Monday 1 January 2018

The centrist awakes


When Andrew Adonis resigned as chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, much of the attention was focussed on his attack on Brexit as "a dangerous populist and nationalist spasm", much less on his characterisation of Theresa May as a fundamentally decent politician who happened to be wrong on this one, and only a few considered his thoughts on what it was doing to the machinery of government.

Part of his attack on government Brexit policy was a claimed "nervous breakdown that has taken place across Whitehall since Brexit". The senior civil service is "now totally drained physically and psychologically by attempting to deliver the impossible with Brexit, such that it is no longer able to deliver the ordinary business of government".

Adonis is not the first to have sounded this warning. Former Monetary Policy Committee member Andrew Sentance calls it "an all-encompassing project for the UK government and the senior civil service, crowding out consideration of other important issues" and Sir Paul Jenkins, former Treasury Solicitor refers to the "unique complexity of leaving".

Labour MPs have frequently complained that government is paralysed by the chaotic way it is pursuing Brexit, but then they would, wouldn't they? On one of the BBC's reviews of 2017, presenter Jonny Dymond and (pro-Brexit) commentator Iain Martin seemed to agree that the process is "sucking the life out of government", but were they just following Adonis's diagnosis unthinkingly? You'd certainly think that demands for all the billions it takes to prepare for whatever kind of Brexit it turns out to be, in the context of a government which still protests that it must live within its means, would mean that the money can't also be spent elsewhere. But May & co consistently deny that anything is being delayed.

One hint is the Sun's call for civil servants to "end the dilly-dally" (they really do speak the people's language don't they?) as they go back to work after the holidays. All government departments have been drawing up plans for Brexit (which means they must have stopped doing something else) and now it's delivery time.

"The push covers domestic policy on everything from cu­s­toms desks to the type of HGV licences foreign truckers require once we leave the EU," the Sun tells us. (Transport Secretary Chris Grayling announced a consultation on a new road pricing system just before Christmas, so that project will have to wait a bit.) "Critically, the shift in approach is designed so the UK can cope in the event of a 'No Deal' with the EU, leaving with no trading agreement."

In October the Financial Times told us "Whitehall is planning to hire another 2,000 staff to deal specifically with Brexit in a sign of how its resources are being diverted towards the challenges of leaving the EU". A further wave of hiring is expected closer to "exit day" in March 2019, "although the overall civil service headcount is still set to shrink further".

The head of the civil service, Jeremy Heywood, says Brexit "has been called the biggest and most complex [challenge] that government and the Civil Service have faced for generations", but he was writing in the official civil service blog, so it's all a bit rallying-the-troops-ish. A slightly less gung-ho view comes from Civil Service World: "Most of the Brexit department’s staff are on loan from elsewhere in government – with the majority on two-year arrangements – because of the 'time-limited nature of the department', according to the NAO [National Audit Office]."

 The NAO tells us that 2,409 new positions have been created in five departments responsible for half of the government's 310 Brexit "work streams", and that about one in eight of these posts is unfilled. If the overall size of the civil service is constrained, and DExEU staff are seconded from other departments, that means their previous work can't carry on unaffected, and work streams in other departments have to be done by staff who would otherwise have been doing something else. A shortage of specialist staff is also looming, as project delivery, commercial and digital skills are required to progress work which is still, necessarily, undefined.

The Home Office has already recognised that it will be recruiting more than a thousand new staff to register and process the three million EU27 citizens resident in this country and immigration lawyers have pointed out that extra Border Force staff will be required if EU27 nationals are required to join the "rest of the world" queues at airports. Recent suggestions that volunteer staff might have to guard the borders at smaller air and sea ports might suggest that the final numbers (and costs) aren't yet known.


Then we have the fact that David Davis's staff are "more over-worked and under-resourced than in any other government department". The civil service's annual People Survey shows that DExEU "has the lowest satisfaction ratings for 'resources and workload' and third lowest for 'pay and benefits' out of 18 government teams". Red lights are flashing at the National Audit Office too, as DExEU's staff turnover is running at 9% per quarter, compared with a civil service average of 9% per year. You can find the survey itself, and a brief discussion of it by someone who was recently an insider, in this Twitter thread:





The very fact that so much time in the Commons chamber (and soon the Lords) is occupied by questions on Brexit, reports on Brexit and debates on Brexit legislation suggests that it is dominating the schedules of ministers and legislators alike, as do the many select committee sessions in Commons and Lords, covering most of the departments of state, eagerly or desperately trying to find out what we are doing to ourselves.



Just before New Year we heard "Boris Johnson is cutting staff in embassies outside the EU to bolster representation within the bloc despite claims of promoting 'global Britain'. The Foreign Office is hiring 50 extra staff to work in embassies across the 27 remaining EU member states" and "hollowing out missions across the world, including in emerging markets in Asia and the Americas". The Foreign Office's Europe director told MPs in November there had been a "big network shift to emerging market economies, including India and China" at the expense of Europe and that the shift back to Europe was "redressing the balance".
This seemed to indicate a desperate rearranging of deckchairs at a time when government rhetoric (in Fox's Department of International Trade at least) is all about new relationships with the "growing parts of the world". It also rang a bell. In August I wrote (look for Anyway... those two articles) about a charm offensive in EU capitals ordered by May. To quote my quoting at the time:
"As we approach the next stage of negotiations - discussing our future relationship with the EU once we've left - we want to ramp up the communications work, campaigns and stakeholder engagement that will enable the government to communicate its messages effectively in EU member states as well as at home," said a DExEU spokesperson.
Robin Niblett, of the foreign policy think tank Chatham House, told us: "During the last big push for 'Global Britain', prior to Brexit, the government raised the number of British diplomats in India, China, the Gulf, while cutting back some of the human capacity in European capitals. Now the government is having to do some re-engineering to bring back that capability to prepare for the pointy end of the Brexit negotiation".
Call me a cynic, but August to November isn't a very long time. Is this just a re-announcement of the same initiative, or didn't it work the first time?



HMRC seems to be working on something


And it's touched a nerve.



Apparently some donations to the Brexit referendum campaigns have attracted requests for additional tax. "These Brexit tax bills look politically motivated," harrumphs the Telegraph, talking about "attempts to tax Leave donors".  "Boris Johnson phones Brexit donors to express anger over tax demands on referendum campaign money" is the headline for Christopher Hope's Telegraph article on the subject, and Nigel Farage and Westmonster have given it both barrels. Unfortunately all the coverage, including Hope's piece, points out that a Remain contributor has suffered the same terrible fate. Could it be that the taxman is merely doing his job?


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