Category: Brexit

A “Swiss-type” post-Brexit arrangement with the European Union for the United Kingdom?

21st November 2022

We had another Sunday special this weekend:

The newspaper considered the story so important that it was splashed on their front page:

You may have prejudices – indeed Very Strong Opinions – about political journalists and Sunday newspapers, but the starting assumption here must be that the reporters and the editor believed this story had sufficient substance so as to warrant such prominence.

The story would not have been invented.

If you look at the report, the basis for the story is as follows:

And:

Reading this closely we can note that (a) this is set for the “next decade” rather than an immediate policy and (b) the source(s) quoted is(/are) not said to be ministerial level.

Although “ministers” are said to be “confident” about the “thaw”, the “senior government sources” in favour of this Swiss-type arrangement would appear to not to be ministers.

Had it been ministers, the newspaper would presumably have said so.

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Many readers of this blog will also have Very Strong Opinions about a Swiss-type arrangement.

I have two initial responses.

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The first is that this was another example of British exceptionalism and unilateralism, with the assumption that just because the United Kingdom wants something, it will get it.

Perhaps we can click our fingers and speak loudly and slowly in English as we demand this arrangement.

There seems no realisation that any agreement requires all parties to agree, and there is no indication that the European Union would want a Swiss-type relationship with the United Kingdom.

The European Union does not even want a Swiss-type relationship with the Swiss.

A Swiss-type relationship requires a number of discrete agreements to be negotiated and implemented in respect of sectors and subjects.

The European Union would be unlikely to have the patience or the inclination to deal with the United Kingdom, with the latter’s still-raw post Brexit politics and continuing governing party psychodrama, in such a fiddly manner.

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But.

My second response was a mild cheer.

Regardless of the impracticality of the suggestion, it at least showed a glimmer of realism in Whitehall that the United Kingdom does need to re-think its relationship with the European Union internal market and for that relationship to be placed on a better footing.

And if we read carefully, this was not a demand for action tomorrow, but a proposal for the direction of travel over the next ten years.

The source is correct that “it is overwhelmingly in the businesses interests on both sides”.

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But, but.

Today’s political news has been about the government denying this report.

I suspect that this denial is true too, on its own terms.

This denial is not incompatible with the actual words of the source quoted above, given Sunak and his government are unlikely to still be in power in three years’ time, let alone in ten years.

The commercial and economic pressures for a closer and more sustainable relationship will continue.

The politics, of course, are toxic – but there are at least two general elections in the next ten years.

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The preference of this blog is, as many of you will know, for a close association between the United Kingdom and European Union, with shared institutions and agreed processes, which would allow us to participate in the internal market.

(“But that will mean we are ‘rule-takers!’ “ will comment Pavlov’s commenters, not caring that we are now very much rule-takers in our current predicament.)

And such an association is better done as a single agreement rather than many Swiss-type bilateral agreements.

The politics in the United Kingdom will need to settle down before this can happen.

But the commercial and economic case will continue to be there, getting stronger and more compelling with each economic quarter.

Piloting the United Kingdom to such a relationship, and convincing the European Union that it is sustainable to agree it with us, is the great challenge for United Kingdom statecraft over the next decade.

That, and the great challenge of even keeping the United Kingdom together in one union.

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Gordon Gekko, “Bloatware”, and Retained EU law

16th November 2022

There is a scene in the film Wall Street which almost gets you nodding-along with, if not cheering on, Gordon Gekko.

The scene is very carefully done.

It is a company’s annual stockholders’ meeting, and Gekko is about to speak from the floor.

You will know what he says.

But what you see is a stage full of non-plussed people in suits:

“Teldar Paper has thirty-three different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analysing what all these guys do, and I still can’t figure it out.

“One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents.”

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The point is – or seems – inarguable.

And having got his audience – and us – onside Gekko then subverts us with his “greed is good” exhortation.

(Though even then he has to slip in “for lack of any better word” to make the sentiment expressed palatable.)

And if you find yourself thinking “but actually…”, just think of those thirty-three vice presidents all on that stage.

You cannot help but think he may have a point – doesn’t he?

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Of course: that scene is a combination of clever writing and clever visual rhetoric.

And it is easy to depict things as, in effect, bloated – and to get claps and cheers.

But sometimes what appears bloated has a less obvious purpose.

Take, for example, the new owner of Twitter.

This is a tweet from him:

And this is what then happened:

Whoopsie.

Many who logged out of Twitter could not log back in, and so if you wanted to retain access you could not log out.

Or as Rorschach once put it:

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The word “bloat” in this context is pejorative – a term used instead of thinking.

Just seeing a lot of something you don’t understand and do not like, and characterising (indeed, caricaturing) that something as “bloatware” is not enough.

There may be all sorts of hidden and semi-hidden things which are important, if not critical.

That is why a slow, methodical case-by-case approach is needed.

Else you can inadvertently turn-off something that matters, like Musk’s new Twitter did with phone-based authentication.

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And now we come to our old friend, the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill.

The premise of this Bill is that the mass of European Union law that still has effect in the United Kingdom is bloatware.

One can imagine a certain kind of government minister gleefully tweeting:

“Part of today will be turning off the EU retained law bloatware. Less than 20% is actually needed for the United Kingdom to work!”

Or another minister posing in front of thirty-three shelves of regulations, instead of thirty-three corporate vice presidents.

Some would be tempted to nod – perhaps even you.

But.

As this blog has averred before, a lot of retained European Union law is important and beneficial, and we negotiated and implemented it ourselves.

A great deal serves a function – even if it will take time and effort to ascertain what that function is.

Perhaps some of it is statutory bloatware and can be safely discarded.

Yet the moral of Musk and authentication is that gusto is not enough.

Caution – for lack of a better word – is good.

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Getting any quick international trade deal is easy, if you give in to the other side

15th November 2022

There is one way to get a “quick win” international trade deal.

That way is to just give in to what the other side want, but without gaining anything of equal value in return.

It really is quite easy.

All you have to do is turn up to the negotiation, ask what the other side’s negotiators want, give it to them, and – Hey Peston! – the United Kingdom has a trade agreement.

It is as easy as falling off a eucalyptus tree.

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This week in the House of Commons there was a debate on the Australian trade deal.

In that debate the former minister George Eustice said (and this should be read carefully):

“…the Australia trade deal is not actually a very good deal for the UK, which was not for lack of trying on my part.

“Indeed, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, there were things that we achieved, such as a special agricultural safeguard for years 10 to 15, staged liberalisation across the first decade and the protection of British sovereignty in sanitary and phytosanitary issues.

“It is no surprise that many of these areas were negotiated either exclusively or predominantly by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on behalf of the UK team, but it has to be said that, overall, the truth of the matter is that the UK gave away far too much for far too little in return.”

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It gets worse:

“…we should not set arbitrary timescales for concluding negotiations.

“The UK went into this negotiation holding the strongest hand—holding all the best cards—but at some point in early summer 2021 the then Trade Secretary my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) took a decision to set an arbitrary target to conclude heads of terms by the time of the G7 summit, and from that moment the UK was repeatedly on the back foot.

“In fact, at one point the then Trade Secretary asked her Australian opposite number what he would need in order to be able to conclude an agreement by the time of the G7.

“Of course, the Australian negotiator kindly set out the Australian terms, which eventually shaped the deal.”

Ooof.

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As regular readers of this blog will note, this idiotic approach to negotiations was pretty much also that adopted by the government of the United Kingdom with the withdrawal and relationship agreements with the European Union.

Instead of taking negotiations seriously, there were artificial deadlines imposed for domestic and media political consumption, regardless of the quality of the agreement.

In essence: the government of the United Kingdom did not and does not take international agreements seriously.

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Part of this lack of seriousness is down to faux-nostalgia.

The notion that because nearly two hundred years ago the United Kingdom could go around the world agreeing trade deals on its own terms.

The idea that, like some latter-day Richard Cobdens, we can pop across the channel and agree a free trade deal, and still be back for tea.

Indeed, the very phrase “international trade deals” is invoked and bandied about by supporters with Brexit with misty-eyed sentimentality.

Being able to enter into such agreements was, it was claimed, one of the advantages of Brexit.

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But.

International trade agreements are not creatures of sentiment.

International trade negotiations are perhaps the most hard-headed, unsentimental things one can imagine in the commercial world.

Indeed, international trade law is commercial law for grown-ups.

Any real benefits gained from such a deal are hard-negotiated and will come at a cost elsewhere.

And a benefit, in any case, may only have an overall marginal economic effect.

For forty-five years, the United Kingdom benefitted from the experience and expertise of the European Commission in negotiating trade deals, with the commission being able to deploy the clout of the single market and twenty-eight member states.

In this way, the commission were able to negotiate deals with mattered and were worth having.

That has now been thrown away, with the United Kingdom leaving the European Union’s common commercial policy and internal market.

What we have now have instead are bravado and bluster, and Elizabeth Truss asking what the other side want so that we simply can give it to them.

And we also have the moral hazard of Boris Johnson and David Frost agreeing to the Northern Irish Protocol and then saying we will renege on it.

We could not be in a less impressive place on the world stage.

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Yes, perhaps, Eustice should have resigned rather than go-along with what he knew to be a bad trade agreement with Australia.

Perhaps.

But it is a Good Thing that he has set out the real position now on the floor of the House of Commons.

The United Kingdom, in a post-Brexit world, is going to learn slowly and painfully that the superficial approach of Johnson and Truss to international agreements is disadvantageous.

Well, at least the limitations of this approach are becoming apparent.

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What does it mean to “take (back) control” of a border?

14th November 2022

Brexit, we are told, was about “taking back control” – of our borders, our money, and our laws.

Yet, if you read the news, it would seem the United Kingdom is less in control of its borders than it was before we departed the European Union.

It would seem that simply declaring that we were “taking back control” was not enough for us to, well, take control.

A less-than-a-moment’s thought should explain why.

It is difficult, if not almost impossible, to have absolute control of a border from one side alone, if a significant amount of people want to cross that border.

In extreme situations, of course, resorting to coercion and lethal force can give the impression of control, at least in the immediate term.

But for there to be effective and sustainable control of a border usually requires those on both sides to cooperate.

As such, the simplistic unilateralism of “taking back control” will not work in practice.

And it is thereby not surprising that the current home secretary has had to agree with France a form of cooperation about the channel crossings.

Though, as Zoe Gardner points out on Twitter, this is not the first time such a thing has been announced:

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Another misconception is that deterring those crossing the channel will work.

That one can remove the “demand”.

That by threatening people with flights to Rwanda or keeping people in horrible conditions the United Kingdom will somehow reduce the number of those seeking asylum here.

The demand seems, to further use economics jargon, “inelastic”.

All that appears to be happening is that, by using various hostile, inhumane and illiberal measures, is that the same number of people are still coming – but we are treating them less well.

The “push factor” does not seem to care about our unpleasant ways.

And there is little that the United Kingdom can do to directly address the “push factor”.

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So what we have are high significant numbers of asylum seekers.

[Word ‘high’ replaced, as some commenters complained it was misleading.]

What should be done?

Well, as Gardner further says, the dealing with the actual claims themselves should be the priority:

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What we can take control of is not our border – but our internal processes, and how well those processes are resourced.

That is what is within our control.

Anything else either requires sincere international cooperation or is outside of our or any other receiving country’s direct control.

And that is control we cannot take – either “back” or otherwise.

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Removing all the European Union law in the United Kingdom may be a practical process on which the sun will never set

8th November 2022

Back in August 2016, a month-or-two after the Brexit referendum, I wrote the following at the Evening Standard:

“So extensive are the EU ties which bind the UK that they take at least a political generation to untangle. Gus O’Donnell, the former head of the UK civil service, has pointed out that it took Greenland, with a population less than Croydon and with only the issue of fish, three years to leave the old EEC. And in the Eighties the EEC was a far less complicated entity than the modern EU.

“Thousands of UK laws — nobody knows exactly how many — are based on EU law. Many of these laws only have effect because of the European Communities Act, which would need repeal or substantial amendment. Some of the laws have effect without any UK-implementing measure.”

The phrase I want to emphasise here is “nobody knows how many”.

Six years later, still nobody knows how many laws of the United Kingdom are based on the law of the European Union.

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This situation has to come to prominence because of the daft notion of the current government that somehow all the laws of the United Kingdom are based on the law of the European Union can be identified and replaced at speed.

The entire exercise is ludicrous, as well as probably impossible.

The idea can only have been conceived by someone with no real idea of how entangled domestic and European Union law was by 2016 (or 2019-2020, when we actually departed in practice).

It is not a question of simply going to a database and using the right search terms – say to find all the regulations made under section 2 of the European Communities Act 1972.

Even with those regulations many were revoked or amended other regulations –  so that, without considerable time, you would never know the full extent of the entanglement.

Regulations were also made under other statutes, and much European Union law took effect without needing any local enactment at all.

And the important thing to note is that at the time – 1973 to 2016 – nobody ever thought the whole thing would need to disentangled, and so nobody thought to keep any track of it.

This is why, with the hurried departure of the United Kingdom after the referendum, the whole problem was kicked into the the future with the notion of “retained European Union law”.

Such a disentanglement could not be done at speed before departure, and for the same reason the disentanglement cannot be quickly done now.

It matters not that some politician confidently asserts that “something needs to be done” by some artificial “sunset” date.

And to the surprise of nobody who knows about European Union law, entire tranches of European Union law are still being found:

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It will take a long time – perhaps decades, perhaps never – to unwind all the European Union law that had effect in the United Kingdom and replace or revoke it.

That is not a pro- or anti- Brexit statement, but the simple fact of the matter.

Some of these laws were championed by the United Kingdom when a member state of the European Union.

Some of the laws were hard-fought triumphs by United Kingdom ministers and officials.

Some of the laws are good and beneficial, and some are not good and need removing.

But this can only be done on a slow, methodical law-by-law basis.

As I averred back in August 2016: it may take at least a political generation.

The moment this is realised and accepted by the current government then we may be moving into a practical rather than an ideological understanding of our post-Brexit predicament.

That realisation, however, may itself take a political generation.

It is even likely to be a process on which the sun will never set.

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Brexit, revisited – and a non-apology

4th November 2022

When I posted a correction yesterday, I got this comment in the moderation box:

Gosh.

Mistakes come in different forms: mistakes of attribution (such as the one corrected) are mistakes of fact, but there can also be mistakes of judgement and reasoning, and even mistakes of principle (either in their assertion or in their application).

And the mistake alleged here was one of those broader forms of mistake.

Should I recant?

Should I admit that I am wrong as alleged?

Well.

No.

The position remains (excuse the pun) that I have no ultimate objection to Brexit.

By which I mean I have no ultimate objection to the United Kingdom not being a member state of the European Union.

I do object – fundamentally – to the United Kingdom being outside of the Single Market.

But it is quite possible to be a member of the Single Market and not be a member of the European Union.

Indeed, a number of European countries are members of the Single Market but not members of the European Union.

I also object – and have done so consistently, and in detail – to the manner and speed of the departure.

(Departure should have been done slowly, gradually and methodically over a decade at least.)

So consistent and detailed have I been in this objection many regard me as pretty much a Remainer.

Some may say – perhaps fairly – that my view is of a Brexit in name only, where the substance of law and policy would not change, but with the United Kingdom formally outside the institutions of the European Union.

My preference would be for a close Association Agreement, with settled mechanisms for dialogue and consultation between the European Union and the United Kingdom on Single Market issues.

But since Maastricht I have not seen the case for the European Union to cover the non Single Market (once called) “pillars” of justice and home affairs, or of foreign and security policy.

Of course: cooperation on such topics is crucial – but there is no necessary reason why such cooperation should be through the European Union.

I also do not think a single currency is essential for a Single Market.

And the United Kingdom’s half-hearted opt-in-and-opt-out approach to the European Union on the other “pillars” and the single currency was a brake on what other member states wanted to do, and so I do think the European Union is better off without us if that is what they want to do.

So, I will not be issuing a correction post on my judgement call.

I realise that the view set out above is not widely shared – and perhaps nobody else has exactly the same view.

But it is my sincerely held view, and I cannot and will not pretend otherwise.

So this is my non-apology, and I hope you can accept it!

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The fantasy of the Brexit “ring of power”

21st October 2022

Imagine, if you will, a Brexit “ring of power” – as magical and metallic a prop as you would find in any work of high fantasy.

This ring, however, has two qualities.

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First, the size of this ring is diminishing slowly over time.

In December 2019 its size could be measured as a majority of 81 parliamentary seats.

Now, in October 2022, its size can be measured as 71 seats.

And with by-elections and defections, its size will go down and down.

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Second, the shininess of this ring also is diminishing over time.

In December 2019 it was bright and glimmering.

But now it is somewhat faded and – by January 2025 – there will be no shininess left at all.

The shininess is time-limited.

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Yet, for both these qualities, it is still a ring worth seizing – or so its pursuers think.

For a parliamentary majority is worth having, especially for the Conservative party, as they are not that common.

After 1992, the Conservatives had to wait until 2015 before they had an overall majority, and they promptly lost that in 2017.

In 2019, they managed another overall majority against weak opposition and with the promise of “getting Brexit done”.

But this may now be the last Conservative overall majority for a political generation, if not for all time.

One can understand why so many Conservative politicians want to wear the ring and wield its supposed power before January 2025.

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The problem for those seeking to wear this ring and wield its supposed power is that the ring was itself wrought out of a deeper fantasy.

This were the fantastic notions that, first, the prospect of Brexit could be easily avoided with a mere referendum – and that, second, Brexit would be easy and inconsequential.

In 2015 the Conservatives avoided splitting the vote with Ukip with the promise of a referendum.

Then the Conservative government under Cameron nonchalantly assumed the referendum would be an easy win, and so they lost.

In 2019 the Conservatives promised that getting Brexit done would be easy, but it has not been.

Instead the clouds and forces of reality, as manifested in market forces and otherwise, batter and bruise the United Kingdom.

We have sluggish-to-no growth and have willingly cut ourselves off from the huge single market of our neighbours – a single market we helped fashion to our advantage in the 1980s.

We are getting relatively ever-poorer.

And there is nothing which any government can really do about it while we remain cut off from the huge single market of our neighbours.

All politicians can do is incant the same old lie about “taking back control” as the United Kingdom is increasingly at the mercy of global forces.

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No politician who puts on the ring is going to do well: there are just different forms of failure, different ways to implode, different reasons to resign or be sacked.

One national step forward, of course, would be to suddenly trash the ring of power, and to have a fresh general election.

To rid ourselves of the allure of this cursed artefact.

But there is no reason to believe that those craving the ring of power would voluntarily agree to lose the ring completely while it still exists and glimmers.

And they can toss the ring among themselves until January 2025.

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But, because the ring’s power is ultimately illusory, then no good can come to those who put the ring on.

Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss have all come and gone, even if Johnson wants to come back again.

The ring, forged with lies, will destroy each politician who wants to wear it.

And after January 2025 – or some happier earlier date – the ring disappears.

The Conservative majority built on the back of Brexit disintegrates.

There will then just be a political void where the governing party used to be

And those who remember will wonder why any of it was ever thought worthwhile.

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How the constitution of the United Kingdom has been tested continuously for over seven years

19th October 2022

Imagine that a group of political experimentalists had come together about seven or so years ago to devise a scheme to test just how far the constitution of the United Kingdom could be pushed.

Imagine that demonic scheme was as follows:-

First: the test of a supposedly non-binding referendum in what was normally a parliamentary system

Second: the test to see if a Prime Minister could force through an extra-parliamentary invocation of Article 50, free from any statute.

Third: the test of whether – after over forty-five years – the United Kingdom could be extracted at speed from the European Union.

Fourth: the test of whether parliament could put in place a mechanism to ensure that such a departure required a withdrawal agreement to be in place.

Fifth: the test of whether a Prime Minister could close down parliament so as to force through a no-deal departure.

Sixth: the test of how the constitution can deal with with a dishonest knave of a Prime Minister.

And now we have a seventh: the test of how the constitution can deal with a vacant fool of a Prime Minister.

I may have missed out some of the tests along the way.

We may also soon have other tests – about how to deal with a border poll on the island of Ireland, or a move towards an independent Scotland.

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The constitution has been through a lot in the last ten years – perhaps too much.

Some would say that the tests set out above “show the need for a codified constitution” – but one suspects for some anything and everything “shows the need for a codified constitution”.

In each of the tests to date, there is support for the view that our uncodified constitutional arrangements have fared relatively well.

The supreme court checked and balanced the attempted misuses of Prime Ministerial power and asserted the rights of parliament; parliament with the Benn Act forced a government to enter into a withdrawal agreement; and the body politic ejected Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, even though he had recently won a substantial majority.

But the constitution needs a rest, on any view.

Constitutional law has now been continuously exciting for seven years; and it should never be exciting for more than a few weeks at most, if at all.

And as I type this, a Home Secretary is resigning and government backbenchers are threatening to vote against in a “confidence” motion.

The constitution is not going to get a rest anytime soon.

Brace, brace.

Again.

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A proposal: the creation of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Public Procurement

11th October 2022

Yesterday’s post on the latest court defeat of the Good Law Project touched on a serious problem with public procurement in the United Kingdom.

The problem is, in a word, accountability.

The law of public procurement provides for special duties on public bodies (and some utilities) when they procure goods, services and works.

These special duties do not apply to private purchasers of such things.

These special duties include the legal principles of transparency and equal treatment.

One reason for these special duties is to promote competition: public supply contracts can be lucrative, and so the competition for such contracts should be as open as possible.

Another reason for these special duties is that it is a public good that public bodies are transparent and treat tenderers fairly and equally.

But.

It is one thing to have such duties, but it is another to ensure that they are enforced and observed.

The unfortunate implication of the most recent Good Law Project court defeat seems to be that it should be left to disappointed tenderers to bring legal actions in respect of non-compliance with public bodies with the legal principles of public procurement.

There is, of course, no dispute that such disappointed tenderers would have standing to bring a challenge.

But it is unrealistic to expect typical government suppliers to litigate against their customers and to accept substantial litigation and costs risks.

Sometimes it can make commercial sense for a disappointed supplier to bring such a claim, but it is rare in practice.

Typical government suppliers have no incentive to vex or irk their main customers – and, regardless of the theory that such things should not be taken into account in the next procurement exercise – upsetting major customers is not usually a sensible thing to do.

And if disappointed tenderers are disincentivised from bringing challenges, then who enforces the rules?

The courts do not seem to like self-appointed crowd-funded publicity-seeking groups like the Good Law Project bringing such challenges.

But if such groups do not bring challenges, then who will?

My own view, for what it is worth, and as a former central government public procurement lawyer, is that there should be an independent statutory body that can challenge seemingly errant public procurement exercises.

This would do domestically what the European Commission can do in respect of breaches of European Union public procurement laws.

It would be like an Office of Fair Trading or National Audit Office but for public procurement, with powers to request documents and issue sanctions.

Such a body would also be able to look at complex procurement issues in a way that a court is ill-equipped to do in litigation.

And to placate those who would not like this domestic equivalent of the European Commission, it could be called something quaint like His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Public Procurement.

The alternative – given that bodies like the Good Law Project are not to have standing – is to have a system of law that is supposed to act in the public interest which is, in effect, unenforceable other than by the untypical and occasional, desperate and litigious government supplier.

The “public” needs to be put back into public procurement, and this is one proposal for how that can be done.

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Pragmatism, competence, policy, and law

20th September 2022

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

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:

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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:

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:

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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