This week in Brexitland, April 22, 2022

1. Here it is, your weekly Moggster update

There are many downsides to Jacob Rees-Mogg becoming the Minister for Brexit Opportunities, yet I have found a definite upside, at least on a personal level: he provides a great deal of material for this Substack, to which I can only offer my eternal gratitude to him. He says so many silly things that are Brexit related, in fact, I could probably produce a daily bulletin focusing solely on the idiotic tidbits in service of the Church of Brexit that he has muttered in the previous 24 hours. It seems possible to me that this is intentional on his part, taken out of the Trump/Putin playbook in which you say so many things that aren’t meant to be taken as true in any material sense that the point isn’t to be believed at all, but rather to destroy the idea of truth itself as something to be valued.

Let’s all take a deep breath then and dive in. The minister appeared in front of the European Scrutiny Committee for a Brexit love-in that featured over an hour of Brexiter fantasy so extreme, it was hard even for a seasoned veteran of such malarkey as myself to fully take it all in.

A brief word on this particularly committee itself: it may well be the most Brexity thing on Earth. Chaired by Bill Cash, one of the all-time deepest believers in the Brexit project, it used to exist to scrutinise new EU legislation. You would have thought then that one of the few bona fide Brexit benefits would have been to see this committee disappear from existence, given there is by definition no new EU legislation to scrutinise from a UK perspective. But on it carries, seemingly now to gather once every so often in order to pontificate about how the Brexit we got wasn’t so great but hey, don’t worry, utopia is still round the corner.

It goes without saying that a great deal of what Rees-Mogg had to say during the session was complete nonsense. It was difficult to know a lot of the time whether the minister was being sincere with his stream of consciousness claptrap or taking the piss. Most of it was the usual Brexiter utopian rubbish, which you’ve all heard a million times and I’ll spare going over in detail for the sake of readers’ sanity. However, there were a few moments to highlight. First of all, there was some banter between him and Cash about how great it is, now that the UK is a fully sovereign entity once more, that we have the freedom to make all of our own laws. Rees-Mogg talked about how many times back in the bad old days that he had heard about legislation not being possible because of the EU impediments involved, or worse, heard things from constituents that needed changing, only to find some big, bad EU Directive standing in the way.

The obvious question to the minister, in a less Brexity setting obviously, would be this: if for so many years there was this mountain of stuff that UK governments wanted to do but being in the EU stood in the way of, why then is it now so difficult to find these items of horrible European Union law to eliminate? So tricky, in fact, the government ended up needing to hire Rees-Mogg as a minister to sniff them out? As a beautiful example, when pressed for examples by the European Scrutiny Committee, Rees-Mogg could only point to gene editing regulation and some fiddling with the training of lorry drivers. Neither are game-changing from an economic or social point of view and certainly not worth cutting yourself off from the largest single market in the world to achieve.

The minister also had some things to say on every Brexiter’s favourite topic these days, the Northern Ireland Protocol.

“We signed it on the basis that it would be reformed……That is really important to understand because a lot of commentary that says: ‘Well, we signed it and therefore surely we should accept it lock, stock and barrel.’ That’s absolute nonsense.”

This is yet another one of those classic Rees-Mogg quotes where you have to wonder whether the man is too stupid to understand things like how international treaties work, or if he does compute much more than he lets on about and is being intentionally misleading. For what it’s worth, I usually cannot tell. With Boris Johnson, you get that he’s full of shit and knows it, but with Jacob, I find it genuinely hard to judge his sincerity.

There followed the usual threats that emanate from this government on a regular basis to suspend the NI Protocol altogether. What Rees-Mogg is doing here, at least in part, is using the “If we pretend to be mad and say we’ll do things that are clearly against our rational interest, that will demonstrate how determined we are and then the EU will cave into our demands in full” gambit. Despite the fact that this hasn’t worked even once in all of the numerous negotiations with the EU held since June 2016, it keeps being returned to as if it had yielded extraordinary results time and time again.

The other quote from the Moggster to highlight from the session is his bit about divergence from EU regulation, another topic that is catnip to right-wing Brexiters.

“We must get away from this idea of divergence. I don’t care what the EU does any more, any more than I care what the United States does or the Singapore does."

Yes, Jacob, let’s just ignore every country in any sort of geographical proximity to us and while we’re at it, pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist either. This is such an obnoxiously silly thing to have said, I find it hard to believe Rees-Mogg truly believes it himself. Given what we have to untangle here, let’s start with the basics: there are regulatory environments which exist throughout the world. Some, like those in the EU and US, are very important for a trading nation like the UK to engage with, however we decide to that. To say, “Let’s just ignore all that because we didn’t make it ourselves” (although in truth, we did shape a lot of EU regulation while we were members) is to expose the heart of the Brexit project: it is ultimately about living in a fantasy world in which the sun still never sets on the British Empire, and so we remain in charge of all of the rules that everyone else has to live by. The unfortunately thing is, this nonsense is the actual ethos of the current British government.

Post-Brexit, the UK government has to figure out some way of dealing with our new position in the world that isn’t “Look at us, we’re number one!'“ and being mostly ignored, except when we are giving weapons to someone in desperate need of them. The truth is, having as little trading friction with our nearest neighbours as logically possible is almost certainly the best solution for us. The problem is, the Church of Brexit strongly disagrees and they are the new established religion, at least for now.

2. Brexit hurts the Falkland Islands

Of all the places that even a metropolitan elite Remoaner such as myself didn’t expect to be materially negatively affected by Brexit, the Falklands may possibly top the list. So imagine my surprise this week when I discovered that this has indeed been the case already. It was almost enough to make me spit out my blue and yellow dyed humous in shock.

You see, as it turns out, the EU is the largest market for the Falklands’ fish. The islanders also export a lot of meat to customers within the single market as well. Given exporting these goods makes up about half the islands’ GDP, having huge barriers to entry into their largest market has hampered their economy. In fact, when you take into account that the tariff barriers now in place between the Falkland Islands and the EU can be as high as 42% - all because of Brexit, just to remind ourselves - it is now unviable to export these goods. Which raises large questions about the Falklands’ economy.

It does make one wonder: what would it have done to the Leave vote in 2016 if the prospect of Brexit damaging the economy of the Falkland Islands had been raised successfully? Given the islands’ place in the hearts of many of those who in the end voted to Leave, it is worth wondering about.

Meanwhile, what will this government do for the Falklands, having now hobbled their economy via their utopian project? I may be going out on a limb here but I would guess the following: nothing whatsoever. What could they do, other than reverse parts of Brexit they have no intention of reversing?

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I will be back next week again with the worst of Brexit.