Sunday 3 June 2018

Call it Project Fear and then it isn't real


Well done Sunday Times!

Sunday Times 3 June 2018
This morning's Sunday Times "exclusive" is all good stuff, but that headline ensures it can be dismissed easily as "Project Fear".

From what I can glean from the front page and other sources (I'm not currently paying to view Tim Shipman's original in all its glory), civil servants have been through the results of various possible levels of government stupidity in some detail. They've worked out what could be expected to happen if David Davis (how is he still in that position?) is told to walk away from negotiations with nothing to show for it.

But what does No Deal mean? "Walking away and trading on World Trade Organisation terms" is what the piece says, and the way many people seem to think. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. The Article 50 process is not a trade negotiation. It's intended to produce a withdrawal agreement. If possible.

We'll read the will in a minute
But really, what does no deal mean? It depends on what deal you haven't got, which negotiations you walk away from, and when.

Some hard Brexiters advised from the start that we shouldn't bother with Article 50, we should just get out and start paddling. The CBI, and actual businesses, fainted at that idea, and government thought "We're British. If there's a nicely written way in the treaty to get out of the treaty, let's do that". What they didn't do was produce a plan before invoking Article 50.

We're now advised to expect a government white paper (a "policy [document] produced by the Government that set[s] out their proposals for future legislation") a few days before the June EU Council summit at which the whole Irish border issue is supposed to be resolved ("Please!" implores the Irish government, though in fact they merely remind May & co that it would be the decent thing to deliver some proposals in time to discuss them).

If the British negotiators walked out of a trade negotiation and no agreement was forthcoming that might be unfortunate, but we could go home, lick our wounds, conceive a better strategy and try again a couple of years later. But that's not where we are. Olly Robbins, the DExEU front man, and his merry band are busy trying to sort out a UK Withdrawal From the EU Agreement. It's planned to include arrangements for transition and it's hoped that it can be accompanied by a political statement on the future relationship between the UK and the EU. Not a trade agreement.

** Walk out now, and we have no agreement on transition, no agreement that business can carry on as it is for a couple of years while some maniac government tries to work out what things might look like in future (and how many more years of transition we'll need not to fall apart on the way there).

** Walk out now and we instantly lose the dozens of trade agreements, some with major economies, that we currently work under (and the hundreds of more minor agreements about things like recognition of each other's veterinary inspectors). Chilean wine might still arrive for Daniel Hannan, and we might still not charge a tariff for it, but the agreements under which that trade is done would be null and void, and things would start to fall apart.

** Walk out now, and all the British expats in EU countries wouldn't know what their position was, and the authorities of the next EU country they wanted to go to for work wouldn't know what their status was.

** Walk out now, and British local authorities would no longer know whether Ms Bueltmann  of 23 Railway Cuttings is eligible to vote in next year's local election (though they might actually be more concerned about the coming 2018 general election).

** Walk out now, and the Irish border would suddenly become important in practice as well as in theory. What legal system would be used to check food products crossing into the Republic? Especially if milk produced or processed in the North was to be used in a product intended for export to "the continent"?

** Walk out now, and agreements on aircraft safety would no longer have a legal basis. Everybody might know that our planes were fine yesterday, and everybody knows British engineers are OK, but that's not the way insurers work.

Let them eat langoustines -
if they can't be certain of getting through the border and
across the channel, we'll just have to eat them here.
** Walk out now - and this is the front page story - and lorries would keep turning up at Dover and Calais, but on what legal basis would their goods be accepted or rejected? "The government has said it would in effect throw open Britain's borders in the event of a no-deal Brexit," the Sunday Times tells us from somewhere. "But officials fear the EU, particularly the French, would not do the same". You mean they'd follow the law - with the UK suddenly a third country - until somebody told them otherwise.

"We don't recognise that" said every minister asked about the story this morning. That's a weasel-words formulation to avoid actually denying the report exists, so they can pretend they're not lying. If the report didn't exist, they'd happily say so. Journalists know this as well as the rest of us and should call it out.

Walk out now, and all that and much more would happen. Walk out at the last minute, or contrive a vote in the Westminster parliament which rejects the agreement the hapless Davis has returned with... or watch the EU parliament reject it for us... and a lot more will happen, with much less time to recover from it.

Echoes

Here's a response to the story from someone who's definitely not a friend of Brexit

And this is from somebody who did vote to leave:

Here's a government which is warning its citizens of the effects of Brexit. And it isn't ours.

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