This week in Brexitland, December 17, 2021
North Shropshire and Brexit
The Lib Dems not only won the North Shropshire by-election, they stormed it. In a seat in which the Tories got 62.7% of the vote at the by-election, a constituency that had been Conservative since the first Reform Act, the Lib Dems got almost half the vote. Calling it “seismic” barely covers it - this is the type of electoral result that changes politics.
There is so much I can say about this, but I want to keep it brief and to the point. At the very least, what yesterday’s result demonstrates is that a Remainer candidate can win in a Leave voting seat. That isn’t to say that Brexit still isn’t a key divide in British politics - it clearly is - but that simply shouting “Remainer!” at a candidate in a Leave seat will certainly not guarantee victory.
This could affect a huge change in British politics, this one dynamic alone. For a start, Labour could be slightly less cautious when they talk about Brexit. I’m not saying they’ll go full on Rejoin or anything like that anytime soon, just that it has been demonstrated that the issue is not as toxic as they had come to believe. Perhaps they will feel more freedom to critique elements of Johnson’s terrible deal or even in time to suggest moving back into at least some of the EU institutions might not be such a bad idea. At the very least, North Shropshire indicates we may be at the start of something exciting.
Penny Mordaunt’s speech in America and what it tells us about Brexit Britain
On Tuesday, the Secretary of State for International Trade, Penny Mordaunt, gave a speech at the Carter Centre in Atlanta, Georgia on what this UK government perceives as the future of Anglo-US relations. The best way to summarise the speech in one sentence is that it was all you’d expect from a Secretary of State for International Trade during the unfortunate Boris Johnson period of British history.
Most of it is fluff that essentially begs the United States to like us more. Can’t you see we’re meant to be together? Or as Mordaunt put it in Atlanta:
‘There’s a reason that Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence sit side by side in Washington. It shows that first America followed Britain in reinventing its human rights. Two hundred years later, Britain has returned the compliment.’
She was alluding to Brexit there at the end, in case you’re confused about whether there was a second Glorious Revolution you might have missed during Covid.
‘(Brexit) is a seismic shift. And it requires a paradigm shift in the American response in order to maximise the opportunity for all of us. It’s not every day that a G7 country does that. Leaves the orbit of the EU to enable it to be closer to others. To be closer to you.’
Jesus, it sounds like a letter from a stalker. The problem here is very simple, UK government: America just isn’t that into you. They only see the UK as a small cog in the western alliance. They hope we don’t fall apart or go rogue, although arguably, Brexit fulfils the latter description there. That’s it. They do not see the United Kingdom as their equals. You can moan about that, say it’s unfair, that it is unbefitting of a country with our size, history and economy but that is the way they see it. Everything would be so much easier if you just stopped pretending America cares way, way more about the UK than it very clearly does.
Yet in amongst the stuff that suggests the US should possibly look into taking out a restraining order on Great Britain, there were actually some moments in Mordaunt’s speech that give rare insight into what this government sees as its ideal world. This is the crucial paragraph of the whole speech and possible the only bit of the whole thing with any real substance:
‘We have left a trading group whose regulations inter-operate with others on the basis of harmonisation. We have now chosen a different framework; one favoured by the WTO, the CPTPP and the United States. We want the way our regulatory systems inter-operate with others to be based on adequacy and equivalence.’
In other words, what the government has done here - without telling anyone openly about this, other than leaving this one paragraph in Penny Mordaunt’s speech for nerds like me to decode - is they have given up on truly ambitious trade deals, not just with the US but anywhere in the world. In other words, they aren’t looking to take the relationship they had with the EU and transfer it to the ‘Anglosphere’, as all the proper pre-2016 Brexiteers always endless talked about, but have accepted that we will have much poorer trading relationships with everyone in the world from here on out. We’re screwed, basically, only Penny Mordaunt’s speech, as ever with anything that involves a cabinet member of Boris Johnson’s, is trying to sell this tragedy as some sort of huge Brexit bonus.
If the paragraph quoted about is to be taken at face value, Britain is out of the market for deep trading relationships. It isn’t looking to harmonise standards with anyone in order to create truly free markets and free trading zones - it is happy with thin trading arrangements spread widely. Is it possible that this is simply because this is the only type of trading arrangement America is interested in?
The reason, incidentally, the US likes this sort of arrangement is that it is the largest economy in the world, which also has the largest military on Earth and besides all that is a almost a continent unto itself. It doesn’t need to trade with anyone else in particular - it sees the value of (limited) free trade, mostly as a means of American soft power. Yet it doesn’t need to do it in the same way as say, a smallish island off the coast of France that has an 80% service based industry that relies on importing most of its food and in fact has not been resource self-sufficient since the Bronze Age. But hey, sovereignty and all that, right?
UK government delays Brexit checks - again
This time round, the portion of Brexit that is being delayed by our government involves the checks on goods coming from the island of Ireland into Great Britain that were due to start happening on January 1st. The delay is perfectly rational: the checks will be economically harmful to Britain, and in relation to Northern Ireland, may end up being more than that.
I find the psychology of putting these checks off fascinating. It’s almost as if this government likes Brexit as a concept, as an invaluable avatar in the ongoing culture war that plays to the Tories’ advantage - at least it did before North Shropshire - but don’t actually like what Brexit means in practice. Yes, instituting checks between the island of Ireland and Great Britain is an idiotic thing to have to contemplate at the tail end of 2021 - yet that was what hard Brexit was always going to mean. They can delay the inevitable but someday, they are going to have to do the thing they fear most: actually implement the Brexit they negotiated.
Until next week, keep safe. If you are one of the many people suffering with the Omicron variant, I hope your illness is short and shallow, and I’ll be back in seven days time - Christmas eve! - with, as ever, the worst of Brexit one week has to offer.