How Brexit destroys its high priests - and why it will get them all eventually
Something I have thought long inevitable has finally appeared. To be fair, this sort of thing I’ve heard before but always on the fringes of the right - this week, it’s gone mainstream. What I’m talking about is a category of Brexit commentary which could loosely be described as “Boris Johnson betrayed Brexit”. This is only interesting because of Johnson’s position within the Brexit ecosphere, eventually managing to overshadow even Farage as BJ became “the man who got Brexit done”, added to the fact that its flowering is great proof of the adage, “Brexit eats all of its supporters eventually, no matter how Brexity they seek to become”.
This comes from an article that Allister Heath wrote in the Telegraph yesterday, and just so it’s clear I’m not taking his words out of context, here’s the article and transcribed below, the offending paragraph:
“Europe, like us, is in decline: we shouldn’t benchmark ourselves to France or Italy but to Singapore, South Korea and the wealthier US states. The Remainers have nothing useful to add: their shrieks are a displacement exercise. Being part of the single market has done nothing for Eurozone growth, or pay, these past couple of decades: there have been costs to Brexit, and the benefits have mostly yet to materialise as a result of the Johnson government’s incompetence, but Europe doesn’t have the solutions to our, or its own, woes.”
Before I go on, I particularly love this paragraph for lots of reasons - it exemplifies so many of the faults of Brexity thinking, it deserves to be singled out to be pored over by 22nd century history students trying to figure this period of British history out. The line about the single market having done nothing for Eurozone growth is possibly my favourite - what is Allister basing this presumption on? He’s essentially saying that the single market has done nothing to help the economies of the Eurozone countries whatsoever, but how the hell can he know that? Perhaps, just perhaps, the economic troubles besetting the continent since the crash of 2007/2008 might have been a great deal worse without the single market having been in place? There’s no way I can prove that, just as there is no way that Heath can prove his point since we don’t have the counternarrative to tell us, but I would like to posit that free trade across most of Europe was probably something that had a positive effect on the economies in question?
This again is what makes Brexit commentary so fascinating to me: I end up defending centre-right orthodoxy against people who have spent their whole adult lives as part of the right-wing commentariat, yet have seemed to turn away from things like free trade and sometimes, when it doesn’t suit Brexit well enough, free markets.
Anyhow, we could be here all day on this - I could write a short book about that one Allister Heath paragraph quoted above - but let’s get back to the actual subject of this sub-heading, the Brexiters turning on one of their high priests, this time someone who is arguably the pope in all of this, the “man who delivered Brexit”, none other than Boris Johnson himself.
Of course, Heath allows himself some wriggle room here. Its “Johnson’s government” that was incompetent, stopping short of attributing this attribute directly to the man who is surprisingly still prime minister as of the moment of publication. Yet it’s still blaming the government Johnson led, essentially saying that the reason Brexit hasn’t been brilliant just yet is because they have clearly mucked it all up, which is tacit criticism of the man himself. Which is extraordinary in one sense, when you think about Johnson’s place in the Brexit hall of fame, but not even remotely noteworthy in another. Brexit, as a utopian project, eats everyone who champions it, every single one of them, eventually. That’s it’s got to Johnson so quickly shouldn’t be a shock; when Brexit turned out to be terrible, the public intellectual Brexiters had two choices. One, blame Brexit itself, which they were never going to do; two, blame those who gave us the Brexit that we have. And that has to fall at the feet of “Johnson’s government”, however much I’m sure some of them would like to blame Remainers or the EU exclusively. At some point, if you want to make a serious intellectual point, you can only blame how things are now on those who have been in charge of the country for the past several years.
There are warnings here for Liz Truss. In fact, I would consider it nothing short of a miracle if three years from now, she is not blamed for her part in “the betrayal of true Brexit” in a manner much like Theresa May became an enemy to the church she tried unsuccessfully to lead for a few years. It will be for slightly different reasons on the surface, but ultimately the same narrative will apply: anyone trying to action Brexit as a genuine political, public policy and economic project will demonstrate that it is not fit for purpose. At that point, the other priests can either come to the conclusion that there is no God (Brexit is fundamentally flawed beyond saving) or that it is the sins of man that are to blame (we’d get the one true and holy Brexit promised to us in scripture if only we could find the chosen one to lead us to the holy land, the problem being everyone appointed to this role turns out to be a traitor or a fraud).
Truss will get a honeymoon period, if not with the country then certainly with the high priests of Brexitland. But there’s no way it can last; eventually, reality wins. I feel now about Truss a lot like I felt about May in late-2016 - an annoyance at her lack of insight and honesty, but also with a twinge of pity for her, knowing what is clearly going to be her fate when the roof caves in on her.
2. Truss goes on the offensive with the EU
Liz Truss, the current Foreign Secretary in case you had forgot there was still a government in place, has launched dispute proceedings with the EU over the UK being shut out of a range of science research programmes.
This is red meat to the Brexiters, who love a good fight with the EU and anything that gives the illusion of the UK and the EU being equal sized entities. It might even, on one level, have some validity in the sense that despite it being understandable that a non-EU country such as the UK could be excluded from these programmes, it probably isn’t actually good for anyone long term that we are.
However, there are several important points to raise here.
One is that Remainers are constantly told by Brexiters that Project Fear was filled with things that never came to pass after we left the EU. This is ridiculous on many levels, but on a basic one, Project Fear postulated that Brexit would cause the UK and the EU to constantly be at each others throats, with all sorts of legal clashes arising. Brexiters, on the other hand, always told us that this would not be the case - remember “easiest deal in history?” - and yet they are the ones happily perpetrating this idiocy themselves, all while still saying that Brexit has caused no disruption whatsoever. This government of Brexiters is actively seeking to prove Project Fear was correct.
Then we come on to the size issue at stake here. Put aside, just for a moment, any argument about the relative good and bad points of the current UK government and the EU structures, the Commission and the Council in particular. Let’s also put aside the argument about whether one should support the UK in this dispute if one is British, regardless of right or wrong. The fact is - and I know no one is supposed to point this out, but facts don’t care about your feelings - the EU is much, much bigger than the UK. Bigger by almost every possible metric you want to bring up: geographic size, population, GDP. On GDP per capita, the UK is slightly ahead, but only slightly, and given the other size related metrics, this is more than cancelled out when you’re talking about ongoing trade disputes.
And if the Brexiters had been right in the hypothesis that the EU was fundamentally weak, on the verge of splitting apart, and that meant that the size factor was mostly an illusion, then we would be in different terrain. But they were wrong about this, undeniably incorrect on this front, so sorry, a united EU against a UK (which is, I think fairly plausibly, not united in itself anyhow) means it’s fairly easy to predict who is going to win any trade war between the two sides.
The sad truth is, Brexit turned the UK from an international rule maker to a rule taker. Brexiters might not have felt we had enough say in things when we were an EU member, and there are plausible arguments to be made there, but now we have no say whatsoever. We can’t force our own standards onto other countries because the UK is simply too small to do this effectively and in terms of massively diverging from the EU on anything regulatory, we risk cutting our own market off from the huge, single market on our doorstep a little more each time we do that. Brexit just leaves us stuck in limbo, hoping other trading blocs do things that we like, with no real power to change the currents. That’s not being unnecessarily negative, or failing to see the positive, that’s just the unfortunate reality of our post-Brexit situation.
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Yes, I heard that the UK used to be pretty good at getting EU grants in the science area, I guess that was through the Horizon programme. Anyhow, apparently we were one of the bigger hitters in terms of the effectiveness of UK universities and programmes getting the EU money. I assume that has all changed now over the years of uncertainty since Brexit, and Truss's action to take the EU to court over the situation Brexit caused and she exacerbated is only likely to make things harder for UK Science in future.
I heard a decade-old programme the other day on Radio 4 Extra. It was examining the science business and making the argument that there were useful parallels to be made with the Premier League football in terms of trying to attract the stars of science to work in the UK. There were interviews with Paul Nurse and David Willetts (who was the Science Minister at the time). The talk was of the Foreign Office having put a cap on immigration, and how this had put likely candidates from, say, India or wherever off, with the impression that the UK was not a welcoming place to work or live and that they would be better off going to the USA. Willetts seemed to be optimistic that having discussed the issue with the people at the Foreign Office, he'd got them to see that an exception to the cap for these kind of high status individuals was good for the UK, and he was all guns blazing for trying to go around the world and convince the people who might want to come here that we were a welcoming place that wanted these intelligent scientists at the start of their careers to come live and work here. And of course the whole conversation was couched with an exception for EU candidates, who of course in those days could come and live and work at UK Universities without visas, red tape or anything. It was a dispatch from another world. I expect that after 6 years of Brexit hooha, any good work Willetts might have achieved has gone way down the drain, and unwelcome red tape and attitudes in the country in general will be as much of a consideration for bright scientists from Germany France or Spain as any potential candidates from India or China...
Not sure the UK government is a "rule taker". (Sorry if you have covered this before) My take is the current Tory government believes in very very small government - I.e. bare minimum of regulations and laws. Instead of "agreeing to" EU directives and rules in order to make it easy for companies to trade, the burden of proof on applying EU rules falls on individual companies. If a company doesn't succeed it is not the UK government's fault but that of a company's management.
Likewise, water companies can now pollute beaches for all sorts of reasons. The UK government won't step in to make citizens life better - instead the citizen has to sue the water company...or not use the beach. Unless private beach, it should be clean for use?
Similarly, the UK government won't help solve transport strikes. Instead, we turn on each other rather than the government as they claim it is not an issue for them.
But they are okay with awarding large contracts (PPE) without worrying about inflation rising, or raising taxes beforehand to meet the costs of those contracts.
The UK government is having its cake and eating it - no blame on it, no EU rules to accept, and it can spend money how it likes with no real oversight.