Friday, 19 January 2018

What do we know now? I have no idea


To save time

For a freestyle look at where we are, try "Everything you need to know about the Brexit endgame in five minutes" or for a more formal view (which I quote below) look at "2018: The year of Brexit decisions". But I'll go on.

Officials are talking

We're assured that "officials are talking" about Brexit, so there's no need for the Department for Exiting the European Union to pretend to tell us what's going on at the moment. But there really isn't much time.

The EU parliament held its first plenary session of the year on Tuesday 16 January, with several of the EU's presidents addressing it ("president" is an awkward word in this context, but... some other time).

The Estonian presidency (which would have been the British presidency if not for a certain vote) ended at the New Year, having concentrated on matters digital, in business and governance. Now Bulgaria has taken over, and their emphasis seems to be on security and solidarity.

Speeches about Brexit came from Donald Tusk, who chairs the EU council and facilitates its work when the heads of government and state have other things to do back home, Jean-Claude Juncker, who leads the EU commission (more than a civil service, far less than a government, much to his personal regret) and Guy Verhofstadt, the EU parliament's representative on Brexit (not a negotiator, to his personal regret).

The main point reported from Tusk's speech was that it's still open for the UK to change its mind on Brexit: "If the UK government sticks to its decision to leave, Brexit will become a reality – with all its negative consequences - in March next year. Unless there is a change of heart among our British friends. Wasn’t it David Davis himself who said: 'If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy'?" But there was business to be done as well: "what we need today is more clarity on the UK’s vision. Once we have that, the leaders will meet and decide on the way the EU sees its future relationship with the UK as a third country... The hardest work is still ahead of us, and time is limited. We must maintain the unity of the EU27 in every scenario, and personally I have no doubt that we will." Juncker too said "our door still remains open and I hope that will be heard clearly in London".

Verhofstadt's line was that the second phase of talks will be harder than the first (not least because we'll have to finish the things which May & co pretend were signed off after phase 1). He was concerned to translate guarantees on citizens' rights into law as soon as possible and to prevent cherry picking during the transition period. He did ask what Barnier put in Farage's tea to make him come out for a second referendum. Verhoftsadt enjoys goading (some of) the British press:





"Senior backbencher" Bernard Jenkin MP didn't like the idea of the UK changing its mind on Brexit. He told Sky "Nobody serious wants another referendum in this country on this question". When it was put to him that the government could change its mind, Jenkin went on: "You want the government to just ignore the referendum? It’s absurd".

Chart from Lord Ashcroft Polls https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2018/01/parties-stand-second-eu-referendum/

What exactly is absurd? Just ignoring the referendum, he says, but, to coin a phrase, nobody serious is saying that. Millions are, however, saying they would like another vote and, as Lord Ashcroft has discovered, the wording of the question has a noticeable effect on the answers - voters are opposed to a "second referendum" but, when a deal is available, are open to a "referendum on whether to accept the terms or leave without a deal"'. Whether they want to be asked or not however, a majority would like to "stay in the EU after all". I wonder what effect "somebody serious" coming out and suggesting that another vote is a serious possibility would have on these numbers.

Chart from Lord Ashcroft Polls https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2018/01/parties-stand-second-eu-referendum/

To Jenkin then, another vote is absurd, though millions seem to disagree with him. According to May it's "crucial" that there isn't such a vote, which can only mean that it's very  important that such a vote does not happen. But why? If people consistently consider it a reasonable thing to do, how is it absurd? And what could the crucial factor be other than to protect May's fragile commitment to the cause?

When I commented on Twiter that "crucial" is an odd choice of word I was told it was a "Good word, another referendum would mean that you effectively disenfranchise all the leave voters." To which the only response is to ask how you disenfranchise people by including them in the electorate for another vote.

But what next?

The CBI has 190,000 business members of all sizes and sectors, employing nearly 7 million people, about a third of the private sector workforce. In December, not for the first time, its Director General Carolyn Fairbairn  told its members (and of course the media) that "From our politicians we need unity, clarity and certainty, not a different opinion every day. Politics will need to work on business time scales if we are to get the right result for the country... To keep jobs and investment in the UK, binding Brexit transition terms by the end of the first quarter need to be accompanied by progress on a framework for a final deal that delivers barrier free trade with the EU".

The concern is that arrangements for withdrawal, recruitment across borders, new customs processes and many other things will not be known in time to prevent damage to businesses. Companies have made contingency plans and put pressure on government, but they've seen very little progress. Most are holding out as long as they can before incurring cost and suffering the disruption of actual relocation, but some can't wait any longer (the pharmaceutical industry, discussed here, has extra problems because the European Medicines Agency is relocating from London to Amsterdam).

Neil Armstrong, chief executive of medical devices regulatory affairs management company MeddiQuest says "We took the decision to relocate our company out of the UK a year ago – and we were probably a year too late to be able to ensure continuity in all eventualities, in all areas".

Mika Reinikainen, chairman of the European Association of Authorised Representatives reports that his organisation is moving its HQ from the UK to Brussels in 2018: "One of the very simple reasons for that is that some of the feedback has shown that anyone who has got a British address is not going to be very effective in any European organisation. So we are leaving the ship, even if it is a little premature... The UK has more authorised representatives than any other member state and possibly all the other member states put together, so it is a very serious problem for us".

Another representative body for business is the British Chambers of Commerce, also representing millions of employees in companies across the country. They're engaged in developing businesses in their local areas and have well established links to similar bodies internationally.

Writing in the Observer, the BCC director general Adam Marshall says "Businesses have been very patient in waiting for clarity on Brexit in the 18 months since the referendum. That patience is now wearing thin. Businesses want answers, they want clarity and they want results. Chambers of Commerce members – as well as their EU trading partners – want a swift “standstill” transition agreement as soon as possible in 2018. This would give certainty on short-term trading conditions and ensure that businesses face only one set of adjustment costs when the final UK-EU settlement kicks in. The transition must be agreed quickly; a failure to do so would see contingency plans activated, investment flows delayed and a battening down of the hatches in far too many of our firms".

And yet the BCC's head of trade policy isn't apparently interested in transition, just looking forward to the "next phase of negotiations [which] will not formally begin until late March" (the next EU council summit is 22-23 March). She notes that "the UK government has a mere two and a half months to a) internally reach a decision as to what kind of relationship it wants to have with the EU in the future, b) set out credible proposals to make this happen, and c) discuss these with individual member states". And then "The UK has agreed the negotiating timetable as set out by the EU – but it can and must influence the content of what will be discussed over the next two months. This means that if it wishes to achieve all of its ambitions for a future relationship, it must put together a plan for a new model for cooperation between the UK and the EU, and actively promote it before the next EU Council summit in March".

Interlude

Lord David Hannay, who has a long history of negotiating with and on behalf of the EU, was questioned by the Commons international trade committee at the beginning of January. He noted that negotiations on the transitional phase have yet to start. "The Government call it the implementation phase, though nobody else in the world calls it that because it isn't. It is what I prefer to call the standstill. It seems to me very clear that it is a standstill the Government want. When the Prime Minister made a statement on the package that was agreed in Brussels before Christmas, two little words popped up that I welcomed greatly. She said that things will be 'as now'. Well, I can’t read 'as now' as anything other than being in the single market and customs union."

The road ahead

The calendar as seen in the EU (and apparently agreed by the UK government) is presented in 2018: The year of Brexit decisions, which is based on the guidelines agreed at last December's EU council summit:
  • Early January to late March
    This might be enough to agree the "post-Brexit transition period requested by Britain". The EU is offering "continuation of the status quo after Brexit until the end of 2020... Britain would still be under all the obligations of an EU member... pay contributions... guarantee freedom of movement... remain a member of the single market. However, the UK would lose its voting rights in the EU... During the transition period Britain would be allowed to negotiate and make agreements, but not implement them."
  • London
    May & co have sketched a transition period (they insist on calling it implementation, but see the interlude above) mirroring the status quo to some extent but allowing negotiation of trade agreements outside the EU (though what time there'll be for that with all the existing ones to be carried over...).

    "Broadly speaking, the Cabinet is still divided into two opposing camps. The Brexiteers want to leave the single market and the customs union, and to abruptly ditch all EU legislation. They dream of a 'free Britain,' signing international trade agreements and standing up to the EU in economic might... the other camp... want as soft a Brexit as possible. They fear a collapse of the British economy. They want to retain as much EU regulation as possible in order to protect access to Britain’s biggest export market. They only support Brexit out of loyalty to the Conservative party."

    "Theresa May has announced that she will make another speech at the beginning of the year... to outline what Britain wants. In principle... a tailor-made solution that would allow the British to retain many of their rights while freeing them of their European Union obligations."
  • March 22-23, 2018: EU summit in Brussels
    "This is where the transition phase will be decided, the divorce bill legally drawn up and Michel Barnier given a mandate to negotiate the EU’s future relationship with Britain. What is still not clear is whether or not the British government will have defined a realistic position by then. It is also not a given that EU member states will remain as united as they have so far: Conflicts of interest may arise."
  • April to late October 2018
    "The goal for October 2018 is to finalize a withdrawal treaty [and] a political framework agreement covering the future relationship... to achieve this goal in just six months, the British side will have to get involved in much more intensive and frequent negotiations than it has up till now. A joint declaration of principles of this kind would need to define the basis for subsequent trade talks, which would start in 2019.

    "The EU heads of government recently said that the aim is to guarantee a level playing field and fair competition. If the EU-UK relationship is seen as a sliding scale, then the more EU regulation the British side retains, the more access it will retain to the single market, and vice versa. However, Brussels has warned that there can be no cherry-picking, i.e. the British will not be able to pick and choose its preferred rules for crucial business sectors.

    "To date, Michel Barnier has been describing the EU’s offer as "Canada Dry." ... a simple trade agreement with broad exemption from duty for goods, but with no market access for services."
  • London
    "Much depends on whether Theresa May remains head of government... Until now, May’s government... have been seeking 'Canada plus plus plus' - market access for goods and services, including the financial market. The British want to make their own rules, and they want the EU to recognize these rules as equivalent to its own... corresponds to the promise of prominent Brexiteer Boris Johnson, who claimed that the British could have their European cake and eat it too. This possibility is categorically rejected by Brussels. The question is whether there is a line of compromise somewhere between these irreconcilable visions."
  • EU summit on October 18-19, 2018
    "the final draft of the Brexit withdrawal deal and the plans for a future trade relationship need to... gain approval from the EU Council... after the summit, the EU parliament will need to sign off on the package. The bloc's member countries will also need several months for their national parliaments to consider the proposal for the new EU-UK economic agreement, and the UK parliament will review the terms of the final withdrawal agreement, as well."

Keeping it simple

The fact that officials are talking about all this has been mentioned in passing, but I have yet to see any proposals for visible meetings involving the "chief negotiators". I've also heard nothing about another Downing St face-off to produce a single proposal for a future relationship. On past form we can look to May's February(?) speech to define the position, and a subsequent cabinet meeting to be manoeuvred into signing it off. The Deutsche Welle article quoted above includes a useful section headed Grace period: End of October until the EU summit on 13-14 December:

"There may be a great deal of argument towards [the] end of the process, and these two months could serve to bring in last-minute compromises to end disagreements on all sides. Up till now the Brexiteers have firmly suppressed the reality that any new agreement is going to be extraordinarily complex. New rules will have to be written for every field in every sector, from air travel to scientific exchange to financial services and beyond. Even a basic agreement on this will inevitably contain a lot of explosive material, for both the European and the British sides."


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Monday, 1 January 2018

The centrist awakes


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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





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



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



HMRC seems to be working on something


And it's touched a nerve.



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


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Monday, 25 December 2017

Christmas at the top


Before the referendum vote, and for most of the time since then, one of the basic arguments of the zealous Brexiter has been that it won't be difficult, unless the EU chooses to make it so (though of course they'll give us what we want, because "they'll know what's good for them").

But leaving with no deal would be no problem. Indeed many of them would prefer to do just that, and look forward to "WTO terms", as if anybody but Mauritania trades that way. Liam Fox and his cronies dream of leading the WTO to new frontiers of trade in services, ignoring the fact that the WTO hasn't made a significant agreement for 15 years, and that Trump is trying to destabilise it so that his bilateral advantage seeking can prevail.




Some of them are now moving (more or less) into the realm of reality. However sunlit the uplands might one day be, however much it is worth (other people) sacrificing to arrive at the right kind of freedom, the British people will have to put their shoulders to the wheel.

Iain Duncan Smith has just popped up to advise British businesses that they will have to "learn to get by in a different world," though of course "it's not a case of less trade. It's a case of a different type of trade". Meanwhile, the EU27's negotiating guidelines note that "The United Kingdom has stated its intention to no longer participate in the Customs Union and the Single Market after the end of the transition period, and the European Council will calibrate its approach as regards trade and economic cooperation in the light of this position so as to ensure a balance of rights and obligations, preserve a level playing field, avoid upsetting existing relations with other third countries" or, put simply, if you're out you won't get the benefits of being in.

Hearing that British consumers might have to pay more for post-Brexit cheese, Michael Gove has drawn himself up to his full medium height to assure us that the British farmer will rise to the occasion. "I am deeply concerned about your unpatriotic attitude towards cheese," he told his questioner (we're assured it was a joke, but it can be hard to tell with Gove). His faith in the capacity of the agricultural sector to substitute for imports seems little short of heroic (though since the UK currently exports £320m of cheddar to Ireland every year and imports £389m of cheddar, maybe the problem in this particular case is not as big as feared).

Chris Grayling is in the same boat as Gove, telling Andrew Marr in October that, if there was no trade deal, "It would mean that producers, supermarkets bought more at home, that British farmers produced more, that they bought more from around the world and it would damage French producers and continental producers". Just like that. If it sounds like Dig For Victory, it should. In extremis, I have no doubt that we could do all sorts of things to keep ourselves going, but we were not told to prepare for rationing.

Six weeks ago John Redwood, who is MP for Wokingham but also Chief Global Strategist for investment managers Charles Stanley (£183,600 per year for 300 hours) advised investors to move money out of the UK. He noted that the economy is slowing down, though economic sentiment is improving, but the Bank of England is tightening conditions for consumer borrowing. To quote Frances Coppola, writing in Forbes:

"Redwood's advice to investors is to flee the UK before the credit crunch bites...

 "Sounds sensible, doesn't it? No. It is an absolute disgrace for this man to give such advice. You see, the Rt. Hon. John Redwood MP - to give him his full title - is... a senior member of the Conservative Party, which is currently in government and making a total hash of the Brexit negotiations. He is also a former Cabinet Minister and a member of the Privy Council.

"This senior lawmaker is advising investors to stop investing in his country."

I hope the advice he produces for his second employer is better than what he gives his first - the people of Wokingham, who elect him, and the rest of us who pay him as a parliamentary representative. In April he tweeted "You do not have to buy German or French cars. There is a good choice of models, prices & specifications available from UK car factories", only to be reminded (many times) that there are no British owned car factories of any size, that where cars are made is decided elsewhere, that all car companies depend on the frictionless market which May has decided to take us out of... then try to get back close to, etc etc.

But none of these prescriptions are as bad as Redwood's allegory "Little Red white and blue riding hood – a topical Christmas story".

Christmas media management

It's Christmas, so government likes to tell us things while they think they can control the message, and the media is happy to play along. So we had the blue passports thing with the BBC repeatedly telling us blue passports are "coming back" (sparking rows between those who can actually see the very dark navy of old passports and those who see only black) and the Sun proudly displaying a mock-up in a blue that has never been used, and the now compulsory size, shape and format which the old ones never had.

A more sober discussion came on Christmas Eve, with Margaret Thatcher's old sidekick Charles Powell telling us it was her government which adopted the new passport in the 1980s - under no pressure from the European Union. He called the clamour for old-style travel documents “part of the nostalgia on which the predominantly elderly Brexit constituency thrives”. (Mr Powell is 76.)

The same story came up in April and September (and who knows how many other times?) with all the same components:
  • We can change the colour forced on us by the evil EU!
    We always could, as explained here: "What is commonly called an ‘EU passport’ is in fact a national passport established under the national laws of the Member States and issued to their citizens." and "The current format of the EU passport contains common features on which Member States have agreed in non-binding resolutions such as for example paper size, the burgundy coloured cover, similar typeface for name and the use of the words ‘European Union’ in the  country's official language on the cover."
  • Shock, horror, they could be made in France or Germany!
    As Theresa May occasionally tells us, the UK is still a full member of the EU, and the tender process is governed by EU procurement rules. And surely a Tory will go for the best value bid.
  • Why is it costing us £490m just to change the colour?
    It isn't. That's the cost of the whole five-year contract.
  • Why does it have to be that shape?
    To comply with international standards for machine-readable travel documents, as defined by the International Civil Aviation Organisation. (And of course the template for the old one was agreed in 1920 by the League of Nations, with 42 countries signing up to it.)
Two things:
  • According to the September story noted above, the contract was expected to be awarded by Christmas. Is the winner based somewhere that wouldn't fit with an "expression of our independence and sovereignty", as announced by the prime minister?
  • Note the dates. The April story came at the beginning of the Easter parliamentary recess, the September one on the first Sunday of the conference recess, and now it's Christmas. Does nobody in a media organisation have a memory? Are they all complicit, or just lazy?


Will this burst of nostalgic "patriotism" draw the line at blue passports? As Mike Smithson of Political Betting observes, surveys suggest that there could be more to come.







Oh, and the UK already issues blue passports, but they're for refugees.

















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Sunday, 10 December 2017

How not to negotiate


Jean-Claude, don't do that.
Michael Gove set the weekend off with a proud declaration in the Telegraph that "The British people will be in control. If the British people dislike the agreement that we have negotiated with the EU, the agreement will allow a future government to diverge".

His boss (who he had praised loyaleaginously [my neologism, sorry] only the day before) had come home from a press conference with a piece of paper saying that the Brexit negotiations could move on to phase 2, and you might think that a cabinet minister's job was to tell the world, and most especially the rest of the EU, that her word could be trusted.

After all, the EU27 want to be sure she has the backing of her cabinet (we'll come back to this later) and she now has to get stuck in to the big stuff about transition (to what?), trade and security (that grouping from her March letter that brought charges of blackmail), and the framework for a future relationship from which could eventually come the most wonderful trade deal the world has ever seen.

But now Gove says we might not like it and we might just change it. At the next election (which is supposed to be 2022, beyond the end of what the CBI might call a transition period and his boss does call an implementation period). Some even take it as a demand for a "second referendum". Gove's article looks like the action of one of those damned saboteurs, but someone with a finger on the Tory pulse claims it was approved at the top.



Is it really a good idea, when you're in the middle of negotiating the UK's biggest change since the second world war, to reassure people that we could change it all in a couple of years' time? Those cuddly people at Westmonster seem to like it.



So, on to some rules of negotiation.

1. Select a laughable cabinet

Theresa May averts her gaze as David Davis adjusts his
trousers in readiness for being hugged by Jean-Claude Juncker.
Did the EU Commission select Michel Barnier as lead negotiator because he knows David Davis? They were both Europe ministers in the 1990s but Reuters' profile of the Frenchman doesn't include any opinions from the honourable member for Haltemprice and Howden.

In the Brexit context Davis is better known for simply not appearing to know how the EU works. Before the referendum vote, as he still proudly tells us on his own website: "the first calling point of the UK’s negotiator in the time immediately after Brexit will not be Brussels, it will be Berlin, to strike the deal: absolute access for German cars and industrial goods, in exchange for a sensible deal on everything else. Similar deals would be reached with other key EU nations". Then only three weeks ago he was in Berlin, telling a business audience that "We should be trying to maintain what we already have" and "Putting politics above prosperity is never a smart choice". They laughed.

Liam Fox, or "discredited former Minister Dr Liam Fox" as I'm reminded to call him every other time I use his name, was a prize-winner in 2009 as the largest over-claimer in the House of Commons expenses scandal, then had to resign after 17 months as Defence Secretary when he was discovered to have given a friend inappropriate access to ministerial offices and business trips. He also exhibits what you might call the standard Brexiter over-optimism, telling Radio 4 that "a post-Brexit free trade deal between Britain and the European Union will be 'one of the easiest in human history' to negotiate" and echoing Davis that the only thing which would stop it would be if "politics gets in the way of economics".

When it comes to Boris Johnson, I could enumerate his lies and infidelities but I really only need to quote a Daily Mail headline: "US in shock as wildly eccentric politician Boris Johnson is made Britain's top diplomat prompting giggles from State Department official while media calls him 'sexist' (and even Cher is outraged)". 

And now there's Gove, but we've already looked at him...

2. Take everything off the table

May's conference speech last October caused a second Brexit-related drop in sterling, but all she said was:

"It is, of course, too early to say exactly what agreement we will reach with the EU. It’s going to be a tough negotiation, it will require some give and take. And while there will always be pressure to give a running commentary, it will not be in our national interest to do so. But let me be clear about the agreement we seek. I want it to reflect the strong and mature relationships we enjoy with our European friends. I want it to include cooperation on law enforcement and counter-terrorism work. I want it to involve free trade, in goods and services. I want it to give British companies the maximum freedom to trade with and operate within the Single Market – and let European businesses do the same here. But let’s state one thing loud and clear: we are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration all over again. And we are not leaving only to return to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. That’s not going to happen. We are leaving to become, once more, a fully sovereign and independent country – and the deal is going to have to work for Britain."

By January, at Lancaster House, May was telling us exactly what she didn't want. She wanted to be out of the EU internal market (commonly known as the single market) and the EU customs union. She wanted to be free from the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union. And that's been about it as a statement of government policy since then, and Brexiters have started to tell us that "everybody always knew" that was what Brexit means. Not true, but apparently it must not now be questioned.

So she took everything off the table, apparently with the intention of getting as much of it as possible back in negotiation. She also promised to "provide certainty wherever we can" and to "strengthen the precious union between the 4 nations of the United Kingdom" but we all need a laugh.

3. Kick off the process before you know what you want

Why did May send her Article 50 letter to Donald Tusk on 29 March 2017? Because it was about as long as she thought she could get away with. She gave the impression that she would have a detailed plan by then, and some of us almost believed her.   


4. Hold an election

As Reuters reported: "Theresa May called on Tuesday for an early election on June 8, saying she needed to strengthen her hand in divorce talks with the European Union by bolstering support for her Brexit plan". 

That went well didn't it? She now has fewer MPs, faces a revitalised Labour Party, and is at the beck and call of the Democratic Unionist Party.

5. Intervene in the wrong forum at the wrong time

In June, after David Davis had had to go to the first round of Brexit negotiations before there was actually a government as such, and abandon his "row of the summer" by accepting the sequencing of talks proposed by the EU (something to do with an election in which the Tories came first, but didn't really win) May turned up at the scheduled EU council meeting with a proposal for how she wanted to deal with EU expats.

She had been told from the start that the member states would not engage in negotiation, that it all has to be done through Michel Barnier's team, so she was given a short slot to say her piece and there was little discussion. Then the press conference was hijacked by questions about Brexit. The position paper then went on to the second round of talks in July. Could she really not have had it ready for Davis to take into round 1 a few days before?

May's Florence speech also stirred up the negotiating schedule by forcing the postponement of the fourth round of talks. Was her position simply not known until then? Did she think she would be noticed more if she rebelled against the timetable she had signed up to?

6  Fail at the October summit

In the wake of the December EU council summit, it might be forgotten that some in government thought they might pass the "sufficient progress" test two months earlier. That was of course one of the purposes of the Florence speech which led Michel Barnier to hail a "new dynamic" in the negotiations but to tell the waiting press after the postponed September round that "We will need several weeks, even several months, to be able to see 'sufficient progress' on the principles of this orderly departure". And having seen the amount of work that had to be crammed into the few days before the December summit, you have to wonder where the October optimism came from.

When 26 British MEPs backed a motion in the EU parliament on 3 October to the effect that there had not yet been sufficient progress in talks to allow phase 2 to begin, they were accused of voting against the British interest and labelled "Brexit betrayers" (I could easily have found much worse names but that will do). This was a supposed British interest in optimism and positive attitude rather than anything else.

7. Do no work at the last scheduled round of talks 

Despite there being no other scheduled talks before the December summit, the UK and EU negotiating teams had no more than 24 hours together at the November round. David Davis described it as a "stock-take". It's always been assumed that work would be carrying on between these meetings, but you also have to assume there's some purpose to the get-togethers (the British team is reported to be up to 100 strong) over and above the painful press conferences.

8. Pretend to work out the effects of your intended actions

Parliamentary drama turned to farce as the Labour party enlisted the monarch to compel David Davis to hand over his elusive impact assessments, which didn't exist as such and had to be compiled and written over a period of three weeks, only to be greeted as inadequate and not living up to the billing that Davis had given them.

This morning, Davis told Andrew Marr that nobody should have expected anything different, and Peter Bone - billed as a "senior Brexiter", resplendent in Grassroots Out tie (of which he probably still has a garage-full) and spouting rubbish about the "deal" reached on Friday, observed that it would be ridiculous to bother with impact assessments. The media management message seems to be that enough of the right work is being done, what has been handed to the DExEU select committee is all they should expect, because after all, the pre-vote Brexit forecasts were all wrong (despite most of them being for the period following Brexit, so we can't know that yet).

9. Give the impression of doing no work until it's far too late

At the November press conference Barnier surprised some people by agreeing with a journalist that the UK had to produce serious proposals within a fortnight.  That day passed and nothing happened. Then Donald Tusk set a new deadline of Monday 4 December but May wasn't having any of it. "We have always said we are working towards the European Council, which is December 14," May’s spokesman James Slack told reporters.

She was due to lunch with Jean-Claude Juncker on that day (I wonder when that was organised) and this became the moment she would present her final case. Yet all along the word in Westminster was that the only date that matters is 14 December.

European Union wheels tend to grind slow. A Council summit requires a lot of preparation, and all but the final detail is supposed to be ready beforehand. This was shown in the calendar produced by Barnier in advance of the November talks - draft Council conclusions were to be worked on as early as 29 November. Yet, as I'm often reminded, negotiations have a habit of going to the wire, and it wouldn't surprise me if this drafting job started on time, with Commission officials leaving a Brexit-shaped gap.

Elsewhere there were many interviews with Irish government ministers concerned about the border, and keen Brexiters telling us how "technology" would make it all simple. They prayed in aid former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern who had the same story:

"Our economy is relatively small, a huge amount of the trade is multinationals; it should be possible, I think, to do that by technology," he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. "But of course, when you come down to agriculture and smaller items, I don’t think technology would work. One thing we do not want, can’t have, is back to a physical border.”

He added: "Theresa May, take her at her word, she’s confidently said she doesn't want a physical border, the EU don’t want a physical border, the Irish Government don’t. So you’re left down with the one alternative — to make technology work in most cases and to throw a blind eye to those areas that can’t come in within technology".

But they ignored another former Taoiseach, John Bruton, and current Irish ministers who are not convinced by the technological solution (or indeed commentators who wonder how large a fraction of the economy and border activity you would have to "throw a blind eye to").

Meanwhile the UK government kept a straight face, assuring us we won't have a hard border but we can't fix it until the end of trade talks

Of course there was work going on the background, as we discovered later in the week, but what part of the arrangements for Northern Ireland couldn't have been done much earlier?

10. Forget to consult the woman you depend on

If anything, the DUP have said even less than the UK government about the Irish border, and certainly less about other aspects of the negotiations. What they said on Monday 4 December however, was, first, "No", and then that the text came as a "big shock... Once we saw the text, we knew it was not going to be acceptable". More taken from the Irish News:

Former first minister Arlene Foster said that the DUP had made its position "quite clear" throughout negotiations with Mrs May that they would reject any deal which treated Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK. She now told the Prime Minister that it "could have been dealt with differently" and that she will not support Brexit legislation in Westminster unless the deal due to be agreed on Monday was changed.

The DUP's deputy leader, North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds, had earlier also said that the party only received draft proposals on Monday morning: "Despite several briefings over the course of the last few weeks, we only received written text late yesterday morning. We understand this was due in part to delays caused by the Irish Government and the EU negotiating team. So the DUP does stand strong for the union and we also issue a warning to the Dublin government - that by continuing its aggressive stance they are in danger of delivering for themselves the very outcomes that they said they want to avoid." Mr Dodds said there could be regulatory alignment in certain areas, but added "not in relation to following the rules of the single market or the customs union for Northern Ireland as a generality."

11. Capitulate

That's the way some of the hard, hard, hard leavers see it. UKIP Leader Henry Bolton has dubbed today’s Brexit deal announcement "a total surrender to the European Commission". Westmonster continues:

He said: "I would say 80-90% of it was actually drafted in Brussels, we don’t know that but it’s my guess. I recognise the style of the document. If there is no agreement we stay under full alignment, meaning we’re tied to the customs union, single market and ECJ". People aren't happy with Theresa May’s capitulation. Agreeing to allow the ECJ to hold sway for eight years is a particularly large sell-out, whilst there is no end to open borders in sight.

And Remainers can fall in with them: 





David Allen Green, legal commentator for the Financial Times perhaps spoke more in sorrow than anger:




12. Proclaim victory.

At the second attempt maybe, but...



13. Then be "confusing" about what you've agreed 

David Davis told Andrew Marr on Sunday morning "we want to protect the peace process and we also want to protect Ireland from the impact of Brexit for them... this was a statement of intent more than anything else. It was much more a statement of intent than it was a legally enforceable thing".

The Irish government in turn said it assumed the British government would honour its word, and that it would hold the British government to the agreement. It relied on paragraph 46 of Friday's joint report: "The commitments and principles... are made and must be upheld in all circumstances, irrespective of the nature of any future agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom.”

In response to reports that some hardline Brexiters had been assured by the British government that the term full alignment (cause of much argument) was "meaningless", Dublin responded strongly, stating that the deal was "binding". A comment to the Zelo Street blog suggested "The way the Three Brexiteers have spent the weekend repudiating Friday's agreement, I wouldn't be surprised if the EU 27 decided that insufficient progress had been made to start trade talks".

One of several legal evaluations I've seen of Friday's document is from Dr Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, printed in the Irish Times. She observes that May's government "had worked hard to downplay the deep complexity of the Northern Ireland/Ireland issue... it had stated that it had no intention of putting a “hard border” across the island of Ireland and that, quite frankly, it did not see the need for such a border to exist in the first place. This, of course, was part of the problem". It continues:

"The inevitability - nay, the unavoidability - of a hard border if the UK (and with it Northern Ireland) leaves the single market and has no customs union with the EU has really never properly been countenanced by the British government.

If the UK wishes to have a different, more “liberated”, relationship with the EU in the future then difficult choices have to be made about how to manage the consequences of that for Northern Ireland. This joint report manages to put off the making of those difficult choices for now and instead sets some fortified boundaries to limit the damage that those choices could cause.

The joint report is not, therefore, an exercise in “constructive ambiguity”; it is entirely unambiguous in many respects. Where it gives the impression of haziness is in the fact that the report allows for three quite different scenarios."

Read the piece to see how "putting off the making of difficult choices" is really what has been achieved.

14. Fail to agree objectives with your cabinet

It has long been rumoured that May hadn't allowed her entire cabinet to discuss what they hoped to get out of Brexit. Then Tom Newton-Dunn told Sun readers "Theresa May has delayed a crunch Cabinet debate over an EU trade deal until next year over fears it will spark major resignations. The PM will not ask her top table to agree what conditions Britain is prepared to accept from Brussels in exchange for it until the EU has first laid out its own terms".

He quoted "one cabinet minister" as saying "We haven’t grasped the nettle on the trade deal yet, and we really have to soon. Theresa’s fear is the moment we do, half of us walk out. We just don’t know which half will yet" and the rumours persisted. Then Philip Hammond appeared before the Treasury Select Committee two days after the DUP debacle.

The chair, Nicky Morgan, asked him "I  have one last  question.  In your  remarks, you mentioned the phrase “end  state”. Has the  Cabinet discussed openly, in a free discussion, the end state of where the UK Government want to get to by March 2019 and beyond?"

Hammond answered "The Cabinet has had general discussions about our Brexit negotiations, but we have not had a specific mandating of an end-state position. That is something that will be done first in the sub-committee that has been constituted to deal with this issue. Logically, that will happen once we have confirmation that we have reached sufficient progress and we are going to begin the phase-two negotiations with the EU 27. We are not yet at that stage, and it would have been premature to have that discussion until we reached that stage". It might not make sense to "mandate an end-state position" before then perhaps, but this suggests that no discussion has taken place.

The BBC's Laura Kuenssberg commented "Hammond confirms publicly what everyone in SW1 knew privately - cabinet is still to have THE big discussion about the kind of Brexit they ultimately think we should have - DUP row has hugely ramped up the pressure for it to happen" 

and

"Cabinet ministers believe they were promised that discussion by Christmas - on the face of it it's impossible to believe they still have't worked out what their big picture vision is" 

and again

"As and when the PM actually tries to get the Cabinet to agree what the world should look like after 2021, after Brexit, and after the transition period, all hell might break loose because she has no majority and simply, members of govt want different things".

And, though it seems to come as a surprise to May every day, these things happen in public. Every other EU member state's head of state/government, Michel Barnier's whole negotiating team and everybody in the EU Commission knows what we know (and more - I discovered the legal analysis quoted above in a tweet from Michel Barnier's deputy Sabine Weyand). Accordingly, as the Guardian reports "While May was lauded by her ministers for striking an agreement in the early hours of Friday morning to move the Brexit talks on to the future relationship, a statement was being drafted in Brussels for agreement by EU leaders next week in which they will call on the UK to offer urgent clarity over their vision for the future".

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Wednesday, 6 December 2017

Oh God, what have I done?


The government has been lying to us, and probably to itself. Half way through a week in which we have seen Theresa May pull out of a Brussels lunch to take a call from her "partner in government" Arlene Foster, then go back in to "withdraw its agreement to its own text" as Justin Webb on the Today programme put it, a week in which David Davis has come out and casually admitted that the preparatory work for Brexit that he's been telling the world about for months simply doesn't exist... what are we to do?

In fact Davis was lying in that casual admission as well. I'm absolutely sure that he's had some top quality civil service minds working on what various flavours of Brexit would do to various parts of the British economy. I'm even ready to believe they've spent time on what would happen to British society in various circumstances. But his overriding objective has been to tell the British people absolutely nothing.

Nothing that would allow us to evaluate the decision we made (or didn't make) on 23 June 2016, nothing that would help us work out how well or badly he and his cronies are doing the job handed to them by a vote which was legally advisory but became politically binding (thanks to Cameron's shallow certainty that it would go his way and May's determination that, even though she still doesn't believe it, it's the mission that God has given her).

Somehow, after all this time...
Keep your cards...

  • the Brexit referendum vote was one year, five months and 13 days ago
  • May's first speech to a Tory conference as leader, when red lines first appeared, was one year, two months and one day ago
  • May sent her letter to trigger the Article 50 process eight months and seven days ago
  • then the election she called to strengthen her hand in the Brexit negotiations was five months and 28 days ago
  • and the first negotiation, when there still wasn't actually a government, started eleven days later
...close to your chest
...May can still cock up her relationhip with the DUP by not quite getting round to telling them about the text she's managed to agree with Ireland and the EU27's representatives. And Davis is dragged to the DExEU select committee to admit that all this wonderful, heavy-duty work he's been boasting about is stuff they've seen already. In the papers.

I wrote last week about Davis's non-existent impact assessments, but it's worse than even cynics like me thought. The Guardian's Jessica Elgot picked it up last night as MPs and peers filed in and out of the little room where they were allowed to read the precious 800 pages (without taking notes or anything useful like that of course). Their comments as they emerged blinking in disbelief were enough to make you very angry





What they had read was "completely ridiculous",  "nothing new" and "patronising". A peer said "You can't call it a Brexit impact assessment because it makes no assessment of the impact" and an MP told her the information is "stuff sourced to select committee hearings and press releases". A man with a friend in one of the government departments had heard that "the Brexit impact assessments did not exist at the time of parliament's vote to release them".

Starkest of all was "the personal opinion of head of [business] department Greg Clark that releasing a comprehensive and unredacted assessment would stop Brexit". Read the comments yourself, and there's more of the same if you look around.

The man who is representing you and your children in talks with the EU has strung us all along for a year or more. There is nothing for us to see, nothing that we can be allowed to know. He's told us that all of this work exists in excruciating detail (though his ministers admit they've never read it, and the prime minister might only have seen summaries) but it's not there. Not for the likes of us.

If you want to know what's going on, look to the EU. They have access to most of the same information (as have many organisations across the world), and they've been doing our negotiations for the last 40 years (with British staff on board of course, because we were doing it as a collective enterprise).

Now we're setting out on our own we're led by liars and dissemblers, and we can't be trusted with the information that tells us how well (do you believe they wouldn't have published it?) or badly (they didn't) it might turn out.

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