The week in Brexitland, December 3, 2021
Another post-Brexit mini-Suez to grasp - the US gets further involved in the Article 16 debacle
The US has waded in again to all things Brexit and not in the way most Brexiteers ever hoped or imagined. By now, we should be hand in hand with the Americans, building a new “Anglosphere” trading block that has the Eurocrats crapping in their boots. Instead, high tariffs on steel and aluminium products from Britain into America will remain in place for the time being, at least until the UK government takes any threat of Article 16 off the table.
There is so much to digest here for Brexit-watchers, it really is a treat. How about this one: the tariffs in question were actually originally put in place by Donald Trump in 2018 and applied to all of the EU, which included the UK at the time, of course. Biden got rid of the tariff for EU countries last month but kept it in place for the UK because of fears around the NI Protocol. In other words, Donald Trump ends up creating a tariff that in the end only applies to Brexit Britain directly because of Brexit. There’s some poetry in that - all of the things the Brexity right loves, screwing them over at once.
Of course, it’s another example of how a now isolated Britain can be bossed around by the great powers of the moment. The US didn’t want Brexit, but now that it’s happened, they are going to use it to their advantage whenever they see fit, which from the looks of things, may be often. I always found it odd that so called hard-headed conservative pragmatists in Britain, those who always say that reality doesn’t care about your feelings, really thought that America would embrace post-Brexit Britain to its bosom and welcome it like some sort of prodigal son returning home. It’s so cringingly soft-headed and embarrassing that most of them claim to have never had such thoughts about America these days. Unfortunately for them, video evidence exists to refute this claim in a great deal of instances.
Brexit is bad for the British agricultural sector - who saw that one coming?
I cannot tell you how many pre-referendum debates I was either directly involved in or watched live in which someone who was pro-Brexit swore up and down that farmers would come out better from leaving CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), even though it seemed obvious to any objective viewer this was extremely unlikely. They said that all of the money farmers got from EU subsides was just our money anyway. We give it to Brussels and then they give some of it back to the farmers. Why don’t we just give it all to the farmers ourselves, many a Eurosceptic asked? And while we’re at it, design it more for our needs, including a better deal for the environment.
Sure enough, farmers look set to get a lot less state funding overall now that we’ve left the EU. Worse, leaving CAP gave the UK a chance to reset things in the sector to make them more environmentally friendly and better value for money, but that looks set to go down the drain, with the National Trust amongst others complaining about the lost opportunity.
This is another example of Brexit in miniature, a common theme of this substack. Being in the EU gave us one way of doing things, a way that for the most part worked. Could things have been done better? Of course they could have. The question is whether that was ever realistic or not given the general incompetence of so much of how Whitehall runs, even when the ministers are brilliant, never mind when they are mostly dunces handpicked because they were assumed to be loyal to Boris Johnson. What we have ended up with is losing every advantage of being inside the EU institutions while not being able to turn the little newfound independence gained into any genuine wins.
Scots told to “get on board” with Brexit
Penny Mordaunt, the Minister of State for Trade, has said that the people of Scotland should “get on board” with Brexit, according to the National. Sounds stupid - did she really say that? In actual fact, Mordaunt only told the SNP to “get on board”, but given they are the ruling party in Scotland, it starts to feel like we’re splitting hairs here.
If there is anything I hate in the realm of public policy, it is any shade of stabbed-in-the-backism. In other words, the idea that a policy that failed would have worked out just great, if only people had believed in it hard enough. This is wrong on so many levels, I don’t know where to begin.
Here’s what I’d say to Penny Mordaunt if I had to put this all very succinctly: if something is objectively good, you don’t need to convince people to “get on board” with it. They do so of their own free will because, you know, the thing in question is obviously good for them in some regard. It’s only when something sort of sucks that you have to try and convince people to “get on board” with it. I have three kids and I know this all too well. I never need to tell them to “get on board” with playing video games or eating ice cream. I only need to do that if I want to get them to go the dentist or something like that. Which leads me to conclude that I would say that Brexit is like going to the dentist, only you at least ultimately get something you need out of going to the dentist.
Until next time, please subscribe if you haven’t already, and I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.