May's "disunity is not an option" election - day 2

We were greeted by a Daily Mail headline which quoted from Lenin (you know, Steve Bannon's favourite thinker) and several likenings of Theresa May to Recep Tayyip Erdogan for her "uncompromising" election announcement.

@simonjhix Until Erdogan, televised election debates took place here in Turkey, these are not good signs. Congrats to BBC, ITV.

— Сэлчук Озшахин (@ozsahins) April 19, 2017

Yvette Cooper asked a pointed question (she's good at that, and she's ambushed May before).  David Mundell said something which looked rude, but (much) later he "explained" he'd actually said "leadership pitch" (she's not so good at that)

Former shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper confronts Theresa May: "Isn't the truth that we cannot believe a single word she says?" pic.twitter.com/HPoViJOhBj

— Press Association (@PA) April 19, 2017

---

Last Friday saw the announcement of a competition between other EU cities to be the new hosts of the EU medicines and banking regulators (both are currently in London).  David Davis popped up to protest that there was no reason for them to go anywhere.

That was a silly idea then (and Davis must have known it) but the EU's Department of the Bleedin' Obvious reaffirmed on Wednesday that EU agencies must be in the EU.

European Union agencies must be based in the EU. The decision to relocate EU agencies based in the UK is not part of the Brexit negotiations pic.twitter.com/74M6Zzd2Ee

— European Commission (@EU_Commission) April 19, 2017

Imagine (to pluck an idea from nowhere) that Scotland became independent.  Could the UK Oil and Gas Authority stay in Aberdeen?  Much of its work would have to be transferred to a Scottish body, but any remaining UK agency would have to move, probably south of the border.

---

Then there was the fun surrounding the Gorton byelection, which was supposed to take place on May 4th alongside the local elections.  A new MP would be elected... to a parliament which wasn't sitting... and would have to be elected again a month later.

Everybody agreed this was daft, but nobody knew who could cancel the byelection.  It wasn't the government and it wasn't Labour, who'd called the vote in the first place.  Attention rested on the local returning officer but she said it was nothing to do with her.

Finally it seemed to be decided that a special motion would have to be passed in the Commons to enable her to avoid embarrasment all round.

---

Theresa May has announced an election designed to give HER a mandate to offer strong leadership.  She had worked out that Brexit wasn't all going to be done by 2020 and that she should take advantage of an apparently weak opposition to buy free passage to 2022.

But then the CPS "made it clear" that decisions would come very soon on prosecutions for Tory election expense irregularities in 2015.  That couldn't possibly be part of the real motivation for an early election could it?

The ME, sorry, May, election, in June - day 1

And so Theresa May strides to the steps of Downing St (actually the middle of the road) to declare that she can't hold out against these nasty politicians frustrating Brexit (formerly known as the democratic parliamentary process) and that she must have a mandate.

She has already asserted (with no obvious backing in fact) that "There is a sense that people are coming together and uniting behind the opportunities that lie ahead".  That's her "sense", presumably, also known as wishful thinking in the service of perceived political necessity, and her view of the "opportunities" which she has religiously refused to be better than vague about.

She will have tutted when her minion David Davis spoke of achieving "the exact same benefits" from Brexit negotiations, and not over the lamentable American grammar.  He should have known - after all, everyone should know - that the target is the "best possible deal".  What is there to argue about?

The policy has been admirably summarised by... oh, somebody or other...

We'll do everything we can

[which might not be enough]

to get the best deal we can

[which might be crap but the best possible] #r4today

— Ed Wilson (@eddwilson) April 19, 2017

The main point for May, and for most commentators, is that this hurried election is solely to produce her own mandate, so that she does not have to rely on a manifesto by David Cameron (remember him? It already seems a long time) and a leadership given to her by default.
This is May's June ME election.

And after Cameron's running rings round the broadcasters in 2015, to dictate a set of TV "debates" which disadvantaged him as little as possible, May has gone one step further and tried to ban debates altogether.  A chair should be procured, with suitably modern and tasteful upholstery, to represent our prime minister in all its defiant emptiness, as debate rages around it on the election issues which aren't about ME/May.

---

I've put in a plea for a daily fact checking slot on the Radio 4 Today programme, supplemented by live fact checking and corrections during interviews.  I don't hold out much hope, but after last year's fact-free zone of a referendum campaign, you have to try.  Every programme, every media outlet should face the same demand.

Brexit, a long and arduous birth

As Brexit negotiations emerge blinking and squalling from their nine-month gestation, stories of demands and preparations by companies and other institutions keep coming.  Here are a few from the last week.

Catastrophe looms at ports after Brexit, shipping industry warns

The Guardian reports "The UK is facing an 'absolute catastrophe' if it does not sort out a 'frictionless and seamless' border at Dover and other ports, the shipping industry has warned" and explains the disruption which could occur in UK and other ports if Theresa May's promised "deep and special relationship" doesn't turn out right.  Software and other systems would need major changes to handle the customs checks which result from anything but the perfect deal.

Then we see what the rest of the world thinks of us.

Brexit bites as the UK falls from first to fifth place as the preferred FDI destination, according to a KPMG survey. pic.twitter.com/Q7I1NkpnIY

— UK News (@UK__News) April 12, 2017

As ever, the picture is more nuanced than a tweet or headline, but the story is that Brexit has reduced the UK's attractiveness to external investors.

Transferwise boss warns fintech startups against Brexit Britain

The report begins "At a government-backed conference designed to trumpet the UK as a post-Brexit fintech powerhouse, the CEO of Transferwise went off-message, suggesting startups should avoid London and confirming that his own firm will move its European headquarters to the mainland". Though Transferwise countered:

@JolyonMaugham @iainmartin1 @KevinCoates Our global hq is in london and stays in London; without passporting, we need to get a license in another EU country and set up there too

— taavet hinrikus (@taavet) April 12, 2017

London and the UK still have their attractions, but licensing and regulation will require at least some functions - and some companies - to be located elsewhere.  This is a widespread concern in financial businesses, with contingency plans beginning to turn into action (Lloyds TSB is now setting up an HQ in Berlin).

And, back to shipping and ports...

Shipping: Where a hard Brexit is not an option  

“They had better let us know soon,” says Guy Platten, the chief executive of the UK Chamber of Shipping, because ports like Dover, Holyhead and Zeebrugge just aren't ready for extra complexity to be added to an export-import system which has been built in a single market.

Beyond the policy vacuum?

We now have opening statements on negotiating positions from the UK government, the EU council and the EU parliament.  Michel Barnier, chief negotiator for the EU commission, will get his mandate at the end of April (rather unbelievably, a few days before the new French president is elected).  But for everybody whose lives and businesses depend on our EU relationship this still feels like a policy vacuum. There is no indication of the upheaval to come (or, of course, the sweetness, light and sunlit uplands predicted by keepers of the Brexit faith).

Every sector, every company, every institution  is coming up with its own worst case scenario and its own special demands.  Nissan, to pluck a name out of the air, will know what they were promised all those months ago, and their view of its value and limitations will be at least as good as that of the ministers who made the promise. Hundreds of companies and organisations have been consulted, though the word is that "negativity" was frowned on.

Nothing can be known for certain until the end of the negotiations, until the ink is wet on however many agreements there are in the end, and producing software, building port offices, setting up operations in another country, passing a #GreatCopyAndPasteBill can't all be done over the weekend before the grand signing.

This isn't going to stop.

Why does it all have to be so complicated?

"It's OK, we can just walk away with no deal, and trade on WTO terms," they keep telling me.  "Why should Brexit be complicated?"

Well, apart from the fact that the process we're about to enter with the sending of a little Article 50 letter isn't a trade negotiation...

If we walk away with no deal that's no deal on the future rights of British ex-pats in EU countries and other EU ex-pats in the UK.  It means nobody knows the status of the border between Northern Ireland and the South, and poor Nigel Farage doesn't know where his EU pension will come from.  And a few thousand other things.

We already trade on WTO terms with most of the world. We use the EU's terms.  To reactivate the UK's membership of the World Trade Organisation we have to propose a schedule of tariffs and other ways we want to deal with the world.  And any other member of the WTO can object to our proposals.

One of those other members is the EU, part of whose schedule we would probably try to take on, to save time.  Because what we don't have is time.

At the moment we leave the EU we have to know the terms on which we deal with the EU, and "no deal" doesn't sound a good way to start.  We also lose our access to the dozens of trade agreements the EU has made while we've been a member.  Many-to-most of those might be available for quick re-signing, but at least one country has already argued that a lone UK shouldn't just get the same terms as we had while part of a 500million-strong market.

Remember all those other countries queuing up to sign shiny new trade deals with us the moment we leave?  If they have any sense at all, nothing will be finalised until they know our relationship with the EU and so what we're worth to them.  Shall we say "no deal" might well be of less value in some cases?

To say nothing of the things that Article 50 actually does cover - how far do we get without a proper legal relationship with international regulatory systems for air travel, chemicals manufacture, medicines testing and dozens of other sectors?

A lot of these things might well be easy enough to reconstruct - REconstruct, at a cost - but not if we walk out without a deal.

No deal is better than a bad deal. Is a bad deal what Theresa May wants?

What is Theresa May planning for Brexit (if anything)?  She tells us she will present a deal for Parliament to approve in less than two years.  Most people who follow the news might therefore be thinking that everything will be sorted out by early 2019.  But the Article 50 process is not a trade negotiation, and nobody on the other side of the table expects to be talking about separation and trade at the same time.

The much-quoted clause 2 of the article says (my emphasis):

... the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with [the withdrawing] State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union.

Nothing is impossible, but insiders seem to agree that arrangements for withdrawal, coupled with an agreement on a framework for the future, can be completed within two years, but any actual trade deals will take longer, which could mean the UK is unable to do deals with non-EU countries for some time.

On the quiet, the government acknowledges this. When the CBI asks not to be left looking over the cliff edge of a sudden change in relationships, May and Brexit minister David Davis will acknowledge that time might be needed to complete the implementation of the deal.  The word "transition" sometimes passes their lips but always as if it's implementation of a deal already signed.

"No deal is better than a bad deal," May has said.  But there's no time limit on trade negotiations.  The Article 50 deadline applies only to agreement on things like money, ex-pats, membership of security, scientific and other organisations.  "Crashing out on WTO terms" is nothing to do with that, unless we make such a mess of it that we leave the EU and have to negotiate a free trade agreement from outside, but May is telling us it is.

My worry is that the government is feeding the expectation that everything will be done and dusted by 2019.  The more vociferous Brexiters don't see why it should take even that long, but if we stay "unfree" past that date there will be more than grumbles.

We're going to see a brief battle in Parliament this week over the possibility of a "meaningful" vote on whatever deals emerge, but Gina Miller is right. - we won't know for a year or more what options we will have and should fight for. We won't know for about the same time whether an Article 50 notification can be withdrawn or reversed.  Today we're in a phony war, which May wants to keep phony as long as possible.

I don't know what Parliament might have to vote on in 2018-19.  I do know that May will have to manage expectations very differently to avoid massive disappointment, backbench revolts and perhaps worse.  Farage has warned of "public anger" at any "betrayal".  Less calculating voices suggest taking to the streets.  A prime minister who seems terrified of telling us anything definite about the future might give them an excuse to deliver.

Questions on the EU referendum

This morning, questions were invited by the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, to be addressed in a future programme.  I supplied the following, and may well use them for similar purposes elsewhere.

Question 1

Everybody is asking what would happen after we leave the EU, but the period of years between a vote to Leave and the agreement of a new relationship would have economic impact.  This is probably more predictable, being closer in time and mostly a matter of unncertainty.  What projections can you make about what we might call the Brinterim?

(Michael Gove has said he doesn't see us leaving the EU "this parliament" and the House Of Lords report on the subject agrees it would be a long and complicated process.)

Question 2

Is it not true that, as a matter of international law, the UK could not make trade agreements with any other country until we finalised an agreement with the EU and were no longer a member?  Wouldn't some prospective partners in any case want to see what arrangements we made with the EU, to understand what kind of deal they could make with us themselves?

Question 3

Is it not true that, as a matter of international law, any unilateral attempt to restrict immigration from the EU (and other unilateral measures) could be declared unacceptable?  It would also change the stance taken by EU negotiators.

Letter to my MP - unaccompanied child refugees

I must express my concern at your vote against the Dubs amendment to the Immigration Bill, which attempted to commit the government to taking a share of the unaccompanied child refugees currently languishing in various locations across Europe.  The figure of 3000 such children has been proposed by Save the Children since at least last summer, and at least the same number of unaccompanied children is still recorded by charities despite large numbers having apparently disappeared, perhaps abducted for who knows what purposes.

The repeated wheeling out of the "pull factors" argument horrifies me.  It means that those children who have already travelled into EU countries, wherever they come from and whatever they are fleeing, must not be helped for fear of encouraging others to travel.  Their fate is irrelevant.  They must stay in the mud of the camps, at the mercy of illness, violence and gangs, in the service of this "greater imperative".

The UK government has rightly, and to its great credit, spent large sums on supporting refugee camps around Syria, and tried to enlist other countries to make similar provision.  But our attitude to those who, for whatever reason, have travelled westwards seems to be that they must be punished for their foolish decisions, or the foolish decisions of their parents.

I can only hope that you will think again when Lord Dubs' second amendment arrives in the Commons.  I would be ashamed if this country's policy continues to be that these people should just go away.

Letter to my MP - home office powers in the context of the EU referendum

In the run up to the EU referendum it is important that we operate as far as possible on the basis of factual information, which is not always easy.

I note from Baroness Neville-Jones's piece in the Guardian last Friday that about 6000 non-British EEA nationals have been turned away from our borders on security grounds since 2010.

On the other side, the Vote Leave campaign tells us today that 50 people with previous convictions have committed serious crimes while in the UK.  I assume that both these claims are fundamentally true.

In his statement following the European Council on 19 February the prime minister told us that he (and Theresa May I think) had negotiated:

1. new powers to stop criminals from other countries entering the UK, and to deport them if they are already here
2. longer re-entry bans for fraudsters and people who collude in sham marriages
3. powers to prevent EU nationals avoiding British immigration rules when bringing their families from outside the EU.

I have found it difficult to find any further information on these new powers, and would be grateful if you could help me fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

Calling myself to arms

Yesterday on his weekly LBC self-promotion (with a relatively youthful Michael Crick standing in for David Mellor) Ken Livingstone pronounced on the Labour campaign to Remain in the European Union.  About the most positive thing he said was that Alan Johnson, "Labour's most popular man", was on the job.

Ignoring for now the implications of that throwaway label, just note that it was all he had to say about the campaign as such.  But "where is it?" demanded Crick.  Anyone who's bumped into Johnson as he tours the country, or found a lonely handful of leafleters in a shopping centre somewhere might have noticed that Labour is running a campaign, but for many of us it's just the occasional media interview with Johnson himself or some random Labour MP who's clearly not devoted much time to the question.

The other insights I got from Livingstone before I turned off in exasperation were:

1. he thinks the EU is pretty useless but we should stay in to improve it (probably using the "Make it so" method of those who can criticise at the drop of a hat but have nothing but slogans to replace the various evils they identify)
2. he reminded us that there are more pressing votes before 23 June, and that Labour will turn its attention across the Channel after 5 May (when they will be celebrating/lamenting their results in English councils, Scotland, Wales and London) and "get the core vote out".

Before clicking the off switch I tweeted

Your core vote, Mr Livingstone, isn't big enough to win the referendum, and a third of them are talking to UKIP anyway. @lbc

— Ed Wilson (@eddwilson) March 26, 2016

Three months to go before the referendum, and I see a Remain campaign presented by Tories who otherwise don't deserve support and minor figures who are either unprepared or so obviously public relations types that they deserve to be ignored.

Grassroots Out was reported yesterday to have spent £7 million already (spending is not properly controlled until the regulated 10-week campaigning period.  This is a grassroots organisation of people who only really care about this referendum.

There's still a good chance of legal battles when one of the rival Leave organisations is designated as the lead campaign, but it's time people like me did something useful rather than just moaning about the pitiful inadequacy of Ken Livingstone's "core vote strategy".

What country do I live in?

2016 sees events in Ireland and elsewhere to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising, the first of a series of events which shaped the country I live in, not least by making it rather smaller.

This is also the year of a referendum which the prime minister has presented as a choice between a "great Britain in the European Union" and a "great leap in the dark".

It's hardly surprising, then, that I find myself thinking about the country I live in.

David Cameron's image of a great Britain (and his invocation of a "greater Britain" at last year's Conservative party conference) plays with the idea of Great Britain, but that is not actually the name of the country.

Great Britain came into being at the union of Scotland and England (which had incorporated Wales since the 13th century) and then was subsumed into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.  Today's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland came into being in 1922, and is therefore not yet 100 years old.

But what is our nationality?  Not UKish but British.  This includes Northern Ireland, which isn't part of Great Britain, but not Ireland (which is part of the British Isles, but let's not go there).  And Britain is often used as shorthand for the UK - more acceptable, perhaps, for the non-royalists among us - though some in Northern Ireland bridle at that while still considering themselves British.

Confusing, aren't we?

In sport we see Team GB (the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic Team), the ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board), an Irish Rugby Football Union which covers both the Republic and Northern Ireland and a Great Britain tennis team which this time does exclude Northern Ireland (but competed under the name British Isles, including all of Ireland, until 1912).

In football the four "home nations" of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have a team, while the Six Nations rugby union competition also features four "home nations" but this time Ireland is the whole island.

Foreigners often refer to the country as Great Britain, which annoys many in Northern Ireland and some in Scotland, or England, which should annoy everybody.  The "Queen of England" often features in American reports (and they have their own problems, since some Canadians still hold out against the equation of "America" and "USA").

We seem to delight in adding to the confusion.  There's the mining company Anglo American (founded in South Africa) and various Anglo-Irish agreements (which certainly apply to the whole United Kingdom with the Republic).

With devolution of some governmental powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland over the last 20 years a new chapter has opened.  England is wondering where and what it is.  Some polls find majority support for an English parliament, which leaves the UK parliament worried about what it would do.

This asymmetrical state is symbolised in sport. When the anthems are played at an England v Scotland football match, one side sings Flower of Scotland and the other God Save the Queen, which is also the national anthem of Scotland (Peace! You know what I mean.).  Another of the periodic outbursts of campaigning is underway to adopt an English anthem - Jerusalem in this case - though many traditionalists harrumph at the very idea.

We really ought to sort ourselves out.

And what do we call ourselves?  I'm British, but I am a... what?  The word "Brit" is often heard, but it's rather informal.  The obvious answer is "Briton", but that rarely escapes from ancient history.  It remains the obvious answer though.

And if we are Britons, what else?  We talk about the British Pakistani community (for example) while in the USA they have Pakistani Americans.  The "American" is the person, and "Pakistani" indicates a subgroup of Americans.  We could refer to Pakistani Britons, Italian Britons etc.  What effect might that have on the sore topics of multiculturalism and integration?

For now, let's just count the options we have for celebrating so many countries' sporting successes as our own.

Was Today trying to tell us something?

The top headline for the Today programme on 11 March was that the Archbishop of Canterbury believes it is not racist to be concerned by high levels of immigration.  In the news bulletins that headline was supplemented by other points from the archbishop's interview with House magazine, such as the need for a Europe-wide response to the migrant crisis, the inadequacy of the current response, that the UK should take its share of refugees and that the government's proposed 20,000 in four years looks "very thin".

The overall impression of the story, however, reinforced by repetition of the headline several times an hour, was that fear is a reasonable response to large migration flows and that it is "absolutely outrageous" to label such a response racist.

I agree with every point quoted in the programme, but they make up a small part of the whole (the interview may be found at the archbishop's own site), and the headline about fear being reasonable and not racist makes up a small part of that small part.

Iain Duncan Smith then came on for the 8:10 interview and ventured into the same subject area as he presented his case for leaving the EU.  I will not dwell here on the content of that interview, though I thought he sailed through quite easily with little interrogation.  My concern is with the last two minutes of the programme.

At approximately 08:58:22, John Humphrys repeated the "fear is not racist" headline yet again, then introduced without comment a clip from Iain Duncan Smith's interview.  I cannot remember such a pay off to the programme before, and can only assume that listeners were supposed to go away with that message ringing in our ears.

Complaints about BBC bias are frequent, and I do not agree with all of them at all, but I can see this particular item in no other way.


[I have sent this as a letter to the Radio 4 Feedback programme, and will copy it to others.]