Wednesday, 6 November 2019

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:


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...

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