This week in Brexitland, February 11, 2022

1. What will Jacob Rees-Mogg’s time as “Minister for Brexit Opportunities” really be like?

Just in case you were still thinking about Brexit as a serious political project built on real world ideas, there is a new Brexit minister in town. Sort of. This one’s job is to find all of the wonderful opportunities that have somehow eluded the government thus far. The man for this job, according to Boris Johnson, is none other than Jacob Rees-Mogg.

This means that Brexit is now spread across government in three ways: Truss handles the ongoing negotiations with the EU from inside the FCO, Rees-Mogg is looking for all the ways to use our freedom from the shackles of Brussels to do, well, that’s Rees-Mogg’s job to find out, and finally we have James Cleverly as the new minister for Europe, which makes it all extra confusing. What will Cleverly handle if Truss does all the negotiating? Will he occasionally have tea in Ljubljana in an effort to get the Slovenians to throw off the shackles as well? You know, for something that was supposed to be “done” some time ago, it’s remarkable how much of the government’s energy Brexit still occupies.

In all seriousness, it’s interesting that we even have a Minister for Europe again. Theresa May did away with the post in a fit of “Brexit means Brexit” and there was no such position in the Foreign Office between the summer of 2016 and December of 2021. Europe was subsumed into other FCO minister’s briefs in an effort to make the continent of which we remain a part less important in the face of Brexit. A sort of geography wish-fulfilment sort of a thing. Then Boris Johnson, for whatever reason, decided to quietly bring the post back at the tail end of last year.

Anyhow, it’s worth gazing into a crystal ball and wondering what will happen under Rees-Mogg’s reign as Brexit Opportunities Minister. I reckon he’ll do what everyone who has tried to solve this conundrum has done before. He’ll ask businesses and get next to nothing back. They don’t really want to change much. Then he’ll figure he needs to speak to small businesses, only to find that’s really logistically difficult and besides, they don’t actually want to change much either, convinced that whatever the government does will almost certainly make things worse. Then the stuff he’ll find using Brexity think tank types will all be about the slashing of workers rights, getting rid of construction safeguards, that type of thing, which will just be rejected by whomever is the prime minister out of hand, or will meet with such opposition from campaign groups and the public that it will all be dropped. In the end, Rees-Mogg will come up as empty handed as everyone else who has attempted the same exercise.

Here’s what I’ll close this section on: the whole idea of having a Brexit Opportunities Minister is an indictment of Brexit itself. If Brexit had been a good idea, the opportunities would be so obvious, every government department would be up to their eyeballs in them already. The fact that six years on from the referendum, this needs a whole extra minister tells you everything you need to know.

2. Public Accounts Committee report says that Brexit equals “increased costs, paperwork, delays”

"One of the great promises of Brexit was freeing British businesses to give them the headroom to maximise their productivity and contribution to the economy - even more desperately needed now on the long road to recovery from the pandemic. Yet the only detectable impact so far is increased costs, paperwork and border delays.”

PAC chair Meg Hillier, February 9th, 2022

A report out this week from the Public Accounts Committee, which is a Select Committee in parliament, was pretty damning about the effects of Brexit on Britain’s ability to trade with its nearest neighbours. What makes this not just another report damning about what Brexit has done to our ability to trade are two main things:

1. It comes from inside of parliament, which gives it extra weight, particularly given there are no parties except the SNP which are openly anti-Brexit at present.

2. The PAC isn’t some bastion of leftie Remainer-dom, one of what Brexiters might deem “The Usual Suspects”. No, it is a cross-party committee that looks at things the government spends money on and comments on whether they are good value for money. Amongst its current members are former deputy leader of UKIP before he became a Tory Craig Mackinley, and Mark Francois.

There are two main things I would like to say about the report. One is that it feels like we’re moving into a new phase of Brexit, which I think is a good thing, where most of the conversation within the two main parties isn’t about whether Brexit was good or bad in the abstract, but whether the Brexit we’ve ended up with now is good or bad in the specific. So, Labour can complain that the government screwed it all up and got a bad deal; the Tory spartans can claim that we haven’t got “real Brexit” yet for whatever reason; Remainers can row in behind the idea that whatever else Brexit might be, so far it’s pretty rubbish. In the end, all of it deconstructs the very idea of Brexit whether anyone engaging in this debate realises this or not.

The second thing to say about the report is the fact that there are no solution being offered for any of the problems it points out, by anyone who still explicitly or tacitly supports Brexit, and yet the government does this pantomime, acting as if it is constantly working on solutions. We’ve put up large trade barriers with every country around us and I don’t think this has really sunk in for the vast majority of people in Britain yet. These things are still talked about as “teething problems” that time will help overcome. Yet, that isn’t going to happen on its own. Something needs to be changed in order to lower the trade barriers that Brexit created, if they are to be lowered. The only way to do that anyone has figured out so far is to move closer to Europe on alignment of standards and regulation. But no one in government wants to talk about that, so on and on the pantomime goes.

3. The DUP does some more stupid things - the UK government follows suit

One of the great stories of Brexit is the disintegration of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. They have behaved so illogically at every turn and done things that are so against their larger interests, that you would think they collectively lost their minds at some point in 2015.

First of all, the idea that Brexit was in their larger interests was fairly stupid to begin with. I can understand to some extent those who have no interest in or knowledge about Northern Ireland thinking that Brexit wasn’t going to cause the Good Friday Agreement and indeed, the whole way the island of Ireland works, any trouble - and we had an NI Secretary for a while who said she didn’t know that people voted along sectarian lines there, so the evidence of ignorance in England at least is fairly vast - but for those whose whole project is invested in maintaining of a Northern Ireland in a United Kingdom, barmy barely covers it.

What’s truly special about the DUP is how badly they have played their cards at every step since the 2017 general election result gave them a stellar hand. They had the Theresa May government at their mercy, needing DUP votes to maintain a majority. They also had in May a prime minister who clearly, under no circumstances, would have put a customs border down the Irish Sea. And what did they do? Everything they could to sabotage her premiership, backing Boris Johnson to the hilt, all so he could do the thing everyone apart from them figured out long before that he would do, which is shaft them completely and utterly at the first turn.

And yet they still can’t bring themselves blame the man, after all of that, and even in the face of his Partygate-created weakness. They are still trying to find new ways of dealing with the trauma they inflicted upon themselves that are just more of the same brand of stupid that got them into this mess. It’s as if Republicans are secretly controlling their brains now. For their latest brilliant ploy involves walking out of the power sharing executive, collapsing the Stormont government because - God I feel silly even having to type this - they believe this will force the EU into making major concessions around the Northern Ireland Protocol.

All right, let’s break down the faulty logic involved here. So, by collapsing the NI government, the one that was trying to stop enforcing the checks required by the Protocol, power reverts back to Westminster….who will obviously enforce the checks. And this change in fortune is somehow going to cause the European Union to make changes to a treaty signed two years ago that aren’t in the interests of the EU, Ireland or indeed, even Northern Ireland to change. Work that one out.

Of course, the Tory government have just parroted the DUP line because it serves their immediate interests. Yeah, yeah, this will cause the Eurocrats to think twice, blah blah blah. It’s all part of their eternal game of kicking the Northern Ireland Brexit can down the road for as long as it can be kicked. As ever with the whole NI Protocol saga, there seems to be a strong will to hide in a fantasy throughout the Tories and the DUP. Only, this should matter a whole lot more to the DUP.

Sinn Fein are about to win an election in Northern Ireland for the first time ever. Trade from Great Britain is falling, while trade between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and by extension the rest of the EU is growing. The DUP’s project is starting to reach crisis stage. And yet all they can do is throw temper tantrums and do the same thing that has got them into this mess, namely believing anything the Conservative Party tells them.

Thanks for reading. As always, if you haven’t subscribed, please do so, and I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit, which just keeps on coming and coming.