-Brexit import controls,
currently set to
begin this October, gives cause to wonder if these, too, may once again be
postponed or
watered down.
The bigger picture
The bigger aspect of this fiasco is that it reveals
two central features of Brexit. One is just how much unnecessary aggravation
and cost has been caused by Brexit hubris and by the rush to get Brexit done. As
this today’s announcement shows, it was not a necessity of Brexit to ditch CE
marking and it only arose because of the hubristic desire for ‘sovereignty’ and
the almost frenzied desire to expunge all traces of EU membership. And even
having adopted that position, it was unnecessary and unrealistic to try to do
it so quickly, which itself was part of a wider refusal to create a long, or
even any meaningful, transition period.
Secondly, and more profoundly, the fact that the
government has finally been forced to change policy reveals the utter vacuity
of the ideas of sovereignty and regulatory divergence that inform so much of
Brexit. Akin to the ‘gravity’ effect of geographical proximity on trade, there is
what Professor Anu Bradford of Columbia Law School labelled the ‘Brussels Effect’ which exerts
a regulatory pull on nearby, smaller, economies. That applies not just to
conformity assessment but to regulation in a more general sense, and explains
why, for all the Brexiters’ bombast, there has so far been fairly
limited regulatory divergence and what, according
to Joël
Reland of the UKICE research centre, is a growing trend towards ‘managed
divergence’ via UK-EU agreement.
To the extent that the continuation of CE marking implies
continuing alignment on many kinds of goods standards it also shows the myth of
sovereignty in the Brexiter sense: it seems that in most cases goods sold by UK
firms in the UK will conform to many of the standards set by the EU, which also generally means changing as and when the EU changes those standards. Moreover, those
firms will in many, perhaps most, cases require assessment to be registered via
an EU-approved notified body within an EU member state.
So this is what ‘taking back control’ means in
practice: almost the opposite of what it promised. The Mail has
described the CE decision as a “another Brexit climbdown” by Rishi Sunak, and
it is not yet clear to what extent there will be a backlash from Brexiters. Will
the average leave voter care about, or even be aware of, this? Almost certainly
not, and there is no reason why they should. But, by the same token, the idea
that leave voters either had a burning desire for, or gave a mandate to, the
scorched earth theory of sovereignty that Brexiters claimed to flow from the
2016 referendum is also ludicrous.
As for the rest of us, UKCA now stands as a literal
symbol – if there is such a thing – of the waste, stupidity, hubris and sheer folly
of Brexit itself. In that context, several possibilities suggest themselves for
what the ‘C’ and the ‘A’ might stand for, few of which are suitable to be
spelled out for younger readers.
*Note that the various deadlines referred to had some exemptions/ variations, especially as regards conformity assessment marking of medical devices. Also note that, as ever with Brexit, there are all sorts of deeper complexities, qualifications and exceptions in relation to what goods, what standards, and what forms of registration are affected. I’ve tried to skip over these by the use of various qualifiers (‘most’, ‘many’, ‘often’ etc) so as to stick to the main contours of the issue.
Updates (3 August 2023):
1. The retention of CE marking does not quite mean, as some commentators suggest, that the UK is simply a 'rule-taker' of EU standards. This is because, as mentioned in the text, the UK participates in CEN and CENELEC (and also, though not mentioned, ETSI) as a non-EEA member. As such, it (via BSI) can participate in discussions and vote, and in some very specific circumstances not adopt standards which it didn't vote for. However, it is of course the case that the UK no longer has any say in the wider policy and legislative frameworks within which and from which particular standards may derive. In any case, the sovereignty point in this specific development isn't primarily about standards, it is that it shows the impracticality of a national system of conformity assessment marking and registration.
2. Subsequent to writing this post, it emerged that neither the construction industry nor the medical devices industry were included in the announcement of indefinite postponement. In both cases, unlike the general situation where CE validity in GB was due to end at the end of 2024, these already had later deadlines (June 2025 for construction and various dates in 2028 and 2030 for medical devices). It is not clear if this discrepancy will persist, or what its rationale could be. No doubt more in future blogs.
3. As briefly pre-figured in this post, a couple of days later the government announced a further delay in introducing import controls. Crucially, this was attributed to the potential inflationary effects of doing so, a tacit admission of the extra costs of post-Brexit trade. For discussion of the import control issue, including the risks posed by postponement, see my post of April 2022. Again, no doubt there will be more in future blogs.
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