It Could Be Said #52 (Tory) Brexiters Screwed Brexit
Will finally gets round to writing about what went wrong with Brexit
George Best liked to tell the story of the hotel staff member who upon bringing him and the semi-naked women he was entertaining more champagne, sadly remarked, “where did it all go wrong?”. And it’s hard not see similarities between people’s reaction to Best’s off-field escapades and the growing consensus on Brexit. After all, have we Outers not secured the United Kingdom’s complete departure from the European Union, on terms that would have been considered an implausibly hard break with Brussels just ten years ago? Maybe, we were being reckless and naughty, but we got what we wanted right? Right?
Well, not if you believe Tory Brexiters. Veteran politicians and a former whisky salesman listlessly bemoan that the great opportunities presented by Brexit are being squandered, whilst the people who voted for them in 2017 and 2019 drift towards resurgent Farageist forces.
So, what’s gone wrong? Why are Tory Brexiters so miserable?
There Are Only Four or Five Moments That Really Matter. Moments When You're Offered a Choice
I’ve begun reading Tim Shipman’s latest Brexit book No Way Out, and the first section covering the missteps during the first wave of negotiations was surprisingly annoying to read. It all came rushing back – the egos, the mistakes, the constant sodding gamesmanship. And I know it only gets worse from here!
My read of these early chapters from Shipman, and indeed most commentary, is that people think this was all avoidable. A bit more pre-referendum preparation and expertise from the Civil Service, a bit more flexibility from the politicians from either side of the Irish border, and a bit more decisiveness from Theresa May would have allowed Britain to secure a better, more dignified Brexit. But when you look at each of these reasons, you realise that whilst they didn’t help, they’re more excuses for the refusal of Tory Brexiters to come to terms with what they had campaigned for.
Take the Civil Service. It’s very easy to say that David Cameron behaved recklessly by refusing to let them prepare for a Leave referendum win, but what exactly would they have been preparing? In theory they could have assembled a shadow set of negotiators, ready to begin work immediately after the referendum. Can you imagine the convulsions if Olly Robbins had been empowered to begin preliminary, technical discussions with the Europeans before the conclusion of the Tory Leadership election? Or the reaction of David Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox if upon appointment they were greeted by boxes and boxes of papers about Brexit that the Civil Service had been preparing since before the referendum?
Even if you think such preparatory work would have been well-received, that doesn’t answer what purpose it would serve. Other than speed-running politicians through the Jean Monnet Modules that introduce undergraduates to the European Union so that they knew their Four Freedoms from their Three Pillars, there wouldn’t really be anything else to do. The Civil Service needed the politicians to first make a political decision about the type of Brexit they wanted, then it could start sketching out what that might look like in practice, let alone how to go about achieving it. Given that deep into 2018, the politicians still hadn’t given them that, it’s hard to see what the Civil Service could have done before the referendum other than busywork. After all, the European Union was, if anything, caught by surprise even more than the British political establishment by Leave’s victory, and it was able to swiftly organise its negotiators because their politicians knew what they wanted to achieve.
Likewise, what happen with relation to the Irish border doesn’t get Tory Brexiters off the hook. Shipman clarifies what had been hinted at the time, that Ireland had considered working together with the British to develop joint proposals but had been firmly told to knock it off by their fellow Europeans. Now this may have been a tactical mistake by the Europeans, because there’s a chance that sitting down with the Irish to develop customs and regulatory arrangements for goods during the summer of 2016 would have made Westminster realise sooner that either the United Kingdom would acquire an internal trade border or together stay in Brussels’s regulatory obit, but that would only have brought forward the choice that Tory Brexiters bemoaned having to face in 20191.
Likewise, complaints about the Democratic Unionist Party being overly rigid rang hollow too. Whatever you want to say about them, the DUP repeatedly said that they could not support a deal that created a hard border down the Irish Sea. Instead of listening to them when they first said this in 2017, the Tories repeatedly tried to either fudge the issue or bully the party that provided 100% of their majority. Now it’s undoubtedly true that the DUP was slow to react to the reality that Northern Ireland never mind Westminster was never going to let one of the Brexit Opportunities being setting the clock back in Ulster to 19962, but it’s equally true that Tory Brexiters kept encouraging this delusion. And they did so for reasons that have been vindicated by the struggles of successive governments to settle the issue only being resolved by Rishi Sunak agreeing to hug the Europeans closer; Ulster Unionism being trapped on the other side of a Irish Sea Border it resents, anchors Great Britain to the European Union for fear of making the situation in the Province worse by heightening the contradictions of its economic and constitutional position.
Which brings us to Theresa May. Shipman repeats the usual charges against her – she lacked vision, failed to work closely with Labour, and took too long to make decisions. All true at key moments of course but look at what happened when they weren’t. When May finally alighted upon a vision, the Tory Brexiters hated it. When she finally reached out to work with Labour, they rushed to end her premiership. And even now they second guess every decision she made on Brexit, including some they supported at the time.
"You Couldn't Live with Your Own Failure, Where Did that Bring You? Back to Me"
Even in these early chapters Shipman capably illustrates the absurdity of Britain beginning such important negotiations without a clear idea of what it wanted to achieve. He clearly sympathises with the argument that this lack of clarity made the decision to promise to invoke Article 50 by March 2017 premature, especially given how the procedure stacked the deck against the departing member.
But even leaving to one side that May’s party was becoming restless, this is wrong on two levels. Firstly, the reaction at the time was far from this being premature, but that May had successfully bought some extra time, given the Europeans had been annoyed she didn’t invoke it before her first European Council meeting in September. Secondly, that Britain did nothing with those additional months other than argue about procedural issues shows that the problem was never lack of time.
Without being overly flippant, a good management consultant wouldn’t have needed a full weekend in July or August 2016 to pull together a plausible Brexit vision. The problem is that the key people didn’t want to make the key decisions until the last possible moment, because they feared the consequences. Given that Theresa May really was removed as Prime Minister and numerous civil servants find themselves forced or frozen out, such hesitation may have been cowardly, but it was far from unwise.
It was understandably underbaked but where May ended up, was big picture wise, perfectly defensible. She delivered the two big promises of the Leave campaign, ending Freedom of Movement and most contributions into the EU budget. It also secured our exit from the common agriculture and fisheries policies, freedom to pursue meaningful regulatory divergence in the provision of services and chart a different path on regional development. And that’s before you consider it entirely removed Britain from the two non-economic pillars of the European Union and ended Britons participation in the common European citizenry.
There was however a price to be paid for these great prizes, and that price was staying in the Customs Union and the Single Market for Goods. But this feels right. There was a broad majority in favour of Brexit in 2016, but a crucial segment of Leave-inclined voters were convinced to vote Remain due to fear of the economic consequences. May had secured much of the benefits and removed much of the risk.
Alas, most Tory Brexiters were rooted in memories of the Maastricht Treaty and the Doha Round of the GATT. What they yearned to be above all else was to be free of a Commission they saw as the biggest roadblock between them and Britain’s low-tax, low regulation, high trade future.
Now maybe this is me as a protectionist kidding myself, but I do not believe that the ability to aggressively pursue global free trade was a winning hand for Leave in the referendum. Indeed, no less an authority than Dominic Cummings banned talk of “Global Britain” during a campaign that instead promised continued alignment on workers’ rights, food and environmental standards, and key subsidies whilst stressing Brexit Opportunities such as higher wages, less immigration3, and more money for the NHS. Likewise, the free trade deals that have been signed Brexit have tended to mirror what we had access to within the European Union, not because we couldn’t get different deals, but because ministers fear that the necessary concessions on regulations, imports, or visas would be toxically unpopular. How badly the Australian Free Trade Agreement has been received amongst traditional Tory voters in the farming community suggest that such fears were valid. And then of course there’s the small issue that even now, Tory Brexiters are too frit to fully police the very customs border they destroyed May’s premiership to secure!
The fundamental reason the entire political system was paralysed was that a small faction of hardcore Tory and DUP Brexiter MPs had convinced themselves that if they held firm, they could get a harder Brexit than what they could win in a fair fight with either the Europeans or their own voters, by the automatic operation of Article 50 triggering a No Deal Brexit4. Contrary to the idea they were radicalised during May’s deliberations, they destroyed Boris Johnson first run for the Tory Leadership because in a (admittedly dazed and confused) post-referendum Telegraph column he had flirted with a Brexit deal that would look something like Norway.
There was no winning with them. The only way to deliver a quick and dignified Brexit that placated a broad majority of the population, would have been for Theresa May to enlist Labour’s help to crush them. Not only would that have gone against the personalities of everyone in either party’s leadership, but if Tory Brexiters moan this much after getting to pass the Brexit Deal they wrote, can you imagine how much they’d be now complaining in such an alternative reality?
A threat that was always overlooked in Britain was that an overly lax Irish Border regime would result in Irish goods being checked upon entry into the Continent alongside British ones. This is why working collaboratively with Britain without the major European players’s approval would have always been national malpractice on Ireland’s part.
Too be honest saying the DUP Brexit Ultras wanted to set the clock back to 1996 makes them sound more coherent than they were, because there’s no reason to believe the likes of Sammy Wilson or Iain Paisley Jr are not committed devolutionists like the rest of the party. And if the DUP wants devolution then it needs to have a working relationship with Sinn Fein, which means that using Brexit to recreate a hard border was a non-starter.
There is something comical about the insistence of right-wing Tories who are usually all in on using immigration restrictionism as an election tactic, that Leave’s victory has nothing to do with reducing immigration.
I do not take seriously Cummings’s claim that we shouldn’t have invoked Article 50 for three reasons. Firstly, a Cummings-advised Gove or Johnson administration would have experienced the same pressure from their own side that they show progress getting Brexit started. Secondly, trying to weasel out of the agreed procedures for someone to depart the European Union, written by a Brit no less, would have played very badly in the country, especially as the argument “we can’t be expected to get Brexit done in two years” would have struck terror in even most Leavers’s hearts. Thirdly, his whole strategy was clearly to bring negotiations to a point of Deal-or-No-Deal which could only happen under the Article 50 parameters. I could however see him trying to get the government to be such a nuisance within European institutions that the Europeans are provoked to invoke Article 50 on our behalf, but that a) wouldn’t change anything and b) wouldn’t work anyway.