Out with the old

The story so far...

Let's suspend Parliament to concentrate minds

It was five weeks after Boris Johnson's first trip to the Palace to become prime minister (with Parliament at work for just two days of that time) that Jacob Rees Mogg took a flight north to Balmoral, accompanied by Commons chief whip Mark Spencer and Natalie Evans, the leader of the House of Lords. They went to advise the Queen (that is, to instruct her) to suspend Parliament - or prorogue, in the jargon - for five weeks. There was to be a Queen's speech, they said.

This is hardly a big deal for a new prime minister - you'd expect a Queen's speech earlier than this - but Conservative Campaign HQ and the executive committee (a select group) of the "1922 Committee" (all the Tory MPs) had engineered the election to leave no time before the summer break.

It was just for a Queen's speech wasn't it?

Of course it wasn't - first, the complicated stuff.

Of the two cases which ended up at the Supreme Court for prorogation to be judged unlawful, the one in the Inner Court of Session in Scotland had acquired detailed evidence, as set out in pages 7 to 9 of Lady Hale's summary of the Supreme Court judgment. The three important aspects of the evidence for me are:

• The proposed prorogation was carefully crafted to occupy as many days as possible, but still not fall foul of the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019, which was in turn designed to require reports from government ministers and prevent the long prorogation-for-No-Deal which had been feared.
• "The dates proposed sought to provide reassurance by ensuring that Parliament would sit for three weeks before exit and that a maximum of seven days were lost apart from the time usually set aside for the conference recess." No conference recess had been approved, and there were strong moves not to do so.
• "Politically, it was essential that Parliament was sitting before and after the EU Council meeting (which is scheduled for 17th-18th October). If the Queen’s Speech were on 14th October, the usual six-day debate would culminate in key votes on 21st and 22nd October. Parliament would have the opportunity to debate the Government’s overall approach to Brexit in the run up to the EU Council and then vote on it once the outcome of the Council was known." That "opportunity" never arose. Johnson's "ample time for debate" was pathetically and dishonestly kept so short as to be useless.

So that Queen's speech...?

It's easy really, as Jacob Rees-Mogg discovered a little later, when the plan changed so that there really would be a Queen's speech. An innocent-looking Leader of the House told Cardiff West MP Kevin Brennan, that "Prorogation will meet the judgment of the Court and, therefore, will be the time necessary to move to a Queen’s Speech, and no more".

It's worth noting that the two and a half weeks of prorogation before it was declared unlawful didn't produce a Queen's speech or, apparently, any part of one. It's as if they didn't do any work on it, as if that hadn't been the reason at all.

But even when there was a Queen's speech Parliament blocked it

No they didn't.

The speech was delivered on 14 October and the final decision - which went through by 16 votes - came ten days later, having eaten up a lot of that "ample time" Johnson had promised for debating Brexit.

And then they tried to block Brexit by forcing another extension

No they didn't.

The Benn Act prevented No Deal on 31 October, which was a serious risk, with all that "ample time" having gone. If Johnson wasn't lying about wanting a deal (now why would we even think that?) he really needed that extra time.

The EU Council meeting would be too late to achieve Brexit on 31 October, and the way Johnson actually achieved his deal - wasting two months after appointment, then frantically negotiating amendments to ten percent of the previous deal and eventually adopting parts of the deal before that, which he'd dismissed as unacceptable in September, and by abandoning the DUP he'd assured would never see that choice made by a British Conservative prime minister - lost him any hope of a majority in time. But MPs did not block Brexit, they temporarily blocked No Deal

(The ERG, of course, were right behind Arlene Foster and her crew. Until dumping them became the best way to achieve the higher prize - Brexit whatever.)

And then Parliament blocked the Withdrawal Agreement Bill

No they didn't.

With No Deal out of the way for the moment many of the Conservative rebels were happy to support the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill, and enough Labour MPs joined them to give the bill a second reading (agreement in principle that the bill should go through the process of becoming law) by 30 votes.

What Johnson couldn't get through was the timetable for debate. Three days for all stages in the Commons was rightly seen as ridiculous, and trying to force the Lords to ignore the fact - for example - that the Bill presented no useful detail of how the new Northern Ireland "solution" would be implemented seemed likely to produce a battle, and quite possibly No Deal, if the 31 October deadline had to be observed.

So it wasn't. Thank you Mr Benn, Ms Cooper, Mr Letwin, and all who helped develop the legal manoeuvres to stop government doing maximum damage to the country, but not - I must stress - to stop Brexit.

So now what? No idea

The manifesto gives little detail, and who could expect to believe it anyway?

The Brexit timetable is still ridiculous - just three days again for the Withdrawal Agreement Bill - and the bill is even more unacceptable than before - among other things, parliamentary scrutiny over future negotiations has been removed. But a sizeable Conservative majority, who have all apparently signed in blood to support whatever deals Johnson manages to contrive, means he doesn't have to bother about that. The Lords will amend it, but they'll be forced to accept rejection of those amendments under pressure of time and No Deal on 31 January (it's always there).

One thing we can be sure of is that Johnson will avoid proper scrutiny whenever he can.

But whatever happens, No Deal must be on the table

Nope. As anybody who's ever bought a secondhand car knows (this is their favourite analogy, and I've been through that transaction myself a few times), walking away means you're no worse off, apart from the loss of some time. The terms of Article 50 mean you lose your membership at the deadline even if you have walked away. If you're going to do this Brexit thing, that seems like a really bad way to do it.

Because the EU only ever negotiates when they're close to a deadline

A lot of people parrot this line, but what past negotiations are they talking about? What other negotiations with the EU have had fixed deadlines?

Recent trade agreements with Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, etc which we've negotiated together while this Brexit thing was going on were finished when they were finished. Leaving the EU has a two-year timetable - it's different. May then negotiated a transition period of 21 months, extendable to 45 months, to negotiate (optimistically) a future UK-EU relationship. After a few Article 50 extensions and Johnson's master negotiation technique that's now eleven months, extendable to 35, and he's nailing us to the eleven.

Which will actually be about nine. The 27 would talk longer if we asked. They're not stupid. But if Johnson insists on his Christmas 2020 deadline he'll be faced with demands to commit to continuing full alignment of regulations in several fields. Here's a description of the data adequacy area which - together with financial equivalence - is discussed in the Times article referred to as if these requirements are somehow a surprise.

Anyway, it was Johnson, not the EU, who shifted after his little walk in the park with Varadkar. Falling into No Deal would be stupid - it would be make future talks longer and harder. Pursuing No Deal would be a policy which nobody campaigned for in 2016, as far as I can remember, so very few people would have voted for it. If that's Johnson's objective, he should be honest for once in his life and say so.

Now for the "people's priorities"

If they can fit them in.

Apart from all that legislation in the latest Queen's speech, much of which couldn't have been guessed at from the lightweight manifesto, what might there be to do? Significant parts of the country are still living with flooding or the effects of flooding, which Johnson shows no sign of reacting to. Then there are the homeless, who've been helped this week with... an announcement. Government certainly seems to have been embarrassed into action here, but some of the numbers are vague and some look a bit pathetic - "The Communities Secretary also announced £10 million – extended today by £3 million – for the Cold Weather Fund, which will boost life-saving support for rough sleepers during the cold winter weather". That's across the whole of England.

When Parliament opens again on 7 January Johnson will have been prime minister for 167 days, with Parliament sitting for just 35 of them, and in that time he's just about managed three sessions of Prime Minister's Questions. Watch for a proposal to change the format of PMQs for the avoidance of even more scrutiny. That's a real people's priority!

Or maybe a quick trip to Mustique

And now he has his majority he doesn't have to care, so off he and girlfriend Carrie Symonds fly to "the exclusive island" to "spend new year with the Von Bismarck family". As you do.

And "According to The Times, it is expected that Mr Johnson will pay for the flight himself" is apparently news. I wonder why that might be. I'll be keeping an eye on the Commons register of members' financial interests. He could be really strapped for cash compared with the last couple of years in which he's pulled in about £800,000 above his MP's salary - the House of Commons' top outside earner.

Questions for whatever government mouthpiece next appears in front of a journalist - 1

Image: Daily Express
"Boris Johnson squares up to Vladimir Putin
as he vows to stand up to
'Russian aggression'"

1. Do you accept that Dominic Grieve, the former chair of Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, believes that the Russia Report should have been published before the election campaign?

2. Do you accept that Jonathan Evans, former head of MI5, Peter Ricketts, former National Security Adviser, David Anderson, former reviewer of terrorism legislation and Robin Butler, former head of the civil service, all agree with him?

3. Do you accept that the report was submitted to the security services and the Cabinet Office in March of this year, that the scrutiny and redaction process was complete by early October, when "the agencies and the national security secretariat indicated that they were happy that the published form would not damage any operational capabilities of the agencies", and that the report was sent to the Prime Minister on 17 October for "final confirmation"?

4. Do you accept that a report from the Intelligence and Security Committee - as with reports from an ordinary select committee - does not require a response from government before it is published?

5. So why was the report not published on 5 November?

Brexit Day (No 3) +27 - The "revoke the past; sod that, revoke the present" election

Little Matty Hancock - he does like a selfie

History, according to the New Book Of Tory, consists of various "Labour years of disaster" and the last 126 days. Little Matty Hancock came onto the Today programme on Saturday with a shiny new announcement on dementia research to distract us from the Labour manifesto. The figure of £1.6 billion was mentioned, but that's for Research! generally. The actual proposal is £83 million over ten years to fund a "dementia moonshot", a national effort, with scientists invited in from all over the world (even if they earn less than £32,000 a year).

Justin Webb asked him, "Do you have a sense that, included in this announcement is an acceptance that there has not been a proper spend up to now?" and Hancock went into a long explanation that the problem of dementia was actually "partly as a consequence of success in dealing with cancer and cardio-vascular diseases". He has a point, since the incidence of dementia rises with age, but he was rather too proud that "we've seen the fastest acceleration in survival of cancer of all the major European countries", because we started from a lower point than comparable countries and have been trying to catch up.

Webb tried to return to the question, and this is where things got silly. "Here's the problem though, with all of that, and talk of moonshots, and you heard it with the audience last night [the Question Time leaders' debate], the scepticism that there was towards Boris Johnson, this business of making promises. They know, and everyone in that audience knows, that the NHS has been underfunded in historic terms over the last decade. They know as well that our spending on research and development is less than the OECD average, has been for many years. They know that these things could have been done in the past and weren't, and they just don't believe you."

Little Matty protested, "Oh I don't think that's reasonable at all", but Webb persisted, "Most of those things are true, aren't they [all of them, surely]?". Hancock then started to paint a new history: "No. Boris Johnson has been prime minister for a hundred and twenty days. I've been health secretary for 15 months...". And now it was Webb's turn to protest (I simplify slightly, there was a lot of talking over each other): "Is that really credible? 'It wasn't us. It was other Conservatives...'?".

"It's called renewal," Hancock replied. "You renew in office, and if you're saying that anybody who has been in a party that's been in government can't come up with new ideas, that's for the birds." Nobody said that, of course, but let's leave them to it for a while.

JW: Did you support the levels of NHS spending that there were for the last decade?

LMH: Yes, it's gone up every single year, in fact...

JW: By well under the long term average, isn't it?

LMH: Hold on, the only year that NHS funding has been significantly cut in real terms [he said "times" but let's be kind] was in 1976, the last time a Labour government...

JW: You're avoiding the point that I'm making...

LMH: I'm not...
.

JW: You know perfectly well that it's been less than the long term average for the last decade, and people know that ...

LMH: And in the future Justin... elections are about what we're going to do next and what we're going to do is we're now clearly the only party that can move past the Brexit status [I think he meant stasis] that has got politics stuck for the last few years, and then we're going to put the longest and largest cash injection into the NHS, and including doubling the research budget, so on this point on dementia..." and he went on to a story about his grandmother, which I don't want to belittle, but it is a standard way to hold the stage uninterrupted.

Believe a little more, and TinkerBrexit will live!

There you have it. We should ignore what has gone before, forget the mistakes and bad decisions of previous Conservatives (which included these Conservatives of course, but under a different flag) and look to the future. I fully expected him to demand that we believe a bit more.

Friday night's Question Time leaders special drew the same kind of argument from Hancock's boss. The audience began with a question about telling the truth, greeted with laughter (which somehow disappeared in the clip prepared for the BBC news bulletins). "I think the issue of trust in politics is central to this election", said the improbable prime minister, and the problem of course, was the "failure of politicians to deliver Brexit". "Why do you think you're being asked that question?" asked Fiona Bruce, but we didn't hear an answer.

What he did say was, "I didn't want to have an election... We had to do it because Parliament is blocking Brexit". To her credit, Bruce pulled him up - they voted  for second reading, but were unwilling to let him force it through with no proper consideration, but he was in full flow. "They were given every opportunity to pass it...". To which I can only say "bollocks".

When asked about poverty by a teacher... "I want you to know that I've been in office for 120 days or so, as prime minister, and I do understand. I've been to many hospitals, many schools in the time that I've been prime minister, and I've talked to nurses and doctors, and teachers about what's going on in their schools, and that's why we're now levelling up funding for education across...." And of course he has no knowledge of, and no responsibility for, what his own government did before.

Other Tory automata have come out with the same line, including Nicky Morgan, who's not even standing this time, on Wednesday morning. The manifesto tells us "With a new Parliament and a sensible majority Government, we can get that deal through in days. It is oven-ready - and every single Conservative candidate at this election, all 635 of them, have pledged to vote for this deal as soon as Parliament returns". A pledge signed in blood, no doubt.

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I've been told off for suggesting this, but Labour are doing something rather similar. When was the last time you heard a Labour spokesperson even mention the achievements of the last Labour government, which ended - I know it's hard to admit it - less than ten years ago? I'm very ready to be corrected, but the only things of that sort I can remember Corbyn applauding are the Good Friday Agreement, the Human Rights Act and the Equality and Human Rights Commission "which we set up".

Richard Burgon, who could be Secretary of State for the Justice Department in 16 days, but is told off by lawyers for casual use of the word "robbery", was explicit on Wednesday's Today. Nick Robinson reminded him that Labour had been in power for many of the years during which the WASPI women were not warned about their impending change of pension terms, and he told us straight: "Labour is under new management now". Not quite Year Zero - I haven't received my booking card for a session at a holiday camp in Xinjiang yet - but plain enough.

There is no time

One of the gems associated with the UK House of Commons is @PARLYapp, a "journalism project that focuses on the UK Parliament and the Westminster village" as they say, and which reports the business of the day in plain English on Twitter. Up it popped on Monday with the news that "If the government is returned a Queen’s Speech with reduced ceremonial will be held on Thursday 19th December," and "In any other scenario such as a hung parliament or a Labour victory, the Queen’s Speech will be in January". As the duty PARLYapper explained, "'reduced ceremonial' likely means the 2017 version of the [Queen's speech] - Queen in a day dress, arrives in a car rather than in a carriage. (EU hat TBC)".

Other timings: 19 December is also the beginning of the Christmas recess, whoever is elected, unless the new prime minister really wants to get people's backs up. When Her Maj goes off to Sandringham to hang up her EU hat for another year we can't quite be sure yet. Since Parliament only meets after the election on 17 December, and nothing much can happen until all the MPs are sworn in, nothing will happen before Christmas, despite Johnson's manifesto pledge: "If we elect a majority of Conservative MPs to Parliament, we will start putting our deal through Parliament before Christmas and we will leave the European Union in January".

Again, unless the new prime minister wants to annoy everybody, nothing else will happen until 6 January, by which time Johnson will have been prime minister for 166 days, and parliament will have been sitting for 34 of them. Somehow our hard-working, accessible prime minister has managed to fit three PMQs into that, but Donald Tusk's words "Do not waste this time" do come to mind.

****

Thanks for the title and theme of this post to my Twitter sparring partner RicoS90.

Brexit Day (no 3) +11 - the "can this bunch really be serious" election

Iain Duncan Smith celebrating
announcement of the "national living wage"

The minimum wage has not been a big election issue so far, though Labour and the Conservatives have both made a pitch. But today came the announcement of new Living Wage rates. (For the purposes of this piece, and indeed for anything else I write, George Osborne's "national living wage" is the minimum wage rate for over-25s).

The current rates are therefore:

• Living Wage: £9.30 per hour (£10.75 in London)
• minimum wage 25+: £8.21
• 21+: £7.70
• 18+: £6.15
• 16+: £4.35
• apprentice: £3.90

Sajid Javid's proposal came at the Conservative conference in October - the minimum wage for the top band would rise to £10.50 by 2024, and the age for receiving this rate would fall to 21 by the same date. We haven't seen the 2019 manifesto yet, but what have the Tories said at previous elections?

• 2010: "we will keep the minimum wage"
• 2015: "take everyone earning less than £12,500 out of Income Tax altogether and pass a law to ensure we have a Tax-Free Minimum Wage in this country... the National Minimum Wage should rise to £6.70 this autumn, on course for a Minimum Wage that will be over £8 by the end of the decade... nobody working 30 hours on the Minimum Wage [should pay] Income Tax on what they earn"
• 2017: "A new Conservative government will continue to increase the National Living Wage to 60 per cent of median earnings by 2020 and then by the rate [of increase] of median earnings"

The Labour offer has come from John McDonnell - the minimum rate for all workers would be £10 per hour "immediately", then rise with living costs [not earnings?] so that "everybody over 16 years of age will be earning comfortably more than £10.50 an hour by 2024". And in previous years?

• 2010: "We will end for good the concept of a life on benefit by offering all those unemployed for more than two years work they must accept, and we will make work pay better with the goal of a minimum wage rising at least in line with average earnings and... a new £40-a-week Better Off in Work guarantee [and] the Low Pay Commission’s remit will have the goal of the National Minimum Wage rising at least in line with average earnings over the period to 2015"
• 2015: "raising the National Minimum Wage to more than £8 an hour by October 2019"
• 2017: "raise the Minimum Wage to the level of the Living Wage (expected to be at least £10 per hour by 2020) – for all workers aged 18 or over"

****

Even Brexit Party Ltd promise they'll announce a full set of policies and present them in a "contract with the people" rather than a manifesto (though how such a contract could be enforced any better than a manifesto I have yet to hear) but we know what they want. The SNP, Lib Dems and others are making it primarily a Brexit election, along with Johnson's "Get Brexit Done" party and Corbyn's "Get Brexit Sorted" party, but  most of the time it's hard to work out what anybody's actually planning. Just waiting for the results... but (where have I heard this before?) they'll have very little time to do anything in Parliament by the time the election's done with.

One trade specialist is wondering: "Both Labour and Conservative are committing to completing a fundamental negotiation with our main trading partner next year. Yet in this election campaign so far dominated by triviality we have little idea of what they'll negotiate".

Emily Thornberry inspiring her colleagues

In interviews today, Emily Thornberry did outline what Labour has in mind and, as I said a few days ago, I find it hard to believe. "We want to be able to negotiate the sort of deal that we have been talking to the Europeans about for more than three years," she told us. "It is being in a customs union, in a single market, in a close alignment of rules and regulations." That menu surely can't be done under the EU27's current negotiating mandate - one of the Barnier mantras throughout has been that a permanent relationship can't be agreed under Article 50.

And yesterday Labour's campaign coordinator Andrew Gwynne told Andrew Marr that Labour would seek to strike "reciprocal agreements with the EU27 that allow British citizens to enjoy some of the freedoms that they will lose as a result of Brexit”, with Thornberry supplying further detail: "if a Labour government left the EU, the post-departure immigration policy would include controls on EU nationals, although those already in the UK would face no restrictions". All in three months? This means major amendment to the existing withdrawal agreement, which is all Barnier is allowed to negotiate, and - again - couldn't be done under Article 50.

****

Today's main performance came from Brexit Party Ltd. At a campaign launch in Hartlepool, Richard Tice's newly adopted constituency, Farage told the world he'd been thinking (after complaints and even resignations by many of his - still - potential candidates arguing that putting up 600 candidates was daft), and he'd decided that they really shouldn't stand in seats which were won by Conservatives in 2017.

Having concluded, after careful study, that the new proposed withdrawal agreement "is not Brexit" and must be opposed across the country (except Northern Ireland), the proprietor saw a single tweet which converted him to this new strategy. Johnson spoke to him, and he was enlightened. We can get a "a free trade agreement on the model of a super Canada plus arrangement..." was the message. "... not based on any kind of political alignment... a fantastic new free trade agreement with the EU by the end of 2020. And we will not extend the transition period...".

And that did it for him. Such clarity of thought! I haven't come across anybody serious who thinks this is remotely possible, and the Tory-Brexity insistence that this mess is all about trade - in goods, not even services - and not also about the many other sorts of cooperation that this kind of Brexit would throw away (and which would certainly change that "plus"into a "minus") still doesn't seem to concern anybody much in the media.

I've seen an extreme Brexiter tonight on Twitter who was fully in agreement with Farage yesterday, and is now fully in agreement with new-Farage. It's easy!

Until the next rethink.

Brexit Day (no 3) + 6 - the "apologise, just in case" election

James Cleverly observing Ken Clarke

for tips on debating skills 

The "getting Brexit done" party

We began the day with James Cleverly touring the studios, apologising for everything the ruling party did yesterday:

• an insouciant toff belittling the good sense of Grenfell victims (Cleverly didn't bother with Andrew Bridgen's apology for apologising for Jacob Rees Mogg)
• a cabinet minister apparently withholding relevant information about the suitability of a Conservative candidate for the Welsh Assembly, to whom a judge had said: "Are you completely stupid? You have managed single-handed, and I have no doubt it was deliberate on your part, to sabotage this trial… get out of my court". (This later led to Little Alun Cairns resigning as Welsh Secretary, but even then, in an otherwise quite reasonable interview, Stephen Crabb MP regretted the leak of the email which suggested that Cairns had lied and which made him resign. 
• a doctored video (lots of people do it, but they tend to be satirists) and Cleverly then had a different excuse for each interview he did (we had to shorten it, it was satirical, we put them both out, which Nick Robinson pinned him down on - guess which version got all the shares)
• various Conservative candidates being unpleasant at various times
• did he even mention Johnson's tabloid-Telegraph front page about affluent peasants?

This Sky News video itself turned out to have been unfair, since Cleverly's tour of the studios had taken him to Julia Hartley Brewer at Talk Radio when Kay Burley thought he was coming to Sky News, but it's an excellent account of the the things Cleverly should have been apologising for:

“And yet we have an empty chair”

Pretty devastating rundown of Tory blunders by @KayBurley while party chairman James Cleverly is 15ft away and refusing to come on air

pic.twitter.com/JIpGmmBBPY

— Matt Chorley (@MattChorley) November 6, 2019

Then, around lunchtime, Johnson took his convoy of cars and security vans off to Buckingham Palace to tell the queen the speech she made just 23 days ago is officially useless, and she'd be making another one, probably just after Christmas, and he couldn't be sure it wouldn't be his again.

"You're not very good at this, are you?" she might have thought, but not said.

Then he returned to Downing St to make another election campaigning speech. He started by claiming that he really didn't want an election, but election campaigning is what he's spent far more of his time doing in the three and a bit months since he was appointed than negotiating with the EU, let alone attending the Commons.

At least he used the plain lectern, with no crest, so he wasn't claiming it was a state announcement this time.

Fact checkers have been tearing into Johnson's material for weeks - the 40 hospitals that might be six, the 20,000 police officers who might almost replace the ones we've lost since 2010, the free ports we had until 2012, and which exist in many other EU countries, but which have apparently always been forbidden by the EU - but he keeps churning it out.

Because fact checkers don't reach a large audience unless they're on the media people watch, listen or engage with, and unless they call things out in real time.

For a good look under one of these headline numbers you need go no further than a powerful tweet by a former Chief Prosecutor of North West England, which outlines the damage which the pledge on police funding don't even pretend to undo.

There's an election on then

Suspend your disbelief as you enter here. We're saying there's a Conservative government of some kind after 12 December, and that "Brexit happens" on 31 January next year.

We keep hearing that Johnson pretends he can negotiate everything he needs from the EU by the end of 2020. This means he doesn't intend to use the option of more transition time which his withdrawal agreement has inherited from its very close cousin, the one May left us when she resigned.

The transition period (so called because it would be a transition to an unknown destination) is usually known by Conservatives as the implementation period (so called because there would be nothing to implement), and was originally nearly two years - 21 months - with the option to go on for another two years - 45 months. With extension to 31 October it was 14 months extendable to 38, and  Johnson's new deadline of 31 January makes it 11 months extendable to 35.

The only number Johnson wants us to look at is eleven - February 2020 to December 2020. Let's assume that the Withdrawal Agreement Bill to actually implement Brexit ("coming back with a deal" is just the beginning) gets through Parliament, with some of its excesses (allowing ministers to do pretty much whatever they like) trimmed back and some of the glaring omissions (too little on how the new arrangements for Northern Ireland would be put together) filled in, the transition might start.

Referring to the Explanatory Notes for the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (clause 31), the next thing to do in the UK is "the making by a Minister of the Crown of a statement on objectives for the future relationship with the EU", then not to proceed until "a Minister of the Crown has moved a motion on the statement on objectives for the future relationship with the EU in the House of Commons and the House of Commons has approved this motion and... a Minister of the Crown has moved a motion for the House of Lords to take note of the statement on objectives". The Commons has to vote for the objectives of the negotiation.

I'm oversimplifying massively here. Let's assume they can do it by the end of February.

That makes ten months.

Meet Phil Hogan, the new
EU trade commissioner

Let's also assume that the EU side can do their equivalent work (appointing negotiators - under the new Irish trade commissioner Phil Hogan - and agreeing a negotiating mandate without waiting for an EU Council meeting) in the same kind of time.

That gives Johnson (remember - disbelief still suspended) three or four months (up to 1 July, as specified in the Withdrawal Agreement) to decide whether he wants to carry on negotiating for the rest of the year before giving up, give up then and there, or request an extension past December 2020. He tells us he will not take the third option, which makes the most likely outcome a WTO-only relationship with the EU from the beginning of 2021 (though the Withdrawal Agreement, with its provisions for the Irish frontstop, citizens rights and a financial settlement of what would be around £19bn by then, would still be in operation and really annoying some Tories) .

And many other negotiations would have to be going on at the same time - to try not to lose too much of the police and justice cooperation we've built over the years, to try to construct some kind of associate membership of the regulatory structures we have again built over the last 40 years - for the aerospace, automotive, chemicals, food and drink and pharmaceutical industries. (This really is a ludicrously expensive way to reconstruct something not quite as good as what we have now.)

The timing is ridiculous. Johnson doesn't mean it.

Laura McAlpine with Jeremy Corbyn
at what I think is a different meeting

The "getting Brexit sorted" party

Corbyn chose Harlow yesterday for his Brexit speech. Harlow is currently the seat of Robert Halfon, promoter of "blue collar Conservatism". He was campaigning for free car parking at hospitals in 2017 and before, but didn't manage to convince his party, while Labour was campaigning on it in 2017. Labour's candidate for December is Laura McAlpine, who hosted the event, as is Labour's standard pattern.

Let's see what a "Labour Brexit" might be (these quotes are taken from the speech which was put out on the web, not as it was delivered).

"Labour’s plan will get Brexit sorted [not 'done'] so a Labour government can get on with delivering the real change Britain needs [not 'the people's priorities]."

"So an incoming Labour government will first secure a sensible deal. That will take no longer than three months because the deal will be based on terms we’ve already discussed with the EU, including a new customs union, a close single market relationship and guarantees of rights and protections... It’s a deal that will protect British manufacturing and respect the precious peace in Northern Ireland... And then we’ll put that deal to a public vote."

A few things here: Starmer and his people have certainly kept a line open to their counterparts in the EU negotiating team. As a responsible negotiator, Barnier would have kept in touch with a possible replacement government, but I'm not convinced his responsibilities would have allowed him to make any commitments. Yesterday, Starmer claimed that his Labour team and May's team had jointly talked to Barnier about the terms they'd been discussing in their cross-party talks. He claimed they'd been told it could be done in four to six weeks. I have trouble believing that.

Are Labour telling us that what they could put to a referendum would be a "finished Brexit"? More than a withdrawal agreement with a commitment to a customs union and close alignment to single market rules, which the EU were reluctantly willing to concede in the backstop? I don't believe it. Barnier would certainly talk to an alternative government. He wouldn't go outside his negotiating mandate, and the EU is going to agree - it can't - a future relationship under Article 50.

"So if you want to leave the EU without trashing our economy or selling out our NHS, you’ll be able to vote for it. If you want to remain in the EU, you’ll be able to vote for that. Either way, only a Labour government will put the final decision in your hands. Because this has involved the whole country from the start, it can’t now be left to politicians. To finally get this sorted and move forward we need the people to sign on the dotted line. And we will immediately carry out your decision, so Britain can get beyond Brexit."

Logically put. I hope Labour people will be asked to commit to the legislation for such a referendum making the decision legally binding, which the 2016 vote was not (what a prime minister says - "we will implement..." - isn't law).

"Boris Johnson staked his reputation on leaving the EU on 31st October 'do or die'. 'No ifs, no buts,' he said. So the failure to do so can only be his. The irony is, for all his boasting, Johnson’s sell-out deal STILL won’t get Brexit done. It will lead to years of continuing negotiations and uncertainty... The EU negotiator Michel Barnier has said an EU trade deal on Johnson’s terms would take 'three years, maybe more' of further negotiations... Whereas Labour’s plan will sort Brexit quickly, because whatever the final decision, we won’t be ripping up our main trading relationship."

That's a big claim. We know that Johnson isn't being honest about when Brexit might be "done", but what does Corbyn think he's saying here? Labour will get a deal within three months. Starting when? Given Christmas, let's be generous and assume he means the end of March. As I said above, that could surely only be a withdrawal agreement with a political declaration going for a close-ish relationship.

There'll be an EU Council in late March, and we should know soon what the EU Parliament calendar looks like. Assume they both say OK and the UK Parliament approves it (we're talking about a Labour government here, remember) it goes into a referendum campaign (for which the Labour government has already managed to pass an enabling law, and for which the electoral commission has agreed a question). We then need ten weeks... Just about doable.

Suspending a lot of disbelief (starting with the Labour government) that means that Labour's withdrawal agreement could be put to a vote at the end of June - assume the 25th. Then would come implementation...

Brexit Day (no 3) + 2 - The "stop bad things while people are watching" election

The Preston New Road site, visualised

At the top of the hour the news bulletin told us "The government has halted all fracking operations in England". Not that there are many. And it turned out to be not exactly a ban - "After reviewing the [Oil and Gas Authority] report into recent seismic activity at Preston New Road, it is clear that we cannot rule out future unacceptable impacts on the local community. For this reason, I have concluded that we should put a moratorium on fracking in England with immediate effect," said Industry Secretary Andrea Leadsom.

Asked about her decision by Mishal Husain on the Today programme, Leadsom used words of regret - "this a great opportunity for the UK" but didn't sound all that disappointed. Almost as if the moratorium wasn't designed to last very long. She volunteered "and we have acted on their report within a couple of days".

"In the run-up to an election," we might add.

Husain went on to ask about the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) report on "the threat posed to this country by Russia", as Dominic Grieve put it on Thursday. Leadsom didn't seem to have any good answers on the subject, not even briefed answers. "I'm not aware that there is any hold up with that report" was an easy opening, then she descended quickly into generalities. "... at all times select committees make reports and the government prepares a response and there's nothing peculiar about the time that takes...".

The ISC is not a select committee. It's established under its own law, which specifies the selection of its members and their privileged access to secret information. Select committees publish their own reports, and government responses sometimes appear months later. Government certainly can't hold up publication of a select committee report. It can delay this one, precisely because it's different.

Grieve has told us about the seven months or more since his committee's report was completed, and that it's been vetted to death by spooks and civil servants. All it needs is the final OK from Downing St. They've had their ten days, and Johnson's mouthpieces can't tell us what's holding it up.

Leadsom told us several times that she knew nothing about this report, but she "wouldn't accept that it's been held up". Not an answer. Especially when she went on to say "I completely recognise that, in the run-up to a general election Dominic Grieve might be calling for [publication] but nevertheless the fact is that many select committee reports are produced and the government has to respond properly. It can't respond in haste..."

Funny that "in the run-up to an election" government couldn't "act on their report within a couple of days".

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve calls for a report into alleged Russian interference to be published before the general election, and says Number 10's justification for not releasing it is "completely and totally untrue. It's a lie"

Read more: https://t.co/a8StmgpFRo pic.twitter.com/i6kIsEwaA3

— Sky News Politics (@SkyNewsPolitics) November 2, 2019

When they knock on the door... 

Is this really the best the Conservative party can do?

Here’s a game both for the media and people at home

This is Tory general election brief for candidates - and here’s the page with suggested answers to qs

Why not read along with candidates when they deliver preprepared lines? Surprise them by pre-empting what they’ll say next! pic.twitter.com/uuu4QAHnQq

— Sam Coates Sky (@SamCoatesSky) November 2, 2019

More news of those Brexit riots

Always on the button, the Sheffield Star reports "Confusion as NO ONE turns up for 'huge' pro Brexit demo in Doncaster".

Brexit Day (No 3) +1 - The "throw a dead deal on the table" election

This morning we saw a report from a committee of Parliament - The detention of young people with learning disabilities and/or autism - reported alongside the harrowing stories of people who've suffered from inadequate services and inadequate law. Other committees might be beavering away to finish their own reports before the end of the parliamentary session, when they lose access to the facilities of Parliament, and the committees cease to exist.

What we didn't see was the Intelligence and Security Committee report which Dominic Grieve raised the alarm about yesterday. As he told the Commons, "in accordance with the Justice and Security Act 2013, we sent [it] to the Prime Minister on 17 October for him to confirm that there were no classified matters remaining. There ought not to be, because the report has already been carefully looked at by the Cabinet Office. That confirmation should have been received by today to enable publication before the House is dissolved". But that confirmation seems still to be unavailable.

Today, some of those infamous "anonymous sources" have told Alberto Nardelli of Buzzfeed that there's nothing to see here, and that we should all move along and stop making a fuss. The fact remains, however, that a committee of Parliament - not just the Commons - which is required to exist by its own Act of Parliament, has undertaken an investigation of Russian money and misinformation operations and their effects on British democracy, that the report is complete, and that we might not see it until after a general election. If ever.

(Incidentally, it's rather amusing, and also something to be fixed toot sweet, that the independent website of the independent Intelligence and Security Committee is not itself secure.)

We therefore have a man who's considered trustworthy enough (and in most contexts we'd consider him "establishment" enough) to be granted access to the operations of British spooks, who's really annoyed successive Conservative governments for the last couple of years but not been relieved of those responsibilities, who's labelled a "traitor" by sundry Brexity social media warriors, and who's led his equally trustworthy bunch of Conservative, Labour, SNP and crossbench MPs and peers in producing a report.

Which might be relevant to an election campaign.

And which Number Ten appears not to want to see published. Not a good look.

Where do we go from here?

Parliament is still staggering on, as noted above about committee reports, but not for long. Dissolution comes next Wednesday, 6 November, at which point all the legislation which is now in play will be lost.

We might hope that the Domestic Abuse Bill, which was messed about by Johnson's initial, unlawful prorogation, will come back in. This deceitfully initiated session (the sovereign will no doubt absolutely love coming back just before Christmas to deliver another Queen's speech, which will sound suspiciously like the one she's just done) has had time for little more, but it would be very interesting indeed if the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill wasn't also reintroduced in its current form.

IFF it's a Conservative government doing it...

The next important date is 14 November, when nominations of candidates close, and now Farage has given it extra significance, as that's the day he promises to unleash his full slate of candidates on the world if Johnson doesn't play his game (see below).

After the election on 12 December, Parliament will reopen for "business" (swearing in and not much else) on Monday 16th, before packing up again three days later. Will the Lords even bother turning up?

Then they start again on 6 January, with Brexit No 4 looming at the end of the month. There's going to have to be a Queen's speech at some point, and whoever ends up running a government will have to prove they have a majority.

It makes you wonder how they ever get anything done.

An unstoppable force stumbles into the light

Donald Trump happened to discover the landline number of a British radio station yesterday, and happened to call just as his old mucker Nigel Farage happened to be on the air. They exchanged a few astonished pleasantries - "What are the chances of that then?" they laughed over each other at one point... [not really]

The stunt worked, in that it dominated front pages and broadcast media first thing this morning. Speaking to one of his fellow employees on LBC ahead of his party's launch event this morning, "Farage refused to give clues as to whether his party would be fighting a national campaign, or a narrowly-focused, constituency-specific one. He said: 'Some newspapers are suggesting that we will fight vast numbers of seats, others think we will fight as few as 20 seats. I run a very tight ship, we don’t leak. I will reveal all later on today.'".

And so he did. I was trying to discover the actual location of Brexit Party Ltd's election campaign launch, and found this, from authoritative blog-of-record Guido Fawkes: "the Brexit Party are to hold a rally in Parliament Square on the day the UK is due to leave the EU [1 November; surely some mistake], either in celebration of independence or anger at parliamentarians once again pushing pointless delay". The best laid plans of mice and registered company number 11694875, eh?

The event's message was for Boris Johnson: Join a Leave Alliance with us and a few Labour-Leavey-types we'll tell you about later, dump your agreement with 27 other countries, and we'll take over some constituencies where you don't have a chance but we do, and we can clobber Labour, and we'll leave you alone in areas where you should win on your own, and you'll emerge with a stonking majority. Otherwise we'll stand against you everywhere and... (the logic started to fall apart here; I couldn't tell whether Farage was threatening Johnson with a Labour majority, the loss of Brexit, or both).

A frighteningly large number of Conservative party members (not all of them infiltrators) would probably have snapped that up, but MPs and the party machine seem to think that something called the Conservative party matters, so the answer so far has been No.

Commentators were working out what the actual likely effect might be. Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University offered a long Twitter thread beginning "People seem to be forgetting there are a lot less Labour Leave votes in Labour Leave seats now than in 2016 because a lot of them switched to Cons in 2017. So BXP candidates in Lab Leave seats will usually take more votes from Cons...".

The British Election Study came to a similar conclusion: "There are some caveats. It is possible that there may be some small subset of seats, where the Brexit party is more attractive to recent Labour voters, and the Conservatives have done a good job of reclaiming Brexit party voters since June. But even with these caveats, it is hard to see how the Brexit party will hurt Labour more than the Conservatives".

And, just to help, Matt Chorley at the Times Red Box dug out this analysis of British attitudes to Donald Trump.

Chart shows why Trump's intervention is bad for Johnson, and good for Corbyn

(thanks to @mattsmithetc @yougov)https://t.co/ffP2okhJ4Y pic.twitter.com/X8qNqAs2f9

— Matt Chorley (@MattChorley) November 1, 2019

We don't do bribery and corruption around here

Oh no, not at all. The impending social media election wars have led media companies to allocate digital analysts to "tell us what's going on". We've heard variously that the LibDems got started early and are consumer-testing various images of Jo Swinson, that Labour have just kicked off a solid campaign, and that the Conservatives might have posted an ad directed at the good people of Milton Keynes, informing them that Jeremy Corbyn was rude about them once.

But these people are still assuming that their objects of study will play by the rules. Quite apart from a £100m "Get Ready..." campaign, which was supposed to cement Brexit, a Conservative government and the idea of "getting it done" in electors' minds (government websites are now being changed wholesale, with "Get Ready For Brexit" becoming "Find Out More About Brexit'), we have the My Town campaign.

A week ago, the "town" I live on the edge of was the subject of this Facebook post. Many other towns have reported the same. And local information on the scheme is already out there - Marketing Stockport tells us "Cheadle to benefit from new Towns Fund". A local opposition councillor, however, points out that there "may be no money for Cheadle in Government towns fund". Nobody has received a penny yet of course, but it has been noticed that the lucky towns nominated so far seem to be Conservative areas or parts of marginal constituencies.

Yvette Cooper asks, "How on earth has Mark Sedwill allowed this to happen? Did permanent secretaries go along with this Tory abuse of government advertising?".

A happy ending

It has to happen sometimes.

After many months of suspicion that they were holding back progress on their investigations of electoral malpractice during the Brexit referendum, perhaps under political pressure, the Metropolitan Police have "submitted a file to the CPS for Early Investigative Advice in relation to the second investigation, which followed a referral by the Electoral Commission on 19 July 2018 and concerns Vote Leave and Be Leave".

It could still take a long time, and it could still come to nothing, but OpenDemocracy suggests that "the timing of the submitted file by the Met for what is termed 'Early Investigative Advice' from the CPS could not be worse for the prime minister" in the run-up to an election.

We can only stand and stare.

Brexit day (no 3) - The "I've done what I can" election

When John Bercow announced his resignation, one of his guiding ideas was to have the next speaker elected by a chamber who know the candidates, rather than by a house with a hundred or so neophytes shepherded through the votes "to best effect" by their party machines. This is an example of Bercow's good side, and it looks as if he's going to get his way, with the election to replace him now scheduled for Monday 4 November.

The sessions of tributes to him, and later to his own selection as speaker's chaplain Rose Hudson-Wilkin, were gushing and interminable, and he sat there lapping it up - not an example of his better side - though Chi Onwurah put it nicely: "I find it very hard to imagine this Chamber without you, although I do hope the electors in Newcastle give me the opportunity to find out".

Please note: the vote is on Thursday 12 December and Parliament re-opens the following Monday for swearing in of MPs.

Corbyn greeting Andrew Gwynne,
Labour's campaign coordinator, at the launch

Battersea

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, Jeremy Corbyn was launching the Labour campaign (not the manifesto, as Clive Lewis would have to admit later to Andrew Neil - that still has to be written by the Clause 5 Committee).

Corbyn's speech was mostly familiar stuff I'm not going to analyse here - it's going to be a long election - though the idea that this is the "last chance to tackle the climate emergency" - with or without a "Green Industrial Revolution at the heart of Labour’s plan to transform Britain" was perhaps a bit much for the first day.

"Labour will get Brexit sorted within six months. We’ll let the people decide whether to leave with a sensible deal or remain. That really isn’t complicated." We'll see. Perhaps.

"I travel all around our country and listen to people. This is what I learn from them: they don’t see politics like the media and political class do." This might be heresy, but I'd be surprised if we don't hear pretty much the same from every party at some point.

"The Prime Minister wants you to believe that we’re having this election because Brexit is being blocked by an establishment elite. People aren’t fooled so easily. They know the Conservatives are the establishment elite. And you know what really scares the elite? All of us, the British people. What the elite are actually afraid of is paying their taxes.

"So we’re going after the tax dodgers. We’re going after the dodgy landlords. We’re going after the bad bosses. We’re going after the big polluters. Because we know whose side we’re on. And the big question of this election is: whose side are you on?"

He personalised it, naming a handful of the villains Labour will be "going after", and followed it immediately with "And we have something that the Rupert Murdochs, the Mike Ashleys, and the Boris Johnsons don’t have. We have people". Which - I'm sorry - is vacuous tripe.

And it was picked up later as "unashamed class war", maybe a lazy label from Sarah Montague on World At One (available through most of November), though Professor Rob Ford told us it was "very much the approach last time, and last time [Corbyn] achieved the largest campaign swing in polling history, so if it ain't broke don't fix it is probably the thinking at Labour HQ".

Labour's Laura Pidcock dismissed the "class war" accusation with a laugh. "What's divisive about bringing together the majority of people in this country? The majority of people in this country are not millionaires, billionaires, speculators... Jeremy Corbyn was talking about that. They are in a tiny minority, and he's saying 'Whose side are you on?'"

Whose side are you on? What's divisive about that?

The Conservative party  campaign has been going from
early September. And we've been paying for it.

Some playschool in middle England

It's difficult to work out when the Conservative campaign started. Work from the day Johnson was appointed, though, and you probably won't go far wrong. There is the small matter of his never having achieved a majority in the Commons, but I won't tell the Queen if you won't.

He was continuing his tour of the primary schools of England, and there'll be plenty of time in the next few weeks for more on that stuff. More important was a point of order raised in the Commons by Dominic Grieve, who may not have much longer left in the public eye. He chairs Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, which has privileged access - as the title suggests - to the intelligence services and the security apparatus of the UK.

Grieve said: "The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, of which I am the Chair, has been investigating the threat posed to this country by Russia. We have produced a report, which, in accordance with the Justice and Security Act 2013, we sent to the Prime Minister on 17 October for him to confirm that there were no classified matters remaining. There ought not to be, because the report has already been carefully looked at by the Cabinet Office. That confirmation should have been received by today to enable publication before the House is dissolved, but I regret to say that it has not been. We thus have a Committee of Parliament waiting to lay before the House a report that comments directly on what has been perceived as a threat to our democratic processes. Parliament and the public ought to and must have access to this report in the light of the forthcoming election, and it is unacceptable for the Prime Minister to sit on it and deny them that information".

At the time of writing, nothing more has been heard from Johnson's tour of hospital wards ("Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits Addenbrooke’s Hospital - but is reportedly ‘booed’ out") and finger painting classes of the UK, but I'm sure he'll be heartened by the judgement of a vox-popper this morning on the Today programme - "I'm going to vote for Boris because he's a really naughty boy". As Newsnight's diplomatic editor tells us "failure to [publish the report] because of a refusal by No 10 to sign it off may be seen by many as an attempt to suppress evidence of previous Russian attempts to subvert UK polls".

London - air pollution capital of the UK

And what have the Liberal Democrats been up to? Not a lot today, apart from running a diesel vehicle around central London to try out a poster or two, and incidentally to annoy a Guardian journalist.

Build a brighter future with idling diesels!

Apologies, this seems to have been slightly doctored
along the way.

The party of nowhere

And now, Brexit Party Ltd seems to be having a bit of a rethink. The message went out last night: "Message from HQ ... IMPORTANT. Please go DARK on social media. DO NOT respond to any questions about where we are standing, what the strategy or plan is from now".

Will they not, after all, be standing in "all 650 seats in the UK" (despite not being registered for elections in Northern Ireland)? The operation has been naming prospective parliamentary candidates all over the place (and that "prospective" can be important; in theory, calling yourself an actual candidate opens you up to having to declare everything you do, even months before the actual election, as an election expense). One of them was asked this morning on Today whether the whole-UK approach is still the plan, and she didn't know. She was going to have to ask her election agent. If she ever gets one, since they don't have any local parties. Or members.

Foreign news

Nigel Farage, who must still be earning his media masters at Global more money than opprobrium, invited his old mucker Donald Trump on to LBC this evening, just for a bit of mild intervening in another country's elections, you understand. I suspect we'll touch on this tomorrow.