About this deal
It’s been a relatively quiet Brexit news week, with just the usual drip-drip of news about its negative impact on everything from the availability of au pairs to the production of strawberries to Brittany Ferries’ cross-channel freight volumes. As I remarked in a recent post, each individual piece of damage may be fairly small and easily dismissed, but the cumulative impact is ever-more alarming. The Political Editor of UnHerd, Tom McTague, comes to similar conclusions about Labour’s Brexit position, writing this week that Labour “finds itself in the enviable position of benefiting from the Tory party’s association with Brexit, but without having to actually risk reopening the old wounds of the referendum by pledging to re-join the EU”. McTague’s analysis is well worth reading, but the main way mine differs from his is that, at least on my reading, he thinks that, had the Tory Party proceeded differently, it need not have “lost its grip on the revolution”. I think it was always doomed to fail, though I don’t pretend to have known how that failure would play out (nor do I know how it will do in the future). But even that might have gone away in time had the actually effects of Brexit not proved to be so dire (confirming at least some, if not all, of the ‘Project Fear warnings). Again, it is this, rather than issues of loser’s consent, or weird psychological preferences, or vindictiveness, or elite plotting, or any of the other convoluted arguments being put forward, which explains why Brexit is still divisive and still contentious. So Jacobs may be right in saying of the present situation that “this is how Brexit dies”, but Brexiter MPs are doing all they can to prolong its life even if they, like Jacobs, recognize its failure. If so, that makes their actions even more despicable. That is very much a relic of the now barely mentioned‘Global Britain’ strategy, yet, as regards AI specifically, as recently as March of this year, in its policy paper introducing a consultation exercise that has still not been concluded, the government was talking hubristically of how “having exited the European Union we are free to establish a regulatory approach that enables us to establish the UK as anAIsuperpower.” Sunak’s latest ideas at least recognize that international regulation entails international agreement, rather than regulatory competition between unequal players.
Perhaps the answer to all this is that Frost is as useless at drafting resignation letters as he is at everything else. Because, despite a slimy eulogy in Conservative Home, and his own high estimation of his achievements, it’s important to recognize just what a failure Frost has been. He was the one who negotiated the NIP – the supposedly crucial difference to Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement – that he and Johnson later disowned. He also agreed the Political Declaration that they both disowned immediately. He negotiated the Trade and Cooperation Agreement which wasn’t, as he claims, something people said couldn’t be delivered but a thin agreement limited by the government’s own self-harming restrictions. The damage of that to UK trade has already begun, and will worsen when, from next week, UK import controls are introduced. Despite his supposedly ‘hard ball’ approach, Frost got precisely nothing from the EU that wasn’t on offer anyway. Add to that the poison that approach has contributed to the UK-EU relationship and, now, his jumping ship before the NIP talks are concluded and it makes for a record of lamentable incompetence, mediocrity and inadequacy. But for Brexit, and Johnson’s patronage, he would never have achieved any prominence at all. The idea of the UK as an AI regulatory centre is also more realistic than previous ideas about how, after Brexit, the UK might create regulatory regimes in all kinds of areas in the expectation of attracting businesses to the UK because of its regulatory regime and, in due course, that regulatory regime emerging as the global regulatory standard. That approach was set out in the government’s January 2022 paper ‘The Benefits of Brexit’ (see, especially, pp. 24-29), as indicated by sub-headings such as ‘a sovereign approach’, ‘leading from the front’ and ‘setting high standards at home and globally’.Meanwhile, the two main strands of Brexit politics, those of the Northern Ireland Protocol and the EU Retained Law Bill, drag on undramatically, yet with the capacity to unleash crisis and chaos in the near future. Both are dominated by the never-ending toxicity of the internal dynamics of the Tory Party. As a result, they are doomed to conclude that Brexit isn’t working ‘as it should’ because it ‘hasn’t been done properly’ and that it hasn’t been done properly because it has been ‘betrayed’. Yet at the very same time they continue to be surprised that those who never supported it remain unpersuaded. That applies especially strongly to those, like Farage and Tice, who endlessly rant about how Brexit has been betrayed. There is an obvious contradiction, if not an impossibility, in simultaneously denouncing Brexit for not having delivered its promises and expecting those who always knew those promises were bogus to cease denouncing it. To put it another way, Brexit leaders and commentators can hardly tell leavers that they have been defrauded by Brexit and expect to convince remainers to get behind the very fraud they are complaining about.
Towards the end of Gudgin’s article is another version of the losers’ consent theme, but this time making one of the most persistent, and the most pernicious, claims within the Brexiter canon, that remainers in parliament “attempt[ed] to subvert the result of a legally-conducted referendum”. It's manifestly untrue. When was this attempt made? Well, it’s still early in the day and, as I remarked last week, a Friday morning blog can get caught out, so perhaps, later in this anniversary day, we will see all of these things. But it’s not likely, and if it happens then it will be very different from the recent tenor of Brexit discussion. What we see instead is a mixture of defensiveness and blame-shifting and, most striking of all, a growing tendency for Brexiters to focus attention not on Brexit itself but on ‘remainers’. It can also be said that, whilst there is no clear consensus on what a ‘closer relationship’ should be, there is at least an implicit consensus for a closer relationship outside of the EU and the single market. This needs to be phrased very carefully: of course, there isn’t a consensus view for that as the preferred option, but it is difficult to imagine that anyone who preferred to re-join the EU, or preferred to re-join the single market, would actually object to closer ties without doing either. Ultimately, that will matter a lot for British politics, but in one way at least it will be less immediately damaging than what we are currently living through. For this latest eruption of instability and infighting within what is, for now, the governing party has to be counted as the latest instalment of the political and reputational damage wrought by Brexit. The crucial question is whether it will also prove a cathartic moment? Could it, indeed, a be a further sign that, as I tentatively suggested in March, Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ has broken?The second reason why the ongoing contestation over Brexit is of interest is because, again simply by virtue of being ongoing, the context of it has changed. In particular, the debate about Brexit is now inseparable from the next General Election, and the, at least at present, languishing prospects of a Tory victory. The Brexiters are scared that, as a result, time is running out for them. But Craig’s new angle is to suggest that it is still relevant. He argues that ‘Project Fear’ shifted votes to ‘remain’ in the closing days of the campaign, making the ‘leave’ win much tighter than it would otherwise have been. This, he says, means that compared with the 60-40 win for leave that he believes could otherwise have occurred, the 52-48 win was less amenable to ‘losers’ consent’, and more likely to enable “conspiracy theories to flourish”, accounting for the continuing divisions. This book confirms Chris Grey’s status as one of the most acute and authoritative analysts of Brexit. Forensically detailed yet approachably written, this fully updated edition provides invaluable perspective on what looks destined to become one of the greatest public policy disasters of the twenty-first century. If you want to understand why, there really is no better guide to the whole sorry mess.” Tim Bale, Professor of Politics, Queen Mary University of London That inflects their position on things like, especially, the Retained EU Law (REUL) Bill, with the idea that this may be the last chance to embed de-alignment from the EU, and the Northern Ireland Protocol negotiations. There are two aspects to this. One, for the true believers, is that they think that passing REUL Bill and achieving what they think is possible in terms of scrapping the Protocol or, if not, having a major conflict with the EU (and it looks as if they will have to decide which way to jump very soon) will help to protect the Tories from a resurgence of the Reform Party, potentially led again by Farage, and/or from high levels of abstaining from disaffected leave voters. It also undoubtedly underpins the central emphasis the Tories are placing on their ‘stop the boats’ message. Beyond that, though, is the whole question of ‘losers’ consent’. It’s true that some have focused on improprieties in the 2016 vote, including not just the conduct of the campaign but funding and possible Russian interference, though it’s not clear that a wider margin in the result would have assuaged those concerns rather than magnified them. But that wasn’t the biggest complaint. Far more important was the fact that what ‘leaving the EU’ meant was not specified by the referendum, so what the losers were being asked to consent to was only defined retrospectively. That would still have been a complaint, and an equally legitimate one, whatever the margin of their defeat.
Despite these differences, there is within this the very slender basis of a political consensus: whatever they ascribe it to, a miserable 9% of the public think that Brexit has been a success. Far from solving any of Britain’s problems, Brexit is now itself a problem in need of a solution. So what might the solution be? Yet, so far as I know, not a single high-profile Brexiter has publicly said such a thing. Will any of them ever have the courage and honesty to do so? Or will they continue to chunter on that all would have been well had true Brexit been delivered, even as historians begin to write epitaphs to their lies and hubris? Will they go to the grave unrepentant, even as the ashes of their failed project are scattered to the winds? The very obvious counter to all this, apart from the fact that the Committee’s report was unanimously agreed by its members who included Brexiters, lies in the composition of the Commons vote on whether to accept its findings and recommendations. It’s true that, shamefully, some 225 Tory MPs chose to abstain*, including, disgracefully, Rishi Sunak whose weak leadership has been plainly exposed, and another seven voted against. That is a terrible reflection on the willingness of Johnson’s supporters to pervert important democratic safeguards, though listening to some of their contributions to the debate it wasn’t always clear they even understood what the vote was actually about. For example, Lia Nici, holding the report containing all the evidence in her hands, declared that there was no evidence of Johnson’s wrongdoing on the wholly extraneous grounds that she had once been one of his Parliamentary Private Secretaries. Yet if successful completion was denied him by Johnson’s change of heart, then why not say so in his letter? It would have been far more damaging to Johnson had he said, in terms, that the Prime Minister was undermining gaining full freedom from the EU rather than, as he did, pronouncing that Brexit had now been securely done. If, on the other hand, he didn’t want to damage Johnson then why use the resignation letter to criticize the government at all? Why, indeed, resign at a time when, on so many fronts, the government is in crisis unless the intention was to cause maximum damage? But if that was the intention, then why not turn the knife by loudly saying that Johnson was ‘caving in’ to the EU, and betraying the sovereignty of the UK? It is the refusal of Brexiters to accept that which explains how their original obsession with leaving has now shifted to an obsession with remainers. That in turn is part of the attempt to show that Brexit has been ‘betrayed’ or ‘not done properly’ or ‘done in name only’. Taken together, it creates a vicious circle. The more that Brexiters themselves decry the Brexit we actually have, the less reason there is for the public, including leave voters, to support it, and the less the public support it, the more Brexiters turn their ire on remainers.
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Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the EU divided the nation, unleashing years of political turmoil. Today, many remain unreconciled to Brexit whilst, in a tragic irony, some of those most committed to it are angry and dissatisfied with what was delivered. Many of those might say that there is no point in it, on the basis that it won’t make enough, or any, difference, but that wouldn’t be to object to doing it per se. Conceivably, some of those might say that doing so might, by ameliorating the damage of Brexit, undermine the momentum towards re-joining, and object on that basis. But anyone making that objection would at least implicitly be accepting that following this option would‘make a difference’, as otherwise it could not adversely affect the case to re-join. Perhaps it is enragement about this which explains why so much Brexiter energy is directed at insulting remainers. Ever since the referendum result some Brexiters have seemed to enjoy the hurt and anguish it has caused remainers more than they do Brexit itself, which in itself has contributed to keeping all the divisions alive. That is even more the case now when, even in seeking to defend Brexit, they do not invite everyone, leaver and remainer alike, to relish its supposed success, but frame their argument in terms of humiliating Brexit’s critics. So it is really the anticipated Labour government which matters. Quite how far that government will choose to seek, and more importantly be able to agree, closer relations with the EU remains to be seen. But there are quiet noises that Starmer is getting bolder, and that Labour will try to maximise the closeness of ties with the EU, within the considerable limits of remaining outside the EU, single market and customs union. The reason why all this analysis is so full of questions and imponderables is because Johnson’s position is now so weak, and because events around him are moving so fast. Thus it is perfectly possible that when Frost decided to resign (which appears to have been early in December) the Prime Minister was set on averting conflict with the EU, perhaps because of fears it would lead to a trade war and to opposition from the US President. At that time, the ERG were in an especially weak position because they had driven the fiasco over the attempt in late November to save one of their own, Owen Paterson, from punishment. From this, so many of Johnson’s current woes have flowed, including the loss of the North Shropshire by-election.