Category: Brexit

13th September 2021

Like a bouncing ball we go from the high slogans to the low mundane – or grim – reality of Brexit.

Take, for example, this from businessman and former politician Archie Norman:

M&S chair Archie Norman has branded EU border rules "pointless".
Tells @NickFerrariLBC food products to France and Ireland delayed by day. "This is a pointless bureaucratic exercise", "these rules serve no purpose at all – our food standards are higher than the EU 1/

— lisa o'carroll (@lisaocarroll) September 13, 2021

In translation:

– taking back control was and is ‘pointless’, and

– leaving the single market was and is ‘pointless’.

For what Norman here describes as “pointless” is the direct, natural and necessary consequence of both taking back control and leaving the single market.

What he describes is Brexit in its everyday reality.

This is what the slogans really meant when converted to actual practice.

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Here is another example, for the great immigration law expert Colin Yeo:

The supposed “turn-around” policy for migrant boats is similar to previous reports of wave machines or floating fences. It sounds tough but will never be implemented, says @ColinYeo1. https://t.co/FXStug1Oy8

— Free Movement (@freemovementlaw) September 13, 2021

In essence: if the French don’t cooperate, then the home secretary’s’s ‘turn around’ migrant boat policy is not only vile and inhumane – it cannot actually work.

Again, this is the reality of taking back control.

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Both the examples above are crash-courses in the value of multilateralism in a complex world – and of the banality of autarchy.

By taking back control the United Kingdom has lost the means of exercising control – whether it is the terms of trade, or its borders, and so on.

And this is not a surprise.

For taking back control exists on the plane of slogans and not on the messy plane of reality of the world in which we live.

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12th September 2021

Once ‘euro-scepticism’ was a big thing in British politics.

Parties and politicians, as well as the media, competed with each other to be disdainful of the European Union project, but without calling for outright departure.

Anyone with an absolute view on the merits of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union were regarded as marginal if not eccentric – whether ‘pro’ or ‘anti’.

The conservative party, for example, had a steady stream of defections to the liberal democrats of ‘pro-EU’ politicians, and the referendum party came and went.

But about ten years ago ‘euro-scepticism’ disappeared, to be replaced by those seeking outright departure.

Why did this happen?

Well, one possibility is – paradoxically – the European Union stopped pushing for more powers and competencies.

To an extent ‘euro-scepticism’ was reactive: a response to treaty after treaty of expansion: Maastricht, Amsterdam, Lisbon.

And once the treaties stopped, then ‘euro-scepticism’ stopped – for it did not serve the purpose of a brake.

There still has not been a major European Union treaty since Lisbon, signed in 2007.

In respect of major treaties, the European Union has been in a steady state since Lisbon.

And there has been no real taste for one.

(Indeed, the fiscal pact of 2012 was done outside the European Union framework.)

And when the movement to ever close union ended – at least at treaty level – then British ‘euro-scepticism’ flipped into Brexiteering.

There were, of course, many other factors around ten years ago that contributed to Brexiteering.

But one cause must have been the collapse in ‘euro-scepticism’.

Few in 2016 wanted to ‘be in Europe but not run by Europe’ – as the old slogan said.

And ‘euro-scepticism’ was never a positive message such would win a binary referendum.

Not many would vote Remain because it offered only mild opposition to the European Union as opposed to Leave’s explicit hostility.

Polarisation on the European Union question did not suit the tradition of ‘euro-scepticism’.

But.

It can also be averred that ‘euro-scepticism’ had been successful – that is, if success is taken to mean a sequence of secured outcomes.

The United Kingdom had secured the benefit of opt-outs – from the Euro and freedom of movement to justice and home affairs.

On this basis, it is hard to say ‘euro-scepticism’ was a failure.

But opt-outs can only take you so far without touching upon the ultimate questions of membership.

By 2015 there was little left to opt out from.

The ‘re-negotiation’ was a flop.

So perhaps ‘euro-scepticism’ died in part because there was no longer anything left that it could achieve.

And also perhaps because that before 2015 it had been too successful.

**

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31st August 2021

When does the story of Brexit begin?

Some would say that the story of the departure of the United Kingdom begins with the founding of the European Economic Community itself, or even of the European Coal and Steel Community.

For even then the supranational approach that the United Kingdom was to find so repugnant was obvious (see here).

Others can point to the accession of the United Kingdom to the European communities in 1973 or (a view with which I have sympathy) the treaty of Maastricht of 1992.

More recent start dates would be the referendum of 2016 or the timing and circumstances of the Article 50 notification in 2017.

It depends on the nature of the story you want to tell.

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This post looks at another starting-point.

The ‘Bloomberg speech’ of then prime minister David Cameron in January 2013.

Cameron, of course, is now little more than a pantomime villain in the story of Brexit, reduced to texting ministers and officials for commercial favours while the audience groans and hisses.

And the prospect of reading – still less sitting through – an old Cameron speech may not be a welcome one.

But.

This 2013 speech, when taken together with the ‘renegotiation’ of 2015-16, shows fault lines that later shaped how Brexit evolved in practice, and it is worth looking back at.

An edited version of the speech is still on the government website (with some brief ‘political’ content removed) while the Downing Street YouTube channel has the speech in its entirety.

To the extent the speech is remembered now – if it is is remembered at all – it is because it contained the promise by the head of the then coalition government of an ‘in/out’ referendum, in the event that the conservatives won outright the next general election.

And that announcement is of significance as, unlike many political promises, it was carried out.

But also of significance is the framing of the announcement – what the speech did and did not say.

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One premise of the speech is that the referendum would be tied to a ‘renegotiation’ which, in turn, envisaged treaty changes for the benefit of all member states.

It would be this new ‘settlement’ that would then be promoted as part of the referendum campaign.

To the extent that there is a fundamental critique of the European Union it is in terms of ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘gap between the EU and its citizens’.

And to the extent that there is a detailed practical critique it is about the ‘unfair’ relationship between Eurozone members and member states such as the United Kingdom that were not part of the Eurozone.

The speech has structure and coherence – and, after the experience of Theresa May and then Boris Johnson, it is a strange feeling to read a prime ministerial speech that has structure and coherence.

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But.

There is a lot missing.

There is not a single mention of immigration – even though by the ‘renegotiation’ of 2015-16 this had become a perceived political priority.

This is because although the Eurozone crisis had begun, the perceived migration crisis (and the rapidly increasing domestic political support for UKIP) was in the future and as yet unknown.

Some now contend that Brexit was always about immigration and migration and ‘taking control’ of our borders – yet the issue is not mentioned once in the major speech that initiated the political process that led to the referendum.

There is also not a mention of ‘freedom of movement’ or indeed any of the ‘four freedoms’ that the European Union aver are integral to the single market.

For Cameron and the United Kingdom, the single market could be discussed and extolled without any reference to the foundational principles of that market.

It was almost as if the same single market was different things to the United Kingdom and to the rest of the European Union, described in different ways, and with each side talking past the other.

Ireland gets one brief mention – and is bracketed with the United Kingdom for having border controls against the rest of the European Union.

But there is nothing at all about how the single market and shared membership of the single market and the customs union meant there was no need for a regulatory or customs border on the island of Ireland.

There is also nothing about how shared European Union membership provided a solution to the hard political problems of the Irish border (and similarly there is no mention of Gibraltar either).

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And there is a complacency about treaty changes – an assumption that the fundamental reforms to the European Union that could only come about by amending the treaty texts would be an easy task in a tight time frame.

The referendum was to be in the ‘first half’ of the next parliament – in effect the entire process of renegotiation and referendum would need to take place between 2015 and 2017.

Looking back from 2021, we now know that there has been no new European Union treaty at all – the last general treaty is still that of Lisbon in 2007 – and there is no appetite for a new treaty and the politics it would entail.

But without treaty changes there was a severe limit to what could be achieved in a negotiation, especially against a strict deadline.

And so – unsurprisingly – the ‘renegotiation’ was damp and squibby.

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The Bloomberg speech revealed a lack of realism about what could be achieved from the beginning of the ‘renegotiation’ process, with expectations raised that could not be fulfilled.

And this had a significant political consequence.

For, from the very beginning of the referendum process, the government made no positive case for the United Kingdom to be part of the European Union as a matter of principle.

The government’s case was instead to be for the United Kingdom to remain part of the European Union on renegotiated terms and as part of a new overall settlement.

But when those renegotiated terms fell flat, and the new overall settlement failed to come into existence, then the government had nothing positive to argue and campaign for.

Indeed, given the lacklustre government campaign – directionless after the failure of the ‘renegotiation’ – it is remarkable that the referendum was as close as it was.

The government’s own run-up to the referendum, from the announcement of the referendum onwards, had been misconceived.

And you can see why this was by reading what was in – and what was not in – the Bloomberg speech of January 2013.

**

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