Tuesday 30 May 2017

The "No debates please, we're British" election - day 42


A Brexit deal on security cooperation?


The day's Lib Dem theme was security cooperation with the EU after Brexit, with the central claim that UK authorities would lose access to important shared databases if #MrsME came away with a deal which put us outside the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

May's letter notifying the EU Council that she wished to start the Article 50 process said "In security terms a failure to reach agreement would mean our cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be weakened".  Opponents criticised this as a "shameful threat" (Tim Farron) and "completely irresponsible to threaten, gamble or bargain on national security" (Yvette Cooper).

From Brussels Guy Verhofstadt (EU parliament coordinator on Brexit) used the word "blackmail" to say he wouldn't say it was blackmail, and President (=chair) of the EU Council Donald Tusk, in pacific mood, said "Our partners are wise and decent.  That is why I am absolutely sure that no one is interested in using security cooperation as a bargaining chip."

May herself told the Commons: "There are certain elements of the European Union in justice and home affairs that we're currently members of that in leaving the European Union we would not be members of, and we need to negotiate what the future relationship will be... the aim of this will be to ensure cooperation on these matters".

So, as with the Irish border and anything else you might think of, the carefully guarded position is that cooperation is important to everybody, it's in nobody's interests to lose it, so we will aim not to - a vague declaration of positive intent which conveys nothing much.  And so it will be until the negotiations actually start (19 June is pencilled in, but it'll be talks about the order of talks first, so who knows?) and information starts to feed out (not from the British side if May has anything to do with it).

The subject of Clegg's campaign statement was the Schengen Information System (SIS II), which is used to pass information about criminals, suspects, missing persons and a variety of other things between EU member states and associated EEA countries.  His argument was that "the UK would lose access to the database under Theresa May's plans to leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.  Unless this position changes, UK authorities will see their access to the database cut off on 29th March 2019".

He went on to ask May how she hoped to "maintain access to SIS II without accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice", how she planned to "mitigate the loss of this information on the movement of terrorist suspects across the continent" and how she hoped to "issue instructions to other EU countries to stop and question terror suspects if we are no longer part of this system".

Similar questions can be asked about several other EU databases of law enforcement information.  For a national government to agree to upload and to be allowed to download details from other member states there need to be agreed rules, and a way to resolve disputes.  To maintain access, the UK would have to declare its conformity to data protection and other regulations overseen by the ECJ.  Similar considerations would apply to participation in Europol, Eurojust and the European Arrest Warrant.  No other country has access without accepting ECJ jurisdiction in this area.

Amber Rudd responded with nothing but "We will need to have a new form of agreement" and "I am confident".  So that's all right then.  Lib Dems will demand to know what #MrsME "intends" to get, and her team will refuse to say any more than "it'll be fine".  Labour will probably prefer not to mention it, though there are obvious questions to ask about Salman Abedi.

Labour's manifesto says of this:  "We will introduce legislation to ensure there are no gaps in national security and criminal justice arrangements as a result of Brexit.  Labour recognises the vital role that cross-border agencies such as Eurojust and Europol have played in making Britain safer and that European Arrest Warrants have been invaluable. A Labour government will seek to retain membership of these agencies and continue European Arrest Warrant arrangements."

The Tories "want to work together in the fight against crime and terrorism" and "there may be specific European programmes in which we might want to participate and if so, it will be reasonable that we make a contribution".  Those might include security and policing programmes I suppose.  Words like "database", "Schengen", "Europol", "Eurojust" and "arrest warrant" don't appear in the document at all.

This is much weaker than the government white paper which came (late) with the Article 50 bill in the Commons.  That document listed the strength of current British work with these various systems and bodies and said "we will therefore look to negotiate the best deal we can with the EU to cooperate in the fight against crime and terrorism. We will seek a strong and close future relationship with the EU, with a focus on operational and practical cross-border cooperation"  which is about as informative as it's likely to get.

Two topical questions arise.
  • The Manchester bomber Salman Abedi is reported to have flown from Libya to the UK via Turkey and Düsseldorf.  What were systems such as the Schengen Information System supposed to tell us about his movements?  What did they tell us?  Clegg is raising the question of what they could do for us after a new agreement with the EU.
  • The causes of British Airways' troubles over the weekend are still "emerging" while the effects on many thousands of would-be passengers are all too obvious.  In an unsatisfactorily curtailed interview on Radio 4's World At One a GMB official told us that BA had been unable to supply the Home Office with passenger details during this time.  We don't know for how long or for which flights.  What effect does that have on police operations now, and how do we ensure that the same process is included in a Brexit agreement?

The Nutkipper's Ball


Offered a full half hour with Andrew Neil in front of a (possibly) mass audience, Paul Nuttall seemed happy to talk about torture, internment and execution quite a lot, as well as integration by burqa ban, longer sentences (an old favourite: you don't even need to know how long sentences are at present) and race as an aggravating factor for sexual offences (it already is when considered  as motivation, but you mean just membership of a race, prompted Neil).

At least the last few are in the UKIP manifesto.  Torture, internment and the death penalty are Nuttall's own hobby horses.  A more careful party leader might keep things to his party's programme, but UKIP is different.

Nuttall's favourite phrases are "Hang on" and "Let me finish" and he would probably rather be an MP than an executioner.  He dodged Neil's question about internment in Northern Ireland being a recruiting sergeant for the IRA.  Did he not hear it?  Does he have no answer?  Doesn't he care?
UKIP's policy on expats' rights in the Brexit negotiations seems to be: See what the prime minister (who isn't going to be him, he knows) gets, and carp from the sidelines.  And apparently UKIP's future is assured, even if it attracts votes in homeopathic proportions,  because if #MrsME backslides in Brussels "we will be bigger!" in some unspecified way and within an unspecified time. 

The Main Bout

Does it do #MrsME any good to show that she (or her staff) are good at negotiating a debate format which gets her out of the one thing that terrifies her most, debate?  Did Corbyn not think it important to mention, or did he forget?  Anyway, each of them faced a carefully selected audience with Sky's Faisal Islam as moderator of the audience questions and Jeremy Paxman to do the hard stuff.

With Corbyn it was the same old questions, so no, he doesn't want to talk to ISIS but he does want to get just about everybody else who's currently fighting in Syria round a table in Geneva because danger springs from large ungoverned spaces, of which Syria has lots.  And no, he wasn't going to condemn the IRA as such, but he would talk a lot (and fairly well) about the peace process.

"Your manifesto's fine but I'm not convinced by you" brought a stumble then something quite good about always wanting to meet people whether they agreed with him or not "because they always know something you don't know".

And no, he wouldn't promise to cut immigration (though it probably would fall) because #MrsME had tried that three times now and not got anywhere.  He talked about blocking undercutting of wages by stopping bad employers importing lots of low-paid immigrants, said immigration would be needed because of the long standing skills shortage and pledged funds for communities hit by sudden inflows.

Corbyn needs much harder questioning on Brexit.  He's a paid-up member of the unicorn brigade, expecting, nay promising, a close relationship with Europe and continuing membership of "important agencies".  I was waiting for an "exactly the same economic benefits" but it didn't come.

A representative of a successful small business in Manchester condemned Corbyn's many "taxes on aspiration" including VAT on school fees.  Corbyn didn't try to placate him but launched into a defence of improving the lot of many by asking the few to pay "a little bit more".  Then came the pledge to protect small business from bigger business which might have helped with the questioner but we didn't find out.


Corbyn received several rounds of applause, May perhaps slightly more as her airy pledges on Brexit started.  But Corbyn also had the audience laughing along with him a couple of times while they laughed at May after one of her protests that "government is putting record amounts of money into something or other and Labour's sums don't add up".  It was a polarised audience, with equal thirds said to be pro-Labour, pro-Conservative and undecided, so that laughter might all have come from the Labour group, but those were the impressions on the night.

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May's researchers had done their work, and she wished Islam a happy birthday before facing the questions.

A long-service policeman asked how many extra officers she'd put on the streets and how she would pay for them.  The answer was, after we'd been round the houses, none, but she would invest in "enabling different policing".  This is a perfectly good argument - there are new types of crime and changing frequencies, it's not just how many you have but what you do with them - but hanging over us is the accusation that police ears on the community ground just aren't there in many places. On armed officers "we're having an uplift", but she didn't deny the initial cuts to armed police and the force as a whole.

The dementia tax will stop me passing my house down to my family, protested a man of a certain age.  "A lot of people are thinking about that,"  opined May, but "we've put a cap" on the amount which has to be paid for social care.  (Last week it was "we've discarded any idea of a cap", then "we'll include a cap in the consultation"; now this.)

Is it fair that old people are to receive winter fuel allowance in Scotland while you would remove them elsewhere?  And she made the reasonable point about many people not needing it but that was about it.  Islam prompted her on how many would lose the payment and May fell back on "We will consult".  She intends to consult on this, social care and many other things it seems, yet she's quite precise about the new things she needs the money for.  I smell an uncosted manifesto.

The next standard question was on school funding and how many schools faced cuts.  And the standard answer was that there was a new fair funding formula coming in (this is one of the reasons for cuts, the other being a plan for lower funding per pupil in real terms).  It was around here, when she seemed to be protesting in several directions at once, that May heard a smattering of laughter directed at her.  She recovered with her usual mantra about more good school places.

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To a great extent Paxman asked the same kind of questions as the audience, but picked again and again to try to entrap or elicit a simple, straight answer.  He didn't have much success with that but he did tie each of his victims down to a very specific refusal to answer.  Corbyn's was over Trident - the party dictates that Trident should be renewed but do you think it's morally defensible?

And May was asked "When did  you change your mind on the biggest issue of the day (Brexit)?", then "Are you trying to achieve something that you think is bad for us?".  (Both questions are rendered approximately but fairly, I hope.)  And she wouldn't say that she had changed her mind on Brexit, or that she actually believed in it now, only that she believes in "making a success of it".  

Won't the fact that you signed off an increase in national insurance contributions for the self-employed, then withdrew it within a week, tell the EU27 you're "a blowhard who collapses at the first sound of gunfire?" came the next, which she denied.  "I have achieved..." - which is true - several detailed matters in her old home portfolio, "which people said we'd never get".  I'd like to see a list of the latter.
"How many times did you maintain that there would not be a general election?"  asked Paxman.  And she admitted that she had, but had realised as far back as March that "other parties" intend to frustrate the will of the people (even though there were different versions of that, and we won't know what the final "will of the people" is until an actual agreement emerges, and some of us can't see a great deal of difference between Tory and Labour positions).

"You've failed repeatedly on immigration" was accepted quite brazenly, as if to protest "So?", but "it's coming down now".  (Will somebody simply ask "why do you think that is?"?  Paxman didn't.)  But have you costed the effects of significantly reduced immigration, which George Osborne (!) describes as economically illiterate.  May told us she's still working on post-Brexit immigration rules (so no answer).  She fell back on the need to train people up to fill the long recognised skills gap, and that we should "recognise what people feel" about immigration.
She fended off a question on how much she was willing to pay for Brexit with "we'll put forward a fair settlement", then tried to described a couple of the "bad deals" that leaving without a deal (applause) would be better than - some in the EU are talking about "punishing" the UK and there are some here would would "do anything" to get a deal (which wouldn't happen on her watch so it's really irrelevant).  And yet she couldn't bring herself to say she was actually willing to walk out with no deal.

Paxman pressed both of them pretty hard (a tweeter who claimed to have counted made it rather more interruptions for Corbyn than for May) but neither was completely trapped at any stage.  My impression was that neither would have converted many who have already plumped for a side but that Corbyn's demeanour might well have pulled in some of the unconvinced and May's attempted recovery from an unusual exhibition of weakness, inconsistency and uncertainty would have weakened her support in others.

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A selection of comments from pundits...


Tom Newton Dunn on BBC2's Newsnight quoted an old spoof Volvo advert to describe Theresa May - "boxy but good".

Saboteurs department


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