Pragmatism, competence, policy, and law

20th September 2022

Day-to-day politics have returned, and there was an interesting admission from the Prime Minister:

New – Ahead meeting Biden in NY tomorrow, @trussliz admits no UK/US trade deal is on the horizon. Clearly true, but also an attempt to break narrative that if she doesn't do a deal on the NI Protocol, she'll be punished by Biden and there won't be an FTAhttps://t.co/AcYdp590GW

— George Parker (@GeorgeWParker) September 20, 2022

The content of this admission is not, in and of itself, any surprise.

There will be no trade deal with the United States in the foreseeable future – indeed there may not even be trade negotiations for such an agreement.

But.

The surprise is that this is being openly admitted by any minister, let alone the Prime Minister.

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Other Brummie solicitors will be hating this:

So that's trade deals with both the US & Oz in the bag. Remoaners must be hating this.

— Lord Digby Jones (@Digbylj) July 11, 2017

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Of course, one reason for this admission may be tactics.

The United States can hardly use a trade deal as leverage in respect of their concerns over the Northern Irish Protocol if we say those Californian grapes are already sour.

You can see the point of such a tactic, even if you do not see any merit in it.

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Another recent deft government manoeuvre, which was not widely noticed, was the government not carrying through the nomination of the controversial Christopher Chope to the committees investigating the conduct of departed Prime Minister Boris Johnson:

Government has not moved the motions on Sir Christopher Chope joining the privileges committee and the standards committee

— PARLY (@PARLYapp) September 6, 2022

A further tactical switch was the dropping of the attempt to repeal the Human Rights Act, which was going to take up a lot of parliamentary time and departmental resources and still get stuck in the House of Lords.

As this blog suggested, this dropping of the bill is likely to be replaced by smaller illiberal changes to other legislation, rather than through one big bang Act of Parliament.

And today also saw indications that the government’s commitments are weakening to “privatising” Channel 4 and the awful Online Safety Bill.

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Taking these incidents together, one could form the impression that the government is becoming more pragmatic.

If so, this would be a welcome to change to the bluster of the Johnson period, where unforced errors were freely made, and as loudly as possible.

But.

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Tactics, of course, are not the same as strategy – or overall tone.

Even when there are this micro-changes to the business of government and the process of legislation, the macro politics seem unchanged.

In particular, the “cake-ism” of the government’s Brexit policy – and of its promised tax policy.

The government is also maintaining the fiction that the Northern Irish Protocol bill is “necessary”.

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The new deputy Prime Minister Thérèse Coffey (who – disclosure – I happen to have known since university) was last week roundly and rightly mocked for her apparent new departmental guidance on the Oxford comma.

(The punctuation in the title of this post is deliberate.)

But perhaps more interesting from a policy perspective was what else was in that guidance:

But tellingly message also suggests "all submissions should go to junior minister ahead of SoS" – a sign she will be so busy as deputy PM that much will be delegated

Also she "likes slides (no more than 8) to structure meetings and "a maximum of 4 officials" so everyone speaks

— Chris Smyth (@Smyth_Chris) September 15, 2022

This is sensible stuff for any minister in charge of a medium-sized or large department.

It should be the minimum standard required – but one suspects hyper-active and unfocused minsters have been trying to do everything and ending up doing nothing.

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Tactical improvements are of little use or value if the overall strategy is misconceived.

Neither Brexit nor solving the cost-of-living crisis will be “done” by the government’s current approach.

Avoiding easy mistakes will not be enough with the hard policy problems ahead.

That is also the minimum requirement of governance.

And it is a measure of how bad politics – and policy – have been that these simple changes are conspicuous enough to be welcomed.

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This blog said that it would give the new Prime Minister a clean slate – although some under the line thought this was too generous.

And it is still very early days: the Prime Minister has been office less than two weeks, and that has included a period of national mourning.

The early signs are that there may be marginal improvements.

But the big blundering is still there.

And although we should always remember that there is no one way of governing well, we should note there are many ways of governing badly.

This should be obvious to capable politicians, Elizabeth Truss and Thérèse Coffey.

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I wrote about the Oxford comma legal case on the day Theresa May triggered Article 50 and the FT’s readers rated their relative importance. pic.twitter.com/nVttkkw5jc

— Michael Skapinker (@Skapinker) September 16, 2022

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