Unpicking the defences of Brexit

Bemused by the ‘mysterious silence’ of the government about the benefits of Brexit, last weekend former Trade Secretary Peter Lilley bemoaned (£) that “the consequence of that silence is that the narrative about Brexit is being written by its opponents”. The mystery is easily solved: the benefits of Brexit are effectively non-existent and the failure of its promises is self-evident. And the formidable attempts by Brexiters to proclaim a narrative of success have foundered not because its opponents’ voices are louder but because the public, without much leadership but seeing the evidence accumulating before them, have seen that failure.

But it’s true that, as a result, Brexiters have increasingly found themselves having to defend their project rather than get away with airy promises, or bullish assertions of it being ‘the will of the people’. These attempts have become ever-more desperate and convoluted, and their very variety is, in itself, one of their most important defensive weapons. In the hands of the more adroit, or perhaps just the more opportunistic, Brexiters it enables them to continually shift from one line of argument to another, deliberately creating a swirl of disorientation.

A recent example is the discussion on GB News between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nick Tyrone, which Tyrone described on his Week in Brexitland Substack. Tyrone did as good job as anyone could of responding to Rees-Mogg’s salvoes, the more so given the huge advantages his interlocutor had by virtue of being the host. But it is impossible to ‘win’ such encounters because they are intended to confuse rather than to clarify, and setting innumerable false hares running is one of the easiest ways of doing so. This doesn’t just apply to broadcast interviews. In any number of published comment pieces, Brexiters layer falsehoods upon half-truths upon questionable assumptions, in ways which can only be unpicked through line-by-line ‘fisking’, which is incredibly time-consuming, and not especially effective.

Nevertheless, it’s worth disaggregating and examining some of the commonest arguments currently used to defend Brexit, and especially those about sovereignty and democracy, which are the Brexiters’ last redoubts. Even so, despite being the longest ever post on this blog, it’s impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis.

Stonewalling and denial

These are the now boilerplate defences of Brexit, so commonly made as to not need specific links. They include the claim that ‘it hasn’t been done properly’, which comes in variants ranging from ascribing this to governmental incompetence, to blaming it on EU punishment, right through to positing betrayal by various actors up to and including ‘the deep State’.

All of these were virtually baked into Brexit, partly because it made utopian promises that could never come true, and partly because it thrives on narratives of betrayal, treachery and victimhood. So, like apologists for communism, Brexiters say it has either ‘never really been tried’ or that it has fallen victim to counter-revolutionaries and to renegades from the true path of purity.

Slightly more optimistic versions of the same thing are that ‘it hasn’t been done properly yet’, or that it ‘hasn’t had enough time’ for the benefits to be obvious. These claims are, by definition, impossible to refute, placing the utopia of Brexit in sight but always out of reach, like a mirage oasis. But one obvious rejoinder is that it wasn’t suggested before the referendum that the benefits would be long in coming, let alone the 20, 50 or even 100 years that some Brexiters have since spoken of.

Still, perhaps it is reasonable to apply the ‘David Frost test’ for what would constitute failure for Brexit. He suggested one piece of evidence of failure would be “if we are still debating this in five or six years’ time in the same way”. That was in June 2022, so the jury is still out, but there is no sign at all so far that Brexit is not going to be a failure in these terms.

One thing which all the defences of Brexit in this category share, albeit to varying extents, is that they render nonsensical attempts to make claims about the benefits of Brexit. That’s most obvious if Brexit has been comprehensively betrayed and is ‘Brexit in name only’ for, if so, how could there be any benefits? Even the much weaker defence that Brexit will take time to deliver benefits has an obvious circularity, whereby any sign of success shows it was right, whilst any absence of signs of success doesn’t show it was wrong. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Bathos and deflection

This category includes what is emerging as a favourite Brexit defence, that which does not necessarily deny that Brexit has been damaging, but constantly invokes the most extreme forecasts of how damaging it would be (or, often, garbled versions of those forecasts) so as to defend it on the bathetic grounds that it ‘hasn’t been as bad as the warnings’. It’s a line which can be traced back at least as far as David Davis’s 2018 assurance that Britain would not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction” and its obvious flaw is that Brexit was meant to be something positive and desirable, rather than ‘not being cataclysmic’ or, even, ‘not being too bad’.

A related defence is to admit the evidence of (especially economic) damage that has occurred since Brexit, but to deflect blame for this away from Brexit to, typically, the pandemic, the Ukraine War or, more recently, conflict in the Middle East. This can readily be run alongside the ‘more time is needed’ line of argument, and has a similar circularity in enabling any supposed successes to be celebrated but any damage or lack of success discounted.

However, it differs from that line in that, whereas the promise of future success can never, strictly speaking, be disproved, the argument of damage being down to other factors can be, by reference to the specific effects of Brexit which have not been experienced by other countries. Thus, for all that Brexiters dismiss them, counterfactual economic models do, at least approximately, strip out Brexit effects from those of other factors.

Whataboutery

Such counterfactuals seek to answer the real question, which is how does Brexit Britain compare with Britain had Brexit not happened. That question is evaded by another defence, that of the ‘whataboutery’ which makes comparisons with other countries, especially other EU countries, or with the EU as a whole.

The narrow version of this is to compare, especially, GDP growth so as to show (especially if the ‘right’ time periods are cherry-picked), that the UK is doing no worse than some such comparators. Again, this doesn’t meet the objection that Brexit was promised to be a positive. Moreover, when these comparisons show, as they sometimes can, the UK outperforming its comparators it doesn’t address the real question. At particular times, even when an EU member, the UK performed better than other members. So if there are times, now, that it does so this tells us nothing about Brexit, at least in the absence of a plausible explanation of how Brexit is responsible for it.

The Brexiters do not have such an explanation, since the things they claim for what would be explanations – regulatory divergence and major new trade deals – have, as they constantly complain, scarcely happened. On the other hand, anti-Brexiters can plausibly explain why the UK performs less well than the counterfactual of Brexit not having happened, primarily in terms of the increased barriers to trade with the EU and the loss of freedom of movement of people.

The broader version of whataboutery is to point to events in the EU – not just in terms of economic performance, but actual or alleged crises over things like irregular migration, or Hungary, or, currently, the farmers’ protests – to say ‘look what a mess they are in’. This in turn links to the endless predictions, both before and since Brexit, that the EU is about to collapse entirely.

This kind of whataboutery is nonsense at multiple levels, as well as being incompatible with the idea that the EU is a powerful bully that is able to ‘punish’ us. Firstly, it’s nonsense because few of those who oppose Brexit have ever believed that the EU is some kind of nirvana. Secondly, even if the EU were in crisis, or collapsed, that doesn’t make Britain any better off. Indeed, given geographical proximity, and economic and political connections, any instability and suffering the EU endures are likely to have a profound negative impact on Britain, whilst Britain no longer has any influence upon what happens within and to the EU.

Lies, half-truths and exaggerations

This category could be expanded to fill a whole post, so here I will only give a few of the commonest or most egregious examples. Some are plainly ridiculous, such as Kemi Badenoch’s recent claim that “we have used our Brexit dividend to get the NHS more than a £1 billion more every single week than it had before Brexit” [emphasis in original tweet, where it was denoted by ‘*’ symbols]. Of course, there was no such dividend, and the NHS budget is, as it always was, purely a decision of the British government. The same applies to the similar, and more frequent, claim that the NHS has now received the £350 million a week proposed at the referendum, so Brexit has fulfilled that promise.

Equally untrue, although probably much more widely believed, are the claims that Brexit allowed the early roll out of vaccines (it didn’t: the UK was still operating under EU laws and regulations at the time) and that it allowed the UK to give support to Ukraine (it didn’t, and the UK had begun to do so ever since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, when still an EU member).

Other things in this category are more difficult to unpick, as they may contain some element of truth. Many of the Brexiter claims about trade deals are of this sort, because it’s true that neither CPTPP nor the Free Trade Agreements with Australia, New Zealand, and any which may follow, could have been done by the UK as an EU member. The half-truths and exaggeration relate to the benefits, which are paltry. In other cases, the claims are lies in all but name, most obviously the description of non-binding Memorandums of Understanding with individual US states as ‘trade agreements’, which they aren’t in the standard use of that term (plus they have little or no economic value, and could almost certainly have been made as an EU member anyway).

Likewise, most claims of regulatory independence are overblown, since they either aren’t practical to exercise, or make little difference, or are things which would be likely to have happened at some point as an EU member. I’ve written so much about these things before that I don’t have the strength to do so again and, for regular readers at least, probably don’t need to.

The last redoubts: sovereignty and democracy

What does warrant more attention is what have become the last redoubts of the Brexiter defence, and in some ways its strongest if only because they are the most intangible. Sovereignty and democracy are not, of course, the same thing, as sovereign states can be undemocratic. As regards sovereignty itself, Brexiters routinely deploy this as the central defence of Brexit, the more so given the evident lack of benefits and the mounting evidence of costs. For if sovereignty ‘has no price’, then these inconvenient truths can be ignored.

There is a particularly specious version of this defence, a recent example being furnished by Julia Hartley-Brewer, which argues or implies that people voted for Brexit knowing the damage it would cause, because the remain campaign told them (that this is the meaning of Hartley-Brewer’s tweet is borne out by her previous remarks). The obvious flaw is that the leave campaign thundered assurances to such voters that every single one of these warnings was part of ‘Project Fear’, and it defies belief that many voters believed the warnings but voted to leave anyway rather than doing so because they accepted the assurances that the warnings were false.

Indeed, more generally, it’s worth recalling how Brexit was sold. Yes, the slogan of ‘taking back control’, which may be taken as a proxy for ‘regaining sovereignty’, was central to the leave campaign, but it was proposed not as an abstract virtue but as a means of delivering concrete benefits, most obviously control of immigration to those who wanted that, but also benefits to the economy and, more expansively, to the totality of policy, which Brexiters said had been ceded to the EU. So it is dishonest now to propose ‘sovereignty’ as the justification of Brexit, detached from whether it has delivered these concrete benefits.

Flawed ideas of sovereignty

Alongside that dishonesty lies another, or, at least, an ignorance. Sovereignty has probably never meant untrammelled national freedom of action, and certainly doesn’t nowadays. This is why the regulatory independence of Brexit has proved so illusory. In practice, countries operate within a framework of international standards, whether they be derived from the EU or other trans-national bodies. More broadly, countries pool and/or cede sovereignty for purposes of defence, as with NATO, or for a whole variety of non-economic reasons which give rise to international treaties, conventions and, indeed, law.

Of course, Brexiters are constantly straining against those limits but, in doing so, are simply repeating the same flawed idea of sovereignty. The flaw isn’t just that countries can’t escape external constraints, it’s that to the extent they can do so it has negative consequences which they choose to avoid. That choice is, itself, an expression of sovereignty. Thus the idea that Spain, or Denmark, or Germany do not have sovereignty because they choose to be in the EU is as preposterous as the idea that the UK has gained sovereignty by leaving. Indeed, one of the most arresting moments in the entire Brexit process was when the government published the first Brexit White Paper in February 2017. For it contained the remarkable sentence: “Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” (para 2.1).

Interestingly, the hollowness of the sovereignty argument was again unwittingly revealed by Rees-Mogg just this week, when he was questioned by Lewis Goodall of the News Agents. He was asked about the PopCons’ ‘anti-institutional’ agenda for changing the structures and systems of government, and why, if this was so necessary, the Conservative government in which he had served had not done so. Rees-Mogg replied, “we had no ability to change the system until we left the European Union”, but went on to say that “they [structures and systems of government] were changed very effectively by Tony Blair”. To spell out the obvious: when Blair was Prime Minister, Britain was in the EU.

Flawed ideas of electoral democracy

It is here that the Brexiters very last line of defence comes in, emphasizing not just sovereignty but democratic sovereignty. It echoes the line that Tony Benn took to justify opposition to EEC membership in the 1970s in saying that ‘at least, now, you can vote out the politicians who make the laws that govern you’ (although it’s notable that Benn didn’t share the Brexiters’ naïve view of sovereignty). It was wheeled out by Rees-Mogg (in his interview with Tyrone) as if it were a sort of dialectical checkmate. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

To the extent it works at all, it rests on the premise that Britain is more democratic than the EU. How democratic Britain is can be debated, given, amongst other things, its arcane uncodified constitution, non-proportional voting system, unelected upper house, and extensive executive power underpinned by Royal Prerogative. So, too, can the democracy of the EU be debated. Perhaps it should indeed be constituted as a Federal State, with a constitution and an elected government, a United States of Europe, but such ideas were anathema to Brexiters, as they are to Eurosceptics in many EU states. There’s much more to be said about both debates than I have space for here but, at best, it’s a shaky premise.

Beyond that, the idea that, unlike before Brexit, British electors can now exert control over the policies and laws that govern them is fallacious. First, as with sovereignty, it ignores all those internationally derived regulations which, necessarily, continue to apply despite Brexit. Something similar could be said of the way that - as Liz Truss found, just as Harold Wilson did in the 1960s and James Callaghan in the 1970s - with or without Brexit ‘the markets’ put as much constraint on UK economic policy as, say, the EU did on that of Greece, and for much the same reasons. More generally, it massively overestimates the impact that EU membership had on Britain. We know, because of the extent of Retained EU Law (or what is now called Assimilated Law), that plenty of rules came from the EU, but these turn out to be rather dull and uncontentious things that few people care about or want to see scrapped. They aren’t the stuff of political controversy.

By contrast, the most controversial political issues of recent decades, from privatization and trade union restrictions in the 1980s and 1990s, to Iraq in the 2000s, to perennial battles over the extent of public spending, had little or nothing to do with EU membership (other, of course, than that of EU membership itself). Likewise, the big political issues of post-Brexit Britain remain similar to the big political issues of pre-Brexit Britain. So inflation, unemployment, tax rates, interest rates, the NHS, crime, education, defence, housing, immigration, and so on were and are what people vote about. But Brexit makes little difference to the policy options offered by political parties in these areas, and even if it may expand some options (certain taxes, perhaps) it reduces just as many (security data-sharing, say).

That’s even true for immigration policy because, although the UK has ended freedom of movement, the question of its overall total level was always subject to domestic choices as the government controlled non-EU immigration. Moreover, when an EU member, it was the UK’s choice not to use the controls on freedom of movement available to it, just as in 2004 it chose not to restrict free movement from newly acceded member states in Eastern Europe. On the Rees-Mogg argument, British voters could have changed both those things, so either they didn’t care enough or the idea of voter control of policy is flawed. On the other hand, as regards irregular migration, post-Brexit Britain no longer has the benefit of the Dublin regulations, and British voters can do nothing at all about that, even if they want to.

This also begins to show how the argument that Brexit gives electors control frequently rests on an entirely unrealistic idea of how electoral democracy work. Very occasionally, a single big issue may be defining, swaying large numbers of voters, but it has to be a very big issue. Even then, it doesn’t necessarily determine election results, or even change government policy (recall the Iraq War). For the most part, voters choose on the basis of the overall package of a party’s policy offer, their perceptions of its leadership and values, and similar ‘broad-brush’ considerations. Likewise, the record of an incumbent government is typically judged in the round, over many years and in relation to many issues. So when, to use the Rees-Mogg/ Tyrone clip again, Rees-Mogg says “if you didn’t like a tariff introduced by the EU, you had no means of stopping it” it is irrelevant. Elections aren’t fought or won at that level of specificity.

To be fair, presumably Rees-Mogg didn’t literally mean a single tariff, but trade policy generally. However, as an EU member, the UK could have held parliamentary votes on the ratification of EU trade deals, as other member states, or even regions, do (recall the Walloon vote against CETA), but it waived that right. On the other hand, parliamentary oversight of the UK’s post-Brexit trade deals is limited and lacks a statutory basis. Perhaps, if voters really cared about it, they could pressurise politicians, or even vote in elections, to make this oversight more rigorous. But, by the same token, they could have done the same to force pre-Brexit governments to hold votes on EU trade deals, and, indeed, to vote those deals down if they did not want them. In fact, voters were not interested in making this an electoral issue any more than, until the referendum, voters saw EU membership as a contentious or important issue. The underlying point is that a parliamentary democracy doesn’t give voters overarching control of policy any more than sovereignty bestows unconstrained freedom of action.

Flawed ideas of parliamentary democracy 

However, it's also doubtful to whether leading Brexiters understand, or are even committed to, parliamentary democracy at all. It was, after all, Johnson and Rees-Mogg who instigated the Prorogation of parliament in 2019. And just this week David Frost (£), recalling that period, wrote that “the problem there was Parliament deciding to act independently on Brexit, as if it were itself the government”, a reference, apparently, to the Benn Act, and perhaps to the Indicative Votes process.

So, apart from the irony of a placeman lawmaker, especially one of a distinction either nugatory or inordinately well-disguised, lecturing about democracy, it seems that Frost doesn’t understand the most basic fact of parliamentary democracy, which is that the government governs to the extent that it commands a majority. But it’s not actually a lack of understanding, it’s one of the dirty secrets at the heart of Brexit that, even as the Brexiters spout about democracy, what they have done is to substantially increase the power of the Executive at the expense of parliament, most obviously in the growth in the use of Statutory Instruments and ‘Henry VIII powers’.

There must also be more than a suspicion that when Brexiters rail against ‘unelected’ judges and civil servants they don’t grasp that whilst elections are central to democracy and its institutions they cannot and should not completely define them. Or, again, they do actually grasp this, and hate it, partly because of the constraints it places on the Executive and partly because what defines Brexiters, and populists generally, is not a commitment to parliamentary democracy but to a mythologised idea of ‘the will of the people’, mystically distilled and enacted by their leaders. 

For a brief period, the referendum result empowered them to use that slogan as a battle cry to bully and scarify their opponents. Now, with Brexit, in any form, so self-evidently unwanted by the majority of the people, and, in its actual form, so unloved by the minority who still want it, they are forced to ever-more contorted and untenable justifications.

Moving forward

At issue in all this is not a re-litigation of Brexit itself. Brexit has happened, so the real point is to set out and challenge at least some of the extraordinary array of arguments, some contradictory, some illogical, some dishonest, some just wrong, which Brexiters are still deploying.

With some exceptions, they have had to just about accept that Brexit has had many costs and no benefits, but they still seek to excuse that and still fall back on the more intangible claim to have restored sovereignty and democracy. But that too is flawed, not least because, apart from everything else I’ve written in this post, the very fact that Britain could and did vote to leave the EU shows that doing so was unnecessary on those grounds. Stripped of that final conceit, the Brexiters have nothing to protect them from the hard facts of their abject failure.

Exposing the many ways they try to conceal or deny that failure matters, not because of the past but because of the future. Having wreaked so much damage on our country, the Brexiters now want to do it one final disservice by preventing an honest appraisal of what they did, thus preventing us from finding any real solution to it.

Brexit: a mug's eyeful

When I was a teenager, after much saving up from my ‘Saturday job’ money, I bought my first ever stereo device, a portable radio cassette player (younger readers may need to consult a dictionary). Not only did it have – gulp! – two speakers, but a whole array of controls, lights, and little graphs printed on it, as if precisely measuring all sorts of important sound variables.

It was my pride and joy until I showed it to my brother-in-law, a marketing manager, who took one look at it, laughed, and said “that’s what we call a mug’s eyeful”. I had never heard the expression, but he explained it meant something which was made to look impressive with all sorts of superficial features but, not only did they have no real function, they disguised the underlying shoddiness of the product itself. And, indeed, he was right. The only control that served any purpose was the volume knob, and that soon broke, although not as soon as the cassette player began to mangle tapes, the aerial snapped, and the carrying handle fell off.

To anyone with any understanding of what it meant, it was obvious from the outset that Brexit was a mug’s eyeful. All the things which it was promised would follow from ‘taking back control’ were as illusory as the supposedly sophisticated controls on my pitiful boombox. Meanwhile, all the technical-sounding explanations, from the UK’s trade deficit guaranteeing a great deal to semi-digested factoids about, for example, GATT Article XXIV, that were littered throughout the Brexit prospectus were as meaningless and misleading as the pathetic fake graphs on its stupid plastic case.

Damaged goods

It is now four years since the UK actually left the EU, and, despite the government producing a predictably misleading though highly glossy anniversary brochure extolling ‘Britain’s Brexit success’, it is obvious to all but the most dull-witted or obtuse of Brexiters that it has been a failure. Nigel Farage said as much months ago. And just this week, Ben Habib – the creepy Brexit Party ex-MEP now standing for Reform in the by-election caused by creepy Brexiter Tory Peter Bone’s scandal-ridden demise – tweeted that those who voted for Brexit had “got nothing”. But of course, since they were the ones who sold this mug’s eyeful to a gullible public, they ascribe that failure to it not having been done properly. Thus Daniel Hannan, rather than apologise for his magniloquent visions of a post-Brexit utopia, discussed in last week’s post, can now only offer a threnody (£) for what might have been, but for “the Blob”, illustrated by a peculiar, and somewhat inaccurate, discussion of tariffs on Moroccan tomatoes.

And where once Brexiters petitioned for January 31 to be celebrated annually as ‘National Independence Day’, the best Roger Bootle, a one-time member of the ‘Economists for Brexit’ group, could come up with (£) was that it has not “brought the disaster that some other economists envisaged”. Underwhelming as that claim is, it was only achieved by the now-standard tricks of referring to parts of one of the pre-Brexit Treasury forecasts, whilst also dismissing as “elaborate guesswork” the various post-Brexit estimates of its costs.

Perhaps the nearest thing to an admission of their folly came in an article on the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) website, suggesting that “in retrospect, the libertarian argument supporting Brexit appears to have been fundamentally flawed in its understanding of the European Union’s nature and functions”. It’s the closest I’ve seen to a recognition that it’s not just that Brexit hasn’t led to the UK becoming ‘Singapore-on-Thames’, but that it was never likely to – something rarely acknowledged by either the libertarian Brexiters who wanted that outcome or, for that matter, by those anti-Brexiters who feared it was ‘the real agenda’ behind Brexit. It is also an interesting piece in revealing what to others is obvious, given their anti-state ideology, which is that libertarians never had any interest in the UK state ‘regaining sovereignty’, even though many of them opportunistically parroted that line.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, evidence of the damage of Brexit mounts up at an alarming, and possibly accelerating, rate. Recent examples are chronicled by Anthony Robinson for Yorkshire Bylines and Edwin Hayward in the New European, and I won’t try to cover them all here. But it is fitting that, around the time of this anniversary, the three biggest of them relate to very central parts of Brexit.

Trade in British and Canadian goods

The first is the stalling of the UK-Canada trade talks. This is important both in itself and for wider, partly symbolic, reasons. One of the things which I, and many other commentators, got wrong in the early days of the Brexit process was to think that it would prove very difficult, and perhaps impossible, for the UK to ‘roll over’ the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) made between the EU and various third countries, and especially do so on the same terms, and by the end of the transition period. In fact, this was largely achieved, usually maintaining similar terms and occasionally, as in the case of Japan, slightly improving them (although to little, if any, practical benefit according to the UK Trade Policy Observatory).

As regards Canada, a continuity agreement was reached in November 2020, but certain parts of it contained temporary provisions, the permanence of which formed part of negotiations for a new trade agreement to replace the continuity agreement, and it is these negotiations which have now broken down. This does not put an end to the continuity agreement in its entirety, although it was originally intended only to be an interim agreement, but it does mean that those parts which were temporary will lapse or have done so. The most high-profile example of the temporary provisions related to the quota for tariff-free exports of British cheese to Canada, which expired at the end of 2023, and to rules of origin for tariff application in the automotive sector, as well as, in rather more complicated ways, trade in beef and pork.

Along the lines that I suggested in my previous post, it is necessary to be careful not to treat this simply as a Brexit bad news story. After all, the main criticism of the new trade deals the UK has done with Australia and New Zealand was that, in its desire to demonstrate its ‘post-Brexit freedom’ the government had simply accepted any terms they were offered, regardless of their effects on, especially, British farmers. So this breakdown of talks with Canada, which was initiated by the UK, can be read as a sign of a less dogma-driven approach and, certainly, has been welcomed as the “right decision” by the National Farmers Union mainly because the alternative would have been to lower UK food standards, especially as regards hormones in beef, in exchange for tariff-free access for cheese.

Nevertheless, as the British Chambers of Commerce emphasised, it is a blow for British cheese exporters and also for car-makers, and a blow which is, specifically, a cost of Brexit since it was the continuity agreement which made temporary what, under the EU-Canada agreement, would have been permanent had Britain stayed in the EU. This may only be a small blow to the Brexiter claim that they would be able to rollover trade deals, but it is a much bigger blow to their proposition that, outside the EU, the UK could negotiate deals which fitted its specific interests rather than for those interests to be subordinated to, and diluted by, those of the EU and its members.

This matters, because the central plank of the Brexiters’ trade case is the freedom to have an independent trade policy, and it’s pretty much the only argument they have for not being in a customs union with the EU. The benefits of that freedom are never remotely going to outweigh the costs of leaving the EU single market – and it is a mystery why so many ‘free-trader’ Brexiters, like Bootle, continue to insist that those costs are very low, whilst also insisting that the benefits of trade deals could be high – but it’s not even clear that they outweigh the costs of having left the customs union.

It also matters in particular ways because the country in question is, specifically, Canada. On the one hand, that is significant symbolically given the idea held by ‘Ladybird Brexiters’ like Hannan, that Commonwealth countries and, especially, the ‘Dominions’, would fall over themselves to ‘renew old friendships’. That, and the associated ‘CANZUK’ fantasy, was based on a mixture of imperial nostalgia, ignorance about the modern nature of those countries, and quite breath-taking naivety about the tough realities of trade negotiations. On the other hand, it is significant practically, at least potentially, because Canada is a member of CPTPP and has yet to ratify Britain’s membership, something the Brexiters have made the centrepiece of their claims for the benefits of Brexit. As things stand, the Canadian government has said that this latest development will not affect CPTPP accession, but it is quite possible that it will revive opposition from Canadian farming lobbies to ratification.

Import controls on EU goods

The second big story is the next stage of the introduction of import controls on certain goods coming from the EU. It isn’t quite accurate to say, as some media reports do, that it is the beginning of such controls, because controls on some high-risk imports did start when the transition period ended. However, these latest controls on medium-risk goods, mainly cut flowers, fish, meat and dairy products, have been much delayed.

I discussed last week, as I have done in the past, what the likely consequences of their introduction will be, but one thing left hanging was what last week’s announcement about fruit and vegetables meant. My understanding now is that it moved most such produce into the medium-risk category, thus including it in the new paperwork requirements that started this week and the new inspection regime which will come into force at the end of April, but temporarily kept it as low-risk until the end of October, at which point fruit and vegetables, too, will require paperwork and be liable for inspection.

All of this will necessarily add to the costs of trade, and comes against a background in which already, according to a survey reported in the Financial Times this week (£), three-quarters of British firms who trade with the EU say that their sales and profitability have declined as a result of Brexit. The new controls will add to this burden, and, for consumers, adversely impact prices and choice, and probably shelf-life.

I also discussed last week why it is that import controls are necessary, despite some Brexiters still being unable to grasp this and, right on cue, up popped Jacob Rees-Mogg to squeak that introducing them is “totally stupid”, and that he had opposed doing so when Brexit Opportunities Minister (a post, be it noted, that no longer exists, and small wonder since it was the definition of a sinecure). That ignorance or dishonesty goes to the heart of why Britain was not ready to introduce the controls on time, for, astonishingly, it was not officially admitted by any government minister  –  Michael Gove – that they were inevitable until February 2020, after Britain had actually left the EU.

That in turn points to a deeper dishonesty. Anyone who understood the issue knew this from the moment that Theresa May explicitly confirmed that Brexit meant hard Brexit, in January 2017, and the government itself began to prepare for it from at least 2018. The reticence about telling the public was surely because, whilst there was even the thinnest chance of Brexit being abandoned, the government didn’t want to be open about what it meant.

Great Britain and Northern Ireland Internal Market goods

And finally, Northern Ireland, the hardy perennial of Brexit mess and dishonesty. That the Northern Ireland Assembly will resume sitting because the DUP have done a deal with the government is unalloyed good news. What that deal consists of and how it will play out in both practical and political terms is much less easy to assess, and no doubt I will write more about it in the future. Its detail was released by the government as a Command Paper entitled 'Safeguarding the Union' on Wednesday, parts of which need to be read in conjunction with a draft decision of the Joint Committee overseeing the Withdrawal Agreement (JCWA), released rather more quietly the evening before.

These documents are quite long and, in places, highly technical but my initial understanding* is that the changes are substantive in offering easements to border processes, especially on movements from Great Britain (GB) to Northern Ireland (NI). In very brief, the most important of these is to designate most goods (though not including most of those designated for further processing in Northern Ireland) moving between GB and NI as ‘low risk’, therefore exempting them from customs paperwork and removing routine checks if they come from companies signed up to the ‘Trusted Trader’ register and if they are destined never to leave NI.

Such goods will now be able to use the ‘green lane’ which, symbolically, but in a context where symbols greatly matter, is going to be renamed the UK Internal Market line. There is also some relaxation of processes and checks relating to products, including agrifood products, imported from the rest of the world so long as they are not at risk of entering the EU, and this also means that Northern Ireland will have the benefits (such as they are) of the UK’s independent trade policy.

However, the fundamental architecture of the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework remains unchanged. This is important, since it explains why there is very little indication, at least so far, that the EU (or, especially important, Ireland) are or will be unhappy with what has been agreed, though there was just a hint yesterday that that could change. Indeed, much of the Command Paper seems to be a restatement of the ways in which the Windsor Framework acts to make the Protocol more workable with, in some cases, proposals to ‘enshrine’ these in UK law by amending various pieces of legislation including the EU (Withdrawal) Act and the Internal Market Act.

Even so, aspects of the changes mentioned in the Command Paper and fleshed out by the JCWA document do amount to legal changes in the Windsor Framework, at least according to Sir Jonathan Jones (the former head of the Government Legal Service who resigned over the potentially illegal clauses of the Internal Market Bill) who surely speaks with authority. Actually, that in itself is an indication that what is under way is occurring within the Windsor Framework and in conjunction with the EU, and the Command Paper is explicit that some of its proposals will need further JCWA agreement. In other words, we do not seem to be back to the days of the Internal Market Bill, or for that matter the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, where there had been proposals for the UK unilaterally to change the terms of what had been agreed with the EU.

At the same time, that de facto legal changes have been made to the Windsor Framework could be regarded as a victory for the DUP, who say it confounds critics who had said this was impossible, but such changes do not affect the fundamental fact of there still being an Irish Sea border, claims by DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson notwithstanding. Nor do they change the fact of Northern Ireland still being in the EU single market for goods. This means that there continues to be some opposition to the deal from within the DUP, and even more from other unionist parties, most notably Traditional Unionist Voice. Perhaps all these changes amount to is a ladder for the DUP to climb down, knowing full well how limited they are. Or perhaps the DUP have been gulled into believing them to be more significant than they are. Nor are these two possibilities mutually exclusive, since it may suit the DUP to accept them now but, in the future, to declare that they were deceived. In this and others senses, the long-run impact on Northern Irish politics remains unclear.

Regulation of goods

There is also a UK political dimension, since these changes entail the use of Statutory Instruments and some legislation, the crucial pieces of which were passed yesterday. This haste was presumably in order to get a swift resumption of the NI Assembly, but that may, as has happened before in the Brexit process, lead to very technical things having been agreed without anyone quite knowing what they mean in practice. There is a particular question, which is already exercising Brexiters (£), about whether the implication of it all may be to make future UK divergence from EU rules harder. This is because part of the deal means that parliament will have to be told if any future UK legislation has “significant adverse implications for Northern Ireland's place in the UK internal market”, as regulatory divergence related to goods surely would.

The government has denied that this prevents future divergence, and to the letter of the law I suppose that is true, since such legislation could still be passed regardless of what it means for Northern Ireland’s place in the UK internal market. But were that to happen, it would (or could) immediately re-open the issue of what checks are needed for the Sea border. Equally, it’s clear that the DUP believe the deal ensures that there will be no dynamic alignment of EU law and Northern Ireland law, yet it is hard to see how that can be true (as regards goods) under the basic terms of the Protocol, so again it suggests that what it will mean in practice is the UK as a whole staying aligned with such law so that unionists can depict the situation as simply one of Northern Ireland being the same as the rest of the UK whilst, effectively, still following EU law.

To add to the confusion, what I have not seen discussed anywhere yet is what all this means for any passive divergence from EU regulations. That, by definition, would happen without UK legislation being passed, yet it, too, could have implications for the need for border checks. Might we end up with de facto ‘dynamic alignment’, at least for goods, through the back door and, if so, why not gain the greater advantages of doing so by de jure dynamic alignment? Might we even end up with something not so far from the ‘common rule book’ for goods and agrifood envisaged by Theresa May’s ill-fated Chequers Proposal?

In all of this, it bears saying that, apart from those technical changes to the Windsor Framework being agreed with the EU through the JCWA, the legal changes envisaged are solely changes to UK law. Some of these, as noted above, simply make explicit what is already in the Windsor Framework. This is utterly pointless, since the UK is already bound to these by its agreement with the EU.

Pointless in a different way (in that neither is an existing treaty obligation) are the commitments to legislate for the government’s existing policy of making ‘Not For Sale in the EU’ labelling mandatory across the UK, and to ‘enshrine’ in an Act of Parliament that no government will be permitted to agree a new Protocol with an adverse effect on Northern Ireland’s position in the UK Internal Market. But such legislation is effectively meaningless, given that no parliament can bind its successor. So, as with much – but not quite all – of this ‘Safeguarding the Union’ deal announcement, there is a great deal of fluff and rather less to it than meets the eye.

If that gets the Assembly up-and-running again, then all to the good. But there is much in it which remains unclear, practically and politically. Four years since leaving the EU, and over seven years since deciding to do so, the question of what Brexit means for Northern Ireland can still not be said to have a settled answer.

Utterly defective goods

It’s said you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. Brexit never fooled all of the people, and a poll this week found that only 13% of people think that Brexit has been more of a success than a failure. Even so, other polling shows that 33% still think Brexit was the right thing to do, the discrepancy presumably being explained by yet another recent poll showing that 26% think it was the right thing to do but that the government has handled it badly.

Given that a hardcore will no doubt always support Brexit, it’s that latter group, along with the many ‘don’t knows’ in all of these surveys, who are probably the key to where public opinion eventually settles. If and when these groups swing to the view that Brexit has not only failed but was never going to succeed the demand for a refund will grow, as will the demand for those who sold the public this mug’s eyeful to be held to account.

 

*For more detailed and, no doubt, better-informed analysis (though I don’t think it is incompatible with mine), see Professor Colin Murray’s post on the EU Law Analysis Blog.

Update (02/02/2024 at 10.40): One aspect of the Command Paper/ JCWA changes I was aware of, but didn’t discuss as I didn’t understand it, relates to Tariff-Rate Quotas (TRQs). This has since been explained by trade expert Sam Lowe in his latest Most Favoured Nation Substack. Interestingly, this somewhat contradicts what I said (and it was not my invention, it is what the NI Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris said in the House of Commons) said about how the deal would enable NI to benefit from the UK’s independent trade policy. At least as regards TRQs, this seems not be true (see Lowe’s comments about the UK-Australia trade deal). Perhaps this is an example of what I warned of about how all this is being passed very quickly with MPs and others possibly not understanding all of the implications?

Update (02/02/24 at 15.15): An update my previous update! Sam Lowe has now amended his Substack post to explain that NI will be able to use the new TRQs in FTAs such as UK-Australia. A reminder of just how complex some of this stuff is, even to the experts!

Evaluating Brexit, honestly

In last week’s post, I discussed the way that Brexit has embedded dishonesty in British politics. That is an easy diagnosis, but the treatment, let alone any cure, is more difficult, and poses challenges for all of us, including those who are opposed to Brexit.

When the transition period ended, I made a point which now has growing salience, namely that it was going to become increasingly difficult to separate out the effects of Brexit from things which might have happened in the same or similar ways anyway. That isn’t so much about the difficulties of counterfactual economic modelling, which can be addressed, at least in a rough and ready way. It’s more about how particular policy areas are affected by Brexit, given that in many or most cases they have become an amalgam of continuity and discontinuity with EU membership. That problem is compounded by the often complex issue of whether and to what extent, within particular areas, UK policy had actually been a result of its EU membership in the first place.

Honesty therefore requires critics of Brexit to be careful in disentangling the impact of Brexit from that of other issues. However, having done so, honesty also demands of Brexiters that they accept how this impact differs from the promises they made.

Import controls

Of course, there are still plenty of cases where there is no difficulty in identifying Brexit as the sole cause, even if the nature of the effects is more complex to unpick. Amongst current high-profile examples is the long-delayed full introduction of controls on imports from the EU, the next main substantive phases of which are due to begin next week. This has led to warnings of “border disruption” (£) next month, and of further delays, shortages and price rises for some fresh produce and plants when the next stage is implemented at the end of April [1]. (However, as I write there seems to be a possibility of a further delay of some aspects, following a very low-key and unclear government announcement this week of changes to risk categories of many fruits and vegetables, but with the implementation of controls for these products now set for the end of October. Initial media and industry reports are confusing, so watch out for clarification in the coming days.)

Regardless of when implementation occurs, it remains to be seen quite how dramatic or visible the effects will actually be, and this will partly depend on whether sufficient customs and veterinary staff have been recruited, with vet shortages, themselves, being another example of Brexit damage. It is certainly likely that, at the least, as happened in the opposite direction, when the EU introduced its import controls on UK goods, smaller firms will struggle most and, in some cases, simply give up on trade. Meanwhile, larger firms may well adapt to the new processes and absorb the extra costs, but with consequences for prices, the extent of product ranges or the availability of products at particular times. This will apply in various ways both to EU firms sending the exports and to the UK firms receiving them.

Equally, further postponement would bring its own damage, or at least danger of damage, in the form of continuing the increased risk of, especially, importing animal or plant diseases. For, as I’ve explained at length before, these risks have been increased by Brexit, rather than simply being unchanged because ‘the goods are still coming from the EU, and we didn’t have these controls before’. The columnist Simon Jenkins this week suggested that their introduction was down to Rishi Sunak trying to be “macho on Brexit” and that a Labour government should “rescind the controls immediately on taking office”. That’s idiotic [2], and replicates the idiocy of those Brexiters who think border controls are optional, rather than a necessary consequence of hard Brexit (and, to the extent that the UK has controls on non-EU imports, are ultimately a requirement of WTO rules).

There seem to be many people, not all of them Brexiters, who still don’t grasp these risks, but the government’s own announcement of the new controls makes it abundantly clear that biosecurity is a large part of what is at stake. Yet, astonishingly, the government also plans (£) to cut funding for border inspectors at Dover by 70% from April, whilst moving most checks to a new inland border check point at Sevington, over 20 miles away. The head of the Dover Port Health Authority has said that these cuts will “increase the threat to GB safety by an order of magnitude”, whilst the Sevington plan “is in effect opening a new door. We’re not taking back control of our border, we’re removing the border control”.

This is all squarely down to Brexit, and a direct falsification of all the promises made or implied that a free trade deal would (or even could) replicate the ‘frictionless trade’ and deliver ‘the exact same benefits’ as membership of the single market and customs union. However, other things which are currently on the Brexit news radar are much more difficult to describe in such unequivocal terms.

Medicine shortages

One example is the shortage of many medicines, especially those used for the treatment of epilepsy and diabetes. This has been widely reported, often with reference to Brexit as one of the causes. Such reports primarily highlight the fall in value of sterling since the referendum, making the cost of imported drugs higher. However, it’s not clear that the shortages are due to lack of affordability so much as to lack of availability and, at least in that sense, it is a global supply chain problem that is also affecting EU countries (though they may be able to protect themselves better through bulk-buying). It’s true that there is a policy to limit the growth of spending on branded drug products, but this was introduced in 2019, when the UK was still in the EU, so that policy isn’t in itself attributable to Brexit, even if it may have bitten harder because of sterling’s depreciation.

It’s also true that a Nuffield Foundation report highlighted possible disruptions to medicine imports because of border controls, but this was in December 2021 and so, although well after the end of the transition period, such import controls had not been introduced and, as just discussed, still have not been. There were also concerns about whether post-Brexit regulatory approvals for new medicines might be slower than as an EU member but, in fact, the government has decided to grant “near automatic approval” for drugs authorized by EU regulators. This, of course, is in itself an indication of the fatuity of the Brexiters’ ideas of regulatory independence, as I discussed in August 2021, when the idea was being mooted, and again in March 2023, when the policy was announced. But, that aside, it does mean that this isn’t an issue as regards the current shortages.

So in this area, it seems that Brexit is only one, and perhaps not the main, source of the problems. However, it certainly hasn’t done anything to help. Moreover, for better or worse, Brexiter promises to speed up the development of new drugs by removing the “absurd” red tape of the EU’s Clinical Trials Directive have, at least for now, come to nothing, except in the sense that rather than update UK legislation in line with the latest 2022 Directive the UK still operates effectively in line with the previous directive. Moreover, whilst the decline in the number of clinical trials undertaken in the UK began before Brexit, its continuation has been attributed in at least some part to Brexit.

Environmental regulation

Another topic currently in the media is that of environmental protections in general, and control of sewage discharges in particular, again frequently reported as linked with Brexit. Compared with the question of medicine shortages, this is an even broader policy area, and therefore even more difficult to assess, still less to generalize about. For example, as regards sewage, specifically, a recent policy briefing from the Institute for European Environmental Policy UK (IEEP UK), a respected and well-established sustainability think tank,  points out that “there is no divergence (yet) between UK and EU Law relating to sewage discharges”. And, on the other hand, even when it was in the EU the UK was sometimes in breach of EU regulations, suggesting that recent discharge scandals are not simply caused by Brexit [3].

However, more generally, It seems clear that there are several examples of actual or proposed divergence from EU standards, including passive divergence, none of which would have happened but for Brexit.  Whether each and every one of them is also retrograde is beyond my ability to assess, but I don’t think it can automatically be assumed that they are. For example, whilst the relaxation of EU rules on gene editing/ genetic modification, with the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act, 2023, is strongly opposed by some campaigners, others see it as a positive development, and it is even possible that the EU will move in a similar direction as part of a drive towards ‘sustainable’ agriculture. (Again this issue was discussed in more detail in a previous post, in February 2022, when the policy was still being developed.)

Nevertheless, looking at the overall picture, a summary report released this week by IIEP UK, whilst recognizing that some areas of divergence are “technical and complex in nature and difficult to assess”, shows “increasing incidences of divergence, some of which threaten to be consequential in their impact”, especially given anticipated changes to EU regulation in 2024. The report also identifies some areas where the UK has “flirted” with not just divergence but regression, including air pollution policy, and areas like chemicals and pesticides where the UK has been slower and less stringent in regulatory change than the EU. So, at the very least, we are a long way from the ‘green Brexit’ that Michael Gove promised in 2017 and 2018.

Steel job losses

The issue of the failed promises of Brexiters is also central to one of this week’s biggest news stories, the announcement of major job losses at the Tata steel plant in Port Talbot. Again this is a complicated story, which, despite some claims, doesn’t come down to being a consequence of Brexit or being nothing to do with Brexit. In the mix are the long-term decline of the British steel industry; the extent to which, whilst in the EU, the UK both did and  did not make full use of state aid and other support provisions which as a member it could have done; the extent to which the UK has greater scope for state aid since Brexit, given the Level Playing Field provisions of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, and the ways in which since Brexit it has both used state aid and not done so; the impact of not being within the EU-US steel tariff deal; the impact of the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM); and the impact of net-zero policies.

I’ve spent hours this week trawling though media and specialist reports, and I honestly can’t disentangle, or even see how it would be possible to disentangle, these and other issues so as to ascribe what is happening to Brexit, though that certainly doesn’t mean it can be completely separated from Brexit. But what I think can unequivocally be said is that Brexit has not in any way helped the steel industry, and this is where the failed promises made by Brexiters come in.

For instance, in 2016 Nigel Farage said that a vote to remain would mean the end of British steel industry – not quite the same as saying Brexit would save it, but certainly implying that – and Boris Johnson urged steelworkers, specifically, to vote leave, citing “EU rules” preventing cutting “steel energy costs” as the reason. Meanwhile, Michael Gove, speaking directly to a Port Talbot steel worker, again at least implied that post-Brexit state aid freedoms would benefit the industry. And the prospect of such freedoms was certainly central to the Lexiters’ case, something which, even though ostensibly pro-remain, Jeremy Corbyn agreed with, albeit that neither they nor he understood the subject.

I still have a vivid memory of seeing a TV vox pop conducted before, or possibly shortly after, the referendum with a voter in, I think, South Yorkshire. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a record of it, but the interviewee talked about how, before joining the EEC, the area had been dominated by steel and coal industries, and so leaving the EU would bring them back. The reason I remember it is because of the huge anger I felt realizing that decent people like this were being despicably conned, and that even as they held these unrealistic, but perfectly understandable and even noble, hopes, as early as 2012 Brexiters like Patrick Minford were glibly referring to the decline of coal and steel as a desirable template for post-Brexit manufacturing industry generally [4].

Evaluating Brexit

On all of the topics discussed in this post – import controls, medicines, environmental protection, and steel – there is much more that could be said than space allows here. For that matter, those with greater knowledge than me, or who have dug deeper into the details than I have, could undoubtedly identify all sorts of other Brexit connections. It is in the nature of Brexit that it threw so many spanners into the highly complex mechanisms under the legal and economic bonnet of the UK that identifying all its direct and indirect effects is all but impossible, and certainly impossible for any one individual. It’s this, along with the problem of disentangling what is and isn’t a Brexit effect, which makes evaluating it so difficult.

Some may think that such attempts at being fair-minded are misguided, not least because Brexiters have lied so much and continue to do so. Why not just say Brexit has made a mess of everything, and leave it at that? After all, there is a certain poetic justice in doing so when Brexiters spent years ascribing every ill to EU membership. Even so, I think there are good reasons to strive for fairness and accuracy, for two reasons.

The most general one is that the Brexit dishonesty that I discussed in last week’s post isn’t negated, but exacerbated, if it is replicated by anti-Brexiters. Secondly, there is a tactical reason. It becomes very easy for Brexiters to dismiss all the damage they have caused if their opponents make false or exaggerated claims about it. If they can genuinely show that some of these claims are false, it becomes easier for them dismiss those which are true. It also enables them to link post-Brexit criticism to their all too potent pre-Brexit ‘Project Fear’ accusation and, although much of that accusation was false, it’s true that the way that George Osborne, in particular, represented the pre-referendum short-term Treasury forecast gave them unnecessary ammunition. At all events, for me, personally, it is central to writing this blog to make it is as honest and accurate as I can [5].

All of which brings me back to my opening point, and the theme of this post. In some ways, the battle for the post-Brexit narrative that began at the end of the transition period has been lost by Brexiters, as opinion polls attest. But it is a battle which is far from over and, as time goes by, it will change in its nature, as the effects of Brexit become harder to disentangle from other factors. The Brexiters will try to exploit that, to deny or obscure its damage, but that is best countered by working even harder to establish and communicate the reality of what is happening.

Hand-in-hand with that is the need to keep hammering home the more fundamental point that Brexit was not supposed to lead to an endless debate about how bad it has been. It was not supposed to need justification by poring over statistics to declare that, by some dubious measure over some cherry-picked dates, it hasn’t been a disaster. It was promised as something which would make Britain unequivocally and self-evidently better. From that perspective, it’s nothing short of sickening to read how, in 2016, Daniel Hannan described what Britain would be like in 2025 if people voted for Brexit. It’s no good Brexiters constantly (and, actually, inaccurately) saying that ‘this was the biggest democratic exercise in British history’ and then expecting us to forget all those promises.

So in evaluating Brexit, the real test is whether it has delivered these promises – promises of specific, concrete, often economic, benefits, and not simply ‘sovereignty’ as an abstract ideal; promises sold using grotesque emotional manipulation, and made with no suggestion that they would take decades to transpire, or would have any downsides at all.

It is a test which Brexit has already failed, and looks set to go on failing.

 

Notes

[1] Politically, it is of note that the Labour Party are amongst those voicing these warnings. It is a further indication that, at least, they are serious in intending to seek an SPS agreement with the EU and, unless they are not serious about what would be needed to significantly reduce the border disruption, that implies a ‘dynamic alignment’ agreement as the EU Ambassador to the UK highlighted just this week (Labour are still ambiguous about this, as I’ve discussed in detail previously).

[2] Admittedly, Jenkins also advocates seeking to join the single market and to create a customs treaty with the EU, which would allow border controls to be dropped, but that does not justify his argument that they should, or could, be dispensed with immediately.

[3] However, there was a specific, albeit temporary, issue in 2021 about the relaxation of sewage treatment rules because of shortages of chemicals associated with post-Brexit shortages of lorry drivers.

[4] This doesn’t, however, mean that what is happening to Port Talbot now represents Brexit Britain following the path set out for it by Minford. He was advocating the complete, unilateral, removal of Britain’s tariffs (and, no doubt, though I don’t think he said it here, all state aid), so as to let manufacturing industry sink or swim. That has not happened.

[5] For those who may be interested, I have written an expanded explanation of this point which was originally going to be part of this post but for reasons of length and focus I have posted it separately.

Brexit has embedded dishonesty in British politics

There has been relatively little Brexit news over the last week or so, and perhaps the most significant was Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s high-profile Mansion House speech, in which he said “it is now obvious that Brexit isn’t working”. Drawing on research undertaken by Cambridge Econometrics, Khan stated that the UK economy as a whole is £140 billion, or 6%, smaller than it would have been without Brexit, of which £30 billion was foregone growth in London. According to the same research, by 2035, the value of goods and services produced in London will be 7.5% lower than it would have been without Brexit, and 10.1% lower for the UK as a whole, whilst investment for the UK will be a staggering 32.4% lower than it would have been.

The speech was significant for two reasons. The first is political. Khan just about stayed within the parameters of current Labour policy by calling for a “closer relationship” with the EU, but in suggesting the need for a “more honest and mature discussion” about the negative impact, and about the benefits of rejoining the single market, he strayed further beyond it than any other senior Labour politician. That won’t have any immediate impact – the politics of remain-supporting London are different from those facing Labour nationally – and Starmer’s current stance is arguably (in my view) defensible and unarguably here to stay for the foreseeable future*. But it is slender candle in the wind, which might kindle a greater flame in the future.

The second significance is the Cambridge Econometrics study itself. Inevitably, Brexiters were quick to try to rubbish it, such as in a ‘Briefings for Britain’ article (curiously, written in the first person but credited to Briefings for Britain collectively, so we’ll never be able to assess the author’s credentials). But the fact remains that there are now at least four major counterfactual estimates, from the CER, the NIESR, the OBR and, now, Cambridge Econometrics which all show that Brexit has been damaging, albeit with a range from GDP (or in the latter case GVA) being 4% lower than it would have been to 10% lower by 2035. Each comes from a credible source, each is independent, each uses a different modelling or calculating technique, and all show a negative impact. Yet, mysteriously, all of them are wrong according to the that small group of avowedly pro-Brexit economists who, as I’ve discussed before, persist in ignoring the counterfactual question in favour of various largely bogus comparisons with the EU, or the Eurozone, or individual EU countries.

Brexiter sophistry

It is especially hard to take this group seriously when one of its most active members tweets approvingly things like this week’s Express report of a “Brexit victory” because a West Midlands firm has won some new export orders. Good news, no doubt, but there’s nothing to suggest it has anything to do with Brexit. To the extent that such empty puff-pieces have any meaning at all, it is that they grow out of one of the most disingenuous rhetorical strategies of the Brexiters. One of the ways they dismissed warnings of the damage Brexit would do as ‘Project Fear’ was to create a flawed reductio ad absurdum, so that, say, warnings of reduced investment or reduced trade with the EU were rendered as claims that all investment or all trade with the EU would cease; or claims about the EU as a peace project were rendered as claims that leaving the EU would cause World War Three to break out.

Hence, now, as with the Express report of a new investment and export contract, any piece of good news can be misrepresented as discrediting the mispresented false claim that Brexit would mean no new investment or export contract. It is doubly dishonest since it also posits as the test of Brexit not whether it has had the positive effect that Brexiters promised, but whether it has not had a negative effect.

Similar sophistry greets the release of any and every report about Brexit. Thus, this week a report in the Telegraph (£), of all places, highlighted the impact of Brexit in eroding the global standing of the London stock market. Within it, quite reasonably and correctly, there was discussion of the way that Brexit is not the only factor. But, immediately, that got taken up by pro-Brexit social media accounts to show that claims it was all down to Brexit were false, even though no such claims had been made. And, again, all the Brexiter reaction was about attempts to downplay any Brexit damage rather than to argue that, in fact, Brexit had benefitted the stock market, as if the Brexiters had sold their project with the promise ‘it won’t be too bad’.

Brexiter failure to take responsibility

This failure to take responsibility for their failed project is now endemic. The latest trade figures show that the percentage of UK trade done with the EU is now higher than before the referendum, at about 53.3%. Cue for many to declare that this showed Project Fear disproven and Brexit justified once again (see, for example, many of the responses to this Tweet). But it means nothing of the sort. The explanation is that growth in trade with non-EU countries has been weaker than with the EU. This is the exact opposite of the central Brexiter proposition about trade, which is that the EU has a declining share of world economic growth and so, ‘unshackled from the corpse’ of the ‘EU protectionist racket’, the UK would re-orientate towards the fast-growing areas of the world.

That this has failed to materialize isn’t because the UK has not (or not yet) developed many major new free trade agreements, for example with the US or India. We shouldn’t by the way, let the Brexiters off the hook by saying ‘not yet’, given that David Davis, when Brexit Secretary, claimed “it will be possible to secure bilateral trade deals with the rest of the world that are larger than the value of the EU single market within two years”. But, timing aside, such deals just don’t, and can’t, make a massive difference: CPTPP membership is expected to lead to a 0.04% increase in GDP over 15 years, the Australia and New Zealand deals together 0.1%, and a deal with the US perhaps 0.16%.

In fact, the reason the Brexiter proposition has failed to materialize is because it was always a fallacy, for multiple reasons. Global economic development in previous decades has of course meant that in percentage terms the EU accounts for a declining share of world economic activity, but that doesn’t mean it is declining in absolute terms. Nor do fast growth rates in other countries mean that, even if their international trade grows at the same rate, the absolute value of increased trade with the UK necessarily grows very much (i.e. because it starts from a small base). And, in any case, whilst being in the EU assists trade with the rest of the EU, it does not preclude trading outside the EU.

Meanwhile, the basic observation of ‘trade gravity’ – that geographical proximity is a major weighting factor on where trade occurs, something denied by the Brexiter idea of ‘post-geography trading world’ – remains well-evidenced (this also makes Brexiter glee about the poor economic performance of e.g. Germany misplaced: whether in the EU or not it is bad news for the UK if its trading partners are in trouble). Indeed, that is borne out by these latest figures.

In fact, it looks likely that the impact of the pandemic, Ukraine and, now, attacks on shipping in the Red Sea are leading to a general trend to shorten supply chains and, therefore, to make regional economic relationships more important. The Brexiters can’t be blamed for not anticipating those events, but they can be blamed for making a major strategic error in not appreciating the economic and geo-political significance of regionalization. For that is not the wisdom of hindsight: it is exactly what I spelt out in detail in a post of January 2019 – before we left the EU, before the pandemic, before the Ukraine war, before the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. It’s not, as the Brexiters have it, that these kinds of events, rather than Brexit, are what have caused all our recent economic woes. It is that, on the one hand, unlike other countries, the UK has added Brexit to the list of negatives and, on the other hand, that such events illustrate the fundamental strategic flaw within Brexit.

It's worth saying that, assuming the UK starts to introduce full import controls on EU goods at the end of this month, we will see a new iteration of all these debates. Firstly, one consequence is likely to be that the figure of 53.3% for the share of UK trade done with the EU will fall a bit. That is because – to spell it out once again – increasing trade frictions will tend to make trade growth lower than it otherwise would have been. However, it won’t mean that the Brexiter ‘post-geography’ thesis is becoming vindicated. It will just mean that the relative gap between the rates of UK-EU and UK-ROW trade growth will have shifted. Secondly, using the same old trick as they did with Covid and Ukraine, we can expect the Brexiters to use the impact of the Houthi attacks to explain away the impact of import controls.

Brexiter lack of contrition

Of course, trade wasn’t the only way that Brexit was supposed to be beneficial. Domestically, it was supposed to see a re-balancing of the UK economy away from London, and away from financial services, both in itself and as the spur to the ‘levelling-up’ agenda. That was partly predicated on the anti-London sentiment that continues to define populist politics, but it was also a recognition of legitimate grievances about regional inequality and about the consequences of decisions, many taken by the Thatcher governments, to prioritise services, and especially financial services, as the key to future national prosperity. This re-balancing was supposed to mean that, whilst financial services would benefit from Brexit by being freed from EU bureaucracy, other sectors would benefit even more.

From that point of view, Brexit has also been an abject failure. The Cambridge Econometrics report was, understandably given its context, reported mainly in terms of what Brexit means for London. But, in the process, it revealed that, whilst damaged by Brexit, London is proportionately less damaged than the rest of the country, thus actually exacerbating capital-regional inequalities. That is mainly because, indeed, London has a more services-intensive economy, and international trade in services has been less affected than goods trade by Brexit.

So although, as the Telegraph report, and another this week, from recruiters Morgan McKinley estimating that there are 79% fewer newly open jobs in banking in London since the referendum, suggest that financial services have been damaged (and there’s plenty of other evidence to support this), this isn’t offset by any benefit for other sectors which, on the contrary, are as badly or even worse affected. Again it’s the opposite of what Brexiters promised. Again, the Brexiters were warned of this. And, again, it’s no defence for them to say that some of the warnings were for even worse outcomes than have so far transpired.

This also applies to non-economic issues and, of these, perhaps none more so than Northern Ireland and the politics of the peace process. Here, the warnings were clear, and made by senior politicians with direct and deep experience, most obviously John Major and Tony Blair, but they were shrugged off dismissively by Brexiters, including DUP Brexiters who called the warnings irresponsible scaremongering. Exactly how Brexit was going to play out for Northern Ireland couldn’t be said with certainty until the exact form Brexit took was known (and, to an extent, it still can’t be said with certainty). But that it would be de-stabilizing in some way or another was inevitable, if only because the fact that both Ireland and the UK were members of the EU enabled a crucial de-dramatization or blurring of issues of identity, identification, and allegiance.

As things have turned out, what it has meant in particular is the creation of an economic border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with all that means, at least symbolically, for the unionist community. That Brexit, and hard Brexit at that, was and is supported by unionist political leaders doesn’t negate that. And all communities of Northern Ireland are severely affected by the ongoing collapse of the power-sharing institutions and its consequences, of which this week’s mass public sector strike is one of the most serious examples.

For none of this is there the tiniest sign of contrition from any leading Brexiter, or even any admission of responsibility. On the contrary, their only response is to talk of Brexit having been ‘botched’, ‘betrayed’, or ‘not done properly’, even in those cases where they actually voted – as MPs or MEPs – for precisely the form of Brexit that we have.

The wreck of the Brexit government

Alongside all this lies the now hideous spectacle of the Tory government tearing itself apart, on clear display this week in its battle over whether to pass the disgusting and stupid Rwanda Bill in Rishi Sunak’s preferred form, or whether to add some even more disgusting and stupid clauses. At stake, here, is the bigger battle of the ‘Five Families’ or ‘Brexitists’ to slough off the last, moth-eaten, remnants of ‘traditional’ Conservatism. Or, to put it another way, the battle between those who would prefer to think, or at least prefer others to think, that they are not ‘the nasty party’ with those who are more than happy to be just that, and perhaps even think it a badge of honour.

That battle for the meaning of ‘real conservatism’ is, as I’ve argued many times before, inseparable from Brexit and, indeed, those castigating the party for not being ‘real conservatives’ are a perfect overlap with those who decry Brexit for not being ‘real Brexit’, just as there are parallels between Sunak’s plight now and Theresa May’s. I had thought that this battle would not be fully fought until after a general election loss, but it seems as if some within the ‘Five Families’ may be too impatient to wait, or perhaps that, as they pitched it this week (£), the impending loss of the election is what motivates them.

If so, it seems unlikely that they will be satisfied with anything Sunak may do in policy terms – fundamentally, they don’t think he is a real Conservative or a real Brexiter – and yet some, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg (£), seem to have recognized that ditching yet another leader before the election would be too ludicrous to contemplate. Certainly the tide went out on the Rwanda Bill rebellion, with only eleven Tory MPs – dubbed the ‘New Spartans’ by oddball ex-MEP David Bannerman – voting against the government. One rather amusing side-story was the beaching Lee ‘prolier than thou’ Anderson, who resigned as Deputy Chairman so as to be free to rebel, but then pulled out of voting against the government because some Labour MPs laughed at him (and perhaps because he could see how few were going to join him). The Brexitists aren’t yet ready, or able, to go in for the kill.

However, others, like Andrea ‘up yours’ Jenkyns, clearly think otherwise, and it can’t altogether be discounted that a new leader, calling a snap election, might not be able to snatch an unlikely victory. For one thing, there is a kind of febrile desperation in the air in Britain today, so that, faced with a choice between the uninspiringly cautious Keir Starmer and some novel, perhaps charismatic, Tory candidate, the electorate might just opt for the latter. For another thing, it wouldn’t be the first time such sudden surges in popularity have happened – remember Cleggmania? Quite who this charismatic Tory might be, I don’t know, but, after all, such things are in the eye of the beholder. Of course, it is equally possible that the Brexitists just don’t care about electability, and, as with political extremists of all sorts, ‘purity’ matters to them more than power. In a sense, we must hope that is true.

Crippled by dishonesty

If there is a guiding theme in this week’s post, it is how mired in dishonesty British politics has become. As with Britain’s economic problems, that dishonesty isn’t solely the result of Brexit but Brexit created a tipping point, embedding dishonesty to an extent from which it seems almost impossible to recover. Yesterday’s rebuke to the government from the UK Statistics Authority for its misleading use of asylum figures is just the latest example, along with the now almost routine ‘context additions’ (aka factual discredits) placed on posts on X from Sunak, or other government ministers, or government departments, or the Conservative Party. The lies and, at best, half-truths, just pour out daily.

This makes Sadiq Khan’s call for honesty both remarkable and marginal. We can’t, collectively, talk honestly about the most fundamental change made to our country’s entire economic and geo-political strategy. Indeed, we can scarcely talk about it at all. That can be blamed on the timidity of politicians, especially Labour politicians like Starmer who opposed Brexit, and surely know, quite as well as any of us, how damaging Brexit is yet are not able to say so openly. But, more fundamentally, it is the fault of the Brexiters, in both politics and the media, who have made honest discussion so difficult and toxic as to be impossible.

In doing that, they have ironically undermined Brexit itself. A habitual taunt aimed at ‘remainers’ is that they don’t trust their own country to run itself. But running our own affairs must mean, at a minimum, that the reality of those affairs can be openly and honestly discussed. Yet, with Britain having become, in their terms, an independent country, the Brexiters have created a situation where such discussion is impossible. I think the idea that EU membership means the EU running our country was and is utterly fatuous, but, looking at the terms under which the Brexiters have ensured we ‘run ourselves’ since leaving, it might be better if it did.

 

*I don’t think that point is affected by Rachel Reeves’ mention of the negative impact of Brexit this week which, although of note, seemed more aimed at the political chaos around the UK’s departure from the EU rather than at Brexit itself.

Update (23/01.24 at 10.54): Since writing this post, the article on the Briefings for Brexit website criticising Sadiq Khan and the Cambridge Econometrics study, which originally did not identify its author, has now done so. It is Robert Colville.